Heartbreaking new reporting from Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff at NBC News reveals that lawyers have been unable to track down the parents of 545 children separated from their families at the border in a 2017 pilot program. Under that program, which preceded the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy of family separation at the border, about two-thirds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, per an ACLU filing. The story underscores the lasting impacts of the Trump administration’s family separation policy; its effects will be felt for years to come.  

“People ask when we will find all of these families and, sadly, I can’t give an answer. I just don’t know,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “But we will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives.”

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].

LOCAL IMPACT – After decades of service, resettlement organizations and ministries in Clarkston, Georgia — the “most diverse small town in America,” with foreign-born residents making up a third of its population — are looking at the election as a matter of survival as repeated cuts to refugee admissions have imperiled their own livelihoods as well as the fabric of their diverse communities, Stefani McDade reports in Christianity Today. With little government funding and a dwindling number of refugees settling, organizations like World Relief Atlanta have had to close their doors. “I feel like my calling is being taken away,” said Joshua Sieweke, who helped resettle more than 10,000 refugees over two decades of service with World Relief.

$100 BILLION – A new study from the Brookings Institution authored by Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Britta Glennon shows that President Trump’s June executive order restricting entry to skilled foreign workers caused a negative impact to the valuation of Fortune 500 firms equivalent to over $100 billion in losses. “While there may be such long-run adjustments that firms can make when access to skilled labor supply is abruptly constrained, we document that there is a significant short-run negative impact,” they write. “In this particular instance, the June 22, 2020 immigration ban plausibly eroded valuation to the tune of 100 billion dollars for the firms in our sample.” Read the full working paper here.

‘LOW-HANGING FRUIT’ – The Trump administration has detained significantly more immigrants with nonviolent criminal charges, putting it in contrast with previous administrations which focused on those who posed “real threats” to the U.S. And as Monique O. Madan and Romina Ruiz-Goiriena write for the Miami Herald, low-income detainees — characterized by former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director John Sandweg as “the low-hanging fruit of the immigration system” — are forced to wait in detention while wealthier immigrants can use lawyers and connections to fight their way out. “A review of more than 1.2 million immigration cases from 2007-2012 found that immigrants in detention who had a lawyer were four times more likely to be released from detention than the broader population of immigrant detainees,” Madan and Ruiz-Goiriena report. Said immigration attorney Isadora Velázquez: “The system targets poor immigrants. We are not deporting the dangerous people. We are deporting the poor because they can’t afford to fight.”

ALL WELCOME – The city of Aurora, Colorado, welcomes and celebrates its nearly 40,000 foreign-born residents and their economic and cultural contributions, writes Republican Mayor Mike Coffman for The Hill. “As a mayor who is also a Republican, I’m making immigrant integration a priority, charting a new course for my political party and breaking its anti-immigrant stigma,” he writes. “Because in Aurora, the one thing that all these immigrants have in common: they are welcome here.” Coffman also lays out four key steps cities can take to better welcome and integrate immigrant communities: creating a citywide Office of International and Immigrant Affairs, offering resources for immigrant entrepreneurs, providing additional English and citizenship classes, and improving communication by sharing critical information in multiple languages. 

FIRST-TIME GEORGIA VOTERS – Earlier this year, CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet reported on the record high number of foreign-born citizens voting in 2020. Today, she shares conversations with six first-time American voters living in the battleground state of Georgia. One of those voters is Khadija Barati, originally from Afghanistan, who worked with the U.S. military as a medic. She told Shoichet, “I really want to be careful with my vote. I’m going to listen to my heart and brain and think this over. What they say is important and, of course, what they do.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali