Outcry against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s practice of keeping immigrant children in hotels came to a fever pitch last week when advocates confronted officials. “As a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of the Texas Civil Rights Project [TCRP], 17 immigrants, including adults and children, detained at a Hampton Inn in McAllen, Texas, will instead be sent to a US refugee agency,” report Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz for BuzzFeed News. “The hotel was the center of a protest over the practice last week, and where a TCRP attorney trying to reach the children was pushed into an elevator wall by men in plain clothes. Immigrant children and families would wave at advocates from the hotel's windows or hold up signs saying they didn't have telephone access.”

The suit prevents the Trump administration from expelling the children before they have the chance to seek asylum in the U.S., a practice implemented under the guise of the pandemic that has effectively shut down the asylum system. “The Trump administration must stop secretly deporting children, and not just grant hearings to the children we learn about,” the ACLU said in a statement.

Hilton, the parent company of the independently owned and operated Hampton Inn & Suites where the children were detained, has stated that they do not support and won’t allow their hotels to be used this way in the future. “We believe that hotels should be places of hospitality. … Our policy has always been that hotels should not be used as detention centers or for detaining individuals.”

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

COVID RELIEF – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will delay furloughs for around 13,400 employees until the end of August following assurances from Congress and an increase of application and petition receipts, Nicole Ogrysko reports for Federal News Network. “Despite USCIS’ recent uptick in revenue, the agency is standing by its original request to Congress for an additional $1.2 billion in emergency funding, plus authorization to add a 10% surcharge on its application fees.” But yesterday, Senate Republicans proposed new COVID relief bills that fail to address key immigration issues like worker shortages in health care and relief for mixed status families — and do not include full funding for USCIS. Since the pandemic began, the Trump administration has implemented nearly 50 immigration-related policies, yet immigration remains absent from COVID relief. Like we said in our statement last night, America hoped for better and America should expect better.

FALSE OPTION – Recent federal court orders out of California and D.C. — the first requiring the release of all children from U.S. immigration detention centers, and the second denying a request that would allow families to be released together — have effectively instituted another form of family separation, Jasmine Aguilera writes for TIME. Now, parents must choose whether to stay with their children and waive their right to be released, or release the children to a sponsor indefinitely. Bridget Cambria, an immigration lawyer who represents families at one of the three facilities that detains children, characterized it as “a Sophie’s Choice, either you stay in a burning building with your child or you give your child away…it’s a false option.”

RECRUITING FOR THE FUTURE – Two Cornell Law scholars, Stephen Yale-Loehr and Mackenzie Eason, released a proposal yesterday for a revamped immigration system based on a points-based visa program that would help the country recover economic losses from the pandemic. Aiming to capitalize on President Trump’s interest in a “merit-based” immigration system, the program would add to existing immigration streams by awarding 50,000 green cards to highly skilled immigrants each year, James Dean reports for the Cornell Chronicle. “Our plan doesn’t take a single visa away from other immigration streams … It simply adds more visas for skilled workers and distributes those new visas using a system that is both fair and transparent,” Eason said.

ELEVATING THE PLAYING FIELD – Foreign-born athletes now comprise a record proportion of professional athletes in America, according to new analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy, making up 23% of the NBA and 29% of the MLB rosters. “The average NBA player’s salary increased from $246,000 in 1982-83, when there were few foreign-born players, to $7.7 million in 2019-20, when 23% of the players were foreign-born, an increase in the average player salary of 1,254% from 1983 to 2020 (adjusted for inflation),” the report finds. Asks Stuart Anderson in Forbes: “If it’s reasonable for the New York Yankees or Milwaukee Bucks to employ a foreign-born individual they believe to be best suited for a job, why is it wrong if a technology company does the same?” For more discussion on immigrant contributions on and off the playing field, listen to my conversation with former Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon for a previous episode of “Only in America.”

IMMIGRATION NATION – Parts of Netflix’s upcoming documentary series “Immigration Nation” were reportedly nearly blocked by ICE, Caitlin Dickerson reports for The New York Times. “After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day,” Dickerson writes, pointing to scenes that “include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody.” The series, which takes viewers inside the world of immigration enforcement, premiers on August 3.

Thanks for reading,

Ali