NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

A New York Times
 investigation
finds that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)'s report
of more than 12,000 cases of COVID-19 in detention "doesn't tell the
whole story, and that the agency also played a role in the spread of
the virus," including in communities surrounding detention
centers.   

Isabelle Niu and Emily Rhyne write that "[a]s Covid-19 cases rose
last June, ICE detention facilities had an average infection rate five
times that of prisons and 20 times that of the general population."
Moreover, "unlike the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE does not have its
own systemwide plan to vaccinate people in custody." 

The accompanying video by Niu, Rhyne and Aaron Byrd is worth your 15
minutes.  

With a cheer to the Academy for choosing "Nomadland" as 2020's best
picture and Chloé Zhao as best director, welcome to Monday's
edition of Noorani's Notes. I'm Dan Gordon, the Forum's vice
president of strategic communications and your guest editor today. If
you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me
at [email protected]
.  

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**EVANGELICALS AND REFUGEES** - Good reads today on evangelical
Christians' pushback when President Biden maintained a historically
low refugee cap of 15,000 for this year. "[T]he actual tragedy
isn't that [President] Biden hasn't kept his word: It's that
thousands of vulnerable children and families are left in harm's way,"
writes Tess Clarke, Director of We Welcome Refugees
, in an op-ed for Relevant
Magazine
. She points
to her group's petition
urging Biden to
act, which nearly 5,000 people now have signed. Meanwhile,
for Christianity Today
, Stefani
McDade's reports on the "betrayal" evangelical advocates felt and
the moral arguments they are making. As World Relief President Scott
Arbeiter said, "[We] will always stand with refugees, regardless of
who is president, whether he keeps his promises, or how the U.S.
government decides to respond. And we'll always seek to convene a
Christian conscience on behalf of the marginalized." 

**SECURITY EXPERTS** - Members of the Council on National Security
and Immigration  - security
experts who served in the Trump and George
W. Bush administrations - are pushing for a refugee
admissions cap of 62,500, reports Caroline Simon of Roll Call
. "The
dismantling of the USRAP [U.S. Refugee Admissions Program] over the last
four years under the false pretense that refugee resettlement is
incompatible with national security has been
heartbreaking," they wrote in a letter
 last week. "While we
appreciate that your administration is struggling with addressing the
current situation at the southern border, we urge you to move swiftly to
admit pre-approved refugees because they are not a security
threat." Said Elizabeth Neumann, a founding member of the council
and alumna of Trump's Department of Homeland Security: "There was
this strong disconnect between the actions that were underway throughout
the government to try to achieve this goal, and then an announcement
that, 'No, you're keeping it at 15,000' - it just did not make
sense." 

**SENSE OF HOPE** - As Vice President Kamala Harris' work to
address migration from Central America ramps up, she spoke about her
approach on CNN's "State of the Union"
 Sunday.
"I come at this issue from the perspective that most people don't want
to leave home," Harris said, per Joseph Choi at The Hill
. "...We have
to give people some sense of hope that if they stay that help is on the
way." Harris said she had met with several members of President Biden's
Cabinet to focus efforts on stemming the flow of migrants.  

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**KIDNAPPED** - Asylum seeker Carolina, 36, from Honduras,
was told to wait in Mexico for her immigration hearing - then was
kidnapped as she tried to return for her court date, reports Kevin
Sieff of The Washington Post
. By
the time she and her 15-year-old
daughter were released, Carolina had missed her court appearance. In
the eyes of the law, her asylum case "had been closed in absentia
because she hadn't shown up."  While the Biden administration ended
the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as "Remain in Mexico," in
February and is bringing people whose cases remain active into the
U.S., the 28,000 people like Carolina whose cases were closed in
absentia are shut out, at least for now. "It's hard to think because
I was kidnapped on my way to my court hearing, I missed my only chance
to make an asylum case," Carolina said. 

**DEBUNKED** - In a piece for CNN
,
Ronald Brownstein dispenses with the racist "replacement
theory" espoused by many immigration restrictionists. In
fact, "[m]any of the Whites most drawn to the far-right argument that
new arrivals are displacing 'real Americans' are among those with
the most to lose if the nation reduces, much less eliminates,
immigration in the decades ahead," he points out. The Census Bureau
is forecasting growing racial diversity no matter the future immigration
level, and at the same time it "projects ominously slow growth
 in
America's working-age population without more
immigration." Translation: "Without more immigrants, those culturally
anxious Whites face the virtual certainty of more financial pressure on
their federal retirement benefits and slower economic growth for
American society overall." 

**NEW VISION **- A reminder that on May 6, we're looking forward
to joining the George W. Bush Institute and Ethics & Religious Liberty
Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention to bring you a
conversation with President George W. Bush on his new book, Out of
Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants
. President
Bush will be joined by Dr. Russell Moore, President of the ERLC
, and Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural,
and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise
Institute. Register for the free event here
. One of the immigrants whose
portraits Bush painted, Chobani Founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, was the
keynote speaker recently at the The George W. Bush Presidential
Center Forum on Leadership. It's an entertaining conversation.
 

Thanks for reading, 

Dan 

 

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