This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.

Sign up here!

🌧️Hot and muggy, with highs close to 90 and chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Sunset is at 8:24 p.m.

Yesterday was the last day that all but a handful of hotel shelters were open in Massachusetts. Many of the families who spent last year in hotel shelters are now more settled in communities across Massachusetts, finding work and planning their next steps. GBH’s Sarah Betancourt spoke with one woman about her path working to settle in Massachusetts with her family.

Carolyn Michelle Brooks Castillo said she, her husband and their four children escaped from gang violence in Honduras in 2023. They made their way to Massachusetts, slept on the floor at Logan airport and then spent more than a year in a shelter in Lowell. In the meantime, they’ve applied for asylum and successfully secured work permits. Castillo and her husband have found part-time and temporary work in construction, cleaning and caretaking.

Now they’ve moved into a three-bedroom apartment, with help from the state’s HomeBASE program. “The children are so happy, so content. They can have their own space and be comfortable. They said they still can’t believe it,” Castillo said. “It’s not that someone can say the government will give something to me, I will take this and that — no, it’s important that someone moves forward with a mission and purpose, and now we can prepare to work more, be secure and in one place for the children.” Their next goal: finding full-time work and building more stability.

Four Things to Know

1. The Trump administration yesterday threatened to pull all of Harvard’s remaining federal funding and released an investigation accusing the university of being a “breeding ground for race discrimination” and of being “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitic harassment of Jewish students and faculty.

Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement with the American Council on Education, said the letter struck him as being more about sending a message than about substance. “There was an attempt to document the assertions this time,” Fansmith said, “but clearly no effort to work with the institution. No acknowledgment of all the steps Harvard has taken, which have been pretty comprehensive.”

2. Sen. Ed Markey said he’s very worried about the effects of the federal budget bill, known as the Big, Beautiful Bill, which Senate members have been trying to pass before President Donald Trump’s July 4 deadline. The bill, Markey said, takes money from the health care system to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

“What the Republicans have done to healthcare — $900 billion out of Medicaid, $500 billion out of Medicare, $300 billion out of the Affordable Care Act — make it a much worse bill,” Markey told GBH’s Adam Reilly. “They’re going to make that transfer out of the healthcare system into the hands of billionaires and that’s actually, incredibly, worse than what the House of Representatives did.”

3. Massachusetts lawmakers passed a $61 billion budget yesterday, with a 139-6 vote in the State House and a 38-2 vote in the State Senate. The bill will officially make bus trips at regional transit authorities (not Boston’s MBTA) fare-free for riders and order that real estate broker fees be paid only by the people who hire them, not by tenants whose landlords sought out a broker’s services.

But lawmakers are also keeping an eye on Washington: federal spending cuts, especially to Medicaid, could mean the Massachusetts legislature has to revise how it spends the state’s money.

4. How do you tackle rebuilding the oldest public housing development in Massachusetts, currently home to more than 1,000 families? One step at a time: a groundbreaking for the Mary Ellen McCormack public housing complex yesterday was a ceremonial start to a two-decade-long project to redo the 1930s-era complex, turning 1,016 units into 3,300.

“I look forward to seeing the foundations rise up higher, and the walls go in,” said Carol Sullivan, who leads the Mary Ellen McCormack tenant task force. Tenants are especially excited about washers and dryers in every unit, she said. The first project will be a 94-unit building, scheduled to be completed by fall 2026. Current residents have been promised that they can stay at the complex during construction, and that they will be guaranteed a spot in the new buildings.

MBTA train components shipped from China seized

U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized unassembled parts for new Red and Orange Line trains, made in China and headed for Massachusetts, over suspicions that the company that made them is using forced labor from China’s Uyghur population.

GBH’s Jeremy Siegel, following up on reporting from the news site Contrarian Boston, confirmed that CBP agents took hold of train shells and other parts that arrived at U.S. ports in May. The manufacturer, a Chinese state-owned company called CRRC that won a contract to build new MBTA trains in 2014, makes the parts in China, then ships across the ocean to the U.S. and brings them to a factory CRRC built in Springfield, Massachusetts, where workers assemble them into completed cars and send them to the MBTA.

But in 2020, an Australian government think tank called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute issued a report claiming that the Chinese government forced 80,000 Uyghur people to move from their homes in Xinjiang to work in factories across the country between 2017 and 2019. Among the dozens of companies they named was CRRC.

A spokesperson for CRRC denied the company uses forced labor, and said they have “maintained rigorous compliance reviews of all suppliers.” “We take this request very seriously and have responded promptly with providing documentation to CBP to demonstrate full compliance,” the spokesperson wrote.

Erik Olson, executive director of the industry group Rail Security Alliance, called on CBP agents to investigate CRRC’s imports back in 2020. Yesterday he said that seizing their imports is “the only right thing to do” in response to allegations of forced labor in China and child labor in Africa.

“Throughout it all, CRRC has continued to reap billions of dollars in passenger train contracts — unchecked — from Boston to Los Angeles,” Olson wrote in a letter yesterday. “We applaud the integrity of CBP to ensure importers into the U.S. abide by our laws.”

So what does this mean for the MBTA? For now, there are enough parts at the factory in Springfield that production can keep rolling. CRRC had already promised hundreds of new cars, due by 2023, that have not yet been delivered. The project’s price tag has risen from $567 million in 2014 to more than $1 billion today.

“What — if any — impacts this current issue has on the future delivery schedule is not immediately clear,” MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said. “But the MBTA and its contractor are committed to finding a resolution that allows production to continue well past this year.”

Read Jeremy Siegel’s full reporting here.