June 24, 2025 ❧ Airlines Selling Data to ICE, Moroccan Government Slaughtering Docs, and Florida Funds the War in Iran 

Plus: The latest on Nestle's slavery, goat communication, and Current Affairs' new Ten Commandments! 

AROUND THE STATES

❧ At a Texas immigration facility, children fight adults for clean water. According to materials filed in court by immigration attorneys, children detained in immigration facilities in Texas are subject to immense suffering. Some children report having to fight adults for limited clean water; others were denied medical care and now struggle to walk. This is far from the first time children have been abused in immigration detention. The Trump and Biden administrations have been sued over denying children soap, toothbrushes, and showers, keeping children in motels away from oversight, and holding children in overcrowded tents. And that doesn’t include the mistreatment adults face, from being denied medical care to being fed rotten food and dirty, “smelly” water. 

Lawyers are only able to investigate conditions in children’s detention facilities thanks to the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 court agreement between the federal government and immigrants’ rights advocates that guarantees minimum conditions for the treatment of detained children. Unfortunately, the government has often not upheld their obligations under the settlement. The budget bill currently being negotiated includes provisions to permit the government to detain migrant children indefinitely, which is not allowed under the Flores Agreement, and the government recently filed a motion to terminate the agreement entirely. (Associated Press) 

❧ Airlines sold passenger data to Homeland Security and ICE. According to investigative reporting from the Lever and 404 Media, a major aviation industry clearinghouse has sold billions of flights’ worth of data to DHS and ICE without passenger consent or knowledge. The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is owned by nine major airlines, and it collects data on the more than 240 airlines’ flights who use their services. According to their website, ARC has detailed data on 54 percent of all trips taken globally.  

Interestingly, ARC requested in its contracts that the government not disclose the source of the data unless forced by a court order. This comes as law enforcement has increasingly turned to purchasing large datasets on millions of Americans that they would not be allowed to collect themselves. That’s as opposed to seeking subpoenas for data pertaining to specific individuals suspected of crimes. Other examples include ICE’s purchase of millions of people’s utility information and police purchasing cell phone location data to track targets’ doctor visits. (The Lever and 404 Media)

❧ Harvard hired a researcher to investigate the school’s ties to slavery, then fired him when he found too many slaves. Harvard, like virtually all American institutions more than 150 years old, has extensive ties to slavery. And in 2022, Harvard investigated its relationship with slavery by commissioning a 100-plus page report on the subject and commissioning researchers to find descendants of the university’s enslaved workers. To that end, Harvard hired Richard Cellini, who led Georgetown’s successful venture to find more than 10,000 descendants of people enslaved by the university. Georgetown now manages a fund worth $400,000 per year to benefit descendants and gives them preferential admission to their undergraduate program. 

But Harvard did not want to be as ambitious as Georgetown, and shortly after hiring Cellini, they began pressuring him not to find too many descendants. “At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” Cellini told The Guardian. (Harvard has a $52.6 billion endowment.) After Cellini’s team found just over 900 descendants, he was fired without an explanation. Since the firing, the work has been handed off to a separate nonprofit genealogy research team, but other researchers affiliated with the project have previously criticized Harvard’s alleged attempts to “dilute and delay” contacting descendants. (The Guardian)

Richard Cellini claims to have been fired by Harvard after finding that the university enslaved too many people. This is the kind of news Harvard needs to get back in Trump’s good graces. (Image credit: 10 Million names)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Speaking of slavery, Nestlé still enslaves people. The huge international food company has promised to end the use of forced labor in its cocoa production chain since at least 2001, although they’ve also spent the past two decades fighting tooth and nail to dismiss slave labor lawsuits. But a recent investigation by Public Eye found that workers in Brazil who harvest Nestlé’s coffee are subject to debt bondage, violence, and abuse. 

Lured by the prospect of higher wages than those available in city centers, men travel sometimes thousands of miles for seasonal work harvesting coffee beans. But in the case covered by Public Eye, the victims were paid only a fraction of that—ultimately making less than minimum wage. Worse still, their supervisor fabricated debts to the farm, and threatened that they could not leave until their mountains of owed charges were repaid. This is far from the first time Nestlé’s suppliers have been found to abuse and enslave workers in Brazil. Slavery is still a significant problem worldwide. One report by Walk Free and the International Labor Organization estimates that 50 million people live in slavery today, with more than 27 million people forced into labor on any given day. (Public Eye)

Here’s a handy chart of brands owned by Nestlé, in case you feel the urge to boycott. And this is just a few; there’s a more comprehensive chart here. (Image: Fabrik.)

❧ British police gave a notorious tech company information on citizens’ political ideologies and sex lives. Two police agencies have begun a pilot of a nationwide collaboration between UK police and Palantir, the surveillance company founded by billionaire Trump donor Peter Thiel. The project, named “Nectar,” aims to create a “real-time data-sharing network” that tracks information on people across the UK. Internal documents say Palantir will “aid in the prevention, detection, and investigation of crimes,” which of course is the most broad mission imaginable. And even worse, Palantir will be given an enormously broad set of data on individuals, including information on their sex lives, races, sexual orientation, and political ideologies. 

Palantir has a history of abusing its relationship with police. In a contract dispute at the end of its relationship with the NYPD, Palantir refused to give its data to police, claiming the information was Palantir’s proprietary material. And in New Orleans, Palantir partnered with police to form a “predictive policing” program that ran for six years without public knowledge. Currently, Palantir is building a tool to help the Trump administration “choose who to deport,” according to reporting by Wired. Trump border czar Stephen Miller, alongside other high-level staffers, happen to own hundreds of thousands of dollars of Palantir stock. (The I Paper)

❧ The Moroccan government is slaughtering hundreds of thousands of dogs. Animal welfare groups have accused the Moroccan government of planning to kill as many as 3 million dogs as the country tries to cull the stray population in advance of the 2030 World Cup. Morocco is hosting the tournament alongside Spain and Portugal, and government officials claim reducing the number of dogs is important to improving the country’s appeal as a tourist destination. But instead of ethically neutering and vaccinating strays, as the government had claimed to be doing, the state has resorted to crude killings. Eyewitnesses have seen dogs being beaten, shot, and poisoned to death. Some still-living dogs have been thrown into vans “filled with carcasses” and driven to facilities to be killed off-site. While protestors have made the issue known to FIFA since March 2023, it remains to be seen if soccer’s governing body will do anything to reduce the slaughter done for the sake of its tournament. (CNN)

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

❧ Florida spends hundreds of millions of dollars funding Israel’s wars. War bonds are a key way the Israeli government funds its genocide in Gaza (and now also its war with Iran). Since October 7th, the country has sold $5 billion in bonds with the promise that each purchase helps fund the war effort. And no jurisdiction buys more bonds than Florida. Of the $1.7 billion in bonds purchased by American governments, jurisdictions in Florida own nearly 1 billion dollars’ worth. Palm Beach County alone holds $700 million in Israeli war bonds, which make up 16 percent of the county’s holdings. But the county was recently prevented from buying additional bonds after Moody’s downgraded the bonds’ credit ratings below Florida’s minimum rating requirements, citing among other things, “the risk of a broader escalation involving Iran.” 

Enter the Florida legislature. A new law set to be signed by Governor Ron Desantis creates a special carveout for Israeli bonds by barring localities from setting a minimum credit rating requirement for foreign bonds. (The only foreign bonds Florida counties can invest in are, by law, Israel’s). In effect, this means that Palm Beach County has a pass to violate its own policies to ensure it can keep funding genocide. (The Lever)

❧ Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” threatens hundreds of hospitals. This week, Senate Republicans unveiled their version of the budget bill. Among other monstrous things, the bill would strip health insurance from 16 million people through its Medicaid cuts. That alone is a tragedy, but it’s made worse by the fact that these cuts would imperil hundreds of hospitals. A high percentage of people who go to rural and “safety net” hospitals are on Medicaid. When those patients lose Medicaid, it means that hospitals then don’t get paid for their emergency care. An analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the House version of the bill would result in a $204 billion increase in uncompensated care over the next decade. (The Senate version was more extreme in this regard and will have worse impacts on hospital closures.) 

Rural hospitals are particularly vulnerable to these added costs because they already operate in financial precarity. 42 percent of rural hospitals are losing money, and 146 rural hospitals closed or stopped providing inpatient care between 2015 and 2023. Another 700 hospitals—one third of all rural hospitals in the US—are at risk of closing in the near future, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. In all, an analysis by the Center for American Progress found that nearly 200 hospitals would be at risk of immediately shutting down if the bill gets voted into law. (The American Prospect)

❧  Texas put the Ten Commandments in classrooms, as Louisiana took them down. On Saturday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law requiring public schools to post in classrooms 16-by-20 inch framed copies of the Ten Commandments. According to a co-sponsor of the bill, “the focus of this bill is to look at what is historically important to our nation educationally and judicially.” Which is why, I presume, Texas will also require classrooms to post copies of MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. 

In related news, on Friday, the day before Texas’ law was enacted, a federal court struck down a similar law in Louisiana. The state of Louisiana plans to appeal its case to the Supreme Court if necessary, where the law is not on their side. The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms violates students’ constitutional rights. By placing a religious text at the head of the classroom (a specific sect’s interpretation of a religious text, no less), the government promotes an establishment of religion. Thank God the Supreme Court doesn’t have a history of overruling 50 year old precedents—Republicans in at least 15 other states have proposed similar commandment laws. In the meantime, educators and public servants should feel free to reference Current Affairs' guide to navigating Louisiana's law. 

RUMINANT FACT OF THE WEEK

 Goats have regional accents!

A 2012 study by professors at Queen Mary University of London found that when baby goats form social groups, their bleats begin to sound similar. In contrast, when they’re raised apart, their bleats become more differentiated. This means that goats have, in practice, regional accents. Scientists have also found regional accents among bats, whales, and yes, even people. (NPR) 

Learning the difference between goat accents is easy. Just make some flashcards and study the baa-sics. (Photo Credit: Libreshot)

Writing and research by Grady Martin. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Skopic. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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