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.
🥶Mostly sunny and still below freezing, with highs around 30. Sunset is at 5:02 p.m.
A short-lived partial government shutdown is over: Congress voted yesterday to fund the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Transportation through September. Part of the agreement to pass the funding bill involved giving the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, funding to cover their operations for a shorter period: two more weeks. That two-week period gives Congress a chance to negotiate reforms. But it does not do much for people who believe the agency, created in 2003, should be abolished altogether.
GBH’s Adam Reilly asked every Massachusetts congressperson if they think ICE should be reformed or shut down. “Democrats have the power to defund and abolish ICE. We should do it. This is about right and wrong, and the murder we are seeing on the streets is just plain wrong,” Sen. Ed Markey said in a social media post. Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not call for closing ICE but instead for a complete overhaul: “No more roving patrols. No more secret masked police. No more warrantless raids. Investigate and prosecute ICE crimes.”
Democratic Whip Katherine Clark said that “ICE needs to act like every other law enforcement agency” and suggested reforms. Rep. Stephen Lynch said he would support reforms like body-worn cameras and name plates, but only with “ironclad guarantees” that they’ll be followed. Rep. Jake Auchincloss said he’d support “reforming and retraining ICE.” Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern have been calling for the agency’s abolition since 2018. Rep. Seth Moulton said he’d support abolishing ICE and prosecuting agents who have broken the law. Reps. Lori Trahan and Bill Keating both said they will not support funding ICE under current conditions. Rep. Richard Neal did not comment. You can read the delegation’s comments in more detail here.
Four Things to Know
1. About 19,000 Haitian people living in Massachusetts can keep their legal permission to live and work here under the Temporary Protected Status program while their cases continue through court, a federal judge ruled. The Trump administration and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had said they would end the program for Haitians, as they have for people from other countries around the world in the last year.
“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely,” Judge Ana Reyes wrote. She also noted that Noem did not consult other agencies about the decision to terminate Haitians’ TPS, despite rules requiring her to do so. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the Department of Homeland Security will appeal Reyes’ ruling. Here’s a short video explainer about what’s going on.
2. Twenty-three out of Massachusetts’ 40 state senators signed a letter asking Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell to prepare for the possibility of prosecuting federal officials who abuse their authority, citing the killings of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
“Without a doubt, state prosecution of federal officials who abuse their authority faces a narrow legal path,” the state senators wrote. “We all know that the federal administration and Congress will not rein in these federal abuses. As a result, state prosecution of federal officials who abuse their federal authority is the only viable mechanism for accountability.” Read the full letter here.
3. After the Museum of Fine Arts announced it was laying off 33 workers last week, local art professors and museum patrons say they’re worried about how the layoffs of curators who worked on the museum’s Islamic and Native American departments will shape the museum’s future. About 130 faculty and staff at the nearby Massachusetts College of Art and Design signed a letter asking the museum’s board to reconsider the layoffs.
Creator and museum-goer Ayia Elsadig, whose video about the layoffs went viral, said she believes “it seems like the MFA has no problem profiting off of and gaining good publicity off of cosplaying being inclusive, and using our identities for its own influence, for its own public perception.”
4. Somerville’s new mayor, former city councilor Jake Wilson, is opening city hall for office hours every Thursday. Residents can book an appointment on the city’s website or show up at city hall and talk to a member of the mayor’s office staff about whatever Somerville-related issues they wish to discuss.
“People want more from their government,” Wilson told GBH’s Morning Edition. “They wanna see the government just very actively look into identifying and addressing issues that come up.”
Catching the Codfather: a new podcast from GBH’s The Big Dig
By Ian Coss, Host of The Big Dig and Catching the Codfather
In the fall of 2023, I was between projects. Our first season had just wrapped up, it was doing better than I had dared hope, and someone at GBH asked me if I had another story in mind for a possible second season. I had nothing. I said: give me two weeks.
At that point I had a vague notion of this podcast as a series of interlocking parts – each one offering a different glimpse into the curious world of Greater Boston – and I knew that one of those parts was the waterfront. The modern economy and culture of this region were born at the water’s edge, and to this day, ports and fish hold a special grip on our imagination. As one person later told me: the West has its cowboys; we have our fishermen.
So I started searching around the docks for stories in the recent past – something with stakes, mystery, conflict and character – I immediately came upon a single name that encompassed all those things: Carlos Rafael, a man known locally as “The Codfather.”
Carlos operated a massive seafood business out of New Bedford, Massachusetts – the city that inspired Melville to write “Moby-Dick” – until one day in 2016, when he was arrested as part of a sprawling undercover investigation. The case involved falsified documents, duffel bags of cash, corrupt cops and millions of dollars worth of illegal fish. I was intrigued, as anyone would be. Carlos was out of jail by the time I was reading all this, so I looked up his number online and called him. To my surprise, he picked up. To my greater surprise, he invited me down to his office to talk. Now, three years later, that conversation is the anchor of our third season: “Catching The Codfather.”
The reason it took so long, and that we ended up doing a whole other season in between , is that the story of Carlos Rafael turned out to be far more complicated than I had once imagined. In New Bedford, Carlos remains a deeply divisive figure. Some people in town describe him as a kind of folk hero, a righteous rebel; others describe him as a selfish crook, a conman. So who is the Codfather, really? What I eventually realized is that to judge the crimes of Carlos Rafael, you also have to judge the entire system that he set out to break – a system of elaborate regulations that emerged over decades of debate, protest, lawsuits and lobbying. So if you looked at the title of the series and thought: this sounds like straight true crime – know that this is true crime Big Dig-style, with a healthy dose of history and policy. We’re going deep into the world of a legendary seaport and deep into the workings of the federal bureaucracy to understand why the two are in a perpetual state of conflict.
And if you want to binge the entire thing right away, go ahead and join our membership program, the HOV Late. The whole series is up there as of today. Also, I’ll be doing these emails weekly with some photos and thoughts behind each episode from the series, so if there’s anyone who you think would want to follow along together, forward this email or tell them to sign up on our site. I’m excited for you all to hear the new season.
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