Wednesday, November 10

Breaking news this morning from a team at Reuters: About 1,300 children were evacuated from Afghanistan without their parents and are now in limbo. Many have been placed with relatives, but more than 250 are living in government shelters or in foster care.

"The complicated situations of the minors, coupled with language barriers and lack of culturally appropriate foster families for those who don’t have sponsors in the United States, is creating a tangled knot of problems for the U.S. government," report Kristina Cooke, Mica Rosenberg and Lindsey Wasson. "Primary among them: no clear mechanism for reuniting children who are now in the United States with parents still stuck abroad."

The Biden administration is working on speeding up the entry process for parents in Afghanistan whose children are already in the U.S., two U.S. officials say.

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].

911 — In November 2020, Maira Oviedo-Granados called 911 hoping the Knox County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Office would rescue her from a violent and armed boyfriend. Instead, Angela Dennis and Tyler Whetstone of the Knoxville News Sentinel report, "deputies ensnared her in the county’s controversial immigration enforcement program." Oviedo-Granados, who has a pending asylum claim, has now filed a lawsuit against the Knox County Sheriff and Knoxville Mayor seeking $2.5 million in punitive damages after she was separated from her children and jailed without access to a translator or attorney. The lawsuit "opens the door to a class-action lawsuit that could seek to punish the county and its leadership for unlawfully participating in the program."

HAITIAN DEPORTEES — Though the Biden administration quickly deported thousands of Haitians back in September, some are making plans to migrate to the U.S. again, reports Monica Campbell of PRI’s The World. "They can’t do this … We left Haiti years ago and now we’re back?" said 19-year-old Dianie, who left Haiti when she was 15. "There’s no president, so how can I be sent back to a country where they can murder the president?" While most Haitians making the journey to the U.S. still travel by land, a growing number are making the dangerous journey by sea, Campbell writes. "It’s an uncertain voyage and, wherever they may land, Haitians are often intercepted and turned back."

PROJECT ANAR — For the Los Angeles Times, Andrea Castillo tells the story of attorney Wogai Mohmand, who is spearheading an effort to get Afghans stuck in Afghanistan safely and legally into the U.S. Co-led by Mohmand and two other Afghan American women, Project ANAR (Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources) "draws on past models of similar U.S. aid to groups from Latin America and South Asia" using humanitarian parole. So far, the group has helped some 9,000 Afghans apply for parole to enter the U.S. — but an overwhelmed United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has yet to process any of the applications submitted. So far, almost 70,000 Afghans have been paroled into the U.S. as part of the government’s Operation Allies Welcome effort and an additional 20,000 Afghans have separately applied for parole since August, per USCIS.

Here is today’s list of local stories:

Western Kentucky University faculty members have launched a project to fill more than 150 welcome bags "with essential and comforting items" for Afghan arrivals. (Hannah Covington and Rhonda Miller, WKU Public Radio)
Chris George, executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, Connecticut, is looking to "develop a complimentary program of engaging community groups in the resettlement process." (Desiree D’Iorio, WSHU)
Raised in just 10 days, nearly $1.5 million will go to Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence to support refugee resettlement efforts. (Antonia Noori Farzan, The Providence Journal)

THE TED LASSO EFFECT — In an op-ed for Forbes, Stuart Anderson draws parallels between the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s recently published paper on hiring skilled immigrants. "When organizations (in our context, European football clubs) are given more flexibility to hire skilled immigrants, their performance improves, and such immigrants provide them with a competitive advantage relative to organizations that are more constrained," said Britta Glennon, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Organizations benefit from being able to hire more skilled immigrants."

NEW STRATEGY — With "the detritus of two decades of congressional efforts to reform U.S. immigration laws" buried in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, Foreign Policy columnist Ted Alden makes the case for a new approach to immigration reform. He identifies a number of priorities for the Biden administration to engage Congress on: Reform the rules for high-skilled immigration, control the southern border through a combination of enforcement resources and legal pathways, and greater resources for asylum processing. Whether or not Biden’s plan passes, Alden writes, "it is time to leave the vision of a comprehensive reform behind and start taking the slow, necessary steps to build an immigration system that helps the United States meet the challenges of the 21st century — especially growing competition from China."

Thanks for reading,

Ali