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While not every petition made a change or elicited a response from the White House, many captured a momentary pulse of the nation.
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The most common topics for petitioning included healthcare, veterans issues and requests to honor individuals, such as Yogi Berra, and create or officially recognize holidays, like Talk Like a Pirate Day. The petitioning system, launched in 2011, was part of Obama’s open-government initiative. But it nonetheless resulted in one of first couple’s most memorable meetings, this dance party: Her petition garnered only 19 signatures. In 2015, 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin requested a meeting with the first black president, something she never thought she’d live to see. A request for Obama to appear on a previously unvisited talk show, for example, prompted him to appear on “Real Time with Bill Maher” in January 2016. They ranged from serious, like an effort to ban gay conversion therapy at a state level that led the president in 2015 to support states’ bans, to playful. The Pew Research Center analyzed the petitions in a recent report. How could we ever forget the effort to get the Obama administration on board with building a Death Star? Some, like that one and a petition to deport Justin Bieber, resulted only in conversation. Over the past five years, Americans have produced and signed nearly 5,000 petitions through the White House’s “We the People” site. Trump said the Border Patrol union would have a lot of clout in department decisions. News of Morgan’s departure comes a day after Trump announced he would build a border wall and hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, bringing the total force to 26,000. The union endorsed President Trump in the election, breaking with its practice of remaining neutral in elections. The Border Patrol’s union had opposed Morgan’s appointment, preferring a candidate who had risen through the ranks of the agency. After a subsequent stint running the FBI’s training academy, he started the top job at the Border Patrol in June. Morgan spent 20 years at the FBI and was first brought to Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, in 2014 to overhaul its internal affairs division. Morgan’s departure was first reported by the Associated Press. He will leave the Border Patrol abruptly after seven months on the job, according to a person familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
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Mark Morgan, the agency’s head, was hired from the FBI in June to reform the force after a series of corruption allegations and problems with excessive force. The chief of the Border Patrol will leave his post at the end of the month, likely the result of a change in direction by the Trump administration and a reflection of the new power of the agency’s union.