Nineteen colleges and universities — including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Duke — have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing in favor of protecting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“The filing states that DACA recipients at the 19 schools are ‘some of the most gifted and motivated young people in the world.’ It notes that ending the program would prevent these students from taking full advantage of the opportunities that the schools offer, such as research and off-campus internships, as well as making them unable to use their skills for the public good,” Matthew Griffin writes in the Duke Chronicle.

Welcome to Thursday’s Go Nats (!) edition of Noorani’s Notes.

Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

NEW GENERATION – In the wake of anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies and violence during the past year, Ruben Vives and Andrea Castillo at the Los Angeles Times explore how a new generation of Latinos in California are fighting back — whether pursuing law school or becoming mental health therapists. “In the third year of the Trump presidency, many Latinos have found themselves in a state of reflection about their cultural identities, their place in U.S. society, and the need to act — whether via social media, political engagement or by shifting the trajectory of their personal and professional lives.”

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE – The proclamation that President Trump signed last Friday could cut legal immigration by a staggering 65%, Nicole Narea reports in Vox. When it takes effect Nov. 3, the proclamation will prevent immigrants who don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to pay medical costs from moving to the U.S. permanently. “The move could bar roughly 375,000 immigrants annually, based on projections of data from fiscal year 2017, according to Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.” And those 375,000 won’t be impacted at random: The proclamation “targets immigrants who have come to the U.S. legally under policies Trump and his advisers often attack.” Paige Winfield Cunningham has a great explainer in The Washington Post, pointing out that “someone making as little as $16,000 a year would have to show they can cover the entire cost of a plan on their own to gain admittance to the United States.”

UNLIKELY EPICENTER – Around 8,000 migrants are now being detained in eight U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the state of Louisiana, making it an “unlikely epicenter” of the detention of asylum seekers, Nomaan Merchant reports for the Associated Press. “These new facilities, a mix of old state prisons and local jails, are a drive of several hours from New Orleans and other major cities, far from where most immigrant rights’ groups and immigration lawyers are based.” Meanwhile, ICE data for the past several years show that more migrants are being arrested in North Texas than any other region in the country, with a staggering 17,600 arrests in the last fiscal year. Dianne Solis at The Dallas Morning News writes that this is being driven by increased cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE: “About 70 percent of ICE arrests come after the federal agency is notified by local jails or state prisons, ICE acting director Matthew Albence said last month.”

WORLD OF MOTION – As part of a series on migration, CBS This Morning traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos to offer a glimpse into the lives of the thousands of migrants from Afghanistan and Syria enduring difficult journeys to find refuge. “With a crackdown on migrants in Turkey and tough immigration policies elsewhere in Europe, the number of people fleeing to Lesbos by sea has soared to more than 16,000 this year, according to the U.N. That’s the biggest influx since 2016.”

WHERE WE COME FROM – Tune into the latest episode of “Only in America,” where I sit down with Oscar Cásares, author of “Brownsville,” “Amigoland” and the new novel, “Where We Come From.” Oscar currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin and is originally from the border town of Brownsville, Texas. We discuss his path to becoming a writer, his identity as a Mexican American, and the power of storytelling.
Thanks for reading,
Ali