The debate is over, but the focus on immigration lingered the day after, as a superPAC launched a new ad campaign against Donald Trump, questioning his conservative bona fides on the subject and treating “a path to citizenship” as a series of dirty words. News organizations, bingeing on stories about immigration flip-flops among a variety of candidates, surfaced one about Trump, reviving quotes from 2013 that are a far cry from the harsh, xenophobic tenor of his 2016 campaign remarks.  The Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress published a piece reminding voters that Trump is hardly the only anti-immigrant contender in the GOP field.

More than 140 House Democrats, and some 22 Senators, have signed letters denouncing the Obama administration’s ICE raids, rounding up undocumented persons who lost their bids for asylum before an immigration judge. But the administration has held firm in defense of their actions. Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson wrote a joint response released Thursday. “We will continue to conduct enforcement actions in line with existing laws and policies, including the apprehension and removal of individuals with final orders of removal who have exhausted or waived all appeals,” they wrote. The two also stressed the State Dept’s initiative to expand third-country processing as a way of heading the problem off at the pass.

Vice President Biden sought to downplay the issue during a private session at a House Democratic retreat, suggesting the number of people actually deported was relatively small and that the administration was striving to carry out the actions in a humane way.

Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois joined forces with the Latino Victory Foundation, the National Partnership for New Americans, Mi Familia Vota, iAmerica Action and the SEIU for the “stand up to hate tour,” a drive to naturalize 1 million citizens by May 1 and persuade them to vote against Trump. Another Democratic House member, Rep. Loebesack of Iowa, introduced legislation aimed at returning to the U.S. a pastor (and constituent) who was deported to his native Honduras during a spring 2015 raid.

Vox ran an interesting story about how the landscape of immigration politics changed, as Republicans distanced themselves ever further from reform while Democrats brought advocates on board their campaign operations as never before.

Facebook banned the private sale of guns on its platform as well as on Instagram, places where transactions often took place without benefit of background checks.

Among grantee activities:

--United We Dream released a report entitled “Immigration Raids: The Real Impact.” It publicizes the group’s Deportation Defense Hotline, offers due process advice to affected parties, and documents the chilling effect raids can have on immigrant communities. The hotline received 316 calls for help in less than a month’s time.  

--ThinkProgress wrote in praise of a Muslim YouTube beauty vlogger whose question about Islamophobia was aired at Thursday’s GOP debate.

--Bibles, Badges and Business held forth at a community forum on immigration reform in Iowa in the runup to the Feb. 1 caucuses, seeking to counter harsh xenophobic rhetoric and flesh out the argument about why reform would be good for communities from the faith, business and law enforcement perspectives.

--Grantees shared a Huffington Post deep dive on what life is like for Syrian refugees in the U.S.