Hundreds of thousands of citizenship applicants fear they won’t be able to vote this year due to the delay in processing at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). “The delays have worsened amid budget shortfalls and policy changes by the Trump administration, as well as the coronavirus pandemic, which temporarily shuttered USCIS offices this year,” Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports for The Washington Post.

“After you call this your country for so many years, you’re still not a part of its democracy. I speak for many people when I say that feels really hurtful,” said Laura Muñoz, who moved to the U.S. from Colombia at age 12 and now works at the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “I feel like my voice is not going to count,” said Rutilia Ornelas, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Wisconsin. She chose to apply for citizenship after 20 years as a permanent resident.

“As of March 31, the last date for which data is publicly available, more than 700,000 citizenship applications were still pending, according to agency data. USCIS has completed 156,849 naturalizations since mid-March, but additional would-be citizens have applied during that period as well.”
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].
PROFILED – As an American diplomat, former State Department Foreign Service Consular Adjudicator Tianna Spears should have been able to cross the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, with just a flash of her SENTRI card. Instead, Spears — a Black woman — was targeted for “secondary inspection” two out of every three times she crossed the border, including five times in her first month on the job in Juarez. In a powerful essay for Politico Magazine, Spears writes: “One time, an officer told me, which I wrote down: Just because you say you work at the consulate does not mean that you are not smuggling drugs into the country. I asked him to explain. He responded, I don’t know, but I do know what drug dealers and smugglers look like. He stepped forward, crossed his arms, looked at me up and down, and said: You know what I mean.”
EMPTY PROMISES –Despite pledging to uphold religious freedom around the world, the Trump administration has not addressed the plight of refugees fleeing religious persecution — a contradiction that Eric Costanzo, lead pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, highlights in an op-ed for The Christian Post. Pointing to the local Burmese Christian population in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he writes: “The more our church has engaged with our Burmese neighbors, the more we’ve cherished them and learned just how important refugee resettlement and family reunification visas are for protecting their families and faith.” He also notes that “natives of Myanmar along with the other five countries in ‘Travel Ban 4.0’ earned almost $22.0 billion annually, and paid more than $6.1 billion in taxes in 2018.”
RECOGNITION – Nearly 3 million farmworkers who have risked their lives throughout the pandemic to put food on Americans’ tables — many while making ends meet without federal emergency assistance — are being honored with the Hispanic Heritage Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation on October 6, reports Nicole Acevedo for NBC News. While many farmworkers earn poverty wages and are ineligible for COVID relief despite being considered essential workers, they continue to put food on our tables: “Every single time we take a bite of food, we should think about the importance of our farmworkers in our lives … Their service is nothing short of heroic,” said Antonio Tijerino, president and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation.
UNFIT – A new federal court ruling from Judge Richard Leon blocks U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from conducting “credible fear” interviews with asylum seekers — a policy enacted under the Trump administration’s “Cuccinelli-Morgan Agreement” — citing inadequate training requirements for CBP officers that “do not come close” to those of full asylum officers, reports Colin Kalmbacher for Law & Crime. By the nature of their positions, Judge Leon argued, CBP agents are unfit for the job: “After all, law enforcement officers typically ‘function as adversaries’ whose role is ‘to investigate criminal activity, to locate and arrest those who violate our laws, and to facilitate the charging and bringing of such persons to trial.'”

CHANGE OF HEART – Ryan and Katharine Hurlburt, an evangelical Christian couple from Georgia, voted for President Trump in 2016 — but they won’t be voting for him this November, they write in an op-ed for The Hill. Citing their disappointment in the president’s handling of human trafficking and restrictions on asylum, they write that “having witnessed the negative effects that the administration has had on vulnerable people, particularly refugees and other immigrants, we are among the significant number of evangelical Christians who will not vote for the president again. … This is not what the president promised to evangelical voters.”
Thanks for reading,

Ali