According to UNHCR, at least 79.5 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. This includes 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18.

For fiscal year 2021, the United States of America, under President Donald J. Trump, will admit a maximum of only 15,000 refugees — the lowest number since the Refugee Act of 1980 was passed.

As this refugee ceiling goes into effect, I am certain the communities I have visited over the years that welcome and depend on refugees — from Southern Baptist Churches in the Deep South to Catholic relief organizations in the heart of Texas to law enforcement officials in Utah and business leaders in Ohio — are asking the same question: Isn’t America better than this?

As Anita Snow and Julie Watson report for the Associated Press, America’s reputation as a safe haven for refugees fleeing violence has essentially evaporated under the Trump administration; the number of refugees admitted has dropped 80% over the course of Trump’s presidency. The pair profile a number of refugees impacted by the policy change, including “an Iraqi woman who can’t get to America even though her father helped the U.S. military and a woman in Uganda who hasn’t been able to join her husband near Seattle despite a court settlement requiring cases like hers to be expedited.”  

I grew up a Dodgers-despising SF Giants fan. But this morning, a tip of the hat to Dodger Blue. 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].

“NO END IN SIGHT” – The recent news that 545 children have yet to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border is a reminder that the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which began in 2017, was “only the beginning of a three-year nightmare with no end in sight,” writes Krish Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), in an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun. LIRS was one of two national nonprofits tasked by the government with reuniting families, and Vignarajah recalls specialists being “shocked to see children and toddlers, separated from their parents and visibly shaken from the trauma of losing their only pillar of stability after a long, dangerous journey to the U.S.” In addition to demanding families be reunited and granted legal status, Americans “must hold accountable each and every official who forsook basic decency, core American values, and humanitarian law to allow our government to traffic in kidnapping,” she adds. “In the Land of the Free, families belong together.”

ICE MISCONDUCT – The number of women alleging they were forced to undergo unnecessary medical treatments — including forced hysterectomies — while in immigration detention at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia has now nearly tripled to 57, report John Washington and José Olivares for The Intercept. “The new numbers of relevant cases and women who remain in detention were included in the materials submitted to the closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill about the ordeal over women’s medical care at Irwin. Organized by the Senate Democratic Caucus … The briefings came as part of Congressional investigations into the allegation, which Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress have pledged to look in to,” per the piece. “The widespread attention on the women at Irwin has amplified calls for better medical care in immigration detention, where there has been a dramatic increase in deaths over the past year.”

TPS IN THE COURTS – Tens of thousands of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in Texas are relying on the court system in the wake of a Trump administration move to end the program for recipients from four countries. Julián Aguilar for the Texas Tribune reports that “in a victory for the Trump administration and its immigration hardliners, an appellate court last month ruled the White House could end the program for recipients from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Sudan,” But yesterday, Law360’s Alyssa Aquino writes, a split court panel ruled that TPS holders “may be eligible to become permanent residents regardless of how they initially entered the U.S.” Unless TPS is extended by the Trump (or another) administration, this is most certainly headed to the Supreme Court.

FLORIDA VOTE – Florida is a “true melting pot” of the Latino electorate in the U.S., with voters hailing not only from Cuba and Puerto Rico but also from Mexico and countries across Latin America, Brittny Mejia reports in The Los Angeles Times. Indeed, according to the Pew Research Center, Latinos other than Cuban and Puerto Rican make up 44% of the Hispanic electorate, with immigrants from different parts of the region approaching politics with different lived experiences. “The power of the non-Cuban, non-Puerto Rican vote in the state has become clear over the last few weeks, as both parties politically target-bombed these groups with appeals for their votes,” Mejia writes, noting that “[in] a state that for years has been won by slim margins — Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 1 percentage point here in 2016 — any one of these disparate communities could make the difference.”

LIMBO – Despite the Supreme Court decision upholding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Trump administration continues to leave DACA-eligible students in limbo as DHS continues to reject all new applications, Elvia Malagón writes for the Chicago Sun-Times. Vanessa Esparza-Lopez, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Immigrant Legal Defense Project, said she was one of many who interpreted the court decision to mean new DACA applications could be accepted. Now, “if the administration doesn’t change with the election, it’s likely that they will attempt to end the program once again,” she notes.

Thanks for reading,

Ali