The layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services slashed the staffs of major federal aging, disability and anti-poverty programs, leaving the future of those programs uncertain.

At least 40% of staff got layoff notices and many were turned away at the front door Tuesday when they showed up for work at the Administration for Community Living, or ACL, which coordinates federal policy on aging and disability. That's according to the agency's former director under the Biden Administration, Alison Barkoff, who says she talked to multiple members of her former staff.

The agency funds programs that run senior centers and distribute 216 million meals a year to older and disabled people through the Meals on Wheels program.

"The programs that ACL implements improve the lives of literally tens of millions of older adults, people with disabilities and their families and caregivers," says Barkoff, now director of a health law program at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. "There's no way to have these RIFs and not impact the programs and the people who rely on them."

Last week, the announcement of the coming layoffs at HHS said that ACL's responsibilities would go to different parts of HHS.

But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's guide for reshaping government, had suggested ACL take on work on special education services once the Department of Education was dismantled. It's not clear where that work will be done now.

In addition, every staffer was laid off from the Division of Energy Assistance, according to two employees who lost their jobs on Tuesday, Andrew Germain and Vikki Pretlow. The office runs the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps 5.9 million low-income households pay heat and cooling bills and pay for home repairs to boost energy efficiency.

The staffers said layoffs of about 20 workers came as a surprise and they expressed concern about whether the program would continue once funding runs out at the end of September and impoverished people face rising heating bills in fall and winter.

LIHEAP provides "life-saving services," says Germain. One way the funds are used is to help low-income people pay their electric bills when they rely upon oxygen or other medical devices or need to keep the refrigerator running to store insulin or other medicines.

Germain ran compliance monitoring to make sure states used the LIHEAP money correctly. He said fraud is rare. But LIHEAP was scrutinized by Project 2025. It noted a "loophole" – fixed by Congress more than ten years ago, in 2014 – that was used by about 10 states to give minimal energy assistance in a way that then qualified impoverished people for a bigger SNAP, or food stamp, payment.

Congress appropriated $4.1 billion to LIHEAP in fiscal year 2024. Germain says without federal staff to run the program, it's unclear how it will continue after the current appropriation ends in September.

Pretlow, who lost her job as a program specialist in the LIHEAP office, said: "You can be paid much more in a different place, you can be praised more in a different place, you can be appreciated more in a different place. But the people I worked with have a great heart for service."

Summary:

The Trump administration inadvertently revealed on Monday that it is attempting to trap Venezuelan migrants in a catch-22 that would effectively block them from challenging their deportation and detention in an El Salvador prison. In a court filing, the government acknowledged that it had deported at least one migrant to El Salvador due to an “administrative error”—but argued that the individual had no right to contest his imprisonment because he is in the custody of a “foreign sovereign.”

This argument confirms what’s been clear for weeks: The government intends to treat the prison as a black site where migrants have no constitutional rights whatsoever and may be subject to any treatment whatsoever—including indefinite detention, forced labor, torture, or death.

But Monday’s filing illustrates another, more subtle problem that the Justice Department probably did not intend to admit: The government is trying to shunt migrants’ legal claims through a channel that is doomed to end in failure.

It seeks to ensnare these migrants in a Kafkaesque trap from which there may be no lawful escape. And it is trying to sell this subterfuge to the federal judiciary as a legitimate opportunity for due process if any migrants have plausible objections to their treatment.

To see how hollow that promise is, just look to the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. A native of El Salvador, Abrego Garcia came to the United States in 2011, fleeing gang violence. Although he entered the country without authorization, an immigration judge granted him protected status in 2019, finding that he would likely face persecution if sent back to his home country. Federal law prohibits his removal to El Salvador. The Trump administration targeted him anyway, pulling him over while he was driving with his son, who is 5 years old and intellectually disabled. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents falsely claimed that his “status has changed,” arrested him, and threatened to turn over his son to Child Protective Services if his wife did not arrive within 10 minutes. His wife, a U.S. citizen, was able to appear in time, but ICE refused to provide any information about her husband’s arrest. She did not know where he had been taken until she saw a news photo of alleged Venezuelan gang members in CECOT, a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison, kneeling on the ground, their arms raised above their shaved heads. One man, she realized, was her husband.

Abrego Garcia’s deportation was unambiguously illegal, and his lawyers swiftly filed suit demanding his return. On Monday, the DOJ responded with a bombshell admission: Abrego Garcia did have a right to remain in the U.S. and was shipped off to CECOT only because of an “administrative error.” The DOJ then declared that there was nothing the plaintiff or the government could do to fix this confessed mistake. Abrego Garcia, it wrote, would need to file a writ of habeas corpus, the traditional procedure for challenging unlawful detention. Indeed, it argued, Abrego Garcia’s claims “can proceed only in habeas”—he has no other way to fight his imprisonment. And yet, the department concluded, no federal court can hear his habeas claim, because he is “not in United States custody.” He thus has no remedy whatsoever and must remain in CECOT indefinitely.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35407617

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41255101

Summary:

In what may be a first in American history, President Trump just expanded the presidential pardon power to include corporations.

Corporations are artificial legal fictions designed to maximize shareholder wealth. Nonetheless, they can theoretically commit crimes and be indicted for them. According to a 1999 memorandum from the Justice Department, the “important public benefits” of prosecuting corporations include “deterrence on a massive scale,” particularly for “crimes that carry with them a substantial risk of public harm,” such as “financial frauds.”

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

On Friday, Trump issued full and unconditional pardons to four individuals and a related cryptocurrency exchange, BitMEX.

BitMEX solicits and takes orders for trades in derivatives tied to the value of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Last summer, BitMEX entered a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal court for violating the Bank Secrecy Act for having operated without a legitimate anti-money laundering program. Prior to August 2020, customers could register to trade with BitMEX anonymously, providing only verified email addresses. The latest in politics and policy. Direct to your inbox. Sign up for the Opinion newsletter

On Jan. 15, 2025, BitMEX was criminally fined $100 million in connection with its guilty plea, which was on top of $130 million in civil penalties previously imposed by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. At sentencing, the judge noted that BitMEX, which is incorporated in the Seychelles, had claimed not to operate in the U.S. for several years even though U.S. customers comprised a large share of its business.

Two appeals courts have recently rejected efforts by private parties to use copyright to restrict access to the laws that most directly affect ordinary citizens: regulations that ensure our homes, workplaces, devices, and many other products, are safe and fit for purpose. Apparently hoping the third time will be the charm, a standards organization is asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to break ranks and hold that a private party that helps develop a law also gets to own that law. In an amicus brief filed with co-counsel Abigail Burton and Samuel Silver of Welsh & Recker, P.C., on behalf of multiple entities— including Watch Duty, iFixit, Public.Resource.Org, and multiple library associations—EFF urged the court to instead join the judicial consensus and recognize that no one owns the law.

EFF urged the court to join the judicial consensus and recognize that no one owns the law.

This case concerns UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law, and therefore has the right to control how the public accesses and shares them. Fortunately, neither the Constitution nor the Copyright Act support that theory. Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have held that the codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that, whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. A federal court in Pennsylvania followed the latter path in this case, finding that UpCodes’ database was a protected fair use.

The Third Circuit should affirm the ruling, preferably on the alternative ground that standards incorporated into law are necessarily promoted to the public domain. The internet has democratized access to law, making it easier than ever for the public —from journalists to organizers to safety professionals to ordinary concerned citizens —to understand, comment on, and share the myriad regulations that bind us. That work is particularly essential where those regulations are crafted by private parties and made mandatory by regulators with limited public oversight and increasingly limited staffing. Copyright law should not be read to impede it.

The Supreme Court has explained that “every citizen is presumed to know the law, and it needs no argument to show that all should have free access” to it. Apparently, it needs some argument after all, but it is past time for the debate to end.

Summary:

Reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood said on Monday the Trump administration would cut federal family planning funding as of Tuesday, affecting birth control, cancer screenings and other services for low-income people.

Planned Parenthood said that nine of its affiliates received notice that funding would be withheld under a program known as Title X, which has supported healthcare services for the poor since 1970. The Wall Street Journal reported last week the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) planned an immediate freeze of $27.5 million in family planning grants for groups including Planned Parenthood.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27659095

EDIT: Livestream here.

As of 11:50am PST he's still going, so getting close to 19 hours now.

Summary:

Sen. Cory Booker is holding the Senate floor into Tuesday afternoon, as the New Jersey Democrat continues his marathon speech protesting actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The Democratic senator vowed Monday evening that he would keep going as long as he was “physically able,” continuing his remarks through the night. As of noon Tuesday, he had spoken for more than 17 hours, having begun at 7 p.m. ET Monday.

Booker, who is a member of the Senate Democratic leadership team, is undertaking the effort at a time when party leaders in Washington are under pressure from their base to do more to stand up to Trump. He has castigated Trump’s efforts with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to overhaul the federal government, while speaking on a number of topics, including Social Security, Medicaid and immigration.

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy,” Booker said. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”

Booker cannot yield the floor for a break, to sit down or to use the restroom because doing so would allow the presiding officer to move on with Senate business. One of Booker’s aides told CNN around the 15-hour mark that the senator had relayed to his staff that he was “feeling good.”

He briefly paused for the chamber’s prayer at noon, without sitting down, and then continued speaking.

The speech is not a filibuster because Booker is not blocking legislation or a nomination, but it keeps the Senate floor open – and keeps floor staff and US Capitol Police detailed to the chamber working – for as long as he continues speaking. Lawmakers had concluded voting on Monday before he began his remarks.

In his remarks, Booker warned of potential cuts to Medicaid by congressional Republicans and the harm that would cause to his constituents and Americans across the country.

At midnight one day in spring 2023, a team of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a massive chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was raising some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken company.

When the investigator Joseph Allman entered one of the facility’s sprawling barns, he found chickens packed wall to wall, including three dead, decaying birds. The place smelled “awful and noxious,” he said, and as he waded through the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman found plenty more dead animals. Right outside the barn, Allman told me recently, there was a massive pile of manure “completely littered with dead bodies and body parts.”

Over the following year, the investigators returned to the farm and also visited another operation in the area raising birds for Mountaire, where they found similar conditions. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there were multiple birds “unable to reach food or water due to severe limb deformity and disease, or because they are stuck on their backs and unable to get up.” Several dead birds, the footage showed, had been “left to decompose for days to weeks,” according to Rosenberg.

The investigators also obtained a trove of inspection documents from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses through a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed instances of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to death, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.

Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US attorney, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the conditions documented constitute criminal animal cruelty under Maryland state law. The activists have sent Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary analysis to a number of county and state authorities requesting an investigation into the company and charges for animal cruelty. They haven’t received much interest.

Mountaire alleges that early one morning in mid-February, Allman and his colleague Adam Durand posed as AT&T contractors to gain access to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They were later arrested for criminal impersonation — a charge which was soon dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to remove the charge from their records in exchange for one year of no contact with Mountaire, Allman told me. Mountaire sued the two in early March for trespassing.

“This lawsuit isn’t about protecting their business — it’s about silencing whistleblowers,” Allman wrote to me in response to the lawsuit. Durand declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Mountaire Farms declined an interview request for this story, but emailed a statement to Vox. The company said it requires its contract farmers to “follow sound poultry management practices that conform to practices of good animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to comment further on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.

However grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re far from unusual. At US chicken factory farms, overcrowded, unhygienic conditions are so common that 6 percent of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens that have been bred to be unhealthily large — die on the farm each year before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That adds up to more than half a billion unnecessary deaths.

The alleged conditions on Mountaire’s chicken facilities show one of the major ills of the factory farming system in the US, one shared by other companies in the industry: an almost willful disregard for the welfare of the animals they raise. But Mountaire also demonstrates to a greater extent than any other poultry company a less widely known way in which the factory farming system’s tentacles work their way into American life: the industry’s ties to a right-wing, deregulatory political agenda.

While Republican politicians and meat companies have long been intertwined — almost 80 percent of the industry’s political contributions in the 2024 election cycle went to Republicans — Mountaire and its wealthy but little-known CEO Ronald Cameron show just how deep those ties can go. Cameron, who at times has been a top donor to President Donald Trump, far outspends others in the poultry industry in an apparent effort to bend US politics toward his hard-right beliefs, and seemingly to protect and expand a poultry empire that produces roughly 1 out of every 13 chickens consumed in America today, even if relatively few people have ever heard of it.

How Mountaire Farms has fueled a right-wing business and political agenda

In 2016, Cameron and his wife gave millions to Trump-aligned PACs, which made him one of the biggest donors to Trump. Across the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, Cameron gave another $4.7 million.

Cameron has also contributed to several current and former House Freedom Caucus members and far-right Senate candidates, as well as over $14 million to political action committees (PACs) linked to the Koch Brothers and over $2 million to PACs operated by the Club for Growth.

All told, Cameron has given around $75 million to candidates, PACs, and state parties since 2014 — over 99 percent of it to Republicans — making him one of the 50 biggest political contributors in recent election cycles.

While the direction of Cameron’s dollars isn’t unusual in the meat industry, the scale of giving dwarfs that of his competitors. Since 1990, the largest chicken companies have given — through their employees — anything from tens of thousands to a few million dollars each, with similar spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it should be noted, doesn’t spend on lobbying at all.) The only company that comes close is Tyson Foods, which has spent $35 million on lobbying since 1998 and whose employees have given approximately $7.7 million to political candidates and organizations since 1990. However, Tyson Foods is a much bigger company than Mountaire, with 20 times the annual revenue. It’s a top producer of beef and pork, too.

All the while, according to Glassdoor salary reporting, Mountaire Farms’ frontline slaughterhouse employees make minimum wage or slightly above it to perform one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Mountaire workers have accused the company of retaliation, discrimination, denial of bathroom breaks, union-busting, wage-fixing, and exposure to harmful chemicals. In 2020, an employee interviewed by the New Yorker called the work “slavery.” Mountaire did not respond to Vox for a request for comment about allegations made by its employees.

The company has also been accused of creating severe environmental pollution. In 2021, Mountaire agreed to a historic $205 million deal to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its slaughterhouses had contaminated the drinking water and air quality of nearby residents. “While Mountaire does not believe that it caused any damage to any of the plaintiffs, it chose to settle the case in order to achieve a final resolution and to allow construction of a new wastewater treatment plant to proceed,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Environmental pollution is a consistent problem for the meat industry, and Cameron’s political generosity has coincided with beneficial political action for Mountaire on exactly that subject.

In Maryland, where corporations are restricted from giving political candidates large sums of money, Mountaire funneled $250,000 into the Republican Governors Association days before the 2014 election, which it spent on ads to elect Republican Maryland governor Larry Hogan.

On inauguration day, Hogan rescinded regulations pertaining to how much animal manure can be spread onto crop fields as fertilizer — a notorious source of water pollution on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Allman and his colleagues investigated Mountaire chicken operations. Weeks later, Hogan proposed a watered-down version with a loophole for the poultry industry. A spokesperson for Hogan told the Wall Street Journal that Hogan “had no knowledge of [Mountaire’s] involvement with the Republican Governors Association.”

In the middle of April 2020, Trump picked Cameron to serve as an economic adviser to the White House on its strategy to reopen parts of the economy in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump signed an executive order mandating that slaughterhouses remain open to their extent possible, even as they became Covid hot spots — including Mountaire slaughterhouses.

That same day, the Department of Labor issued a statement that essentially immunized meat companies from being held accountable if they didn’t adhere to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 guidelines so long as they had at least demonstrated a “good faith” effort to do so. Around the same time, the US Department of Agriculture permitted 15 slaughterhouses — including one of Mountaire’s — to speed up their slaughter lines from 140 birds per minute to 175.

Why the meat industry gives so much to Republicans

Mountaire may stand out in the size of its contributions to right-wing politicians and groups, but the broader meat and dairy industry gives overwhelmingly to Republicans.

The industry’s political favoritism can be explained in part by geography; animal agriculture is concentrated in rural states where politicians are much more likely to be Republican. But it can also be explained in part by ideology; Congressional Republicans tend to prefer deregulation, which benefits meat, dairy, and egg companies.

Cameron and his company — along with his competitors — benefit from deregulation at each link in the supply chain that Congress and regulatory agencies could change but don’t. Poultry farms are exempt from numerous animal welfare laws and are largely exempt from key environmental laws. The Department of Labor, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has failed to keep slaughterhouse abuses in check. A lot of the farmers that raise chickens for big poultry companies get screwed over, too.

But while Republicans may financially benefit disproportionately from the industry’s largesse, Democrats tend to be anything but tough on the meat industry.

“While conservatives have consistently pushed more aggressive, pro-agribusiness policies,” food policy expert Nathan Rosenberg and journalist Bryce Wilson Stucki wrote in a 2017 story for The Counter, “liberals have often responded with pro-agribusiness policies of their own, even when that meant undermining their own natural allies: small and mid-sized farmers, farm workers, rural minority populations, and the small, independent businesses they support.” I saw that reality myself when I wrote last year about the cozy relationship between the meat industry and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s VP pick.

There’s no clear path to breaking the meat industry’s grip over American politics on the horizon, but there is something anyone can do — starting today — to push back against the kinds of horrific allegations made against Mountaire and other poultry giants: Eat less chicken.

In 2022, the US raised and slaughtered a record-breaking 9.2 billion of them — 24 per person after accounting for poultry exports. Chicken may be branded as a healthier, more sustainable alternative to beef and pork, but its mass production and consumption — whether from Mountaire or its competitors — relies on unimaginable human and animal suffering.

“We’re up against a really big system that seems really entrenched right now,” said Durand, one of the activists, “and we are just trying to do whatever we can to disrupt that.”

Excerpt:

Reporting Highlights

• Unexpected Role: Flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then Global Crossing Airlines started expanding into federal deportation flights.
• Human Struggles: Some flight attendants said they ignored orders not to interact with detainees. “I’d say ‘hola’ back,” said one flight attendant. “We’re not jerks.”
• Safety Concerns: Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

Summary:

The Trump administration accidentally sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison and says it can’t do anything to get him back.

That’s even though the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.

On Monday, in a filing in Maryland federal court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.

“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote.

The admission came in a suit from Abrego Garcia’s family, who is seeking court orders barring the U.S. from paying El Salvador for the man’s detention and demanding that the federal government request the country return him to the United States.

The Trump administration argues that because the man is no longer in U.S. custody, a U.S. court lacks jurisdiction to issue orders regarding his detention and release. U.S. claims it can’t seek man’s freedom from notorious Salvadorian prison because it no longer has custody over him U.S. claims it can’t seek man’s freedom from notorious Salvadorian prison because it no longer has custody over him (AP)

Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. without inspection sometime around 2011 from El Salvador and settled in Maryland, fleeing from gangs in his home country who allegedly stalked, assaulted, and threatened to kill and kidnap him as part of extortion efforts, according to court documents.

In 2019, he was given a notice to appear in removal proceedings, where ICE accused him of being a member of the Salvadorian criminal gang MS-13.

His attorneys maintain he has no criminal record, ties to the gang, or relation to any criminal group. They claim the accusation rests on a flimsy gang arrest when he was targeted by police for little more than wearing Chicago Bulls-branded clothing while seeking work outside a Home Depot. (ICE maintains that a confidential informant told the agency the man was a member of MS-13.)

During the removal proceedings, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and a judge granted him withholding from removal. The government did not appeal the decision.

The Maryland man, a union sheet metal working apprentice and father to a 5-year-old, remained in the U.S. and continued regular mandated check-ins with ICE, according to court documents, appearing most recently in January.

“Instead, the government put Mr. Abrego Garcia on a plane to El Salvador, seemingly without any pretense of a legal basis whatsoever,” his attorneys wrote in their suit, filed on Friday. “Once in El Salvador, that country’s government immediately placed Mr. Abrego Garcia into a torture center — one that the U.S. government is reportedly paying the government of El Salvador to operate. This grotesque display of power without law is abhorrent to our entire system of justice, and must not be allowed to stand.”