Ravaged by back-to-back hurricanes last year and no assistance from the government, many Honduran families feel they have no choice but to flee the devastation and make the journey north to the U.S., reports Natalie Kitroeff writes for The New York Times. 

While people have long left Honduras for the U.S. fleeing gang violence, poverty and corruption, the situation has become more desperate in the months following Hurricanes Eta and Iota: "[H]ouses remain underwater. Gaping holes have replaced bridges. Thousands of people are still displaced, living in shelters or on the street. Hunger is stalking them." Said Ana Hernández, who is heading north with her 11-year-old son: "I never wanted to do this … The situation is forcing me to. You get to a point where you don’t have anything to give them to eat." 

Humanitarian aid from the U.S. would help, Kitroeff writes, but it isn’t the only solution. "We need to be aggressively addressing the levels of despair that the folks hit by these storms are facing," said former Obama adviser Dan Restrepo. "We need to go big now and we need to be loud about it, because that starts actually factoring into the calculus that people face today, which is, ‘Can I survive here or not?’" 

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. I'm Joanna Taylor, Communications Manager at the Forum and your NN host this week, filling in for Ali. See a story you think we should include? Send it to me at [email protected]. 

LAREDO — Residents in the South Texas town of Laredo "are saying ‘ya basta’ (enough) to recent portrayals by lawmakers and others coming to tour the area who say it is a battleground and unsafe" amid the increase in migrants at the border, Sandra Sanchez writes for Border Report.
The latest available FBI crime statistics show a significant drop in violent crime in Laredo from 2009 to 2019, Sanchez points out. "Life here is safe and peaceful," said educator, rancher and No Border Wall Coalition member Mary Sue Galindo. "Outsiders coming here to tell people who actually live here that Laredo is dangerous is not only a lie, it’s an offensive stereotype." A statement from the coalition pointed to the real issue at hand: "We need to start asking why we continue to call Black and brown people crossing the border a ‘crisis’ year after year instead of building a robust system that treats them with respect and dignity. ... there is an urgency for real immigration reform and a solution that focuses on the countries of origin of these migrants to create safe living conditions and better educational and economic opportunities for their people."  

HAUNTED BY HISTORY — The U.S. is "a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had," Caitlin Dickerson writes in The Atlantic. "Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them." Taking an in-depth look at the history of immigration, Dickerson illustrates how the U.S. was never intended to be the diverse nation of immigrants it’s often portrayed as. In fact, she notes, the very first American immigration laws were written in order to keep the country white, a goal that was explicit in their text for more than 150 years. The whole piece is an illuminating read, documenting the nation’s history of racist immigration policies and centering on a key point: "In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones."  

CARE CADRE — Facing growing numbers of unaccompanied children arriving at the border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection "is, for the first time, fielding teams of social service workers to relieve some of the agents from handing out mattresses and Pampers" — an idea originally proposed under the Obama administration in 2014, reports John Burnett of NPR News. As the first class of Border Patrol processing coordinators, 39 non-law enforcement personnel will now "work inside stations to care for the more than 5,000 individuals whom agents are apprehending every day," providing assistance to overwhelmed agents. For some advocates, however, the change is "well-meaning but ill-directed:" The National Center for Youth Law’s Neha Desai told Burnett, "[f]rom my perspective we should be investing in initiatives that prevent children from being in CBP custody entirely."