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Today we take a look at the potential local impact of some Supreme Court cases. But first: the Springfield factory that assembles new MBTA cars will furlough about 40% of its workers — 161 people — for two months this spring. That’s because the parts it needs to assemble the cars are in U.S. ports, detained on suspicion that their manufacturers in China used forced labor from Uyghur people to make them.
The company, CRRC, is now trying to provide U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigators with documentation of its supply chains. The MBTA says the company has submitted 2,100 files, or 2.1 gigabytes of data, tracing up to eight tiers of suppliers. So far, the company has delivered all 152 Orange Line cars the MBTA ordered, but just 60 of the 252 Red Line cars.
Interim Transportation Secretary and MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng said the agency is “laser-focused on answering CBP’s outstanding questions.” “We all want to avoid or minimize any potential impacts on the plant’s labor force, which has been producing high-performing subway cars,” he told the State House News Service.
Four Things to Know
1. Segun Idowu, Boston’s chief of economic opportunity and inclusion, will resign from the position he’s held for about four years at the end of next month. His job has been helping businesses in the city, from large companies like Lego (which last year moved its U.S. headquarters from Connecticut to Back Bay) to small shops that set up storefronts in downtown Boston under a federally-funded, city-run program.
In a statement, Idowu said he’s resigning to take care of his 98-year-old grandmother full-time. Last year, two City Hall employees were arrested in a domestic dispute. One of them said Idowu had inappropriately propositioned her earlier that night, though he knew her partner worked in his office. Independent investigators cleared Idowu of wrongdoing.
2. In the first year of the second Trump administration, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell filed 47 lawsuits against the federal government. The issues at hand ranged from funding cuts to universities to the administration’s executive order saying the U.S. should stop the long-held practice (made law under the 14th Amendment in 1868) of birthright citizenship.
Many of the cases are still in court. Campbell said that her office has secured rulings preserving $3.14 billion in federal funding to Massachusetts, out of the $3.3 billion targeted. “These billions are to educate our youth, promote public safety, protect health, fortify our infrastructure, support our most vulnerable communities and so much more,” Campbell said.
3. Three Massachusetts congressional representatives — Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Seth Moulton of Salem — are asking the Trump administration to extend the immigration status that has let almost 5,000 people from Haiti legally live and work in Massachusetts. The administration has been ending the use of the program, called Temporary Protected Status, for immigrants from across the world over the last year. The U.S. allowed Haitians to apply for TPS after a devastating earthquake in 2010.
One local Haitian immigrant, named Bruno, said in a press conference that ending the program would leave his family without a place to call home. “If TPS is not extended, my family and I have nowhere to go. Return to Haiti would mean return to danger, uncertainty and devastation,” he said. “It will not only affect me, it will tear apart a family that has built a life, dream, and future here in the United States.”
4. At her tattoo shop in Brookline, Darlene DiBona Chesko specializes in recreating nipples, eyebrows and hairlines; helping clients cover up scars; and creating decorative works of art on the chests of people who have had mastectomies or top surgeries.
“The chest becomes a canvas,” said DiBona Chesko, owner of Odyssey Wellness Tattoo Shop. “I’ve done a beautiful leopard in the jungle sitting on a tree — jungle foliage and flowers and stuff. I’ve done a big chess piece on a person who did not have reconstructive surgery and so she just healed flat. I think if memory serves, she did actually have reconstructive surgery, but she said it felt awful. She didn’t like the way the implants were, and she was uncomfortable, so she had them removed and she just healed flat and then got a great big chest piece over that.”
How the Supreme Court’s deliberations on transgender athletes could have a local impact
Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases regarding trans women and girls who want to play school sports: Little v. Hecox, regarding a runner who was legally barred from joining her college cross-country team in Idaho; and West Virginia v. B.P.J., which involves a high school track and field athlete.
GBH’s Esteban Bustillos explains both cases in more detail here. As part of his reporting, he also asked legal experts what rulings in these cases could mean locally.
Massachusetts largely allows trans athletes to play school sports on teams that align with their gender identity. The federal Department of Education last week announced that it will investigate Foxborough Public Schools, claiming that “by permitting students to participate in sports based on their ‘gender identity,’ not biological sex,” the district may have violated Title IX.
“It doesn’t seem like the Supreme Court is poised at all to decide about whether states that have permissive policies are somehow violating the rights of other students or anything like that,“ Chris Erchull, a senior staff attorney with GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, told Bustillos. Erchull is representing two students in New Hampshire who are challenging a law banning transgender girls from school sports. That case is on hold until the Supreme Court releases its decisions.
But: “The stakes are pretty high because the Supreme Court is set to decide whether or not our laws that protect against discrimination in education are going to apply when it comes to the rights of transgender students,” Erchull told Bustillos.
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