NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

With less than a week left in office, the Trump administration is
attempting a "backdoor maneuver" to bring immigration changes facing
legal challenges back to the forefront, Stef W. Kight and Jonathan Swan
report in Axios
.
How? By reissuing them through the new acting Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) secretary, Pete Gaynor.

Gaynor, who previously served as administrator of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, issued a memo
 empowering
former acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf - who "multiple federal judges
have found ... was likely unlawfully appointed" but remains as DHS
undersecretary - to "sign and ratify agency regulations."

The move has potential consequences for proposed visa fee hikes, the
fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and other
immigration moves that have been blocked, Kight and Swan explain.
However, they write, while Trump is making a last-ditch attempt to
protect his immigration actions, President-elect Biden "will have other
ways to undo them."

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]
.

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**ICE CHANGES**- Jonathan Fahey, the acting leader of U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resigned just two weeks after
starting with no explanation regarding his departure - the latest "in
a long line of resignations at ICE during the Trump administration" that
symbolize the agency's constant upheaval under Trump, reports Hamed
Aleaziz at BuzzFeed News
.
"We haven't been bothering to learn the names of the political
appointees for months now, anticipating that they will all be
short-term," said an anonymous ICE official, adding that the constant
turnover hasn't stopped the administration from drastically
transforming immigration enforcement: "Yet somehow the barrage of agency
rule-making and then injunctions by the courts continue. The revolving
door of figureheads doesn't appear to have impeded those actually
implementing the changes much."

**MEXICO**-

****President-elect Biden is under pressure to focus on immigration
reform in his first 100 days in office - and a successful approach
will require collaboration with Mexico, León Krauze writes in an
opinion piece for The Washington Post.
Citing
the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, Krauze implores Biden
to "end the [Trump administration's 'Remain In Mexico' policy] and
work with Mexico to reverse its pernicious consequences," emphasizing
the need for a more robust, humane asylum system. ICYMI: I chatted with
León on "Only in America
" just
before the 2018 midterm elections about our democracy and the future for
immigrants in America.

**"CIVILITY ALWAYS PREVAILS" -**In Washington, D.C., members of the
National Guard are bivouacking at the Capitol and deploying across the
city in anticipation of further attacks by right-wing extremists. For
Renier Suárez, who came to the U.S. from Cuba two decades ago, the
continued threat of violence after last week's storming of the Capitol
has been particularly jarring, Olivia P. Tallet reports for the Houston
Chronicle
.
"I couldn't believe my eyes ... This is something that I have only
seen in Latin America," Suárez told the Chronicle. For him, "America
opened the doors of an advanced democracy where civility always
prevails, as opposed to the authoritarianism he said he lived under in
Fidel Castro's government in the Caribbean island." While recent
events at the Capitol have been painful for our nation, I believe
our democracy
will survive because of generations of Americans who have fought and
died for our nation, the millions of Americans who exercise their rights
in our democratic society, and the millions of immigrants and refugees
who have strengthened our democracy.

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**CENSUS CUTS TIES**- The Trump administration's effort to alter the
way undocumented immigrants are counted in the census has officially
ceased, Hansi Lo Wang reports for NPR
.
The team working on the effort was instructed to "stand down and cease
their work immediately" earlier this week, halting the production of a
Trump-ordered "state-by-state count of unauthorized immigrants that
would have been used to alter a key set of census numbers." Wang notes
that it is still unclear what the Trump administration will do with the
data collected prior to the halt in production. As the Forum has noted

and as I've said before, any efforts to not count or undercount
undocumented immigrants could hurt traditionally red states
.

**GOOGLE ON BOARD**- In a show of support for immigration reform,
Google has pledged to award a quarter of a million dollars to United We
Dream to offset the costs of 500 DACA applications, Richard Nieva
reports for CNET
.
"We know this is only a temporary solution," said Kent Walker, Google's
senior vice president of global affairs, via a blog post
.
"We need legislation that not only protects Dreamers but also delivers
other much-needed reforms." As Paresh Dave notes in Reuters
,
the move comes as Google and other large U.S. employers transition from
working with an administration that repeatedly restricted companies'
ability to hire foreign-born workers to one that promises to work
"immediately" with Congress on immigration legislation.  

Thanks for reading,

Ali

 

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