Undoing Trump’s anti-immigrant policies is all about the fine print, Michael D. Shear and Miriam Jordan write for The New York Times.  

From diplomatic visas to naturalization requirements to the detention of pregnant women, "[h]undreds of little-noticed but consequential revisions to the U.S. immigration system will remain in place unless President Biden’s team specifically looks for — and roots out — the changes." 

Lucas Guttentag, a law professor at Yale and Stanford, put together a team of 70 students who "spent the past four years building a database of every change that Mr. Trump made to the immigration system, no matter how small." They documented 1,064 separate immigration-related changes made by the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. 

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us (and last week’s Only in America guest) summed it up best: "Ninety-nine point nine percent of those [changes] were designed to make immigration harder and reduce the number of immigrants coming to this country." 

Note: Keep an eye out for a virtual hearing from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom at 10:30 a.m. ET today. My friends Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS; Elizabeth Neumann, senior advisor at the Forum; and Jenny Yang, senior vice president of policy and advocacy at World Relief, are among the witnesses who will discuss ways to protect and support refugees fleeing religious persecution and seeking safety in the U.S.  Register to observe the hearing here.  (For more from these experts, listen to our conversations with Mark, Elizabeth and Jenny for Only in America.)  

Welcome to Wednesday’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]. 

TPS — Following last week’s introduction of the Dream Act of 2021, a newly proposed bill spotlights another population that needs a permanent solution from Congress: Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders. The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch reports that Maryland’s senators are pushing for permanent status for more than 400,000 TPS holders with a bill that could help them "gain residency in the U.S., ending a cycle by which holders have to apply to renew their status every six to 18 months."  The proposed legislation would apply to TPS holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen.  

STATUS — Colombia is granting temporary immigration protection to Venezuelan migrants and refugees living in the country without legal status — a move that could benefit more than 1.7 Venezuelans "in the broadest measure yet by a government to assist those fleeing their troubled country’s crisis," reports Antonio Maria Delgado for The Miami Herald. The temporary permits would allow migrants to qualify for residency, allowing them to work legally in Colombia. "By taking this transcendental and historic step in Latin America, we hope that other countries follow our lead," said Colombian President Iván Duque. According to UNHCR, there are more than 5.4 million refugees and migrants from Venezuela worldwide. 

ICE THREATS — Three Cameroonian asylum seekers detained at the Pine Prairie U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Louisiana say ICE officials threatened to expose them to COVID-19 if they didn’t accept deportation, John Washington reports for The Intercept. "They were forcing us out of the dorm, pushing and dragging us," said Clovis Fozao, one of the detained men, explaining how guards attempted to force detainees to submit to deportation. "They threatened to call the SWAT team. They said they were going to put all of us into Bravo-Alpha, which is for quarantine, where they keep everyone with coronavirus." Their flight was canceled after advocacy groups intervened, as The Guardian first reported.  

BIDEN REFORMS — President Biden plans to raise the U.S. refugee ceiling from Trump’s historic low of 15,000 to 62,500 this year, and Ted Hesson at Reuters breaks down some of the details. In addition to establishing regional allotments, reviewing the Special Immigrant Visa program, piloting a private sponsorship program and rolling back restrictive Trump policies, Biden is calling on the heads of several U.S. agencies to develop a report by early August on the role climate change has played in displacing people worldwide.  

‘ENCOUNTERS AT THE BORDER’ — In an alumni feature for Harvard Magazine, Lydialyle Gibson highlights the work of photographer Morgan Smith, who has spent a decade documenting life along the U.S.-Mexico border. Smith’s work provides a glimpse into the unique experience of life on the border, from migrant families camped out awaiting asylum hearings to Mexican soldiers guarding the border wall. "I think it’s hard for Americans to imagine what it’s like … to come from a very poor area in, say, Honduras, which is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and travel thousands of miles to Juárez, another dangerous place, where you know nobody, not really being sure what’s going to happen to you," Smith said of the families he photographed. "It’s pretty heroic."