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]. 

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." 

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."