New this morning: The Trump administration is moving to expand its restrictions on immigration and leave them in place “for months or even years to come,” Michelle Hackman and Andrew Restuccia report for The Wall Street Journal.

“The president’s immigration advisers are drawing up plans for a coming executive order, expected this month, that would ban the issuance of some new temporary, work-based visas. The order is expected to focus on visa categories including H-1B, designed for highly skilled workers, and H-2B, for seasonal migrant workers, as well as student visas and the work authorization that accompanies them.”

This is an example of politics taking advantage of a crisis. Because remember, these visa programs cost employers money and require certification that there is a labor market need. We should be strengthening safeguards, not eliminating programs.

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

ICE CONDITIONS – Following the first COVID-19 related death of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee this week, immigration advocates and lawyers have filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, warning of more deaths unless ICE “rapidly improves conditions and releases more detainees.” Nomaan Merchant at the Associated Press writes, “A coalition of groups including the American Immigration Council and American Immigration Lawyers Association filed Thursday’s complaint, which underscores persistent allegations that detainees are being denied protective gear, cleaning supplies, or adequate space to observe social distancing.” And in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, New Jersey-based immigrant Nicolas Morales talks about his harrowing experience spending five months in ICE custody at the Elizabeth Detention Center. When he filed a petition for his release, “[a]t each stage of the court process, the detention center officials said that detainees were able to socially distance and that we had access to hand sanitizer and the means to protect ourselves. None of that was true.”

REFUGEE HEALTHCARE – Louisville health care provider Family Health Centers has opened a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site targeted at reaching the city’s immigrant and refugee communities, reports Katrina Helmer for WDRB. “There have already been virus-related casualties in Louisville's refugee population … so it's critical that testing and COVID-19 information is easily accessible to these groups. Interpreters are available to help patients over the phone, and the nonprofit is working with the city to make sure more information is translated into other languages for these communities.”

MEALS – Migrant Kitchen — a New York-based catering company led by a son of a Mexican immigrant — has been serving thousands of meals a day to the city’s neediest populations, with the help of dozens of immigrant workers and volunteers. Richard Morgan writes for The Washington Post: “What started out on March 13 with 100 meals to hospitals and shelters quickly grew to 6,000 meals a day to 13 hospitals, four food pantries, three homeless shelters, three senior centers, public housing complexes in the Bronx and Queens, a Queens mosque and dozens of covid-19-infected families.” By the last week of April, “Migrant Kitchen’s alliance of five kitchens produced 31,200 cooked meals, Dorado said, a dizzying growth from the 5,015 it served the first week of April.” In related news, take a second to weigh in with your support for the bipartisan FEED Act.
INCOME GAP – New research published by the Harvard Business Review explores the need to fully consider race, gender and language when determining how a person’s immigrant background impacts their professional income. “Our most surprising finding was that both the top and bottom earners were first-generation immigrants (white Anglophone/Francophone men at the top, women of color working in a non-native language at the bottom), with about a $10,000 annual pay gap between them.”

EXPULSIONS – The number of migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped 50% in April as the Trump administration “continued to use its emergency public health authority to bypass normal immigration proceedings and summarily expel migrants,” Nick Miroff at The Washington Post reports. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “made 14,416 expulsions in April along the U.S. southern border, with U.S. agents quickly detaining, processing and returning migrants to Mexico in a matter of hours. As a result, the agency has been able to minimize the number of detainees held in U.S. border stations. Such detentions have dropped from more than 3,000 per day to about 100, CBP officials said.”

RUBIO TO INTERVENE – Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) told Telemundo yesterday that he plans to “intervene” on the CARES Act to make sure that U.S. citizens married to undocumented immigrants can still receive a stimulus check. “Somebody doesn’t lose their citizenship or their rights as a citizen because they’re married to somebody who doesn’t have documents,” Rubio said. But per J. Edward Moreno at The Hill, “Rubio's office did not immediately respond to inquiry regarding the senator's plan to address the issue.“

RURAL HEALTH – This week on “Only in America,” I chat with Dr. Amit Vashist of Ballad Health, a network of hospitals serving communities in rural Appalachia. Dr. Vashist shares how the immigrant healthcare workforce is contributing to the response and recovery to COVID-19, as well as their critical contributions to rural health care.
Stay safe, stay healthy,

Ali