Joel Rose

A handful of migrant families that were separated at the border by the Trump administration will be allowed to reunify in the United States this week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Monday.

The four families will be the first to be reunified through a task force that was created by President Biden shortly after taking office in January.

The decision to allow migrant parents into the U.S. to reunify with their children here marks a sharp break with the Trump administration, which resisted allowing parents who were previously deported to return.

The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the Biden administration to close dozens of immigration detention facilities across the country, citing the historically low number of immigrants in detention and the high cost of paying for empty beds.

In a letter sent Wednesday to the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the ACLU calls for the closure of 39 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities.

The Biden administration is ordering U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to change how they talk about immigrants.

The terms "illegal alien" and "assimilation" are out — replaced by "undocumented noncitizen" and "integration."

The new guidance is laid out in a pair of detailed memos sent Monday by the heads of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to roll back the previous administration's hard-line policies and build what they call a more "humane" immigration system.

The Biden administration has been scrambling to care for hundreds of migrant children and teenagers crossing the Southern border alone daily — opening a dozen emergency influx shelters and moving thousands out of jail-like holding cells and tents that have stoked public outrage.

Still, the administration faces big challenges as it deals with the record-breaking surge of unaccompanied minors.

More than 170,000 migrants were taken into custody at the Southwest border in March, the highest monthly total since at least 2006, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials who have been briefed on the preliminary numbers but are not authorized to speak publicly.

The sprawling detention center in Tacoma, Wash., housed more than 1,300 immigrants on average at the height of former President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Now nearly four out of every five beds at the facility are empty.

That's because Immigration and Customs Enforcement released hundreds of people to lower the risk of COVID-19, and because the agency is arresting and detaining fewer unauthorized immigrants under orders from President Biden.

President Biden's administration is scrambling to deal with an increasingly difficult challenge on the Southwest border that's become one of the first big political firestorms of his nascent presidency.

A growing number of migrants are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, many to seek asylum, and the government wasn't prepared for a huge influx of children who are coming alone without their parents.

Millions of people watched the moon landing live on TV in 1969. But more than 50 years later, Bonnie Garland still isn't buying it.

"I personally do not believe that man has ever been out of the atmosphere," says Garland, a self-described housewife from Tucson, Ariz. "I'm a very inquisitive person. Always have been. So I question everything."

After four years of former President Trump's immigration crackdown, the Biden administration on Thursday announced new guidelines that are expected to sharply limit arrests and deportations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Under the guidance, ICE agents and officers have been told to prioritize threats to national security and public safety when deciding whom to arrest, detain and deport.

ICE officials said the guidance is intended to help the agency allocate its limited resources to cases the public cares about most.

Updated at 6:10 p.m. ET

When the 19-year-old immigrant got to the United States three years ago, she had to grow up fast. She's going to high school and works a part-time job — all while helping to raise her three younger sisters.

Their mother was deported to Honduras in 2018 after the girls were separated from her by U.S. immigration officials. So if her sisters need advice they can't talk to their father about, the young woman says they turn to her.

After fleeing civil war in Syria, Haitham Dalati and his wife made it to the United States in early 2017 during a brief window when the first version of President Trump's travel ban had been put on hold by the courts.

They hoped their daughter and her family would soon follow. Instead, the rest of the family got caught up in Trump's immigration crackdown and ended up stuck in Lebanon for more than three years.

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Immigrant advocates, eager to break with four years of Trump administration policies, are raising concerns about President-elect Joe Biden's plan to move cautiously to avoid making matters worse.

While still publicly supporting the Biden transition team, they're imploring the incoming administration to move with urgency.

"This is a matter of life and death," said Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, because tens of thousands of migrants still face dangerous conditions in Mexican border towns.

One former detainee says she was already in a hospital gown this past July, waiting to be wheeled into surgery, when she began to suspect something was very wrong. Jaromy Floriano Navarro thought she was getting an operation to remove a cyst on her ovary — until the driver who brought her to the hospital said otherwise.

"She was just like, 'You know you're having a hysterectomy, right?' " Floriano tells NPR in an interview. "And I was in shock, because I knew what that meant."

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó believed in the potential of messenger RNA — the genetic molecule at the heart of two new COVID-19 vaccines — even when almost no one else did.

Karikó began working with RNA as a student in Hungary. When funding for her job there ran out, Kariko immigrated to Philadelphia in 1985. Over the years, she's been rejected for grant after grant, threatened with deportation and demoted from her faculty job by a university that saw her research as a dead end.

Through it all, Karikó just kept working.

A few years ago, filmmaker Liam Barker was at work on the film that would become his 2015 documentary Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho.

For years, immigrants in the Atlanta suburbs lived in fear that a routine traffic stop would lead to deportation. Thousands of immigrants in the country illegally have been deported for minor offenses, advocates say, because of close ties between county jails and immigration authorities.

But now, there are some new sheriffs in town.

"I'm the sheriff of Gwinnett County for everybody, regardless of your race, regardless of your gender, regardless of your immigration status," said Keybo Taylor, the sheriff-elect in Gwinnett County, outside Atlanta.

When President Trump took office, he quickly unleashed a torrent of immigration policies — including his first "travel ban" on people from majority-Muslim countries.

President-elect Joe Biden is now expected to reverse that policy — along with other controversial Trump administration actions — in the first days of his administration.

But other recent changes to the U.S. immigration system may take months, if not years, to unwind. And experts say Biden's ability to reshape the country's immigration system will be sharply limited if Republicans retain control of the Senate.

Members of a Quaker congregation in Maryland are so concerned that President Trump will prematurely declare victory when states are still counting ballots — a process that could take days — that they are ready to take to the streets in nonviolent resistance.

They say such a scenario would amount to a "coup" — even if it involves legal fights and not military action.