• Joe Biden called on Congress to take action on his $2tn infrastructure plan. “We are not open to doing nothing,” the president said at the White House this afternoon. Biden noted he was open to compromise on his proposal to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%, echoing comments from the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, earlier today.
• The UK coronavirus variant is now dominant in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Dr Rochelle Walensky said of the UK variant, “It is the most common lineage, period.” Studies have indicated the UK variant is more contagious and more likely to result in severe illness than the original virus.
• An expert testified at Derek Chauvin’s trial that he should not have used force on George Floyd once the man was laid prone and stopped resisting. Sgt Jody Stiger, an outside expert brought in by the prosecution, told the jury, “No force should have been used once he was in that position.”
• The treasury department announced it has distributed more than 150m checks as part of the coronavirus relief package. The news came on the heels of Biden announcing that his administration has administered 150m vaccine shots since he took office in January.

The rising number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US border with Mexico is emerging as one of the most serious political challenges for Joe Biden’s new administration.

That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants: he and other Republicans believe that Americans’ concerns about a supposed “border crisis” will help Republicans win back political power.

But Harsha Walia, the author of two books about border politics, argues that there is no “border crisis,” in the United States or anywhere else. Instead, there are the “actual crises” that drive mass migration – such as capitalism, war and the climate emergency – and “imagined crises” at political borders, which are used to justify further border securitization and violence.

Walia, a Canadian organizer who helped found No One Is Illegal, which advocates for migrants, refugees and undocumented people, talked to the Guardian about Border and Rule, her new book on global migration, border politics and the rise of what she calls “racist nationalism.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Last month, a young white gunman was charged with murdering eight people, most of them Asian women, at several spas around Atlanta, Georgia. Around the same time, there was increasing political attention to the higher numbers of migrants and refugees showing up at the US-Mexico border. Do you see any connection between these different events?

I think they are deeply connected. The newest invocation of a “border surge” and a “border crisis” is again creating the spectre of immigrants and refugees “taking over.” This seemingly race neutral language – we are told there’s nothing inherently racist about saying “border surge”– is actually deeply racially coded. It invokes a flood of black and brown people taking over a so-called white man’s country. That is the basis of historic immigrant exclusion, both anti-Asian exclusion in the 19th century, which very explicitly excluded Chinese laborers and especially Chinese women presumed to be sex workers, and anti-Latinx exclusion. If we were to think about one situation as anti-Asian racism and one as anti-Latinx racism, they might seem disconnected. But both forms of racism are fundamentally anti-immigrant. Racial violence is connected to the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Whose humanity is questioned in a moment of crisis. Who is scapegoated in a moment of crisis.

How do you understand the rise of white supremacist violence, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence, that we are seeing around the world?

The rise in white supremacy is a feedback loop between individual rightwing vigilantes and state rhetoric and state policy. When it comes to the Georgia shootings, we can’t ignore the fact that the criminalization of sex work makes sex workers targets. It’s not sex work itself, it’s the social condition of criminalization that creates that vulnerability. It’s similar to the ways in which border vigilantes have targeted immigrants: the Minutemen who show up at the border and harass migrants, or the kidnapping of migrants by the United Constitutional Patriots at gunpoint. We can’t dissociate that kind of violence from state policies that vilify migrants and refugees, or newspapers that continue to use the word “illegal alien”.

Read more:

Joe Biden intends to nominate David Chipman, a former federal agent and a senior adviser to the gun control group Giffords, to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to multiple reports.

The AP reports:

If confirmed, Chipman would be the agency’s first permanent director since 2015.

Two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that Chipman’s nomination is expected to be announced Thursday. The people could not discuss the matter publicly ahead of an official announcement and spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity.

Chipman is a retired ATF agent who has for years worked as a senior policy adviser at Giffords, which advocates to strengthen gun laws.

The White House said earlier today that the president intends to make an announcement on gun regulations tomorrow.

A number of Biden’s allies have pressed him to take executive action to end gun violence after the mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado.

That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• Joe Biden called on Congress to take action on his $2tn infrastructure plan. “We are not open to doing nothing,” the president said at the White House this afternoon. Biden noted he was open to compromise on his proposal to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%, echoing comments from commerce secretary Gina Raimondo earlier today.
• The UK coronavirus variant is now dominant in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Dr Rochelle Walensky said of the UK variant, “It is the most common lineage, period.” Studies have indicated the UK variant is more contagious and more likely to result in severe illness than the original virus.
• An expert testified at Derek Chauvin’s trial that he should not have used force on George Floyd once the man was laid prone and stopped resisting. Sgt Jody Stiger, an outside expert brought in by the prosecution, told the jury, “No force should have been used once he was in that position.”
• Biden is expected to make an announcement on gun policy tomorrow. Many of the president’s allies have been urging him to sign executive orders to address gun violence since the mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado.
• The treasury department announced it has distributed more than 150 million checks as part of the coronavirus relief package. The news came on the heels of Biden announcing that his administration has administered 150 million vaccine shots since he took office in January.

Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

An expert police witness has told the Derek Chauvin murder trial in Minneapolis that the accused former officer used a technique designed to deliberately inflict pain and subjected George Floyd to it for an extended period.

Sgt Jody Stiger, a Los Angeles police specialist on the use of force, said on Wednesday that video shows Chauvin applying a “pain compliance” procedure by pulling the 46-year-old Black man’s wrist into the handcuffs, which can be heard clicking tighter.

Stiger said the technique, which also involves squeezing the knuckles together, is normally used to inflict pain in order to persuade a person to comply with an officer’s commands – but at that point Floyd was not resisting and was lying prone on the ground.

The procedure was also used for much longer than was necessary, Stiger told the jury.

The prosecutor asked Stiger what the effect is of using the pain compliance procedure if there is no opportunity for compliance.

“At that point it’s just pain,” he said.

Michael Regan, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has sought to revive the effort to confront environmental racism by ordering the agency to crack down on the pollution that disproportionately blights people of color.

On Wednesday, Regan issued a directive to EPA staff to “infuse equity and environmental justice principles and priorities into all EPA practices, policies, and programs”. The memo demands the agency use the “full array of policy and legal tools at our disposal” to ensure vulnerable communities are front of mind when issuing permits for polluting facilities or cleaning up following disasters.

The directive states there should be better consultation with affected communities and indicates the EPA will be tougher on companies that violate air and water pollution mandates. Regan’s memo calls for the EPA to “strengthen enforcement of violations of cornerstone environmental statutes and civil rights laws in communities overburdened by pollution”.

Enforcement of pollution violations dropped steeply under Donald Trump’s administration, with the EPA even suspending routine inspections of facilities while the Covid-19 pandemic raged in the US last year.

Joe Biden took a quick media question at the end of his address at the White House just now and signaled that although he wants to raise the corporate tax rate above the current 21% introduced by Donald Trump, it does not have to be as high as the 28% now being proposed by the White House and Treasury Department.

“We have got to pay for this,” he said, indicating his $2tn American jobs plan, but added: “But I’m willing to negotiate that.”

He said he was open to talking with bipartisan groups and Republican-only groups of lawmakers at the White House, issuing an open invitation. But they had to be open to compromise.

And while he may be open to movement on corporate tax rates he reiterated his pledge not to raise taxes on any American making less than $400,000 a year.

And the president criticized Republicans who came to the White House with the purported intention of negotiating prior to the passage of the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill titled the American Rescue Plan and then didn’t bargain.

Biden said they proposed a $600bn alternative plan.

“And that was it. I would have been prepared to compromise but they didn’t, they didn’t budge an inch,” he said.

He made a final appeal for a bipartisan deal on infrastructure.

“These are not Republican bridges, Democratic airports, Republican hospitals, Democratic power grid [upgrades]. We are one America, united and connected,” he said.

And Biden reminded Republicans in Congress that the improvements are popular with the general public.

Joe Biden is now talking at the White House about his “one in a generation” $2tn infrastructure plan.

The US president called his “American Jobs Plan” the “single largest investment in American jobs since World War II” and asserted that it doesn’t “tinker around the edges”.

Biden said that the plan, unveiled last week, said that debate was good, compromise over passing the legislation was “inevitable” but his conclusion was that “we are not open to doing nothing”, while Republicans criticize the program.

The president is criticizing not just crumbling roads and bridges and other such large-scale infrastructure, but the high incidence of lead in outdated drinking water pipes and a lack of high-speed internet in homes across the US.

The White House press briefing has now concluded. Here’s where the day stands so far:

• The UK coronavirus variant is now dominant in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Dr Rochelle Walensky said of the UK variant, “It is the most common lineage, period.” Studies have indicated the UK variant is more contagious and more likely to result in severe illness than the original virus.
• An expert testified at Derek Chauvin’s trial that he should not have used force on George Floyd once the man was laid prone and stopped resisting. Sgt Jody Stiger, an outside expert brought in by the prosecution, told the jury, “No force should have been used once he was in that position.”
• The treasury department announced it has distributed more than 150 million checks as part of the coronavirus relief package. The president will likely highlight that achievement when he delivers a speech on his infrastructure plan in just a few moments.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Joe Biden plans to make an announcement tomorrow on gun regulations, the White House press secretary confirmed.

Jen Psaki would not provide further details on what executive actions the president will take to address gun violence. She told reporters that Biden will have “more to say” on the issue tomorrow.

Politico broke the news of Biden’s planned announcement, and the outlet has these details on the president’s thinking:

Biden will direct the administration to begin the process of requiring buyers of so-called ghost guns — homemade or makeshift firearms that lack serial numbers — to undergo background checks, according to three people who have spoken to the White House about the plans. He is expected to be joined at the event by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Other executive actions remain unclear. But stakeholders have speculated that the president could announce regulations on concealed assault-style firearms; prohibitions on firearm purchases for those convicted of domestic violence against their partners; and federal guidance on home storage safety measures.

Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo took a few questions from reporters after delivering some prepared remarks on Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.

An NBC News reporter asked Raimondo if the Biden administration was open to a lower corporate tax rate than the 28% that the president has proposed.

“There is room for compromise. That is clear,” Raimondo said.

The commerce secretary urged businesses to participate in discussions with the White House on the corporate tax rate, rather than just walking away to criticize the 28% proposal.

“Come to the table and problem-solve with us to come up with a reasonable and responsible plan,” Raimondo said.

Senator Joe Manchin, whose vote will likely determine whether Democrats can pass an infrastructure bill, has expressed criticism of Biden’s proposal on the corporate tax rate, instead calling for raising the rate to 25%.

“We’re serious about this,” Raimondo said. “We want to get this done.”

The UK variant of coronavirus is now the most dominant variant spreading in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today.

During the White House coronavirus response team’s briefing this morning, Dr Rochelle Walensky said of the UK variant: “It is the most common lineage, period. So there are many different lineages. Of the many different potential variants, there are several different kinds – of sort of wild type variants – and this is, in fact, the most common lineage right now.”

Walensky noted the UK variant appears to be more contagious than the original virus, and studies have suggested it also carries a higher risk of severe illness and death.

Health experts have warned the rising number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is likely attributable to the spread of virus variants. Michigan has recorded the worst increase in infections over the past two weeks, at a rate not seen since early December.

Speaking at the White House yesterday, Joe Biden celebrated 150m vaccine shots being administered since he took office, but he also sounded a note of caution about the spread of coronavirus variants across the US.

“We’re making incredible progress. There is a lot of good news, but there is also some bad news,” the president said. “New variants of the virus are spreading and they’re moving quickly.”

The trial of Derek Chauvin has resumed in Minneapolis, where the former police officer is facing murder charges over the killing of George Floyd.

Sgt Jody Stiger, an outside expert brought in by the prosecution, has told the jury that police involved in the restraint of Floyd should have ended any use of force at the point he was laid prone and had stopped resisting.

“No force should have been used once he was in that position,” Steiger told the jury under direct examination.

It’s a repetition of what other members of the Minneapolis police department have told the jury already, but the fact it is now being said by an outside expert gives this argument even more weight.

Steiger says at the point Floyd is laid prone by officers, including Chauvin, “He was not attempting to evade. He was not attempting to resist.”

He says the officers should have considered the fatal risk of positional asphyxia.

Follow the latest updates from the trial by reading the Guardian’s live blog:

Donald Trump has released his first statement in response to the sex-trafficking allegations against Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, a close ally to the former president.

“Congressman Matt Gaetz has never asked me for a pardon,” the former president said in a statement released by his political action committee. “It must also be remembered that he has totally denied the accusations against him.”

That unenthusiastic statement comes one day after the New York Times reported that Gaetz asked the White House for pre-emptive blanket pardons for himself and some congressional allies.

According to the Times, Trump was told of the request, but it’s unclear whether he discussed it directly with Gaetz. The request was ultimately denied.

The justice department is reportedly investigating whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him, in violation of sex trafficking laws.

Gaetz has denied the allegations and claimed to be the victim of an extortion plot by a former justice department official. That official has said Gaetz’s claims are “completely false”.

During Trump’s time in office, Gaetz was one of his fiercest defenders in Congress. Gaetz frequently sought to discredit investigations into Trump or his administration, often by spreading conspiracy theories about the former president’s critics.

A reporter asked members of the White House coronavirus response team what the “finish line” of the pandemic looks like for the US.

The question comes one day after Joe Biden said at the White House: “We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do.”

Senior White House adviser Andy Slavitt once again emphasized that more than half of American adults have not yet been vaccinated and cases are rising in dozens of US states.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said the country will see a significant decline in case numbers once more Americans are fully vaccinated.

Fauci said of the “finish line” of the pandemic: “It’s on the way. Hang in there.”