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☔A rainy, foggy day with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 8:05 p.m.
Last year, Department of Defense officials said they planned to assign as many as 600 active-duty military members as temporary immigration judges. The Trump administration has fired or terminated the employment of about 100 immigration judges nationwide, meaning the already slow system is now even slower as immigrants await rulings on asylum cases, bail and deportation.
So who are these active duty troops serving as judges, what are their qualifications and how did they get assigned? The ACLU of Massachusetts is suing to try to find out.
“There is reason to believe, however, that in fact, that these are not merely lawyers who happen to be military reservists who are being hired in their civilian capacity to be temporary immigration judges,” Dan McFadden, managing attorney of the ACLU of Massachusetts, told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt. “But in fact, they’re being activated on active duty orders through the Department of Defense and ordered to operate as temporary immigration judges. That raises a lot of very serious legal questions.” You can read more about the program and the lawsuit here.
Four Things to Know
1. Employers, many of them health care organizations, have laid off or placed on leave Haitian workers whose legal immigration protections were revoked after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. That includes about 1,500 workers in nursing facilities, an industry already struggling to attract workers.
“We work with some of the most vulnerable individuals in the state, and having compassionate care with staff who have worked with these individuals for extended periods of time is so vitally important to the services we provide,” said Michelle Fraser, director of employee relations at Vinfen. “By having this disruption, it does potentially impact the continuity and the quality of care that we provide.”
2. With the formal end of the state’s legislative session coming tomorrow — though that deadline isn’t quite so final this year under new rules lawmakers set for themselves — Gov. Maura Healey said she wants to see the Legislature pass a bill that would ban federal immigration agents from making arrests in Massachusetts courthouses. The bill is called the PROTECT Act, and lawmakers have said they’re expecting to pass it this week.
“It’s about protecting our residents, protecting our communities in the face of unbelievable, unconstitutional, and what I think is un-American actions out of the Trump administration,” Healey told GBH’s Boston Public Radio yesterday.
3. Engineers and business leaders in Boston are talking about how they could use thermal energy from local waterways to heat and cool buildings. Their goal is to start with universities, hospitals and other big institutions. GBH’s Craig LeMoult wrote about the technical details of a similar project here.
“We see them as potential customers of this future system. And so we want to bring them along with us as we design this project,” said Lindsay Butler, executive director of the Green Ribbon Commission. “We want something that’s technically feasible, economically feasible and feasible from a regulatory and permitting perspective. But we also want something that’s going to work for the large institutions.”
4. Public health officials in Massachusetts don’t believe the 18 cases of the parasitic gastrointestinal illness Cyclospora recorded here this year are related to the larger national outbreak. But Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein said he’d like people to pay attention to where their produce comes from.
“What’s being recalled? Where did you go shopping? What’s on your shelves and what might you want to take off your shelves and maybe throw away and not use?” he told GBH’s Morning Edition. “We know as the temperature gets warmer through August and the beginning of September, cyclospora can still persist, and then it usually goes away into the fall.”
What an acclaimed translator of ‘The Odyssey’ thinks about Christopher Nolan’s new film
Have you seen Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of “The Odyssey,” or at least enjoyed the memes about Matt Damon as Boston Odysseus? Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of Homer’s epic inspired Nolan’s adaptation, spoke to Culture Show host Jared Bowen about the story. Their conversation explored translation: converting an ancient Greek poem into English, how humans in the story understand the language of the gods and adapting the story from page to an IMAX screen.
“For any literary translator, you have to think through: which elements of the original work of literature, poetry or prose do I most want to convey, and how can I do that with this impossible challenge of, use not of the same words and yet have it be exactly the same?” Wilson said. She wrote her translation in iambic pentameter to try to preserve the feeling people would have had listening to a performance of “The Odyssey” in ancient Greek.
Wilson said she thinks Nolan’s film is “an amazing spectacle at the movies,” especially on giant IMAX screens. “In terms of the script, I was disappointed by it. I just felt that there were so many wonderful actors who weren’t given enough to do,” she said. “I just didn’t think there was enough complexity.”
You can watch their full conversation here.
Dig deeper:
-NPR staffers share their favorite fiction reads of 2026 so far
-Love, science and resurrection collide in Christina Lauren’s ‘The Romance Revival’
-‘Judy Blume: A Life’ traces the rise of the children’s author from housewife to household name
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