NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

NPR's
 Franco
Ordoñez is out this morning with new details on the administration's
plans to fix our asylum system. The plan, which has not been formally
announced, would take asylum cases backlogged in Department of
Justice immigration courts and "instead handle them under the purview of
the Department of Homeland Security, where asylum officers already
process tens of thousands of cases a year." 

On first blush, the movement of cases to trained asylum officers makes a
lot of sense. Especially when, as Reuters
 reported in
March, 42% of immigration judges hired by the Trump administration "had
no immigration experience." Trump-era hires were also "twice as likely
to have military court experience, which Reuters found was linked to a
higher rate of deportation orders." 

Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) detention continues to use taxpayer dollars to
pay for empty beds, reports Joel Rose of NPR
. Since ICE
released hundreds of people to lower the risk of
COVID-19 and shifted enforcement priorities to focus on public
safety threats, the number of detainees has dropped from a peak of
55,000 under Trump to just over 14,000 now.  

Because of guaranteed revenue contracts, "ICE pays more than $1 million
a day for empty detention beds," according to an NPR analysis. "The
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office published a report
 earlier this year documenting
a significant jump in the number of guaranteed minimum beds ICE agreed
to in detention contracts signed during the Trump administration." 

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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**LUIS **- 34-year-old Guatemalan Luis Alberto Paredes was found
limping and struggling at the border after being lost in the brush for
five days without food, reports Sandra Sanchez for Border Report
.
While Border Patrol agents, state troopers and law enforcement personnel
are focusing efforts on the influx of migrant families and unaccompanied
migrant youth at the border, "desolate regions of Texas farther north,
like rural Brooks County, often contend with a harsher reality:
Recovering the bodies of migrants hopelessly lost in an unforgiving
terrain," Sanchez explains.  

**ENFORCEMENT** - Hundreds of Honduran
migrants - including families - set out for the Guatemalan
border Tuesday in the hopes of eventually reaching the U.S., Delmer
Martínez and Claudio Escalon report for the Associated Press
. "But
relatively few arrived at the official border crossing and likely
decided to cross at the numerous blind points along the border to avoid
detection," they note. Part of the reason is that "Guatemalan and
Mexican governments have taken a harder line against such caravans in
recent times under pressure from the United States."  

**UTAH** - In an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune
, DACA
recipient Bernardo Castro describes his experience living
with "quasi-legal protection that provides us with work authorization
but no safety net." Bernardo has a degree in business management and is
pursuing the "American Dream of entrepreneurship" - but "with recent
pending judicial rulings putting the status of DACA recipients in
jeopardy, I still worry that every day might be my last day in this
country." Other members of Utah's immigrant community are also
awaiting permanent solutions: Annie Knox at Deseret News
 shares the
story of Vicky Chavez and her two daughters, who have lived in
sanctuary at the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City for the
past three years after fleeing Honduras. Chavez and three other
undocumented women from other states have filed a
lawsuit "[alleging] U.S. immigration officials under then-President
Trump stuck them each with roughly $60,000 in fines - a civil penalty
for not leaving the country - because they spoke out about their
cases." FYI: In our upcoming Only in America
 series,
we're taking a virtual road trip around Utah to talk to residents
about how immigration impacts them and where Utahns think we should go
from here. 

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**MISSION REWRITE** - Back in 2018, the Trump administration
rewrote the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) mission
statement to remove the phrase "nation of
immigrants." Now, Stef W. Kight reports for Axios
, agency
leadership is conducting an internal survey to rewrite the agency's
mission statement, asking employees "for three words that 'best
describe how we aspire to accomplish our mission.'" In an internal
email, USCIS Acting Director Tracy Renaud wrote, "I feel it is
essential that we leverage your ideas and input as we craft a new
mission statement and set our vision for the agency." 

**NO GOOD CHOICES** - Dara Lind at ProPublica
 reports
that as government agencies scramble to get migrant children out of
short-term Border Patrol jails and into "emergency" temporary
facilities, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is
"cutting corners on health and safety standards, which raises new
concerns about its ability to protect children." Mark
Greenberg, former head of the Administration for Children and Families
(which oversees the unaccompanied-children program) at HHS, summed up
the predicament: "There may be no good choices ... Everything has to
be weighed against the alternative. And the alternative is the backups
at Customs and Border Protection. And recognizing how bad that is, it
means that people have to make unpalatable decisions."  The bottom
line: With internal government estimates predicting that as many as
25,000 children could cross the border in May, "how long emergency sites
remain open depends on how long children keep coming to the U.S. in
numbers beyond what HHS can accommodate." 

**JOBS** - "Immigrants work more, save more and start more
businesses per person than native-born
Americans," write economist Stephen Moore (Trump's former economic
advisor for the 2016 election campaign) and lawyer David Simon in an
op-ed for The Hill
. Restricting
immigration won't raise wages for Americans, they write, arguing
that "skilled immigrant workers share knowledge with their native-born
co-workers, making all more productive and higher paid." In his latest
column for Forbes
, Stuart
Anderson couldn't agree more: "Immigration can prevent population
decline in the United States and allow America to grow-if U.S. elected
officials choose the right policies."  

Thanks for reading, 

Ali  

 

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