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☀️Sunny and hot again, with highs in the 90s. Sunset is at 8:22 p.m.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can unilaterally end a legal immigration program called Temporary Protected Status for people from Syria and Haiti. That’s the program thousands of people working in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and home care in Massachusetts rely on for their work permits. Without it, employers have been getting in touch with TPS holders and telling them that they can no longer work.
It’s an emergency for those who lose their work permits and pay — and a disaster, health care experts say, for an already strained system that depends on those workers to fill major gaps in the workforce. The result could be longer wait times for care and for placements in rehab facilities or nursing homes. Nursing homes in the state are already short-staffed, with a 26% nursing vacancy rate.
GBH’s Liz Neisloss spoke with health care workers from Haiti who have had their work permits revoked en masse by the Trump administration. And there are other Trump administration immigration changes impacting the health care workforce: One nurse, who lost a work permit she got through a Biden administration program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, said she still wants to hope she’ll be able to get her work permit back.
“And then we can have access to work,” she said, “and help people, because we want to. I love to take care of people.” You can read Neisloss’ full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. The state’s Democratic candidates for Senate — Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Seth Moulton — debated over one another’s records yesterday. Moulton said Markey’s voting to confirm 61 Trump nominees shows that he is not doing enough to oppose the administration. Markey said Moulton threw trans youth “under the political bus” when he told the New York Times two years ago that “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”
GBH’s Adam Reilly breaks down his takeaways from the debate here. Among them: “Markey and Moulton are separated by plenty, including their ages and their differing diagnoses of what Massachusetts needs from its junior senator right now,” Reilly wrote. “But as both made abundantly clear Wednesday, they’re united in seeing President Donald Trump as a debacle for the country and for American democracy.”
2. About 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital went on a one-day strike yesterday as their union negotiates for higher wages and against increases in health insurance premiums. But they likely won’t be back at work today: Massachusetts Nurses Association officials said hospital management plans to striking nurses off the job for five more days and has hired 1,300 nurses to temporarily replace them.
“At a facility like this, we need to have those nurses to take care of the really medically complex patients that we take care of here,” said Tarcia Edmunds-Jehu, a nurse midwife at the hospital. “If you don’t support the nurses, you’re not supporting the patients.”
3. The city of Boston is joining about 1,500 other school districts in suing the companies behind Instagram, TikTok and Snap. In the lawsuit, school districts from across the country allege that the social media platforms are designed in a way that encourages “addictive behavior” and worsens the mental health of students. That means schools have to spend more time and money addressing students’ mental health and behavioral challenges, they said.
“This lawsuit is about the platforms themselves… and what internal rules they need to institute,” Mayor Michelle Wu told GBH’s Boston Public Radio yesterday. The social media companies have said they disagree with the allegations.
4. The deep ocean submersible Alvin, known for finding the wreckage of the Titanic, is back in the deep, exploring sunken ships once used by Antarctic explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott.
The team is “doing some exploration and discovery of the shipwreck and looking at what the shipwreck looks like,” said Anna Michel, chief scientist for the National Deep Submergence Facility at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “[We’re] doing some 3D reconstruction, some imagery and also looking at some of the biology on the shipwreck.”
African teams are making World Cup history, 60 years after boycotting
Boston Stadium in Foxborough is hosting its final World Cup game today, a quarter finals match between Morocco and France.
To say goodbye to the tournament — which brought us fans from around the world, watch parties in barbershops, and 3 a.m. bar closing times — GBH’s Sam Turken has a bit of history that shaped this year’s World Cup: the 1966 matches, which African teams boycotted over a FIFA policy that put them at a disadvantage. FIFA had given teams from Europe and South America 14 guaranteed spots in the round of 16, but refused to give just one to a team from Africa.
“Certainly from a structural standpoint, discrimination was clear,” Peter Alegi, a historian of African soccer at Michigan State University, told Turken. “FIFA has always claimed that it was a universal institution governing the world’s game. But really what it was, was a European institution with South American partners, and it was dominated by white men.”
Change wasn’t instant. But this year 10 African teams competed, and nine of them made it into the knockout rounds. It brought joy to soccer fans in Massachusetts’ diasporic communities, including to large immigrant groups from Cape Verde and Ghana.
“The African teams are up-and-coming,” said Alex Wachera, who’s originally from Kenya. “Do not count us as underdogs. We are here to rule the world. Be careful.” You can read Turken’s full story here.
⚽More World Cup coverage:
-The World Cup Effect: What Americans have learned from hosting a global tournament
-FIFA didn’t offer GBH News media credentials for the World Cup. We went anyway.
-In a booze-heavy Boston summer, what do sobriety experts advise?
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