A guest post by Betsabé Vásquez Martínez, current student in our 2022-23 MPP cohort The CBP One app was launched in 2020 as a portal that provides migrants with a variety of US Customs and Border Protection services. With the introduction of Title 42 (a legal clause invoked by the Trump administration to allegedly stop the spread of COVID-19 across borders), the app became the only pathway to schedule asylum application appointments. This policy allowed the United States to turn away asyl...
When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them, 'Texas', rather than the United States. We Texans are notoriously prideful of our beloved state and its heritage, and as far from home as I may be, I am no exception to this rule. However, it’s been over three years since Texas was actually home; meanwhile, I’ve lived on two more continents: two years in Morocco as an English teacher, and a year here in the Netherlands for my master’s degree, beginning my second as a research assistant....
Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the United States has been performing what seems to be a partial withdrawal from the international stage. This retreat is sometimes purposeful, as when the administration realised its campaign promise to exit the Paris climate agreement. But it is also sometimes uncertain, as when Vice President Mike Pence offered a conciliatory endorsement of NATO’s Article 5 in early June, just days after Trump failed to do so during his speech in Brussels....
US President Donald Trump has called global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese and appointed a foe of environmental regulations to head up America’s Environmental Protection Agency. On April 22, which annually marks Earth Day, thousands of scientists around the globe marched to defend the role of science, research and facts in society today against repeated attacks from the White House....
Trump may lose, but will that be the end of ‘Trumpism’? As I write this in late October 2016, Washington DC is a divided city in a divided country. I am struck by the imminent sense of disaster — and the clearest sign of this is what we DON’T see, just days before the election on 8th November. Have you ever heard of a US election without countless placards in every neighbourhood? You might imagine ‘Clinton’ signs in the front yards of the affluent Northwest part of the city, interspersed w...
Like most Americans, I have a pretty mixed up immigrant background: in my case from Sweden, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. My mother’s family emigrated from Sweden during the ‘great wave’ of migration between the 1880s and the 1920s....