President Donald Trump says he will revisit the decision to end a program that shielded nearly 800,000 young, undocumented immigrants from deportation if Congress doesn’t act on the issue.

Hours after administration officials said new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, will no longer be accepted, Trump tweeted late Tuesday that “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!”

Action by Congress is not certain. Lawmakers have been unsuccessful for years in their efforts to revise substantially U.S. immigration policies. During Obama’s eight years as president, the Senate – controlled by members of his Democratic Party for most of that time — approved major policy changes only to see the legislation fail in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

President Trump approved the decision to end DACA but sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions before news cameras Tuesday to announce the controversial policy change.

“DACA is being rescinded,” Sessions announced. The action revoked an executive order former President Barack Obama issued five years ago after the U.S. Congress repeatedly failed to agree on an immigration reform bill.

WATCH: Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Sessions argued that Obama’s “open-ended circumvention of immigration laws” was in violation of the U.S. constitution and unlikely to survive a legal challenge brought by several Republican-controlled states.

Former President Barack Obama, who has refrained from commenting on most of the policy changes Trump has enacted this year, challenged Sessions’ legal argument in a strongly worded statement, saying the decision was “purely political” and that it targeted young people who “have done nothing wrong.”

Demonstrators opposed to the administration’s decision massed in Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Denver and other cities.

WATCH: ‘Dreamers’ Vow to Fight to Keep DACA Until the Bitter End

Activist Gustavo Torres told a crowd outside the White House: “This president lied to our community. … He told us, ‘I have a big heart for you dreamers.’ He’s a liar!”

The future status of the hundreds of thousands of young, foreign-born students and workers is unclear for now, since they are no longer protected from summary deportation by the DACA program. Congress will have six months to act if it wants to continue to allow them to remain in the United States.

The young immigrants, also colloquially known as “dreamers,” typically entered the United States as young children. Many trace their heritage to Mexico or Central American countries, but some arrived so young that they have grown up knowing nothing other than American society and customs.

Anyone who joined the “deferred action” program for work and study was required to have and maintain a clean criminal record. DACA did not promise participants citizenship or permanent U.S. residency, instead promising a reprieve from deportation.

DACA Changes Explained

The program was initially intended as a stop-gap measure to protect aspiring young immigrants, while Congress was to come up with a more lasting solution to their problems.

“I have a love for these people,” Trump said at the White House late Tuesday, “and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly.” Earlier he had issued only a written statement stating that federal immigration patrols would not make seeking out DACA recipients for detention and deportation a priority issue.

Victoria Machi and Ramon Taylor contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation’s Nikki Haley said Tuesday that if President Donald Trump decides not to certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal next month, it does not mean that the United States will withdraw from the agreement. VOA’s Margaret Besheer reports
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North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is the most serious threat the world currently faces, the U.N. secretary-general said Tuesday, warning that “confrontational rhetoric may lead to unintended consequences.”

At U.N. headquarters, Antonio Guterres said that “the solution must be political.The potential consequences of military action are too horrific.”

“Negotiations will depend on the will of the parties,” the U.N. leader added. “My appeal is not for any specific solution.”

North Korea on Tuesday, two days after its latest atomic test, declared itself a “full-fledged nuclear power in possession of ICBM as well as A-bomb and H-bomb.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was allowing Japan and South Korea to buy more U.S. military equipment.

The president tweeted the remark a day after he spoke with South Korean President Moon Jae-in about North Korea’s sixth nuclear explosion, which Pyongyang claimed was the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, at its Punggye-ri test site.

In that phone call, Trump and his counterpart in Seoul agreed to lift payload restrictions on South Korean missiles.

It is not immediately clear what equipment Trump was alluding to with his Tuesday morning tweet, but analysts said he was most likely referring to missiles and related systems.

“Japan has been seeking an extremely advanced missile radar which the U.S. had not previously given it,” said Anthony Cordesman, the strategy chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“South Korea has been reluctant to buy American weapons when it has plans to develop its own. But buying new types of arms from the United States would be the fastest way to upgrade its defenses, particularly ballistic missile defenses,” said Jonathan Pollack, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research group headquartered in Monterey, California.

Pollack told VOA that Seoul specifically might be interested in purchasing SM-3 and SM-6 missile interceptors.

Such moves could raise objections from Beijing.

“I think that China would like to see as little actual militarization of the Korean Peninsula and Japan as possible,” Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment in the defense secretary’s office, told VOA.

A day after the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told the Security Council that Pyongyang was “begging for war,” a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman, quoted by state media on Tuesday, responded that “the U.S. is indeed the heinous aggressor who is begging for war.”

The unnamed spokesman added that the United States was “terribly mistaken” in thinking it could frighten North Korea by talk of “all options” on the table and “imposing the toughest sanctions.”

China, which is North Korea’s only major ally, and Russia contend that further tightening sanctions against Pyongyang will do little to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Twitter on Tuesday: “Can’t believe I’m agreeing with Vladimir Putin but I am — further sanctions on North Korea very unlikely to work.”

But Moon, the South Korean president, has asked the United Nations to consider blocking oil shipments to the North, government officials in Seoul told reporters.

White House officials have not mentioned oil sanctions against Pyongyang, but they said Trump and Moon broadly agreed on all major points in a 40-minute telephone conference Monday.

The United States this week is circulating a draft of a new resolution about North Korea at the United Nations, hoping for a Security Council vote next Monday.

Trump has vowed to stop all U.S. trade with any country doing business with North Korea, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he is working on details of such a plan, which would primarily target Pyongyang’s neighbor and main trading partner, China. More than 90 percent of North Korea’s export earnings come from China.

VOA’s Margaret Besheer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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As a parade of motorists rolled down their windows on the edges of a Houston Home Depot parking lot offering cash, the crowd of day laborers had slowly thinned to about a dozen by mid-morning.

 

The workers who were already gone were off to tear out soggy carpeting, carry ruined sofas to the curb and saw apart mold-infested drywall. Those who still remained knew they were hot commodities and weren’t going to settle for low offers.

 

The owner of a car dealership shook his head and drove off after his $10-an-hour proposal to clean flooded vehicles drew no takers. A pickup driver who promised $50 for two hours to rip out wet carpeting and move furniture was told the job was too short to be worthwhile.

 

Day laborers — many of them immigrants and many of them in the country illegally — will continue to be in high demand as workers who clear debris make way for plumbers, electricians, drywall installers and carpenters. Employers are generally small, unregulated contractors or individual homeowners, resulting in a lack of oversight that creates potential for workers to be unpaid or work in dangerous conditions.

 

Houston’s day laborers are generally settling for $120 to $150 to clear homes of Harvey’s debris for eight hours. As noon struck Friday, three workers took a job for $100 for up to five hours rather than let the whole day slip. It didn’t hurt that the contractor provided tools, distributed bottles of cold water and dangled the prospect of more steady work clearing other houses.

 

“Now we’ll be busy for the rest of the year,” said the contractor, Nicolas Garcia, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mexico who has had his own business for 15 years. “Now that this disaster happened, we have to step it up.”

 

Garcia, 55, is working about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston in the Southbelt/Ellington area, a middle-class residential neighborhood whose main streets are lined with fast-food restaurants, strip malls and churches. Waters reached 5 feet in some streets on Aug. 27, forcing families with young children to escape on neighbors’ boats and inflatable swimming pool toys.

 

The contractor led a caravan of workers to a four-bedroom house that was in better shape than others. Sharon Eldridge, a 63-year-old renter who lives alone, landed in about a foot of water when she stepped out of bed Sunday. Her furniture and clothes were ruined, but she didn’t have to evacuate.

 

Armando Rivera, a 36-year-old Honduran who is living in the country illegally and raising four children with his wife, said it was painful to see so many people die and lose their home, but the storm would jolt the local construction economy.

 

“When there is work, you can live a good life,” he said as he took a break from knifing Eldridge’s water-logged beige carpeting into pieces small enough to carry outside.

 

Construction workers were scarce even before Harvey struck. The Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group, said Tuesday that a survey of 1,608 members showed 58 percent struggled to fill carpentry jobs and 53 percent were having trouble finding electricians and bricklayers. Texas’ shortages were more acute.

Nationwide unemployment in construction was 4.7 percent in August, down from 5.1 percent a year earlier. Ken Simonson, chief economist for the contractor trade group, said the latest indicator was the lowest for any August since the government began keeping track in 2000.

 

“From what I’m reading, we’ve never seen so many homes either destroyed or at least rendered uninhabitable at once,” Simonson said. “I doubt there is enough labor with the skills.”

 

A sharp increase in immigration arrests under President Donald Trump may further limit the labor pool. The Houston office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made about 10,000 arrests this year, second-highest in the country after Dallas. The region has about 600,000 immigrants in the country illegally, third-largest behind New York and Los Angeles.

 

Laborers who gathered at Home Depot stores for Harvey work — some on their fourth of fifth major storm — swapped stories about exploitation that either they or someone they knew had suffered. Jose Pineda, a Nicaraguan who entered the country illegally in 2005 through the Arizona desert, said he had injured his arm with a saw and was shorted $380 but decided not to complain. Arturo Garcia, a legal resident from Mexico, knows three people who got hernias on the job and had to pay for surgery out of pocket because they were uninsured.

 

Storm recoveries pose heightened danger. A 2009 study by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network found that day laborers working on storm recovery during Hurricane Katrina were commonly exposed to mold, worked on roofs without safeguards against falling and were exposed to chemicals and asbestos.

 

Pineda, 40, joined three other laborers at a three-bedroom house with soaked red carpet, moldy leather chairs, a television and other furniture strewn about as if a tornado hit. The owner balked in the Home Deport parking lot when workers asked for $120 each to clear the house and bargained them down to $100.

 

When Pineda saw the home and experienced its overwhelming stench, he realized it would take much longer than the owner promised and insisted on $150. The workers left when the owner refused.

 

“They didn’t realize that everything in the house was ruined,” said the owner, who identified himself only by his first name, Guy. “We just don’t have the money to pay them.”

 

 
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President Donald Trump’s envoy to the United Nations is laying out the argument for the U.S. potentially declaring Iran in formal violation of the nuclear deal.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley says she doesn’t know what decision Trump will make on the Iran deal. She says it’s his decision alone.

 

WATCH: Haley on Iran nuclear deal

But Haley is detailing a litany of U.S. grievances against Iran and its Revolutionary Guard. Many of the accusations took place before the nuclear deal was negotiated.

 

Decertification would be a first step toward the Trump administration fulfilling its threat to pull out of the deal.

 

But notably, Haley says if Trump does declare Iran in violation, that doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. will withdraw from the deal. She’s leaving open the possibility that sanctions relief could remain.

 

 
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The world’s poorest continent continued to grow more generous according to a yearly index of charitable giving released on Tuesday, bucking the trend of otherwise declining signs of charity worldwide.

Africa was in a 2016 survey the only continent to report a continent-wide increase of its index generosity score when compared to its five-year average.

The score is a combined measure of respondents in 139 countries who were asked whether they had given money to a good cause, volunteered their time and helped a stranger.

“Despite the many challenges our continent is facing, it is encouraging to see that generosity continues to grow,” said Gill Bates, Southern Africa’s CEO for the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) that commissioned the poll.

Numbers for donating money dip

But globally, donating money and helping a stranger fell by nearly 2 percent, while volunteering dropped about 1 percent, the index showed.

From the United States to Switzerland and Singapore to Denmark, the index showed that the planet’s 10 richest countries by GDP per capita, for which data was available, saw declines in their generosity index score.

Myanmar leads the world

Myanmar, for the fourth consecutive year, held the top position of the World Giving Index as the most generous country.

Nine in ten of those surveyed in the Southeast Asian nation said they had donated money during the previous month.

Indonesia ranked second on the combined measure of generosity, overtaking the United States which held that position in last year’s index.

Big jump for Kenya

A star performer, CAF said, was the East African nation of Kenya, which jumped from twelfth to third place in a single year.

Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country, which has been grappling with the effects of civil war ranked bottom of the World Giving Index.

The index is primarily based on data from a global poll of 146,000 respondents by market research firm Gallup.

 
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Winds wreaked havoc on wildfires that were threatening two crown jewels of the National Park Service on Monday, pushing the flames toward man-made and natural icons in and around Glacier and Yosemite national parks.

The wind-driven fires, combined with high temperatures and dry conditions, have disrupted holiday travel and hampered firefighters across the West during a Labor Day weekend that capped a devastating summer in which an area larger than Rhode Island has burned.

The dozens of fires burning across the West and Canada have blanketed the air with choking smoke from Oregon, where ash fell on the town of Cascade Locks, to Colorado, where health officials issued an air quality advisory alert.

A fire in Montana’s Glacier National Park emptied the park’s busiest tourist spot as wind gusts drove the blaze toward the doorstep of a century-old lodge. The 14-square-mile (36-square-kilometers) fire that consumed a historic Glacier backcountry chalet last week was about a mile away from Lake McDonald Lodge, a 103-year-old Swiss chalet-style hotel.

The lodge’s setting on the lake as the Going-to-the-Sun-Road begins its vertigo-inducing climb up the Continental Divide has made it an endearing park symbol for many visitors, and it’s the jumping-off point for hikes, boat rides, horseback riding and tours in old-fashioned buses known as jammers.

Rangers evacuated tourists and residents from 55 homes near the lake on Sunday as firefighters laid hoses and sprinklers around the hotel. On Monday, fire crews got bad news: The wind had shifted and gusts were driving the fire down the mountainside toward the lake’s shores.

Losing Lake McDonald Lodge on top of the destruction of Sperry Chalet last week would be “unimaginably devastating,” said Mark Hufstetler, a historian who worked at the lodge for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“These are some of the most remarkable buildings anywhere in the United States and they are an integral part of the Glacier experience and the Glacier tradition,” Hufstetler said. “If they did not exist, that experience and that tradition would not exist, either.”

Fire crews understood the significance of the lodge and were ready to protect it, said fire information officer Diane Sine.

“It’s important to all of us and a very high priority to do whatever we can to preserve that,” she said.

Outside California’s Yosemite National Park, a wind-fueled fire on Sunday drove deeper into a grove of 2,700-year-old giant sequoia trees. Officials said the fire had gone through about half the grove, and had not killed any trees.

Giant sequoias are resilient and can withstand low-intensity fires. The blaze burned low-level brush and left scorch marks on some big trees that survived, said Cheryl Chipman, a fire information officer.

“They have thick bark and made it through pretty well,” Chipman said.

There are about 100 giant sequoias in the grove, including the roughly 24-story-high Bull Buck sequoia, one of the world’s largest. Fire crews also wrapped 19th-century cabins in shiny, fire-resistant material to protect them from the flames.

The fire threatening the grove was one of several in the area — one of which closed some trails in Yosemite. A road leading to the park’s southern entrance was also closed.

Brenda Negley woke up Monday in her Oakhurst home 14 miles away and found her truck covered with ash. Her mother was there, too, after evacuating her own home, but Negley’s thoughts were with the peaceful and secluded grove that she has regularly visited since childhood.

“I’ve been sick with worry over Nelder Grove,” she said. “As much as Nelder Grove is my home, and I don’t want to lose my home, I want to save my mom’s home and everyone else’s home.”

Elsewhere in Northern California, a fire destroyed 72 homes and forced the evacuation of about 2,000 people from their houses. The fire has burned 14 square miles (36 square kilometers) in the community of Helena about 150 miles south of the Oregon border.

In Los Angeles, a fire that destroyed four homes and threatened hillside neighborhoods is no longer actively burning, but firefighters remained at the scene in case the wind reignited the blaze, Fire Department Chief Ralph Terrazas said.

Still, Terrazas said Monday that wind conditions could re-ignite the blaze, so fire officials were not reducing the number of firefighters at the scene.
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By artist Sharon Hayes’ count, Philadelphia has more than 1,500 sculptures honoring male historic figures — heroes on horseback, visionaries with arms folded and eyes looking forward, the usual roundup of Founding Fathers.

By contrast, there are only two sculptures dedicated to women — religious martyrs Joan of Arc and Mary Dyer.

The realization prompted, “If They Should Ask,” as assemblage of nine pedestals encircled by the names of more than 80 women that Hayes thought were worthy of being memorialized.

The exhibit is part of Monument Lab, a citywide public art and history project that asks people to join a conversation about “history, memory and our collective future.” Temporary monuments by 20 different artists, including Hayes, are popping up around the city that answer the question posed to the artists: “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?”

“A monument claims a space. It’s trying to say, `This is who we celebrate and this is who we think is important,”‘ Hayes said. “I think the current climate is showing us they are meaningful.”

Monument Lab, produced by the city’s Mural Arts Program, has been in the works for years but comes in the midst of a national debate on the meaning of monuments.

While the topic has long been controversial, it has turned deadly after a woman was run down in Charlottesville during a rally by white nationalists, who were angry about the planned removal of a Confederate General Robert E. Lee statue.

The fact that statuary can stir such passion is “a reminder of how powerful things are in a public space,” mural arts executive director Jane Golden said. “This project is aimed at building civic dialogue, stirring people’s imaginations as a force for positive change.”

The project grew out of one of Paul Farber’s classes at the University of Pennsylvania. Farber, managing director of Penn’s Program in Environmental Humanities, asked students to note which famous Philadelphians were immortalized in sculpture and which were not. 

They found very few honoring specific women and no public art honoring a person of color. However, this fall, the city plans to unveil a statue of Octavius V. Catto, a black Philadelphia writer, educator and activist. Monument Lab organizers say it’s the first to honor a lone African-American in Philadelphia.

“Monuments are reflections of power dynamics and power possibilities,” said Farber, the project’s artistic director. “We’re seeking a public reckoning with not just what is present but what is absent.”

Farber stressed that this project is not about removing monuments. It’s about “what we know and what we believe in today,” he said.

Interactive art

The artists’ work varies in medium and in what issues they address. Hayes’ work addresses gender inequity.

In one city square, artist Kara Crombie installed an interactive boom box sculpture honoring the city’s music history that also asks participants to create their own musical compositions.

In another park, artist Marisa Williamson created a scavenger hunt for people to learn forgotten stories from African-American history.

Elsewhere, artist Karyn Olivier covered a towering sculpture memorializing the 1777 Revolutionary War Battle of Germantown with mirrored plexiglass. Now it reflects the current neighborhood, reminding residents they are the monument’s keepers.

“Monuments only function if we engage them. I asked myself what it means to have a monument that is shrouded and concealed, but in that invisibility you pay attention to it again,” Olivier said. “Monuments should commemorate, celebrate, but they should also make you challenge, investigate and interrogate history.”

Audrey Buglione, who lives a few blocks from the park, visited Olivier’s work recently.

“I’ve walked through this park before and I could not tell you what this monument looked like,” Buglione said. “I like that this is reflexive, representing the community.”

Olivier explained that she’d chosen to cover that specific monument because of its proximity to another which honors German settlers who in 1688 signed the first petition against slavery in the British colonies.

During World Wars I and II, the German surnames at the front base of the statue were covered, Olivier said. Today, the names are visible. There is also a relatively new addition to the monument: “To the memory of the hundreds of thousands of German volunteers in the American wars.”

“It’s amazing to me what fear can do,” Olivier said.
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