With the Supreme Court’s decision on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) looming, many Dreamers are waking up every Monday — the day on which rulings are typically released — paralyzed with anxiety, writes Astrid Galvan for the Associated Press. Adrián Escárate, a 31-year-old from Chile who has lived in the U.S. since he was 3, is getting up early on Mondays and immediately reaching for his phone to check for Supreme Court updates: “When it hasn’t come down, you kind of breathe a sigh of relief and say, ‘OK, we’re good for this week,’” he told the AP. Reyna Montoya, whose advocacy group Aliento offers arts and healing workshops to fellow DACA recipients battling anxiety, gets up early each Monday so she can be ready if a decision is handed down. “My gut hurts,” she said. Both Escárate and Montoya are among the 650,000 DACA recipients who stand to lose their legal protections if the Court does not rule in their favor.

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

HAVOC – The coronavirus outbreak at a Tyson meat packing plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, is “wreaking havoc” on family-owned Mexican restaurant Antojitos Carmen, run by three generations of immigrants, report David C. Adams, Esther Poveda and Andrea Zarate for Univision. The restaurant’s owner, Maria del Carmen Castellanos, told Univision her husband and restaurant co-operator spent nearly seven weeks in the hospital fighting COVID-19. Maria’s daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, in-laws, and niece were also among the 349 cases that put Louisa County’s infection rate higher than that of New York City. “Carmen’s story is typical of many Latino families in Iowa, the nation’s largest pork producer and the heart of its meat packing industry … It’s also emblematic of the dramatic demographic shift in southeast Iowa, which boasts a Latino population dating back more than 150 years, and which has been growing fast in the last two decades thanks in large part to the meat packing industry.”

ALIENATED – As outrage from the killing of George Floyd reverberates around the world, Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo recalls for the BBC the racism he experienced in the United States. “It did not matter that I am from a black majority African nation, people who look like me here have to negotiate for their humanity with a system that constantly alienates, erases and punishes them.” Caribbean-born American reporter Felicia J. Persaud recounts in News Americas Now some of the Black and Latino men, both native-born American and immigrant, who have been killed by police since she arrived in the country in 1996. “[T]he list gets longer and the protest[s] last for a short time, while the beat simply goes on.”

850,000 – Hundreds of thousands of immigrants awaiting court hearings have now been impacted by the partial shutdown of the country’s immigration courts in the wake of COVID-19, according to a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. “[O]nce scheduling delays for the rest of the individuals in the Court’s backlog are taken into account, 850,000 immigrants — or more than three-quarters of a million — may well be affected by the shutdown even if the Court were to reopen today,” the report finds. Among those impacted are those who were nearing the end of their immigration hearings, as well as those whose hearings were set to begin after the end of May or who were in the Court’s backlog. Those immigrants could face “months or years of delay” before their hearings are rescheduled.

SLOWING THE SPREAD – The rampant spread of COVID-19 in jails is begging the question of how many people should be released to slow its spread, reports Anna Flagg for FiveThirtyEight: “[W]hile experts are unsurprised by the outbreaks in correctional facilities, it’s less obvious what should be done about it. Computer simulations suggest that reducing the jailed population could help control the spread of the virus inside and outside the jails. And officials have been doing that — but they’re wrestling with where to draw the line.” As we noted earlier this week, COVID-19 continues to spread among immigration detention facilities — and testing remains woefully insufficient.

Stay safe, stay healthy,

Ali