Tania Romero, a Honduran mother of four, faces deportation – and stage 4 oral cancer.
Her son, Christian, is a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and doctoral student at Yale who grew up in the U.S. Christian is campaigning for immigration authorities to release his mother, who has been detained since August after being pulled over for a traffic violation and now faces deportation to Honduras, Miriam Jordan at The New York Times reports.
“Sending my mother back to Honduras would be a death sentence,” he said.
Welcome to Friday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes.
We’re less and a week out from our annual event, Leading the Way: An American Approach to Immigration. (Media can register for the event here).
Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at[email protected].
“WE’RE NOT WELL” – In August, more than 600 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across seven Mississippi cities conducted “the largest single-state immigration-enforcement operation” in American history. One of those cities was Morton, Mississippi, which Charles Bethea profiles in a powerful New Yorker piece. On one hand, the First United Methodist Church in Morton has “helped disburse more than a hundred thousand dollars for more than two hundred local families” to pay utility bills. On the other hand, Cristina, a small business owner from Nicaragua who has lived in Mississippi for 18 years, told Bethea: “Look at how they come to kill Hispanics. I’m afraid to go to Walmart. I’m afraid to go to the mall. To the movies. We’re not well. Not well. This has affected us so much. We can’t work. Every day, every day, I pray to God that my husband comes home. Because immigration is everywhere.”
TRUMP ON FACEBOOK – While President Trump’s reelection campaign has run more than 3,000 Facebook ads in English focused on curbing illegal immigration in the last six months, his “more than 1,200 Facebook ads in Spanish during the same period hardly mention his signature campaign promise to be tough on immigration,” Jason Lange and Elizabeth Culliford write in Reuters. But Trump “has run more ads in Spanish than all of the 18 Democratic presidential contenders combined.” Way to take the constituency for granted, Democrats.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN – The mental health crisis is more acute among U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, who have a rate of suicide almost 28% higher than at any other law enforcement agency – 115 CBP employees have died by suicide since 2007, Justin Rohrlich reports for Quartz. And yet, despite this serious and real problem, “sources with knowledge of CBP’s efforts to address mental health told Quartz that the agency isn’t doing enough and, in fact, has fostered a culture where seeking help is not only discouraged but punished.” There’s a sensible solution: Christian Penichet-Paul, the Forum’s policy and advocacy manager, “called on the Trump administration—which is spending somewhere between $25 million and $1 billion for each mile of border wall—to redirect some of that money toward proper counseling and other psychological support services for border officers.”
HUMAN SMUGGLING AND U.S. CITIZENS – A deadly vehicle crash in June involving migrants racing away from law enforcement north of the Rio Grande has led to murder and human smuggling charges, writes Maria Sacchetti in The Washington Post. The charges were filed against six teens, including “former high school football players, a track runner and a student active in church.” The charges “revealed a growing trend as the Trump administration tries to crack down on illegal immigration along the southern border: the deep involvement of U.S. citizens.” While smugglers are often labeled as part of international gangs and cartels, “more than 60 percent of people convicted of smuggling in federal courts in recent years have been U.S. citizens, the majority of them with little or no criminal history.” More evidence that our broken immigration system is a jobs program for smugglers.
“DELETING RECORDS” – Immigration court data released by the Justice Department contains “‘gross irregularities’ and the agency appears to have ‘silently but systematically’ deleted nearly a million records,” according to the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. Claire Hansen in U.S. News & World Report writes that TRAC – which is well-respected among policymakers and researchers – “determined that it appeared the agency was both unintentionally and intentionally deleting records from the data releases.”
Thanks for reading,
Ali
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