Biden Administration to Give $450,000 to Each Illegal Alien Separated from their Family by the Trump Administration

Unaccompanied illegal alien children talk to an agent outside at a pod in a Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied alien children in the Rio Grande Valley run by the US Customs and Border Protection on March 30, 2021. Photo by Dario Lopez-mills / Getty Image

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Forbs staff writer Anna Kaplan, citing the Wall Street Journal which broke the story Thursday (Oct. 28), reported that the Biden administration is in talks to offer illegal immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation for what their advocates say is “lasting psychological trauma.”

Kaplan quoted the Journal’s reliance on unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” that several agencies are at work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to traumatic stress during the Trump administration.

The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said. Most of the families that crossed the border illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. included one parent and one child, the people said. Many families would likely get smaller payouts, depending on their circumstances, the people said.

It is unclear how many people will be eligible for the settlement, but about 940 families have reportedly filed claims to date.The illegal immigrant families were separated after crossing the border from Mexico to claim asylum in 2017 and 2018 as part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others, have filed lawsuits against the government alleging that the thousands of children and parents impacted by the policy have mental health effects from the prolonged trauma. The Journal reports that lawyers representing families and the government are continuing to negotiate the settlement and aim to reach an agreement by the end of November.

During Biden’s first weeks in office, he vowed to reunite the families that had been separated by the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. Starting in 2017, the Trump administration tried to prosecute all immigrants who illegally crossed the border, resulting in children who arrived with their parents being sent to shelters and border facilities.

Lawyers representing the children in lawsuits allege that children were subjected to malnutrition and provided little medical attention at these facilities. The ACLU identified approximately 5,500 children who were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border in 2017 and 2018, according to court documents. Not all of the children have been reunited with their parents, as governmental investigations found that the Trump administration did not create ways to track the parents and the children who had been separated.Approximately 1,000 families have yet to be reunited, Family Reunification Task Force leader Michelle Brané said in an interview earlier this month. She noted that there could be more as it’s “very hard to know because there’s no record.” She said the task force has reunited at least 52 families since Biden assumed office.

~ Grif

Biden administration’s Department of Defense proposes forcing volunteer National Guard soldiers to remain in Washington past their regular duty assignments

The Department of Defense under the Biden administration has proposed forcing National Guard troops who are stationed around the Capitano buildings to remain there under involuntary deployment through May of this year. This order will force volunteer guardsmen who were set to end their deployments this month to remain in Washington, rather than returning to their homes and jobs on schedule. The involuntary deployment orders are usually reserved only for service in times of national emergency or wars. National Guard troops originally were deployed this year as a response to the Antifa-led riot January 6, and the subsequent military occupation of the nation’s Capitol.

Details of the proposed expansion and continuation of the military presence around the Capitol buildings are detailed by Tara Copp-McClatchy, Washington Bureau correspondent for American Military News. She writes:

he Defense Department is considering issuing involuntary activation orders to National Guard units to protect the U.S. Capitol through May, even as thousands of those service members who have been in Washington since January are set to return home this weekend, two defense officials told McClatchy.

The National Guard deployment was in response to the deadly attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. On Inauguration Day, more than 26,000 National Guard service members were protecting the nation’s capital. About 5,200 have remained, but their mission was set to end on Friday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week directed that 2,300 service members continue to protect Congress through May 23, citing a request from the U.S. Capitol Police. Throughout Wednesday, National Guard leaders were speaking to their state governors and Guard leadership to find volunteers to come to Washington for the next two months.

One defense official told McClatchy the units may be placed under involuntary activation so that instead of individual service members from various states filling the request, an entire unit and its leadership would do it, which the official said would improve command and control.

Often the National Guard fulfills requests by getting governors to support deployment, then that governor tasks the state’s Guard units to issue voluntary activation orders, which take into account a service member’s ability to leave a full-time job.

In times of war or natural disaster the activation orders can be involuntary, which provide service members additional protections from losing their civilian jobs due to their military responsibilities.

Having to rely on involuntary activation reflects the hesitation some states have expressed in sending forces to the Capitol, or extending the ones already there, citing the many demands those units have faced, including supporting COVID-19 response and natural disaster relief.

Michigan National Guard troops account for almost 1,000 of the approximately 5,200 service members still guarding the Capitol, and those forces will be returning home this weekend, said Bobby Leddy, a spokesman for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Michigan’s Guard members “were some of the first troops on the ground to answer the call to protect our nation’s Capitol Building from security threats,” Leddy said. “There is no intention of extending this deployment.”

California has also sent members of its National Guard to protect the Capitol since January. The 200 that remain “will be heading home” this weekend and there are no plans to extend the mission in Washington, said California National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Jason Shiroma.

Kansas has 50 National Guard members at the U.S. Capitol, but “they will be back mid-month and will not be extending,” the Kansas National Guard said in a statement to McClatchy.

Florida received a request to help protect the Capitol in the days following the inauguration, but declined to send forces.

“Florida was not (and is not) able to support based on current COVID requirements within the state and ongoing federal mobilizations and training requirements,” Florida National Guard spokesman Will Manley told McClatchy in a statement.

While it did have service members in the capital to support the inauguration, “the South Carolina National Guard will not be supporting the mission in D.C.,” said South Carolina National Guard spokeswoman Capt. Jessica Donnelly.

Other Guard units, including Kentucky and Washington state, said they are ready to assist if needed.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute on Wednesday released an annual survey that found that trust in the military has declined from 70 percent in 2018 to 56 percent in 2021. Although the poll did not identify specific reasons for the decline, institute experts told reporters that last year’s military’s response to protests over the death of George Floyd could be one of several reasons for the drop.

Kathleen McInnis, a national security expert who recently testified before Congress on civil-military relations, said the optics of having a continued military presence surrounding Congress did not help.

“The capitol is supposed to be the heart of our democracy,” McInnis said. “A key question is, what does it say that the military is the solution to this challenge?”

~ Grif

Biden Gives China Full Access to Control the U.S. National Power Grid

In his first week in office, President Biden put U.S. security at great risk by giving China autonomous ability to control the national power grid.

Biden issued executive order 13990 in which, buried amid matters purportedly designed to combat climate change, was an anomalous and potentially dangerous provision that suspends a key security measure put in place last May 1 by former President Donald Trump. Biden’s executive order permits China to have full access to the U.S. power grid for 90 days.

Trump’s Executive Order 13920 declared an official national emergency with respect to the nation’s electric grid and prohibited the acquisition or installation of “any bulk-power electric equipment … designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied, by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary.” In sum, Trump forbade the use of grid equipment that is made in China, Russia, or other hostile nations.

Trump’s order was a common-sense response to real, proven threats. Just last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States seized a Chinese-built transformer because officials believed “its electronics had been secretly given malicious capabilities, possibly allowing a distant adversary to monitor or even disable it on command.” Cybersecurity expert Joseph Weiss reported that officials found “electronics that should not have been part of the transformer — hardware backdoors” that could allow the Chinese to “effectively gain control of the transformers without any network forensics being the wiser.” Weiss also noted that China was first caught trying to hack into a U.S. grid in California as far back as 2001, and that “the Russians have been in our U.S. grids since 2014.”

According to Tommy Waller, director of infrastructure security at the Center for Security Policy, believes the security threat extends far beyond China’s 90-day access to the power grid. “We’re also worried about sensors and actuators and drives that are installed even if they are not connected to the Internet,” he said. “If that hardware installed inside of them is designed at some point to send the wrong readings, it could sabotage the safety and security of that system.”

A December 2018 report report of the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) focused on tackling a different kind of catastrophic blackout. In “Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage,” the council examined the United States’ ability to respond to and recover from an outage “of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence.” NIAC was tasked with considering an unprecedented scenario: an outage that extended beyond days and weeks, out to months or even years, while affecting large portions of the country.

“We know how to deal with, what we’ll call ‘extended outages.’ We have lot of experience responding to those, similar to what happened in Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria,” said Scott Aaronson, vice president of security and preparedness for the Edison Electric Institute, and a member of the report’s advisory group. “The devastation in Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and Maria gave us a glimpse at how a loss of power can cascade into other sectors affecting public health and safety and the economy.”

The report concludes that “existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage,” adding, the “profound risk requires a new national focus.”

According to Aronson, “From a planning perspective, if you’re simply planning for things you already know how to do, that isn’t helpful.”

There has been much debate around the federal response to the disaster on Puerto Rico, and the official death toll — raised from an initially-reported 64 to 2,975 following more study — reflects the difficulties NIAC’s report addresses. A power outage of this length would be devastating and deadly with impacts reverberating far beyond utility poles and wires.

According to the NIAC report “The devastation in Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and Maria gave us a glimpse at how a loss of power can cascade into other sectors affecting public health and safety and the economy.” The report uses the word “cascading” more than two dozen times, highlighting the potential for far-reaching impacts from such an event. And the findings do not inspire confidence.

The U.S. utility sector has been focused on cybersecurity for several years now, as the industry grasped the full extent of the threat it faces — and how unprepared most companies really were.

The effort to get up to speed has progressed on several fronts: The U.S. Department of Energy created the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, and is now funding tens of millions of dollars in projects and research. ​GridEx, a biennial security event hosted by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, draws thousands of participants and allows them to run through their cyberattack response protocols. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been strengthening its Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards to respond to more sophisticated threats.

In the face of these enhancements, a recent survey found almost half of power and utility CEOs think a cyber attack on their company is inevitable.

Despite the efforts to secure the grid from a potentially catastrophic shutdown, the threat of a devastating power disruption remains. Biden’s seemingly irrational lifting of the embargo against China, and by extension anyone else that would hope to see the America go down in flames, does nothing to protect the U.S. Instead Biden has opened the door to a cyber attack from any number of countries and terrorist originations that view the national power grid as a prime target.