Joel Rose

President Biden's nominee to lead U.S. Customs and Border Protection faced tough questions from a Senate committee about how he would handle the southern border.

Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus told senators on Tuesday that he would seek to balance border security with humane treatment of migrants.

As the Biden administration scrambles to relocate thousands of Haitian migrants camped in a small Texas border town, it's also looking for a private contractor to help operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — and to hire at least some guards who speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that there are no plans to transfer Haitian migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. has long housed asylum-seekers encountered at sea.

As the Biden administration moves quickly to expel migrants camped under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, its plan depends on a controversial Trump-era policy put in place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to speed up removals.

Across the political spectrum, a broad majority of Americans say they favor welcoming Afghan allies to the U.S. — driven in part by an outpouring of support from groups that generally favor tougher restrictions on immigration.

Activist Claudio Rojas says he was deported to his homeland, Argentina, for appearing in a film that criticized U.S. immigration authorities.

Rojas is one of the stars of The Infiltrators. He was invited to introduce the movie at the Miami Film Festival in 2019. Instead, Rojas was detained at a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.

A few weeks later, he was deported.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says immigration authorities are encountering an "unprecedented number of migrants" at the southern border.

Authorities encountered migrants more than 212,000 times in July, according to official numbers released Thursday — including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children, surpassing the monthly record set in March.

With the rate of coronavirus infections rising across much of the South, some Republicans governors are floating the theory that migrants — and by extension the Biden administration — are to blame.

They're "allowing free pass into the United States of people with a high probability of COVID, and then spreading that COVID in our communities," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in an interview last month on Fox News.

For years, activist Maru Mora-Villalpando has organized hunger strikes to protest conditions at an immigrant detention center in Washington state. By 2017, she'd gotten the attention of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

One high-ranking ICE officer described her as an "instigator" in an internal email. Another responded that Mora-Villalpando was a "well-known local illegal alien," and suggested that trying to deport her might "take away some of her 'clout.'"

A police officer has been killed in a violent incident near the Pentagon transit center in Virginia, officials confirm. The officer has not been publicly identified.

When the pandemic hit, Keri Smith and her family fled with what they could fit in their car. They spent the past 15 months in Canada, where she was born, at a family cottage in rural Nova Scotia.

Now that Smith and her husband are fully vaccinated, they're ready to come back to their home in Northampton, Mass.

"I have my house; my kids go to school," Smith said in an interview with NPR. "We want to get back to our lives. We are ready. And we can't."

When former President Donald Trump threatened a wave of mass deportations in the summer of 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mobilized to deliver.

But those raids turned out to be more hype than reality — in part because of opposition from local law enforcement leaders, including Harris County, Texas, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, who runs one of the country's biggest jails in Houston.

The Department of Justice is shifting away from the Trump administration's effort to decertify the union that represents immigration judges, the latest twist in a two-year battle over the union's future.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority last year sided with the Trump administration, which tried to dissolve the union that represents nearly 500 immigration judges.

Survivors of domestic and gang violence have better odds of getting asylum in the U.S. as the Justice Department reverses controversial rulings from the Trump administration.

When President Biden visited the battleground state of Georgia for a rally to celebrate his 100th day in office, immigrant advocates were there to protest, chanting, "End detention now!" as he stepped to the microphone.

Normally the president would just ignore the hecklers until security could escort them out. Instead, Biden engaged with the protesters.

Across the political spectrum, Americans are worried about the rising number of migrants apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

But whatever their misgivings about the situation at the border, majorities of poll respondents favor creating a legal pathway to citizenship for certain groups of immigrants already living in the country.

The Biden administration is ramping up exceptions to a public health order that has largely shut the U.S.-Mexico border to migrant traffic since last year because of the pandemic.

More migrants are being granted humanitarian exceptions because they are considered the most vulnerable, including families with young children and transgender people who had been living in dangerous conditions in Mexican border towns.

A handful of migrant families that were separated at the border by the Trump administration will be allowed to reunify in the United States this week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Monday.

The four families will be the first to be reunified through a task force that was created by President Biden shortly after taking office in January.

The decision to allow migrant parents into the U.S. to reunify with their children here marks a sharp break with the Trump administration, which resisted allowing parents who were previously deported to return.

The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the Biden administration to close dozens of immigration detention facilities across the country, citing the historically low number of immigrants in detention and the high cost of paying for empty beds.

In a letter sent Wednesday to the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the ACLU calls for the closure of 39 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities.

The Biden administration is ordering U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to change how they talk about immigrants.

The terms "illegal alien" and "assimilation" are out — replaced by "undocumented noncitizen" and "integration."

The new guidance is laid out in a pair of detailed memos sent Monday by the heads of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to roll back the previous administration's hard-line policies and build what they call a more "humane" immigration system.

The Biden administration has been scrambling to care for hundreds of migrant children and teenagers crossing the Southern border alone daily — opening a dozen emergency influx shelters and moving thousands out of jail-like holding cells and tents that have stoked public outrage.

Still, the administration faces big challenges as it deals with the record-breaking surge of unaccompanied minors.

More than 170,000 migrants were taken into custody at the Southwest border in March, the highest monthly total since at least 2006, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials who have been briefed on the preliminary numbers but are not authorized to speak publicly.

The sprawling detention center in Tacoma, Wash., housed more than 1,300 immigrants on average at the height of former President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Now nearly four out of every five beds at the facility are empty.

That's because Immigration and Customs Enforcement released hundreds of people to lower the risk of COVID-19, and because the agency is arresting and detaining fewer unauthorized immigrants under orders from President Biden.

Millions of people watched the moon landing live on TV in 1969. But more than 50 years later, Bonnie Garland still isn't buying it.

"I personally do not believe that man has ever been out of the atmosphere," says Garland, a self-described housewife from Tucson, Ariz. "I'm a very inquisitive person. Always have been. So I question everything."

After four years of former President Trump's immigration crackdown, the Biden administration on Thursday announced new guidelines that are expected to sharply limit arrests and deportations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Under the guidance, ICE agents and officers have been told to prioritize threats to national security and public safety when deciding whom to arrest, detain and deport.

ICE officials said the guidance is intended to help the agency allocate its limited resources to cases the public cares about most.