Washington (AFP)

US politicians tried Sunday to prevent mass deportations of Americans in financial difficulty, after the expiration of a moratorium that protected them.

"We are in danger of being deported," Samantha Pate and Andrew Martinez, residents of Aurora, Colorado, told KDVR television.

The couple, with two children, plan to settle temporarily on land they own.

The family expects to "live in tents with a wood stove for the winter," says Andrew Martinez.

It was at midnight on Saturday that an expulsion truce initially decided for health reasons linked to the Covid-19 pandemic expired, and which was renewed several times.

The White House took parliamentarians by surprise Thursday, ensuring that the health authorities could no longer, for legal reasons, further extend the moratorium, and asking them to legislate urgently.

What the elected officials did not manage to do before the House of Representatives ceased its work for the summer break.

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More than 10 million people in the United States are behind on their rent payments, calculated the CBPP, an independent research institute.

And some 3.6 million tenants estimate that they risk being evicted within two months, according to a study by the statistics office carried out in early July with 51 million tenants.

- "Inhuman" -

The upturn in the US economy, which does not benefit all households in the same way, is pushing up rents.

According to the latest score made by the specialized site Realtor, between June 2020 and June 2021 the median rent in the United States climbed by 8.1%.

A handful of Democratic parliamentarians from the party's far left continued to plead for a recall to Washington of House of Representatives members on Sunday.

"We want the House of Representatives to meet, the Senate can also intervene, the President could issue a decree, we have to do everything possible," Member of the House of Representatives Jamaal Bowman told AFP on Sunday morning , elected from New York came to the steps of the Capitol to support a small group of young activists who spent the night there.

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"To deport people, or to make their deportation possible during a pandemic is inhumane."

The elected is not tender for his fellow Democrats, majority in the House of Representatives: "We parliamentarians, we are quick to defend Wall Street, to defend large companies, to take decisions that allow Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to go to space. "

House boss Nancy Pelosi explained that faced with the difficulties of urgently legislating on the moratorium, some Democrats "have decided to focus rather than on how to send tenants and owners the money" provided for in the massive pandemic response measures taken early in Biden's tenure.

This is an envelope of 46 billion dollars, intended precisely to resolve at least in part the problem of unpaid rents, but the distribution of which is very laborious, for reasons of bureaucracy in particular.

© 2021 AFP