A Look at Commencements as U.S. Campuses Are Roiled by Israel-Hamas War Protests

Commencement ceremonies are being held at colleges and universities across the U.S. As many campuses have been roiled by protests over the Israel-Hamas war, some school administrations have taken steps to contain disruptions during their commencement activities.

University of Michigan’s commencement was held early Saturday with a few interruptions. Ahead of the ceremony, the school had said staff and security officers were ready to respond and that interfering with commencement would not be considered free speech.

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Here is a look at some of the commencement ceremonies:

Northeastern University

In Boston, commencement ceremonies for Northeastern University began peacefully Sunday morning at Fenway Park.

Some students waved Palestinian flags but those were dotted among flags from India, the U.S. and other nations. Graduate students had their ceremony first, with the undergraduate ceremony scheduled for the afternoon.

Police last month arrested about 100 protesters at Northeastern when they broke up an encampment on the Boston campus.

Read More: 25 Arrested at University of Virginia as Pro-Palestinian Protests Continue on U.S. Campuses

University of Michigan

Police officers stood nearby as some graduates holding Palestinian flags and shouting pro-Palestinian messages protested during commencement at the University of Michigan on Saturday, where tens of thousands of people gathered inside Michigan Stadium. One banner said, “No universities left in Gaza.”

The protests were away from the stage and didn’t stop the nearly two-hour event. But U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro paused a few times during remarks and at one point said, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, if you can please draw your attention back to the podium.”

Del Toro administered an oath to graduates in the armed forces. He said they would “protect the freedoms that we so cherish,” including the “right to protest peacefully.”

Protesters have been demanding that Michigan cut financial ties with any companies connected to Israel. The university has allowed protesters to set up an encampment in the middle of campus.

Police assisted in breaking up a large gathering Friday night outside a campus art museum where a dinner was held for recipients of honorary degrees. At least one person was arrested.

source https://time.com/6974888/us-campuses-commencement-ceremonies-israel-hamas-war-protests/

Israel Closes Gaza Crossing After Hamas Attack, Warns of Military Operation in ‘Near Future’

JERUSALEM — Israel closed its main crossing point for delivering badly needed humanitarian aid for Gaza on Sunday after Hamas militants attacked it, while the defense minister claimed Hamas wasn’t serious about a cease-fire deal and warned of “a powerful operation in the very near future in Rafah and other places across all of Gaza.”

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Both struck blows to ongoing cease-fire efforts in Cairo mediated by Egypt and Qatar after reported signs of progress. Israel hasn’t sent a delegation, unlike Hamas, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “we see signs that Hamas does not intend to go to any agreement.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under pressure from hard-liners in his government, continued to lower expectations for a cease-fire deal, calling the Hamas demands “extreme” — including the withdrawal of Israel forces from Gaza and an end to the war. That would equal surrender after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 that triggered the fighting, Netanyahu said.

Hamas didn’t immediately respond to Gallant’s comments. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a statement earlier said the militant group was serious and positive about the negotiations and stopping Israeli aggression in Gaza is the main priority.

But Israel’s government again vowed to press on with a military operation in Rafah, the southernmost Gaza city on the border with Egypt where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents now seek shelter from Israeli attacks. Rafah is a key entry point for aid.

Kerem Shalom, now closed, is another. The Israeli military reported 10 projectiles were launched at the crossing in southern Israel and said its fighter jets later struck the source. Hamas said it had been targeting Israeli soldiers in the area. Israel’s Channel 12 TV channel said 10 people were wounded, three seriously. It was unclear how long the crossing would be closed.

The attack came shortly after the head of the U.N. World Food Program asserted “full-blown famine” in devastated northern Gaza, one of the most prominent warnings yet of the toll of restrictions on food and other aid entering the territory. The comments were not a formal famine declaration.

Gaza’s vast humanitarian needs put further pressure on the cease-fire talks. The proposal that Egyptian mediators had put to Hamas sets out a three-stage process that would bring an immediate, six-week cease-fire and partial release of Israeli hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack, and would include some sort of Israeli pullout. The initial stage would last for 40 days. Hamas would start by releasing female civilian hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Netanyahu claimed that Israel has shown willingness to make concessions but said it “will continue fighting until all of its objectives are achieved.” That includes the stated aim of crushing Hamas. Israel says it must target Rafah to strike remaining fighters there despite warnings from the U.S. and others about the danger to civilians.

In later remarks for Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day, Netanyahu added: “We will defend ourselves in every way. We will overcome our enemies and we will ensure our security — in the Gaza Strip, on the Lebanese border, everywhere.”

The Hamas cross-border attack on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage. Israel says militants still hold around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others. Netanyahu is under growing pressure from some hostages’ families to make a deal to end the war and get hostages freed.

Israeli’s air and ground offensive has killed over 34,500 people, according to Palestinian health officials, who don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants but say women and children make up a majority of those killed.

Israel blames Hamas for civilian deaths, accusing it of embedding in residential and public areas. The Israeli military says it has killed 13,000 militants, without providing evidence to back up the claim.

Also Sunday, Netanyahu’s Cabinet approved a measure to shutter Qatar’s Al Jazeera news channel, accusing it of broadcasting anti-Israel incitement. The decision threatened to further disrupt the cease-fire talks.

source https://time.com/6974856/israel-hamas-attack-crossing-point-gaza-aid-injuries/

Queen Elizabeth II Ruled Too Long

As much of Britain and the world waits on baited breath over King Charles’s cancer treatment, it is only natural that many look back to his mother’s time on the throne with a mixture of nostalgia and regret. It was Queen Elizabeth II’s unchanging nature, epitomized by her unbending adherence to the royals’ unofficial motto of “Never complain, never explain” that made her a constant fixture in the lives of millions of Brits and billions more around the globe. When she died in 2022, nobody under the age of 70 had known another British monarch; few younger than her son could remember George VI, let alone the ill-fated Edward VIII or George V.

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For all intents and purposes, Elizabeth II was the British monarchy. But her reign—longer than any other British monarch in history—has set the stage for much of the predicament the royal family finds itself in today. Queen Elizabeth II has for years been by far the most popular British royal, a fact that remains true even now.

There are good reasons for this. She served as an unmistakable bridge between the last days of the British empire, which she was born into, and today’s era of instant technology. When she became Queen, communication by telegram was common; when she died, the Telegram app was in equally frequent usage. It is hard, if not impossible, to think of any comparable figure who exerted such influence—however symbolic it was—over such a period of immense transformation.

Read More: The Story Behind TIME’s Commemorative Queen Elizabeth II Cover

Outside of Britain, the Queen played a central role in building the soft power of the country throughout the second half of the 20th century. When, after the post-war years of austerity and misery, the country established itself once again in the 1960s as a world power to be reckoned with, thanks to the dual strengths of the canny Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the telegenic young Queen. Wilson’s virtues were political; Elizabeth’s those of being able to temper regality with apparent accessibility.

The late Queen undoubtedly had her flaws. She was not a woman of any artistic or intellectual interests (unlike her unfairly maligned husband), and was happiest when spending time with her corgi. She could be a poor judge of character; her open preference for her second son, the now-disgraced Prince Andrew, and continued loyalty to him was testament to that. And she could be slow at reading the public mood, too. She notoriously took days to publicly address the death of Princess Diana in 1997. She was by all accounts reluctant to do so even then, feeling that she had been bounced into doing so by then Prime Minister Tony Blair. And she could justly be criticized for sticking to conservatism rather than considering the idea of progress when it came to the monarchy; by the end of her reign, it was still recognizably the same institution, battered and shop-soiled but intact, that she had inherited, much to her shock and surprise, while in Kenya on Feb. 6, 1952.

Yet the Queen’s greatest flaw was one that she had no control over, and that was that she set an impossibly high expectation of what monarchy should be that her successors could never hope to live up to. Queen Victoria did much the same, dying in 1901 after nearly 64 years on the throne, and allowing four subsequent monarchs to flounder in her wake —from her son Edward “Dirty Bertie” VII to George VI. Only Queen Elizabeth II was able, half a century later, to wipe away memories of her great-great grandmother’s reign, by doing as little as she could to upset the monarchical applecart. (She never exercised a single meaningful veto throughout her reign.) There was much sentimental talk, especially late on, about “the new Elizabethan age.” But what her reign more closely resembled was a second Victorian age, even as British expansionism and concomitant exceptionalism was replaced by a slow, managed decline into a middling power.

None of this was the late Queen’s fault. She did everything that could be expected from her, sometimes even more. So many hands shaken, so many ribbons cut, so many “Have you come far?” enquiries. She—or at least those around her—had an undeniable knack for finding the appropriate phrase on public occasions. Her dismissal of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s accusations of royal racism after their Oprah Winfrey interview with “recollections may vary” appeared to end any serious threat to the monarchy. Her promise during COVID-19 that “we will meet again” comforted many at a time when hysteria and uncertainty dominated. She may, or may not, have enjoyed her portrayal in The Crown as an ingénue-turned-battleaxe.

Read More: Meghan and Harry’s Interview Won’t End the Monarchy. But a Reckoning Is Coming

But one thing that her lifelong belief in duty would never have allowed was to quit. Recollections of those dread days in late 1936 never disappeared, when her uncle Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson—passing the crown over to her father. Her decision to remain Queen until the last possible moment, frail but still shaking hands with the disastrous Prime Minister Liz Truss, was personally commendable but has left Charles III with the impossible task of inheriting a legacy too large for anyone to bear.

It’s interesting to wonder what would have happened had King Charles III inherited the throne years or decades earlier. A younger Charles would perhaps have been a more energetic, at times even interventionist monarch. Instead, Charles assumed the throne at 73, and will likely be remembered by posterity as a warm-up man in reverse, whether he reigns for two years or 20 more.

Read More: Why King Charles III Will Be Worth the Wait

The world, or at least the parts of the world that still care about the British monarchy, may be be forced to look at the 41-year-old Prince William to revitalize the institution whenever he takes over. Yet a man who has no interest in the religious faith that he will be defender of, who has been beset by scurrilous rumors including adultery, and whose attitude toward the Commonwealth seems to be that it’s best wound up without delay is hardly the steady and dutiful custodian of the throne that his grandmother was.

Shakespeare’s Henry IV once described the crown as “troublesome,” and said that “it seem’d in me/But as an honor snatch’d with boisterous hand.” Elizabeth II dealt with the honor in rather more sober fashion, and succeeded, but she left an impossible inheritance in the process. And that, surely, is her lasting legacy: setting a standard that nobody else could live up to.

source https://time.com/6973948/rethinking-queen-elizabeth-legacy/

Here’s What We Know About Kate Middleton’s Net Worth

Kate Middleton’s life changed significantly when she married Prince William in 2011, having met while studying at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Now Princess of Wales and next in line to be Queen, Kate married into a generationally wealthy family whose working members get official expenses covered by proceeds from their vast land holdings, and she and her husband have only gotten wealthier during their marriage. 

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It’s not possible to determine the exact net worth of a royal, but CelebrityNetWorth pegs Kate’s current net worth at an estimated $10 million. Her husband’s net worth, calculated by the same source, is $100 million—an estimate that doesn’t appear to include a private estate reportedly worth more than $1 billion.

Before she got married, Kate was already relatively well-to-do. Her family inherited a trust fund that in 2014 was worth more than £3 million ($3.7 million), according to the Daily Mail.

When Kate was born, her father, Michael, was a flight dispatcher and her mother, Carole, was a flight attendant. Five years after welcoming Kate, Michael and Carole started a business called “Party Pieces.” The family grew wealthy enough to send their three children to a prestigious private school, Marlborough College, and buy an apartment in London and the family’s home—a manor in Berkshire.

The party business grew into a successful enterprise that was valued at £30 million ($37 million) at the time of the royal wedding, according to the Evening Standard. However, the business reportedly lost more than £1 million ($1.3 million) during the pandemic. Per a statement filed via Companies House, an agency of the British government, Party Pieces Holdings Limited had acquired £2.6 million ($3.2 million) in debt by 2023, leading to the sale of the business.

Before getting married, Kate worked for her parents’ business and as an accessory buyer for the apparel brand Jigsaw.

Kate is now a working royal, which means she spends her time in public engagements as a patron to charities and representative for the country and Crown. She gets her official living, travel, and household expenses covered by what is called the Sovereign Grant. 

Each year, the royal family gives profits from its vast holdings under the Crown Estate to the U.K. government, but gets paid back a proportion in the form of the Sovereign Grant. Historically, the proportion was 15%, but that amount was raised to 25% in 2017 for 10 years to cover renovations at Buckingham Palace. However, the government announced it would be cut to 12% starting this year because of new profits from offshore wind farms on the Crown Estate.

In the most recent financial year, the royal family received £86 million ($109 million) from the Sovereign Grant, according to an annual report published in June 2023. That equals out to £1.29 ($1.63) per person in the U.K., according to the royal website. A core grant of £51.8 million ($65 million) funds official travel, property maintenance, and household operating costs.

However, the Sovereign Grant doesn’t cover Kate and other royals’ security costs, which is paid for by the taxpayer, with the cost not disclosed.

Kate and William, along with their three children—George, Charlotte, and Louis—make use of three homes—Kensington Palace in London, Anmer Hall in Norfolk, and Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor Castle estate. The Guardian reported that Anmer Hall was a gift from Queen Elizabeth II, while the couple pays rent on Adelaide Cottage.

source https://time.com/6974780/kate-middleton-net-worth-estimations/

U.K. Labour’s Sadiq Khan Wins Historic Third Term as Mayor of London

LONDON — Sadiq Khan, the Labour Party’s mayor of London, romped to victory Saturday, securing a record third straight term at City Hall, on another hugely disappointing day for the U.K.’s governing Conservatives ahead of a looming general election.

Khan won a little over a million votes, or nearly 44% of the vote, more than 11 percentage points ahead of his main challenger, the Conservative Party’s Susan Hall. He did particularly well in inner London but struggled in several outer boroughs.

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There had been frenzied speculation on Friday that the result would be closer than previously thought, but Khan’s lead showed a swing from Conservative to Labour when compared with the previous mayoral election in 2021.

Khan, who replaced Boris Johnson as London mayor in 2016, has been an increasingly divisive figure in the past few years.

While his supporters say he has multiple achievements to his name, such as expanding housebuilding, free school meals for young children, keeping transport costs in check and generally backing London’s minority groups, his critics say he has overseen a crime surge, been anti-car and has unnecessarily allowed pro-Palestinian marches to become a regular feature at weekends.

“Sadiq Khan was absolutely the right candidate,” said Labour leader Keir Starmer. “He has got two terms of delivery behind him and I am confident that he has got another term of delivery in front of him.”

The incumbent Labour mayors in Liverpool, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire were also reelected Saturday, while the party looks to have ousted the Conservative mayor in West Midlands. A recount is underway there.

The latest successes come a day after Labour seized control of councils across England that it hasn’t held for decades. The party was also successful in a special election for a seat in Parliament, that if translated to a general election would lead to one of the Conservatives’ biggest-ever defeats.

Though the Conservatives suffered a drubbing in the local elections, it looks as though Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will not face a further rebellion among his ranks.

Sunak was able to breathe a sigh of relief when the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in the northeast of England was reelected, albeit with a depressed share of the vote. Sunak had hoped that Andy Street would hold on in the West Midlands but it appears he may have lost.

One negative for Labour was that its vote in strongly Muslim areas in England was depressed by opposition to the party leadership’s strongly pro-Israel stance over the war in Gaza.

Starmer conceded that the party has had issues with Muslim voters, but the results in general were positive for the man who is favorite to become prime minister at the next general election.

Sunak has the power to decide on the date of the next election, and has indicated that it will be in the second half of 2024. Starmer urged him not to wait.

“We’re fed up with your division, with your chaos, with your failure,” he said Saturday. “If you leave your country in a worse state than when you found it, 14 years later, you do not deserve to be in government a moment longer.”

Thursday’s elections in large parts of England were important in themselves, with voters deciding on who runs many aspects of their daily lives, such as garbage collection, road maintenance and local crime prevention. But with a national election looming, they are being viewed through a national prism.

John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the results show that Sunak has not helped the Conservative brand following the damage accrued by the actions of his predecessors, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.

“That in a sense is the big takeaway,” he told BBC radio.

Sunak became prime minister in October 2022, after Truss’s short-lived tenure. She left office after 49 days following a budget of unfunded tax cuts that roiled financial markets and sent borrowing costs for homeowners surging.

Her chaotic — and traumatic — leadership compounded the Conservatives’ difficulties following the circus surrounding her predecessor Johnson, who was forced to quit after being adjudged to have lied to Parliament over coronavirus lockdown breaches at his offices in Downing Street.

By late afternoon Saturday, with most of the 2,661 seats up for grabs in the local elections counted, the Conservatives had lost around a half of the 1,000 seats they were defending, while Labour had picked up about 200 despite some seemingly Gaza-related losses.

Other parties, such as the centrist Liberal Democrats and the Greens, also made gains. Reform U.K., which is trying to usurp the Conservatives from the right, also had some successes, notably in the special parliamentary election in Blackpool South, where it was less than 200 votes from grabbing second place.

source https://time.com/6974786/labour-sadiq-khan-wins-third-term-london-mayor/

Watch the Classic Stunts That Inspired the Action in The Fall Guy

Before directing Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, or Bullet Train, David Leitch was one of the most prolific stuntmen in Hollywood. He doubled for Brad Pitt in Fight Club and Troy. He executed stunts on two of the Matrix movies and one of the Bourne installments. He is a scholar of the action flick and told TIME his latest movie, The Fall Guy, is a “love letter to action movies.”

The film centers on a stunt man, played by Ryan Gosling. He had a brief romance with an aspiring director (Emily Blunt) but ghosted her after a serious injury. When she finally gets her first big break, her new movie’s star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes missing, so the stunt man sets out to find him and save his true love’s picture (and maybe win her back in the process). The Fall Guy depicts the meticulous preparation needed to execute stunts as well as the fantastic feats themselves. And the movie broke the world record for the number of cannon rolls—or car flips—in a movie.

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The Fall Guy also nods at the dozens of action movies that came before it. “I wanted to pay homage to the history of stunts and do really fun ones in the spirit of some of the classics,” says Leitch. When dreaming up the stunts in their various films, Leitch and his executive producer and wife Kelly McCormick keep a TV running in the background of their brainstorming meetings that plays everything from Buster Keaton’s leaps to Bollywood battle scenes.

TIME asked Leitch and McCormick to talk through the classic action scenes in movies like Casino Royale, True Lies, and Indiana Jones that inspired the stunts in The Fall Guy.

The Casino Royale Cannon Roll

A cannon roll is a classic stunt that involves fitting a cannon-like contraption beneath a car. When the car reaches a specific speed, the apparatus triggers and propels the car into a series of rolls. Before The Fall Guy, the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale held the record with seven rolls.

“David challenged the team to break the world record,” says McCormick. “He actually put it in the script.” Leitch’s team ultimately achieved eight and a half cannon rolls.

The feat is all the more impressive considering that Casino Royale’s cannon rolls were accomplished with the car moving downhill and gravity working in its favor. The Fall Guy shot its cannon rolls on a flat, sandy surface. As McCormick explains, “Sand is hard because that canon hits down into a surface, and the harder the surface, the easier it is to roll it.” Sand, by contrast, has a lot of give.

The High Falls in Sharky’s Machine & Assassin’s Creed

High falls are another familiar if complicated stunt. One of Leitch’s favorites is a fall out of a glass building in the 1980s classic Sharky’s Machine. A stuntman on 2016’s Assassin’s Creed performed a free fall of 125 feet, the highest jump in a film in 35 years.

The height of the fall is determined by factors like the wind, which can pull a jumper away from the airbag he’s supposed to hit on the ground. The stunt man on The Fall Guy was able to fall 150 feet.

“We had agreed that 120 was the height that felt right, unless the conditions were absolutely perfect that day, and then we’d let him go to 150,” says McCormick. “And, and they were, and so we did. He hadn’t hit that number in rehearsals. He hadn’t hit that height in his life.”

Marrying stunts and romance in True Lies and Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Leitch argues “action shouldn’t be done for action’s sake.” It should always serve the story. “The hardest stunt in the movie was the stunt of falling in love,” Leitch says of making The Fall Guy.

Few films marry romance and action well. But James Cameron may be the master of striking that balance. “True Lies is such a great movie for action and relationship, right, and the stakes involved in those sequences,” says Leitch. He specifically points to the helicopter stunt at the end of the film when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, hanging out of a helicopter, must grab Jamie Lee Curtis’ character from a moving car headed off the edge of a bridge. It solidifies trust within the couple at the end of their journey together.

Perhaps in a wink to that film, The Fall Guy features a scene involving a helicopter in which our two protagonists have a conversation about their feelings for one another in the midst of a death-defying chase.

McCormick cites another film that melds action and romance, the 2005 Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie action comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In that movie, the action scenes often morph into sexually-charged moments of romance. “Mr. And Mrs. Smith, the fight in the kitchen and the even the warehouse, it’s just so original and about their relationship,” McCormick says. “It’s really is connective and memorable.” Leitch happened to work as Pitt’s stuntman on that film.

Scrappy fights and jumping across vehicles in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Leitch says that the stunts of ’80s and ’90s action movies are “baked into The Fall Guy.” Gosling got to pay homage to one of film’s greatest action stars—and his old co-star on Blade Runner 2049—Harrison Ford. A long chase sequence involving Gosling hopping across cars and trucks mimics a famous scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

“There’s a great truck sequence in that where Indy is trying to transfer from truck to truck, and he’s hanging behind it,” Leitch says. Just as Indiana Jones gets dragged behind a truck, Gosling’s character surfs behind a truck in The Fall Guy. “I think we started out there, but then as the guys got into the choreography it started to become our own version of that.”

Throughout the truck scene, Gosling’s character scraps with a goon much larger than him. That fight serves as a callback to just about every Indiana Jones action scene: “He’s always overwhelmed and outmatched but somehow figures a clever way out of it.”

Big car jumps in The Fall Guy TV Show, Smokey and the Bandit, and Hooper

Modern audiences may not know that The Fall Guy is based on old IP. The Fall Guy TV show, which aired in the 1980s, starred Lee Majors as a Hollywood stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. He drove a GMC Sierra and often made jumps over barriers and ponds while pursuing criminals. Gosling’s hero, too, finds himself chasing bad guys in a newer GMC Sierra and jumping over partitions to reach them—though in The Fall Guy movie, there’s a dog in the passenger’s seat, just to up the stakes.

The end of The Fall Guy features a car jump across a gigantic canyon. That jump honors jumps in two Burt Reynolds movies, Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper. “It was fun to figure out, ‘How can we take that to the next level?” says Leitch.

source https://time.com/6973939/the-fall-guy-stunts-inspiration/

Biden Administration Says 100,000 New Migrants Expected to Enroll in ‘Obamacare’ Next Year

(WASHINGTON) — Roughly 100,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children are expected to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance next year under a directive the Biden administration released Friday.

The move took longer than promised to finalize and fell short of Democratic President Joe Biden’s initial proposal to allow those migrants to sign up for Medicaid, the health insurance program that provides nearly free coverage for the nation’s poorest people.

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But it will allow thousands of people, known as “Dreamers,” to access tax breaks when they sign up for coverage after the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace enrollment opens Nov. 1, just days ahead of the presidential election.

“I’m proud of the contributions of Dreamers to our country and committed to providing Dreamers the support they need to succeed,” Biden said in a statement Friday.

While it may help Biden boost his appeal at a crucial time among Latinos, a crucial voting bloc that he needs to turn out to win the election, the move is certain to prompt more criticism among conservatives about the president’s border and migrant policies.

The action opens the marketplace to any participant in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, many of whom are Latino.

Xavier Becerra, the nation’s top health official, said Thursday that many of those migrants have delayed getting care because they have not had coverage.

“They incur higher costs and debts when they do finally receive care,” Becerra told reporters on a call. “Making Dreamers eligible to enroll in coverage will improve their health and well-being and strengthen the health and well-being of our nation and our economy.”

The administration’s action changes the definition of “lawfully present” so DACA participants can legally enroll in the marketplace exchange.

Then-President Barack Obama launched the DACA initiative to shield from deportation immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents as children and to allow them to work legally in the country. However, the “Dreamers” were still ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition of having a “lawful presence” in the U.S.

The administration decided not to expand eligibility for Medicaid for those migrants after receiving more than 20,000 comments on the proposal, senior officials said Thursday. Those officials declined to explain why the rule, which was first proposed last April, took so long to finalize. The delay meant the migrants were unable to enroll in the marketplace for coverage this year.

At one point, there were as many as 800,000 people enrolled in DACA at one time, though now that figure is roughly 580,000. The administration predicts only 100,000 will actually sign up because some may get coverage through their workplaces or other ways. Some may also be unable to afford coverage through the marketplace.

Other classes of immigrants, including asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status, are already eligible to purchase insurance through the marketplaces of the ACA, Obama’s 2010 health care law, often called “Obamacare.”

The president last year also unveiled a regulation that was aimed at fending off legal challenges to DACA; former President Donald Trump tried to end it, and it has bounced back and forth in federal court. Last fall, a federal judge said the current version can continue at least temporarily.

“President Biden and I will continue to do everything in our power to protect DACA, but it is only a temporary solution,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “Congress must act to ensure Dreamers have the permanent protections they deserve.”

source https://time.com/6974415/dreamers-affordable-care-act-biden/