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.
☔Rainy morning, cooler day, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:13 p.m. It’s day 8 of the federal government shutdown.
When we talk about racial disparities in education, it can be hard to picture exactly what that means for students’ day-to-day lives. So here are a few examples from a new MassINC report: About 14% of Black and Hispanic students in Massachusetts go to a school without a gym, compared with 7% of white students; 20% of Black and Hispanic students and 9% of white students go to schools without art rooms, and 12% of Black and Hispanic students don’t have libraries in their schools, compared with just 4% of white students.
Why is that? One reason: money from the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s Core Program — which gives cities and towns funding for major school construction projects — disproportionately benefits suburban districts, rather than Boston or gateway cities like Brockton, Quincy, Holyoke and Lawrence, according to MassINC. In fact, about 60% of schools whose facilities are crowded or ranked below average are in those gateway cities.
“Most of the state’s funds are going to rebuild suburban schools, and in many cases they’re suburban schools that are in pretty good condition,” report co-author Ben Forman, MassINC’s research director, told GBH’s Trajan Warren. “Meanwhile, the urban schools that have been assessed to be inadequate and in poor condition haven’t been a priority and they’ve been lingering at the bottom of the list.” If the state focuses its spending on schools in the worst condition, they can close those gaps much faster, the report’s authors wrote. You can check out the full report here.
Four Things to Know
1. Burlington’s town meeting members are trying to get more control over the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in their community. On Monday, they overwhelmingly approved a resolution demanding that ICE let the town inspect the building. The lot it’s on is zoned as an office park, but immigrants have said they spent hours, days, or up to a week there before being transferred to a detention facility.
“It’s an office building in an office park,” select board chair Mike Espejo said. “It’s not meant for detaining people who are awaiting trial. It’s not sanitary, it doesn’t have the proper shower facilities or places for people to sleep for overnight detention. So it’s an office building being used as a jail.”
2. Next month, Somerville voters will weigh in on a non-binding ballot question: should the city do business with companies tied to Israel? Lucy Tumavicus, of the group Somerville for Palestine, said advocates are focused on companies like HP.
“We’ve talked to thousands of Somerville voters [who] want their voice heard by their elected officials on what is really one of the most critical moral questions of our time,” Tumavicus said. “They want the opportunity to vote on it.”
3. New England’s last coal-fired power plant, Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire (outside of Concord), is closed for good. It likely won’t have much of an impact on our region’s grid: coal generation made up about 0.22% of electricity generation here in Massachusetts last year, though that does not include coal power imported from outside of New England.
The plant’s owner, Granite Shore Power, is closing it as part of a settlement with environmental organizations, years ahead of the 2028 deadline. They have said they’d like to turn the site into “renewable energy parks” with solar power and batteries, but there are no public plans at this point.
4. Meet the people behind Growing Places, a nonprofit in Central Massachusetts that buys food from local farms and delivers it to the homes of people in need.
“We’re a small nonprofit,” Executive Director Ayn Yeagle said. “We have a large geographic footprint serving 27 communities in north central Massachusetts — it’s 800 square miles — and we have 12 adult staff and seven youth staff, … so when I hear things like that and hear that our community knows who we are, that brings me joy.”
Local anti-trafficking advocates say federal actions put victims at risk
Marta Portillo Vasquez, 58, went to an immigration center in Revere in August to give her fingerprints for a visa application. Portillo Vasquez, who is from El Salvador, is applying for a visa for victims of human trafficking, called a T-visa.
Federal agents there handcuffed her, shackled her fee, and took her to a detention center in Vermont for 30 days, she said.
“It was very traumatizing,” Portillo Vasquez recently told GBH’s Phillip Martin, speaking in Spanish. “I’m still panicking to the point I don’t want to go out.”
Her case is part of a larger pattern around how human trafficking is handled under the Trump administration, said her attorney, Todd Pomerleau. Human trafficking covers both sex trafficking and forced labor.
Pomerleau told Martin he believes the Trump administration is trying to keep human trafficking victims from seeking the legal protections they’re entitled to: “The government deliberately prevented her from seeking a determination that her T-visa was viable,” Pomerleau said of Portillo Vasquez. “People that have come forward are being arrested.”
U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley, a Trump appointee, said her office is “not familiar with a single instance where a victim has reported a sex trafficking crime and has ended up in removal proceedings.”
“It is our goal to achieve justice for every victim regardless of their status in the United States,” Foley told Martin.
Martin, who has been reporting on human trafficking for years, spoke with organizations that work with survivors and heard concerns about federal budget cuts, the elimination of support for already-vulnerable communities and more.
“I’m disgusted, nauseated most nights,” said Heather Wightman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based organization RIA. ”Everything chips away at an already vulnerable community of people that we serve.”
Kat Santiago, RIA’s director of peer mentorship, said the people she sees are feeling more desperate.
“We ask: ‘From 1 to 10, how much are you stressing around your basic needs?’ ... And I get a lot of people saying ‘8,’ ‘9,’ ‘10,’” Santiago said. “Food prices have gone up, and the amount of food stamps that they get is not enough for them to feed themselves and their families.”
And when help is available, survivors say they’re worried about how information they give will be used. Jose Alfaro, a local trafficking survivor who serves on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, said the national trafficking hotline that helped him when he needed it will soon be run by a new contractor. Department of Homeland Security Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison announced the change in a press release, saying the new contractor will, “as appropriate, share information with law enforcement to help survivors leave their trafficking situation or find justice.”
That’s concerning, Alfaro said.
“There are many, many people that are fearful that this administration is going to want to share personal information with law enforcement without the survivors’ consent of what has happened to them,” Alfaro said. “This has a lot of ramifications for a lot of the survivors that are choosing to come forward.”
Read Phillip Martin’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Trafficking Inc.: Forced labor in Massachusetts
-For labor trafficked immigrants, T-visas are a life-saving but flawed relief
-'Working like a slave’: Why human trafficking in restaurants is underreported
-Unseen: The boy victims of the sex trade
In case you missed it: Last week marked Phillip Martin’s retirement. He’s a legendary investigative reporter and, while we wish him the best, we will miss seeing and hearing him every day in our newsroom. Hear about Martin’s decades-spanning career with GBH, NPR and more right here.
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