The Department of Homeland Security published a post-Trump report recently recognizing that immigrants are up to three times more likely to work in “essential” jobs with high risk of COVID-19 exposure than U.S.-born Americans. Essential workers who are not U.S. citizens are “especially vulnerable” to the virus, the report warns, because they also face multiple […]

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, a private Massachusetts residential and day school, has for decades used shock therapy on students with developmental and emotional disabilities to curb aggressive behavior and self-harm. This month, the school won a reprieve from a proposed ban after a federal appeals court concluded that the March 2020 decision by the […]

An old bridge winds across the river between Minnesota and Wisconsin, where Lake Superior Community Health Center maintains sites less than six miles apart. That bridge, says CEO Jessie Peterson, represents a barrier to how easily low-income patients on either side can access health care.  Peterson’s center maintains its hub in Duluth, where more low-income […]

For more than four months, much of the media coverage on policing reform has focused on whether congressional negotiators can strike a bipartisan deal that will pass muster in the divided Senate. Three weeks ago, the negotiators appeared optimistic as they announced “an agreement on a framework” for a compromise. But they have since hit […]

Congress faces growing pressure to pass new federal voting legislation in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last week that will make it more difficult to challenge a spate of new Republican-backed state-level voting restrictions.  Democrats already wrestling with a loaded agenda on voting rights now face the additional complication of how to address […]

President Joe Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Central America this week with a mission: Begin a new era of U.S.-supported programs to try to decrease migration by reducing poverty, violence and corruption in the infamously unstable region.  It’s no small task. Local oligarchs and U.S. companies have long reaped profits from countries with […]

A year ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle a program that has protected 700,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation. As that anniversary neared, educator Astou Thiane met with President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to discuss the future of immigration reform in this country […]

At 107 years old, Viola Fletcher is the oldest known survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. She recounted to a congressional subcommittee last week the traumatic night when a white mob forced her family to flee their thriving Black neighborhood. “I still see Black men being shot; Black bodies lying in the streets,” Fletcher […]