This week at Unbreaking, September 26
In Immigration, ICE raids and brutal responses to protests are taking place alongside a massive and less-visible administrative effort to delegalize people who are present in the US lawfully — and to keep detained immigrants from being released on bond while they await hearings in an immigration court system so backlogged that some current cases won’t be heard until 2029. Our Data Security team is tracking more instances of the administration’s attempts to access, compile, consolidate, and weaponize personal information. But some state governments aren’t handing over their information without a fight. And in Medical Research Funding, the overall situation remains grim, but we also saw some legal wins for funding restoration at major universities.
In addition to the three issue pages we updated today, we’re tracking the Trump administration’s attacks — and ongoing countermoves from across American society — in Equality at Work, Food Safety, Medicaid, the Postal Service, and Transgender Healthcare. If you’d like to help us build timelines and make sense of what’s happening in these issues or the many others we’re still building out, let us know!
Immigration
Many of the Trump administration’s immigration actions fall into three connected categories: 1) making hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants “illegal” and therefore deportable; 2) conducting mass raids that largely target people without criminal records who’ve been peacefully living and working in the US for years; and 3) imprisoning detained immigrants in overcrowded, often brutal conditions without the possibility of release on bond. Alongside this, federal agents continue to assault and arrest journalists, protestors, and elected officials — and to block legally protected oversight of ICE facilities.
We’re watching these trends across the country in this week’s update to our Immigration timeline. In Chicago, we saw mass arrests and the killing of a local man at an immigration stop. In New York, protestors and elected officials were arrested at a Manhattan ICE facility that’s already the subject of a lawsuit over inhumane conditions. And in the aftermath of this summer’s ICE raids and protests in Los Angeles, a federal judge has ordered DHS to refrain from brutalizing journalists, protestors, and legal observers in Southern California.
We also included new moves in lawsuits challenging the administration’s attempts to strip lawfully present immigrants’ legal status and its decision to keep immigrants in detention indefinitely while their cases crawl through increasingly backed-up courts.
Data Security
In Data Security, we continue to see the Trump administration trying to acquire, compile, and weaponize ever-larger swathes of personal data, including voting and medical records, financial data, and detailed personal information on benefits recipients. But states and judges are pushing back.
Since our last update, the Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed that it is sharing state voter data with the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to identify noncitizens on voter rolls — despite the fact that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. The DOJ also sued Maine and Oregon for detailed voter data — the latest tactic in its push to gather such data from states. Meanwhile, federal health officials are trying to waive medical privacy protections as part of an effort to collect information about the “harmful effects” of COVID vaccines during pregnancy.
There have also been efforts — some successful — to protect sensitive data. A federal judge paused the US Department of Agriculture’s attempt to collect detailed personal information about SNAP (food stamp) applicants in 21 states. The Arizona attorney general limited ICE’s access to a database of US-Mexico wire transfers that it had used to target immigrants. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union demanded further details (PDF) from the San Francisco Police Department after reports that out-of-state law enforcement, including federal authorities, had accessed the city’s automated license plate reader data — likely in violation of California law.
Medical Research Funding
The medical research funding landscape continues to change dramatically. A contentious 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court in late August allowed the administration to continue blocking up to $2 billion in NIH funding. Many of these grants were initially withdrawn because they involved DEI, gender identity, or COVID-19; a recent spate of grant cancellations suggest that research involving human fetal tissue may also be at risk. In an effort to consolidate political control over grantmaking decisions, the administration issued an executive order seeking to put funding decisions in the hands of political appointees rather than scientific experts.
There’s also some good news: Harvard brought the fight for its revoked funding to court, and earlier this month, they prevailed in their lawsuit against the administration, though it remains unclear whether the blocked funds will be released. A federal judge later ordered over $500 million in frozen grants to be reinstated to UCLA. Whether the universities receive the funds will likely set a precedent for other higher education institutions.
We’re tracking these and many more changes in our Medical Research Funding explainer.
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