US Business

When a young Colombian man and his family arrived at the US border early one morning, they helped themselves to bananas and water, then sat down in the shade and waited for American patrol officers.

Like dozens of others who enter the United States every day through this gap in the fence, they are not trying sneak into the country unnoticed.

“We don’t want to cross illegally, we want to ask for asylum,” says the 30-year-old, who asked to remain anonymous and said he was fleeing violence in his home country.

In the United States, the stream of impoverished migrants flowing up through Mexico remains a potent topic in the public discourse, dividing the nation’s politics and coloring relations with countries to the south.

The issue of migration is set to loom large at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles this week, even without the presence of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is boycotting the gathering in protest at the exclusion of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Pandemic-era restrictions that allow the summary rejection of an asylum claim remain in force at the border, despite plans by US President Joe Biden to scrap them.

The so-called Title 42 can automatically bar entry to anyone without a visa, but at an informal border crossing in sun-scorched Yuma, the vast majority of those arriving are still able to lodge a claim for asylum, either because of the makeup of their family, the country they came from or the danger they face.

– Buses –

“We’re seeing immigrants from a lot of different countries,” says Customs and Border Protection officer Fidel Cabrera.

The gap in the fence — literally a hole where there is no barrier — is one factor, but the infrastructure on the Mexican side is another.

“The type of migrants we see here now is different from years ago.” Most have the resources to travel by plane, says Cabrera.

“We’re very close to a couple of international airports… (then they) take some kind of public transportation… and they’re here usually within an hour.”

Buses ply the route from airports in Mexicali and Tijuana to Algodones, a Mexican border enclave nicknamed “Molar City” because of its hundreds of dentists offering cut-price fillings to Americans.

From the highway there is a short trudge through scrub and sand to the border.

But with desert temperatures regularly hitting 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), even this walk is unpleasant.

US border guards leave fruit and water for hungry migrants who wait for a patrol to process them.

Since last September, only 11 percent of those who presented themselves to border officials in the Yuma sector have been rejected under Title 42, according to US government data.

The rest of the nearly 150,000 are not automatically granted asylum, but are at least given the chance to present their case.

– ‘Moving on’ –

For Yuma — an otherwise sleepy town where farmers grow a major portion of the nation’s lettuce — the nearly 150,000 people who have passed through this year have not left a mark, says Mayor Douglas Nicholls.

“They all are moving into other communities,” he tells AFP.

“When they’re released from border patrol, they have to have a host family or somewhere where they’re going.

“I’m not aware of anyone that stayed in Yuma longer than a day or two to get their transportation to wherever they’re going.”

After a two-hour wait in the shade of a tree, the young Colombian father presents his papers to a border agent.

No reason is given to waiting reporters, but he and his family will be allowed to lodge their claim for asylum.

He is adamant that he is not one of the economic migrants demonised by some cable news, who hosts say left a perfectly acceptable life just to make more money in the United States.

“No one leaves home just because they want to,” he tells AFP.

“If you go, you go because you have to.”

America is bitterly divided over abortion. But on stage in New York, comedian Alison Leiby tries to lift taboos surrounding the right by making people laugh at her own experience of ending a pregnancy.

In “Oh God, A Show About Abortion,” the 38-year-old takes up the challenge of making light of a subject that can be very delicate and difficult for many.

With a large dose of self-mockery, Leiby portrays herself as a New York anti-heroine, who has no dreams of motherhood and considers herself incapable of managing her finances and fails to keep her cactus alive.

But above all, Leiby downplays the medical procedure and its aftermath, recounting a banal Saturday in New York that did not leave her feeling discomfort or guilt.

“I thought that I just had not seen a lot of depictions or stories in pop culture or in a documentary or in interviews. I never hear people talk about the kind of abortion I had,” Leiby told AFP, describing her experience as “not traumatic.”

“This kind of abortion is incredibly common, at least in places where abortion is accessible. So I thought that maybe it would be worth telling that story to kind of destigmatise how afraid many are.”

Leiby says she is after laughs but also wants the show to be “an easy way to start talking about a difficult thing for people.”

She admits that she is aware of her privilege as a white, heterosexual women who lives in a state where abortion is legal.

“A lot of other people don’t have that kind of safety and don’t have that kind of access,” Leiby said.

The hour-long show, which has been running since April, was given impetus on the evening of May 2 when a leaked draft decision showed that the Supreme Court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of nationwide access to abortion.

“It certainly made the show just take on more meaning for me performing it every day, and it feels more political,” said Leiby.

– ‘Scary’ –

Last week, one performance ended with a Q&A with Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group that campaigns for abortion rights.

“This show is terrific because it addresses stigma around abortion,” Northup told AFP.

“I think that she brought humanity and a real sense of urgency… (that) we need to be talking about abortion more,” she added.

Leiby also tackles in a raw and uninhibited way contraception, being a woman who does not want to have kids, and periods, calculating quickly on stage that they can take up 2,000 days or six years of a woman’s life.

Many themes spoke directly to members of the audience, which were overwhelmingly women.

“I’m someone that doesn’t want to have kids of my own,” said Briana Gio, a social worker who grew up in Oklahoma, a state that recently signed America’s most restrictive abortion ban.

“(But) we go through this phase. All of a sudden we have this moment of, am I getting too old? And then also just the fact that people are like, ‘You’re gonna regret it.’ I hear that a lot from my mother,” the 30-year-old added.

Leiby would like to take her show away from New York and its liberal audiences. But she is wary.

“There are people that have messaged me (saying) please bring this to Kentucky, bring this to West Virginia. We need this.

“(But) the people who do want it (Roe v. Wade) overturned are very, very active and present and involved in that belief in a way that can feel very scary.”

For now, her show’s run in Manhattan has been extended to June 30.

Former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani almost certainly did not flee Kabul as it fell to the Taliban with millions of dollars in stolen cash, a US government watchdog’s report said Monday.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report, which will be published on Tuesday, is an interim document, as the office is still awaiting answers to questions sent to Ghani.

First reported on by Politico, it interviews witnesses as well as officials who were in the helicopter convoy with Ghani as they hastily fled the Presidential Palace in Kabul while the Taliban marched into the capital on August 15, 2021.

In subsequent days, multiple reports suggested that Ghani and the other officials took up to $169 million in Afghan government money with them. Ghani has always fiercely denied these claims.

“Although SIGAR found that some cash was taken from the grounds of the palace and loaded onto these helicopters, evidence indicates that this number did not exceed $1 million and may have been closer in value to $500,000,” the report states.

It based that assessment heavily on interviews with the witnesses and officials involved, all of whom said they saw no signs of such large amounts of cash on the helicopters already overloaded with people fleeing for their lives.

“$169 million in hundred dollar bills, stacked end to end, would form a block 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) long, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet tall… This block would have weighed 3,722 pounds, or nearly two tons,” SIGAR noted, adding that witnesses reported “minimal luggage” on the helicopters, which had no cargo holds.

Instead one official carried around $200,000, another carried some $240,000 and others had “$5,000 to $10,000 in their pockets… No one had millions,” one former senior official told SIGAR.

“If true, this puts the total amount of cash on board the three helicopters at approximately $500,000, with $440,000 belonging to the Afghan government,” the report said.

“SIGAR also identified suspicious circumstances in which approximately $5 million in cash was allegedly left behind at the presidential palace,” the report added.

It was not clear where the money came from or what it was for, “but it was supposedly divided by members of the Presidential Protective Service after the helicopters departed but before the Taliban captured the palace,” it said.

The report said there appears to have been “ample opportunity and effort to plunder Afghan government coffers.”

But, the watchdog added, it “does not have sufficient evidence to determine with certainty whether hundreds of millions of dollars were removed from the country by Afghan officials as the government collapsed or whether any stolen money was provided by the United States.”

The United States on Monday accused Russia of trying to “intimidate” American correspondents in Moscow, who were summoned by the Russian foreign ministry and threatened with reprisals because of US sanctions.

“The Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs summoned your colleagues to quote ‘explain to them the consequences of their government’s hostile line in the media sphere,'” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters in Washington. 

“Let’s be clear, the Kremlin is engaged in a full assault on media freedom, access to information and the truth,” he added, slamming what he called a “a clear and apparent effort to intimidate independent journalists.”

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova threatened at the end of May to expel Western media if YouTube continued to block the department’s weekly briefings.

On Friday, she again accused Washington of “targeting for repression Russian media” inside the United States. 

“They are doing everything to make it impossible for Russia media to work,” she said, adding that “if they don’t normalize the work of Russian media on US territory, there will be forceful measures as a consequence.”

She said the US media representatives were “invited” to the Russian foreign ministry on Monday. 

Price said Moscow was reacting to the blacklisting a month ago of three Russian television channels — Pervy Kanal, Rossiia-1, and NTV — as part of international sanctions in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. 

He accused Moscow of “false equivalence” in comparing independent US journalists to the sanctioned Russian media, whom he described as “propaganda arms of the Russian government.”

“The United States continues to issue visas to qualified Russian journalists, and we have not revoked the foreign press center credentials of any Russian journalists working in the United States,” he said.