Our friends at FWD.us just released Restricting Immigration, the third installment of a four-part series underscoring the damaging impact of President Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration. The administration’s extensive restrictions, which currently have essentially shut down most immigration avenues,“have contributed to a 50% reduction in immigration levels compared to when President Trump took office,” according to the report. They’ve also done incredible damage to the economy: “Experts estimate that the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts to current immigration levels would shrink GDP by 2% and cost 4.6 million jobs over 20 years.”

Meanwhile, support for immigration has increased significantly during the Trump presidency. As the FWD.us report points out, “Nearly three-quarters of the American public – 70% – overwhelmingly supports maintaining or expanding immigration, the highest number Gallup has recorded since they began polling on the question.”

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

UNAUTHORIZED – A new report from Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reveals that U.S. border agents in Guatemala detained Honduran migrants headed for the U.S. border before returning them to Honduras in an unauthorized operation last January, Michelle Hackman and José de Córdoba write in The Wall Street Journal. The report found that by working with Guatemalan authorities to load Honduran migrants onto buses and send them back, the U.S. agents both violated the limits on their jurisdiction and failed to “take precautions to ensure that the operation was safe or legal.”

HIDDEN DATA – The State Department has removed previously public data on resettled refugees, including their religious affiliations, Emily McFarlan Miller and Jack Jenkins report for Religion News Service. The change comes at a time when the U.S. is admitting significantly fewer persecuted Christian refugees than in the past, and it “certainly will make it more difficult to hold the government accountable to its commitments to protect those fleeing violations of their religious liberty globally,” said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization and advocacy for World Relief and national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table. The number of Christian refugees admitted to the U.S. this year marked a 77% drop from 2016’s number; the number of Muslim refugees admitted has also dropped 93% since Obama’s last full year in office.

WARNED – Employees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been told to report colleagues they suspected of sharing internal information as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on leaks of internal documents, Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News. In an email to staff, senior DHS official Randolph D. “Tex” Alles also asked for reports on employees who made requests for information outside of their day-to-day responsibilities. “This is another way to say to people: People are watching you,” said Ur Jaddou, a former lead DHS official under the Obama administration. “It is not just us, but your fellow colleagues now have an eye on you.”

SETTLEMENT – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay $14 million to thousands of immigrants the sheriff’s department “held after a judge ordered them released so that federal agents could attempt to deport them,” reports The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti. The settlement affects approximately 18,500 immigrants detained between October 2010 and June 2014 in Los Angeles County jails before local law enforcement stopped cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2014.

LOUISVILLE – Louisville’s immigrant population has been subject to hate and anxiety since the election of Donald Trump, reports Adam K. Raymond for Spectrum News in Kentucky. From DACA to refugee resettlement to family separation to H-1B visas, the Trump administration has decreased the number of immigrants allowed in the country and caused overwhelming anxiety for the future of those living here — “We don’t know what’s going to happen the next second, or the next week,” said Omar Salinas Chacón, a DACA recipient. Catholic Charities resettlement director Colin Triplett said that he has seen local employers struggle to fill jobs and the “spirit of the city suffer” under Trump: “I do believe that having a diverse community is important. You learn a lot from people about their experience and the way they see the world and that’s a contribution to our society as a whole.”

OZARK IDENTITY – In an interview with Becca Martin-Brown of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, artist Amber Perrodin explains Looking for America’s Ozark Story Project, which explores the intersection of immigrant and traditional Ozark folklore through the collection of works contributed by those who have a connection to the region. The project is available online in English, Spanish, and Marshallese to encourage input from a diverse range of residents. (We plan to discuss the topic of American identity at this year’s Leading the Way virtual conference — if you haven’t already, make sure to register!)

Thanks for reading,

Ali