MORE THAN READY — In response to the increased refugee admissions cap, refugee agencies say they’re "prepared to hire more staff, draw on their volunteer networks and accept referrals from the U.S. government" despite the downsizing that occurred under the Trump administration, reports Austin Landis of Spectrum News. Said Chris Kelley, who spoke on behalf of Refugee Services of Texas: "Do we have volunteer teams ready to settle folks in new apartments? The answer is yes. Do we have liaisons in schools and in police departments and in churches? Absolutely. We are more than ready, willing and able to settle refugees."  

PLAN B? — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) "is quietly considering trying to use a fast-track budget maneuver to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants should bipartisan talks on providing a pathway to citizenship fall apart," Luke Broadwater reports for New York Times. In recent weeks, Schumer reportedly told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that he "is ‘actively exploring’ whether it would be possible to attach a broad revision of immigration laws to President Biden’s infrastructure plan and pass it through a process known as budget reconciliation." Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of an immigration strategy that doesn’t address the situation at the southern border.  

COBO AND CHÁVEZ — Two Ixil Maya indigenous activists
from Guatemala, Francisco Chávez Raymundo and Gaspar Cobo Corio, "had been part of a tight circle of indigenous activists who in the spring of 2013 helped bring a military dictator to trial over the 1982 genocide of the Ixil people," Jazmine Ulloa writes in the Boston Globe. "But as they continued their work to preserve historical accounts and records of the massacre, and to defend their ancestral lands from the government and the transnational corporations with which it partnered, an authoritarian backlash began to gain momentum" Fleeing death threats, Chávez and Cobo spent 17 months in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, under the Trump administration’s "Remain in Mexico" policy after being released from U.S. immigration detention. Finally able to petition for asylum in the U.S. under Biden, "they hope to continue their defense of indigenous communities in Guatemala from the U.S. — if the U.S. allows them to stay."