Dreamers — among them thousands of health care workers helping Americans get through the coronavirus pandemic — still need congressional action to ensure their futures in the U.S., write Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and director of the Houston Health Department Stephen Williams in an op-ed for the Houston Business Journal. “Houston is home to 32,000 DACA recipients, and we are deeply relieved that these hard-working young people who came to the United States as young children will be able to stay and continue to build their lives here,” Turner and Williams write. “We must urge Congress to step up to the plate and pass legislation that gives 1.2 million eligible Dreamers across the nation a pathway to citizenship so they can truly call this country home.” Houston’s 1.6 million immigrants — who own nearly 130,000 businesses and pay close to $14 billion in local, state and federal taxes — will also be critical to the city’s economic recovery, the piece notes.

Meanwhile, some DACA recipients are so frustrated with the program’s roadblocks that they are opting to leave the U.S., even if it means leaving behind families and hometowns, reports Monica Campbell for The World. “Many DACA holders hit limits in their personal and professional lives in the US,” Campbell writes. “DACA does not offer a path to legal permanent residency or citizenship. Some recipients figure they may find greater opportunities and more stability elsewhere.” However, it’s a “huge trade-off:” Because of their time living in the U.S. without permanent legal status, former DACA recipients who leave to live in another country could face a 10-year ban on returning to the U.S.

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

IMMIGRATION HALT – The lack of funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is threatening to shut down the country’s immigration system entirely, reports Hamed Aleaziz for BuzzFeed News. The agency says it will have to furlough 60% of its staff for up to three months if it does not receive emergency congressional funding by August 3. Those furloughs will not only result in job losses for thousands of American workers, but “will also bring the U.S. immigration system to a grinding halt, negatively impacting families, U.S. businesses, educational institutions, medical facilities, and churches throughout the United States,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a former agency official. Call me a cynic, but it’s almost like the Trump administration planned this.

“PETRI DISH” – Danilo de León, a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Guatemala, shared a harrowing story of neglect after contracting COVID-19 within a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, Luis Carrasco writes for the Houston Chronicle. De León was transferred to an isolated room with ten other detainees, who “took turns doing the cleaning by heating water in a small microwave and advocating for each other as their symptoms ebbed and flowed,” Carrasco writes. Earlier this week, U.S. representatives toured two Texas facilities and called for the release of all detainees who are not a safety risk. “The conditions are bad,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas). “These people are living in a petri dish.”  

LEGAL REPRESENTATION – The Pennsylvania Immigrant Family Unity Project, a program that provides pro-bono attorneys for immigrants facing deportation, is back up and running again in Philadelphia after receiving $200,000 from the city, reports Jeff Gammage for The Philadelphia Inquirer: “For detained undocumented immigrants, an attorney is the one asset guaranteed to give them a fighting chance against removal, which for many can have dangerous or even fatal consequences. … Immigrants who have lawyers to help battle deportation have a 5½ times greater chance of winning relief in court than those without counsel.”

POSITIVE – Three people at a border camp in Matamoros, Mexico, are the first among the more than 2,000 asylum seekers living there to test positive for COVID-19, Helen Perry of Global Response Management (GRM) Global told Adolfo Flores of BuzzFeed News. GRM Global had previously stepped in to provide medical care after the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy sent thousands back across the border, set up a 20-bed field hospital in March amid concerns that the virus could spread rapidly through the camp. “Immigrants and asylum-seekers at the camp and across the southern border were already facing a months-long wait for their Remain in Mexico/MPP cases to be adjudicated,” Flores writes. “That wait keeps growing as suspensions of MPP hearings are extended because of the coronavirus pandemic.”

ATTRACTING INVESTMENTS – The Trump administration’s immigration policies could backfire on investments in state-level and ultimately the national economy, said University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Professor Zeke Hernandez in an interview with Molly Wood for Marketplace. “This is, I think, one of the great untold stories about immigration, and this is both skilled and unskilled immigration. In a study that I did several years ago, I found that in the United States, for every 1% increase in the share of immigrants from a certain country, firms from that country were 50% more likely to invest in the state where those immigrants live.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali