NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

On Monday, President Biden announced a number of nominations for key
roles at the Department of Homeland Security. Among them was Tucson
Police Chief and Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force
 member Chris Magnus, Biden's pick
for Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP), as first reported by Zolan Kanno-Youngs at The New
York Times
. If
confirmed, Magnus would be in charge of the largest federal law
enforcement agency in the U.S., and at the forefront of "a politically
divisive challenge now before the Biden administration: how to handle a
record number of border crossings that are projected to increase in the
coming months." 

Meanwhile, Biden's nomination to lead U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS) is, in my humble opinion, one of the
smartest people in immigration land: Ur Jaddou. Nick Miroff, Maria
Sacchetti and Mark Berman at The Washington Post
 write
that Jaddou "served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary
subcommittee on immigration and citizenship from 2007 to 2011, then
spent two years as a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department
and was then the USCIS chief counsel from 2014 to 2017, during Obama's
second term." 

Both Magnus and Jaddou are excellent picks who will bring needed
leadership to parts of the administration that have their work cut out
for them. Read our full statement here.
  

Welcome to Tuesday'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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**ON REFUGEES** - According to Refugee Council USA, more than 700
refugees scheduled to arrive in the U.S. had their flights canceled in
March alone, reports Emily McFarlan Miller of Religion News Service
. The
flights had been booked by the State Department based on President
Biden's revised refugee admissions goal, but the administration has
yet to raise the admissions number set by his predecessor. "Right now,
the way that the refugee program is operating, it really is operating as
if President Trump were still president," said Jenny Yang, vice
president for advocacy and policy at World Relief. Also for Religion
News Service
,
Eugene Cho, co-editor of "No Longer Strangers: Transforming Evangelism
With Immigrant Communities
,"
wrote an op-ed making the Christian case for welcoming refugees,
asylum-seekers and immigrants. And  The Washington Post's
 Catherine Rampell writes
how the experiences of refugee families in limbo show "how little has
changed since Trump left office, despite Biden's warm-and-fuzzy
rhetoric." 

**VISA BACKLOG** - According to a recent State Department legal
filing, a massive backlog of nearly 2.6 million visa
applications remains even after President Biden "has moved to
reverse many of his predecessor's anti-immigration policies,"
reports CNN
's  Bob Ortega. Contributing
to the backlog are pandemic-related measures, which have impacted the
visa process. What's even more alarming: "Backlogs in some
immigrant-visa categories are 50 or even 100 times higher than they were
four years ago, at the start of the Trump administration."  

**BORDER NUMBERS** - The latest government data show that the
number of unaccompanied minors in CBP custody has dropped 45% from a
peak in late March, Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN
. As
of Sunday, there were 3,130 children in
custody - down from 5,767 on March 28. Still, data obtained by
CNN show that the average time in CBP custody for unaccompanied
migrant children is around 122 hours, "far above the 72-hour legal
limit." Mexico's new migrant policy, which limits the number
of Central American families being returned from the U.S. border that
it will accept, adds another layer of challenges to the Biden
administration's border approach, Mary Beth Sheridan writes for The
Washington Post
. Another
development in the slippery slope of border externalization: The
Biden administration has tapped Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to
temporarily deploy troops to the U.S. border to help manage the increase
of unaccompanied children and migrants, per Alexandra Jaffe of
the Associated Press
.  

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**ROSA** - In her column for the Boston Globe
, Marcela
García tells the story of Rosa Yanes, an immigrant from El
Salvador we first mentioned in the Notes back in 2018, and how the
pandemic has impacted her. Rosa lives in Chelsea, a mostly Latino
part of the Boston area which was the epicenter of COVID-19 in
Massachusetts last year. Rosa and most of her family, who share
a three-bedroom apartment, got sick, leaving Rosa without a job
and her husband on the brink of death. (García notes
that Chelsea "has the highest rate of overcrowded housing
 in
the state, a large share of front-line workers
,
and high rates of asthma
 - contributing
to roughly 21% of Chelsea residents being diagnosed with COVID-19 during
the pandemic.) For Rosa, the uncertainty of the past year has been
compounded by her Temporary Protected Status (TPS): effective next
fall, her status - along with those of
roughly 6,000 other Salvadoran TPS recipients in the
state - will expire. "Rosa and her husband have talked to their
children about next year's deadline," writes García. "This is where
they always end up: The kids don't want to go to El Salvador, and Rosa
would not leave them here by themselves. It's an impossible choice." 

**MOVING TEXAS** - As a DACA recipient in El Paso, Texas, Claudia
Yoli Ferla cannot vote. Nevertheless, she's "seeking to fight back
by empowering a powerful bloc of young voters who could transform
Texas's political future," Alexandra Villarreal reports for The
Guardian
. Yoli
Ferla is the incoming executive director at Move Texas
, a "non-partisan, youth-focused civic
engagement non-profit" where she hopes to "use her platform to uplift
the voices, stories and lived experiences of other young people, trying
to turn first-time voters into lifetime organizers." Her vision for
Texas? A state where "officials and policies reflect the increasingly
diverse constituencies they represent," something that young voters will
be critical to. "When we get young people to have this conversation,
to engage in this conversation ... when we give 'em an opportunity
to understand how these issues intersect with their very basic civic
duty, which is to vote - I think the lines start to
connect," Yoli Ferla said. 

** **

Thanks for reading, 

Ali 

 

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