NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

According to FBI data collected and analyzed by Axios
,
"U.S. communities along the Mexico border are among the safest in
America, with some border cities holding crime rates well below the
national average," Russell Contreras reports. "The latest crime data
collected by the FBI from 2019 contradicts the narrative by President
Trump and others that the U.S.-Mexico border is a 'lawless' region
suffering from violence and mayhem."

In fact, crime in border cities has decreased dramatically over the past
20 years, and remains low despite the cities' close proximity to those
in Mexico plagued by cartel violence. Border Patrol arrests were down
76% in 2018 from a peak in 2000.

Said McAllen, Texas, Mayor Jim Darling: "Everyone just dismisses us a
dusty little border town and media show images of the wall and detention
centers. That's not the whole picture."

Some of the first high-profile reporting on this data was done in 2011
by USA Today's

Alan Gomez, Jack Gillum and Kevin Johnson. Their exhaustive data
analysis found that "violent crime rates were on average lower in cities
within 30, 50 and 100 miles of the border."

Welcome to Tuesday'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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**SMUGGLING UPTICK** - In southern Arizona, human smugglers are
exploiting President Trump's pandemic-related restrictions and taking
advantage of the access road openings left from the border wall
construction by returning to "more unusual, dangerous and risky
smuggling tactics" to transport migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border,
reports Rafael Carranza for the Arizona Republic
.
"Apprehensions have climbed rapidly since March, when the Trump
administration implemented large-scale restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico
border to curb the spread of COVID-19. Those restrictions include a
freeze on asylum processing and, under Title 42, the immediate expulsion
of any migrant apprehended at the border." More evidence that our
fixation on security is only creating new business opportunities for
cartels to take advantage of immigrants.

**A NEW ERA** - President-elect Joe Biden's Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) pick, Alejandro Mayorkas, is better suited to the job
than his predecessors, argues Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and
CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, in an op-ed for The
Hill
.
She points to his experiences as a Cuban immigrant and seasoned
immigration official in the Obama administration, adding: "That
Mayorkas's nomination should come amid a global pandemic is no
accident either. During his tenure at DHS, he oversaw the Department's
response to both Ebola and Zika
."
She concludes that the "compassion and humanitarian tone" Mayorkas
brings "has been completely absent over the past four years - at a
time, no less, when 80 million
 people have been
displaced by violence, war and persecution." The Coalition for the
American Dream, which includes more than 100 top businesses and trade
associations, also commended Biden's DHS pick, saying via a statement
yesterday that the
selection of Mayorkas "signals [Biden's] commitment to protecting
Dreamers and we look forward to working with his administration on
common sense proposals that will provide legal certainty for Dreamers
and avoid significant disruptions to the American workforce and
economy."

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**SUPREME COURT SKEPTICISM**- Supreme Court justices on both sides of
the political spectrum questioned Trump administration lawyer Jeff Wall
yesterday on the historical precedence and practical application of the
administration's attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants in the
census count, Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News
.
President Trump's latest Supreme Court appointment, Amy Coney Barrett,
expressed doubt about the administration's definition of a person,
citing an undocumented immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years
as an example. She asked Wall: "Why would ... such a person not have a
settled residency here?" Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed
the sentiment: "I'm not sure how you can identify any class of immigrant
that isn't living here in its traditional sense. This is where they
are."

**KEEPING THE FAITH** - Who helps the nation's farmworkers - some
of our most essential and most vulnerable laborers - keep their faith
through the coronavirus pandemic? Bekah McNeel digs into that question
in a Christianity Today

profile of those who minister to and spiritually support agricultural
workers, noting that "[f]or many workers, the pandemic has made an
already difficult living even more daunting
." Take John Erb, Chief
Operating Officer of Roy Farms in Washington, who approaches labor
relations with an eye toward healing. "Erb believes that biblical
stewardship of the earth and human relationships can bring some measure
of peace and justice to a broken world." Said union leader Baldemar
Velasquez of the COVID risks involved in opening his headquarters for
distribution of public health supplies: "We know we're taking risks.
But when you're a people of the people ... when it comes to loving,
you don't count the price."

**ETHIOPIA**- The UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo
Grandi, "has launched an appeal for $147 million to support as many as
100,000 people fleeing Ethiopia's Tigray region into neighbouring
[sic] Sudan," the UNHCR announced yesterday
. In recent weeks, 43,000
have escaped the region's ongoing violence, almost half of them
children. The appeal "aims to fund UNHCR, the UN and humanitarian
community to help Sudan manage the crisis over the next six months."

Thanks for reading,

Ali

 

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