U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 128 suspected undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco over the course of five days last week as part of its pre-election “Operation Rise” crackdown on sanctuary cities, Nick Miroff reports for The Washington Post. Though officials from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) privately “acknowledged that the number of suspects taken into custody so far by the ‘sanctuary op’ did not amount to a major increase in arrests,” the campaign will now turn to additional cities. As we noted last week, ICE is also erecting billboards targeting immigrants in at least one city.

Over at BuzzFeed News, Hamed Aleaziz reports that ICE is speeding up the process for deporting undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for under two years by not granting them a hearing in front of an immigration judge. Though the policy was initially blocked in 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit lifted the injunction back in June: “The shift could allow the Trump administration to increase deportations while circumventing a court system that is severely backed up and short on resources,” Aleaziz notes, “but advocates for immigrants have said it would destroy their due process rights.”

Welcome to Friday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. ICYMI, the Forum hosted a Facebook Live conversation yesterday with former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism at DHS Elizabeth Neumann, the Anti-Defamation League’s George Selim and former Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer on the rise of white nationalism and what it means for immigration reform.  

If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

SEPARATED – New reporting from Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff at NBC News reveals that after a 2017 “pilot” program of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, prosecutors warned that children under the age of 12 should not be separated from their parents because they wouldn’t be able to find them again. A memo obtained by NBC detailed the warnings from a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, which preceded the broader separation policy enacted by the Trump administration in 2018. “But the memo, prepared for John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, was never sent to Justice Department officials in Washington,” Soboroff and Ainsley write. Our friends at FWD.us are out with a new report on how the administration’s immigration policies have torn apart families.

REEVALUATING – Latino evangelicals are re-evaluating their voting choices this election season as President Trump continues to attack immigrants while simultaneously attempting to court Christian voters with pro-life values, Juan Carlos Chavez writes for the Tampa Bay Times. Their votes will be decisive: “White and Latino evangelicals overall cast ballots at a rate nearly double their share of the population — 26 percent compared to 15 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.” A recent survey from Vote Common Good shows a 13-point swing toward Biden among evangelicals in Florida, a state that went for Trump in 2016.

RESET – A Biden administration would likely shift U.S. policy toward Central and Latin America away from President Trump’s singular focus on slashing immigration, taking a more traditional diplomatic approach of “building democratic governments, fighting corruption and respecting human rights,” write Tracy Wilkinson and Molly O’Toole for the Los Angeles Times. Driven by the belief that democratic societies and healthy economies abroad are the best ways to control immigration into the U.S., Biden’s plan “would do away with the harshest of Trump’s immigration measures and instead rely on a four-year, $4-billion regional strategy to combat the ‘factors driving migration,’” Wilkinson and O’Toole report. Back in May 2019, we released a working paper looking at short- and long-term solutions addressing Central American migration.

20% – Almost 20% of  detainees at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California, have now tested positive for COVID-19, Rebecca Plevin at the Palm Springs Desert Sun reports. As of Wednesday, there were 148 active cases at the center, making it the largest current outbreak at any ICE facility in the country. Just last week, U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter, Jr. criticized the health conditions at Adelanto — the largest ICE facility in the country — and “ordered ICE to stop accepting any new or transferred detainees until the court has determined that the facility has sufficiently reduced its population to allow for social distancing at all times and at all places.”

‘FEAR AND MISTRUST’ – Deeply rooted health and economic barriers, coupled with fear and distrust, have stifled COVID-19 testing efforts in vulnerable immigrant communities in Minnesota, reports Catharine Richert for Minnesota Public Radio. “Latinx Minnesotans are testing positive for COVID-19 at about five times the rate of white Minnesotans,” Richert writes, but the lack of health care coverage and the fear of having their information used against them have deterred undocumented immigrants from getting tested. Dr. Kathleen R. Page and Alejandra Flores-Miller, writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, note similar observations in their work with Baltimore’s Latinx community: “After years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, the fear and mistrust in this community was understandable, painful, and palpable.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali