NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

 The sights and sounds of President
Trump's 2018 "zero-tolerance" family
separation policy are seared into the national conscience. Advocates
and attorneys say President Biden's efforts to undo the policy and
reunite the more than 600 parents still separated from their children
"might be the thorniest" of the new administration's immigration
proposals, USA Today's
 Rick
Jervis reports. 

More immigration-related executive orders are expected to roll out
this week. However, a halt in separations won't be immediate: "as
with all new policies, it takes a while to get the message down to the
troops on the grounds," said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in
Harlingen, Texas, who is helping to reunite some
450 separated families. 

As for reuniting separated families, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of
the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said that "a deep look into the
genesis of the policy" could help locate parents - and understand how
the policy came to be. "This policy was so inhumane and such a stain on
the United States that we simply can't move on until we have a full
accounting," Gelernt said. "It will be a mistake if 20 years from now
people studying our immigration history did not know exactly what
happened." 

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]
. 

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**LEGISLATION** - Getting sweeping new immigration
legislation passed will be an uphill battle for the new president,
reports Julia Ainsley at NBC News
.
The legislation includes a path to citizenship for many undocumented
immigrants, hiring more immigration judges to handle asylum cases,
"humane alternatives" to immigration detention and the return of
"an Obama-era program that lets children apply for refugee or asylum
status in the United States from their home countries," Ainsley
reports.  Sen. Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), who will officially
introduce the bill, says he's "under no illusion" that passing it
will be anything other than a "herculean task," noting that although
Democrats technically hold a majority in the Senate, at least nine
Republicans would need to sign on to gain the 60 votes needed to
pass the legislation. 

**REDISTRCTING TEXAS** - President Biden gave Texas Republicans a
gift by rescinding the Trump administration's order to exclude
undocumented immigrants from the census apportionment count, reports
Todd J. Gillman of The Dallas Morning News
.
With immigrants included, redistricting in Texas is likely to result in
39-40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (a 3-4 seat
difference from the last decade). Lloyd Potter, the
state's demographer, puts it simply: If the census excluded
undocumented immigrants, "we definitely wouldn't have gotten
three [seats]. Maybe as few as one. It would certainly have diluted our
representation." Way back in 2018, when the proposal to include a
citizenship question was first proposed, we made the case
 that red
states could lose out.  

**ROOT CAUSES** - President Biden's immigration reform plan
"means little right now" for thousands of migrants fleeing Central
America as Guatemala and Mexico continue to deploy military and police
forces at their borders, reports Sandra Cuffe of the Los Angeles
Times
. While
the administration has already ended several of Trump's harsh
policies, "none of those policy changes do much for people fleeing
Central America now until they make it to the U.S.
border." Meanwhile, Mark Stevenson, Rob Gillies, and Aamer Madhani
of The Associated Press
 report
that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, "who spoke
Friday with Biden by phone, said the two discussed immigration and the
need to address the root causes of why people migrate." As we noted
last week, President Biden's proposed immigration legislation
includes measures to address the root causes of migration from Central
America via a $4 billon four-year plan
 that
"aims to decrease violence, corruption and poverty in El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras." 

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**IMMIGRATION POLITICS **- While both The Washington Post
 and the Los
Angeles Times
 Editorial
Boards gave glowing reviews of President
Biden's proposed immigration legislation, the path forward is going
to be complicated in a narrowly divided Congress, reports Will Weissert
for the Associated Press
. In
2020, House Democrats "lost four California seats and two in South
Florida while failing to pick up any in Texas" - and new census
figures mean these states are likely to add House seats in
2022. Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican from Florida,
said there is conservative support for targeted reforms, but "[m]any
Republicans are worried about primary challenges" as Trump's focus on
immigration crackdowns has made the issue one of "political
peril" for the GOP. 

**100 DAYS **- President Biden's temporary deportation
freeze means "100 days to breathe" for many North Texas undocumented
immigrants and their families, reports Allie Spillyards for NBC 5
Dallas-Fort Worth
. For Eric Garza,
who has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and faces
deportation following a traffic stop, it's a temporary relief. His
attorney says that while the pause is unlikely to change the outcome of
Garza's case, "their hope is that it gives Congress time to adopt more
long-term reform that could."  

Thanks for reading,

Ali

 

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