WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre attacked a federal judge for “sabotage” Friday after the jurist blocked the potential mass release of migrants at the US-Mexico border — as President Biden offered no comment on the crisis at his only public event of the day.
Jean-Pierre made the unusual attack on Florida US District Judge Kent Wetherell hours after he forbade the release of migrants on “parole” without a court date if detention capacity is exceeded, issuing the order hours before the end of the Title 42 COVID-19 expulsion program.
“On the ruling that you just you just laid out to me — so look, the way we see that, it’s sabotage, it’s pure and simple. That’s how that reads to us,” Jean-Pierre said. “The claims that CBP is allowing or encouraging release of migrants is just categorically false … and it is a harmful ruling.”
In fact, The Post and other outlets have reported on hundreds of migrants being sent on to the American interior from border cities. In El Paso, Texas alone, more than 1,100 migrants were released from US Customs and Border Protection custody on Thursday.
Jean-Pierre reaffirmed her choice of words moments later, again saying, “it’s a harmful ruling … we need Congress — beyond the ruling, beyond what we’re seeing from the sabotage, pure and simple … we want Congress to act.”
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Karine Jean-Pierre attacked a federal judge for “sabotage” Friday.Al Drago/UPI/Shutterstock
When yet another journalist asked Jean-Pierre whether she was attacking the judge or Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, who brought the suit, Jean-Pierre said, “I won’t go into a specific person,” passing on the opportunity to disavow her disparagement of one of the other two branches of government.
The White House’s main spokeswoman didn’t specify what policies Congress should enact to address the border rush.
Biden, meanwhile, didn’t mention the dramatic scenes unfolding at the border while welcoming Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to the White House — the US leader’s only scheduled public appearance of the day.
“We are both facing the challenges of migration in the Western Hemisphere and you’re doing a heck of a job,” Biden told Sanchez before refusing to answer any shouted reporter questions.
Jean-Pierre defended Biden’s lack of comment on the crisis after he predicted a “chaotic” period at the frontier on Tuesday.
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“Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas is a powerful messenger,” Jean-Pierre said, referring to the Homeland Security secretary who appeared in the White House briefing room on Thursday.
“He took your questions twice this week,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden, adding that “a week ago today, he sat down and had a one-on-one interview with one of your colleagues, [MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle] … and was asked about Title 42.”
In El Paso, Texas alone, more than 1,100 migrants were released from US Customs and Border Protection custody on Thursday.REUTERS
A DHS-organized press call on Friday morning, meanwhile, triggered outrage when administration officials required press to pre-submit their questions. An official later told Fox News journalist Jacqui Heinrich that the vetting of queries would not happen again and that it was “a new system… in an effort of transparency” to ask journalists for their questions in advance.
Meanwhile, throngs of migrants waited to cross the border Friday in blistering heat and a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo reported by the New York Times said the crisis could get much worse. An estimated 660,000 migrants from around the world may be in Mexico planning to enter the US, the memo said.
What is Title 42 and what does its end mean for US border immigration?
What is Title 42?
Title 42 is a federal health measure enforced by the US Border Patrol. It allows the agency to kick certain migrants out of the US and return them to Mexico. This includes asylum seekers, who under international law have the legal right to make an asylum claim in America.
Currently, migrants who cross the border illegally and who are from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua or Venezuela are subject to Title 42 and could be sent to Mexico.
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How did Title 42 start?
President Donald Trump invoked the law in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue the policy. The Trump administration made the case that keeping migrants out of the country would slow down the spread of infections and maintain the safety of federal agents encountering migrants.
What has happened with Title 42 under Biden?
When President Biden took over, he continued to enforce Title 42 with one important change from his predecessor. Biden said Border Patrol agents were only allowed to expel migrants from certain countries under his direction. That meant migrants seeking asylum from countries like Cuba and Venezuela could still seek asylum if they arrived at the border and stay in the US while their cases were decided in court — unless they had a criminal record.
What is happening with Title 42 now?
Title 42 is supposed to be a health policy, not an immigration law. It will end at 11:59 p.m. May 11, when the Biden administration ends all COVID-19-related policies.
Why is it controversial?
Many have called for the policy’s end, saying it’s illegal and that international law guarantees people the right to seek asylum.
Others, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, warn that the southern border could see up to 13,000 migrants per day crossing with the intention to stay in the country when the measure ends.
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What would the end of Title 42 mean for immigration into the US?
It’s unclear exactly how many people have been expelled under Title 42 because there have been scores of people who have attempted to enter the country numerous times and been rejected again and again, but the US Border Patrol said it made an all-time high of more than 2.3 million arrests at the border in the last fiscal year. Forty percent of people who were expelled from the country were ejected under the rules of Title 42.
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The migrant crisis began shortly after Biden took office and Republicans accuse him of creating new “pull” factors — a stance also taken by the presidents of Guatemala and Mexico. Biden aides generally emphasis “push” factors such as crime and poverty and say the COVID-19 pandemic worsened them.
On his first day in office in January 2021, Biden halted funding to construct former President Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall. That June, Biden ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that required most asylum seekers who reached the southern border to await US court rulings south of the border.
Republicans also accuse Biden of illegally allowing nearly one million migrants arrested at the border while Title 42 was in effect.REUTERS
The Biden administration this week also sought to direct blame for the border rush onto what it branded a “broken” immigration system. Biden’s proposals for reform included legalizing almost all migrants currently in the US illegally, which Republicans say would incentivize even more new arrivals.
Republicans also accuse Biden of illegally allowing nearly 1 million migrants arrested at the border while Title 42 was in effect to be released into the US without a court date under “parole” programs or via notices to report to badly backlogged local ICE offices, where they will be placed into legal proceedings and have their asylum claims adjudicated.
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New York City’s ICE office backlog means that migrants may wait a decade just for an appointment to get a court date. Immigration courts then take on average another four years to reach a decision.
Asylum applicants are granted US work permits while they wait and any children they have in the US automatically become citizens — setting the stage for potential heartbreak years later if their claims are denied, as most ultimately are, immigration hardliners say.
In fiscal 2021 courts denied 63% of asylum claims — and judges denied 71% of claims the year before, according to data compiled by the University of Syracuse.
A Biden administration parole program rolled out in January sought to tamp down illegal border crossings by allowing 30,000 people per month from four nations — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — to get pre-approval to enter the US at legal points of entry and then await court rulings, which some Republican politicians also decry as illegal.
The Biden administration gradually relaxed enforcement of Title 42, which under former President Donald Trump was used to turn away nearly everyone who illegally crossed the border during the pandemic. Biden at first allowed unaccompanied minors to remain, then gradually allowed greater numbers of family units and single adults.
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There were nearly 2.4 million arrests for illegally crossing the US-Mexico border in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30 — up from an elevated 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, fewer than 500,000 in fiscal 2020 and nearly 1 million in fiscal 2019. Those figures do not include migrants who evaded arrest.
So far in fiscal 2023, apprehensions of migrants are up 4% at the southern border.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine, has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.
The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.
The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this year, with its product receiving hundreds of millions of queries a month. It has 15mn monthly active users with most of that traffic coming from the US.
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The new funding will help Perplexity compete with west coast rivals in an increasingly fierce fight for engineers. “The talent war for AI is like no other time before,” according to Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, the AI and data analytics company that announced a $10bn fundraising round on Tuesday.
Perplexity is seeking to capitalise and improve on the search advertising system pioneered by Google, in which marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries. It is in talks with major brands to pilot advertising on its platform.
In a sign of growing competition in the space, AI companies have recently targeted the search market by linking up chatbots to the internet. This week, OpenAI rolled out web searching for its popular ChatGPT product, while Anthropic’s Claude can perform searches through a feature called “computer use”.
Google and Microsoft, which are leaders in the $300bn digital advertising world, have also recently incorporated large language models, which power AI chatbots and make results more conversational, into their search offerings.
The latest round has pushed Perplexity’s valuation higher by nine-fold since the start of the year, in another sign of how hot start-ups developing new AI tools can draw in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment.
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After OpenAI’s $6.6bn fundraising in October — one of the largest in Silicon Valley — one person close to the company said Perplexity was inundated with unsolicited interest from new investors.
Run by former Google intern Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity raised $250mn this summer, on top of previous funding rounds in January and April.
Perplexity makes money through subscriptions. It says its annualised revenues — a projection of full-year revenues based on extrapolating the most recent month’s sales — have grown from $5mn in January to $35mn in August.
The spate of deals for lossmaking AI start-ups has stoked concern among some investors that rising valuations in the sector show all the hallmarks of a bubble, however. But even those who argue most AI valuations are increasingly detached from reality are willing to stake bets on companies they believe could be winners.
Perplexity and T Rowe Price declined to comment. IVP, B Capital, NEA and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The closing of the round was first reported by Bloomberg.
An unidentified person braves the weather to do last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve in Omaha, Neb., on Dec. 24, 2009. That year, a powerful storm spread snow, sleet and rain across the nation’s midsection.
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If you’re hoping to wake up on Christmas morning to white fluffy stuff on the ground, there’s a chance you might get your wish.
Christmas magic won’t bring snow to the majority of the country, but some parts might just get lucky, according to Scott Kleebauer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center.
“If you are one of those people that does get a chance to enjoy a white Christmas, definitely feel very lucky and very blessed to be able to enjoy something like that, as it looks like a lot of people this year will not be able to,” Kleebauer tells NPR.
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While hopes for a white Christmas are on many minds each year, experts say the chances of experiencing one may diminish in the future, in partbecause of shifts in weather patterns driven by global warming.
Here is what the weather is likely to look like on Christmas Day across the country and how a changing climate may impact Christmases to come.
Will you have a white Christmas?
The areas that have the highest chances for a white Christmas — when there is at least 1 inch of snow on the ground on Christmas morning — will be out west in the Rockies, around the Great Lakes and in higher terrain in northern New England, Kleebauer says. Parts of the Appalachian Mountains across the high country of West Virginia, western Maryland and into western Pennsylvania also have a chance for snow.
There’s hope for a white Christmas in a few parts of the U.S.
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There’s also a high chance of “heavy precipitation and high elevation snow” in northern California and parts of the Pacific Northwest on Christmas Eve that will start again on Dec. 26, according to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, or CPC.
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“A storm system in the Pacific Northwest could bring mountain snow as Santa is making his rounds, and the CPC features a moderate potential for Heavy Snow Hazards in the northern Rockies, especially in the Cascade Mountains and the Bitterroot Range of Idaho,” Erica Grow Cei, meteorologist and spokesperson for the National Weather Service, tells NPR.
Most of the country is also expected to have temperatures that are “milder than average” on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to NOAA. Temperatures are expected to be near normal to slightly above normal across portions of the Plains and into the southeastern portion of the country. States including Texas and Florida are forecast to see temperatures in the 70s.
This map by the Climate Prediction Center shows areas at risk of heavy snow from Christmas Day to the end of the year.
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So far, 2024 has been the warmest year on record globally and is likely to beat the record set just last year, according to NOAA. The year is also on track to be one of the warmest two years ever recorded in the contiguous U.S.
Warmer temperatures could impact future white Christmases
Historically, parts of the northern U.S., the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada Mountains have had the highest likelihood of experiencing a white Christmas, according to Kleebauer and a map by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
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The last time the majority of America woke up to a white Christmas was nearly 15 years ago, Kleebauer says. On Dec. 19, 2009, a large snowstorm blanketed parts of the Northeast starting in Virginia and dumped more than 12 inches of snow on Boston, with snow lingering through Christmas Day. Snow also fell in other parts of the country during that time, resulting in “large snow coverage across the United States, even into those areas that don’t see white Christmases too often,” he says. Texas was one of those areas.
But because of warmer temperatures driven by climate change, the coldest temperatures are becoming less frequent in parts of the country.
This map by NOAA shows the historical probability of at least 1 inch of snow on the ground on Dec. 25. The agency says actual weather conditions on Christmas Day will vary each year.
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When looking at changes in monthly and seasonal temperatures — along with the number of snowy days — “it is clear that winter is the fastest warming season across 74% of the United States, with the northeastern United States and Upper Midwest,” says Elizabeth Burakowski, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. has seen rapidly warming temperatures, according to the federal government’s most recent National Climate Assessment, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
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“As the world’s climate has shifted toward warmer conditions, the frequency and intensity of extreme cold events have declined over much of the US, while the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat have increased,” the assessment says. “Across all regions of the US, people are experiencing warming temperatures and longer-lasting heatwaves. Over much of the country, nighttime temperatures and winter temperatures have warmed more rapidly than daytime and summer temperatures.”
As temperatures rise, more precipitation is expected to fall as rain instead of snow, particularly in areas in the western part of the U.S., the assessment also found. These temperatures will also lead to “earlier snowmelt, altered rates of snowmelt and evaporation directly from the snow, and longer snow-free periods,” the assessment says.
So far this winter, snowfall across parts of the U.S., including areas of the Prairie Pothole region including North and South Dakota, southern portions of Minnesota and Wisconsin, has been below normal, according to Shawn Carter, Winter Hydrology Desk lead at NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center. Government data shows that snowfall in the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades are well above normal, while the Rockies are seeing a mix of normal to slightly below normal levels, Carter also says.
White Christmases are a sentimental favorite, but they are also a powerful example of how the world’s climate is changing.
“Seeing changes in the chances of a white Christmas is one of so many ways we may experience climate change,” Burakowski says. “When we come together as a community to address climate [change], we’re preserving so much more than snow on Christmas day.”
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The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point but signalled a slower pace of easing next year, sending the dollar racing higher and US stocks lower.
The Federal Open Market Committee voted on Wednesday to reduce the federal funds rate to 4.25-4.5 per cent, its third cut in a row. The decision was not unanimous, with Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack casting a dissenting vote, with a preference for holding rates steady.
Officials’ economic projections released alongside the rate decision pointed to fewer reductions than previously forecast for 2025, underscoring policymakers’ concern that cutting borrowing costs too quickly could undermine efforts to cool price growth across the world’s biggest economy. Policymakers also lifted their projections for inflation.
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Fed chief Jay Powell said that following Wednesday’s cut, the central bank’s policy settings were “significantly less restrictive” and could now be “more cautious” as they consider additional easing. He also characterised the December decision as a “closer call” than at previous meetings.
Inflation was moving “sideways”, Powell added, while risks to the labour market had “diminished”.
Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley said the Fed’s forecasts for 2025 were “much more hawkish than we anticipated”.
US government bonds fell in price after the Fed decision, with the policy-sensitive two-year Treasury yield rising 0.08 percentage points to 4.33 per cent. The dollar jumped 1 per cent against a basket of six peers, while Wall Street’s S&P 500 share index dropped 1 per cent.
The Fed’s goal is to apply enough pressure on consumer demand and business activity to push inflation back to the US central bank’s 2 per cent target without harming the jobs market or the economy more broadly.
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Officials now expect to cut the benchmark rate by half a percentage point next year to 3.75-4 per cent, down from the full percentage point reduction predicted in September’s “dot plot”. Four officials pencilled in one or no additional cuts next year.
Most saw the policy rate falling to 3.25-3.5 per cent by the end of 2026, also higher than in the forecast from three months prior.
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They also raised their forecasts for inflation once food and energy prices are stripped out to 2.5 per cent and 2.2 per cent in 2025 and 2026, respectively, while they predicted the unemployment rate would steady at 4.3 per cent for the next three years.
“In considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” it said.
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In a sign that the Fed is preparing to skip rate cuts at forthcoming meetings, the FOMC amended its language regarding future changes to its policy settings in its statement.
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Wednesday’s decision was not the first this year that was opposed by a Fed official, after Michelle Bowman cast a dissent to September’s half-point reduction. That was the first time a governor voted against a decision since 2005.
The quarter-point cut was widely expected by financial markets, but came amid debate among officials over how quickly inflation was retreating towards the Fed’s 2 per cent target. The core personal consumption expenditures price index, the central bank’s preferred inflation gauge that strips out food and energy prices, rose at an annual rate of 2.8 per cent in October.
The Fed kicked off a new rate-cutting cycle in September with a bumper half-point cut, but fears about the labour market have ebbed since then and the economic outlook has brightened. That healthy state of the US economy has changed the calculus for officials as they try to settle on a “neutral” rate that neither constrains growth or drives it too high.
The central bank has described recent cuts as a “recalibration” of policy that reflects its success in knocking inflation from a peak of about 7 per cent in 2022.
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On Wednesday, Powell said the Fed was in a “new phase in the process”, suggesting that the bar for future cuts would move higher as rates approached estimates of neutral.
Fed officials raised that estimate for the neutral rate again, with a majority now pencilling it in at 3 per cent. This time last year, they gauged it was 2.5 per cent.
The Fed meeting came just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House, having vowed to raise tariffs, deport immigrants and slash taxes and regulations. Economists recently polled by the Financial Times said the policy combination could trigger a new bout of higher inflation and hit growth.
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