GBH Daily: Cutting through the jungle primaries

⛅ Increasingly cloudy, with a high near 57. Sunset is at 5:42 p.m.

Today we offer the story behind a new documentary about the aftermath of the arrest of an immigrant from the point of view of his wife and three daughters. But first: Former governors Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker both support it. The NAACP New England Area Conference has also endorsed it. But former Boston City Councilor and one-time mayoral candidate Tito Jackson and current Sen. Lydia Edwards of Boston both oppose it.

Ballot Question 3 on the statewide ballot is among the most controversial — and expensive — of the nine questions Massachusetts voters will face next Tuesday, with prominent Democrats and Republicans supporting both sides. Reporter Craig Lemoult delved into the question with several experts to determine exactly what the measure would and would not change. One thing everyone agrees on? There’s a whole lot of disagreement on this issue.

“Opponents and supporters seem to feel that there’s something fundamentally broken about Massachusetts politics,” said political scientist Evan Horowitz of Tufts University. “All they agree on is that it’s sick — but the diagnoses are totally different. They don’t actually agree on what condition it has.”

Four Things to Know

1. A new dwarf planet? Astrophysicists from Harvard University have found what they believe is a previously undiscovered dwarf planet in our own solar system. The object, which the scientists say is probably between 600 and 1,500 kilometers in diameter, is one of the brightest objects discovered in the solar system in decades. It’s also among the seven largest objects identified in the outer solar system so far, the scientists say.

“We don’t really know its size because all we can see is how much light we’re getting from it,” said Matthew Holman, a Smithsonian Astrophysicist and lecturer at Harvard University. “So it could either be a very reflective object that’s smaller, or a very dark object that’s bigger.”

2. Where you gonna watch women’s sports? The story starts with eight women, some of whom have been friends since childhood and grew up in the Boston area. They loved sports, and just wanted a place to watch women’s games. The result was The Sports Bra, which co-owner Whitney Edwards describes this way: “You can walk into any bar or restaurant right now and there is something on the TV. Usually, it is men’s sports. For us, we’re just ultimately centering it on women — we are not shunning men at all — in that, we invite everyone into our space.” Find out more about the bar’s opening in the next few weeks.

3. Dustup between Minogue, State Police union: With Election Day just a week away, a war of words has broken out between Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue and the State Police Association of Massachusetts (SPAM), which represents the troopers and sergeants of the Mass. State Police. In a social media post Saturday, Minogue claimed the State Police Association of Massachusetts and the Healey Administration had engaged in a quid pro quo in which Healey would receive the union’s endorsement and SPAM would get an 18% wage increase over three years for its members. Minogue’s allegations prompted sharp pushback from SPAM, whose president, Brendan Murphy, called Minogue’s claims “categorically false.”

4. Cambridge residents reimagine LGBTQ nightlife: You may have found the local nightclub scene lacking in creativity, community or unique performances. Cambridge residents Aaron Greiner and Franton Lin are trying to change that.

The two co-founded Fruitstand, a series of themed parties that has taken over The Sinclair in Harvard Square once a month for the last two-and-a-half years. They say it’s a way to celebrate pop music and provide a space for the LGBTQ community to connect.

“The vision for Fruitstand was always to provide a consistent place for queer gathering,” Greiner said. “From the very start, we wanted this place that really felt like you could depend on it.”

New documentary: ‘They took my husband’

By Emily Judem, senior video producer at GBH News

When Brenda Romero began to tell me her story, I thought about my grandparents.

They fled to the U.S. from Austria in 1939, after it became clear that no one in Vienna’s once-vibrant Jewish community was safe from the Nazi regime.

Here, they found safety. My grandmother so deeply loved the U.S. that for the rest of her life, she preferred Hershey’s to Swiss chocolate. When her homeland had sentenced her to death, America had let her in.

One evening last winter, before we brought cameras and microphones into her life, Romero sat with me in a room at La Colaborativa, her daughters alternately napping and playing on couches in the hallway. She recounted that she and her husband Milton Mejia also fled their homeland in search of safety. Their families had been targeted by a narcotrafficking cartel after family members renounced the group. The cartel sought retribution, according to court documents.

Romero and Mejia’s fear was not hypothetical.

In 2012, Romero’s sister was killed in front of her. Mejia’s uncle was murdered the same year. The year before, Mejia had narrowly escaped an attempted stabbing.

But Romero and Mejia have not, ultimately, found security in the U.S.

On Sept. 12, 2025, minutes after he passed a “reasonable fear” interview – an important step in his bid to stay in the U.S. legally — ICE officials arrested Mejia at the USCIS Asylum Office in Boston, and within days, he was sent to a detention facility in Louisiana, 1,600 miles from his family and legal representation.

They Took My Husband, a new documentary from GBH News, chronicles the aftermath of Mejia’s arrest for Romero and her three daughters.

Romero allowed my colleagues and me to follow her over the last year as she has adjusted to life without Mejia — and without his income.

“What worries me most is providing a roof over my daughters’ heads. That’s my biggest fear … that I might end up having to sleep in my car,” she said in an interview in February.

Even as she struggles to keep her family housed, Brenda wrestles with another fear — that her husband will be sent back to Honduras to face the deadly violence they both fled.

Romero, Mejia and their family courageously let me in to document what ended up being one of the most painful years of their lives. What I witnessed will stay with me forever.

What has touched me most is that through it all, they keep going, with determination — and perhaps most remarkably — hope.

Said Mejia, after more than a year in detention, “I always tell the Lord that he gave me a family, and that he will bring me back to my family.”

If this had been my grandparents’ story, would they have had the strength to hold on to hope for this long? I don’t know. What I do know is that today, nearly a century later, my life would not be the same.

Across GBH:

📻 LISTEN: Boston Public Radio, 11 a.m., on GBH 89.7 FM: Journalist Jacob Weisberg joins us to discuss his book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” Also, GBH News’ Emily Judem and lawyer Jonathan Ng discuss Judem’s new short documentary, “They Took My Husband: Life After an ICE Arrest in Chelsea, MA.”

🧑‍⚖️ LISTEN: The Curiosity Desk, 1 p.m., on GBH 89.7 FM: A reflection on Judge Judy’s TV-adieu with NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and Jessica Silbey from B.U. School of Law.

🪄 LISTEN: The Culture Show, 2 p.m., on GBH 89.7 FM: Jared, Callie, and Joyce Kulhawik revisit the 1993 Salem-centric Halloween Classic “Hocus Pocus.”

📺WATCH: NATURE: Tiger Island continues, 8 p.m., on GBH 2: In Part Two, the film crew uses thermal cameras to film the tigers at night, revealing previously unseen behavior.

📺WATCH: Discovering Maggie Smith, 8 p.m., on GBH 44: Explore the remarkable on-screen career of Dame Maggie Smith, one of Britain’s most prolific actresses.

📺WATCH: NOVA: Evolution: Body Builders, 9 p.m., on GBH 2: From the first time two cells stuck together, evolution has been crafting new bodies. Discover the process behind the variety of animal shapes and sizes. Episode Three of Five.

JOIN US TOMORROW: Forum Network: Adams Speaker Series: John and Abigail Adams, Thu (10/29) at 6:30pm at Old South Meeting House: Come for an engaging conversation exploring the remarkable leadership and enduring contributions of John and Abigail Adams and their relevance today.

🧑‍🍳COOK: Visit Boston’s Chinatown on Weekends with Yankee

🎯PLAY: Can you guess how much Antiques Roadshow finds are worth? Test your skills with our daily game.

GBH Daily is written by Don Seiffert with contributions by Katrina Ávila Munichiello and edited by Anna Fort and Jackie Bruleigh.