The Forum Daily | Wednesday, May 14, 2025https://immigrationforum.org/

THE FORUM DAILY

Yesterday, 20 states filed two lawsuits [link removed] against the Trump administration with the goal of stopping policies that withhold grants for homeland security and transportation from states that do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), reports Chris Johnson of Roll Call [link removed].  

"These agency actions would damage the carefully built trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities, which is critical to promoting public safety," Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul (D) said. 

Separately, the administration continues to redirect agencies toward immigration enforcement, sometimes at the expense of other objectives. For example, the FBI is telling agents to scale up on immigration enforcement and scale back on white collar crime, reports Sarah N. Lynch of Reuters [link removed].  

Agents will now be expected to spend a third of their time helping with plans for immigration enforcement, according to sources within the agency. 

And on Monday, a federal judge allowed the Internal Revenue Service to share immigrants’ tax data with ICE for enforcement purposes, the Associated Press [link removed] reports. 

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I’m Dan Gordon, the Forum’s VP of strategic communications, and the great Forum Daily team also includes Jillian Clark, Broc Murphy, Clara Villatoro and Becka Wall. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. 

**LOST DOLLARS** — The United States could lose $12.5 billion in revenue from international tourism this year with foreign travelers feeling unwelcome and unsafe, reports Ceylan Yeğinsu of The New York Times [link removed]. Among 184 countries in a new report from the World Travel & Tourism Council, the U.S. is the only country projecting a decline. "Without urgent action to restore international traveler confidence, it could take several years for the U.S. just to return to pre-pandemic levels of international visitor spend," noted council President Julia Simpson.  

**TORRANCE COUNTY** — A small town in New Mexico is one of many communities convinced that their financial health depends on ICE detention agreements, a team at Bloomberg [link removed] reports. The history and context — including the role of private prison companies and concerns about the Torrance County Detention Facility — are well worth a read. 

**ASYLUM** — A new report [link removed] by a coalition of nonprofits details how the freeze on asylum has put people in danger, exposing them to abuse from criminal groups and authorities at the southern border, reports Julian Resendiz of Border Report [link removed]. "We wanted to shed light on what is happening and bring forward people’s testimony," said Jesus de la Torre, assistant director for global migration at Hope Border Institute. "We wanted to do them justice and for Congress to uphold asylum and refugee law regardless of manner of entry." 

For more stories on policies’ impacts on people: 

* American-citizen children were among those deported after immigration enforcement actions near the Canadian border in Montana. (Matt Hudson, MTFP [link removed]) 

* Federal officers broke a car window while trying to apprehend a man after a church service. (Sebastián Agudelo Gómez, Telemundo [link removed] 10 Boston [link removed]) 

* An atmosphere of anger prevails in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, affecting the work of those trying to protect migrants and asylum seekers. (Amanda Ulrich, The Guardian [link removed])  

**UKRAINE** — A group of Ukrainian women who have been serving other newcomers in the Atlanta area now fear that the lives and community they’ve built could be in jeopardy, reports Eden Turner of The 19th News [link removed]. Other Ukrainians around the country — and the American communities that welcomed them — feel similarly anxious, as Jennifer Hansler of CNN [link removed] reports.  

Thanks for reading,  

Dan 

**P.S.** "Nearly half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by people born outside the United States," Ilya Strebulaev points out on Crunchbase News [link removed]. 

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