World
Macron says Russia can’t win in Ukraine after strike on mall
France’s president denounced Russia’s fiery airstrike on a crowded shopping mall in Ukraine as a “new war crime” Tuesday and vowed the West’s support for Kyiv would not waver, saying Moscow “cannot and should not win” the war.
The strike, which killed at least 18 people in the central city of Kremenchuk, came as leaders from the Group of Seven nations met in Europe. It was part of an unusually intense barrage of Russian fire across Ukraine, including in the capital, Kyiv, that renewed international attention as the war drags on.
Speaking at the end of the G-7 summit in Germany, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to address that concern, vowing that the seven leading industrialized democracies would support Ukraine and maintain sanctions against Russia “as long as necessary, and with the necessary intensity.”
“Russia cannot and should not win,” he said. He called Monday’s attack on the mall “a new war crime.”
As they have in other attacks, Russian officials claimed the shopping center was not the target.
In a virtual address to the U.N. Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia has become a terrorist state and called for it to be expelled from the United Nations. He also urged the U.N. to establish an international tribunal to investigate Russia’s action in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy ended his address by asking all in the chamber to stand in silent tribute to the “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian children and adults killed in the war. All council members rose, including Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky.
How to counter Russia and back Ukraine will also be the focus of a summit this week of the NATO alliance, whose support has been critical to Kyiv’s ability to fend off Moscow’s larger and better equipped forces. Ukrainian leaders, however, say they need more and better weapons if they are to hold off and even drive back Russia, which is pressing an all-out assault in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
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As Macron spoke, rescuers combed through the charred rubble of the shopping mall, which officials said was struck when more than 1,000 afternoon shoppers and workers were inside.
Kateryna Romashyna, a local resident, told The Associated Press that she had just arrived at the mall when an explosion knocked her down. When another blast came about 10 minutes later, she realized she needed to get away.
“I ran away from the epicenter with all of my strength,” she said. Fighting back tears, she added: “You have to be a real monster” to strike a shopping mall.
Many of those inside quickly fled the building when an air raid siren sounded and took shelter across the street, Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky said. Several of the bodies of those who didn’t make it out in time are burned beyond recognition, he said.
In addition to the 18 killed, authorities said 59 were wounded, while 21 people were still missing.
The attack recalled strikes earlier in the war that hit a theater, a train station, and a hospital. Zelenskyy called it “one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.”
Rocket attacks continued elsewhere in Ukraine, with authorities in the city of Dnipro reporting that workers at a diesel car repair shop were trapped in rubble after a strike from a cruise missile fired from the Black Sea, Ukrainian news agencies reported. The Ukrainian military managed to intercept and destroy other missiles fired at the city, the agencies said.
As condemnation came in from many quarters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov struck a defiant note, saying Russia would press its offensive until it fulfills its goals. He said the hostilities could stop “before the end of the day” if Ukraine were to surrender and meet Russia’s demands, including recognizing its control over territory it has taken by force.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov claimed that warplanes fired precision-guided missiles at a depot that contained Western weapons and ammunition, which detonated and set the mall on fire. Ukrainian authorities said that in addition to the direct hit on the mall, a factory was struck, but denied it housed weapons.
Konashenkov also falsely alleged that the mall was not in use.
One survivor, Oleksandr, a mall employee, told the AP from a hospital bed that the shopping center was packed with customers. He recalled stepping outside with a colleague for a cigarette when the air raid siren went off.
“There was a black tunnel, smoke, fire,” he said. “I started to crawl. I saw the sun up there, and my brain was telling me I needed to save myself.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said the missile attack was one of Russia’s “crimes against humanity.” She emphasized the need for all Ukrainians to remain alert and expect a similar strike “every minute.”
On Tuesday, Russian forces struck the Black Sea city of Ochakiv, damaging apartment buildings and killing two, including a 6-year-old child. Six more people, four of them children, were wounded. One of them, a 3-month-old baby, is in a coma, according to officials.
The unusually intense spate of fire came as the G-7 leaders pledged continued support for Ukraine and prepared new sanctions against Russia, including a price cap on oil and higher tariffs on goods.
Zelenskyy has called for more air defense systems from his Western allies to help his forces fight back. NATO’s support for Ukraine will be a major focus of a summit starting this week in Madrid, and an early signal of unity came Tuesday when Turkey agreed to lift its opposition to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.
Read: Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall in Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted the two Nordic countries to abandon their long-held nonaligned status and apply to join NATO. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had blocked the move, insisting they change their stance on Kurdish rebel groups that Turkey considers terrorists.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned the West that “the more weapons are pumped into Ukraine, the longer the conflict will continue and the longer the agony of the Nazi regime backed by Western capitals will last.”
Russia has falsely called the war a campaign to “de-Nazify” Ukraine — a country with a democratically elected Jewish president who wants closer ties with the West.
In a sinister message to NATO leaders, Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos published satellite images and the precise coordinates of the conference hall where their summit will be held.
It also posted images and the coordinates of the White House, the Pentagon and the government headquarters in London, Paris and Berlin — referring to them as “decision-making centers supporting the Ukrainian nationalists” in a message on the Telegram app. That wording echoes warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin that he could target such centers in response to what he has called Western aggression.
In other developments:
— One of the two Britons sentenced to death by separatist forces in eastern Ukraine has filed a formal appeal, the Russian news agency Tass reported early Wednesday. The report said the appeal filed on behalf of Shaun Pinner will be considered within two months.
Pinner, Aiden Aslin and Moroccan Brahim Saadoun were sentenced to death on June 9 and were given one month to appeal. The court claimed they were fighting for Ukraine as mercenaries so were not entitled to protections provided to prisoners of war. There was no mention of appeals for the other two men.
— The two fighting countries continued a sporadic series of prisoner exchanges. Ukraine exchanged 15 Russian prisoners-of-war for 16 Ukrainian soldiers and one civilian, the Ukrainian Pravda news outlet reported Tuesday.
— Ukrainian Pravda also reported that in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, the mayor was detained Tuesday and occupying authorities seized his computer hard drive and documents after he had refused to cooperate with Russian-appointed local officials. Russia’s Tass news agency confirmed the detention.
— Bulgaria said Tuesday it was expelling 70 Russian diplomats designated “a threat to national security,” ordering them to leave within five days. A Bulgarian foreign ministry statement said this would reduce Russia’s Sofia embassy staff “to up to 23 diplomatic and 25 administrative and technical staff.”
51 migrants die after trailer abandoned in San Antonio heat
Desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically sought word of their loved ones as authorities began the grim task Tuesday of identifying 51 people who died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer without air conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat.
It was the deadliest tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggled across the border from Mexico.
The driver of the truck and two other people were arrested, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas told The Associated Press.
He said the truck had passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo, Texas, on Interstate 35. He did not know if migrants were inside the truck when it cleared the checkpoint.
Investigators traced the truck’s registration to a residence in San Antonio and detained two men from Mexico for possession of weapons, according to criminal complaints filed by the U.S. attorney’s office. The complaints did not make any specific allegations related to the deaths.
The bodies were discovered Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio when a city worker heard a cry for help from the truck parked on a lonely back road and found the gruesome scene inside, Police Chief William McManus said. Hours later, body bags lay spread on the ground.
More than a dozen people — their bodies hot to the touch — were taken to hospitals, including four children. Most of the dead were males, he said.
The death count was the highest ever from a smuggling attempt in the United States, according to Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio.
“This is a horror that surpasses anything we’ve experienced before,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “And it’s sadly a preventable tragedy.”
President Joe Biden called the deaths “horrifying and heartbreaking.”
“Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful, as is political grandstanding around tragedy, and my administration will continue to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers from taking advantage of people who are seeking to enter the United States between ports of entry,” Biden said in a statement.
Read: Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall in Ukraine
Authorities did not know the home countries of all of the migrants, nor how long they were abandoned on the side of the road.
By Tuesday afternoon, medical examiners had potentially identified 34 of the victims, but they were taking additional steps, such as fingerprints, to confirm the identities, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores.
Among the dead, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin based on documents they were carrying, according to said Rubén Minutti, Mexico consul general in San Antonio. Several survivors were in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said.
At least seven of the dead were from Guatemala and two from Honduras, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, head of the North America department in Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department, said on Twitter. About 30 people had reached out to the Mexican Consulate looking for loved ones, the officials said.
Attempts to cross the U.S. border from Mexico have claimed thousands of lives in both countries in recent decades.
U.S. border authorities are stopping migrants more often on the southern border than at any time in at least two decades. Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, up by one-third from a year ago.
Comparisons to pre-pandemic levels are complicated because migrants expelled under a public health authority known as Title 42 face no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts. Authorities say 25% of encounters in May were with people who had been stopped at least once in the previous year.
South Texas has long been the busiest area for illegal border crossings. U.S. authorities discover trucks with migrants inside “pretty close” to daily, Larrabee said.
Migrants typically pay $8,000 to $10,000 to be taken across the border and loaded into a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they transfer to smaller vehicles for their final destinations across the United States, he said.
Conditions vary widely, including how much water passengers get and whether they are allowed to carry cellphones, Larrabee said.
Authorities think the truck discovered Monday had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track in an area of San Antonio surrounded by auto scrapyards that brush up against a busy freeway, Wolff said.
San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and desperation in recent years involving migrants in semitrailers.
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck parked at a San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of the city. More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he was to be paid $3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Read: Biden suspends rules limiting immigrant arrest, deportation
Other tragedies have occurred long before migrants reached the U.S. In December, more than 50 died when a semitrailer rolled over on a highway in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities reported finding 652 migrants packed into six trailers stopped at a military checkpoint near the border.
Some of the 16 people taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses remained hospitalized Tuesday in critical condition.
Those taken to the hospital were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water was found in the trailer, said Fire Chief Charles Hood.
“They were suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no visible working AC unit on that rig.”
Temperatures in San Antonio on Monday approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
Big rigs emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid a surge in U.S. border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.
Before that, people paid small fees to get across a largely unguarded border. As crossing became much more difficult after the 2001 terror attacks in the U.S., migrants were led through more perilous terrain and had to pay thousands of dollars.
Some advocates drew a link to the Biden administration’s border policies. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had been dreading such a tragedy for months.
“With the border shut as tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into more and more dangerous routes,” he wrote on Twitter.
Migrants — largely from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — have been expelled more than 2 million times under the pandemic-era rule in effect since March 2020 that denies a chance to seek asylum. The Biden administration planned to end the policy, but a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the move in May.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths on the Southwest border in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported in the previous year and the highest since it began keeping track in 1998. Most were related to heat exposure.
G7 leaders wrap up summit meant to bolster Ukraine support
The Group of Seven developed economies on Tuesday wraps up a summit intended to send a strong signal of long-term commitment to Ukraine’s future, ensuring that Russia pays a higher price for its invasion while also attempting to alleviate a global hunger crisis and show unity against climate change.
The leaders of the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., Canada and Japan on Monday pledged to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” after conferring by video link with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Read: G7 countries to provide $19.8 billion in aid to Ukraine
The summit host, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said he “once again very emphatically set out the situation as Ukraine currently sees it.” Zelenskyy’s address, amid a grinding Russian advance in Ukraine’s east, came hours before Ukrainian officials reported a deadly Russian missile strike on a crowded shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk.
Officials have said during the summit that leaders of the major economies are preparing to unveil plans to pursue a price cap on Russian oil, raise tariffs on Russian goods and impose other new sanctions.
From the secluded Schloss Elmau hotel in the Bavarian Alps, the G-7 leaders will continue straight to Madrid for a summit of NATO leaders — where fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will again dominate the agenda. All G-7 members other than Japan are NATO members, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been invited to Madrid.
Zelenskyy has openly worried that the West has become fatigued by the cost of a war that is contributing to soaring energy costs and price hikes on essential goods around the globe. The G-7 has sought to assuage those concerns.
While the group’s annual gathering has been dominated by Ukraine and by the war’s knock-on effects, such as the challenge to food supplies in parts of the world caused by the interruption of Ukrainian grain exports, Scholz has been keen to show that the G-7 also can move ahead on pre-war priorities.
The summit host has been keen to secure agreement on the creation of a “climate club” for countries that want to speed ahead when it comes to tackling global warming.
Read:Biden urges Western unity on Ukraine amid war fatigue
After a meeting Monday with leaders of five developing nations, a joint statement issued by Germany emphasized the need to accelerate a “clean and just energy transition” that would see an end to the burning of fossil fuels without causing a sharp rise in unemployment.
In the cautiously phrased statement, the leaders tentatively endorsed the global “climate club” idea.
Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall in Ukraine
Rescuers searched through charred rubble of a shopping mall Tuesday looking for more victims of a Russian missile strike that killed at least 18 and wounded scores in what Ukraine’s president called “one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky said many of the more than 1,000 afternoon shoppers and workers inside the mall in the city of Kremenchuk managed to escape. Giant plumes of black smoke, dust and orange flames billowed from the wreckage as emergency crews combed through broken metal and concrete for victims. Drones whirred above, clouds of dark smoke still emanating from the ruins several hours after the fire was extinguished.
Casualty figures rose as rescuers sifted through the smoldering rubble. The regional governor, Dmytro Lunin, said at least 18 people were killed and 59 others sought medical assistance, of whom 25 were hospitalized. The region declared a day of mourning Tuesday for the victims of the attack.
Read:Biden urges Western unity on Ukraine amid war fatigue
“We are working to dismantle the construction so that it is possible to get machinery in there since the metal elements are very heavy and big, and disassembling them by hand is impossible,” said Volodymyr Hychkan, an emergency services official.
At Ukraine’s request, the U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting in New York on Tuesday to discuss the attack.
In the first Russian government comment on the missile strike, the country’s first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyansky, alleged multiple inconsistencies that he didn’t specify, claiming on Twitter that the incident was a provocation by Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied it targets civilian infrastructure, even though Russian attacks have hit other shopping malls, theaters, hospitals, kindergartens and apartment buildings in the four-month war.
On Tuesday, Russian forces struck the Black Sea city of Ochakiv in the Mykolaiv region, damaging apartment buildings and killing two, including a 6-year-old child. A further six people, four of them children, were wounded. One of them, a 3-month-old baby, is in a coma, according to local officials.
The missile strike on Kremenchuk occurred as Western leaders pledged continued support for Ukraine and the world’s major economies prepared new sanctions against Russia, including a price cap on oil and higher tariffs on goods. Meanwhile, the U.S. appeared ready to respond to Zelenskyy’s call for more air defense systems, and NATO planned to increase the size of its rapid-reaction forces nearly eightfold — to 300,000 troops.
Zelenskyy said the mall presented “no threat to the Russian army” and had “no strategic value.” He accused Russia of sabotaging “people’s attempts to live a normal life, which make the occupiers so angry.”
In his nightly address, he said it appeared Russian forces had intentionally targeted the shopping center and added, “Today’s Russian strike at a shopping mall in Kremenchuk is one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.” He said Russia “has become the largest terrorist organization in the world.”
Russia has increasingly used long-range bombers in the war. Ukrainian officials said Russian Tu-22M3 long-range bombers flying over Russia’s western Kursk region fired the missiles, one of which hit the shopping center and another that struck a sports arena in Kremenchuk.
The Russian strike echoed earlier attacks that caused large numbers of civilian casualties — such as one in March on a Mariupol theater where many civilians had holed up, killing an estimated 600, and another in April on a train station in eastern Kramatorsk that killed at least 59 people.
“Russia continues to take out its impotence on ordinary civilians. It is useless to hope for decency and humanity on its part,” Zelenskyy said.
The United Nations called the strike “deplorable,” stressing that civilian infrastructure “should never ever be targeted,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. Group of Seven leaders condemned the attack in a statement late Monday saying “indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians constitute a war crime. Russian President Putin and those responsible will be held to account.”
Read:Russia strikes Kyiv as Western leaders meet in Europe
The attack coincided with Russia’s all-out assault on the last Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, “pouring fire” on the city of Lysychansk from the ground and air, according to the local governor. At least eight people were killed and more than 20 wounded in Lysychansk when Russian rockets hit an area where a crowd gathered to obtain water from a tank, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said.
The barrage was part of Russian forces’ intensified offensive aimed at wresting the eastern Donbas region from Ukraine. Over the weekend, the Russian military and their local separatist allies forced Ukrainian government troops out of Lysychansk’s neighboring city, Sievierodonetsk.
To the west of Lysychansk on Monday, the mayor of the city of Sloviansk — potentially the next major battleground — said Russian forces fired cluster munitions, including one that hit a residential neighborhood. Authorities said the number of victims had yet to be confirmed. The Associated Press saw one fatality: A man’s body lay hunched over a car door frame, his blood pooling onto the ground from chest and head wounds. The blast blew out most windows in the surrounding apartment blocks and the cars parked below, littering the ground with broken glass.
“Everything is now destroyed,” said resident Valentina Vitkovska, in tears as she spoke about the blast. “We are the only people left living in this part of the building. There is no power. I can’t even call to tell others what had happened to us.”
The Russian forces also pummeled other Ukrainian cities, killing at least five people and wounding 15 others in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and striking the key southern Black Sea port of Odesa where a missile attack destroyed residential buildings and wounded six people, including a child, according to Ukrainian authorities.
In Lysychansk, at least five high-rise buildings and the last road bridge were damaged over the past day, Haidai said. A crucial highway linking the city to government-held territory to the south was rendered impassable.
Arrest of Indian Muslim journalist sparks widespread outrage
Police in India’s capital New Delhi arrested a Muslim journalist Monday evening for allegedly hurting religious sentiments in what many have slammed as the latest example of shrinking press freedoms under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Mohammed Zubair, one of the co-founders of fact-checking website Alt News, was arrested over a tweet that police said deliberately insulted “the god of a particular religion.” Senior police officer K P S Malhotra said the case was registered following a complaint from a Twitter user and Zubair was remanded in custody for one day.
Journalists across India have been increasingly targeted for their work in recent years. Some have been arrested under stringent criminal charges over posts on social media, where they routinely face threats and trolling. The Twitter accounts of some journalists and news websites have also been suspended on government orders.
The incident immediately set off a wave of outrage, with activists, journalists and opposition politicians taking to social media to decry it as harassment of the press while calling for Zubair’s immediate release.
Also read: Leading Muslim journo held in India
“In a democracy, where every individual possesses the right to exercise the freedom of speech and expression, it is unjustifiable that such stringent laws are being used as tools against journalists,” said DIGIPUB, a network of Indian digital news organizations, in a statement.
“Arresting one voice of truth will only give rise to a thousand more,” wrote opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Twitter.
Pratik Sinha, the other co-founder of Alt News, said that Zubair was arrested without any notice from police, which is mandatory under law for the sections under which he has been detained.
Founded in 2017 as a nonprofit, Alt News is India’s most prominent fact-checking news website and has gained a reputation for its reporting on hate speech and debunking misinformation, particularly by Hindu nationalists. Its founders often face online trolling and threats by right-wing groups, some of them linked to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Several similar cases have been filed against Zubair in the past. Earlier this month, police charged him for calling some Hindu monks “hatemongers,” news website The Wire reported. The Hindu monks had made inflammatory statements about Muslims and at least one of them had called for a “genocide” of the minority community. The monks were arrested and later released on bail.
Zubair was also among the first journalists to highlight controversial comments made by the now-suspended spokesperson of the BJP on the Prophet Muhammad that created a diplomatic row for the Modi administration. The Indian government distanced itself from the spokesperson’s comments after it sparked massive backlash from many Muslim nations.
India's rank fell eight places to 150 among 180 countries in this year's Press Freedom Index published by watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.
“Indian journalists who are too critical of the government are subjected to all-out harassment and attack campaigns,” it noted in its 2022 edition, adding that reporters were regularly exposed to police violence and increasing reprisals from officials.
Zubair’s arrest comes two days after lawyer and human rights activist Teesta Setalvad was arrested by the Gujarat state police’s anti-terrorism wing.
Also read: Woman tribal politician to become India's next President?
Setalvad was arrested Saturday for allegedly “committing forgery and fabricating evidence” in a case about the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state. Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat, has denied the charges against him, and has been cleared of complicity after government investigators and courts ruled there is no evidence against Modi.
Setalvad has long campaigned to get justice for victims of the riots in which nearly 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. Her arrest was condemned by global rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Leading Muslim journo held in India
Police in the Indian capital have arrested a leading Muslim journalist on charges of hurting religious sentiments through one of his tweets.
Mohammed Zubair is the co-founder of Alt News, a popular fact-checking website that has been critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party government.
Zubair's recent tweets highlighting the comments of BJP spokespersons allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad prompted many Muslim countries to lodge protest and led to countrywide demonstrations.
Read: Hearing on rule for identifying plotters against Padma Bridge Tuesday
Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha said that his colleague was called by Delhi Police for questioning in a different case and arrested "in this new case instead" on Monday night.
"No FIR copy is being given to us despite repeated requests," Sinha tweeted.
India's opposition has condemned Zubair's arrest. "Arresting one voice of truth will only give rise to a thousand more," Congress leader Rahul Gandhi tweeted.
Alt News was founded in 2017.
Biden suspends rules limiting immigrant arrest, deportation
The Biden administration, reacting to a federal court ruling in Texas, has suspended an order that had focused resources for the arrest and deportation of immigrants on those who are considered a threat to public safety and national security.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Saturday it will abide by the decision issued this month, even though it “strongly disagrees” and is appealing it.
Immigrant advocates and experts on Monday said the suspension of Biden’s order will only sow fear among immigrant communities.
Many living in the country illegally will now be afraid to leave their homes out of concern they’ll be detained, even if they’re otherwise law-abiding, said Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University.
Also read: Biden urges Western unity on Ukraine amid war fatigue
Prioritizing whom to arrest and deport is a necessity, he said. “We simply don’t have enough ICE agents to pick up and put into proceedings everyone who violates our immigration law,” Yale-Loehr said.
The Texas case centers around a memorandum Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, issued last September, directing immigration agencies to focus their enforcement efforts on those who represented a threat to national security or public safety or who recently entered the U.S. illegally.
The approach was a departure from President Donald Trump’s administration, when immigration agencies were given wide latitude on whom to arrest, detain and deport, prompting many immigrants without legal status to upend their daily routines to evade detection, such as avoiding driving or even taking sanctuary in churches and other places generally off limits to immigration authorities.
But on June 10, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton in southern Texas voided Mayorkas' memo, siding with Republican state officials in Texas and Louisiana who argued the Biden administration did not have the authority to issue such a directive.
In response, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will make enforcement decisions on “a case-by-case basis in a professional and responsible manner, informed by their experience as law enforcement officials and in a way that best protects against the greatest threats to the homeland,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its statement Saturday.
Also read: G-7 to ban Russian gold in response to Ukraine war: Biden
How the court ruling plays out in cities and towns across the country remains to be seen, advocates say.
Sarang Sekhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the largest such group in New England, said the outcome likely rests on the approach taken by local ICE field offices.
Some ICE offices may elect to go after a wider range of immigrants, while others will continue to focus on going after ones that pose the greatest threats, he said.
“This takes away any kind of centralized guidance,” Sekhavat said. “What this does is really leave it in the hands of the local field office and how they want to go about enforcement.”
Nationwide, ICE officials arrested more than 74,000 immigrants and removed more than 59,000 in the fiscal year that ended in September, according to the agency’s most recent annual report. That’s down from the nearly 104,000 arrests and 186,000 deportations the prior fiscal year, according to ICE data.
ICE spokespersons in Washington and the Boston field office, which covers the six-state New England region, declined to comment Monday, as did officials in ICE’s Los Angeles field office.
But in a June interview with The Associated Press conducted before the Texas court ruling, Thomas Giles, head of ICE's LA office, said nine out of 10 immigration arrests locally involve people convicted of crimes.
He said the Biden administration’s priorities didn’t bring a huge change for the region because officers were already focused on people with felony criminal convictions or prior deportations.
It required them to weigh aggravating and mitigating factors and make more detailed evaluations on cases, he said, but the focus remained constant.
“We’re out here enhancing public safety," Giles said.
3 killed, dozens hurt in Amtrak train crash in Missouri
An Amtrak passenger train traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago struck a dump truck Monday in a remote area of Missouri, killing three people and injuring dozens more as rail cars tumbled off the tracks and landed on their sides, officials said.
Two of those killed were on the train and one was in the truck, Missouri State Highway Patrol spokesman Cpl. Justin Dunn said. It was not immediately clear exactly how many people were hurt, the patrol said, but hospitals reported receiving more than 40 patients from the crash and were expecting more.
Amtrak's Southwest Chief was carrying about 207 passengers and crew members when the collision happened near Mendon at a rural intersection on a gravel road with no lights or electronic controls, according to the highway patrol. Officials were still trying to determine the exact number of people aboard. Seven cars derailed, the patrol said.
Rob Nightingale said he was dozing off in his sleeper compartment when the lights flickered and the train rocked back and forth.
Also read: 46 dead, 16 hospitalized after trailer of migrants found
“It was like slow motion. Then all of a sudden I felt it tip my way. I saw the ground coming toward my window, and all the debris and dust,” Nightingale told The Associated Press. “Then it sat on its side and it was complete silence. I sat there and didn’t hear anything. Then I heard a little girl next door crying.”
Nightingale was unhurt and he and other passengers were able to climb out of the overturned train car through a window.
The collision broke the dump truck apart, he said.
“It was all over the tracks,” said Nightingale, an art gallery owner from Taos, New Mexico, who said he rides Amtrak regularly to Chicago.
It's too early to speculate on why the truck was on the tracks, said National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy. A team of NTSB investigators will arrive Tuesday, she said. Trains won't be able to run on the track for “a matter of days” while they gather evidence, she added.
At one point, KMBC-TV helicopter video showed rail cars on their side as emergency responders used ladders to climb into one of them. Six medical helicopters parked nearby were waiting to transport patients.
Close to 20 local and state law enforcement agencies, ambulance services, fire department and medical helicopter services responded, Dunn said. The first emergency responders arrived within 20 minutes of receiving a 911 call, he said.
Passenger Dian Couture was in the dining car with her husband celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary when she heard a loud noise and the train wobbled and then crashed onto its side.
Also read: Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall
“The people on our left-hand side flew across and hit us, and then we were standing on the windows on the right-hand side of the car," Couture told WDAF-TV. “Two gentlemen in the front came up, stacked a bunch of things and popped out the window and literally pulled us out by our hands."
Passengers included 16 youths and eight adults from two Boy Scout troops who were traveling home to Appleton, Wisconsin, after a backcountry excursion at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. No one in the group was seriously injured, said Scott Armstrong, director of national media relations for the Boy Scouts of America. The Scouts administered first aid to several injured passengers, including the driver of the dump truck, Armstrong said.
High school students from Pleasant Ridge High School in Easton, Kansas, who were headed to a Future Business Leaders of America conference in Chicago, were also aboard, Superintendent Tim Beying told The Kansas City Star.
Cheryl Benjamin was on her way home to East Lansing, Michigan, after an Alasksan cruise and a trip to Disneyland. She said she felt a bump, then heard a squeal, then looked out the window and saw the cars in front of her falling to the right. Then her car fell, the last to derail. It all took about 45 seconds.
Benjamin told The Associated Press that the passengers organized themselves to escape the cars. Some of the Boy Scouts on board helped her climb out of the train and onto the ground. She was spending Monday evening in a local high school gym, where community members had brought in food for the passengers as they waited for buses to take them to hotels.
Republican state Rep. Peggy McGaugh was at the high school. She said locals heard about the crash and started frying chicken, making sandwiches and delivering pallets of water.
“Being the small community this is, nobody wants to be the hero but everyone wants to help," McGaugh said.
Mike Spencer, who grows corn and soybeans on the land surrounding the intersection where the crash occurred, said everyone in Mendon understands that the intersection is dangerous, especially for those driving heavy, slow farm equipment. The approach to the tracks is on an inclining gravel road and it’s difficult to see trains coming in either direction, he said.
Spencer said he had contacted state transportation officials, Chariton County commissioners and BNSF Railway, which owns the track, about the potential danger. Spencer, who is on the board of a local levy district, said the dump truck driver was hauling rock for a levy on a local creek, a project that had been ongoing for a couple days.
Amtrak is a federally supported company that operates more than 300 passenger trains daily in nearly every contiguous U.S. state and parts of Canada.
It was the second Amtrak collision in as many days. Three people in a car were killed Sunday afternoon when an Amtrak commuter train smashed into it in Northern California, authorities said.
The Southwest Chief takes about two days to travel from Los Angeles to Chicago, picking up passengers at stops in between. Mendon, with a population of about 160, is about 84 miles (135 kilometers) northeast of Kansas City.
46 dead, 16 hospitalized after trailer of migrants found
Forty-six people were found dead and 16 others were taken to hospitals after a tractor-trailer rig containing suspected migrants was found Monday on a remote back road in southwest San Antonio, officials said.
A city worker at the scene was alerted to the situation by a cry for help shortly before 6 p.m. Monday, Police Chief William McManus said. Officers arrived to find a body on the ground outside the trailer and a partially opened gate to the trailer, he said.
Of the 16 taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, 12 were adults and four were children, said Fire Chief Charles Hood. The patients were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water was found in the trailer, he said.
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Three people were taken into custody, but it was unclear if they were absolutely connected with human trafficking, McManus said.
Those in the trailer were part of a presumed migrant smuggling attempt into the United States, and the investigation was being led by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, McManus said.
Those in the trailer were in a presumed migrant smuggling attempt in South Texas, according to an official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the information had not been authorized for public release.
It may be the deadliest tragedy among thousands who have died attempting to cross the U.S. border from Mexico in recent decades. Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck that was parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of San Antonio.
Big rigs emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid a surge in U.S. border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, which were then the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.
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Before that, people paid small fees to mom-and-pop operators to get them across a largely unguarded border. As crossing became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terror attacks in the U.S., migrants were led through more dangerous terrain and paid thousands of dollars more.
Heat poses a serious danger, particularly when temperatures can rise severely inside vehicles. Weather in the San Antonio area was mostly cloudy Monday, but temperatures approached 100 degrees.
Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall
Scores of civilians were feared killed or wounded in a Russian missile strike Monday on a crowded shopping mall in Ukraine's central city of Kremenchuk, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post that the number of victims was "unimaginable," citing reports that more than 1,000 civilians were inside at the time of the attack.
Images from the scene showed giant plumes of black smoke from the shopping centre engulfed in flames, as emergency crews rushed in and onlookers watched in distress.
At least 13 people were dead and more than 40 wounded, according to the regional governor, Dmytro Lunin, who said rescuers were continuing to comb the smouldering debris for more victims.
The strike unfolded as Western leaders pledged continued support for Ukraine, and the world's major economies got ready to pursue new sanctions on Russia, including a price cap on oil and higher tariffs on goods.
Meanwhile, the US appeared ready to respond to Zelenskyy's call for more air defence systems, and NATO planned to increase the size of its rapid-reaction forces nearly eightfold – to 300,000 troops.
Zelenskyy said the mall presented "no threat to the Russian army" and had "no strategic value."
He accused Russia of sabotaging "people's attempts to live a normal life, which make the occupiers so angry."
The Ukrainian military said the shopping centre was hit by missiles fired by Russian Tu-22M3 long-range bombers from the skies over Russia's western Kursk region.
The secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said one missile hit the shopping centre and another struck a sports arena in Kremenchuk.
The Russian strike carried echoes of attacks earlier in the war that caused large numbers of civilian casualties – such as one in March on a Mariupol theatre where many civilians had holed up, killing an estimated 600, and another in April on a train station in eastern Kramatorsk that left at least 59 people dead.
"Russia continues to take out its impotence on ordinary civilians. It is useless to hope for decency and humanity on its part," Zelenskyy said.
Mayor Vitaliy Maletskiy wrote on Facebook that the attack "hit a very crowded area, which is 100 percent certain not to have any links to the armed forces."
The United Nations called the attack on the shopping centre "deplorable," stressing that civilian infrastructure "should never ever be targeted.
The attack happened as Russia was mounting an all-out assault on the last Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk province, "pouring fire" on the city of Lysychansk from the ground and air, according to the local governor.
At least eight people were killed and more than 20 wounded in Lysychansk when Russian rockets hit an area where a crowd of people gathered to get water from a tank, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said.
Russian forces appeared to step up an offensive centring on trying to wrest the eastern Donbas region from Ukraine after forcing government troops out of the neighbouring city of Sievierodonetsk in recent days.
To the west of Lysychansk Monday, the mayor of the city of Sloviansk – potentially the next major battleground – said Russian forces fired cluster munitions on the city after dawn, including one that hit a residential neighbourhood.
Authorities said the number of dead and wounded had yet to be confirmed. The Associated Press saw one fatality: A man's body lay hunched over a car door frame, his blood pooling onto the ground from chest and head wounds.
The blast blew out most windows in the surrounding apartment blocks and the cars parked below, littering the ground with broken glass.
"Everything is now destroyed. We are the only people left living in this part of the building. There is no power," said local resident Valentina Vitkovska, in tears as she spoke about the blast. "I can't even call to tell others what had happened to us."
Overall, Zelenskyy's office said at least six civilians were killed and 31 others wounded as part of intense Russian shelling against various Ukrainian cities over the past 24 hours – including Kyiv and major cities in the country's south and east, but not counting the attack in Kremenchuk and the shelling of the eastern city of Kharkiv where at least five people were killed and another 15 were wounded.
It said Russian forces fired rockets that killed two people and wounded five overnight in and near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and continued to target the key southern port of Odesa. A missile attack destroyed residential buildings and wounded six people, including a child.
In Lysychansk, at least five high-rise buildings in the city and the last road bridge were damaged over the past day, the regional governor said.
A crucial highway linking the city to the government-held territory to the south was rendered impassable by shelling.
The city had a prewar population of around 100,000, around one-tenth of whom remain.
Analysts say that Lysychansk's location high on the banks of the Siverskyy Donets River gives a major advantage to the city's Ukrainian defenders.
"It's a very hard nut to crack. The Russians could spend many months and much effort storming Lysychansk," said military analyst Oleh Zhdanov.
In other developments, in Germany's Bavarian Alps, leaders of the Group of Seven countries unveiled plans to seek new sanctions and pledged to continue supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes."
In a joint statement Monday after they held a session by video link with Zelenskyy, the leaders underlined their "unwavering commitment to supporting the government and people of Ukraine in their courageous defence of their country's sovereignty and territorial integrity."
Elsewhere, Washington was expected to announce the purchase of an advanced surface-to-air missile system for Ukraine.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the plans to greatly expand the alliance's rapid-reaction forces as part of its response to an "era of strategic competition." The NATO response force now has about 40,000 soldiers.
NATO will agree to deliver further military support to Ukraine – including secure communication and anti-drone systems – when its leaders convene in Spain for a summit, Stoltenberg said.
Britain's defence ministry said Russia is likely to rely increasingly on reserve forces in the coming weeks of the war.
Analysts have said a call-up of reservists by Russia could vastly alter the balance in the war but could also come with political consequences for President Vladimir Putin's government.
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