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The State Department launched a program this month that creates a safe passage to the United States from Central America. It would give some U.S.-based Latino parents the chance to bring over children they left in their home countries.

More than 57,000 child migrants made the trip across the U.S.-Mexican border this year. Many report being physically and sexually abused along the harrowing journey.

The new program could benefit immigrants like Wilfredo Daz, who left Honduras 16 years ago just before the birth of his third child. As they've grown, his kids have begged him to bring them to the United States to live with him in Brooklyn.

"I feel really bad, really bad, when they say to me, 'Dad, take us, take us,' " Daz says.

What makes it harder for Daz is that his son in particular has been targeted by gangs.

But Daz decided long ago that he wouldn't allow his children to cross the border.

"Some girls are used as prostitutes," Daz says. "I don't want that to happen to my two daughters."

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Wilfredo Daz left Honduras 16 years ago before his third child was born, and he hopes to bring his children to the U.S. under the State Department's new program. Alexandra Starr hide caption

itoggle caption Alexandra Starr

Wilfredo Daz left Honduras 16 years ago before his third child was born, and he hopes to bring his children to the U.S. under the State Department's new program.

Alexandra Starr

Now there may be a safer way for Daz's children to join him. Under the new State Department program, the mother or father has to be in the U.S. legally, and their kids must be living in Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala.

The program will allow parents to request interviews for their children to see if they can qualify as refugees. Qualifying as a refugee puts you on a path to citizenship.

"The definition for refugee status is relatively narrow, and it's a high bar," says Catherine Wiesner, a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of State.

One of the major reasons child migrants have given for fleeing to the U.S. is to escape gang violence. That is often not sufficient to get refugee status.

But applicants who don't meet the refugee bar still may be able to come to the U.S. If they can show they face imminent danger, they might qualify for something called humanitarian parole.

Getting parole does not put you on a path to citizenship, but as Wiesner points out, it could provide a way to come to the U.S. safely.

"You know, one of the most important things about doing this program in country, to allow children to make these humanitarian claims in country, is that it avoids them taking this incredibly dangerous journey," she says.

The Obama Administration has unfurled this program quietly. Parents who want their children to interview to come to the U.S. will have to submit the requests through organizations like Catholic Charities.

Mario Russell, with Catholic Charities in New York, says he thinks this new program acknowledges how bad things are in some Central American countries.

"The old models, I think by which families were divided, that is to say that some children stayed in the home country were raised by a grandparent, just don't work anymore because the conditions have become really unsustainable, and that's why I think they're leaving in large measure," Russell says.

There are a lot of children in Central America who could show they are in danger. The fact that they need to have parents with legal status in the U.S. will cut down on applications.

The Two-Way

A Closer Look At Obama's Immigration Plan: What's In It, Who's Affected

In this sense, Daz is lucky. Sixteen years ago, he became eligible for something called Temporary Protected Status or TPS.

Politics

After Obama's Action, Immigration Agency Awaits 'A Real Challenge'

TPS is for immigrants who are already residing in the U.S. when a natural or humanitarian disaster hits their country. Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras just a couple of months after Daz arrived, so he's been able to live and work in the U.S. legally ever since.

But he still wasn't allowed to bring his kids over. When he contemplates reuniting with them, he gets emotional.

"It would be an enormous happiness to have my children here," he says.

The State Department launched the program earlier this month. Daz says he will request asylum interviews for his kids before the end of the year.

Central America

Immigration

Auric Goldfinger might have expected James Bond to die, but the FBI wanted nothing to do with 007. That's according to FBI records released today from the agency's vault.

At issue was a request from Harry Saltzman, who with Albert Broccoli produced the Bond films, seeking to use a military aircraft for Goldfinger, the film in which Bond thwarts the aforementioned villain from stealing the precious metal from Fort Knox. (It was 1960s, folks.)

The FBI, in the memo from Director J. Edgar Hoover's office to bureaus in Miami and Los Angeles, noted that Saltzman said the bureau, which has an integral role in Ian Fleming's book of the same name, would be cast in a positive light. But the FBI wasn't interested.

"The type of book written by Fleming is certainly not the type where we would want any mention of the FBI or a portrayal of FBI Agents, no matter how favorable they might look in the movie," the memo said. "Fleming's stories generally center around sex and bizarre situations and, certainly, are not the type with which we would want to be associated."

The memo instructs the FBI's Miami bureau to contact Saltzman and "bring forcefully to his attention" the fact the law prohibited the FBI's name from being used without its permission.

Despite the objections, the film was a blockbuster.

(h/t The Guardian)

goldfinger

007

FBI

James Bond

He sustained an injury during the game at the University of Mississippi — which brought cheers from the crowd. He says returning to the court after half time couldn't have taken more than 15 seconds, but it felt like a lifetime: "It's like the comedian Dick Gregory said, 'Yeah, I spent four years in Mississippi one night.'"

Games like these took a tremendous emotional toll. Wallace says if he hadn't given himself time to heal, there would have been terrible consequences.

"I would have committed suicide," he says, "like Henry Harris, the second black athlete who played in the SEC, who ran and jumped off a building a few years later. Like Nat Northington, who was the first athlete, period, who just left after about a year or so. But there's no question about it — if you don't think you have to heal after getting beat up, you don't know the basics."

Wallace didn't really have the support of his teammates. Those games, those experiences he survived on his own.

After graduation he went up north — he needed a break, he said. Law school and work with the Justice Department followed before he settled in Washington, D.C.

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Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C. Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean hide caption

itoggle caption Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean

Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C.

Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean

But his storied season with Vanderbilt and the SEC? Glance around his office and you'd never know it. Wallace doesn't display a single memento from that time — no trophies, framed jerseys or even newspaper clippings.

Maraniss says "it's not the formula story that you might expect" but there is one moment in Wallace's story that he admits has that Hollywood feel.

"In Perry's last game, which was against Mississippi State in Nashville, his last basket of his college career is a slam dunk, which was illegal at the time," Maraniss explains. "It was a game that Perry dedicated to his mother, who had just passed away about a year earlier. And Perry saved the best for last, in many ways, in this game."

"Yeah, that's what I wanted," Wallace adds: "To make a statement. And I had made a promise to my mother, and I kept it best that last game. So I scored — what was it? — 28 points and 27 rebounds. Nobody's ever heard of that. And the pice de la resistance was the dunk at the end. ... The illegal dunk. And that basically said, well, these segregation laws were illegal laws. They were the law, but they weren't just. And so this is what I think of all those unjust, illegal rules. There it is. Slam dunk."

Read an excerpt of Strong Inside

Most books about President Richard Nixon focus either on his foreign policies or on the crimes and misdemeanors that forced his resignation under threat of impeachment.

Not Stephen Hess's new book, The Professor and the President.

Hess, who has been writing about government for decades out of Washington's Brookings Institution, was witness to a rare partnership inside the White House.

The president – Richard Nixon — was a Republican who felt obliged to do something about welfare.

"Government can do a lot of things for men. It can provide a man shelter, and it can provide him food, and it can provide him a house. It can provide him clothing, but it can't provide him dignity," Nixon had said.

The professor — Daniel Patrick Moynihan — was a Democrat, a Harvard sociologist, whom Nixon recruited to the White House staff.

Moynihan went on to be a four-term senator from New York, and Hess says he managed to persuade Nixon to embrace a much more liberal approach to welfare than most of his White House team would ever have done. He gave NPR's Robert Siegel a peek into Nixon and Moynihan's relationship, which he refers to as "the oddest couple that you could imagine."

Interview Highlights

On appointing Moynihan to White House staff

It was really quite fascinating because after he appointed Moynihan, the liberal Harvard Democratic social scientist, he appointed Arthur Burns, the Columbia conservative economist. And they went at it at the highest level in the highest fashion for the mind and the heart of Richard Nixon.

On Nixon giving Moynihan a blank slate

When Pat Moynihan came to the hotel Pierre, where the transition was, in New York and met with the president-elect and then came downstairs to have dinner with me, he said, "he's ignorant!" Meaning, he doesn't know anything about domestic affairs. I knew Richard Nixon; I had been his speech writer when he ran for governor. I said, "Oh no, he's disinterested. He is fascinated and overwhelmed in his interest in international affairs and our place in the world." But what it meant for Pat Moynihan was he had an open slate to write upon.

On treating Nixon as an intellectual, and some artful flattery

The next thing [Moynihan] found out was that Richard Nixon was very smart. Once he could get to him, they developed an interesting relationship, because, almost from the get-go, Richard Nixon started to be treated by Pat Moynihan as an intellectual. Nobody had ever treated him as an intellectual before, and Nixon was fascinated by it.

What Pat was doing was trying to convince Nixon to be a great president. You don't go in and say, "you should be a great president." You could say a "great athlete," a "great actor" — you don't say a "great president."

So the word he used was "historic." Everything that Nixon was doing, even some little thing about moving the boundaries of regional agency – "historic!" No president had ever done it before. And that's what he was trying to do. Remember, Pat Moynihan was born in 1929. All of his youth was FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. That was the model of a president. And that's what he was trying to sell to Richard Nixon.

On Nixon leaving his feelings aside

August 8, 1969, [Nixon] went on television to announce his [welfare] program and said to the American people, "this is gonna cost more than the present program." For a president to say that? And, of course, that was very offensive to Arthur Burns, whose whole theme was to bring down the cost of government.