Jack Herrera at POLITICO tells the story of Rosemeri, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, who is one of thousands of migrants in Tijuana who left shelters and apartments for a makeshift encampment in the hopes of eventually entering the U.S. following the election of President Biden. "By early March, it had grown into a shantytown of more than 1,000 people, and today as many as 2,000 migrants — most of them families with children — brave the elements
each day and night. Together, the makeshift community decided on a name for the tent city: La Esperanza, The Hope."
While lawmakers in Washington debate how to address the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, "[w]e want the authorities to simply tell us how we will be processed," said Rosemeri. Herrera points out that while Biden’s rhetoric has been welcoming, it’s the lack of clear guidance for migrants that’s causing challenges: "The issue isn’t Biden extending a hand; it’s that he hasn’t figured out what he wants to do — and has kept the legal pathway closed in the meantime."
"This is a closed borders crisis, not an open borders crisis," said Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. "When people don’t have the option to enter lawfully, they’re going to eventually try to come unlawfully. And the fact that the president has laid out no real timeline for getting American immigration laws back to normal is just going to increase the uncertainty and illegality of actions along the border."
Welcome to Friday’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].
WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE — White House officials are "ramping up pressure" on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies to "speed up releases from its overloaded shelter system to free up space for children packed into crowded border patrol stations," per Ted Hesson, Mica Rosenberg, Kristina Cooke and Steve Holland at Reuters. According to a Reuters analysis of government data, the number of
children in HHS custody has grown by more than 65% between the end of March and mid-April — reaching more than 19,000 — while the number released from shelters has stayed around 300 per day. Some officials are critical of the White House approach: "There's a balance of timeliness and safety. We can't just release kids without doing checks."
CAPACITY — NPR’s Joel Rose further explains the challenges facing HHS and other agencies responsible for unaccompanied migrant children, reporting that while fewer migrant children are being held at border facilities, politics and capacity issues leave HHS with "some thorny problems to solve." Meanwhile, Dasha Burns and Julia Ainsley at NBC News talk to some of the parents trying to find their children in the HHS system. This, folks, is the challenge: "At the start of this year, HHS was able to match about one case manager to 12 children, but the number of children per manager has shot up as the agency scrambles to hire more people who can look after each child's welfare and placement in homes with parents or sponsors. The spokesperson didn't provide the current ratio."
A NUDGE — "We have a moral responsibility in the world — as every other country does, too — to receive refugees who have a well-founded fear of persecution or harm [if they] return to their own country," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) on Thursday. Her message, Mike Lillis writes in The Hill, is a nudge to President Biden to increase the number of refugees being accepted into the country: Despite campaign promises to
welcome more refugees after admissions dropped to historic lows under Trump, the admissions cap is currently 15,000 — the lowest figure since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980. Why is this happening? Sources told CNN that
Biden has not signed the presidential determination to raise the Trump-era cap "because of political optics."
ASYLUM AND ENFORCEMENT — A new report from the Migration Policy Institute reveals that "[a]sylum applications and the number of migrants being detained in Mexico and Central America have been growing as the U.S. has limited pathways for asylum seekers," per Law360 [paywall]. The study assessed humanitarian aid systems and enforcement actions in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica, concluding that policymaking "has remained ad hoc in most of these Central American countries, shifting between the foreign and interior ministries, migration agencies, and the presidency, depending on the moment and the external pressures that force action." MPI President Andrew Selee, one of the report's five authors, summed up
the findings: "Enforcement itself isn't enough to manage migration."
THE FATE OF TPS — Jose Sanchez and Sonia Gonzalez, originally from El Salvador, have legally resided in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for two decades. "But when the New Jersey couple applied for green cards – which would let them remain permanently – they were denied because they initially entered the country illegally," reports John Fritze of USA Today. They sued in 2015, and on Monday
the Supreme Court will hear their appeal "in a case that has drawn little attention in Washington even as it has raised significant questions about the Biden administration’s approach to immigration." As Biden’s Justice Department prepares to defend the 2015 denial, the case underscores the need for a more permanent solution from Congress (ironically, the Biden-backed U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would provide such a solution for TPS recipients like Jose and Sonia.) "Integrate [TPS recipients] into our society rather than leaving them in permanent limbo – in theory, that's what the Biden administration says it wants to do," said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a Georgetown University law professor and former immigration judge. "Only here's their first chance to make it happen and they don't connect the dots."
FINES — In 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began to "impose fines of hundreds of dollars a day against [undocumented immigrants seeking sanctuary in places of worship] for ‘willfully’ refusing to leave the country or having ‘connived or conspired’ to prevent their own deportation," writes Tom Goldsmith, senior minister of Salt Lake City’s First Unitarian Church, in an op-ed for The New York
Times with photos from Kim Raff. The piece features Vicky Chávez, a mother who fled Honduras and has been living in Goldsmith’s church for three years (and whose story we shared in the Notes earlier this month). Chávez was among the immigrants living in sanctuary who received "unconscionable fines — most of which were initially $200,000 to $500,000 and reissued at around $60,000." The critical question: "Will [Biden] and his administration choose to defend a Trump-era policy of retaliation and fear, or will he ensure justice for these families and use his power to set them free?"
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