Progressives in Congress are gearing up to push President-elect Biden to fundamentally reimagine our immigration system, according to a draft resolution co-sponsored by Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Yvette Clarke of New York, Judy Chu of California, Jesús García of Illinois, and Veronica Escobar of Texas first obtained by Nicole Narea at Vox. But as Franco Ordoñez notes for NPR, advocates pushing for the boldest of those demands may run up against "inherent limits on executive powers."

In my own conversation with Ordoñez, I stressed that the administration should look toward a return to Obama-era enforcement priorities: "From the perspective of the immigrant community, they want to live in a safe community just like anybody else. So, I don't think that the immigrant community wants to see a moratorium on the deportation of public safety threats." The Forum has laid out a list of sustainable immigration policy priorities that the incoming Biden-Harris administration can champion within its first 100 days — all of them with strong bipartisan support.

Welcome to Monday’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].

BORDER RUSH – Amid President-elect Joe Biden’s promises of a more humane border policy, more migrants driven by economic distress and natural disasters across Latin America are attempting to cross into the U.S., reports Miriam Jordan for The New York Times. "The pressures that have caused flows in the past have not abated and, in fact, have gotten worse because of the pandemic. If there is a perception of more-humane policies, you are likely to see an increase of arrivals at the border," said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School in New York. New caravans are forming in Honduras, while migration from Mexico is up for the first time in 15 years as the pandemic has "decimated" livelihoods. The Biden administration, which has vowed to reverse Trump’s harsh immigration policies, will be forced to grapple with these numbers without "opening the floodgates," Jordan writes. Said Alfonso Mena, who spent six nights in the desert before being apprehended by U.S. officials and returned to Mexico: "What wouldn’t you do to help your children get ahead? … We are not bad people. We come to work." Last year, our policy team put together resources on the factors driving Central American migration and how the U.S. can address it.   

VIOLATION – U.S. border officials "have expelled at least 66 unaccompanied migrant children without a court hearing or asylum interview since a federal judge ordered them to stop the practice," Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News. Trump administration officials conceded this weekend that the expulsions were a "contravention" of a November ruling from District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, which "prohibits the Trump administration from using a pandemic-era emergency border policy to expel minors who are apprehended without their parents or legal guardians." Children expelled in violation of the policy were between 12 and 17 years old, and one turned out to be a U.S. citizen. This weekend’s declarations "represent the second time the Trump administration has admitted to expelling unaccompanied migrant children in violation of November's court order," Montogay-Galvez writes.

BACKING OFF – In a victory for the area’s immigrant communities and advocates, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department has announced that it will back off its policy of publicly sharing the release dates of people in custody — information that immigration advocates say "was being used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help it arrest immigrants for possible deportation," reports Max Rivlin-Nadler for KPBS. The policy went into effect in 2017 and aimed to "curb local law enforcement’s relationship with ICE," but faced years of protests. "For now this is a big win for our communities, because we’re making things harder for [ICE]," said Lilian Serrano, chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium. "Sometimes we might not be able to fully stop their actions, but we can definitely make things harder for them, and in that way mitigates the impact in our communities and reduces the amount of people affected by it."

MISSING PARENTS – Tracking down the parents that the Trump administration separated from their children at the border under its "zero-tolerance" policy has proven to be a daunting task given the lack of information about parents, many of whom live in rural areas or continue to distrust the U.S. government. Writing for the Arizona Republic, Daniel Gonzalez explains the difficult task that lawyers and human rights defenders like Rebeca Sanchez Ralda have in reuniting separated families. Cathleen Caron, executive director of Justice in Motion — one of the groups working to find parents — notes that parents feel they have been "deceived by the U.S. government. Their kids were taken away. They (were deported). They don’t have much reason to trust that they have any control over their children."

WILDLIFE CONCERNS – Contractors in Arizona’s Coronado National Memorial, which happens to be in the path of one of 29 border wall construction projects, are "dynamiting mountainsides and bulldozing pristine desert" to build as much of President Trump’s signature project as they can before he leaves office in January, reports John Burnett at NPR. The Department of Homeland Security has waived "dozens of federal environmental protections" to make way for the construction project, which is expected to be cancelled once President-elect Biden enters office. Conservationists like Gary Nabhan, an author and ethnobotanist in the region, are worried about the long-term effects: "The wall is going through such sensitive areas and going up so fast that no one knows what effect it's going to have on wildlife."

Thanks for reading,

Ali