A new lawsuit filed in federal court on behalf of 19 states, including California and Massachusetts, is aimed at preventing the indefinite detention of migrant children, Patrick McGreevy and Taryn Luna report in the Los Angeles Times.

“The latest legal action is over new regulations rolled out last week that will take effect in two months unless blocked by the courts. The states argue the rules undermine the Flores settlement of 1997, including the presumption that all children are eligible for release into the community.”

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes.

Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].
COURAGE – Central American families come to the U.S. fleeing violence, poverty and corruption. They are willing to risk everything. But, as Ericka Andersen writes in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, the administration is sending a clear message through their new enforcement practices: “Bad parents are responsible for family separations through their own illegal behavior.” However, Andersen writes, “we know that a courageous parental love often fuels a person’s decision to cross the border, to send their child north or to stay in the United States illegally.” Putting a human face to these journeys, Adolfo Flores at BuzzFeed News interviewed 13 children waiting in Matamoros, Mexico, for their asylum hearings in the U.S. The courage of these children – and their parents – rises far above the fearmongering of the administration.
DISASTER – Researchers at the University of Iowa found that people who have lived through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in small rural communities all tend to talk about the event the same way, Aimee Breaux reports for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. “‘People often describe the experience of a raid as (like) a natural disaster,” said University of Iowa researcher Nicole Novak. “Without prompting, people have described the experience of having their town raided as having a tornado go through town, having a fire, shooting, bombing … Multiple people have compared it to 9/11.”

TWO KIDS, EIGHT DAYS – The ICE workplace raids in Mississippi earlier this month left two children unattended for eight days, Jasmine Aguilera reports in Time Magazine. The children’s mother, Ana, maintains that she “did tell officials that she had two children on the day of her arrest — and that it was only when she told ICE agents again that action was taken to release her.”

DENIALS – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is now denying all deferred action requests that are not from military applicants – meaning the agency will no longer consider deferrals of deportation for people with serious medical conditions, reports Shannon Dooling at WBUR. The current program allows migrants to remain in the U.S. for up to two years if they can prove extreme medical need. “The dated letters notified families they must leave the country within 33 days of the government's writing.”

INDIA – In the latest example of anti-immigrant sentiment, this week millions of people in India suspected of being undocumented migrants – most of them poor Muslims in the northeast region of the country – wait to hear whether or not they will remain citizens of India, Niha Masih at The Washington Post writes. “The ruling party has engaged in increasingly strident anti-immigrant rhetoric. Amit Shah, the country’s powerful interior minister, called such migrants ‘termites’ who would be thrown out one by one. Shah has announced that he intends to take the citizenship exercise nationwide, portraying it as a matter of national security.” One of those forced to prove their citizenship is Mohammad Sanaullah. After 30 years of service in the Indian army and three years after his retirement, “Sanaullah, 52, was arrested and held in a squalid detention center. That night, he said, he cried for the first time in his adult life.”

THOUSAND CUTS – As most college students are either back at school or settling into their new dorms, Ismail B. Ajjawi, an incoming freshman at Harvard, was deported before reaching campus after he was questioned for hours about his friend’s social media posts, report Shera S. Avi-Yonah and Delano R. Franklin in the Harvard Crimson. The Roosevelt Institute’s Felicia Wong put it best in her tweet: “Death of the American Dream. By a thousand cuts.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali