I got a couple of notes yesterday asking about the impact of the coronavirus on immigrants moving through our systems.

To begin with, the Miami Herald’s Monique O. Madan reports that the administration ordered all immigration court staff nationwide to take down “all coronavirus posters, which explain in English and Spanish how to prevent catching and spreading the virus.”

Meanwhile, the union representing immigration judges sent a letter to the Trump administration asking it to “‘immediately’ implement steps to protect judges and their staff and provide guidance on how to proceed amid the coronavirus outbreak, which also has the potential to exacerbate the overwhelming backlog of pending cases,” Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN.

And what about the children and families we have forced to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases are reviewed? Nicole Narea at Vox reports that President Trump’s policies could cause a “disaster” in migrant border camps. While only seven cases have been identified across all of Mexico, “aid workers believe it could only be a matter of time before it hits these border cities, where thousands of migrants have been living in makeshift tent encampments that have little means to deal with a major public health crisis.”

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

MARVIN SR. and JR. – Following “a 10-month odyssey from a Honduran slum to a North Texas suburb,” 17-year-old Marvin Joel Zelaya notes the comparative order and safety of his new home — but his father, Marvin Sr., is still living in a makeshift refugee camp in Mexico. John Burnett at NPR reports on what led the father and son to flee the hills of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and end up on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: “They separated at the Texas-Mexico border in November, so that the young man could gain entry to the United States.” In his asylum hearing Marvin Sr. told Burnett the judge said, “It's my son who is in danger, not me.”

E-VERIFY AND CORONAVIRUS – Florida is close to passing E-Verify requirements, but amidst the coronavirus, critics are voicing concerns about pushing undocumented workers further into the shadows, Jacob Ogles writes for Florida Politics. “The health care industry hires a number of immigrants at risk of losing eligibility to work for a variety of reasons, from the public charge policy to attempts to end DACA, to simply having visas expire at a time when federal policy seems focused on more barriers to staying in the U.S.,” said Al Cardenas, a former Republican Party of Florida chairman. “There is going to be no labor force to replace hundreds or thousands of workers who will be displaced.”

COLOMBIA – Colombia is dealing with a major refugee crisis stemming from instability in Venezuela, writes Jorge G. Castañeda, a professor and former foreign minister of Mexico, in an op-ed for The New York Times. “By the end of this year, six million Venezuelans will have fled their country. Only the civil war in El Salvador, a much smaller country, in the 1980s displaced a similar proportion of citizens.” The more than 1.6 million refugees fleeing to Colombia “are largely destitute: men, women and children fleeing not only repression and human rights violations carried out by Mr. Maduro, but more significantly, hunger, disease and a lack of basic necessities including medicine. They are running from a crisis that has dragged on for years with no end in sight.”


THE ROOTS OF SB 1070 – Back in 2010, when asked on CNN about SB 1070 — the Arizona law requiring police to check the immigration status of suspected undocumented immigrants — Donald Trump endorsed it. “Personally, as a citizen, I wouldn't mind. I really wouldn't mind,” Trump said of the police stopping people. In a thoughtful piece for the Arizona Republic, Daniel Gonzalez, Ronald J. Hansen and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez write how the controversial law — which was largely blocked in the courts — set the foundation for Trump’s political success: “Trump recognized that while Arizona was considered ground zero for the anti-immigrant sentiment that led to SB 1070, the same sentiment existed in other states.”

ICE CUSTODY – A 22-year-old Guatemalan woman died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody Sunday — the eighth death in ICE custody in fiscal year 2020 — tying the number of deaths for all of fiscal year 2019, Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News. Maria Celeste Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez “passed her initial asylum screening and was in detention for several months” before dying in custody about a month after receiving gallbladder surgery. “ICE has detained thousands of immigrants who have passed their initial asylum screenings, a practice that in the past generally led to them being released from custody.” Meanwhile, a 33-year-old immigrant from Mexico “was so severely injured from a fall while in detention that he can’t feel his legs and now uses a wheelchair,” reports Dianne Solis in the Dallas Morning News. ICE says there was “no known justification” for the man being unable to walk, but his attorney wants him to receive an independent medical evaluation.

Thanks for reading,

Ali