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☀️Sunny day with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 8:03 p.m.

GBH’s Sarah Betancourt has a look at how more reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining people across Greater Boston are impacting local communities like Waltham, where organizers with the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network estimate at least 40 people have been detained in the last few weeks.

Jonathan Paz of Fuerza Waltham, a neighborhood watch group, said the city’s downtown is turning into “a ghost town:” “businesses are suffering. Kids are afraid to go to school. Families are being torn apart,” he said. Read more about it here.


Four Things to Know

FBI agents in Boston are being asked to move off of their regular cases and work on President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts. An FBI spokesperson said agents might be asked to work on “high risk arrest operations” and provide their services as intelligence analysts.

“Immigration enforcement is not part of the FBI’s mandate and that could pull resources from cases closer to the bureau’s mission, like national security,” said Aloke Chakravarty, a former FBI attorney who also worked as a federal prosecutor on the Boston Marathon Bombing case. “And any time you prioritize one type of enforcement over others, that means that you’re not going to be able to cover a lot of the priorities that, particularly for the FBI, that they have historically done.”

Harvard’s DOJ investigation: The Department of Justice is using an 1863 law to investigate Harvard’s admission practices, looking into whether Harvard is following a Supreme Court ruling from two years ago that bars colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions. It’s the latest in the political back-and-forth between the Trump administration and the university.

“This investigation is yet another abusive and retaliatory action – the latest of many – that the administration has initiated against Harvard,” Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton said in an email to GBH News. 

Student debt payback: About 9 million Americans — almost 1 in 4 student loan holders — are either behind on their federal student loans or about to see their loans sent into collections. For the first time since 2020, government officials will be able to garnish up to 15% of people’s paychecks to pay back overdue loans.

“[Garnishment] is cruel. It has a disparate impact on those families that have the greatest need for every dollar,” said U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who last week filed a bill to try and stop the practice. “This is happening at a time of great economic instability and destabilization because of Donald Trump and his policies. Now he’s coming for your hard-earned benefits and your money.”

Boston Calling is this weekend, and the festival grounds are already being set up. The festival’s first day, Friday, is going to be a little bit country with Luke Combs, Megan Moroney and Sheryl Crow, said Mike Snow, Boston Calling’s co-founder.

For Combs, it started with his agency telling the festival’s talent provider that the singer was interested in doing more festivals and fell into place from there, Snow said. “Boston’s a great city for him and he’s always had a great time down at Gillette and they just said, ‘we’d like to mix it up this year, what do you think?’” he said.


What to know about this year’s cicadas in Massachusetts

Have you heard the buzz? Cicada Brood XIV is preparing to crawl up from the ground and greet us with red eyes and flapping wings.

While there are cicadas every year, this particular brood comes to the surface only once every 17 years. Their insect ancestors emerged to mate, lay eggs and die in 2008. Members of the current brood have been going through their life stages underground since us humans were experiencing the Great Recession, and now they’re ready to come up themselves.

“They initially start climbing up a vertical surface like a tree trunk, a brick wall, decking, tires, whatever — and they latch their little tarsal claws on their legs into the surface and that locks them into place,” entomologist Gene Kritsky told GBH’s Dave Epstein. “And then their nymphal skin starts to split open at the thorax [to reveal] the creamy white adult with its red eyes, as it starts the process of transforming into the adult cicada.”

But cicadas don’t work off the same calendars we do, and the earth’s changing climate has meant some of them were coming out before the rest of their brood was ready.

“As the climate gets warmer, the cicadas are coming out earlier,” evolutionary biologist Chris Simon told Epstein. “And in addition to that, we’re seeing more cicadas come out four years ahead of time. We’ve seen that in the past, but not in such numbers as we see now.”

So what should you do if you see cicadas? Remember that while some people find them to be a little freaky-looking — and loud — they’re actually pretty harmless.

“They don’t bite, they don’t sting, they don’t carry away small children,” Kritsky said. “They have piercing, sucking mouthparts, so they’re not going to eat your garden, they are not going to hurt your trees. If you have cicadas coming up in your yard, they’ve been underground for the last 17 years and your trees probably don’t look any different at all. So they’re not dangerous for us at all, in fact, they do quite a lot of good for the ecosystem.”

One thing to look out for: curious dogs and cats in search of a crunchy snack might try to eat some of the bug brood. Cicadas are not poisonous, but their crunchy exoskeletons can be hard for pets to digest and might cause some stomach upset, according to the American Kennel Club.

Kritsky developed a free app called Cicada Safari to encourage people to help scientists track the brood.

“It’s really good if people also take a picture of the underside of the cicada, because that helps us tell what species it is,” Simon said.

Learn more about cicadas here.