Last month, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo bought a new couch. That might seem like a small thing, but it felt huge to the Yuba City, Calif.-based poet, whose lyrical memoir, Children of the Land, describes an upbringing lived in the shadows as part of a family of immigrants from Mexico.
Originally Published in Time
Jasmine Aguilera – December 8, 2020
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is officially accepting new applications after the government fully reinstated the program on Monday. On Friday, a judge ordered the program to be fully reinstated to what it was before the Trump Administration attempted to rescind it in 2017, a reaffirmation of an earlier Supreme Court ruling.
DACA protects qualifying young people known as Dreamers, who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children, from deportation temporarily. It also grants work authorization, a social security number and access to Medicare.
DACA began as an executive action by the Obama Administration in 2012, protecting an estimated 645,000 young people from deportation, with the option to renew their application every two years. The Trump Administration terminated DACA in Sept. 2017, but the Supreme Court ruled in June 2020 that the government had not followed proper procedure to end the program, forcing the government to keep DACA alive and returning the program to what it was before Sept. 2017. In July 2020, Chad Wolf, Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), reinstated the program through a memorandum, but only for those who had already received DACA, without opening up applications to new potential recipients. It also limited the protections to one year with the option to renew.
The reinstating of DACA is the bare minimum that has to happen when it comes down to the rights and the power of our undocumented community across the country, Vanessa Luna, a former DACA recipient and co-founder of ImmSchools, a nonprofit that partners with K-12 schools to support undocumented students, tells TIME. She adds that DACA is only a temporary fix, and that comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship could be a permanent solution for young Dreamers and their undocumented family members. So while we acknowledge this huge announcement and the impact that it has on the lives of many young people that have been here for many years…we also acknowledge that there’s a lot more work to do.
Judge Nicholas Garaufis, of the Eastern District of New York, on Friday ordered the government to reinstate DACA fully and immediately, restoring it to what it was prior to Sept. 2017, because of the Supreme Court decision, plus the fact that the court had ruled previously that Wolf was not lawfully serving as acting secretary of DHS, his memorandum on DACA had to be vacated.
DHS did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment. In a public announcement of the ruling on the DHS website, the agency wrote DHS will comply with Judge Garaufis’ order while it remains in effect, but DHS may seek relief from the order.
An estimated 1.3 million people have become eligible for DACA since the Trump Administration terminated the program in Sept. 2017, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. The 1.3 million are among those who can now submit their applications for the first time. Those who had already received DACA before Sept. 2017 will have their protections extended from one year to two years with the option to renew.
Tom Wong, associate professor of political science at UC San Diego, predicts many first-time DACA applicants may be facing a decision about whether to apply now while Trump is still in office, or wait until Jan. 20 after President-Elect Joe Biden is sworn in as President. The Biden Campaign had promised to reinstate DACA in its first 100 days in office.
Are you going to pay application fees to a Trump Administration that may not even review your application because its seeking another release from the court order, or do you hold on to your money and wait for the Biden Administration to come in and have more confidence that your application will be fairly reviewed?, says Wong.
He adds that he is pessimistic about the Trump Administration fully following through on the court order. It is a great win for DACA, for DACA recipients and for those that are potentially eligible, Wong says. But whether or not the Trump Administration will turn this court order in to something that substantively changes people’s lives, I am pessimistic about.
A potential DACA recipient can submit an application, Wong says for example, but it is unclear whether other changes have been made to review those applications fairly. One unknown, Wong says is whether or not the updated language from USCIS is just lip service to the court order or if it means a full resumption of the program.
Garaufis has ordered DHS to provide data on DACA applicants, including first-time applicants and how many were approved and denied, by Jan. 4, 2021.
The new application will cost $495 to file. Organizations like ImmSchools are planning to provide legal and financial resources to aid in the application process.
For Dreamers like Ramon Sanchez, a 24-year-old from Texas who was born in Mexico, the new court order means he can go back to renewing his application and paying the application fee every two years instead of each year. He received DACA when he was 16, the same year President Barack Obama implemented the program. By now, he says, he’s used to the application renewal process, but understands how daunting it can be for new applicants.
Have hope, he tells TIME. Own it. I used to be embarrassed of [DACA], and I used to feel like I couldn’t tell people because I was scared of being deported or being incarcerated. Now I yell it loud and proud.
Both Sanchez and Luna said they were confident the incoming Biden Administration could expand DACA. Luna believes the Biden Administration could include young people who were brought to the U.S. after 2007, or create a plan similar to Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (known as DAPA), an Obama program intended to be a pathway to citizenship for undocumented parents of American children or children who are lawful permanent residents that was blocked in court and rescinded by the Trump Administration.
At the moment, the only category of people who qualify are those have lived in the U.S. consecutively since 2007 and who arrived in the country before their 16th birthday. Those with criminal records are not eligible.
Originally Published in The Intercept
John Washington – December 9, 2020
U.S. IMMIGRATION AND Customs Enforcement’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a horrifying – and avoidable – calamity. By handing out masks late, forcing detained people into close quarters, refusing to release the medically vulnerable, not reporting infections, testing inadequately, frequently transferring detainees, and pressuring staff and guards to continue working despite compromised health, ICE’s handling of the pandemic has led to over 7,000 reported positive cases and at least 8 coronavirus-related deaths among detained people.
A new report from Detention Watch Network finds that the dire situation inside also led to wider consequences: When spread in the communities surrounding detention centers is included, ICE’s sprawling incarceration system added nearly a quarter million cases to the total U.S. caseload.
The DWN report, Hotbeds of Infection, released on Wednesday, lays bare how ICE’s abundant failures and dilatory mismanagement killed and infected people inside detention centers and significantly contributed to the spread of Covid-19 across the country. By August 1, almost 5.5 percent of total U.S. cases, according to the report, were attributable to spread from ICE detention centers. The report is yet another damning indication that ICE’s dereliction in protecting basic human rights, grievous medical neglect, and lack of transparency in how it detains and treats people in its system of over 200 detention centers is a massive public health threat – both to detainees and the greater U.S. population.
The impact of ICE’s failure to adequately respond to the pandemic was far reaching and multilayered, the DWN report says. Even as COVID-19 cases have surged across the country, ICE has ramped up enforcement activities, creating a recipe for disaster for those in detention and surrounding communities.
The report’s authors were at pains to explain that it is not immigrants who spread disease but rather the immigration detention regime – the nature of incarceration and all it entails – that fosters disease and sickens migrants and communities alike. It is setting up ideal lab conditions for incubating viruses and putting them out into the community, said Gregory Hooks, a professor of sociology at McMaster University and co-author of the DWN report.
Dr. Ranit Mishori, a Georgetown University School of Medicine professor and senior medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights, said, The United States has a long history of scapegoating immigrants for the spread of infectious diseases, yet medical evidence suggests that punitive immigration enforcement – such as packing detention facilities or scaring immigrants away from accessing medical care – is the true threat to public health.
Danielle Bennett, an ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that since the outbreak, the agency has taken extensive steps to safeguard all detainees, staff and contractors, including: reducing the number of detainees in custody by placing individuals on alternatives to detention programs, suspending social visitation, incorporating social distancing practices with staggered meals and recreation times, and through the use of testing, cohorting and medical isolation.
BETWEEN MAY 1 and August 1, the DWN report found, ICE detention facilities were responsible for over 245,000 Covid-19 cases throughout the country. If a separate country had reported the number of Covid-19 cases attributed just to ICE detention facilities at that point, it would have ranked 16th in the world, having a higher case rate than Germany, France, and Canada. The infection rate inside immigration detention centers was 13 times higher than that of the general U.S. population, which would have, taken together, made them by far the most contagious country in the world, according to World Health Organization stats.
Hotbeds of Infection takes advantage of county-level data on coronavirus infections made available by the New York Times. The authors examined links between ICE detention facilities and confirmed cases of Covid-19 in nearby counties. Focusing on the initial spread of Covid-19 and based on logistic regression modeling, the report provides evidence that Covid-19 arrived sooner – in April and May – and outbreaks were more severe in counties with ICE facilities, as well as in neighboring counties. Over the summer, there was a sharp contrast between counties situated in multicounty economic areas with a high number of people detained by ICE and counties situated in areas with fewer people detained. As the pandemic spiraled out of control over the summer, the health care system in economic areas with a significant ICE presence were burdened by thousands of additional Covid-19 cases.
Recognizing that other factors besides the presence of detention centers contribute to increased Covid-19 caseloads, the authors included a range of control variables, including but not limited to the presence of nursing homes; meatpacking plants; other high-density living quarters including prisons, military bases, or universities; population density; and the percentage of nonwhite populations, who continue to suffer the worst of the pandemic. After taking into account these other variables, the analysis showed a statistically significant relationship between the presence of an ICE detention center and an exacerbation of the Covid-19 outbreak in the surrounding multicounty area. (DWN also released a companion methodology report.)
The advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants reports that over half of immigration detention centers are currently reporting coronavirus outbreaks. According to the DWN report, California, Texas, and Arizona had by far the most Covid-19 cases resulting from the presence of ICE detention facilities.
ICE wasn’t only responsible for imperiling the people it detained and for spreading the virus to surrounding communities, it was also spreading the virus abroad. By continuing deportations even while the U.S.-Mexico border was almost completely shut down for migrants and asylum-seekers, ICE exported the virus to Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, El Salvador, and India – all countries with few intensive care beds, few respirators, and relatively meager health systems particularly vulnerable to viral spread.
Last spring, at one point, people deported from the United States made up as much as 20 percent of all known Covid-19 cases in Guatemala. In the 2020 fiscal year, ICE deported 164,455 people from the U.S., potentially sending thousands, or even tens of thousands, of cases throughout the world.
ATTORNEYS, ADVOCATES, DETAINEES, and even judges began sounding the alarm about Covid-19 in the immigration detention system in March, but ICE failed to heed the calls to take significant preventive measures. Early on in the pandemic, the Philadelphia Inquirer reportedthat ICE was not providing detainees with proper information about the virus. The Intercept reported that a detention center in Georgia, while engaging in a host of medically dangerous practices, was ignoring and underreporting coronavirus cases.
In April, a federal judge ordered ICE to consider the release of all detainees over the age of 55 due to risks from coronavirus, ruling that ICE has shown medical indifference and put people with serious medical conditions or disabilities at substantial risk of harm. Overall, though, very few people were released. Thousands got sick.
Just last week, a judge issued a scathing decision against ICE’s Mesa Verde processing facility in Bakersfield, California – where more than half of the detainees and one-third of the staff have tested positive for the virus – claiming that ICE’s actions showed a deliberate indifference to the safety of the detainees. The judge admonished ICE and the private detention corporation GEO Group for their appalling and abominable response to infections, accusing the detention authorities of deliberately avoiding tests so that the facilities would not need to take protective measures for detainees. The Intercept recently reported that detainees at an Alabama ICE jail were punished, including with solitary confinement, merely for asking to be tested.
Meanwhile, medical staff, administrators, vendors, visitors, and guards have been bringing the virus into detention centers across the country and carrying the virus out, with ICE doing little – and sometimes nothing – to contain the spread on both sides of the bars.
Immigration detention centers, the report grimly notes, have been among the deadliest of public institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The U.S. immigration detention system has a history of medically negligent, dehumanizing, squalid, and sometimes deadly conditions – including previous viral outbreaks – that far predate the Covid-19 crisis. Just in fiscal year 2020, a total of 20 people died in ICE detention centers.
For years, experts have repeatedly condemned the agency for violating basic health standards, keeping detained people locked up for prolonged periods, abusing them, even torturing them, and placing them at high risk for mental and physical decline. In 2019, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and its Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties began investigating troubling reports of in-custody deaths of adults and children, as well as deficient medical care, improper treatment, and filthy conditions at facilities operated by both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, another immigration enforcement agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. They found a widespread failure to provide necessary medical care to detainees with serious and chronic medical conditions, along with critical medical staff shortages. The conditions, in other words, were perfect for a rapacious virus to take hold.
Hotbeds of Infection is the first report to build on the investigations into the dangers within detention centers and looks closely at the risks they pose to the communities where they’re located. Evidence points to detention centers sparking infections early in the pandemic and making outbreaks worse, the report says. The multicounty areas surrounding detention centers with the highest number of people detained saw a 20 percent increase in Covid-19 caseloads. Hooks, the report co-author, said, I think of prisons and detention centers as ongoing superspreader events.
IN MAY, OFFICIALS in Pearsall, Texas, raised the alarm after every local case of Covid-19 could be traced back to ICE’s negligence at the South Texas ICE Processing Center. Similarly, a detention center in El Paso, Texas, has not only been experiencing its own scourge but is exacerbating wider community contagion: El Paso and its surrounding areas are suffering one of the worst infection rates in the country – and the immigration detention center contributed to more than 1,250 cases in the county.
While the number of people locked into immigration detention has been going down throughout the pandemic – in large part because of the broader lockdown, especially at the U.S.-Mexico border – the concern remains that ICE isn’t doing enough to release people. Legally, the agency could release almost everyone in their custody, and there have been calls for them to do so.
Jails and prisons are equally dangerous for spreading infection, though their contribution to community spread – with thousands of them throughout the country – is harder to tabulate. The infection rate in prisons is more than four times as high as that of the general public and the death rate is more than twice as high, according to a report from the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice. And, much like immigrant detention centers, prisons and jails see people constantly going in and out.
In late October, Gothamist reported that ICE agents were rearresting older people who, because of their medical vulnerabilities, had been previously released and locking them back into detention. Bennett, the ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that, since March, ICE has worked to reduce intake so that the agency is maintaining detention capacity at each facility at or below the 75 percent recommended by the CDC – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nonetheless, social distancing inside detention centers remains all but impossible. Detainees have complained not only of inadequate testing and being forced into close quarters with a transient population but also a lack of basic essentials such as masks, disinfectant, or soap.
These facilities are dangerous, said Bob Libal, another co-author of the DWN report. They are bad for the people detained, bad for the people who work there, and bad for the surrounding communities.
Leonel Ignacio Martn contributed reporting.
Originally Published in The Intercept
John Washington – December 9, 2020
U.S. IMMIGRATION AND Customs Enforcement’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a horrifying — and avoidable — calamity. By handing out masks late, forcing detained people into close quarters, refusing to release the medically vulnerable, not reporting infections, testing inadequately, frequently transferring detainees, and pressuring staff and guards to continue working despite compromised health, ICE’s handling of the pandemic has led to over 7,000 reported positive cases and at least 8 coronavirus-related deaths among detained people.
A new report from Detention Watch Network finds that the dire situation inside also led to wider consequences: When spread in the communities surrounding detention centers is included, ICE’s sprawling incarceration system added nearly a quarter million cases to the total U.S. caseload.
The DWN report, “Hotbeds of Infection,” released on Wednesday, lays bare how ICE’s abundant failures and dilatory mismanagement killed and infected people inside detention centers and significantly contributed to the spread of Covid-19 across the country. By August 1, almost 5.5 percent of total U.S. cases, according to the report, were attributable to spread from ICE detention centers. The report is yet another damning indication that ICE’s dereliction in protecting basic human rights, grievous medical neglect, and lack of transparency in how it detains and treats people in its system of over 200 detention centers is a massive public health threat — both to detainees and the greater U.S. population.
“The impact of ICE’s failure to adequately respond to the pandemic was far reaching and multilayered,” the DWN report says. “Even as COVID-19 cases have surged across the country, ICE has ramped up enforcement activities, creating a recipe for disaster for those in detention and surrounding communities.”
The report’s authors were at pains to explain that it is not immigrants who spread disease but rather the immigration detention regime — the nature of incarceration and all it entails — that fosters disease and sickens migrants and communities alike. “It is setting up ideal lab conditions for incubating viruses and putting them out into the community,” said Gregory Hooks, a professor of sociology at McMaster University and co-author of the DWN report.
Dr. Ranit Mishori, a Georgetown University School of Medicine professor and senior medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights, said, “The United States has a long history of scapegoating immigrants for the spread of infectious diseases, yet medical evidence suggests that punitive immigration enforcement — such as packing detention facilities or scaring immigrants away from accessing medical care — is the true threat to public health.”
Danielle Bennett, an ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that since the outbreak, the agency “has taken extensive steps to safeguard all detainees, staff and contractors, including: reducing the number of detainees in custody by placing individuals on alternatives to detention programs, suspending social visitation, incorporating social distancing practices with staggered meals and recreation times, and through the use of testing, cohorting and medical isolation.”
BETWEEN MAY 1 and August 1, the DWN report found, ICE detention facilities were responsible for over 245,000 Covid-19 cases throughout the country. If a separate country had reported the number of Covid-19 cases attributed just to ICE detention facilities at that point, it would have ranked 16th in the world, having a higher case rate than Germany, France, and Canada. The infection rate inside immigration detention centers was 13 times higher than that of the general U.S. population, which would have, taken together, made them by far the most contagious country in the world, according to World Health Organization stats.
“Hotbeds of Infection” takes advantage of county-level data on coronavirus infections made available by the New York Times. The authors examined links between ICE detention facilities and confirmed cases of Covid-19 in nearby counties. Focusing on the initial spread of Covid-19 and based on logistic regression modeling, the report provides evidence that Covid-19 arrived sooner — in April and May — and outbreaks were more severe in counties with ICE facilities, as well as in neighboring counties. Over the summer, there was a sharp contrast between counties situated in multicounty economic areas with a high number of people detained by ICE and counties situated in areas with fewer people detained. As the pandemic spiraled out of control over the summer, the health care system in economic areas with a significant ICE presence were burdened by thousands of additional Covid-19 cases.
Recognizing that other factors besides the presence of detention centers contribute to increased Covid-19 caseloads, the authors included a range of control variables, including but not limited to the presence of nursing homes; meatpacking plants; other high-density living quarters including prisons, military bases, or universities; population density; and the percentage of nonwhite populations, who continue to suffer the worst of the pandemic. After taking into account these other variables, the analysis showed a statistically significant relationship between the presence of an ICE detention center and an exacerbation of the Covid-19 outbreak in the surrounding multicounty area. (DWN also released a companion methodology report.)
The advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants reports that over half of immigration detention centers are currently reporting coronavirus outbreaks. According to the DWN report, California, Texas, and Arizona had by far the most Covid-19 cases resulting from the presence of ICE detention facilities.
ICE wasn’t only responsible for imperiling the people it detained and for spreading the virus to surrounding communities, it was also spreading the virus abroad. By continuing deportations even while the U.S.-Mexico border was almost completely shut down for migrants and asylum-seekers, ICE exported the virus to Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, El Salvador, and India — all countries with few intensive care beds, few respirators, and relatively meager health systems particularly vulnerable to viral spread.
Last spring, at one point, people deported from the United States made up as much as 20 percent of all known Covid-19 cases in Guatemala. In the 2020 fiscal year, ICE deported 164,455 people from the U.S., potentially sending thousands, or even tens of thousands, of cases throughout the world.
ATTORNEYS, ADVOCATES, DETAINEES, and even judges began sounding the alarm about Covid-19 in the immigration detention system in March, but ICE failed to heed the calls to take significant preventive measures. Early on in the pandemic, the Philadelphia Inquirer reportedthat ICE was not providing detainees with proper information about the virus. The Intercept reported that a detention center in Georgia, while engaging in a host of medically dangerous practices, was ignoring and underreporting coronavirus cases.
In April, a federal judge ordered ICE to consider the release of all detainees over the age of 55 due to risks from coronavirus, ruling that ICE has shown “medical indifference” and put people with serious medical conditions or disabilities at “substantial risk of harm.” Overall, though, very few people were released. Thousands got sick.
Just last week, a judge issued a scathing decision against ICE’s Mesa Verde processing facility in Bakersfield, California — where more than half of the detainees and one-third of the staff have tested positive for the virus — claiming that ICE’s actions showed a “deliberate indifference to the safety of the detainees.” The judge admonished ICE and the private detention corporation GEO Group for their “appalling” and “abominable” response to infections, accusing the detention authorities of deliberately avoiding tests so that the facilities would not need to take protective measures for detainees. The Intercept recently reported that detainees at an Alabama ICE jail were punished, including with solitary confinement, merely for asking to be tested.
Meanwhile, medical staff, administrators, vendors, visitors, and guards have been bringing the virus into detention centers across the country and carrying the virus out, with ICE doing little — and sometimes nothing — to contain the spread on both sides of the bars.
Immigration detention centers, the report grimly notes, “have been among the deadliest of public institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The U.S. immigration detention system has a history of medically negligent, dehumanizing, squalid, and sometimes deadly conditions — including previous viral outbreaks — that far predate the Covid-19 crisis. Just in fiscal year 2020, a total of 20 people died in ICE detention centers.
For years, experts have repeatedly condemned the agency for violating basic health standards, keeping detained people locked up for prolonged periods, abusing them, even torturing them, and placing them at high risk for mental and physical decline. In 2019, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and its Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties began investigating troubling reports of in-custody deaths of adults and children, as well as deficient medical care, improper treatment, and filthy conditions at facilities operated by both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, another immigration enforcement agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. They found “a widespread failure to provide necessary medical care to detainees with serious and chronic medical conditions, along with critical medical staff shortages.” The conditions, in other words, were perfect for a rapacious virus to take hold.
“Hotbeds of Infection” is the first report to build on the investigations into the dangers within detention centers and looks closely at the risks they pose to the communities where they’re located. “Evidence points to detention centers sparking infections early in the pandemic and making outbreaks worse,” the report says. The multicounty areas surrounding detention centers with the highest number of people detained saw a 20 percent increase in Covid-19 caseloads. Hooks, the report co-author, said, “I think of prisons and detention centers as ongoing superspreader events.”
IN MAY, OFFICIALS in Pearsall, Texas, raised the alarm after every local case of Covid-19 could be traced back to ICE’s negligence at the South Texas ICE Processing Center. Similarly, a detention center in El Paso, Texas, has not only been experiencing its own scourge but is exacerbating wider community contagion: El Paso and its surrounding areas are suffering one of the worst infection rates in the country — and the immigration detention center contributed to more than 1,250 cases in the county.
While the number of people locked into immigration detention has been going down throughout the pandemic — in large part because of the broader lockdown, especially at the U.S.-Mexico border — the concern remains that ICE isn’t doing enough to release people. Legally, the agency could release almost everyone in their custody, and there have been calls for them to do so.
Jails and prisons are equally dangerous for spreading infection, though their contribution to community spread — with thousands of them throughout the country — is harder to tabulate. The infection rate in prisons is more than four times as high as that of the general public and the death rate is more than twice as high, according to a report from the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice. And, much like immigrant detention centers, prisons and jails see people constantly going in and out.
In late October, Gothamist reported that ICE agents were rearresting older people who, because of their medical vulnerabilities, had been previously released and locking them back into detention. Bennett, the ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that, since March, “ICE has worked to reduce intake so that the agency is maintaining detention capacity at each facility at or below the 75 percent recommended by the CDC” — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nonetheless, social distancing inside detention centers remains all but impossible. Detainees have complained not only of inadequate testing and being forced into close quarters with a transient population but also a lack of basic essentials such as masks, disinfectant, or soap.
“These facilities are dangerous,” said Bob Libal, another co-author of the DWN report. “They are bad for the people detained, bad for the people who work there, and bad for the surrounding communities.”
Leonel Ignacio Martín contributed reporting.
Originally Published in The Hill
Opinion by Ruth Ellen Wassem – December 10, 2020
As the nation braces for a dark winter of COVID-19, we remain hopeful that vaccines will arrive with the spring thaw. In the meantime, foreign-born essential workers are playing a critical role during the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine surviving this crisis without their crucial contributions. Will we dismiss these essential workers who are foreign nationals when the COVID-19 health emergency is behind us?
Foreign-born workers in the United States are more likely than native-born workers to be employed in essential critical infrastructure sectors, as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers in the United States made up 17.4 percent of the labor force in 2019. They are overrepresented in jobs deemed essential and critical: Sixty-nine percent of all immigrants in the US labor force and 74 percent of undocumented workers are essential workers, compared to 65 percent of the native-born labor force. They span the skill-levels of essential workers and are largely employed in two critical sectors – health care and the food supply chain.
In terms of health care workers, 38 percent of home health aides, 29 percent of physicians and 22 percent of nursing assistants are foreign born. Immigrants are also overrepresented in the biomedical sector that is vital to the coronavirus response. Most notably, they comprise 22 percent of scientific researchers in fields related to treatments and vaccines and many only have temporary visas. The eight major U.S. companies researching coronavirus cures and treatments gained approval from the U.S. Department of Labor for more than 11,000 temporary foreign workers from 2010 through 2019.
Approximately 2.1 million foreign-born workers also make up 22 percent of all workers in the U.S. food supply chain, including 37 percent of meat processing workers, 30 percent of workers in commercial bakeries and 30 percent of agricultural workers: In some states, the majority of food workers are immigrants: 69 percent of the agricultural workers in California, 70 percent of the seafood processing workers in Alaska and 66 percent of the meat processing workers in Nebraska are foreign-born.
Rather than rewarding foreign-born essential workers, the CARES Act of 2020 specifically barred immigrant families with an unauthorized family member for receiving a stimulus payment. An estimated 6.2 million essential workers, who have 3.8 million U.S. citizen children, were ineligible for relief payments under the CARES Act. Nonetheless, 5.5 million unauthorized residents work in jobs deemed essential.
This bar, coupled with regulations promulgated by the Trump administration, have had a chilling effect on immigrants seeking benefits for which they otherwise are eligible. In particular, research found that immigrants did not seek health services because of fears it will adversely affect the immigration status of family members.
Setting aside the moral and ethical arguments, the case for incorporating foreign-born essential workers is empirically in the national interest. The nation is more resilient because of the renewal immigration brings. Policies that support immigrant incorporation will strengthen the United States as we rebound from the pandemic and the ensuing economic recession.
Immigrant incorporation is key to U.S. resiliency, yielding positive outcomes for both native- and foreign-born residents. Overall, the impact of immigration is a net positive for job creation and economic growth, although wages may flatten in some instances. A substantial body of researchdocuments that immigrants have been revitalizing cities and towns for the past few decades. They have been repopulating neighborhoods that were emptying and reopening storefront businesses in dormant commercial areas. An estimated 25 percent of new U.S. businesses are started by them. The role immigrants play as consumers with spending power – estimated to be $930 billion in 2014 – further fuels aggregate demand and economic growth.
Only the federal government – in particular, Congress – has the power to remedy the issues faced by foreign-born essential workers pertaining to their legal status and eligibility for federal services. It is time for Congress to consider offering lawful immigration status to unauthorized foreign nationals who have been working in essential jobs during the national health emergency. Whether they toiled in the laboratories, fields, hospitals or food-processing plants, they have earned their right to stand alongside the rest of us as lawful residents of this nation.
In Texas, we say dance with who brung you. When we are dancing in the post-COVID celebration, let’s include all essential workers who brought us through the crisis.
Ruth Ellen Wasem is a professor of policy practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin, and a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She is the author of a chapter, Increasing Community Resilience Through Immigrant Incorporation, in Resiliency in the Age of COVID-19: A Policy Tool Kit. Follow her on Twitter @rewasem.
Originally Published in Vox
Nicole Narea – December 10, 2020
Originally Published in Vox
Nicole Narea – December 10, 2020
Originally Published in USA Today
Richard Wolf – December 10, 2020
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court’s increasingly fervent support for religious freedom was extended Thursday to three Muslim men placed on a no-fly list as punishment for refusing to become government informants.
In a unanimous ruling written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the court ruled that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 permits monetary damages, in addition to injunctive relief.
The case involved Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, and Naveed Shinwari, all practicing Muslims. They claimed that FBI agents put them on the government’s no-fly list because they would not spy on fellow Muslims.
The Department of Homeland Security eventually removed the restriction and allowed them to fly, mooting part of the case. But the men claimed that the retaliation cost them income from lost job opportunities, in addition to having airline tickets wasted.
“A person whose exercise of religion has been unlawfully burdened may ‘obtain appropriate relief against a government,'” Thomas wrote, quoting the federal law. The term ‘government’ extends to individual officials, he said.
“A damages remedy is not just ‘appropriate’ relief as viewed through the lens of suits against government employees. It is also the only form of relief that can remedy some (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) violations,” Thomas wrote.
New Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the case because she was not confirmed in time to hear oral argument in October.
The high court consistently has defended religious freedom in recent years, most recently last month when it blocked rules in New York and California that severely restricted gatherings at houses of worship in areas hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito recently told the conservative Federalist Society that COVID-19 restrictions have resulted in “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” He denounced high court rulings that he said discriminated against religious groups and argued that the pandemic highlighted a wider assault on religious freedom.
Originally Published in Slate
Elliot Hannon – December 9, 2020
Donald Trump used the idea of the wall to propel his run to the White House in 2016, but two whistleblowers allege the border wall’s construction has gotten an assist from unauthorized workers smuggled into the U.S. and hired by contractors to preform construction and security jobs. That’s according to a federal complaint, filed in February and unsealed last week, brought by two workers employed by a contractor to provide security at wall construction sites along the border. The workers also accused the company they were employed by, Sullivan Land Services Co., and a subcontractor, Ultimate Concrete of El Paso, of myriad misdeeds, including hiring unauthorized workers and overcharging the U.S. government.
The most jaw-dropping charge in the whistleblower complaint, however, is that Ultimate Concrete not only smuggled armed Mexican security personnel over the border to provide protection, but the company went so far as to build a dirt road to expedite illegal border crossings to sites in San Diego, using construction vehicles to block security cameras, the New York Times reported. An unnamed supervisor at the Army Corps of Engineers approved the operation.
Originallly Published in The New York Times
Julie Turkewitz – December 10, 2020
The day we received a text message telling us that Jessika Loaiza was in labor in Colombia, my colleague Federico Rios, a photographer, jumped on his motorbike and drove 18 hours, sometimes through driving rain, to get to her. As the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, I live in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, and got in a car to travel a mere 10.
Jessika was a Venezuelan mother living in Colombia who had lost her job amid the pandemic. With her son, Sebastian, 6, she had spent most of the year trekking between the two countries, trying to find a new home. We had been following her for months, aiming to help readers understand the experience of millions of migrants who have been displaced by the economic implosion caused by the health crisis.
As we sped through the Colombia countryside, my colleague Sofa Villamil worked the phones, making sure we would have access to the hospital once we arrived. When we did, we pulled on hospital gowns and fastened two layers of medical masks around our faces, allowing us to document some of Jessika’s first moments with her newborn baby, the child she had carried in her belly for most of the journey.
Afterward, we messaged the journalists Isayen Herrera and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez back in Venezuela, announcing the good news: Jessika’s little boy was healthy, and Jessika was doing well.
Federico and I met Jessika in May, while working on another story. At the time, thousands of Venezuelans were streaming out of Colombia, having lost their jobs amid virus-related shutdowns, and we wanted to include this narrative in a larger piece about the way the pandemic was exacerbating inequality across the region.
We first met Jessika and her family on the highway heading out of Bogota, and I was immediately struck by her maturity. She was just 23 but seemed to be carrying the world on her shoulders. Where will we sleep? she wondered. How will we eat? And then here was Sebastian, in a wool cap with a teddy bear on the front. He had the curiosity of a child, but was about to make the journey of an adult.
Collectively, they seemed to embody the toll that the virus was taking on the many people around the world whose lives had already been upended by war and political dysfunction.
My editor Juliana Barbassa spotted their narrative in my notes, and suggested we pull out their story and turn it into a separate piece.
Once we decided to stick with them, we were faced with the challenge of keeping in touch over many miles and weeks, not to mention a shuttered border.
Many stories at The Times involve a team – but this one involved a particularly coordinated effort from five journalists working for more than six months, with several of us driving thousands of miles to meet up with Jessika and her family along the route. By the end, the Google document holding our notes spanned 124 pages.
When they could, Jessika; Sebastian; Jessika’s partner, Javier; and her brother, Jesús, were also participants in the reporting process, sending us hundreds of text and audio messages from their journey, sometimes with photographs, often responding to my questions about mundane and major events from the road.
Finally, toward the end of the journey, I gave Sebastian a package of markers and a notebook, a reporting tool that he began to use to document the trek from his perspective, texting us pictures of his drawings, becoming a tiny documentarian-in-training.
After the initial night on the road, Federico visited Jessika and her family twice more along the route in Colombia, joining them in a smuggler’s truck over a frigid mountain pass, and then traveling with them all the way to the Colombian border city of Cúcuta. Along the way, I sent him questions for the family and asked him to share the sounds, smells and textures of the journey, and he responded with audio, videos and photos.
As he traveled with them, I created an interactive document that combined my notes with all of our WhatsApp conversations, and I embedded visual and audio files, all of it in chronological order, so that I could try to recreate the texture of the moment when I sat down to write.
Across the border in Venezuela, the family sent us images from a government detention center where they were being quarantined. Jessika was feeling sick, she said. So were many others at the camp. We began to worry. And then we lost touch.
For weeks we didn’t hear from them, and we knew only that their eventual goal was a house owned by Jessika’s family in or near the city of San Felipe. So we began a search, with Federico calling repeatedly to all the phone numbers the family had used along the route. No luck.
I wrote them all on Facebook, and then started messaging their friends and family online, trying to figure out what had happened.
Finally, we got a hit, and someone told us that Jessika and her family had arrived in San Felipe, but that they didn’t know much more.
I called up my colleague Isayen Herrera, in Caracas, and asked if she would start her own search, and consider going to San Felipe, about four hours away, to look for them. She agreed.
And then we got lucky: The family walked into an internet shop to check if government help had arrived in their Venezuelan bank accounts. That day, Jessika’s brother, Jesús, opened Facebook and began to message us.
Isayen and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, a photographer, then spent several days shuttling between San Felipe and the town of Sabaneta, where Jessika and Javier had settled with Sebastian.
Gasoline and car parts were in such short supply at the time that the country’s major highways had become parking lots, full of broken down cars and stranded motorists.
Through Isayen’s interviews, we learned how difficult life had become for the family in Venezuela.
Our final product, a 2,000-word piece that was published on Nov. 27, is a testament to The Times’s commitment to telling complicated stories in difficult times.
But to me, the most remarkable part of this narrative is that Jessika and her family did all of this – allowing us to follow them for months, to document their most difficult and intimate moments – without ever asking for anything in return.
Jessika, Javier and Sebastian patiently answered all of my questions, even the very painful ones, even the repetitive ones, even when it seemed unclear when any of it would be published. They understood automatically that their story would help many others. And it is because of that understanding, because of them, that we were able to publish this story.
Just days before the story ran, I called Jessika to do some fact-checking, and she gave me some of the first good news I’d heard from her. After they had spent several nights on the street in Bogota, her old boss had given them a room to sleep in, allowing them to escape the torrential rain that had taken over the city that week. Javier had found a job at a junk recycler. And Jessika had re-enrolled Sebastian in school, with the hope that he could start classes after the Christmas break.
Life was still very precarious. The job paid little, the home was temporary, Sebastian had no way to connect to virtual classes. But for a moment, it seemed that the journey back to Colombia had been worth it.
