Trump Guts Key Civil Rights Protections With New Executive Order
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would further weaken civil rights protections and make it more difficult for plaintiffs to prevail in discrimination cases in areas such as education, housing, health care and public benefits. The order instructs federal agencies to stop enforcing laws and regulations based on disparate impact — a legal theory that identifies policies with discriminatory effects, even if they appear facially neutral.
Families of Detainees in El Salvador and Venezuela Decry Bukele’s Prisoner Swap Offer
The families of prisoners being held by the authoritarian governments of El Salvador and Venezuela have condemned President Nayib Bukele’s offer to swap 252 Venezuelan detainees sent to his jails by the Trump administration for the same number of political prisoners incarcerated by Nicolás Maduro’s regime. Nelson Suárez, whose brother was among the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious maximum-security jail in El Salvador last month, said he was desperate for the release of his brother, from whom he has heard nothing in five weeks.
We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention. What We Saw Was a Warning to Us All
A young woman walked casually down a public street only to find herself suddenly surrounded by masked law enforcement officers in plain clothes. Without explanation — and in the absence of criminal charges and any due process — she was forced into a waiting vehicle and vanished into the labyrinth of the state security system. Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re recounting what happened to the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Mass., last month. But no: That was the September 2020 abduction of the political activist Maria Kolesnikova in the capital of Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is home to one of the most repressive governments in the world.
Lawsuit Aims to Reverse Firings at Internal Oversight Offices Within D.H.S.
An assortment of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday aimed at stopping the Department of Homeland Security from permanently shuttering its internal oversight divisions after the Trump administration fired critical staff members, grinding operations to a halt. The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., brought by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, along with two immigration rights groups. It seeks to preserve some of the main guardrails within the agency, all created by Congress, that help uncover and prevent human rights abuses by its officers.