“”In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.
That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.
One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.
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“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.
“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.
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Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that ICE raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were “taking very good, long-time workers away” from those sectors, “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Trump later told reporters, “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.” He added, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted.
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ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.
“Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)”
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“Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy.
So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests” stemming from members’ “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee’s meetings.
What about RFK Jr.’s vague claims hinting at nefarious “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms” on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing.”
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“The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being “above any pro- or antivaccine agenda.” With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that “none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.” That’s great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases.
However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent.”
“the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a teenage girl and her parents who are attempting to sue the girl’s school district for alleged disability discrimination. The decision, which did not rule on the merits of the case, is similar to another recent unanimous ruling finding that courts cannot require different discrimination cases to meet different standards of proof to receive a favorable judgment.”
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“two lower courts ruled against the family. The 8th Circuit ruled that simply failing to provide A. J. T. a reasonable accommodation wasn’t enough to prove illegal discrimination. Rather, because the family was suing a school, they would be subject to a higher standard than plaintiffs suing other institutions. The family was told they had to prove that the school’s behavior rose to the level of “bad faith” or “gross misjudgment.”
The Supreme Court disagreed. In the Court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that disability discrimination “claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” adding that “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reiterated how nonsensical the 8th Circuit’s higher standard for educational disability discrimination claims was, noting that some of the most obvious forms of disability discrimination do not involve bad faith or misjudgment against the disabled.”
“Masked federal agents have repeatedly grabbed people in immigration raids over the past few weeks. Most seem to be members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but in the moment there is often little to indicate who they are. This presents a danger not only to the public but to the masked agents themselves.”
“Deportation is the most commonly understood term, but it refers to a codified judicial process for expelling an alien back to their home country for violating immigration law—a process that the Trump administration’s program barely resembled. In the multiple cases of foreign students who were snatched off the street and had their visas revoked, they were given no due process and provided no evidence of what, if any, laws they had violated.
The Trump administration also summarily expelled several hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members and sent them not to their home country but to a nightmarish Salvadoran megaprison. The only word we have that comes close to describing that, courtesy of the war on terror, is to rendition someone.
At the same time, the administration terminated temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. There were also reports that the White House was considering revoking legal status for Ukrainians who had fled their war-torn country.
There is a term for that last one: refoulement—the act of returning a refugee or asylum seeker back to the country from which they fled, and where they face serious risk of harm. The principle of non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international refugee law.”
“The popular child tax credit will receive a slight boost from President Trump’s signature tax and spending bill — but there are caveats.
Currently, taxpayers who make under $200,000 annually as a single filer, or $400,000 if filing jointly, can qualify for a partially refundable credit of up to $2,000 for each child they claim as a dependent who is under age 17 and a US citizen or qualifying noncitizen.
The new legislation increases the credit to a maximum $2,200 per child. Without the bill, the maximum credit would have reverted to $1,000.
But the increase, which amounts to a 10% bump, follows years of rising prices that have chipped away at the value of the original benefit. And many extremely low-income children — in addition to US citizen kids of undocumented parents — will be locked out of the payments altogether.”
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“To qualify for the refundable portion of the child tax credit, which is called the “additional child tax credit” and can be worth up to $1,700, taxpayers must earn at least $2,500 in annual income. (A refundable tax credit can lower tax liability past zero, potentially generating a refund.) Families who make less than that receive no benefit, while many more children are in low-income households that earn just enough to receive part of the benefit but not enough to receive the full payment.”
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“The average benefit for taxpayers with children who made between $10,000 and $20,000 in 2022, for example, was $800, according to the Congressional Research Service. That pay range includes people who worked full-time jobs at the federal minimum wage. Families earning between $200,000 and $500,000, meanwhile, saw an average benefit of $2,810.”