Welcome back to This Week on ICE.
The top line: Tennessee is trying kick migrant kids out of schools.
The Tennessee state legislature has introduced a bill attempting to ban undocumented children from public schools, in a move that could deprive some 10,000 children from a basic education. It’s part of a wider raft of legislation in at least five other states introduced by GOP lawmakers backed by the far-right Heritage Foundation that is set to challenge decades of legal precedence in educational law.
“Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, who was an immigration policy analyst at the Nissen Center Cassandra told The Intercept that the ramifications of this particular legislation in Tennessee are huge. Denying children education could create an uneducated potentially illiterate underclass of children — and then adults — in this country.” — Kelly
CBP doesn’t want you to know they’re watching you.
Customs and Border Protection removed multiple officials who objected to orders to deliberately misclassify documents in an effort to prevent them from being accessed via the Freedom of Information Act, according to a report from Dell Cameron in WIRED Magazine. Those removed include the agency’s top privacy official, as well as one of the branch directors in charge of privacy, after they were asked to label complete and signed-off Privacy Threshold Analyses as drafts, preventing their release to journalists and citizens who request them via the FOIA process.
The orders followed a major disclosure last year to 404 Media, which discovered DHS was using Mobile Fortify, a previously unknown piece of software used to identify and determine a person’s immigration status using facial recognition and fingerprint analysis.
Also on our radar: The DHS mini-shutdown rumbles on with no end in sight.
TSA agents will miss their first paychecks today as lawmakers on Capitol Hill are no closer to breaking the deadlock on funding the Department of Homeland Security, nearly a month into the mini-shutdown. Security lines at some airports have stretched for hours as agents stay home — or in hundreds of cases, outright quit rather than work for no pay.
Efforts at compromise in the Senate, where the GOP majority needs to peel off seven Democrats to advance funding, have all failed. Meanwhile President Trump’s focus is on his bruising poll numbers approaching the midterm elections.
“The White House is in a completely different universe. President Trump is threatening not to sign any legislation at all until Congress passes the SAVE act which… he thinks it will help him win the midterms by severely restricting voting rights in the United States” — Matt
That’s all for now. Please keep sending your questions, comments and thoughts to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Catch you next time.
— Kelly and Matt
