https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/18/dhs-cbp-silence-officials-media/

CBP Refuses To Explain How Silencing Officials Adheres To Mayorkas’ Transparency Promise

Mayorkas, the head of DHS, committed to keeping the department open and transparent during a White House press conference on March 1.

“I will share with you something — another principle to which I intend to adhere throughout my tenure, and that’s openness and transparency, and that includes the Fourth Estate,” Mayorkas said. “Let me — let me share with you what I — what I communicate to the workforce, and we’ll leave it at that, because it’s in the service of openness and transparency: Don’t shrink from criticism; just work very hard not to deserve it.”

Over 9,000 unaccompanied migrant minors were encountered in February, according to CBP. Health and Human Services (HHS) facilities holding migrant children are filling up, despite operating at full capacity, causing officials to look for other options for temporary housing including a convention center in Dallas, the DCNF reported.

A Man-Made Disaster at the Border

On March 14, the day that Kevin McCarthy and 12 House Republicans went to Texas to visit the southern border, the El Paso Central Processing Center for migrants reached capacity. The Republicans heard heartbreaking stories of unaccompanied children, some less than six years old, crossing the border while holding hands. Border agents informed the congressmen that fentanyl traffickers are exploiting the surge in illegal immigration. One agent told John Katko, ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee, that a few of the apprehended migrants appear on the terrorist watch list. Border and immigration personnel are stretched thin. "They’ve never seen anything like this," McCarthy told me.

Indeed, Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas projects that the United States faces its largest surge in illegal immigration in two decades. He’s ordered FEMA to assist in taking care of the hundreds of unaccompanied minors who show up daily asking for asylum. Mayorkas and President Joe Biden insist that the previous administration is responsible for a crisis that emerged weeks after Donald Trump left the White House. They couldn’t be more wrong.

What’s happening on the southern border is the most preventable emergency in years. And Joe Biden created it. No matter how often he tells asylum seekers that now is not the time to enter the United States, migrants won’t listen. That’s because the policies he put into place incentivize the dangerous trek. At the same time, Biden has handed the Republicans an issue that will remain long after the $1,400 checks in the American Rescue Plan have been forgotten. And it hasn’t been 60 days since he took office.

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https://freebeacon.com/columns/a-man-made-disaster-at-the-border/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-idUSKBN2BB0K0

Iran says to cold test redesigned Arak nuclear reactor

(Reuters) - Iran will cold test its redesigned Arak nuclear reactor as prelude to fully commissioning it later in the year, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said on Friday.

Spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted by local media as saying the cold testing, which usually include the initial startup of fluid systems and support systems, will take place early in the Iranian new year that begins this Sunday.

“In other words, we have advanced work in the field of fuel, storage, etc,” Kamalvandi said.

Iran has recently accelerated its breaches of the 2015 international nuclear deal in an apparent bid to pressure U.S. President Joe Biden to reverse his predecessor’s abandonment of the agreement. Both sides are locked in a standoff over who should move first to save the deal.

Iran agreed to shut down the reactor at Arak - about 250 km (155 miles) southwest of Tehran - under the 2015 deal. It was allowed to produce a limited amount of heavy water and Tehran has been working on redesigning the reactor. It says it plans to make isotopes for medical and agricultural use.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to member states earlier this week that Iran has started enriching uranium at its underground Natanz plant with a second type of advanced centrifuge, the IR-4, in a further breach of the deal.

Last year Iran started moving three cascades, or clusters, of different advanced models of centrifuge from an above-ground plant at Natanz to its below-ground Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP). It is already enriching underground with IR-2m centrifuges. The deal only lets it enrich there with first-generation IR-1 machines.

Iran is enriching up to 20% purity at another plant, Fordow.

dubai.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com; Editing by Lincoln Feast.

Emergency sites in Texas for migrant children raising safety concerns

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The Biden administration is not expelling immigrant children unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian. Several hundred a day are crossing the border, going first to often packed Border Patrol stations while they await placement in the HHS system.

HHS has turned to the American Red Cross to care for teenagers in both Midland and Dallas, a departure from the standard practice of having paid, trained staff watch over youths. Red Cross volunteers sit outside portable trailers in Midland to monitor the teenagers staying inside. Staff from HHS and the U.S. Public Health Service are also at both sites.

Neither HHS nor the Red Cross would say whether the volunteers had to pass FBI fingerprint checks, which are more exhaustive than a commercial background check. Both agencies have declined repeated requests for interviews.

The waiver of those background checks at another HHS camp in Tornillo, Texas, in 2018 led to concerns that the government was endangering child welfare. HHS requires caregivers in its permanent facilities to pass an FBI fingerprint check, and the agency's inspector general found in 2018 that waiving background checks combined with not having enough mental health clinicians were "serious safety and health vulnerabilities."

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https://www.foxnews.com/us/emergency-sites-migrant-children-safety-concerns