‘HOPELESS’ — On Monday, attorneys representing detained migrant children and teens asked U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee to "release them from emergency shelters where they say they feel imprisoned, desperate, and hopeless," Adolfo Flores reports for BuzzFeed News. "[Fort Bliss and Pecos] are unsafe, unsanitary, and damaging to children’s physical and mental wellbeing. We hope our motion results in immediate improvements to alleviate children’s suffering at these sites," said attorney Leecia Welch, senior director of legal advocacy and child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law. As of July 21, 4,578 children were detained at the emergency intake sites, Flores notes. 

REFUGEE ADMISSIONS — President Biden set the refugee ceiling for this fiscal year at 62,500 — well above President Trump’s historic low of 15,000. But newly released figures show the State Department has resettled just 6,246 refugees this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, reports Jeff Brumley of Baptist News Global. And according to a 2021 State Department report to Congress, a growing backlog of more than 1.1 million refugees await entry to the U.S. While the numbers indicate that arrivals this year "will fall well short of Biden’s target," the trend is still upward, Brumley notes. "To start a new office and reestablish, it takes time," said Ali Al Sudani, senior vice president for programs and chief of staff at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston.  

DOJ HOTSEAT — Pressure is growing on the Department of Justice to reverse many of the immigration policies put in place by the Trump administration, Politico’s Anita Kumar reports, with "[t]housands of lawsuits on every aspect of immigration policy ... pending from the Trump years." Karla Vargas, a senior attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said her organization is defending landowners in seven cases related to the construction of Trump’s border wall. While Biden halted construction, the lawsuits around the seizure of border land remain. "What we see happening is that there has not been a consensus from DOJ as to how to approach these," said Vargas. Meanwhile, Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reports that the Biden administration "is ramping up deportations and prosecutions of migrants crossing the southern border illegally amid a 21-year high in migrant arrests."