This week, President Donald Trump says some children born overseas to American military and government employees will no longer receive automatic American citizenship.
Later, U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) clarified the policy on a call with reporters. “This update does not affect birthright citizenship, to the military or anyone else in the U.S. or anyone else in the world…this will only affect a handful of individuals each year,” one official said, according to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tal Kopan.
CNN notes that “President Donald Trump has occasionally voiced his support for ending birthright citizenship and said last week he was ‘seriously’ considering ending it, though it’s unclear how he’d have the legal authority to do so.”
Why has USCIS made this change?
In addition, several news outlets reported this week that President Trump said he’d pardon officials who broke the law in order to construct a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
From The Washington Post
When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
President Trump responded to this story on Twitter, saying it was “made up by the Washington Post only in order to demean and disparage – FAKE NEWS!” and that the wall is “going up rapidly.”
The New York Times knocked down that comment, writing:
But the administration’s claims that a border wall is rapidly appearing are overblown. Despite Mr. Trump’s promising to complete 500 miles of wall in his first term, the Army Corps of Engineers and private contractors have constructed only 60 miles of vehicle barriers or replacement fencing where existing impediments had been damaged, according to a Customs and Border Protection document.
This story emerged as Hurricane Dorian is scheduled to hit Florida and other U.S. territories over Labor Day weekend.
As of early Thursday afternoon, the storm was classified a Catagory 1, but the National Hurrican Center says Dorian could hitthe United States as at least a Catagory 3.
The Trump administration has diverted millions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund to “to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum-seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico,” NBC News reported.
The storm has already hit the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, but minimal damage was reported, a relief for a region still recovering from the devastation wrought by 2017’s Hurricane Maria.
How will the storm affect Florida? And what will the federal government’s role be in recovery?
And U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is the latest to drop out of the presidential race.
In a video posted to Twitter, Gillibrand said “it’s important to know when it’s not your time, and to know how to best serve your community and country.”
Who made the cut for the next debate? Who might be the next to leave the race?
And the city of Newark will borrow $120 million to replace lead pipes that have affected the city’s water supply. The New Jersey city has had trouble with lead infrastructure for years.
From The New York Times:
Though lead has long been an issue here, the situation escalated in October after a spate of tests led to the distribution of faucet water filters — the same filters used in Flint, Mich. — to remove lead that had been leaching into tap water.
But two weeks ago, more testing found that some of the filters were failing to adequately remove lead, and the city was forced to distribute bottled water.
Early last week, scenes of more than a hundred people waiting for nearly an hour under the hot August sun to pick up bottled water further eroded the trust residents had in what was coming out of their taps.
We wrap up all that news and more on this week’s domestic edition of the News Roundup.
GUESTS
Steve Kornacki, Author, “The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism”; national political correspondent, MSNBC and NBC News; @stevekornacki
Kelly Jane Torrance, Senior editor, Washington Examiner; @KJTorrance
Reid Wilson, National correspondent, The Hill; author, “Epidemic: Ebola and the Global Scramble to Prevent the Next Killer Outbreak”; @PoliticsReid
For more, visit https://the1a.org.
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