President Trump has been trying to shut down the asylum system at the southern border for three years — and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has effectively succeeded, reports Nicole Narea at Vox.

Because of the coronavirus, “the Trump administration has closed the US-Mexico border, implemented an expulsion order to swiftly turn away migrants at the border, and postponed all immigration court hearings for migrants who are waiting in Mexico for a decision on their asylum applications in the US. Those measures, coupled with the restrictions on asylum seekers that were already in place, have brought the asylum system to a virtual standstill.”

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

EXCLUDED – Tens of millions of immigrants are at risk of being left out of COVID-19 testing and treatment, reports Rafael Bernal in The Hill. “The trillions in stimulus passed by Congress so far in response to the coronavirus crisis provide testing and treatment to anyone who's eligible for federal Medicaid, but that does not include more than 10 million undocumented immigrants, nor up to four million legal permanent residents who've been in the country less than five years.” It also does not include those with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). During a pandemic, policies that leave some vulnerable leave of us all of us vulnerable.
LAWSUITS – A man in Illinois is suing the Trump administration for denying aid from the CARES Act to U.S. citizens married to undocumented immigrants, reports Connor Perrett in Business Insider. “[D]ue to a provision [of the CARES Act] added by the Trump administration, both partners are required to have a social security number for either partner to receive any aid, the lawsuit alleges.” Meanwhile, summarizing a lawsuit filed by the Justice Action Center and others, Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes that “the presidential proclamation issued April 22, 2020, is an attempt to use the COVID-19 crisis to accomplish what the administration could not achieve through legislation. The proclamation contains nearly identical provisions on legal immigration to those of a White House-designed bill that the U.S. Senate rejected on February 15, 2018.”

GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM – COVID-19 has made it clear that immigrants are not just the key to America’s food system but to the world’s, reports Chase Purdy in Quartz. In the United Kingdom, a lack of migrant workers has caused a shortage of up to 80,000 harvesters. In Spain, less than half of the Moroccan seasonal workers who pick fruit were able to do so this year. Across Southeast Asia, migrants “frequently criss-cross borders to fill jobs across multiple sectors, including agriculture. With tighter border controls, many migrant workers find themselves stuck either home or abroad, and often without any sort of healthcare safety or legal protection.” The pandemic “is revealing a vulnerable link in the food supply chain: the immigrant populations that make up a large part of the agricultural workforce. The global food system as it operates today relies on immigrant labor to run smoothly, and the pandemic is emphasizing the risk of undervaluing that work.”
NEW CHALLENGE, NEW ROLES – While the coronavirus pandemic devastates sectors dominated by immigrant workers (restaurants, hotels, office cleaning, etc.), many are adapting to new jobs or changing skills to take on new opportunities, Claudia Torrens and Gisela Salomon report for the Associated Press. Venezuelan immigrant Yelizta Esteva went from a hair salon position to a job with Instacart — the grocery delivery service her husband, who worked at a company remodeling houses, also joined. Maribel Torres cleaned apartments. “Now, with support from MakerSpace, a collaborative work space full of tools and materials that people can learn to use, and La Colmena, a non-profit that helps day laborers, she is sewing masks from home.”
TENNIS AND DAD – Most of his childhood friends have a story about how their love of sports began, and it usually involved their dads — but that wasn’t the case for Sopan Deb and his father, Shyamal Kanti Deb, who came to U.S. from India in 1975, Sopan writes in a New York Times essay. “It felt like every other kid had bonded with their father over a shared passion for athletics, and I hadn’t found a way to bond with my father at all.” Like many South Asian parents of his generation, Shyamal was trying to make ends meet and ensure his kids focused on professional and scholastic pursuits. But then many years later, after a long separation, Sopan reconnected with his father over a tennis match: “I hadn’t swung a racket in 20 years. Yet I wanted to do this for Shyamal: to give him the opportunity to be a father who played sports with his son. If I am being honest, I wanted that for me too.”

Thanks for reading,
Ali