Since the start of the pandemic in March, the Department of Homeland Security has expelled children from the U.S. border with no due process more than 13,000 times, according to documents obtained by Hamed Aleaziz at BuzzFeed News.
“[These] expulsions are legally different than deportations, which would mean an immigrant had actually undergone the immigration process and found to not be legally allowed to stay in the US.,” explains Aleaziz. “Previously, unaccompanied children were sent to government-run shelters as they attempted to pursue their asylum cases.”
The Department of Homeland Security refused to confirm the findings.
Welcome to Thursday’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].
TAXPAYER COSTS – A joint investigation from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that the Trump administration awarded expensive contract modifications to companies building the border wall, increasing the cost of the project by billions of dollars at the taxpayer’s expense, report Perla Trevizo and Jeremy Schwartz. Despite President Trump’s frequent assertions that the border wall was not financed by taxpayers, “[t]he cost of supplemental agreements and change orders alone — at least $2.9 billion — represents about a quarter of all the money awarded and more than what Congress originally appropriated for wall construction in each of the last three years. ... In all, Trump’s wall costs about five times more per mile than fencing built under the Bush and Obama administrations.”

WHAT LIES AHEAD – No matter who the president is, immigration will continue to drive much of the political agenda in the years ahead. BuzzFeed’s Hamed Aleaziz noted in a recent tweet that according to former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, White House adviser Stephen Miller has “immigration orders ready” for a second term. The Guardian’s Amanda Holpuch outlined these orders as efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship, ending Temporary Protected Status and continuing to slash refugee admissions. Meanwhile, ProPublica’s Dara Lind dives deep into border and asylum policy, pointing out that “[j]ust how far Biden would go to unravel that fabric remains entirely unclear, even to campaign advisers who’ve helped develop policies that might do it.” Looking at both scenarios, FWD.us President Todd Schulte lays out the consequences and opportunities of what lies ahead: “The election presents stark contrasts — but no reforms are won simply by an election.”

PASTORS TO THE BORDER – Rev. Elizabeth Villegas and her husband, both pastors in North Carolina, visited the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016 where they met deported immigrant families and talked to mothers desperate to save their children from violence. In a piece for the Roanoake-Chowan News-Herald, Villegas, who is an Advocacy Organizer for Choose Welcome, describes how this experience led her to question the U.S. immigration system and welcome immigrants and refugees into her church community. “As someone who lives in community with immigrants, I can’t help but look at politics and recognize how it’s directly hurting the people that I love, how it’s directly hurting my kids’ friends. I see how hard it is for asylum seekers in my church just to set up doctors’ appointments for their children.”
EMOTIONAL TOLL – More than 20,000 Spanish-speaking domestic workers and their families are struggling economically and emotionally after the coronavirus pandemic took away their employment and exposed them to housing and food insecurity, per a survey from the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “According to the survey, more than half of workers were unable to pay their rent or mortgages for six consecutive months,” Nicole Acevedo reports for NBC News. “Last month, when asked whether they felt confident in their ability to afford food for the next two weeks, 64 percent of the domestic workers surveyed said, ‘I don't know.’” A reminder that today is Latina Equal Pay Day — “the approximate day in 2020 when the average Latina finally catches up to what the average white, non-Hispanic man earned in just 2019 alone.”
IMMIGRANTS IN DETROIT – The 2020 election is top of mind for many immigrant communities in Detroit, Michigan — home to over 425,000 immigrants — with growing concerns over the pandemic, the economy, health care, and intensifying political tensions, reports Stephen Henderson with WDET. Hayg Oshagan, the Director of New Michigan Media and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Wayne State University, believes the state’s immigrant communities “are much more activated this year than normal, including the Bengali community, which is not always active in elections.”
FIRST-TIME VOTERS – In the final episode of our pre-election deep dive into civic engagement, this week’s “Only in America” features the experiences of two first-time voters who recently became U.S. citizens through the Forum’s New American Workforce program. Karla Garcia, a Honduran immigrant who works for the D.C. Board of Elections, told me about her father’s experience voting for the first time this year and the changes she’s seen in the Latinx electorate over the years. Ambica Prakash, an entrepreneur born and raised in India, spoke with me about her journey through the naturalization process and her perspective on civic engagement as a new American.

Thanks for reading,

Ali