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CAPTAIN KHOGYANI — Decades after fleeing Afghanistan as a boy, United Airlines pilot Zak Khogyani helped evacuate more than 1,000 Afghans last summer, in some cases traveling in the main cabin and translating for families in flight, Caitlin O’Kane reports for CBS News. "I knew I had to do something," Khogyani said. " … I couldn’t simply just sit on the couch and watch it happen without doing something to help the situation." On the local welcome front:
IMMIGRATION COURTS — Judges in the San Francisco Immigration Court were eager to speed up the deportations of immigrants who failed to appear after mail from the court didn’t reach them, Tal Kopan reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. Emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed
"that the fast-track docket for immigrants with returned mail, which was first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle last fall, was cheered at the highest levels of the courts and pursued with full awareness that scores of immigrants would likely be ordered deported as a result." Meanwhile, as Kopan previewed last week, lawmakers heard testimony Thursday about whether the immigration courts should be independent rather than part of the Department of Justice, Ellen M. Gilmer reports for Bloomberg Government. Rep. Zoe Lofgren
(D-California), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, is working on legislation that would do just that.
MIXED BAG — A variety of challenges have limited President Biden’s Day One goals to remake immigration, Ted Hesson reports in Reuters. They include "record-breaking border arrests, unfavorable court decisions on immigration, Republican opposition in Congress and internal divisions between liberals and moderates within his own administration." In contrast, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has touted his department’s progress on rebuilding "an immigration system that was dismantled, virtually in its entirety, by the prior administration … We have had to rescind cruel policies, bring offices back to life, issue new policies, and rebuild entire operations." Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News has more on the mixed bag that was immigration during Biden’s first year (and more from Mayorkas).
HAITIANS — Nicole Narea of Vox reports that the U.S. has deported nearly 14,000 Haitians to Mexico since September, per the UN’s International Organization for Migration. In 2021 alone, Mexico received more than 131,ooo asylum applications, of which an estimated 45% were Haitians and their Chilean-born children. Haitians in Mexico "face pervasive racism, and many are unable to work, have no access to medical care, and are targets for criminals," Narea writes. At this point, "Mexico is increasingly going to have to look like at least a long-term stopover point, if not a forever place, because the last thing people want to do is to head back to Haiti after they’ve been on the move for so long," said Caitlyn Yates, a consultant for the Migration Policy Institute and a University of British Columbia Ph.D. student studying Haitian migration. COVID-19 AND DETENTION — The number of COVID-19 deaths in ICE custody is far higher than what’s been publicly reported, writes Layla M. Razavi, interim co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, in an op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune. "COVID-19 exacerbates the already unconscionable, life-endangering medical neglect immigrants face in detention," Razavi writes. "What’s more, those in detention are more isolated than ever as visitation from family members and loved ones remains cut off, all the while oft-maskless prison guards continue to introduce COVID-19 into prisons." As people in detention, public health experts and advocates have called for releases, Razavi writes, "[i]t’s past time for this administration to reverse course and begin to release
immigrants back to the safety of their families and communities." |
