Hello. Laura C. Morel’s hunkered down finishing a reporting project on deadline, so I’m stepping in to help her put out the newsletter this week. But I can’t keep up with all the daily news like Laura can. 

Instead, I’d like to step back and take stock of the way the Trump administration has treated those in the immigration system during the pandemic. 

When the administration could’ve protected immigrants, it’s moved ploddingly or not at all – even when that’s meant endangering its own workers. It’s moved quickly and decisively, however, when it’s had an opportunity to tighten its stranglehold on the U.S. immigration system. 

Here are some of the more striking examples of what we know the administration has and hasn’t done so far: 

• Took another step closer to completely killing asylum. The U.S. asylum system has been in place since after World War II, allowing persecuted people from across the world to seek refuge here. President Donald Trump had already significantly curtailed the protections it provides, sending asylum seekers to makeshift camps in Mexico (under the Remain in Mexico policy) and holding far more asylum seekers in detention centers while they await hearings. Then the pandemic hit, and the administration has shut down immigration at the southern border, denying asylum seekers a chance to even make their case. Even as Trump has pressed to reopen the country swiftly, his administration has extended this shutdown indefinitely. 

• Immediately deported at least 900 unaccompanied children, alone. The children were not given an opportunity to make an asylum case or talk to a social worker. In doing so, the administration has broken with decades of tradition that afford children basic shelter and protections as the government decides their immigration cases. Now, it’s just been sending children right back to their home countries, sometimes without their family even knowing, according to The New York Times. 

• Ignored calls to minimize risk at U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention centers before it was too late. Health experts warned that the conditions inside detention facilities were bound to supercharge the virus’ spread and argued that there were simple ways to release nonviolent detainees, many of whom were simply awaiting asylum hearings. Now, it might be too late, as the virus is tearing through them, just as detainees feared would happen, as we’ve reported. Already, multiple ICE detainees have died in custody. As of Thursday, 1,595 detainees have tested positive for COVID-19, and 818 of them remain in ICE custody either in isolation or under monitoring, the agency posted on its website. 

• Not reunited kids who had families and sponsors waiting for them. Officials in charge of refugee children have issued rules and arguments that have been contradictory and confusing. And they’ve left children in shelters, where social distancing can be impossible, even when they have families that are waiting to take them in, as we’ve reported.    

• Deported immigrants who had COVID-19 back to their home countries. At one point, the Guatemalan health minister estimated that half of Guatemalans returned from the U.S. had the coronavirus. He accused the United States of aggravating the outbreak there.

What are we missing? Let us know. 

– Andrew Donohue
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. She came to the U.S. on a visa to build a better life for her family. Then the pandemic got in the way. (The Washington Post)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly hard for Latino people. They account for more COVID-19 cases than any other racial or ethnic group. They’ve lost jobs. And with the closure of U.S. immigration offices, immigrants without status remain in limbo. This is what happened to Tatiana Angulo from Colombia, who lost her job at a restaurant in the wake of COVID-19. Here on a tourist visa, she had applied to remain legally in the U.S. But due to the pandemic, her application is not being processed, and Angulo now finds herself undocumented.

The kicker: If only the educational visa had worked out, she said. If the offices she called again and again hadn’t been closed because of the virus, or if the person who did answer by chance one time had been able to speak Spanish, she could have gone back to visit, but once tomorrow came, she would have to stay until she was ready to leave the United States for good, or until she was deported. “Better not to think about it and just focus on right now,” she said. But then on impulse, she decided to see if she had enough money to fly back that day. Sitting on her bed, she looked up the website for Colombia’s largest airline. “Wow,” she said. Because of the pandemic, the company had filed for bankruptcy the day before.

2. Immigrants are scared to seek medical care in the midst of COVID-19. A woman running a social justice group in Chelsea, Massachusetts, is trying to change that. (The Atlantic)

Immigrants are avoiding COVID-19 testing and medical care in light of a new Trump administration policy, known as “public charge,” that allows the government to deny green cards to immigrants if they rely on public benefits. Gladys Vega, director of the Chelsea Collaborative, is helping them gain access to a “makeshift social safety net” of resources.

The kicker: By mid-April, the infection rate in Chelsea was six times higher than the state average, comparable to the rate in the hardest-hit boroughs of New York City. With the support of local officials, Vega is trying to use the credibility she’s earned over decades of fighting slumlords, predatory bosses and scammers to persuade the hardest-hit families to use a makeshift social safety net – and to go to the hospital despite their fear that doing so will be weaponized against them later. “Because they’re afraid of their status,” Vega said, “they will not speak up.”

3. How detained immigrants organized a protest inside an ICE detention facility in southern Georgia. (The New York Times Magazine)

As hundreds of immigrants held inside ICE detention centers tested positive for the virus, detainees inside the Irwin County Detention Center organized protests after officers ignored their requests for masks and temperature checks. Through the video visitation app GettingOut, detainees broadcast their protests to people on the outside. They held signs that read, “I’m Human” and “E.T. is the alien.”

The kicker: Hours earlier on April 9, a woman on her work shift in the laundry room slipped the letter into the fold of a clean piece of clothing bound for the Echo-7 unit, a men’s section of Irwin County Detention Center, in south Georgia, where (Nilson Barahona-Marriaga) and 30 other immigrants detained by ICE were held. A man discovered the note in his laundry bag, drafted by a group of detained women held on the other side of the facility. The women, it said, would refuse to show up for $1-a-day shifts in the laundry room, kitchen and commissary and would stop accepting meals from the kitchen. “We ask you to write back to us. If you all have another plan, let us know.” They were demanding that the immigrant detention center take measures to protect them from COVID-19 and that ICE release the sick, elderly and high-risk among them.
 

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