A spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced yesterday that the agency plans to furlough a majority of its employees as it faces budget shortfalls.

Per Priscilla Alvarez for CNN: “Approximately 13,400 employees will be notified whether they'll be furloughed beginning August 3, an agency spokesperson said. The agency has nearly 20,000 employees. … The agency's depleted funds appear to be the result of the administration's policies that decreased the number of petitions — and thus fees — received by USCIS, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst for the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.”

To be clear: USCIS is in its current situation because of the administration’s restrictive immigration policies. COVID-19 is the justification, not the reason, for those policies.
From the travel ban to the most recent presidential proclamation suspending immigration, policy after policy of this administration has made it impossible or harder to access legal immigration and naturalization.

Two resources: Our running list of immigration policy changes since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and our explainer of President Trump’s expanded and extended proclamation to suspend certain types of legal immigration.

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

EXPEDITED REMOVAL – Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s expansion of its “expedited removal” policy, Michelle Hackman reports for The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration is expanding the policy, which currently applies to “immigrants who are found within 100 miles of the Mexican or Canadian borders, and who have entered the U.S. illegally within the previous two weeks,” to apply to any immigrant in the country who entered the U.S. unlawfully in the past two years. “The D.C. Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, said the DHS decision to expand expedited removal wasn’t subject to a federal law that sets rules for how federal regulations must be adopted. … The appeals court for now withheld issuing its mandate to give challengers time to seek additional review, making it unclear when the administration can begin applying its expanded authority across the country.”

“NOT WELCOME” – The Trump administration’s recent ban on new H-1B and other visas has major implications for the international research community, which may start taking their talents to countries more open to immigration, Andrea Widener writes for Chemical & Engineering News. “Even immigrant scientists who are not affected by this particular order feel the pain. Feier Hou, a chemistry professor at Western Oregon University, already has her H-1B visa. But attacks on incoming visa holders make her worry that the same thing could happen to her. ‘It adds a lot of stress to people like myself living in the United States because it adds a lot of instability,’ Hou says. ‘This just all around sends the signal that you are not welcome here.’” Stuart Anderson at Forbes looks at how the proclamation could leave room for the Trump administration to “force foreign nationals waiting years for employment-based green cards to go through the ‘labor certification’ process again in the hopes many will not succeed.”

BECOMING A CITIZEN – In a touching personal piece for Texas Monthly, reporter María Méndez reflects on finally taking her Citizenship Oath amid the coronavirus pandemic after years of waiting to be naturalized. “I remembered the many times I had longed for this moment. Growing up undocumented, wondering what would happen to my family if we were ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time by ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. The many years I believed I wouldn’t be able to attend college because of my status. … The next day, I drove back to Laredo, where people often answer the phone in Spanish, to get back to work reporting on the complicated relationship between the country of my birth and the only country I had ever known.”

BAD PARTNERS – Immigration advocates are calling on the sheriff of Nueces County, J.C. Hooper, to terminate the formal partnership that the county has had with ICE since 2018, reports Vicky Camarillo for the Corpus Christi Caller Times. “Under the agreement, at least two county jail employees were deputized with immigration enforcement powers that include investigating inmates’ immigration status, access to federal databases and extending the jail stay of inmates beyond their release dates to allow federal officials to pick them up.” Advocates say the additional powers the program grants to county employees warrant a closer look: “Our campaign calls for a level of transparency and community oversight that isn’t delineated in the written agreement with ICE, but necessary nonetheless,” said RAICES community organizer Beatriz Alvarado in a statement.

CONFLICTING STORIES – Immigrant detainees are contradicting ICE’s statements to a federal judge that the department is properly protecting detainees from the coronavirus, reports Monique O. Madan in the Miami Herald. “On May 17, detainee James Bishop told the court that guards and ICE officials ‘lied about sanitizing beds sick people slept on’ and that ‘they also ignored deliberately the symptoms we suffer from the covid19 pandemic.’… In a letter signed by about 100 detainees on April 16, detainees told [Magistrate Judge Jonathan] Goodman to ‘please come see us immediately or send investigators’ because ‘we were served spoiled food, we’re starving, bathrooms are bad, violations of rights … We may die and are afraid,’ the collective handwritten statement said.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali