In college, I had a close friend who was an undocumented immigrant. She'd moved to the U.S. as an international student and, for a bunch of reasons, had to quit college and stay on in New York. As a result, for the time being, she was without papers. To survive, she worked exploitative administrative and customer service jobs that paid her petty wages in cash.

Despite being undocumented, she did something that didn’t make sense to me at the time—she filed her taxes every single year. She was preparing for if and when she had the chance to become a U.S. citizen, her tax history would work in her favor.

Like my friend, millions of undocumented immigrants have quietly contributed to the U.S. economy, trusting the government's assurance that filing taxes was safe. Now, that trust is under threat.

A proposed agreement betwe…

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Just eight weeks into his second term, President Trump is preparing to make good on his campaign promise to bring back and expand his controversial travel ban. But this time, it's set to be much more extensive than the 2017 version.

According to reports, the Trump administration is considering restrictions on citizens from as many as 43 countries. The draft plan includes:

• A "red list" of 11 countries whose citizens would be completely barred from entering the US: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen

• An "orange list" with somewhat lighter restrictions on numerous other nations

• Uncertainty about whether people with existing visas or green cards would be protected

The list reads like a who's who of Muslim-majority nations, with a few non-Muslim countries added in—a strategy that helped…

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Welcome to the first edition of Port of Entry, a weekly newsletter that brings attention to global news stories long after the world loses interest in them.

Out of the news cycle, out of mind.

As a child of Bangladeshi immigrants, I grew up tethered to two worlds as so many first-generation kids do. My curiosity about my homeland and how people outside of the United States live led me to journalism.

In 2018, I moved to Bangladesh to report on the world’s largest refugee crisis at the time: the Rohingya—a muslim minority in neighboring Myanmar that have been systemetically persecuted for decades by the Myanmar government for being a minority in a Buddhist-majority country. Over 700,000 Rohingya fled across the border to Bangladesh to seek refuge among the hundreds and thousands of refugees that had already been living there during earlier exoduses.

Aid started flowing in, trees were cut do…

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