 |
|
|
|||||
The U.S. Supreme Court let Donald Trump’s administration on Monday strip temporary protected status from Venezuelans living in the United States that had been granted under his predecessor Joe Biden, as the Republican president moves to ramp up deportations as part of his hard-line approach to immigration. The court granted the Justice Department’s request to lift San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s order that had halted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate the deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the temporary protected status, or TPS, program. The court’s brief order was unsigned, as is typical when the justices act on an emergency request. The court, however, left open the door to any challenges by migrants if the administration seeks to invalidate work permits or other TPS-related documents that were issued to expire in October 2026, which is the end of the TPS period extended by Biden. The Department of Homeland Security has said about 348,202 Venezuelans were registered under Biden’s 2023 TPS designation. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the court to publicly dissent from the decision. The action came in a legal challenge by plaintiffs including some of the TPS recipients and the National TPS Alliance advocacy group, who said Venezuela remains an unsafe country. Trump, who returned to the presidency in January, has pledged to deport record numbers of migrants in the United States illegally and has taken actions to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees. The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under U.S. law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster, or other catastrophe, giving recipients living in the United States deportation protection and access to work permits. The designation can be renewed by the U.S. homeland security secretary. The U.S. government under Biden, a Democrat, twice designated Venezuela for TPS, in 2021 and 2023. In January, days before Trump returned to office, the Biden administration announced an extension of the programs to October 2026. Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation. Chen ruled that Noem violated a federal law that governs the actions of agencies. The judge also said the revocation of the TPS status appeared to have been predicated on “negative stereotypes” by insinuating the Venezuelan migrants were criminals. “Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes,” Chen wrote, adding that Venezuelan TPS holders were more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than American citizens and less likely to commit crimes than the general U.S. population. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 declined the administration’s request to pause the judge’s order. Justice Department lawyers in their Supreme Court filing said Chen had “wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy” away from the government’s executive branch, headed by Trump. “The court’s order contravenes fundamental Executive Branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary,” they wrote. The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that granting the administration’s request “would strip work authorization from nearly 350,000 people living in the U.S., expose them to deportation to an unsafe country, and cost billions in economic losses nationwide.” The State Department currently warns against travel to Venezuela “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.” The Trump administration in April also terminated TPS for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians in the United States. Those actions are not part of the current case. In a separate case on Friday, the Supreme Court kept in place its block on Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate legal process. Andrew Chung, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Libraries across the United States are cutting back on e-books, audiobooks, and loan programs after the Trump administration suspended millions of dollars in federal grants as it tries to dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Federal judges have issued temporary orders to block the Trump administration from taking any further steps toward gutting the agency. But the unexpected slashing of grants has delivered a significant blow to many libraries, which are reshuffling budgets and looking at different ways to raise money. Maine has laid off a fifth of its staff and temporarily closed its state library after not receiving the remainder of its annual funding. Libraries in Mississippi have indefinitely stopped offering a popular e-book service, and the South Dakota state library has suspended its interlibrary loan program. E-book and audiobook programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts, even though those offerings have exploded in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. I think everyone should know the cost of providing digital sources is too expensive for most libraries,” said Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association. Its a continuous and growing need. Library officials caught off guard by Trump’s cuts President Donald Trump issued an executive order March 14 to dismantle the IMLS before firing nearly all of its employees. One month later, the Maine State Library announced it was issuing layoff notices for workers funded through an IMLS grant program. It came as quite a surprise to all of us, said Spencer Davis, a library generalist at the Maine State Library who is one of eight employees who were laid off May 8 because of the suspended funding. In April, California, Washington, and Connecticut were the only three states to receive letters stating the remainder of their funding for the year was canceled, Hohl said. For others, the money hasnt been distributed yet. The three states all filed formal objections with the IMLS. Rebecca Wendt, California state library director, said she was never told why California’s funding was terminated while the other remaining states did not receive the same notice. We are mystified, Wendt said. The agency did not respond to an email seeking comment. Popular digital offerings on the chopping block Most libraries are funded by city and county governments, but receive a smaller portion of their budget from their state libraries, which receive federal dollars every year to help pay for summer reading programs, interlibrary loan services, and digital books. Libraries in rural areas rely on federal grants more than those in cities. Many states use the funding to pay for e-books and audiobooks, which are increasingly popular, and costly, offerings. In 2023, more than 660 million people globally borrowed e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines, up from 19% in 2022, according to OverDrive, the main distributor of digital content for libraries and schools. In Mississippi, the state library helped fund its statewide e-book program. For a few days, Erin Busbea was the bearer of bad news for readers at her Mississippi library: Hoopla, a popular app to check out e-books and audiobooks had been suspended indefinitely in Lowndes and DeSoto counties due to the funding freeze. People have been calling and asking, Why cant I access my books on Hoopla? said Busbea, library director of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System in Columbus, a majority-Black city northeast of Jackson. The library system also had to pause parts of its interlibrary loan system allowing readers to borrow books from other states when they aren’t available locally. For most libraries that were using federal dollars, they had to curtail those activities,” said Hulen Bivins, the Mississippi Library Commission executive director. States are fighting the funding freeze The funding freeze came after the agency’s roughly 70 staff members were placed on administrative leave in March. Attorneys general in 21 states and the American Library Association have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for seeking to dismantle the agency. The institute’s annual budget is below $300 million and distributes less than half of that to state libraries across the country. In California, the state library was notified that about 20%, or $3 million, of its $15 million grant had been terminated. The small library systems are not able to pay for the e-books themselves, said Wendt, the California state librarian. In South Dakota, the state’s interlibrary loan program is on hold, according to Nancy Van Der Weide, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Department of Education. The institute, founded in 1996 by a Republican-controlled Congress, also supports a national library training program named after former first lady Laura Bush that seeks to recruit and train librarians from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds. A spokesperson for Bush did not return a request seeking comment. Library funding is never robust. It’s always a point of discussion. It’s always something you need to advocate for, said Liz Doucett, library director at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine. It’s adding to just general anxiety.” Nadia Lathan, Associated Press/Report for America Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Category:
E-Commerce
Federal judge and Trump appointee Matthew J. Kacsmaryk issued a ruling on Friday that will significantly alter the protections that transgender employees are entitled to in the workplace. The decision impacts the current guidance on workplace harassment from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a move that reflects the agency’s new priorities under the Trump administration and new acting chair Andrea Lucas. In the ruling, Kacsmaryk struck down a section of the EEOC’s guidance that applied to transgender and gender-nonconforming workers, arguing the agency did not have the authority to foist those guidelines on employers. The agency’s guidance had stated that misgendering employees, denying them access to appropriate bathrooms, or barring them from dressing in line with their gender identity could constitute workplace harassment. Updates to workplace harassment guidance The EEOC had updated its guidance on workplace harassment last year for the first time in decades, following a major Supreme Court ruling in 2020 that codified workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees. (Over the last two years, the agency has also fielded well over 6,000 charges that alleged discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.) But Kacsmaryk ruled that the agency’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decision was too broad and imposed “mandatory standards” on employers, contradicting the EEOC’s claim that the guidance was not legally binding. Kacsmaryk also cited the “biological differences between men and women” and said the EEOC’s guidance contravenes Title VIIs plain text by expanding the scope of sex beyond the biological binary.” A new administration’s priorities Trump had already undermined protections for LGBTQ+ workers in one of his first executive orders, which dictated that the government would only recognize two biological sexes. And even prior to this ruling, the new administration had already influenced the EEOC’s priorities: In her new capacity as acting chair, Lucas said the agency would now focus on defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights” and complying with Trump’s executive orders. Over the last few months, there have been several reports that the EEOC is dismissing lawsuits that were already underway involving allegations of discrimination against trans or gender-nonconforming workers. The agency is also reportedly de-prioritizing new charges related to gender identity and discouraging EEOC judges from hearing existing cases that are under investigation. (The EEOC has not commented on these reports.) Since Trump dismissed EEOC commissioners Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, the agency has lacked a quorum and been unable to make formal revisions to its guidanceincluding the workplace harassment guidelines, which Lucas had voted against when they were issued in 2024. Earlier this month, however, Trump nominated a new commissioner who would secure a Republican majority at the EEOC if confirmed, enabling the agency to revoke prior guidance and make other consequential changes to worker protections.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||