President Trump on Saturday approved a plan to lower the number of refugees that the U.S. will accept in fiscal year 2020 to just 18,000 — the lowest in thirty years, reports Kenneth Garger at the New York Post. Lara Jakes at The New York Times reports that the administration has also capped the number of Iraqi refugees who helped U.S. troops during the Iraq War: Only 4,000 can be resettled this year, while 110,000 are waiting to be approved.

In October — for the first time since records began — the number of refugees resettled in the U.S. hit zero, Natasha Frost writes for Quartz. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, urged the administration to reconsider those numbers: “We hope [Trump] will help us increase the number of refugees sent to Utah, so that we can offer a new homeland to the same number of individuals and families that we have in the past,” a spokesman for Gov. Herbert told Lisa Riley Roche at KSL.

This week, the only immigration convening of moderate and conservative leaders from across the country takes place in Washington, D.C. Please join us for our annual event, Leading the Way: An American Approach to Immigration. (Media can register for the event here.)

Welcome to the Monday edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

MINNESOTA MORNING READ – A bitter fight over school funding in Worthington, Minnesota, has become a flash point in the immigration debate, reports John Reinan at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The racial makeup of the prairie town’s school system has changed dramatically over the past few decades — 70% of district students are students of color — and in the past six years, more than 400 unaccompanied minors have arrived, most of them from Central America. A bond request to fund a new school in the district has divided the community, but Matt Widboom — a third-generation farmer, Worthington High School grad and Nobles County Commissioner — supports the bond despite estimating that it will cost him nearly $3,000 a year: “It’s a lot, but it’s an investment … There are two jobs for every person in Nobles County … We don’t have the people to fill the jobs. We need to retain these kids.”

BLOCKED – Over the weekend a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have required prospective immigrants to prove they had health insurance within 30 days of arriving or enough money to pay for “reasonably foreseeable medical costs,” Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke report at Reuters. Not for nothing, the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University found that recent immigrants without insurance accounted for less than one-tenth of 1% of U.S. medical expenditures in 2017.

MESS AT DHS – Stef W. Kight at Axios breaks down the personnel crisis at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where a quarter of leadership positions are listed as “acting” or vacant — including the role at the top. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in particular have struggled to maintain agents for reasons that include low pay, a tougher Senate confirmation process, and the administration’s handling of the border crisis. In fact, according to a DHS official, CBP “had to cancel a recruitment contract earlier this year because of the small number of applicants due to the ‘political and economic environment.’”

WHAT DOCTORS SAW – As they waited for their asylum cases to proceed, two doctors fleeing persecution in Cuba spent months detained at a privately run Louisiana detention center, CNN’s Catherine E Shoichet reports. The doctors, who asked to remain unnamed, said in court filings that they felt “powerless to help” in the face of incorrect diagnoses, improper treatment and delays in care: “They don't see you as a patient … They see you as a prisoner.”

MADE OF STEEL? – President Trump has repeatedly pushed for a steel slat design for his border wall, calling it “absolutely critical to border security.” But photographic evidence obtained by Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley at NBC News shows that the steel slat border barrier prototype can be easily cut through with common tools found at a hardware store. And The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reports that smugglers have repeatedly sawed through new sections of the wall, “opening gaps large enough for people and drug loads to pass through.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali