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🌂Clouds moving in, with showers possible this afternoon and evening. Sunset is at 6:39 p.m.
Two Massachusetts couples are suing the state because they lost their licenses to foster children over a requirement that foster parents sign an agreement to “support, respect and affirm the foster child’s sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.” The couples say doing so would go against their Christian faith.
LGBTQ+ youth in foster care are especially vulnerable: about 40% nationwide have run away or been told to leave their homes because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, according to the Trevor Project.
“These are already traumatized kids facing additional trauma because of their identity — and this isn’t about the foster parents,” said Tanya Neslusan, executive director of MassEquality. “When you are parenting children, it is never about the parents — it is about the children and making sure that their needs are prioritized. And if you can’t in good conscience do that, then that’s really what it comes down to.”
Mallory Sleight, an attorney representing the couples through the Alliance Defending Freedom, said that “by using chosen pronouns, you are agreeing that a boy is in fact a girl, or a girl is in fact a boy. And biblically, these families simply do not hold that belief. And by speaking that belief, especially to a child, they are violating their own religious convictions.” GBH’s Hannah Reale has more about the case and its possible implications here.
Four Things to Know
1. Construction on Revolution Wind, the mostly-completed wind farm off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, can resume following a federal judge’s ruling yesterday in Washington, D.C. The project had been halted a month ago by order of the Trump administration.
Federal officials are still reviewing other wind projects, some of which would power the grid in Massachusetts, according to the State House News Service.
2. Monica Cannon-Grant, activist and founder of the now-defunct nonprofit Violence in Boston, who was arrested in 2022, pleaded guilty yesterday to defrauding donors.
Prosecutors accused her of using money from the nonprofit to pay for her own rent and car. Cannon-Grant pleaded guilty to 18 of the 27 charges against her. She’s scheduled for sentencing at the end of January.
3. Nashoba Valley, home to some of the communities who lost their local hospital when Steward Health Care declared bankruptcy last year, is getting a new medical center in 2027. The project, a UMass Memorial Health satellite campus with emergency services and scans, broke ground yesterday.
“They were very much saddened by the loss of the hospital here in town,” said Katie Petrossi, the leader of Ayer’s council on aging. “It’s certainly no replacement for the hospital that was in Ayer, which was something that older adults were comfortable with.”
4. Tomorrow marks the start of the third annual CineFest Latino Boston, which features movies by and about Latinos. You can find the full lineup here.
“A lot of films speak to what is going on without being kind of blatant about it, but also in a way that we’re not focusing on the negative, but focusing on the positive of our community in terms of our relationship to the U.S.,” Curator Sabrina Aviles told GBH’s Under the Radar. The festival runs through Sunday.
Brazilian immigrants in Greater Boston are being detained by ICE in large numbers
Of the 2,800 people detained by federal immigration agents in Massachusetts during the first seven months of this year, about 780 were Brazilian, according to a review of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data by the nonprofit Deportation Data Project. That’s slightly more than a quarter of all detentions, and three times the number of Brazilians taken into ICE custody in 2024.
Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts are now grappling with fears of what more deportations mean for their communities, GBH’s Phillip Martin reports. That includes people like Sinvalda Oliveira of Marlborough, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Brazil who voted for President Donald Trump in last year’s election. Her friend was one of the people recently deported.
“He was just sitting inside his car in the parking lot of his apartment. And they detained him and they deported him,” Oliveira said. “If these raids keep going, we’re all going to go broke. All the bakeries, all of the markets, we’re not making enough money to pay our employees. It’s crazy. It is horrible. It’s not right.”
Right now, she said, she plans not to vote in 2028 unless there’s a change in immigration policies. “We cannot live afraid that you’re going to close down your business,” she said. “We cannot live much longer with this craziness about immigration.”
Those facing these fears also include people like Renata Nunes, who came to the U.S. from Brazil as a child.
“My grandmother lived through the dictatorship in Brazil. And seeing what’s happening now [in the United States], I never thought that I would have to deal with something that she dealt with,” Nunes said. She’s hearing more friends and loved ones who don’t have legal immigration status say they’re afraid to leave their homes. Even Nunes, who is a U.S. citizen, said she’s concerned about threats to strip people of their citizenship.
“I thought that, ‘OK, at least I’m untouchable — my mom is untouchable, my family’s untouchable,’” she said. “And the realization that that’s not true and the fear ... sort of set in.”
You can find Phillip Martin’s full reporting on this story here.
Dig deeper:
-Immigration arrests increase in Massachusetts with new ICE operation
-Husband of local attorney detained by ICE in window shattering incident
-Everett cancels Hispanic Heritage Month celebration over ICE fears
GBH Daily
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