Newsweek’s Chantal Da Silva reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to launch a “Citizens Academy” in Chicago, a six-week course that will include training on how ICE arrests undocumented immigrants. The training, scheduled to start in September, would include “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests.”

While Newsweek reports that a Chicago ICE official identified the program as “the first of its kind,” Christina Gonzalez reports for Fox11 Los Angeles that the ICE Citizens Academy “has been going on in Los Angeles for years.” But there seems to be a key difference: The Chicago program is being run under the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office, while the Los Angeles program was part of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office.

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

90% FEWER – According to a joint report from World Relief and Open Doors USA, the U.S. is set to resettle the smallest number of refugees since 1980, capping the number welcomed to just 18,000 for fiscal year 2020. What’s more, with only 5,000 of these allotted for victims of religious persecution, the U.S. will see 90% fewer Christian refugees this year than it did five years ago, writes Griffin Paul Jackson in Christianity Today. “Christians aren’t the only ones suffering. Compared to 2015, U.S. resettlement of Baha’i from Iran, Muslims from Burma, and Yezidi from Iraq has decreased by 98 percent, 95 percent, and 92 percent, respectively,” Jackson reports. “While we can and should do all we can to advance religious liberty abroad, we must also continue to offer refuge to those who have felt they had no choice but to flee. We must not close our nation’s doors on the persecuted,” urged Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief, in a statement. 

HISTORIC LOW – The number of international students enrolling in U.S. colleges and universities could also reach a historic low due to consulate closures, travel bans and other immigration measures, writes Stuart Anderson for Forbes. “The enrollment of new international students at U.S. universities in the Fall 2020-21 academic year is projected to decline 63% to 98% from the 2018-19 level, with between 6,000 to 12,000 new international students at the low range, and 87,000 to 100,000 at the high range,” per an analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy. These will be the lowest numbers, Anderson points out, since the end of World War II.  As the Forum has noted, the loss of international students is also a loss for the U.S. economy: International students contribute $41 billion to the economy each year, along with an additional $10 billion spent outside of tuition, and support more than 450,000 jobs.

GREAT PATRIOTS – On Saturday, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported that a group of top U.S. business leaders — including some representing IBM, Apple, Starbucks, and Google —  signed a letter to President Trump led by the Coalition for the American Dream urging the President to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), arguing that the country’s economic recovery from the pandemic depends on it. “Their work and commitment to our companies, their families and communities are critical to our nation’s strength, especially since there are tens of thousands of DACA recipients working as front line doctors and nurses and in other critical industries fighting COVID-19,” the letter reads. In Texas alone, there are 4,500 DACA recipients working in the health care and social assistance industries, notes Jeff Moseley, CEO of the Texas Association of Business, in an op-ed for the Austin Business Journal. “The current pandemic we are encountering has exemplified what great patriots these recipients are, and the necessity of keeping them protected.”

CONFLICTING COMMENTS – President Trump revealed in an exclusive interview with Telemundo on Friday that in a month’s time, he plans to move towards a “merit-based” immigration reform that he indicated could also include protections for DACA. But as NPR’s Franco Ordoñez points out, “Trump made a series of seemingly conflicting comments about his next steps. He said he would be ‘taking care’ of DACA and said the program would be ‘just fine.’ He said he would be signing a ‘big immigration bill,’ which he also called a ‘big executive order,’ and said, ‘I'm going to make DACA a part of it.’… Adding to the confusion, Trump said about DACA: ‘We put it in, and we'll probably going to then be taking it out’ — a phrase he repeated twice in the interview.” (A helpful resource if you want to learn more about how a bill becomes a law here.)

NEGLIGENT – A formal complaint filed yesterday by lawyers on behalf of various migrant families claims that “medical care at Dilley, Karnes and Berks [family detention centers] has been substandard at best, and negligent at worst.” Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff for NBC News report that the complaint “comes a day ahead of a key court hearing in a case that will decide whether ICE should release parents from detention with their children. …The lawyers said they are aware of seven children and 14 adults detained in the centers who have conditions that have been identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as risk factors for COVID-19, such as high blood pressure, chronic respiratory disease, pregnancy and kidney disease.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali