State Auditor Suzanne M. Bump is calling on the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Department of Public Health to address the barriers.
And the rest of us will be thrust into a national emergency of conscience. For we have allowed children to be snatched from the arms of their parents and sent to inadequate holding cells, cages, transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from their loved ones to caretakers in the employ of nonprofits, men and women who don’t know the names of the villages of these children, their aunts and uncles, their neighbors, or what they love to eat for dinner.
Voter suppression schemes target specific populations, generally nonwhites, and make it onerous or impossible to register, to get to the poll and cast a vote. Recent examples include the shenanigans in Georgia, North Carolina and North Dakota.
Negative effects will intensify and compound the longer the shutdown continues. If the government were to reopen today, the affect for this quarter would be nearly tripled due to the impact from workers not receiving paychecks.
The Coast Guard, the agency we rely on during the darkest days of disaster, is about to be shuttered for the sake of a wall and a temper tantrum. Ready to move to Canada yet?
"It was kind of disturbing for everyone in here,” Will Curletti said of the customers and employees in his coffee shop. "You know, the government is shut down and we're still pulling people off the street. You hate to see that happen."
Human trafficking is an issue that touches every community yet remains largely hidden; simply stated, the first step toward putting an end to human trafficking is to acknowledge its existence.
It is harder to understand why American citizens would undermine elections. Yet, in American history, the movements to be inclusive have been balanced by the movements to remain exclusive.
Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety provides officers with more response options to help them de-escalate incidents and better understand mental illnesses so they can respond to mental health-related calls appropriately without compromising anyone's safety.
Recently, our attention has been split by the plight of the Thai boys trapped in the cave, and the bizarre behavior of President Trump in Brussels, the United Kingdom and Helsinki. And yet there are thousands of parents and children trapped in a kind of hell, waiting to find each other.
This time, thankfully, the free press that our president mocks day after day as fake gave us the chance to hear firsthand from these mothers and fathers and their children, to see for ourselves the cages the children were sent to and to hear their cries.
The pumper truck will be primarily used as a first-due attack vehicle and will allow for rapid response to homes and brush fires in areas that the town’s current apparatus cannot access.
“The new federal action will create significant concern for the estimated 10,000 immigrants in Berkshire County as they face yet another anti-immigrant message from this White House."
--- Brooke Mead, director of the Berkshire Immigrant Center
