Over the long weekend, I went through what we learned over the last two weeks. Turns out the administration has:

• Diverted $3.8 billion of Defense Department funding to build the wall.
• Held at least 174 detainees for months without bond hearings.
• Reinforced a 60-day deadline for unaccompanied children’s cases to be adjudicated.
• Gone “to war with the states” over immigration.
• Deported more than 500 people (including families) from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala since late 2019.
• Been accessing data from millions of cellphones for the purposes of immigration and border enforcement.
• Sworn in 28 new immigration judges (11 of them have no immigration law experience).
• Suspended New Yorkers’ access to Trusted Traveler programs.
• Issued a new rule to increase uncertainty for foreign students.
• Allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to collect fingerprints of immigrants 14 years and older.
• Expanded the travel ban to restrict Nigerians.
• Deployed the U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP)’s SWAT teams to major cities.

So, I spent some time writing about why everything the movement does matters.

Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Ali

THEY DIDN’T KNOW I – Back in November we noted the story of Raul Rodriguez, a former CBP officer who has lived in the U.S. for nearly 50 years and has served in five separate U.S. Navy deployments, but who now faces deportation after discovering something he didn’t know: He was actually born in Mexico. Now, Jeremy Raff takes a deep dive on Raul’s situation for the Atlantic, writing about how “his identity as a veteran, an agent, and an American—were based on a lie.”

THEY DIDN’T KNOW II – Paul Canton was born in New Zealand, and surrendered his foreign passport after enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991, David C. Adams writes for Univision. After serving four years as a U.S. Marine, Canton assumed that he had become a U.S. citizen, especially after receiving a social security card and driver’s license by showing his official discharge papers: “That’s what the recruiting officer told me when I enlisted. He said it was automatic.” But now Canton — who is married with children — lives in fear of deportation after attempting to renew his Florida driver’s license and finding out that he was, in fact, not a citizen — and subsequently having his request for naturalization denied.

TO CANADA – Immigration to Canada rose 26% from 2015 to 2019 and is projected to rise higher, while legal immigration to the U.S. fell 7% from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2018 and is expected to fall even more, writes Stuart Anderson in Forbes. “To further ease the challenges of a shrinking labor force and an aging population, our new multi-year immigration levels plan sets out the highest levels of permanent residents that Canada will welcome in recent history,” according to Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen. As a percentage of each country’s population, Anderson writes, Canada actually admits three times the number of immigrants as the U.S.

TYSON FOODS – President Trump’s Jan. 31 executive order suspending immigrant visas from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, and Nigeria — and restricting diversity visas for citizens of Sudan and Tanzania — could directly impact Tyson Fresh Meats’ ability to hire workers in Iowa, writes Jim Caufield in The Perry News. “Refugees from Eritrea and Myanmar have been the most frequently hired workers at the Tyson’s Perry plant in recent years.”
NOT CONFIDENTIAL – Kevin Euceda, an asylum seeker from Honduras, had been in detention for two years, hoping to be approved to enter the U.S. — but the words he shared with a therapist at a government shelter for migrant children are being used against him, Hannah Dreier reports in The Washington Post. This isn’t a one-off case, it’s a Trump administration strategy: “To bolster its policy of stepped up enforcement, the administration is requiring that notes taken during mandatory therapy sessions with immigrant children be passed onto ICE, which can then use those reports against minors in court. Intimate confessions, early traumas, half-remembered nightmares — all have been turned into prosecutorial weapons, often without the consent of the therapists involved, and always without the consent of the minors themselves, in hearings where the stakes can be life and death.”

GLOBAL GUIDES – The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology faced a dilemma: Its pool of docents was a group of wonderful, but aging, white people. So the institution, which is renowned for its artifacts from the Middle East, Africa and Central America, decided to hire refugees and immigrants from those very places, Neda Ulaby reports for NPR’s All Things Considered. The new docents, called Global Guides, “received traditional training in archaeology and ancient history. Plus, the museum hired professional storytellers to help the Global Guides lace in personal tales about their lives.”

WHAT WE EAT – Want a primer on how the food you eat gets to you? The new MSNBC Show “What’s Eating America” — executive produced by our friend José Andrés — explores “immigration, the food industry, and more by examining the stories of people working to raise, process, and harvest what we eat.” The reality is, very few people get “the vital nature that these undocumented, documented, migrant, visa workers in our food system play.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali