Posts

A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.

Image
Travelers wait at the Detroit airport, where a 57-year-old who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S. was detained for 30 hours. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France. But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation. Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Immigration and election experts say her c...
Post a Comment
Read more

He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.

Image
Anna Vignet/KQED Jason Agan was impossible to miss at Angelo Rodriguez High School. The San Francisco Bay Area teacher was loud and gregarious, a fixture on campus since the Fairfield school opened in 2001. He ran the student government and called himself the man behind the curtain, organizing pep rallies and prom. He taught AP calculus, so advanced math students ended up in his classroom, jostling for his approval and letters of recommendation. Some considered him a mentor who inspired a love of math — and even a second father. But for years students also whispered about Agan’s behavior, according to interviews with 14 Rodriguez High graduates, most of whom he had taught. He touched some of them in public in ways that made them uncomfortable, they said, including hugging students and massaging their shoulders. And he seemed fixated on enforcing the dress code, calling out girls whose shorts were too short.  Nearly two decades into Agan’s tenure, and on the heels ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California

Image
Anna Vignet/KQED KQED has teamed up with ProPublica to report on how California handles cases of alleged teacher misconduct .  The state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing releases few details about cases, leaving the public largely in the dark. From our interviews with former commission members and students, as well as a review of records, we found dozens of cases in which the state did not revoke teachers’ licenses after findings of sexual misconduct. We know there are other issues with this system, and we need your help to get a full picture. We want to hear about your experience with the disciplinary process, whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, administrator or credentialing commission member, or you have other insight. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides. You can fill out a brief form or contact KQED reporter Holly McDede on Signal at hollymcdede.68 or via email at hmcdede@kqed.org ....
Post a Comment
Read more

A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm.

Image
Georgia congressman Mike Collins spent most of his life running a trucking business. ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data shows that truckers for the business have a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of similar companies in recent years. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens. “If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.” Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, inclu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit

Image
Members of the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team conduct a raid on a smoke shop in lower Manhattan in 2024. Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal. But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for many officers in one aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers. The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision. In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Puerto Rico Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report

Image
Pablo José Hernández Rivera, Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, called for an investigation into the halting of prosecution efforts related to an alleged scheme to buy prisoners’ votes. Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images Federal and local lawmakers in Puerto Rico, as well as civil rights and advocacy organizations, have called for investigations after ProPublica reported how a federal probe into a drugs-for-votes scheme in Puerto Rico prisons got quashed after the 2024 elections.   The territory’s representative in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, called on members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to join him in a push for a congressional probe into the matter.  “The report published today by ProPublica details facts that no elected official — whether in Puerto Rico or in Washington — can ignore,” he said in a statement in Spanish. The same day, Rep. Héctor Ferrer Santiago, a Popular Democratic Party member, in...
Post a Comment
Read more