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Americans can now privately sponsor refugees from Ukraine, Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News.
Those who are interested can apply via an online portal, which DHS portrays as the main way the government will meet its commitment to resettle 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. Only potential sponsors, not Ukrainian refugees themselves, may apply. The process will involve vetting both would-be sponsors and refugees.
(Right on time, our policy team is out with an explainer about private sponsorship programs for refugees, which covers both the current effort and Sponsor Circles for Afghans. More on the latter below.)
The new DHS program is designed to be temporary — American officials say that Ukrainians who want to come here "are generally seeking a temporary safe haven, not permanent resettlement," Montoya-Galvez reports.
It’s also designed to deter Ukrainians from flying to Mexico and coming to the southern border to seek refuge in the U.S.
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The Forum Daily. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected]. And if you know others who’d like to receive this newsletter, please spread the word. They can subscribe here.
STEPPING UP — All over the country, Americans have stepped up to welcome Afghan refugees as part of Sponsor Circles, filling a void left by the Trump administration’s gutting of the existing refugee resettlement system. In The New Yorker, Eliza Griswold highlights the stories of four Afghan women who were forced to hide for months after the Taliban took over, then escaped and landed in Duluth, Minnesota, in February. "We Googled Duluth and saw how much snow there was," one of the women, Halima, said. "But their letter also said that they could help us continue our education, and that was most important." Although the program has its challenges, around 1,500 people have formed 175 Sponsor Circles in more than 25 states — and have welcomed several thousand Afghans.
Speaking of local welcome:
- Since the start of the year, the all-volunteer Lincoln Bike Kitchen in Nebraska has donated more than 50 bikes to local Afghan refugees, meeting a major need. (Peter Salter, Lincoln Journal Star)
- Sulaman and Arzo Akbarzada were forced into hiding in Afghanistan on their planned wedding day in August. Soldiers, State Department officials and volunteers organized a traditional ceremony for the couple at Camp Atterbury in October, but it wasn’t official. Finally, with the help of a pastor and his family, the couple married (again) earlier this month. (Rashika Jaipuriar, Indianapolis Star)
- Local organizations have stepped up to help the 200 or so refugees who have resettled in the Harrisonburg, Virginia, area: with housing, needed items, English language instruction and more. (Randi B. Hagi, WMRA)
BORDER — Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is preparing for three House hearings later this week that will likely focus on border policy. In the meantime, a federal judge has said he intends to grant a temporary restraining order that eventually could block the CDC’s ending of Title 42 on May 23, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reports. On the border itself, the mayors of Tucson, Arizona, and Brownsville, Texas, have come out in support of Title 42’s end, Rafael Bernal reports in The Hill. "Congress should work on real immigration reform that doesn’t
exploit an arcane public health authority to deny people their basic, human right to seek asylum," the mayors wrote. We’ll also be keeping an ear out for takeaways from a White House briefing this afternoon about plans surrounding the end of Title 42, as reported by Alvarez at CNN.
THANK YOU, GOV. ABBOTT — (Words I never thought I’d write.) To much fanfare, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was going to "take the border to President Biden" and bus migrants to Washington, D.C., once they had been processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Well, as The New York Times’ Eileen Sullivan and Edgar Sandoval report, turns out that both the Biden administration and migrants are deeply appreciative. After an eight-week journey from Brazil, Chadrack Mboyo-Bola was greeted by volunteers as he stepped off a 33-hour ride in a charter bus paid for by the state of Texas. "I would like to say thank you to the governor of Texas," Mboyo-Bola told The Times.
SCOTUS — Remember "Remain in Mexico"? This afternoon the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the Biden administration appropriately tried to end that border
policy, Suzanne Monyak reports in Roll Call. Earlier court rulings have kept the policy in effect while the judicial challenges play out. In her analysis, NPR’s Nina
Totenberg poses an important question: "At the heart of all this is a separate legal question: whether the courts should second-guess the foreign policy judgments that undergird this and other immigration policies." In this case, both the U.S. and Mexico see Remain in Mexico as a "flawed program in which migrants in squalid camps at the border have little ability to find lawyers or information for their hearings and are subject to violent attacks, kidnapping, extortion and rape by criminal cartels."
Thanks for reading,
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