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].
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.
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.
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