At least 19 children and two employees at a Chicago immigration detention facility have tested positive for COVID-19, reports Melissa Sanchez for ProPublica Illinois. Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis, “said she is particularly worried about children who have preexisting conditions that have not been identified by shelter officials or ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] and will make them more vulnerable to COVID-19.”
Meanwhile, Kate Morrissey at The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the ACLU has “asked a San Diego federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit related to the COVID-19 pandemic after its four plaintiffs were released from immigration custody.” The ACLU had sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to free the individuals, whose medical conditions made them more susceptible to COVID-19.

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

UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN – Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there are currently around 3,100 unaccompanied children in ORR custody — and the Trump administration is continuing to hold deportation hearings for them even in coronavirus hotspots, Julia Preston reports for The Marshall Project. “This week an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a teenage single mother with an infant were preparing for imminent court dates and deadlines in New York, lawyers representing them said. With children trapped indoors in shelters and foster-care homes, many young migrants who don’t have lawyers may not even be aware of ongoing court cases that could quickly end with orders for them to be deported.” While hearings for immigrants who are not detained are suspended until May, cases for those in detention “are going forward at the same accelerated pace as before the pandemic.”

SCARED OF TREATMENT – Doctors and lawyers around the country say immigrants are afraid of seeking treatment for COVID-19 because of the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, reports Hamed Aleaziz in BuzzFeed News. On Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit arguing that the Supreme Court “should lift the stay during the coronavirus pandemic or allow a federal court to block the rule due to the medical emergency that had already caused whole swaths of the United States to effectively shut down.”

CONTRIBUTING (1/2) – It’s a travesty that after facing “harassment and persecution” from the Trump administration, 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. are unable to receive aid from the stimulus package despite paying billions in taxes each year, writes León Krauze in a Washington Post opinion piece. “Even this administration has deemed workers who harvest and process the country’s food supply as essential, asking them to keep their ‘normal work schedule’ during the crisis. … ‘Contributing’ is an understatement. The immigrant workforce is critical for a significant number of industries in the United States.”

CONTRIBUTING (2/2) – Immigrants represent at least one in six (possibly as many as one in four) healthcare professionals in the U.S., and they “play such a significant role in healthcare, especially in immigrant-heavy states such as California, New York and Texas, that it’s hard to imagine what kind of shape the U.S. healthcare system would be in were it not for their work,” writes Scott Martelle in a Los Angeles Times editorial. Martelle writes that there is nothing like a healthcare crisis to bring home why we need immigrants in the U.S.: “Even before this pandemic, experts were warning of a looming shortage of healthcare professionals, driven in part by the aging of the baby boomer generation. As more members of that generation slide into retirement years, where demand for healthcare increases, so, too, do many baby boomer medical professionals.” For some data visualization on immigrant health workers, check out the Forum’s latest infographic.

VOICES – There are around 34,000 individuals in ICE detention amid the coronavirus pandemic, and Camilo Montoya-Galvez interviewed five of them — all women detained at a for-profit prison in Louisiana — for CBS News. Eliana Hecheverría, an asylum seeker from Cuba, told CBS: “(I came) seeking protection, but I've encountered the complete opposite. I came looking for freedom, but I've been detained for a year. And in the end, I think I may have to go back to Cuba. And it is not what I want because I can't return to Cuba because of my political opinion and sexual orientation.” Meanwhile, Nomaan Merchant at the Associated Press reports that detained immigrants are pleading for masks and other protections from the coronavirus. Detainees “had resorted to tearing their T-shirts into face coverings after a woman in their unit tested positive for COVID-19. But the guards would not give out the masks until the detainees signed the forms, which said they could not hold the private prison company running the detention center in San Diego liable if they got the coronavirus...”

Stay safe, stay healthy,

Ali