In the News, 2020: NORTH AMERICA

President Trump has been unwavering in his demands for a wall along the entire 2,000-mile-long U.S. border with Mexico.  But Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, have refused to fund it, and in early 2019, this standoff led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Trump declared a national emergency on the border in order to use $2.5 billion in military funds to build the wall. In July 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the wall’s construction could go ahead while lawsuits challenging Trump’s wall funding work their way through the court system.

After a few years of normalizing ties, relations between the U.S. and Cuba are now more tense than they’ve been in decades. President Trump has beefed up the economic embargo on the Communist nation, and Cuba’s economy is struggling. Shortages of food and other essentials have become more severe. But at the same time, Cuba’s repressive government shows signs of change. President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who took office in 2018, has sped up the introduction of internet and cellphone access on the long-isolated island.

Enormous numbers of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras continue to flee the violence in those countries and head north to seek safety and a better life in the U.S. But the Trump administration’s crackdown on those seeking asylum has resulted in an increasingly chaotic situation at the border, including hundreds of asylum seekers being held in jails and thousands of migrants waiting on the Mexican side of the border to be let in. Trump officials say the policy changes are necessary to discourage people from making the trip in the first place.