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🌤️Clouds roll in, with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 4:17 p.m.
Three of the nine people who federal immigration agents detained at an Allston car wash two weeks ago have been released on bond, their attorney said.
“They’re all out, extremely exhausted and traumatized and en route to their families,” attorney Todd Pomerleau told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt.
As first reported on GBH News: An immigration judge ordered their release on Monday, but federal officials took time to processing their bonds. Despite the bond being paid and multiple motions from their attorney, they were not released until the following day. Volunteers who helped pay their bond also had problems with the online system, which initially rejected their payments.
“It’s incredible that they can have the capacity to be arresting people 24 hours a day, sending ICE into our communities,” said Amanda Eisenhower, who volunteers with LUCE Immigrant Justice Network. “But when they are legally required to release somebody on bond, all of a sudden, oh, they’re taking their time. We can’t get around to it. We’ll get to it when we get to it.” You can find more about this story here.
Four Things to Know
1. Former Harvard President Larry Summers is taking leave from teaching at Harvard as the university investigates the school’s connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, this time looking at his relationships with university officials.
“His [Summers] co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester,” Summers spokesperson Steven Goldberg said. Epstein’s emails, released last week by the House Oversight Committee, show that Summers was in regular contact with him and asked for advice about pursuing a sexual relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.
2. After federal officials issued new restrictions on who qualifies for SNAP food assistance, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell joined 20 other states in calling the changes ‘unlawful.’ Federal law says non-citizens who entered the U.S. as refugees, received asylum or were granted humanitarian parole — meaning they were vetted by the government — are eligible for SNAP after obtaining lawful permanent residence status, commonly known as a green card. The new guidance says those immigrants, about 9,500 of whom live in Massachusetts, aren’t eligible.
“The people we’re talking about are people who have a well-founded fear of persecution, who are the most highly vetted immigrants to either enter the country as refugees or be granted political asylum,” said Patricia Baker, senior policy advocate at the Mass Law Reform Institute. “They were victims of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, often at the hands of U.S. citizens or battered at the hands of U.S. citizens. They’re now being denied basic food benefits.”
3. At a ceremony for Transgender Day of Remembrance yesterday, local activists urged Boston city councilors to provide better support for the city’s trans population. The council unanimously approved creating a community advisory board for the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement.
“You have the power to make Boston not just a sanctuary, but a model,” said Chastity Bowick, executive director of the transgender advocacy nonprofit the Marsha P. Johnson Institute. “Not just a safe harbor, but a lighthouse, showing other cities the way forward.”
4. Dave Rothstein, an environmental lawyer-turned-artist from Northampton who sculpted snow into a speakeasy and once built a tiny voting booth for chipmunks, died earlier this month at age 57.
“Every idea and project of his was so just joyful and delightful,” said artist Soren Mason Temple, “that anyone who came across it was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this amazing thing that this person is doing. Let’s share it with everyone.’”
Lawmakers poised to open up state disability records to families, researchers
It took David Scott years of research and ultimately an assist from Gov. Maura Healey to get the medical, educational and behavioral records documenting the life of his older brother, John. John, born with spina bifida, lived at the Fernald School in Waltham from the year of his birth, 1955, to his death at age 17.
When David tried to find out what his brother’s life was like in the institution — now known for human rights abuses, neglecting residents, and letting university researchers experiment on children in its care — he hit roadblocks. A year ago, David got between 80 and 100 pages of records about John’s life, records he believes are incomplete.
Now state legislators have passed a new law they hope will make it easier for family members of people who lived in state institutions to find what remains of their loved ones’ records. This bill would make these records available to relatives and researchers 50 years after a person’s death, and open to the public 75 years after the records’ creations. State officials will be able to redact the identifying details of people named in the records who are still alive. The measure also repeals a historic law that permitted medical schools to claim and experiment on the bodies of deceased disabled people from institutions.
State Sen. Michael Barrett, who led the bill’s passage in the Senate, said he learned of a piece of family history after he started working on it: his great-grandmother spent 25 years at Northampton State Hospital, and his family never knew about it.
“She is one of these folks whose family records we would now like to know more about,” Barrett said.
The State Senate passed the bill yesterday, and Healey is expected to sign it into law. David Scott said it’s the right move — but having seen records strewn around the abandoned Fernald buildings, he worries families still won’t have a complete picture.
“I am glad she’s doing it, but it’s too little, too late,” David Scott told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer. You can find the full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Their disabled loved ones languished in state institutions. Now, they want the records.
-One man finally gets answers about his brother’s life at the Fernald School
-‘Shocking’ report spotlights Mass. history of mistreating disabled people
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