An exclusive poll from Immigration Hub looked at “9,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado and Pennsylvania to see if a voting bloc existed that could be moved toward Democrats with pro-immigration content,” writes Stef W. Kight for Axios. “The survey found weaknesses on immigration messaging for Trump among some of the voters — including white, non-college educated men — who put him over the top in bare victories in three of those four states in 2016.” It also identified an opportunity for Democrats to take back the narrative on immigration “by showing the benefits and humanity of immigrants and appealing to American values.”

We are now less than 100 days out from the election, and as I wrote in The xxxxxx for America is Better, immigration is on the ballot.

Speaking of American values, over the weekend Judge Dolly Gee denied a request from the Trump administration to further extend the deadline by which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must release children from family detention — a deadline which already had been extended from July 17 to July 27, J. Edward Moreno reports for The Hill. Reports are circulating that the administration will resort to separating families by releasing children without allowing their parents to leave with them. We’ll be watching today to see how the administration complies.

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

STIMULUS – Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Thom Tillis of North Carolina are pushing to ensure that the nearly 2 million U.S. citizens married to immigrants without Social Security numbers are included in the next round of stimulus payments, Rafael Bernal reports for The Hill. “Their pitch is twofold: American citizens should not be excluded from government aid based on who they married, and Republicans should not be alienating any group of voters at a time when President Trump’s poll numbers are dropping and the GOP is at risk of losing its Senate majority,” Bernal writes. So far, undocumented immigrants — along with their U.S. citizen spouses and children — have been shut out of the payments.

CHILLING MESSAGE – Attorney General William Barr has reopened a decades-old political asylum case that could send former Bangladeshi military officer Rashed Chowdhury back to his home country, where he would likely be put to death, reports Betsy Woodruff Swan in an unsettling story for Politico. Chowdury’s story dates back to the 1970s, when he was involved in a government coup; after arriving in the U.S. in 1996 he and his family were finally granted asylum in 2006. Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s government has been “lobbying hard” for his extradition. Immigration lawyers say Barr’s move “sends a chilling message to people who have received asylum in the U.S.,” per Woodruff Swan. “It signals, they argue, that even after years of successful legal battles, any protection could still be revoked out of the blue.”

“PENDING” – The Trump administration announced on Friday that all new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) applications will be marked as “pending” while officials consider another attempt to end the program, Astrid Galvan reports for the Associated Press. The announcement came during a Maryland federal court hearing as advocates ask the government to begin accepting new DACA applications following the Supreme Court’s June ruling that the administration did not provide adequate justification for ending the program. Government attorney Stephen Michael Pezzi “said that in general the agency is accepting new applications, putting them on tentative status while the administration decides what to do with DACA. That means that any new applicants aren’t likely to be approved unless a court orders it or the administration decides to keep the program.”

PITCHING IN – Nigerian refugee Edafe Okporo has founded New York City’s “first and only” shelter for asylum seekers and refugees, Julie Compton writes for NBC News, offering temporary housing along with legal counseling and job assistance. Okporo, who is gay, initially fled Nigeria because of homophobic violence, and notes that LGBTQ asylum seekers who journey to the U.S. often end up homeless because family and friends with permanent residence will not take them in. “Most of them face a kind of rejection even from their community in New York,” he said. Meanwhile in New Jersey, about a dozen refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, have sewn more than 2,000 masks to protect their new country against COVID-19, writes Matt Katz for WNYC/Gothamist. The refugees are working with Interfaith Rise, a church-based resettlement agency that is providing sewing machines to those with sewing experience, and earn about $15 an hour for their work.

WORTH YOUR TIME – A few features published over the weekend that are worth a read: For Rolling Stone, Tessa Stuart and Reed Dunlea profile six families from New York to Mississippi whose lives have been upended by the “punitive and unpredictable immigration policies” implemented by the Trump administration over the last year. “But despite the administration’s best efforts to drive them away, these families share a determination to hang on to the lives they’ve made here.” And Hamed Aleaziz at BuzzFeed News has the story of a teenage boy from Honduras who became the first person to successfully challenge the Trump administration’s “unprecedented policy to practically close off the southern border to asylum-seekers, including unaccompanied children like him, during the coronavirus pandemic.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali