As the fight against COVID-19 intensifies and the president urges Americans not to gather in groups of more than 10 people, our immigration system is forcing thousands to live and work in close quarters. And for the migrants, attorneys, judges and officers implementing the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), as the Texas Tribune’s Julián Aguilar points out, it’s “business as usual.”

As of yesterday, there were three COVID-19 cases in El Paso and 53 confirmed cases in all of Mexico — numbers that are likely to increase as testing ramps up. While the Department of Justice has agreed to postpone cases on the non-detained docket, they are not budging on MPP (also known as “Remain in Mexico”) cases — the government considers these migrants to be in detention, even though they are living in crowded makeshift camps on the Mexican side of the border.

“Should the virus spread in the border area with the same speed as in other parts of the world, the squalid conditions in migrant shelters and encampments where many migrants are waiting for their chance to claim asylum under MPP could exacerbate the spread [on both sides of the border].”

On the 40th anniversary of the Refugee Act, welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

VANISHED – In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, U.S. asylum seekers from Mexico have seemingly vanished, Alfredo Corchado and Dianne Solis write for The Dallas Morning News. “Some were forced out of Ciudad Juarez by a Mexican government agency. … Others, like Alberto, were threatened with deportation to violent, crime-ridden Guatemala by U.S. immigration officials.” A place that historically provided passage to the U.S. — and to the hope and prospects of a new life — looks very different today, thanks to the policies of the Mexican government as well as the Trump administration’s restrictive policy changes that started in 2018.

SPEAKING OF THE BORDER – Mexicans are concerned about their northern border — specifically, about the possibility of Americans coming in with COVID-19, Andy Uhler reports for Marketplace. “Mexico’s deputy health minister says he’s worried about people coming into Mexico from the United States. The U.S. has far more cases of COVID-19 than Mexico. The Mexican government even said it might consider restricting access at its northern borders.” And for companies that do businesses on both sides of the border, any restrictions would pose a major challenge. Two-thirds of exports from Mexico are bound for the U.S., which is why the CEO of Hessen Group, a supply chain company with operations on both sides of the border, “says before anyone considers closing the border, President Donald Trump and Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, should discuss a coordinated response to the virus.”

WHEN ARIZONA ELECTED A MEXICAN IMMIGRANT GOVERNOR – Born to a poverty-stricken family in northern Mexico in 1916, Raúl H. Castro crossed the border as a child and grew up to become Arizona’s first — and to date, its only — Latino governor in 1974, writes Simon Romero in The New York Times. Since that moment more than four decades ago, “no Latino has been elected to any statewide office in Arizona, much less as governor. Instead, Arizona turned into a testing ground for policies aimed at keeping foreigners out and curbing the influence of Latinos in American politics — policies that helped lay the groundwork for anti-immigrant measures in other states and in the Trump White House.”

ACLU – The ACLU “asked a federal court on Monday to force officials to release a group of immigrants who have a lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy, or kidney disease to protect them from a potential spread of COVID-19,” reports Hamed Aleaziz in BuzzFeed News. The ACLU cited the concerns of public health experts and identified nine immigrants in custody at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, who were considered high-risk patients. “As of Friday, [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] had no positive cases of the coronavirus in its custody. On Sunday, a staffer at a private jail housing ICE detainees in New Jersey voluntarily self-quarantined after not feeling well, according to the agency. The staffer was being tested for the coronavirus.”

WORKFORCE – As the fight against COVID-19 intensifies in the U.S., let’s remember that immigrants are indispensable to America’s healthcare workforce, as a National Immigration Forum fact sheet from March 2018 points out. Today, these physicians, surgeons, nurses, home-care workers, technicians and more from around the world are on the frontlines battling this disease in communities across our country. Their courage makes us safer.



Stay safe and stay healthy,

Ali