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The Trump administration is predicting years of dramatically reduced international demand for U.S. visas, and planning for drastic budget cuts to visa services worldwide as a result, according to an internal memo seen by ProPublica.

The projections made by the U.S. State Department in a memo signed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday contrast with the rosier outlook expressed repeatedly by President Donald Trump. As recently as Aug. 5, Trump predicted that the coronavirus “will go away” and that a vaccine will be available before the end of the year. But internally, the memo shows, the government is planning for the pandemic to drastically reduce international travel to the U.S. through at least 2022.

The memo projects steep reductions, in particular, to non-immigrant visas. Trump has issued restrictions on some categories of non-immigrant visas, citing the economic impacts of the pandemic, but the majority of non-immigrant visas processed by the State Department are temporary visas for business travel and tourism.

PHOENIX – High school athletic directors and football coaches are eager to kick off the season – assuming the season even happens – but the COVID-19 pandemic likely means no fans in the stands, tough safety protocols for players on the field and tighter budgets for high school sports.

That could lead to cuts to equipment expenditures and, perhaps, to smaller sports programs that depend on revenue from football in the fall and basketball in the winter.

High school sports in Arizona have been stopped, revived and delayed again under state orders and limits issued by the Arizona Interscholastic Association, the governing body for high school sports. But the situation is fluid, similar to that of college and professional sports pondering whether it’s possible to have a 2020 season at all.

“You miss hearing the sounds of the gym and the weight room,” said Pete Jelovic, athletic director at Centennial High School in Peoria. “Even when school starts, the passing periods or the lunch periods, you hear all of those things and you get to interact and you build up towards events.

“We miss having that interaction on our campus and that routine, and just the daily things that happen on a high school campus. We would like to get back to normal as quickly as possible, but we also have to do it safely.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Click here to read their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans.

Guards in an immigrant detention center in El Paso sexually assaulted and harassed inmates in a “pattern and practice” of abuse, according to a complaint filed by a Texas advocacy group urging the local district attorney and federal prosecutors to conduct a criminal investigation.

The allegations, detailed in a filing first obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, maintain that guards systematically assaulted at least three people in a facility overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — often in areas of the detention center not visible to security cameras. The guards told victims that no one would believe them because footage did not exist and the harassment involved officers as high-ranking as a lieutenant.

According to the complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and shared with prosecutors, several guards “forcibly” kissed and touched the intimate parts of at least one woman. She faces deportation next week — meaning investigators could lose a key witness. Her attorneys have requested that immigration officials pause her deportation pending a review of the matter.

PHOENIX – Arizona has failed to conduct robust contact tracing, which was considered a vital tool to slowing the spread of COVID-19 and proved effective in other parts of the world, public health experts say.

And it’s not just Arizona. Contact tracing has “largely failed in the United States” because of long waits for test results and the speed at which the novel coronavirus that causes the disease has spread, the New York Times reported July 31.

Contact tracing allows public health officials to determine how many people were exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The investigative method has been used to successfully control the spread of measles, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.

Since the novel coronavirus was detected in China late last year, contact tracing has proven effective in reducing the spread of the illness in China, South Korea, Germany and other countries.

“It’s a tried and true method that lowers spread of infectious diseases, and it would be useful for COVID-19 if it’s done right,” said Will Humble, a former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services who now heads the Arizona Public Health Association, which represents health workers and organizations.

For contact tracing to be effective, the patient should be interviewed within 24 hours of testing positive, CDC guidelines say. After the patient identifies where he or she has been and the people with whom they’ve had contact, health officials attempt to reach each of those contacts.

PHOENIX – After winning the title of Miss Navajo Nation in September, Shaandiin Parrish immediately got to work on the cultural preservation and advocacy efforts central to the role.

At times, she attended five or more events in a single day, traveling across the 27,000-square-mile reservation to speak to elementary school students and attend conferences.

“You really hit the ground running,” Parrish recalled. “There’s no event too small. There’s no event too big.”

But in March, as COVID-19 swept through the Southwest, Parrish suddenly went from visiting elders and delivering motivational speeches to distributing food, supplies and information to Navajo families hit hard by the novel coronavirus that causes the deadly disease.

In the months since, Navajos have turned to Parrish for information, encouragement and aid as the virus killed at least 462 Navajos and sickened more than 9,000 others.

“I had a voice as Miss Navajo,” she said. “I never had a second thought about helping.”

The number of Arizona’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases topped 191,000 as of Friday, Aug. 14, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Pima County had seen 19,164 of the state’s 191,721 confirmed cases.

A total of 4,423 Arizonans had died after contracting COVID-19, according to the Aug. 14 report.

The number of hospitalized COVID cases continues to decline. ADHS reported that as of Aug. 13, 1,359 COVID patients were hospitalized in the state, down from a peak of 3,517 on July 13.

A total of 1,037 people visited ERs on Aug. 13 with COVID symptoms. That number peaked at 2,008 on July 7.

A total of 473 COVID-19 patients were in ICU beds on Aug. 10. The number in ICUs peaked at 970 on July 13.

Pima County sees downward trend in cases following mask mandate

Following the passage of an ordinance on June 19 requiring people to wear masks when out in public, Pima County has seen a dramatic drop in the number of new positive COVID-19 tests.

The number of cases dropped from a high of 2,368 new cases in the week ending July 4 to just 865 in the week ending Aug. 1, according to a Pima County Health Department report.

Fewer people are dying as well. Deaths related to COVID-19 peaked the week of July 4 with 51 people. The week ending Aug. 1, Pima County saw just 20 deaths.

PHOENIX – In the early 1930s, Robert Carr, a member of the Creek Nation, was expelled for “incorrigible behavior” from Chilocco Indian Agricultural School near the Kansas-Oklahoma border.

By the time he was 21, Carr had been incarcerated in three different institutions. He died in a Kansas state prison where he was held for stealing $30 worth of food, said his niece, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, a professor and Indigenous studies scholar at Arizona State University.

It was the height of the Great Depression and, according to Lomawaima, Carr said he committed the crime because he couldn’t get a job and was hungry.

The school-to-prison pipeline – a trend of school discipline pushing children into prison – is recognized to have started developing at the end of the 20th century, experts say. But Carr’s story is an example of this phenomenon from decades earlier, when the U.S. government sanctioned, and sometimes operated and financed, hundreds of boarding schools for Native American children that relied on military and carceral practices to forcibly assimilate them into Western culture.

Modern juvenile incarceration disproportionately affects Native American youth, and experts on U.S. Indian policy trace the disparity back to the U.S.’s Native American assimilation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries – which included boarding schools. Not only were boarding schools often little better than prisons, they intentionally broke up Native American families and triggered trauma that has compounded over generations, leading to many of the disparities Native Americans face today, according to a report by the National Congress of American Indians.

However, Lomawaima said the history of boarding schools is nuanced.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Tucson received about $95 million from the federal CARES Act. Mayor Regina Romero and the city council members recently approved $3 million of that funding to be distributed to local workers and families that have been negatively impacted by the crisis.

The grant program, named the “We Are One | Somos Unos Resiliency Fund” will focus on individuals and households that have not received any state or federal COVID-19 relief money and whose income does not reach Pima County’s self-sufficiency standard.

The self-sufficiency standard measures how much money an individual or family needs to earn to be able to meet their basic needs with no public or private financial assistance. In 2018, the self-sufficiency standard for a single adult in Pima County was $9.66 per hour or $1,700 per month. For a household with two adults and two young children, the standard was $13.22 per hour for both adults, or $4,711 per month.