Across the historic corridors of the American South and in urban centers from Chicago to Philadelphia, a quiet crisis is hollowing out the foundation of Black generational wealth: the ability to own a home. It does not always arrive with the loud rumble of a bulldozer or the sudden shock of an eviction notice. More often, it arrives as a silent legal technicality known as “Heirs’ Property.”
The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data. “We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.
Gabbard's inquiry may focus on Trump's baseless claims that “foreign interference” caused his 2020 election loss.
Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family. Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.This story has been updated.
ICE is incarcerating a record 73,000 people in dangerous and increasingly deadly immigration jails.
The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task. Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast. Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast. “Such a fucking dope,” another person said. “Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast. Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office. Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.
The measure ending a short partial shutdown passed the House, 217-214.