Politico

SELMA, Ala. — President Joe Biden used the searing memories of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” to recommit to a cornerstone of democracy, lionizing a seminal moment from the civil rights movement at a time when he has been unable to push enhanced voting protections through Congress and a conservative Supreme Court has undermined a landmark voting law.

“Selma is a reckoning. The right to vote … to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it anything’s possible,” Biden told a crowd of more than 1,000 people seated on one side of the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader.

“This fundamental right remains under assault. The conservative Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act over the years. Since the 2020 election, a wave of states and dozens and dozens of anti-voting laws fueled by the ‘Big Lie’ and the election deniers now elected to office,” he said.

As a candidate in 2020, Biden promised to pursue sweeping legislation to bolster protection of voting rights. Two years ago, his 2021 legislation, named after civil right leader John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman, included provisions to restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to a campaign finance system that allows wealthy donors to bankroll political causes anonymously.

It passed the then-Democratic-controlled House, but it failed to draw the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate even under control of Biden’s party. With Republicans now in control of the House, passage of such legislation is highly unlikely.

“We know we must get the votes in Congress,” Biden said, but there seems no viable path right now.

The visit to Selma was a chance for Biden to speak directly to the current generation of civil rights activists. Many feel let down because of the lack of progress on voting rights and they are eager to see his administration keep the issue in the spotlight.

Few moments have had as lasting importance to the civil rights movement as what happened on March 7, 1965, in Selma and in the weeks that followed.

Some 600 peaceful demonstrators led by Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams had gathered that day, just weeks after the fatal shooting of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama trooper.

Lewis and the others were brutally beaten by Alabama troopers and sheriff’s deputies as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the start of what was supposed to be a 54-mile walk to the state Capitol in Montgomery as part of a larger effort to register Black voters in the South.

“On this bridge, blood was given to help redeem the soul of America,” Biden said.

The images of the police violence sparked outrage across the country. Days later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. led what became known as the “Turnaround Tuesday” march, in which marchers approached a wall of police at the bridge and prayed before turning back.

President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eight days after “Bloody Sunday,” calling Selma one those rare moments in American history where “history and fate meet at a single time.” On March 21, King began a third march, under federal protection, that grew by thousands by the time they arrived at the state Capitol. Five months later, Johnson signed the bill into law.

This year’s commemoration came as the historic city of roughly 18,000 was still digging out from the aftermath of a January EF-2 tornado that destroyed or damaged thousands of properties in and around Selma. The scars of that storm were still evident Sunday. Blocks from the stage where Biden spoke, houses sat crumbled or without roofs. Orange spray paint marked buildings beyond salvage with instructions to “tear down.”

“We remain Selma strong,” Mayor James Perkins said, adding that “we will build back better.” He thanked Biden for approving a disaster declaration that helped the small city with the cost of debris cleanup and removal.

Before Biden’s visit, the Rev. William Barber II, a co-chair of Poor People’s Campaign, and six other activists wrote Biden and members of Congress to express their frustration with the lack of progress on voting rights legislation. They urged Washington politicians visiting Selma not to sully the memories of Lewis and Williams and other civil rights activists with empty platitudes.

“We’re saying to President Biden, let’s frame this to America as a moral issue, and let’s show how it effects everybody,” Barber said in an interview.

Among those sharing the stage with Biden before the march across the bridge were Barber, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

President Joe Biden on Thursday praised bipartisan legislation that would strengthen safety rules governing railroads, following the fiery Ohio train derailment that left residents concerned about the air and water quality in the town of East Palestine.

The legislation was introduced by Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, a Republican, and four other senators Wednesday. The Railway Safety Act would bolster a slew of railroad safety measures including raising fines for safety infractions, increasing inspections and imposing new requirements for trains carrying toxic or hazardous materials.

“I applaud the bipartisan group of senators for proposing rail safety legislation that provides many of the solutions that my administration has been calling for,” Biden said in a statement Thursday. “This legislation provides us with tools to hold companies accountable to prevent terrible tragedies like the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine and to make those communities whole.”

Republicans have been critical of the White House’s response to the derailment, accusing the administration of moving too slowly. But the White House has repeatedly pushed back, noting that federal officials were at the site hours after the crash. Biden, who has been criticized for having yet to visit East Palestine, said on Thursday that he planned to travel there “at some point.”

“I’ve spoken with every official in Ohio, Democrat and Republican, on a continuous basis, as in Pennsylvania. I laid out a little bit in there what I think the answers are, and we put it together. And we will be implementing an awful lot to the legislation here. And I will be out there at some point,” the president told reporters.

Stephen Benjamin, the former mayor of Columbia, S.C., will be the new senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement, replacing Keisha Lance Bottoms, the White House announced on Monday.

Benjamin previously served as Columbia’s mayor from 2010 to 2021 and currently sits as the CEO and president of the Benjamin Firm, LLC. As mayor, he served as the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors from 2018 to 2019 and the president of the African American Mayors Association from 2015 to 2016.

“Mayor Benjamin is a longtime public servant, who has served the people of South Carolina for over two decades statewide and as a three-term mayor of Columbia,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “As a former President of both the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the African American Mayors Association, Steve’s deep relationships with communities across the country will serve our Administration and the American public well.”

The White House Office of Public Engagement works with state and local governments to increase dialogue between the Biden administration and American communities.

Biden said Bottoms will return to Atlanta, the city where she was mayor from 2018 to 2022, to be with her family.

“Under Keisha’s leadership, the Office of Public Engagement has kept equity at the heart of our agenda, and continues to serve as the connective tissue between our Administration and everyday Americans who may not have a voice to reach Washington otherwise,” Biden said in a statement. “I have leaned on Keisha as a close advisor with exceptional instincts, and I am grateful to her for serving our nation with honor and integrity.”

LOSITETI, Kenya — First lady Jill Biden got an up-close look Sunday at the historic East Africa drought as she walked along arid land and listened as some Maasai women described how their children and livestock are going hungry. She appealed for more countries to join the United States to help alleviate the suffering.

Some areas of the Horn of Africa have endured five consecutive failed rainy seasons, meaning there was no rainfall or an insufficient amount to help farmers with their crops and livestock. An upcoming sixth rainy season, beginning in March, is expected to be about the same or worse.

Biden, who was on the final day of a five-day visit to Africa, toured an outreach center in the town operated by World Vision with support from UNICEF and the World Food Program. She chatted with people who had brought their children to be screened for malnutrition and she participated in a discussion with a group of women, including a mother of 10 children, who shared their stories.

“They talked about how their livestock are dying. Obviously, you can see the drought here, how bad it is,” the first lady told reporters afterward. “The one source of water here feeds 12 villages and each village has approximately a thousand to 1,200 people.”

“So they are coming here, the people are coming to get water, they’re bringing their livestock to get water. But unfortunately, for many of them, the way they make their living is from their livestock and for most of them, the livestock are dying, so they’re having a hard time,” she said.

Biden noted that the United States has provided 70% of the money sent to the region to help alleviate the suffering, “but we cannot be the only ones.”

“We need to have other countries join us in this global effort to help these people of the region,” she said, adding that the drought was competing with humanitarian efforts tied to Russian’s war in Ukraine and an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and Syria.

“I mean, there are a lot of competing interests but, obviously here, people are actually, livestock, people are starving,” she said.

Meg Whitman, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, who accompanied Biden, said people know intellectually what’s going on in the region but “it’s different when you just see it.”

Underscoring Biden, Whitman said that “everyone needs to help as best we can here because this is going to continue for the foreseeable future.”

Members of the Maasai community, who are predominantly herders, live in Kajiado county where Biden visited.

Nearly 23 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are thought to be highly food insecure, which means they do not know where they will find their next meal, according to a food security working group chaired by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development.

A Maasai elder, Mingati Samanya, 69, said he lost 10 cows during the recent prolonged dry season and struggled to find hay for the rest of his herd.

“The short rains last year were insufficient and right now we are back to struggling for pasture. We hope the long rains will be enough,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Biden sought to use her stature to help focus the world’s attention on the worsening humanitarian crisis in East Africa by touring the drought-stricken area near Kenya’s border with Tanzania.

On the nearly three-hour drive south of Nairobi, the capital, Biden’s lengthy motorcade passed over dry river and creek beds. Numerous cows were walking alongside the highway — many so thin that their ribs were showing.

Throngs of people lined both sides of the motorcade route at various points, waving or using their cellphones to record the event.

Some 4.4 million people in Kenya are facing high levels of food insecurity, with the number projected to rise to 5.4 million in March, according to an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Already, 11 million livestock that are essential to many families’ health and livelihood have died. Many of the people affected are farmers who have watched their crops wither and die, and their water sources run dry.

Northern Kenya, which is arid and semi-arid and is where pastoralist communities live, is most affected.

The country’s agriculture sector heavily relies on rainfall, and the meteorological department is predicting delayed rains in the upcoming short rainy season that should begin in March.

President William Ruto announced last October that his cabinet had lifted a decade-old ban on openly cultivating and importing genetically modified crops. The decision came amid pressure from the U.S. government, which had argued that the ban affected U.S. agricultural exports and food aid.

Last week, Ruto led the country in praying for rain.

The first lady has been highlighting the drought along with women and youth empowerment since arriving in Namibia last Wednesday.

Biden had visited Kenya in 2011, when her husband, Joe Biden, was serving as vice president, to help raise awareness about what then was considered a severe famine. U.S. officials and aid organizations say the current drought is far worse.

Two White House officials involved in crafting immigration policy are preparing to depart as the Biden administration rolls out new asylum restrictions that critics say mirror those from the Trump era.

Lise Clavel, deputy assistant to the president and senior adviser for migration, and Leidy Perez-Davis, special assistant to the president for immigration, are set to leave the White House, according to two sources familiar with the plans. Clavel’s last day will be March 1, but Perez-Davis was asked by the White House to delay her departure and will leave in a couple months, according to a person familiar with the plan but was not authorized to speak publicly.

Both Clavel and Perez-Davis have been in their roles for roughly a year. Clavel has been with the administration since the start, previously serving as chief of staff at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection before moving to the White House. Perez-Davis was previously policy director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project.

Staff departures from any administration are common following a midterm election. But news of the impending exits comes days after the Biden administration announced its most restrictive border control measure to date: a proposed rule that will bar some migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they cross the border illegally or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country. The proposal — which immigrant advocates refer to as the “transit ban” or the “asylum ban” — will take effect on May 11 and serve as its policy solution to the long-awaited end of Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction that lifts the same day.

The policy prompted immediate backlash from immigrant advocates and Democrats who accused the White House of perpetuating a Donald Trump-like approach to border politics that President Joe Biden pledged on the campaign trail to end. Advocacy groups also said they were considering lawsuits.

Amid the blowback, administration officials criticized Congress, arguing that the White House has been left to roll out new policies to fill the “void” left by inaction on the Hill.

“To be clear, this was not our first preference or even our second. From day one, Biden has urged Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures to ensure orderly, safe and humane processing of migrants at our border,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters on Tuesday.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the departures.

Clavel and Perez-Davis’ exit from the administration are just the latest changes on Biden’s team handling migration and the border in his first two years. Tyler Moran, Biden’s senior adviser for migration, left in January 2022, after replacing Amy Pope the previous summer. Esther Olavarria, the deputy assistant to the president for immigration at the Domestic Policy Council, also retired that month.

Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s “border czar” left in April 2021, and some mid and low-level aides have also departed.

Jason Houser, who POLITICO reported was preparing to depart as chief of staff at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will also leave in the coming days. He was the highest-ranking political appointee at the DHS agency since there is no Senate-confirmed director.

As the White House gears up for the end of one Trump-era border policy this spring, it has its sights set on resurrecting a version of another much-maligned immigration program put in place under the previous administration.

The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice on Tuesday announced a proposed rule that will bar some migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they cross the border illegally or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country. The rule was previewed by President Joe Biden in January. Following a 30-day public comment period, it will be implemented upon the May 11 end of the Covid public health emergency, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters.

May 11 is also the end date of the Title 42 public health order currently being used to bar entry to most migrants at the southern border. The rule announced on Tuesday would stay in place for two years following its effective date.

The new proposal — which immigrant advocates refer to as the “transit ban” or the “asylum ban” — is the White House’s most restrictive border control measure to date and essentially will serve as its policy solution to the long-awaited end of Title 42. Within minutes of its posting, the Biden administration faced a flood of backlash from immigrant advocates and Democrats who accused officials of perpetuating the Trumpian approach to border politics that Biden pledged on the campaign trail to end. Threats of lawsuits also began to percolate.

Former Biden White House official Andrea Flores, who now serves as chief counsel for Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), condemned the administration for resurrecting a policy that “normalizes the white nationalist belief that asylum seekers from certain countries are less deserving of humanitarian protections.”

Administration officials in their call with reporters rejected the notion that the proposed regulation was like the Trump transit ban, noting it was not a “categorical ban” on asylum seekers. Instead, they said, the administration had expanded “existing lawful pathways” through the parole programs, and that the measures were not intended to curb people from seeking asylum but to help ensure order at the southern border.

The Biden administration has repeatedly warned of an influx of migrants amid the end of Title 42, which has been used more than 2 million times to expel asylum seekers on public health grounds. Administration officials on Tuesday said the new rule will help the administration manage a bogged-down border and asylum processing system.

But for critics, those utterances and the implementation of the new rule only underscored the degree to which the administration continues to see the southern border as a political issue, and not a humanitarian challenge, facing Biden’s presidency.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service and a former Obama official, said the rule “reaches into the dustbin of history to resurrect one of the most harmful and illegal anti-asylum policies of the Trump administration.” Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) called on Biden to “abandon this misguided policy now.” And Sergio Gonzalez, president of the Immigration Hub, said the move “flies in the face” of Biden’s campaign promise to “rebuild a fair, humane and orderly immigration system.”

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in Title 42-related lawsuits, said in a statement to POLITICO that he’s prepared to take legal action.

“We successfully sued to stop the Trump asylum bans and will sue again if the Biden administration enacts these anti-asylum rules,” Gelernt said.

Tuesday’s proposed regulation was first floated in January, when Biden unveiled a new border measure that involved accepting 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela while cracking down on those who fail to use the plan’s legal pathways. The policy forced migrants to apply for asylum from their home country, while expelling those who try to enter the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico. Migrants were only approved if they had a verified sponsor and were allowed to enter the U.S. by air.

The number of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the border has dropped by 40 percent since December, which administration officials credit to the new measures.

Administration officials on Tuesday said they were looking into expanding the humanitarian parole program for other nationalities and are “working closely with our partners across the hemisphere to encourage them to also expand their legal pathways.”

During his speech last month, Biden also unveiled a new app for asylum seekers and other migrants to schedule appointments to be considered for entry into the United States. Advocates scoffed at the administration’s pushback on Tuesday.

“While the Biden admin has launched a smartphone app for asylum appointments and expanded a temporary parole option for an extremely limited subset of four nationalities, these measures are no substitute for the legal right to seek asylum, regardless of manner of entry,” O’Mara Vignarajah said.

Administration officials also used Tuesday’s announcement to criticize Congress, arguing that the White House has been left to roll out new policies to fill the “void” left by inaction on the Hill.

“To be clear, this was not our first preference or even our second. From day one, President Biden has urged Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures to ensure orderly, safe and humane processing of migrants at our border,” a senior administration official said.

President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, arriving in Ukraine’s capital in a show of support for the war-torn nation and statement of defiance ahead of the one-year anniversary of the war Russia launched.

The shock appearance happened under immense secrecy. U.S. officials had expressed concerns that Biden couldn’t fly into Ukraine or take a ten-hour train ride without immense risk to the host nation or himself. Ensuring the president’s safety was a near-impossible endeavor, those officials said, though they acknowledged Biden had long wanted to go Kyiv.

A scheduled trip to Poland provided the opportunity to finally make the trip, and the caution was ultimately set aside. Biden marked the one-year anniversary of the war by walking the streets of Ukraine’s capital –– the same city Russia tried to seize 12 months ago –– and meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The message of his visit was clear: Ukraine is safe enough for an American president to visit despite the missile strikes, drone attacks and trench warfare initiated by Vladimir Putin.