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.
🌂A partly sunny day and a rainy evening, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 8:12 p.m.
We’ll start today with an update on a story we first brought you two weeks ago: the Trump administration is suing Massachusetts’ state government because the Registry of Motor Vehicles will not issue undercover license plates to ICE. These are license plates the RMV can give to law enforcement officers, so that if a local police officer looks up an undercover plate, they won’t be able to see the names of the registered owners.
“They want us to give ICE — these agents who’ve been out there perpetrating harm, instilling fear, wreaking havoc in our communities — they want us to give ICE confidential license plates so they can operate in secret in Massachusetts,” Gov. Maura Healey said yesterday. “We support law enforcement doing legitimate law enforcement work. That’s not what we’re seeing from ICE. So we’re not going to help them operate in secret as they take people off our streets without cause.”
Lawyers for the federal government called the state policy to issue undercover plates to other law enforcement officers but not to ICE or Customs and Border Patrol agents “discriminatory.” They’re also suing Maine, Oregon and Washington over the same issue. GBH’s Sarah Betancourt and Hannah Reale have more on this case here.
Four Things to Know
1. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit the Trump administration filed last year over Boston’s policy limiting how local police officers are allowed to assist immigration agents. The lawsuit boils down to what are called immigration detainers: the Boston Trust Act, passed in 2014, says that local police officers can’t detain someone on civil immigration charges. It also says they can’t hold someone for longer than they’d otherwise have legal permission to if federal immigration officials ask them to. Some people call this a sanctuary city policy, though there’s no universal legal definition of that term.
But even without that ordinance, a Supreme Judicial Court ruling that applies to the whole state sets similar guidelines, Judge Leo T. Sorokin wrote. “With or without the Boston Trust Act, then, Boston police officers cannot detain a person pursuant solely to a federal civil immigration detainer or administrative warrant,” he wrote. “An order enjoining the Boston Trust Act would not liberate the City to empower its officers to take actions state law does not authorize, nor give Boston police officers the individual choice to honor ICE detainers.” You can read the full decision here.
2. The new person in charge of regulating legal cannabis in Massachusetts, Cannabis Control Commission Chair Christopher Harding, said he wants to be “the most boring agency in state government that is doing its job.” He and fellow new commissioner Xiomara DeLobato held their first hearing yesterday and quickly voted on a stack of new licenses for people looking to professionally sell and grow marijuana. Puff, puff, pass on the drama.
Gov. Maura Healey picked Harding, DeLobato and Anthony Wilson as commission members under a new law that gives her complete control over who is appointed to the board. Until now the commission was larger, and the governor, treasurer and attorney general got to pick who served on it.
3. No World Cup tickets? You’ve got options. The city of Boston is hosting three watch parties: Cape Verde vs. Spain on June 15 at 1 p.m. at Town Field in Dorchester, Haiti vs. Brazil on June 19 at 9 p.m. at the Boston Common Parkman Bandstand downtown and Colombia vs. Portugal on June 27 at 7:30 p.m. at East Boston Memorial Stadium. The live matches are all out of town, in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Miami, respectively.
Mayor Michelle Wu said there will also be parties for the semifinals and finals in July, but the times and locations are still being finalized. And there’s also the FIFA Fan Festival on Boston City Hall Plaza, running June 12 through 27. “Did I wish that we could have had a much longer Fan Fest, and the private resources and committee funding to do so? Absolutely — we had talked through that,” Wu said. “But this is what we are able to do, and we are going to have the very best Fan Fest during the group stage.”
4. Massachusetts’ state government is giving MIT $25 million for a new quantum computing lab. The Quantum Systems Laboratory will be funded through state and federal dollars and is expected to open in 2027. MIT saw a drop of about 20% in the funding it gets from the federal government this year.
“Everything you can think of that uses classical computing now, think about quantum speeding it up; making it more efficient,” MIT president Sally Kornbluth said. “We think about the AI revolution and the expenses of AI and data centers. This is going to be impacted by a whole new different way of computing.”
Under 50 and living with colorectal cancer, two Mass. patients strive to help others
Chris Kowalski of Hanover was 36 when he got the diagnosis: stage 4 colon cancer that had spread to his liver. He found out because he had gone to his primary care doctor after feeling some discomfort in his stomach and ribs after he worked out.
Tracy O’Rourke of Worcester, diagnosed at 47, said she didn’t feel any symptoms at all: her rectal cancer was detected in a routine screening.
GBH’s Marilyn Schairer talked to Kowalski and O’Rourke because they are part of a growing cohort of people under 50 getting diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Cases are growing at a rate of about 3% a year.
“People are diagnosed in their 40s, in their 30s and then even in their 20s,” Dr. Justin Maykel, chief of colon and rectal surgery at UMass Memorial Medical Center, told Schairer. “Why is that happening? We don’t have a great answer, to be honest with you.”
Medical guidelines now suggest people start getting screened for colorectal cancers at age 45, though they can talk to their doctors about getting earlier screenings if they have a family history of these cancers or of polyps, or have an inflammatory bowel condition like Crohn’s disease. The Colorectal Cancer Alliance suggests people talk to their doctors about getting screened if they have possible symptoms.
These days, Kowalski is part of a clinical trial and said he’s responding well. O’Rourke went through treatment, including surgery, and is now in remission.
Both said they encourage people in their lives to get screened.
“I just want to talk about it. If it’s one person that I can talk to, I feel like, okay, my day is complete,” O’Rourke said.
You can read Schairer’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-American Cancer Society says adults should start colorectal cancer screenings at 45
-Can’t keep a habit? This comic shares a proven formula to make it stick
GBH Daily
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