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🌤️Clearing clouds and highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 7:54 p.m.
In September, the Trump administration said it would limit non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses to U.S. citizens, people with green cards and certain temporary workers in fields such as agriculture and construction. There are legal challenges to the policy currently moving through the courts, and a temporary federal court order allows states to continue issuing commercial driver’s licenses if they choose. But the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles said immigrants with legal status under programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, Temporary Protected Status, as well as refugees and people granted asylum can’t renew their commercial drivers’ licenses once they expire.
“A lot of these folks, they’re aware of the federal injunction thinking that that was going to give them some protection, but the registry is just not honoring that,” said Brian Simoneau, a Massachusetts-based attorney.
One of the estimated 200,000 immigrants nationwide no longer able to renew his license is Daniel, who had been working as a driver for Boston Public Schools. Without a valid license, he said, he lost his job.
“I’ve lost my driver license. I lost everything,” he told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt. “I can’t buy anything, pay taxes. I can’t help my family in Haiti. What now? I can’t do anything. This is the hell for me here.” You can find Betancourt’s full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. A bill that would ban federal immigration agents from detaining people at schools, day care centers, hospitals and houses of worship — unless they have a warrant —- passed the Massachusetts Senate last week. Still, the bill has a few steps remaining before it becomes law. The House passed a bill in March that includes only a ban on warrantless arrests in courthouses. And under the Senate version, people would be able to sue under state law if they are deprived of constitutional rights.
Members of the two chambers of state government have until the first week of January 2027 to work out the differences between the two bills. Then they will send the legislation to Gov. Maura Healey to sign.
2. Gov. Maura Healey held a press conference Friday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve legal telehealth access to mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions. In recent weeks, the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mifepristone must be prescribed in person, not through telehealth appointments. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito temporarily blocked that ruling from taking effect last week as the case makes its way through the legal process.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of out-of-state residents seeking abortions and abortion medication in Massachusetts has exceeded the number of Bay State residents seeking these procedures. “The targeting of mifepristone isn’t about healthcare,” Healey said. “The targeting of mifepristone isn’t about science. It’s an attack on women. To be clear: this whole discussion, this whole debate, all these court cases — it’s all about an attack on women.”
3. After the U.S. Department of Education announced it will investigate Smith College in Northampton because the all-women’s college admits transgender women, a transgender student on campus said the investigation is is adding to her feeling unsafe.
“It’s just one thing added to the mix of like the stressful climate, political climate that we’re living in, and we’re all just trying to come here to get our degrees, to study,” the student told NEPM. “They’re just causing that sort of emotional pressure on like the hearts and the minds of the students that are trans that go here. We’re just a scapegoat in this administration’s aims to just outlaw anyone that’s different.”
4. Boston College High School, the private Jesuit all-boys school in Dorchester, will begin admitting sixth-graders in the fall of 2027. Until now, the school has taught students in grades seven through 12. When the school began accepting middle school students in 2007, leaders decided to admit only seventh- and eighth-graders because of space concerns.
“There weren’t a whole lot of schools that had a big entry point in sixth grade,” said Robert Hamblet, head of the middle school. “I don’t think, at the time, they thought that we were going to have as big an enrollment from all the suburban schools that we draw from now.”
Natural resources and national security: How Massachusetts’ white pines fueled the revolution
Three centuries ago, New England’s forests were dotted with white pines. They were tall, some reaching almost 200 feet, and the wood was relatively soft and easy to work with. Colonists in the region that was not yet the United States chopped them down to build homes and furniture.
Conflict between colonists and the British Crown 3,000 miles away had not yet escalated into the Revolutionary War when the British Royal Navy realized it could use tall white pines for ship masts, eliminating the need to piece together wood from shorter trees. In 1690, the British Crown’s Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter declared that any tree more than 2 feet in diameter was to be reserved for the King’s Royal Navy.
“Can the government from 3,000 miles away tell you what you can do in your own backyard?” Eric Rutkow, an historian at the University of Central Florida, told GBH’s Hannah Loss. “When you get into the question of property rights, you really get right into the core of what people get concerned about, especially in the Anglo-American tradition.”
In the 1760s, King George III sent surveyors through the forests of New England to mark any tree more than 2 feet wide with three axe strokes — one vertical and two diagonal on either side — creating what became known as the King’s Broad Arrow. Loss describes how loggers often cut down marked trees before they could be claimed by the Crown. Two surveyors, Elezear Burt and Elijah Lyman, reported marking 363 trees, but were able to collect only 37, because colonists cut down, milled or burned the rest. When the Revolutionary War broke out, shipments of white pine to Great Britain stopped completely.
It’s worth checking out Loss’ full story, which highlights how natural resources — from white pines to oil, natural gas and minerals — continue to shape national security interests during wartime.
Dig deeper:
-Before the American Revolution, these Massachusetts publishers rebelled in print
-Abigail Adams implored her husband to ‘remember the ladies.’ Here’s what she meant.
-Were Paul Revere’s political cartoons more influential than his midnight ride?
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