Citing health risks posed by the coronavirus, a federal judge on Friday ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must release children held in any of the country’s three family detention centers by July 17, reports Miriam Jordan for The New York Times. “The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” wrote Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. At one family detention center in Karnes City, Texas, 11 children and parents have already tested positive for COVID-19. The order will impact more than 120 migrant children, who must now be released either with their parents or “to suitable guardians with the consent of their parents.”

Meanwhile, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration does not have the authority to divert military funds to pay for the border wall, writes Priscilla Alvarez for CNN. The transfer of the $2.5 billion in funds circumvented Congress, according to the ruling. However, an earlier Supreme Court stay clearing the way for those funds to be used while the case made its way through the appeals process remains in effect for the time being.

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

DANGEROUS – The president has cited COVID-19 and protecting American jobs as reasons for extending his near-total immigration ban (our summary here), but “[n]either rationale can justify such a sweeping restriction,” writes Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, in an opinion piece for The Atlantic. “Even more troubling, the order is a large-scale executive-branch power grab that sets a dangerous precedent,” Somin writes. And without interference by either the courts or Congress to check the administration’s power grab, Trump’s “green-card and employment-visa bans will remain dangerous precedents for future presidents.”

WHY THE SHORTFALL? – While the Trump administration continues to blame COVID-19 for the budget crisis at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), experts say the administration’s strict immigration policy changes are the real cause of the shortfall, reports Harvest Prude for World Magazine. “The president has made specific policy choices about immigration that have dramatically decreased the amount of people who are eligible to apply or are willing to apply for some type of immigration status. That’s dramatically affected the ability of that agency to collect the fees that it’s used to,” said John Hudak of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. USCIS application denials have also spiked, per the Cato Institute: the denial rate was 80% higher during the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 than it was during the Obama administration’s last quarter.

HARD HIT – A new study from The Institute for Policy Studies’ Black Worker Initiative and the National Domestic Workers Alliance finds that Black immigrants are facing significant healthcare and financial hardship because of the pandemic, reports Anagha Srikanth for The Hill’s Changing America. “Seventy percent of Black immigrant domestic workers in three locations have either lost their jobs or received reduced hours and pay, according to the survey of more than 800 domestic workers in Massachusetts, Miami-Dade, Florida and New York City.” About half of the workers do not have health insurance, and almost three-quarters say their employers did not provide personal protective equipment. As Aimee-Josiane Twagirumukiza of the National Domestic Workers Alliance put it, domestic workers are “at the intersection of the crises of racism, the crisis of undervalued labor and the crisis of immigration.”

“DEATH KNELL” – President Trump’s new visa restrictions are compounding worries in the science community about the flow of international students coming into the U.S. to study or work, Andrea Widener reports for Chemical & Engineering News. Universities outside the U.S., including in China, are taking advantage of the administration’s anti-immigration rhetoric to attract top students who typically would have trained in America. The academic community is particularly concerned about threats to optional practical training (OPT), which allows students to extend their student visas to work or intern in the U.S. “If OPT goes away, we lose all our international students,” said Peter Kilpatrick, provost at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Getting rid of OPT, Kilpatrick warned, could be the “death knell for higher education in this country.” For more on OPT, our fact sheet on international students lays out the policy changes that could affect foreign students.


DEPORTATION FEARS – Many healthcare workers with H-1B visas are now contending with the dual stresses of being exposed to COVID-19 and/or being deported, reports Quinn Owen for ABC News. “Tens of thousands of working professionals rely on H-1B visas to continue their careers in the U.S. … Immigrant workers make up nearly a third of all physicians and surgeons employed in the U.S. while the overall renewal rates of H-1B visas have grown with the backlogs, according to an analysis from the Migration Policy Institute.” Although the administration’s visa restrictions exclude immigrants treating coronavirus patients, some lawyers say the exemption is “murky.” For more on this topic, check out our recent podcast series, “Keeping Us Healthy.”

INFLATED – USCIS has for the first time released an official estimate of the number of H-1B visa holders working in the U.S., Stuart Anderson writes for Forbes. “However, the H-1B estimate is inflated by hundreds of thousands of individuals waiting years for green cards due to the low annual quota and per-country limits on employment-based immigrants, which is not mentioned in the USCIS report.” The agency reports that there are an estimated 583,420 H-1B visa holders in the country, but that number “would likely drop to fewer than 300,000 if individuals in H-1B status waiting in immigrant backlogs received employment-based green cards promptly, rather than wait years or potentially decades,” Anderson writes. Meanwhile, on his CNN show this weekend, Fareed Zakaria explained why the Trump administration’s employment-based visa bans are unwarranted and dangerous to America’s economic recovery. Zakaria points out that in the tech sector alone, there are still at least 120,000 job openings, with companies desperate for the very workers that Trump’s proclamations are restricting.

TASTE THE NATION – In her new series for Hulu, “Taste the Nation,” Padma Lakshmi travels across the country to sample the cuisines that immigrants brought to the United States and meet the people behind them, writes Catherine E. Shoichet in a CNN interview. Lakshmi, who herself immigrated to the U.S. from India, says immigration is the key ingredient that makes American food great. “I hope that in time of upheaval, and necessary uprising, food can be an example, a positive example of what’s great about immigration and what's great about inclusivity and diversity and why we need all these different nationalities,” said Lakshmi. “To be able to offer [immigrants] a haven and a chance at a better life will give us the ability to renew and refresh our economy and our culture. And we need that.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali