NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

As President-elect Biden forges ahead with transition planning for his
administration, Nicole Narea at Vox

breaks down the top candidates rumored to be under consideration to head
up the Department of Homeland Security.

The list includes

**Alejandro Mayorkas,**former deputy secretary at DHS under President
Obama, who is "best known as the architect of [DACA];" California
Attorney General

**Xavier Becerra**; Rep.

**Val Demings** (D-Florida); and

**Lisa Monaco**, former Homeland Security adviser for President Obama.

"One has to take really seriously what a significant portfolio this is
and what a major management job it is to run an agency of that size and
scope ... The people managing DHS really do have to come prepared and
hit the ground running in terms of their knowledge of what's going on
in the agency and how you start to turn this ship," said Doris Meissner,
senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner
of the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under President
Clinton.

Welcome to Friday'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]
.

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**LAST-MINUTE PUSH** -

****As it wraps up its final weeks in office, the Trump administration
is reportedly rushing though "last-minute immigration limits" including
controversial agreements to send asylum seekers to Central American
countries, Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN.

"It's common for administrations to try to get pending items across the
finish line before a transfer of power, but such moves have the
potential of setting up more hurdles for Biden, who's pledged to roll
back Trump immigration policies, many of which have occurred through
regulations that can be more arduous to reverse."

**'SHARED FUTURE'** - In the aftermath of a highly divisive
election, the country needs to come together with a new understanding of
who we are as a nation, write the Aspen Institute's Ashley Quarcoo and
Caroline Hopper in an op-ed for USA Today
.
They call on Americans to "rediscover the story of immigrants in this
country, who have come here from every continent seeking the promise of
a better life, and whose contributions to this country are another
critical part of our nation's identity." The pair is also conducting a
new research project, Who Is Us
,
which "will explore how Americans from a multitude of backgrounds
grapple with the question of what it means to be American today, and
ultimately how this impacts the way American democracy functions." We
discussed the new American identity at Leading the Way
on Tuesday with the
likes of International Resuce Committee CEO David Milliband, Mexican
Ambassador to the U.S. Martha Bárcena Coqui and the Trinity Forum's
Cherie Harder - for those who missed it, recordings of all
conversations are now available
.

**TALKING TO KIDS** - Allie Mondell, an advocacy organizer for Choose
Welcome, writes in an opinion piece for The Winston-Salem Chronicle

that a recent question from her young son regarding immigrants and the
border wall reminded her to be "intentional" about discussing the topic
with her kids. She broke it down to the basics: "Immigrants are kids
just like him who have moms and dads who love them, friends they like to
play with, and special teddy bears they hold tight at night. ... We've
talked about what it would feel like to leave our home and have to start
somewhere new." These difficult conversations are necessary, she writes.
"Every day our children are learning to forget that immigrants are no
different than they are. As parents, we can and we should help them to
unlearn these errors."

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**IMAGINE IF** - The immigrants responsible for the groundbreaking
COVID-19 vaccines currently in the news could have been denied entry to
the U.S. if subjected to President Trump's tightening restrictions on
legal migration and skilled professionals in particular, Andres
Oppenheimer writes in his Miami Herald

column. "Moderna, the first company to announce a near 95 percent
success rate with its COVID-19 vaccine, was founded by Lebanese-born
Noubar Afeyan, who came to the United States to get his Ph.D. in
biochemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
... The company's CEO is Stephane Bancel, a native of France who came
to the United States to do graduate studies in chemical engineering at
the University of Minnesota." As our friends at New American Economy

point out, immigrants have proved to be essential in just about every
field during the pandemic - including pharmaceutical manufacturing
,
where "[t]he more than 132,000 immigrants working in the industry made
up a quarter of the total workforce in 2018."

**'PATTERN OF OBSTRUCTION**' - Senior members of several
congressional committees wrote to U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) last week, calling for them to halt the deportations
of immigrant detainees involved in pending allegations into medical
misconduct at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, reports
Riley Bunch in The Valdosta Daily Times
.
"Deporting women who maybe key witnesses in these proceedings would be
an obstruction of justice and an abuse of authority," the letter

reads, noting that the actions "fit a pattern of obstruction by ICE."
The agency has already deported

six detainees who alleged they were subject to non-consensual
gynecological procedures by Dr. Mahendra Amin at the Georgia detention
center.

Thanks for reading,

Ali

 

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