Worldly News Online

HACIENDA HEIGHTS, Calif. — Brenda and Leo Ortiz had paid enough attention to the news from Afghanistan that it was hardly a surprise when their 11-year-old son asked them a question: How could so many Americans be killed last week? Ms. Ortiz, 41, tried her best to explain, giving their son a brief history lesson on Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and ISIS. But by Saturday, Ms. Ortiz was focused on more personally pressing matters. Her three children were completing their first month of in-person schooling since the start of the pandemic. She said she was saddened by the deaths of Americans. But she wondered aloud how she could possibly focus on a crisis on the other side of the world when there was more than enough to worry about in the United States, in her own backyard. “I don’t think it was ever going to be easy to leave,” Ms. Ortiz said while watching her children play soccer in their recently resumed league at a park in the Los Angeles County community of Hacienda Heights. “A...

s Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday made her first visit to the southern border since she took office, hitting back at Republican criticism and meeting with advocates who pushed her on why the Biden administration had not yet ended restrictive Trump-era policies on migration. “We can take all of these perspectives into account and have meaningful good public policy if we just stop the rhetoric,” Ms. Harris told reporters after a four-hour visit to El Paso. “You can’t just react to a problem without solving it at its roots. Let’s just agree to that.” During her trip, she confronted an issue that has bedeviled the administration for months and is now tied to her own political future after President Biden put her in charge of addressing the root causes of migration. But for all of the questions she took from reporters, immigration advocates and even a group of detained migrant children — whom she met behind closed doors — the vice president had few answers. In one private meet...