Joel Rose

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.

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.

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.

As the Marine One helicopter was about to lift off last Thursday, White House officials got word that top adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive for the coronavirus.

That prompted White House operations to make a tough call: Who in President Trump's entourage would still be allowed to go to the campaign fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.?

Some people were pulled from the trip — but not Trump.

President Trump's last public event — a fundraiser at his golf club in New Jersey — has touched off a major contact tracing effort as well as a messy political fight.

State leaders, including New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, accuse the president of behaving "recklessly" by headlining Thursday's event. The Democratic governor said Monday that the Trump campaign may have violated state rules limiting indoor gatherings during the pandemic.

In the age of social distancing, car and truck caravans of MAGA flag-waving supporters of President Trump have hit the road from New York to California.

"We stretched for a very long distance; I mean miles back," said Shawn Farash, who organized a caravan of hundreds of motorcycles, cars and trucks that drove through the streets of Long Island last weekend.

Updated on Sept. 18 at 2:15 p.m. ET

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there were lots of stories about scrappy manufacturers promising to revamp their factories to start making personal protective equipment in the U.S.

Back in the spring, fuel-cell maker Adaptive Energy retooled part of its factory in Ann Arbor, Mich., to make plastic face shields. Now, 100,000 finished shields are piling up in cardboard boxes on the factory floor — unsold.

As the nation grapples with questions of racial justice, Americans are increasingly polarized, according to a new poll, with Republicans far less likely to support protests sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake than previous demonstrations.

More Americans support than oppose recent protests after the shooting in Kenosha, Wis., according to the poll by the research firm Ipsos, provided exclusively to NPR.

It was late at night when two teenage cousins from Honduras arrived in a hotel parking lot somewhere in the U.S., escorted by armed men in civilian clothes.

The young men crossed the border illegally into Texas last month and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol. After spending the night in detention, they say they were loaded into a van by the men who were not in uniforms and driven three hours to the hotel.

At the height of summer, temperatures climb to nearly 100 degrees most days in Pharr, a small city in South Texas. Nonetheless, nurse practitioner Oralia Martinez and her staff have set up a temporary exam room outside her small clinic.

This is their way of preserving masks and other personal protective equipment as they treat COVID-19 patients in the Rio Grande Valley, where infections are spiking. While Martinez and her colleagues sweat in full gear outside, the staffers and other patients inside the clinic aren't exposed and don't need as much PPE.

When a Salvadoran woman grabbed her 4-year-old daughter and fled their home country in February, the coronavirus wasn't yet a global pandemic.

By the time they reached the U.S.-Mexico border a month later, that had changed. She crossed the Rio Grande, planning to ask for asylum. But Border Patrol agents took her and her daughter right back to Mexico, despite her pleas.

Most Americans support Trump administration efforts to stop immigrants from coming to the United States as long as it's done in the name of slowing the spread of the coronavirus, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

But Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric during the pandemic has done little to budge public opinion on other immigration policies, the poll found. Most of Trump's policies, including his border wall, remain unpopular except among Republicans.

A federal court has ordered the Trump administration to begin accepting new applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children from deportation.

Two crises collided this spring in Michigan. The state was already under a coronavirus lockdown when a catastrophic storm hit and a pair of dams failed, flooding the city of Midland.

The local hospital, MidMichigan Medical Center — Midland, hired a disaster recovery company to clean up the mess, including a water-logged basement and morgue. More than 100 workers — many of them recent immigrants — were brought from as far away as Texas and Florida. Bellaliz Gonzalez was one of them.

Dr. Basim Ali graduated at the top of his medical school class in Pakistan and landed a residency at a renowned teaching hospital in Texas, where he'll be on the front lines of one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S.

"There's obviously some degree of anxiety about what that's going to be like," Ali said by phone from Karachi before coming here. "But there's also this understanding that this is what we signed up for."

When nurses and doctors across the country were struggling to treat coronavirus patients without enough protective gear, and the federal government was scrambling to find those supplies, Quedon Baul saw an opportunity.

His three-person company in McKinney, Texas, distributes medical supplies but didn't have much experience with face shields. Still, he landed two government contracts worth up to $20 million to deliver the personal protective equipment. He couldn't meet the first deadline, so he found subcontractors to do the job.

Coronavirus testing in the U.S. has run into a number of snags, from a lack of nasal swabs to not enough chemicals needed to run the tests.

Now there's a new bottleneck emerging: A shortage of the machines that process the tests and give results.

Civilian labs and the Pentagon say they've had trouble getting the sophisticated, automated machines that can run hundreds of diagnostic tests at once. Three machine manufacturers — Hologic Inc., Roche and Abbott Laboratories — have confirmed to NPR that demand is outstripping supply.

As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country.

The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records.

But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient.