Yesterday, 20 states filed two lawsuits 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.
"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.
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 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].
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. 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 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 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. "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:
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. Other Ukrainians around the country — and the American communities that welcomed them — feel similarly anxious, as Jennifer Hansler of CNN reports.
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.
