For The New Yorker, Ben Taub tells the gripping story of Omar Ameen, an Iraqi refugee who came to the U.S. with his family fleeing violence at home. Now, Ameen stands falsely accused by U.S. officials of being an ISIS commander — and could be sent back to Iraq and killed. The wrongful arrest comes as a result of the administration’s efforts to paint Middle Eastern migrants as terrorists: Federal employees “have been co-opted into a campaign to extradite an innocent man to almost certain death, in order to make a racist talking point appear to be slightly less of a fiction,” Taub writes. The piece is a must-read.

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

“BIRTH TOURISM” – In its continued effort to crack down on birthright citizenship, the Trump administration will target “birth tourism,” or pregnant women visiting the U.S. from other countries, Stef W. Kight and Jonathan Swan report for Axios. Specifically, the administration wants to give State Department officials “the authority to deny foreigners the short-term business and tourism visas if they believe the process is being used to facilitate automatic citizenship.” But as Jeffrey Gorsky, former chief legal adviser in the State Department visa office, points out: “The underlying practical issue is that very few people who give birth in the U.S. got a visa for that specific purpose. Most people already have visas and come in later.”

WORLD’S MOST COSTLY – Trump’s border wall will now cost more than $11 billion in total, making it the most expensive wall of any kind in the world, John Burnett writes at NPR. “[President] Bush’s fence averaged $4 million a mile; Trump’s wall costs five times that — $20 million a mile,” he writes. "The overall cost of $11 billion is approaching the price of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.”

DEPORTED TO GUATEMALA – A federal judge in Texas yesterday denied a request to stop the deportation of a 23-year-old Honduran mother and her young children to Guatemala, Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News, where they will be asked to decide between staying in Guatemala or returning to Honduras. The children — ages 6 years old and 18 months old — were each recently hospitalized and not healthy enough to be deported, according to the family’s lawyer. Meanwhile, their father — who is currently in the U.S. — says that if the family returns to Honduras, they could be harmed. The decision comes as the Trump administration is sending dozens of asylum seekers to Guatemala as part of a controversial “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” with the country.

MIDDLE-CLASS MIGRANTS – In countries like Nigeria, middle-class professionals who aren’t necessarily struggling at home are still being drawn to the opportunities offered in Canada, writes Eromo Egbejule for The Atlantic. Canada’s sophisticated and transparent system for skilled immigrants is aiming to attract more than one million people by 2021: “Canada gets skilled workers who are productive and contribute to economic activities than they consume,” said Nonso Obikili, chief economist at Nigeria’s BusinessDay newspaper.

CLIMATE REFUGEES – In a pivotal decision, the UN’s Human Rights Committee has ruled that refugees fleeing the effects of the climate crisis cannot be forced to return home by their adoptive countries, Rob Picheta reports for CNN. The judgement came in the case of a refugee from Kiribati, a Pacific island nation at risk of becoming the first country to disappear under rising sea levels, who applied for protection in New Zealand. According to a World Bank study, 143 million people across South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are at risk of becoming climate refugees.

TRAFFICKING – January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and in an opinion piece for The Hill, Evangeline M. Chan, director of the Safe Horizon Immigration Law Project, delves into how the Trump administration’s immigration policies are harming human trafficking survivors: “Policies that create barriers for immigrant survivors to come forward, report crimes, cooperate with law enforcement and apply for protection in the United States, push survivors further into the shadows, making them more vulnerable to being trafficked or re-trafficked, harmed or even killed.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali