Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to hold talks with Mexico about a scheme to pay would-be migrants to stay home and plant trees.
Addressing The “Root” Causes? (Get It?)
Root-causes czar Vice President Kamala Harris, who is clearly addressing the situation at the border only in the most abstract sense, is set to hold a virtual meeting with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador that Mexico says will focus on a controversial program to pay farmers to plant trees in Mexico.
Mexico is soliciting U.S. funding for an extension of the “Planting Life” initiative, which they say will help prevent workers in Mexico and the Northern Triangle from leaving their home countries—temporarily, at least, as Obrador has also proposed the U.S. grant temporary work visas and eventual citizenship to some participants.
“The program has already planted 700,000 trees in Mexico, where it pays 450,000 Mexican farmers a stipend of about $225 per month to tend the saplings,” the AP reported.
An announcement from Harris’s office did not mention the program.
Meanwhile, photos show that a children’s book written by the vice president, Superheroes Are Everywhere, is being included in the “welcome” for unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. custody, but no one seems to know why.
Turkey Reacts to Biden’s Armenian Remembrance Day Statement.
President Joe Biden on Saturday acknowledged the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide, including these lines in an official Armenian Remembrance Day statement: “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. . . We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”
Turkey’s foreign minister tweeted in response, “‘Words cannot change or rewrite history.’ We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice. We entirely reject this statement based solely on populism.”
An official statement from Turkey’s foreign ministry reads, in part, “This statement of the US, which distorts the historical facts, will never be accepted in the conscience of the Turkish people, and will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual trust and friendship.” Politico EU reported that the Turkish foreign ministry also summoned U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield in order to convey their reaction.
Biden Spends The Weekend in Wilmington.
After a long two days of contemplating the bleak climate future alongside world leaders, Biden and family jetted off to Wilmington, Delaware, for the weekend. Biden was spotted embracing and having a conversation with his sister, Valerie Biden, outside of St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine Church.
