The United States lifted a pandemic border control policy late Thursday — a move that could have implications for Canada’s approach to migrants and asylum seekers.
The Trump administration invoked Title 42 shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic started in March 2020. The policy, which is part of the 1944 Public Health Service Act, allows American border authorities to quickly turn back migrants, including asylum seekers, at Ports of Entry (POE) to prevent the spread of disease.
“There is a serious danger of the introduction of COVID-19 into the land POEs and border patrol stations at or near the United States borders with Canada or Mexico, and into the interior of the country as a whole,” Dr. Robert R. Redfield, then director of the Centers for Disease Control, said in the 2020 order.
The Biden administration attempted to terminate Title 42 in 2022 but court decisions kept it in place. The order officially expired at 11:59 p.m. ET Thursday.
According to United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, the United States Border Patrol expelled just over a million migrants between October 2021 and September 2022 under Title 42. It expelled 85,672 migrants in March of this year alone, the latest month for which statistics are available.
A CBP spokesperson did not answer the question when CBC News asked how many of the expelled migrants came from Canada.
Migrants and asylum seekers in north and central Mexico now have to use an app to fill out a form prior to arriving in the United States. The Biden administration also has said it will put more resources into anti-smuggling efforts in response to Title 42’s expiration.
Luisa Veronis, a geography professor at the University of Ottawa, said smugglers often spread misinformation about changes in border policies in an effort to increase business. She said the United States and Canada could respond by providing more information about what the recent changes actually mean.
“I think that’s another point where both Canada and the U.S. could control … making the information accessible, digestible. I think that would be a way to at least make people aware of what is really going on,” Veronis said.
Though Veronis is critical of the United States government’s approach to asylum seekers, she said it’s notable that the U.S. is using the expiry of a pandemic restriction as an opportunity to take a new approach to the problem. She said Canada could learn from that effort to address an influx of asylum seekers.
“The U.S. is trying to put in place practical ways for people to claim asylum by creating an app,” Veronis said.
“So maybe this is a good time to find legal pathways … We need to come up with a smart solution.”
New American border policy harsher: refugee lawyer
Aviva Basman, the president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), said the Biden administration’s new approach to the border is even harsher than Title 42.
“What’s being replaced after Title 42 is something a lot worse. The new rule is more restrictive, more expansive, and it will be barring asylum seekers from seeking protection in the United States,” she said.
“This is going to substantially restrict accessibility to the border. There’s been a lot of problems reported with this app and its use.”
Title 42’s expiration comes just a few months after Canada and the United States renegotiated the Safe Third Country Agreement. The new, expanded version of the agreement closed a loophole which allowed migrants to make asylum claims in Canada if they arrived from the United States between official POEs.
Aviva Basman, president of Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), said CARL hopes Canada will open up to more asylum seekers as the United States puts new border measures in place. (Maureen Brosnahan/CBC)
Earlier this year, a family of four Indian nationals and a family of Romanian descent died near the Canada-United States border. Police in Canada say they believe they were trying to enter the United States from Canada through Akwesasne Mohawk Territory.
Basman said CARL fears that more asylum seekers, including those headed for the United States via Canada, could seek more dangerous methods of crossing the border.
“Individuals are going to feel forced to take more and more desperate, perilous routes in order to access asylum,” she said.
As part of the deal that renegotiated the Safe Third Country Agreement, Canada agreed to take 15,000 migrants from the Western Hemisphere.
Basman said she hopes Canada responds to the changes in United States border policy by opening itself up more to asylum seekers.
“I think that it’s really just important to think about this from the perspective of Canada’s obligations, and what this means for Canada’s reputation as a country that provides protection to refugee claimants who arrive,” she said.
“What we’re really hoping now is that Canada will provide increased access to its asylum procedures by putting in place different categories of exemptions that take into account some of the gaps in the U.S. asylum system.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
