Politics
Tired and confused, first migrants reach California border after Biden's asylum order
Shortly after President Biden’s executive order to restrict asylum access took effect late Tuesday, 50 migrants completed a nine-hour trek through the mountains just north of Tecate, Mexico.
They lined up single file against the brush, in a dusty clearing steps from Highway 94, and waited for Border Patrol agents to pick them up. The migrants, a group including men, women and children from Cuba, Ecuador, China and Brazil, were exhausted, nearly out of food and water.
Many hadn’t heard of the order, which raises the legal standard for asylum claims and blocks access for those crossing the border illegally when average arrests are higher than 2,500 a day.
Lucas Lu, 32, did know about it and worried he had arrived too late to seek asylum. The rule goes against American values, he said.
“It’s not fair,” he said, sitting with his legs crossed in the dirt. “We risked our lives to get here.”
The Chinese former hotel manager had a back brace wrapped around his T-shirt and leaned on a walking stick. He said he had sustained a spinal injury while traveling by boat in Panama. Getting to the southern border had taken him three months.
Lu said he was fleeing authoritarian repression in search of safety, dignity and the ability to speak freely without the threat of jail.
Just past 11 p.m. three sprinter vans and five other vehicles pulled up to the site.
“Gracias a Dios,” one woman exclaimed in the dark. “Thank God.”
The agents brought out trash bags and told the migrants to dump their food and water. One picked up Lu’s walking stick and hurled it into the brush.
“None of this, OK?” he said.
They patted migrants down and loaded them into the vans. An additional 45 migrants were coming down the hill, one agent said, plus groups of 40 and 90 in other areas.
Before and after the order took effect at 9 p.m. Pacific time, the night appeared relatively quiet overall, with many of the crossing sites east of San Diego deserted.
After migrant arrivals rose, making San Diego the top sector across the border, arrests dipped again in recent weeks.
But the daily average of arrests between official ports of entry remains above the 2,500 threshold.
During a call with reporters Wednesday, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said the day started with just over 9,000 people in custody who were arrested before the order took effect — on par with average figures over the last month. The agency didn’t see a significant increase in arrivals of migrants trying to beat the deadline.
Since then, migrants have been removed pursuant to the order, the official said, declining to provide figures. The agency is ramping up efforts to maximize the impact of the order in the coming weeks.
Migrants from Mexico can be quickly returned, and the Mexican government previously agreed to accept some migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba. The official acknowledged it will remain challenging to remove migrants from other countries, such as China, that don’t regularly accept deportation flights.
In Tijuana, Jose Garcia Lara, director of the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter, worries the executive order could cause a crisis as migrants become bottlenecked in northern Mexico.
The shelter, which has capacity for 200 people, had seen about 60 people daily, Garcia Lara said. In recent days, that number had gone up to 100.
Garcia Lara said the shelter numbers tend to be low when more people choose to cross the border illegally. Shelter residents are those waiting for an appointment with border agents through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection phone app, which is glitchy and slow.
He remembers the arrivals of Haitians in 2016, the caravans of Central Americans after that, the way the pandemic-era border rule kept migrants out of the U.S. and crowded in Mexican shelters.
Recently, migrants have shown up not just from the Western Hemisphere but from all over the world — and they’ll keep coming, he said. “We’re used to it,” he said. “What we’ll do is receive them.”
Rosario de Leon, 38, from Mexico’s Chiapas state and her wife, Gracia Cortez, 27, from El Salvador have waited two months for an appointment. They said they had faced discrimination as a gay couple, including in Tijuana, and fled gang extortion.
Cortez said the new rule is fair. Hopefully, it means more appointments could open up through the app, she said.
“It’s not fair that someone enters irregularly while others are following the rules,” she said. “We all need to be patient.”
Across the border at a trolley station in San Ysidro, Mariela Diaz, 28, waited Tuesday afternoon for her husband to be released from federal custody.
Diaz, from Colombia, charged her phone and caught up on the news of the executive order.
“I’m an immigrant, but it’s also something that is getting out of control,” she said. “I understand the president’s decision.”
She was relieved she arrived before the order took effect. Still, she felt for those who would arrive too late.
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
In what might be the most decisive critique yet of President Trump’s remake of the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution on Friday to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Roma Daravi, Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, described the relationship with Washington National Opera as “financially challenging.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the WNO due to a financially challenging relationship,” Daravi said in a statement. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Kennedy Center President Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the call was made by the Kennedy Center, writing that its leadership had “approached the Opera leadership last year with this idea and they began to be open to it.”
“Having an exclusive relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety,” Grenell wrote. “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
WNO’s decision to vacate the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House comes amid a wave of artist cancellations that came after the venue’s board voted to rename the center the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. New signage featuring Trump’s name went up on the building’s exterior just days after the vote while debate raged over whether an official name change could be made without congressional approval.
That same day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) — an ex officio member of the board — wrote on social media that the vote was not unanimous and that she and others who might have voiced their dissent were muted on the call.
Grenell countered that ex officio members don’t get a vote.
Cancellations soon began to mount — as did Kennedy Center‘s rebukes against the artists who chose not to appear. Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of his annual Christmas Eve concert; jazz supergroup the Cookers nixed New Year’s Eve shows; New York-based Doug Varone and Dancers dropped out of April performances; and Grammy Award-winning banjo player Béla Fleck wrote on social media that he would no longer play at the venue in February.
WNO’s departure, however, represents a new level of artist defection. The company’s name is synonymous with the Kennedy Center and it has served as an artistic center of gravity for the complex since the building first opened.
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
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Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
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