Author: Reporter

The Biden administration recently stopped taking mobile app appointments to admit asylum-seekers at a Texas border crossing that connects to a notoriously dangerous Mexican city after advocates warned U.S. authorities that migrants were being targeted there for extortion. U.S. Customs and Border Protection gave no explanation for its decision to stop scheduling new appointments via the CBP One app for the crossing in Laredo, Texas. Several asylum-seekers have said that Mexican officials in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, had threatened to hold them and make them miss their scheduled asylum appointments unless they paid them. Humanitarian...

The separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border has always caused Isabel Allende pain: When she saw it during the Trump administration, her first impulse was to help reunify children and parents through her foundation. Then, the legendary Chilean author thought, she had to write a book. “The Wind Knows My Name,” which grapples with immigration, violence, solidarity, and love, is the latest novel by the award-winning writer who — with more than 77 million books sold — is considered the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Released earlier this month, it is available at bookstores in the...

With traces of winter’s unusually heavy snow still lingering but a warm sun finally shining, farmers were out dawn to dusk in early May on their tractors, planting corn and soybeans across southwestern Minnesota fields many have owned for generations. The threat of losing these beloved family farms has become a constant worry, affecting many farmers’ mental health and raising concerns of another uptick in suicides like during the 1980s farm crisis. Much of the stress stems from being dependent on factors largely outside their control – from the increasingly unpredictable weather to growing costs of equipment to global...

Mexico has been flying migrants south away from the U.S. border for weeks and busing new arrivals away from its boundary with Guatemala to relieve pressure on its border cities. In the weeks since Washington dropped pandemic-era restrictions on seeking asylum at its border, U.S. authorities have reported a dramatic drop in illegal crossing attempts. In Mexico, officials are generally trying to keep migrants south away from that border, a strategy that could reduce crossing temporarily, but experts say is not sustainable. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported in late May that in the weeks since the policy...

The longstanding racial gap in U.S. stroke death rates widened dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, government researchers said in April. Stroke death rates increased for both Black and White adults in 2020 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. But the difference between the two groups grew about 22%, compared with the five years before the pandemic. “Any health inequity that existed before seems to have been made larger during the pandemic,” said Dr. Bart Demaerschalk, a stroke researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix who was not involved in the new study. “This...