In a 5-4 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule to go into effect while legal challenges brought by the state of New York and immigrant advocacy groups proceed. The rule allows an immigration officer to deny someone a green card — or bar them from the U.S. altogether — if the individual “makes use of a public assistance program, such as housing assistance, food stamps or Medicaid — or an immigration officer estimates he or she might in the future,” Brent Kendall and Michelle Hackman report in The Wall Street Journal.

In a column for Forbes, Stuart Anderson calls the decision the “administration’s most consequential economic policy” to date. And remember, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came out against the public charge “ploy” last spring.

Our view: The implementation of the public charge rule will have a chilling effect on immigrants and their families that include U.S. citizens. Just the specter of the rule has steered families away from programs they can access legally. The rule likely will curtail legal immigration as well. Studies have found that the rule could block half of U.S. citizens’ foreign-born spouses from obtaining green cards and could prevent more than half of family-based green card applicants overall.

Hurting children and families should not be an American value.

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

A GLOBAL CHALLENGE – The challenges we face at our southern border vis-à-vis asylum seekers fleeing desperate situations are ones that many countries face around the world. In Libya, an increase in fighting “will make life even more precarious for the more than 636,000 refugees and migrants in the country,” Faras Ghani writes for Al Jazeera. Since 2016, nearly 12,000 refugees and migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe. “If the conflict continues to escalate, refugees and migrants are certain to seek ways of escaping from the country, using both land and sea routes,” said Jeff Crisp, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre.

RETIRING JUDGES – Dozens of immigration judges concerned about their independence in the Trump era have left the bench, Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the Los Angeles Times. One leading cause: “a quota system that the Trump administration imposed in 2018 requiring each judge to close at least 700 cases annually, monitoring their progress with a dashboard display installed on their computers.” The system has led to judges leaving the bench — in some cases soon after being appointed. “Judges are going to other federal agencies and retiring as soon as possible. They just don’t want to deal with it. It’s become unbearable,” said A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

FIFTH DEATH IN FOUR MONTHS – A British immigrant was found dead in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody this past weekend, marking “the fifth death of a person in the agency's custody in the past four months,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News. 39-year-old Ben James Owen’s death is also “the third apparent self-inflicted strangulation of an ICE detainee since October.”

BRIDGE BUILDERS – The annual BridgeBuilder Challenge has awarded five winners from across the globe with a million-dollar grant to help support the resettlement of displaced refugees across the world, reports Devin Thorpe in Forbes. “‘From supporting Senegalese ‘manteros’ (street vendors) in Spain, to creating employment opportunities for migrants in Paris’ cultural sector, to redesigning a safer, more inclusive ID card system in the U.S. South, the 5 Top Ideas represent a geographic breadth and spectrum of perspectives on a topic that influences every corner of the world,’ said program manager Alex Nana-Sinkam.”

"LOOK FOR THE CHURCHES" – Nabeha and her daughter Hanin —Iraqi refugees living in Fort Worth, Texas — have adjusted to life away from home by working with the local Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and helping other refugee families in the region, Blake Tommey reports for the Baptist Standard. Nabeha, who was told to “look for the churches” when she arrived in America, said that “[w]hen refugees come to the United States, they don’t know English, how to get legal documents, how to get their children into school or even which grocery store to go to … So, I always help and advise other people. They contact me about everything — jobs, food stamps, how to apply for Medicaid — and I help them and answer their questions.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali