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].

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."

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