The United States on Wednesday began returning migrants to the Mexican city of Tijuana in a restart of a Trump-era program that forces asylum-seekers to wait for U.S. court hearings in Mexico, Mexican authorities and the U.N. migration agency said.

The United States and Mexico last month agreed to relaunch the controversial scheme known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), in keeping with a U.S. federal court order.

U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has struggled to reverse many hardline immigration policies put in place by his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.

Biden ended MPP soon after his inauguration in January as he sought to pursue what he called a more humane approach to immigration. But a federal judge ruled Biden’s move did not follow proper procedure, and in August ordered MPP reinstated.

The program first resumed in December at the international crossing connecting El Paso, Texas, to Ciudad Juarez. More than 200 people have been returned to Mexico so far under the relaunch of MPP, according to the U.N.’s International Organization of Migration (OIM).

Two migrants were returned to Tijuana, across from California, on Wednesday with future appointments in U.S. courts, an official with OIM told Reuters.

The migrant rights advocacy group Al Otro Lado told Reuters the two men were Colombian nationals.

Neither U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) nor Mexico’s immigration agency immediately responded to requests for comment.

The United Nations’ refugee agency and advocacy groups have criticized the restart of the Trump-era policy, warning migrants face the risk of kidnapping, rape and extortion in dangerous Mexican border towns.

Under the original 2019 program, some 70,000 migrants seeking asylum were forced to wait weeks and sometimes years in Mexico for a U.S. court date instead of being allowed to await their hearings in the United States. 
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The United States and Japan are expected to hold virtual talks this week in which they will renew their vow to secure the Indo-Pacific region amid growing challenges from China and North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will meet with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi on Thursday for the virtual U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee (“2+2”) meeting.

“During the meeting, the delegations will discuss ways the United States and Japan can strengthen our alliance to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific region and to address the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and other global challenges,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.

The meeting comes the same day that Japanese and Australian leaders are expected to sign a new security agreement aimed at setting out for the first time a framework for the countries’ defense forces to work together.

When asked about the emerging security agreements among Japan, Australia, India and the United States — informally known as “the Quad” — China’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday expressed wariness.

Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters during a regular briefing that Beijing believes state-to-state cooperation should improve “mutual understanding and trust among countries in the region” and safeguard regional peace and stability, rather than targeting or undermining the interest of any third party. 

Japan-US ties 

The first “2+2” meeting in 2022 between the United States and Japan comes shortly after Blinken’s in-person talks with Hayashi on the sidelines of the Group of Seven foreign ministerial meeting in December in Liverpool, England.

G-7 countries had called on North Korea for a “complete, verifiable and irreversible abandonment” of all unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

Earlier on Wednesday, North Korea launched an apparent ballistic missile in Pyongyang’s first weapons test of the new year, according to reports by South Korea and Japan. 

The U.S. has said it continues to consult closely with South Korea and Japan and other partners to seek a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and diplomacy.

“We have no hostile intent towards the DPRK. We are prepared to meet without preconditions,” Price said Tuesday in response to questions from VOA. He was referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea. 

Meanwhile, U.S. and Japanese officials have voiced opposition to Chinese activities seen as attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo by force in the East and South China seas, while declaring the importance of “peace and stability” across the Taiwan Strait. 

As Japan is set to review its national security and defense posture in 2022, some experts say rising threats from China are driving the U.S. and Japan to strengthen military collaboration.

A few weeks ago, U.S. Marines and members of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force launched their largest bilateral training exercise of the year, known as Resolute Dragon 2021. That exercise took place at multiple training locations across Japan from December 4 to 17. 

“There is no question that Japan is gearing up to do more in a Taiwan contingency,” Mike Green, the senior vice president for Asia at Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA on Wednesday. 

While Japan’s pacifist constitution imposes restrictions that prevent the island nation from getting involved in a potential military conflict outside its own territory, such as near the Taiwan Strait, Green said developments in recent years have pushed Japan to make a gradual shift. 

“That shifted first with the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, when China’s PLA (People’s Liberation Army) launched missiles and exercises in the vicinity of Japanese islands. That crisis propelled the first revision of bilateral defense guidelines to deal with contingencies in the region.” 

At that time, the U.S. dispatched two carrier battle groups to waters surrounding Taiwan as China conducted missile tests during the run-up to Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election. 

In 2015, Green added, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe changed his interpretation of the constitution and passed legislation allowing “collective self-defense” with the U.S., which removed the major obstacle to doing more. 

Washington and Tokyo are discussing an early visit by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to the White House, which would be his first summit with U.S. President Joe Biden since becoming Japan’s leader in October.
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For just a moment, immediately following the January 6 assault on the United States Capitol last year, it was possible to imagine that the events of that day would shock the country back to political normalcy. 

 

In the hours after the mob of insurrectionists, spurred on by false assertions from former President Donald Trump about a stolen election, was driven from the Capitol, it was possible to imagine that the shocking scenes of violence in the seat of the American government would force the country to reassess what counts as acceptable political discourse.  

It was possible to imagine that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was correct when he came to the Senate floor later that night and declared, “Our democratic republic is strong.” 

 

In the weeks and months that followed the attack, however, optimism about the state of democracy in the U.S. has become increasingly difficult to maintain. 

 

Public polling indicates that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” And even more alarming is that nearly one-third of Americans now say that political violence is sometimes a justifiable response. 

Political pressure 

In the face of Trump’s repeated false claims about the election being stolen from him, senior officials in the Republican Party who had criticized the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol went silent, and those who excused or even justified the actions of the rioters were amplified. 

 

Today, public opinion polling indicates the overwhelming majority of self-identified Republican voters in the U.S. now believe, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that the results of the 2020 presidential election were fraudulent, and that President Joe Biden was illegitimately elected. 

The most recent poll by the University of Massachusetts put the percentage of Republicans who believe the election was fraudulent at 71%, accounting for about 33% of the population overall. 

 

The reaction from Republican state legislatures was predictable, according to Susan Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. 

 

“Once you get your election base believing that the presidential election was stolen from their side, you have a very strong constituency in favor of changing election laws,” she told VOA.

Restrictive voting laws 

At the state level last year, Republican-led legislatures began passing a raft of new election laws. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a Washington-based think tank, 19 states have passed 33 laws that restrict access to the ballot. 

 

Other Republican-controlled states passed laws designed to take authority over election administration away from secretaries of state or local elections officials and place it in the hands of lawmakers themselves. This happened particularly in places like Georgia and Arizona, Republican-leaning states that voted for Biden in 2020. 

In both states, Republican election officials vouched for the integrity of the 2020 election results in the face of Trump’s false claims of fraud. 

 

The actions by Republican state legislatures may assuage the concerns of some portion of their political base about the integrity of election results, but that will come at the cost of creating increased doubt among Democrats. 

This will be especially acute in states like Georgia, Arizona, and Texas, where Democrats have been improving their election performance in recent years, but Republicans still control the state legislature. Those states have passed laws that Republicans claim are “common sense” fixes to the election process but Democrats say are aimed at restricting ballot access and weakening them politically. 

Other state-level changes 

Not all changes to state laws this year restricted voting. In many states, mostly controlled by Democrats, new laws were passed expanding access to the ballot.

 

These changes included increasing the opportunities voters have to cast a ballot ahead of election day, greater access to mail-in voting, simplified voter registration rules, wider use of drop boxes for absentee voting, and improved assistance for voters whose primary language is not English. 

 

While the changes will be broadly supported by Democratic voters, virtually all of these measures are criticized by prominent Republicans — Trump chief among them — as making election fraud easier to perpetrate. While there is no evidence that fraud has played a significant role in any national election in recent history, the changes are likely to cement the belief among many in the GOP that election results in states run by Democrats cannot be trusted. 

‘A dangerous area’ 

“We’re getting to a point where there’s a lot of reasons for both sides to be discounting election results at the national level,” said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.

 

“That’s a very dangerous area, a fragile area, for democracy to find itself,” Masket told VOA. “It’s caused other countries, other democracies, to collapse.” 

 

Stokes, of the University of Chicago, agreed that the “nightmare scenario” for the U.S. is an outcome where, whatever the result of a presidential election, large segments of the population view the outcome as not just disappointing, but illegitimate. 

Pointing to polling data that demonstrates an increased belief that political violence might be acceptable, Stokes said, “We have a lot of people out there in the public who think that violence is justified, and a smaller number, certainly, who would actually act on that. But it doesn’t take that many people to lead to a very violent situation, and possibly a situation of armed civil conflict.” 

A voice of optimism 

“I think we should be concerned whenever there are attacks on the internal operations of our republic,” said Mary Frances Berry, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an attorney, and the former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “So, we’re right to be concerned, but we shouldn’t get frightened, or overly concerned.” 

 

Berry told VOA the U.S. has faced democratic crises in the past and survived. As recently as 2000, she pointed out, it was Democrats who were insisting that former President George W. Bush was illegitimately elected.

 

Democratic lawmakers, some still in Congress, demanded that then-Vice President Al Gore refuse to certify the election results in the Senate. That’s the same demand that the crowd of rioters at the Capitol on January 6 were making of then-Vice President Mike Pence.

 

In both cases, the vice presidents performed their constitutional duties and oversaw the certification of election results in which they had suffered defeat. 

 

“We have short memories,” Berry said. “But if we remember things, it will make us less frightened.” 
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Louisiana’s governor planned to posthumously pardon Homer Plessy on Wednesday, more than a century after the Black man was arrested in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow a Jim Crow law creating “whites-only” train cars.

The Plessy v Ferguson case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ushered in a half-century of laws calling for “separate but equal” accommodations that kept Black people in segregated schools, housing, theaters and other venues.

Gov. John Bel Edwards scheduled the pardon ceremony for a spot near where Plessy was arrested in 1892 for breaking a Louisiana law requiring Black people to ride in cars that the law described as “equal but separate” from those for white customers. The date is close to the 125th anniversary of Plessy’s guilty plea in New Orleans.

Relatives of both Plessy and the judge who convicted him were expected to attend.

It spotlights New Orleans as the cradle of the civil rights movement, said Keith Plessy, whose great-great-grandfather was Plessy’s cousin — Homer Plessy had no children.

“Hopefully, this will give some relief to generations who have suffered under discriminatory laws,” said Phoebe Ferguson, the judge’s great-great-granddaughter.

The state Board of Pardons recommended the pardon on Nov. 12 for Plessy, who was a 30-year-old shoemaker when he boarded the train car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn the law.

Instead, the 1896 ruling solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations until a later Supreme Court unanimously overturned it in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. Both cases argued that segregation laws violated the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection.

In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the 7-1 majority: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.”

Justice John Harlan, the dissenter, wrote that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.”

That 1857 decision said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen. It was overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments, passed in 1865 and 1866.

Plessy lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most other members of the group trying to strike down the segregation law, Keith Weldon Medley wrote in the book “We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson.” But his light skin — court papers described him as someone whose “one eighth African blood” was “not discernable” — positioned him for the train car protest.

“His one attribute was being white enough to gain access to the train and black enough to be arrested for doing so,” Medley wrote.

Five blocks of the street where he was arrested, renamed Homer Plessy Way in 2018, runs through the campus of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where the ceremony was to be held outdoors for COVID-19 safety.

Eight months after the ruling in his case, Plessy pleaded guilty on Jan. 11, 1897. He was fined $25 at a time when 25 cents would buy a pound of round steak and 10 pounds of potatoes. He died in 1925 with the conviction on his record.

Relatives of Plessy and John Howard Ferguson, the judge who oversaw his case in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, became friends decades later and formed a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights education.
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Hundreds of motorists, including a U.S. senator, who became stuck in subfreezing temperatures Monday and Tuesday on an interstate highway in the mid-Atlantic state of Virginia were finally freed after more than 24 hours, according to the state transportation department. 

The motorists became stranded Monday after a crash involving six tractor-trailers during a snowstorm made the roadway impassable. 

Responders spent most of Tuesday clearing abandoned cars from the freeway, according to Virginia DOT spokesperson Kelly Hannon. She said officials expected the roadway to reopen to motorists by Wednesday morning. 

The agency said both directions of Interstate 95 had been closed between the towns of Ruther Glen and Dumfries, about 50 kilometers south of Washington. 

No one was injured in the collision Monday afternoon, but it brought traffic to a halt on the main U.S. East Coast highway. Motorists couldn’t move because of the accumulating snow, forcing many to spend the night in their cars. One stranded driver told a television station she feared running out of gas. 

Among the stranded was U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who tweeted a photo of his predicament on the highway Tuesday after sunrise.

“My office is in touch with VaDOT (the Virginia Department of Transportation) to see how we can help,” Kaine tweeted 19 hours after beginning his normal two-hour commute to Washington. 

Kaine finally arrived in Washington 27 hours after he started. 

Earlier Tuesday, the state transportation department tweeted (at 5:20 a.m. local time) that crews would begin “taking people off at any available interchange” in both directions. 

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said Tuesday that state and local emergency personnel had been working to clear downed trees, assist disabled vehicles and reroute drivers. 

The fast-moving storm dropped 18 to 28 centimeters of snow in the area Monday, according to the National Weather Service, causing thousands of traffic accidents and stranding vehicles. 

Power outages darkened thousands of homes and took traffic cameras offline, hindering response efforts, the transportation department said.

Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press. 

 
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