The New York Times examines the plight of refugees who remain on Manus Island.

Here is a recent sampling of articles detailing how states and local communities are helping refugees settle in the U.S.

“Local organizations are fighting for refugees” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Nov. 7, 2017)

“Building new lives: Syrian refugees find support, friendship from churches” (Baltimore Sun, Nov. 7, 2017)

“Refugee and now U.S. citizen, interpreter helping resettle Somalis” (Joplin, Ill., Globe, Nov. 4, 2017)

The Trump administration has given 2,500 Nicaraguans with provisional residency 14 months to leave the United States, announcing this week “that it will not renew the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation that has allowed them to remain in the country for nearly two decades,” reports the Washington Post.

At the same time, the White House “deferred a decision for the much larger group of 57,000 Hondurans who have been living in the United States with the same designation, saying the Department of Homeland Security needed more time to consider their fate,” writes the Post’s Nick Miroff.

“The Trump Administration’s cruel decision affecting deeply-rooted Nicaraguans in the U.S. is part of its effort to roll back TPS in order to advance its mass deportation strategy,” said Frank Sherry, Executive Director of America’s Voice Education Fund, in a statement after the announcement.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants recently launched its “In Their Own Voices” podcast in which refugees are interviewed.

Check out the first podcast here.

For more information about the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, click here.

A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that the number of refugees annually resettled by the U.S. in recent years has not consistently grown in step with a worldwide refugee population that has expanded nearly 50% since 2013.

Pew based its analysis on data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the State Department.

The new analysis comes in the wake of President Trump recently signing an order lowering the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year to 45,000, which is the lowest cap since Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980.

Having read several articles in the past few days about the pending White House decision on the number of refugees that will be allowed to come into the country annually, one thing is clear: White House policy adviser Stephen Miller is apparently doing as much as he can to push that number to historic lows and has allegedly tried to spike a report showing that refugees offer a net positive economic impact.

Vanity Fair notes in a recent article that every year on October 1, the president of the United States is required to set the number of refugees that will be allowed into the country for the fiscal year, as decreed by the Refugee Act of 1980.

“Given that the current president is Donald Trump, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that his administration is currently considering slashing the limit to its lowest level since the Refugee Act was created,” writes Bess Levin.

According to reports, “certain members of Team Trump want the number to be fewer than 50,000, which would be less than half of the 110,000 refugees Barack Obama said should be admitted in 2016. It probably also won’t come as much of a shock to learn that in making this argument, certain members of the administration are choosing to actively ignore the government’s own cost-benefit analysis of refugees,” writes Levin.

Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum reports that as part of his executive order banning refugees, Donald Trump ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to produce a report about the economic impact of refugees.

“The answer, according to HHS, is that refugees contributed $269 billion in tax revenue and used $206 billion in services, for a net positive impact of $63 billion over the past decade,” writes Drum.

But when the final report was released, “it presented only half the story,” Drum reports.

In a Sept. 20 editorial, the Washington Post, citing a New York Times article, said that the administration “sent the report back for a redo, insisting that any mention of revenue be dropped. The Department of Health and Human Services obliged in a final, three-page report this month, which concluded that per-person departmental program costs for refugees were $3,300, compared with a per-person cost of $2,500 for the U.S. population as a whole.”

Miller “is leading the charge to slash the number of refugees admitted in the fiscal year starting in October, below even the cap of 50,000 that Mr. Trump imposed this year — itself the lowest number in more than 30 years,” the Post said.

The New York Times “reported Tuesday that Miller has advocated for around 25,000 refugees, and that the Department of Homeland Security proposed a cap of 40,000,” the Atlantic reported.

The Supreme Court agreed with the Trump administration Sept. 12 “and put on hold a lower-court decision that would have allowed more refugees to enter the country” (the Washington Post).

The court issued a one-paragraph statement “granting the administration’s request for a stay of the latest legal maneuvering involving the president’s executive order on immigration. There were no recorded dissents to the decision,” the Post reported.

Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security officials “plan soon to submit to the White House a report that is likely to shape the future of President Trump’s entry ban, a key portion of which is set to expire Sept. 24, authorities said,” the newspaper reported Sept. 13.

A group of attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Sept. 6 to stop the Trump administration “from winding down the DACA program, which granted a reprieve from deportation to undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children,” the Washington Post reported.

“It’s outrageous. It is. It’s outrageous. I’m not going to put up with it,” WAshington State AG Bob Ferguson said at a news conference in Seattle, where he was joined by Gov. Jay Inslee and a half-dozen DACA recipients (Seattle Times,Sept. 6, 2017).

Along with Washington state and the District of Columbia, the states suing over DACA are: New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.

President Trump on Sept. 5 “ordered an end to the Obama-era program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling it an ‘amnesty-first approach’ and urging Congress to pass a replacement before he begins phasing out its protections in six months,” the New York Times recently reported.

Pelosi urged Trump to offer Dreamers assurances

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spoke to President Trump “by phone on Thursday and asked him to issue a tweet reassuring young undocumented immigrants that they won’t be deported in the next six months,” the Hill newspaper reported.

“Pelosi told reporters at a Capitol news conference that she told Trump to make clear that recipients under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, often referred to as “Dreamers,” shouldn’t fear imminent deportation as the Trump administration phases the program out over the next six months,” the Hill reported.

Here is a link to Trump’s tweet.

Mark your calendars for Oct. 13. Artist Ai Weiwei’s new documentary about refugees, “Human Flow,” is scheduled for limited release in the U.S. on that date.

Here is a recent Washington Post article about the documentary.

I am posting this story to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the huge volume of news related to President Trump’s decision to terminate DACA. Alex Guillen, a Dreamer, made the ultimate sacrifice to help others:

“A ‘dreamer’ dies trying to save Harvey victims, days before Trump plans to end DACA”

The Washington Post posted this story on Sept. 5 about Alex Guillen, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant and Dreamer, who died while trying to help Houston residents affected by Hurricane Harvey.