Are Border Talks a “Waste of Time?”

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About 300 people met in south Minneapolis to march in protest against the proposed policies of Donald Trump. Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue (CC By 2.0)

Negotiations on funding a border wall seem to be going nowhere as the February 15th deadline for another government shutdown looms. Trump told The New York Times that further talks are a waste of time. Washington correspondent for Reforma Jose Diaz-Briseno weighs in on the wall and Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which keeps Central American migrants in Mexico while they await court dates in the United States.

The continued political crisis in Venezuela has spurred Mexico and Uruguay to work on a settlement, but it doesn’t appear to be working. How is Mexico’s new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO) handling the situation?

More Democrats and an Independent are announcing their candidacies for president in 2020. In a town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper, California Senator Kamala Harris made it clear she’d like to move on from private insurance companies and bring about Medicare for all. Vox’s Dylan Scott  joins the panel to discuss Senator Harris’s commitment to single-payer coverage and the growing pool of Democratic presidential bids. Is former Starbucks CEO and now Independent candidate Howard Schultz throwing his hat into the ever-growing ring a good thing? Depends on who you’re asking.

And, former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and current senior fellow at the RAND Corporation James Dobbins explains why the U.S. should not leave the Middle East before a peace treaty with the Taliban has been approved. Could that keep American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely?

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