Voters go to the polls Tuesday for New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders maintain leads in the latest polls, in a state known for generating suspect poll results. Marco Rubio’s post-Iowa surge has been tested, not only by his debate-night tape loop problem, but by continued attacks over his embrace, then rejection, of comprehensive immigration reform. John Kasich, who is betting heavily on a strong showing in New Hampshire to stay in the race, denounced mass deportations and said he would present an immigration plan within 100 days of taking office if elected. Donald Trump said he would return a donation from a man branded “a determined white separatist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Voters growing weary of the sheer number of candidates for the presidency got some company, as the Secret Service expressed concern that the crowded contest could wind up placing serious strains on the agency’s budget. Yet there could be one more: former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg renewed chatter that he might make a go of it. 

George Soros was No. 5 on the “Politico 100” list of biggest donors in the 2016 election cycle to date. Mr. Soros also made news late last week, when he announced at the Syria Donors Conference in London that the Open Society Foundations was pledging $25m to help train as many as 1,000 Syrian refugees and their host communities in Jordan and Lebanon to become paralegals, empowering them to help other refugees navigate the many bewildering challenges that follow from migration. “Syrians forced to flee their homes often find themselves in a legal abyss with devastating economic effects,” Mr. Soros said. “This new initiative coincides with the Jordanian government’s own positive steps to improve the financial independence of refugees and will allow Syrians to improve their livelihoods now and in the future.” Mr. Soros challenged other government and philanthropic donors to match his contribution and help amplify its impact.

Fox News ran a story claiming undocumented immigrants received up to $750 million in Affordable Care Act subsidies that the government is now trying to claw back, according to a report assembled by GOP members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, while the Health and Human Services Secretary said that immigration reform could help bring about universal health coverage. The Washington Post ran a story about how public schools were coping with a surge of newly arrived immigrant children in the classroom. The New York Times told the story of how Mexico’s crackdown on Central American refugees seeking to make it to the U.S. border.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va. filed formal charges against Umm Sayyaf, an Iraqi woman accused of “providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization resulting in death,” according to the complaint. Sayyaf, also known as Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar, is believed to have seized as a hostage Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker from Arizona who had traveled to Syria to help refugees seeking to flee that country’s civil war. Sayyaf was captured in a U.S. commando raid that took the life of her husband, a member of the Islamic State, whose leader assaulted Mueller. Sayyaf remains in custody in Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times both ran analyses of the balance of powers issues at stake in the Supreme Court’s review of the legal bases of President Obama’s immigration executive actions. 

Under pressure in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced plans to hire a new deputy to better keep tabs on migrants into the US using bimodal information technology.

Among other grantee activities:

--America’s Voice was among the grantees and advocates circulating stories warning that the Obama adminstration’s ICE raids threatened Democratic efforts to capitalize on some of the GOP’s more xenophobic pronouncements.

--The National Network for Arab American Communities announced a new social media campaign, beginning Feb. 8 and running through Valentine’s Day, to share stories “that demonstrate how people across the country and around the world turn hate and violence into an opportunity to #TakeOnHateWithLove.”

--The Sikh Coalition continued to raise awareness and protest incidents of Sikh passengers being denied boarding on airplanes.

--The Center for American Progress’s Think Progress wrote an article decrying Rep. Steve King as the GOP’s choice to chair a task force exploring responses and alternatives to President Obama’s immigration executive actions. Among King’s past pronouncements: he’s likened the way we should treat immigrants to dogs and livestock.

--After years of losing, the ACLU won a partial victory in 2014 when a federal judge told the military it had to review photos of detainee abuse and torture on a photo-by-photo basis. The ruling required the Pentagon to individually certify images it considered harmful to national security and explain its reasoning. Of the 2,000 photos at issue, the Pentagon released 198 late Friday afternoon. (JKaplan)