Tuesday, June 21
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THE FORUM DAILY

Since early 2017, one-third of people the Border Patrol has held have
been minors, report Anna Flagg and Julia Preston of The Marshall
Project
(in
partnership with Politico Magazine
).
And of those children, about a third were held longer than the 3-day
limit court rulings and an anti-trafficking statute have established. 

Conditions inside Border Patrol stations have elicited "constant reports
of neglect and abuse," including a teenager, originally from Guatemala,
who was held in a Texas facility for 18 days with a fractured shoulder.
 

Even under the Biden administration, "[l]ittle has been done to improve
conditions for children in Border Patrol facilities, or to prevent them
from ending up there at all, with official efforts focused primarily
instead on reducing the time children spend detained," Flagg and Preston
report.  

As Congress, advocates, and Border Patrol agents call for change, the
agency is trying to respond - and considering plans for new, less
jail-like family detention centers. But the percentage of detainees who
are minors likely remains about the same. 

Welcome to Tuesday's edition of The Forum Daily. I hope you had a
meaningful Juneteenth. I'm Dan Gordon, the Forum's strategic
communications VP. If you have a story to share from your own community,
please send it to me at [email protected]
. 

**WORLD REFUGEE DAY** - Global displacement remains at a record high
and refugee resettlement is at a record low this World Refugee Day
(yesterday), reports Jeff Gammage of The Philadelphia Inquirer
.
The U.S. is on track to resettle only 18,962 refugees this fiscal year
- nowhere near the refugee ceiling of 125,000. "One of the key
problems is the process just takes too long, anywhere from two to 10
years," said our own Danilo Zak. "The program is just not at a place
where it can respond in an agile and effective way. If the pipeline is
too slow we're just not going to see those [larger] numbers." For more
on how the U.S. can improve refugee resettlement, see the piece in
Newsweek

by World Relief President and CEO Myal Greene - and catch up on our
Facebook Live
from
Friday.  

DACA - Faith leaders continue to advocate for Congress to pass
permanent, legislative solutions for DACA recipients and all Dreamers,
reports Mya Jaradat of The Deseret News
.
"Most DACA recipients still face uncertainty about their future in this
country, to say nothing of their families, including hundreds of
thousands of U.S.-citizen children, employers and the communities that
depend on them," said the Rev. Mario E. Dorsonville, the auxiliary
bishop of Washington. "For those confronted by this reality, the church
remains committed to walking with you and seeing this injustice
remedied." Members of the Evangelical Immigration Table recently
renewed

their call for broader immigration reforms, including Dreamers. Locally,
pastor Patrick Taylor of Aiken, South Carolina, homes in a solution for
Dreamers in his op-ed for The Post and Courier
,
as does Brenda Kirk in The Oklahoman
.
(Patrick and Brenda, as well as Joel Tooley below, are also Forum
mobilizers.) 

**'I'M SADDENED'** - Bethany Christian Services has announced

it no longer can serve unaccompanied minors in Florida because of a
recent executive order by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Katie LaGrone
reports for E.W. Scripps Company
.
"I'm saddened that organizations like Bethany Christian Services, who
have a proven track record of caring for the vulnerable, that they would
be forced to make this kind of decision that goes against their
standards and goes against their hope to care for children," said Pastor
Joel Tooley, a Melbourne Pastor and Bethany Board member.  

CHALLENGE COINS - A "challenge coin" depicting the viral photo of a
Border Patrol agent on horseback aggressively grabbing a Haitian migrant
is now being circulated, prompting a CBP investigation, Michael Wilner
and Jacqueline Charles report in the Miami Herald
.
As Hamed Aleaziz reports in The Los Angeles Times
,
details surrounding the production of the coin (and another similar one)
are still unclear. "These coins anger me because the hateful images on
them have no place in a professional law enforcement agency," said CBP
Commissioner Chris Magnus. "Those who make or share these deeply
offensive coins detract and distract from the extraordinarily difficult
and often life-saving work Border Patrol agents do every day across the
country." 

**AFGHANS REJECTED** - Since June 2, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services has approved only 297 humanitarian parole

requests from Afghans who were not evacuated to the U.S. - and
rejected 4,246, reports Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News
.
Many thousands more applications have not been processed, in part
because USCIS is used to handling only about 2,000 applications yearly.
In addition, 70% of applicants are still in Afghanistan, without access
to a U.S. consulate for a requisite interview.

On local welcome:  

* Tarjorman, a veteran-founded nonprofit group, helped Afghan
interpreter Mohammad escape Kabul and resettle in Maryland. It is now
working on a plan to help his mother flee Afghanistan as well. (Tammie
Moore, Defense Visual  Information Distribution Service
) 

* The nonprofit Global Impact Initiative in Austin, Texas, recently
launched a new program to help refugees obtain commercial driver's
licenses, pointing toward jobs in the trucking industry. Forty-two
refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, already have signed up. (Conner
Board, KVUE
) 

* In collaboration with a new food supplier, a group of Vermont-based
organizations is helping Afghan refugees in the Brattleboro area gain
access to halal chicken, allowing them "to eat comfortably in alignment
with their religion." (Caitlin Howard, The Keene Sentinel
) 

Thanks for reading, 

Dan  

P.S. This fall, Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet representing a Syrian
refugee, will visit New York City for the first time to "promote an open
embrace of refugees and immigrants," Julia Jacobs reports for The New
York Times
.

 

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