Briefing: Quick updates from Immigration, Food Safety + Medical Research Funding
A flagship Trump policy permitting indefinite detention is dividing appeals courts across the US, and ICE is violating court orders against warrantless arrests. Shakeups continue at the FDA, and the NIH is having trouble awarding and administering grants — because it pushed out the staff who award and administer grants. We have updates for you on Immigration, Food Safety, and Medical Research Funding.
Immigration
The Immigration team added 24 events to our timeline this week. A pivotal administration policy — mandatory detention without bond for immigration arrestees — has divided federal appeals courts: Three circuit courts have now affirmed lower court decisions against the policy, two others have ruled in favor of it, and a sixth has deadlocked on the issue. Federal judges in DC and Colorado found that ICE violated court orders against warrantless arrests without probable cause. A federal judge ordered ICE to release a detained Mexican couple so that they could reunite with their terminally ill teenage son, a US citizen, in Mexico; he died less than a day after their reunion. And a 3-year-old US citizen died following violent abuse by the man his mother had to leave him with after ICE detained her; she was deported without her child despite her repeated pleas to ICE to return him to her care.
Food Safety
The Food Safety team added 5 items to our timeline. After a tumultuous 13-month tenure, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned amid a wider FDA leadership shakeup, and top food regulator Kyle Diamantas was named acting FDA Commissioner. A former corporate attorney with clients in the food and beverage industry, including a formula company accused of harming premature infants, Diamantas is nevertheless viewed by insiders as an uncontroversial pick, given that he preserved senior leadership at the Human Foods Program and maintained relative stability within his division. During his Foods tenure, the FDA published its first round of infant formula testing results: The first report from Operation Stork Speed’s ongoing surveillance work show reassuringly low levels of heavy metals, pesticides, phthalates, and PFAS (“forever chemicals”), but it failed to name the formulas that did contain phthalates and PFAS or to establish internal safety standards for these chemicals.
Medical Research Funding
The Medical Research Funding team added 4 new events to the timeline. Many grants have been restored, at least on paper, but the NIH is now so understaffed that it’s struggling to award and administer them. Meanwhile, the real-world impact of defunded research made the news after Scientific American reported on the 2025 termination of a grant to study transmission of the Andes virus, the hantavirus responsible for the deadly outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius.
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