Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, February 19, 2025…
- During Donald Trump’s first term in office, his administration pursued a controversial policy of forcibly separating migrant family members, including young children, at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Biden Administration then set up a task force to help reunite those families. But with Trump’s return to office, one of his first executive actions dissolved that Biden family reunification task force. This has legal experts and immigrants’ rights advocates worried.
- California’s U.S. Senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, are both “demanding answers” from the Trump administration about the abrupt cutoff of federal funding meant to expand zero emission vehicle infrastructure in the state.
Families Separated At The Border Are Protected By A 2023 Settlement. Will Trump Honor It?
On the first day of his second term, President Trump sat behind neat stacks of executive orders in the Oval Office and started signing.
First, he pardoned the more than 1,500 “hostages,” as he called them, who’d been convicted or charged in connection with the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. He went on to sign a slew of immigration-related orders, including one titled “Protecting The American People Against Invasion,” which called for a dramatic surge in border enforcement and, among other things, the dissolution of the Family Reunification Task Force.
The task force was born out of a federal settlement agreement, reached in 2023 between the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union after a yearslong lawsuit, that required the government to reunite thousands of families who were forcibly separated during Trump’s first term. The separations were part of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” immigration policy, a crackdown on illegal border crossings in 2018. As reports emerged of weeping children being taken from their parents’ arms and languishing behind chain-link fences, the policy drew global condemnation for its inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum.
Asked by a reporter if he expected his new immigration orders to be challenged in the courts, Trump responded that he didn’t think they could be. “They’re very straight up,” he said. Immigration and civil rights attorneys who work with separated families disagree, saying the sweeping changes will test the strength of the federal settlement agreement, which also banned most separations for eight years.
California Leaders Question Trump Pulling Funding For Zero Emission Vehicle Expansion
U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, are seeking answers from the Department of Transportation after it cutoff federal funding to expand zero emission vehicle infrastructure in the state.