On Tuesday the Biden administration announced the nomination of Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, Texas, to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Nicole Hensley and St. John Barned-Smith report for the Houston Chronicle.
As Hamed Aleaziz at BuzzFeed News notes, "Gonzalez gained a national profile as the leader of one of the largest sheriff’s departments in the country, particularly during the response to Hurricane Harvey. In recent years, he has also used his position in law enforcement to push back against Trump’s immigration policies."
Gonzalez’s fellow Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force co-chairs pointed to his track record as "an encouraging indication of how he would run ICE — with a balance of security and compassion that makes everyone safer. We encourage the Senate to quickly confirm him."
Welcome to Wednesday’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].
14 vs. 40 — Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute, one of the smartest in the business, along with David Kemp (who I’m sure is pretty smart as well) are out with the Cato Institute 2021 Immigration and National Identity Survey. TBH I’m still sifting through it, but had to pass this along: "The survey found that Americans estimate that immigrants comprise about 40% of the U.S. population. This is notable because the actual share of foreign born is about 14%." Folks, we aren’t having a political debate about immigration — we’re having a cultural one.
JOINT SESSION — President Biden’s speech this evening to a joint session of Congress will include a pledge to tackle immigration, reports The Washington Post’s Marianna Sotomayor. While the president will signal support for a targeted approach, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)
maintains that any immigration deal with Republican support must address the situation at the border, The Hill’s Jordain Carney reports. As former Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice told George W. Bush Institute Executive Director Holly Kuzmich in an interview earlier this month: "Immigration is still America's secret weapon and why it has been the country that it has been."
COURTHOUSE GUIDANCE — The Biden administration is issuing a policy "that sharply limits the immigrants whom ICE officers can arrest at courthouses after years of criticism of the practice," BuzzFeed’s Hamed Aleaziz reports. The new guidance under the Department of Homeland Security also applies to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)’s civil enforcement actions. "As law enforcement officers and
public servants, we have a special responsibility to ensure that access to the courthouse — and therefore access to justice, safety for crime victims, and equal protections under the law — is preserved," the policy reads. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called the new guidance "the latest step in our efforts to focus our civil immigration enforcement resources on threats to homeland security and public safety."
SHELTERS — The Biden administration "is seeking to enlist state-licensed shelter and foster care providers that typically serve local child welfare systems to help provide temporary housing for thousands of unaccompanied migrant children," Caitlin Dickson reports for Yahoo News. "[W]e’re looking at potential capacity to serve approximately 3,000 children,
and I’d say at least a third of that has been identified with potential foster family homes," said Lisette Burton, chief policy and practice adviser at the Association of Children’s Residential Centers. "While this is certainly in response to the urgent need, I think there is interest, opportunity and an eye toward building a stronger unaccompanied-children program for the long term." As NPR’s Kirk Siegler reports, much of the humanitarian relief along the border is coming from volunteer aid groups given amid an absence of federal
funding.
MPP UNWIND — An underreported Biden administration success: Its efforts to unwind the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a.k.a. "Remain in Mexico." Andrea Flores, national director for transborder security at the White House, told reporters that 8,100 asylum seekers previously detained in Mexico under MPP have been processed into the U.S. since February 19, and more are being admitted every week, Mark Wingfield reports for Baptist New Global. "The wind-down of MPP is a model of the fair and orderly migrant processing the Biden administration is building on the southwest border," Flores said.
MIGRATION AS A SOLUTION — Greg Sargent writes in a Washington Post column about how new data from the Census Bureau underscores the demographic challenges facing the nation — and why immigration is a critical part of the solution. Sargent notes that the U.S. population "grew more slowly in the last decade than at any other time except the 1930s," yet "[t]ens of thousands of people each month are pounding at our doors, begging us to let them in, most
harboring nothing more than a desire to participate constructively in our largely successful political and economic order. And we go to extraordinary lengths to turn them away." The key takeaway here: "We need to reorient our whole debate toward the general guiding idea of more migration as a solution, as a good outcome that could supplant much worse outcomes." These demographic challenges — and the ways immigration could address them — are the focus of a February paper from myself and my colleague Danilo Zak.
LATINO COUNT — After warnings of a potential undercount of the Latino population in the 2020 census, Texas, Florida and Arizona made smaller than expected gains in House seats, report Zach Montellaro and Ally Mutnick for Politico. After early estimates that the three states would gain as many as six additional House seats combined, "official apportionment numbers released Monday sent only three new seats to those three states — two
in Texas, one in Florida and, perhaps most surprisingly, none in Arizona — shocking members of both parties and raising concerns among Latino politicians and activists that the Census Bureau, despite years of warnings and advocacy, undercounted their communities in those heavily Latino states." Said Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-California): "An undercount means that there's less money for the kids in your neighborhood, there's less money coming your way for the seniors who need support in your neighborhood. That is the ultimate cost to a community."
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