Who Will Care for Your Children?
  July 17, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, Ya girl has had a particularly difficult week, but it’s all going to turn around because tomorrow I am getting sushi and pie with my bestie. That may not sound like a classic mix, but trust me, they go together like ramma-lamma-lamma-ka-dingity-da-dinga-dong. (Name that musical!) In today’s newsletter, we’re connecting the dots on childcare and immigration policy. Plus, remembering John Lewis, and your weekend reading list. Did you guess correctly, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONIf ICE comes knocking, will you still have childcare?: In 2015, when our now-president was campaigning on the promise that he would remove “illegal aliens” from the United States, daytime talk show host Kelly Osbourne asked, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilets, Donald Trump?” The rebuke was swift for Osbourne’s offensive wording, but there was a larger point buried under the casual racism. And in the era of Trump 2.0, with its brutal immigration policies, the question is: Who will be left to care for our children? The United States has a long history of outsourcing childcare, dating back to enslavement, and continuing through Reconstruction and into the 21st century. As Angela Garbes explained to The Meteor in 2022, the survival of American capitalism is dependent on “ignored” domestic labor. That labor is now largely being performed by immigrants, and if they’re removed from the country, “our care infrastructure will crumble,” warns the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Research shows that immigrants comprise up to 26 percent of not just the daycare but also the early-education workforce. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, nearly half of all female educators are immigrants. But with ICE raids expanding in immigrant communities, and the administration allowing agents to enter child-care centers for the first time since 2011, immigrant providers are under heavy threat. Their livelihoods, already tenuous, are being undermined in other ways, too: The administration is now barring undocumented immigrants from putting their children in Head Start programs—which have long served as a crucial support for the families of care workers—and recent changes to Medicare, SNAP, and child tax credits all make it harder for immigrant workers to make ends meet. And when child-care workers suffer, everyone suffers. Take the case of Nicolle Orozco Forero, a Colombian immigrant in Washington state who cared for children with disabilities. In June, after a routine monthly immigration meeting, she was detained by ICE and eventually deported. (Her young children, one of whom is gravely ill, were also deported.) The 19th’s Chabeli Carrazana spoke to the families who relied on Orozco Forero for care and writes that they “are now in a free fall…[Nicolle] was the connective tissue that kept families employed. Her loss has rippled across industries.” One mother was forced to quit her job after Orozco Forero was detained because she couldn’t find anyone else to care for her daughter, who has autism and is non-verbal. Meanwhile, the administration is patting itself on the back for being “pro-family.” After all, it increased both the child tax credit and the child care tax credit via the Big Beautiful Bill; what more could anyone want? A lot: As we’ve written, the BBB does more harm than good to the limited social safety net in America, especially for lower-income families. As Andrea Palus of Child Care for Every Family Network put it to USA Today, “I think the reconciliation bill did almost nothing for child care. And for sure, almost nothing related to the scale of the need.” There is almost nothing in this country that exists that wasn’t molded by immigrant hands, and that includes our children. And many Americans who assume that their citizenship will shield them from the fallout of anti-immigrant policies may be about to find out that the impact is as close to home as it gets. AND:
 LEWIS IN 1964 AT A PROTEST WHEN HE WAS NATIONAL CHAIRMAN OF THE STUDENT NON-VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 A FAN TAKES IN THE VIEW WITH A SICK T-SHIRT DURING THIS MONTH'S PORTLAND FIRE LAUNCH EVENT IN OREGON. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WEEKEND READING 📚On island life: Huda has spoken. (Call Her Daddy) On being eternally hot: Millennials are redefining what it looks like to enter midlife. Spoiler: we’re making midlife sexy again. (Elle) On centering victims: It’s been a long week of Epstein news, but Julie K. Brown, who broke many of the big Epstein stories, is keeping her focus on what matters: the women at the heart of the case. (Radio Atlantic; listen to the very end)  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"Trying to Break Us Won't Work"
  June 10, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, It was a long weekend, especially for these two. Let’s jump right in. In today’s newsletter, The Meteor’s Angie Jaime writes to us from the West Coast to share what the last few days (and months) have been like in Los Angeles. Plus, the return of our better-news series, Tell Me Somethin’ Good. xoxo, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONDispatch from Los Angeles: To hear national news tell it, the protests resisting immigration raids in L.A. are the product of ICE’s recent violent overreach, but the truth for those of us who live here is much more complex: The block has been hot, so to speak, for months. ICE has been roving the streets of Los Angeles actively since at least February, just weeks after historic wildfires had devastated the city, effectively kicking the community while we were already down. In my own Highland Park on the eastern side of town, ICE began appearing in my neighborhood about six weeks after the fires that forced us to evacuate; the agents began installing street blockades near schools and doing random door-to-door investigations, setting the community on edge. Then, last weekend, ICE activity roiled to a boil, when agents conducted raids at multiple Los Angeles-area locations Friday, arresting upwards of 200 people per day, sparking protests that drew thousands to the streets. But it isn’t the protests that are sending my city into disarray. My neighbors and I are distressed because of the terrorizing actions of ICE and local police, made worse by Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard and now the Marines over our own state’s objections. A cynical—and, let’s be real, accurate—assessment would be that this is occurring by design, that the military presence is an attempt by the Trump administration to break a wounded city into factions that would turn on its most vulnerable. But that’s clearly a strategy of someone with a grudge against California, who does not know or understand Los Angeles in all her complexity, massive and minuscule.  WHO DOESN'T LOVE A GOOD(VIA GETTY IMAGES) Trying to break us won’t work. In the face of both ICE and its unasked-for armed backup, community members have risen up to resist on behalf of those targeted. Protesters of all intersecting identities, young and old, of all genders and races, from across the county, have put their bodies on the line for their fellow citizens, for their families, for people they may never meet., Many community organizers who had previously mobilized around wildfire recovery, Palestinian free speech in the entertainment industry, and other urgent causes have quickly pivoted to protests against ICE—showing that in a time of need, Angelenos have one another’s backs. And by the way, L.A. is not a war zone. In Highland Park this weekend, the cookouts continued apace, the park where I took my six-month-old was teeming with laughing children, and the neighborhood shops were as filled as they are on any other Sunday. The fear, the horror, the agitation do not come from whatever actions protesters might take in expressing themselves. The fear looms because my neighbors may be snatched from their homes at any moment, because the government continues to escalate force against its own people in the pursuit of white supremacy, because regardless of status, being Brown means that nothing precludes you from having your family torn apart by ICE. And yet, Los Angeles is my home and will remain so, in no small part because of the people who make up its foundations. As a philosopher-poet once said, “It wouldn't be L.A. without Mexicans/It’s Black love, Brown pride in the sets again.” —Angie Jaime So how can you help? Volunteering with legal aid services, sharing resources, and financially supporting local aid funds all work (and, of course, urge your members of Congress to raise their voices—this is not normal). AND:
 TELL ME SOMETHIN' GOOD 🎶
 RM (L) AND V (R) WERE DISCHARGED FROM SERVICE THIS WEEK AND WERE MET BY A CROWD OF FANS IN CHUNCHEON, SOUTH KOREA. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
A Plea for the "Disappeared" at the Statue of Liberty
  June 3, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, I want to extend the happiest of Happy Prides to all the organizers and participants of a historic sporting event that took place in Oslo on Sunday, the Ruck You Match. The event was a rugby game with a team of cis gender women scrapping against a team of trans women. It was organized as a big ruck you to a spate of bans on transgender women in sports. (If you’re curious, the final score was 34-7 with the cis women’s team coming out on top.) In today’s newsletter, we talk to filmmaker and activist Paola Mendoza about uplifting the stories of disappeared Venezuelans. Plus, a little good news for the girls and the gays, and a rundown of big upcoming Supreme Court decisions. 🏳️🌈♥️, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONYearning to breathe free: Last Sunday, a group of strangers dressed in white sat, screamed, and held hands at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Before them stood filmmaker and activist Paola Mendoza, reading the names of the 238 Venezuelan men who have been “disappeared” by the Trump administration and sent to the El Salvadoran mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The demonstration, spearheaded by Mendoza, was a re-enactment of the now-infamous images of detained Venezuelan men being brought into CECOT, where they’ve been cut off from their families, along with any shred of due process.  (PHOTO BY KISHA BARI) When Mendoza conceived of the protest, she chose to center the men’s humanity—to remind everyone of the 238 human beings getting treated like political pawns. “I'm desperately trying to refuse to allow [these disappearances] to become normalized, to allow it to just be the banality of regular life,” she said. “How I do that is by uplifting stories, to say, ‘This is not normal … and we cannot allow it to become normal.’” One of the names Mendoza read was that of Ysqueibel Peñaloza, who was sent to CECOT in March despite having no criminal record in any country. Peñaloza was in the U.S. legally on a CBP One application, and was with friends shooting a music video when ICE agents raided the home and arrested him and several others. His mother, Ydalis Chirinos, has been vocal about her son’s plight. “Ysqueibel is one of the two greatest treasures that God gave me,” Chirinos tells The Meteor, and yet “I have no knowledge of how my son is being treated.” Chirinos, who is 50 years old and lives in Venezuela, says she waits up nearly all night hoping to hear from her son or his lawyers; the loss of sleep makes it hard to care for her daughter and ailing father. As she waits for the legal system to run its course, Chirinos appeals to the mercy of those in the United States: “What is happening has no explanation, at least for me, since we are human beings and children of God. We do not leave our country for pleasure, we do it out of necessity…I sincerely ask you to help me.”  THE FIRST GROUP OF MEN SENT TO CECOT IN MARCH. THEIR HEADS WERE SHAVEN UPON ARRIVAL AND THEIR HANDS AND FEET ARE CHAINED TOGETHER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Mendoza is hopeful that more Americans will hear pleas like Chirinos’. “[Prison abolitionist] Mariame Kaba says that hope is a discipline,” she said. “And this is when we have to be the most disciplined.” She posits that even though all sides generally agree that the immigration system is broken, the entire debate can be boiled down to a “yes” or “no” question: “Do you want to be a place that welcomes immigrants, or do you want to be a place that disappears them?” Increasingly, the U.S. looks like the latter; an anti-immigrant domino effect has been rolling out since the Obama administration, and with recent decisions from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is poised to do even more damage. Nonetheless, “if we can figure out a way to get ourselves to the moon, figure out a way to create cell phones and process data and create AI centers,” Mendoza said, “then you got to fucking believe that we also could figure out a way to fix this immigration system. But there isn’t a [political] will or desire to do so and that is the problem, not immigrants.” Which is why the work of changing public opinion is so essential. Mendoza recounts the advice given to her by Morena Herrera, a former guerilla and reproductive rights activist in El Salvador: “She told me all regimes fall. How long a regime lasts is up to the people. AND:
 SOME OF THE MADLEEN'S CREW MEMBERS ON THE DAY THEIR VOYAGE BEGAN. (VIA GETTY AIMGES)
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What SCOTUS Is About to Do to Our Summer
BY CINDI LEIVE  PROTESTERS GATHERED OUTSIDE OF THE COURT EARLIER LAST MONTH TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION'S THREATS TO BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Welcome to June, the month when the most legally-obsessed person in your friend group (hi, that’s us) starts compulsively refreshing the Supreme Court opinion site to be first to know what the Robed Ones have planned for our futures. These are the hot summer weeks that, in past years, have made us rejoice, rage, and panic—and 2025 will be a doozy: The justices are expected to rule on a raft of major cases with real-life, national impact before they break for the summer. A taste of what’s ahead:
Exhausted? Same. And that doesn’t even include big cases on pornography, Obamacare, or everything that joins the birthright case on the “emergency docket”—which is bulging lately given the steady stream of challenges to legally nonsensical White House orders. Stay tuned for more as the decisions roll out. And give thanks for the three queens of SCOTUS sanity, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan, who continue to stand for the law and our rights through all of it.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
