Immigration raid near hospital heightens anxiety and more news from the states

Good evening. In Pennsylvania earlier this month, police and federal agents arrested 10 people working on a hospital construction project, increasing anxiety about enforcement — and seeking medical care — among immigrant communities, advocates say.

In Tennessee, a new generation of civil rights advocates is rising up, after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act and state lawmakers drew new congressional district boundaries that fractured Black voting power. 

In Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump has refused to spend $810 million in program funds passed by Congress, potentially complicating long-term budget talks. 

In Rhode Island, a new study found that high school students involved in music programs had lower rates of chronic absenteeism.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation targeted construction workers building a hospital addition in Danville, Pennsylvania earlier this month. Along with local law enforcement, they stopped and arrested a number of workers on roads near the facility as the men left for the evening on Sept. 2, Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports.

While details have been difficult to verify, the raid sent shockwaves through immigrant communities. Advocates warn that as word of raids near hospitals and medical centers spreads, so can fears of seeking healthcare services in immigrant communities. Medical workers too have warned that more aggressive immigration enforcement has led to immigrants delaying or refusing necessary care.

The September raid was not the first to target construction workers near a hospital in central Pennsylvania. Last August, ICE confirmed the arrests of 24 construction workers in Centre County who were on their way to a construction site at Mount Nittany Medical Center.

Related: (North Dakota) Community members protest ICE after Bismarck-area detainments increase 

Supporters of an effort to place new regulations on data centers in Arkansas’ most populous county are expected to seek an override after the proposal was vetoed, Arkansas Advocate reports. 

Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde vetoed the new rules for data centers approved by the quorum court earlier this month. The regulations would require prospective data center projects to submit to the county electrical load analyses, water and wastewater plans, land-use suitability studies and a decommissioning plan, among other requirements. 

Data center projects have faced bipartisan backlash in communities across Arkansas and the nation over concerns about their energy and water usage and lack of transparency surrounding such projects. Several Arkansas counties have approved moratoriums on new data center projects.

Related: Ohio economists: Abatements may attract data centers, but is that a good thing?

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed Monday for a temporary injunction against OpenAI and Chat GPT, upping his legal challenge against the artificial intelligence company that he says has admitted it can’t regulate its own technology, Florida Phoenix reports. 

Uthmeier, a Republican, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in June, alleging the company knowingly released and aggressively marketed ChatGPT to the public — including children — while concealing “serious risks, suppressing internal safety warnings, and deceiving Floridians against the true nature and dangers of the product.”

OpenAI announced Friday that it was pausing training of its most powerful agents.

Related: (D.C. Bureau) ‘Dumbfounds us all’: Congress struggles with policies rippling from AI development

Tennessee: ​A federal appeals court ruled that prediction market Kalshi’s sports-event contracts are subject to the state’s sports-wagering laws, reversing a lower-court ruling. 

Utah: While police responding to domestic abuse calls now conduct more thorough interviews to assess escalating danger for victims, too few are being immediately connected to resources, advocates say. 

Nevada: The state’s foremost election denier is making a repeat run for secretary of state, which he narrowly lost in 2022 by about two percentage points.

Missouri: The state Board of Education is funding its search for a new education commissioner and strategic plan through philanthropic contributions rather than state dollars.

Ohio: The state has lowered its infant mortality numbers, though the rate still remains above the national average, and communities of color continue to see disproportionately high rates.

Nebraska: A state judge blocked part of an Omaha ordinance to require employers to pay youth workers the same minimum wage as adults as the legal fight plays out.

Louisiana: Most state candidates for Congress said they would not support reducing the amount of federal funding states receive after a disaster. But Democrats and Republicans are divided on massive staffing cuts.

New Mexico: State Forester Laura McCarthy rescinded fire restrictions on state lands after recent rainfall statewide alleviated risk of wildfire ignition and spread. 

“They’re trying to take away the vote we had,” said Fran Pierce, standing in front of a mural of her father, Leamon Pierce, a longtime member of Chattanooga City Council. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Leamon Pierce was a plaintiff in the 1989 case Brown v. Board of Commissioners of the City of Chattanooga, where a federal court found Chattanooga’s system of government violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power and depriving Black residents of meaningful representation. 

He went on to become one of Chattanooga’s first Black and longest-serving council members.

Now, decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Tennessee Republican lawmakers to swiftly pass redrawn congressional district maps in May, three months before primary elections, cracking the majority Black Congressional district of Memphis into three. 

Fran Pierce said after the Supreme Court decision and subsequent redistricting spurred a new understanding of her father’s work, she plans to take action to protect his contributions and defend Black civil rights. 

Read more from Tennessee Lookout. 

Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections, States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau reports. 

Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have a limited immediate impact, election experts say. 

As Republicans fight to retain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the past year aggressively seeking to root out noncitizen voting. 

They have called into question the security of the upcoming elections, following the lead of the president, who has long made spurious claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.

Those efforts are now colliding with federal law — and the reality long shown by studies and available data that noncitizen voting is rare.

The Trump administration has, once again, infuriated lawmakers from both political parties by using a controversial maneuver to cancel funding previously approved by Congress, the D.C. Bureau reports. 

The $810 million in the “pocket rescission” would have gone to refugee assistance programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Treasury Department program that provided “debt forgiveness to foreign countries that make climate change-related investments for coral reefs and tropical forests” and a grant program at the Minority Business Development Agency, among several others. 

The decision by the White House budget office to cancel the funding could make it much more difficult for negotiators to reach agreement on the dozen full-year government funding bills later this year. 

Those bills cannot become law without bipartisan support, a requirement that’s unlikely to happen if Democrats believe the administration will simply cancel funding they don’t wish to spend. 

More from the D.C. Bureau: Trump used impossible foreign labor standards as tariff workaround, small businesses say 

Democratic and Republican governors say they will more aggressively push back on federal overreach regardless of which party controls Washington, Stateline reports. 

Earlier this month, the bipartisan National Governors Association for the first time in over a decade updated its internal principles on federalism — the system of power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states. That document now says governors must defend state sovereignty, including through public criticism of federal overreach, legal challenges to federal action, and declining to use state resources to enforce federal laws. 

The new policy comes as more state leaders during President Donald Trump’s second term elevate the importance of federalism, the uniquely American structure created by the framers of the Constitution.

More from Stateline: The signs offer quick cash for homes. But states want more oversight.

A new study in Rhode Island links sustained arts education — especially music — to lower chronic absenteeism, Rhode Island Current reports. 

The study, conducted by Quadrant Research and commissioned by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, found that continuous high school participation in arts classes was associated with better school attendance. 

After accounting for student demographics, year-to-year differences and school district, researchers estimated 25.4% of four-year music students were chronically absent, compared with 37.3% of students without four consecutive years of music.

Reducing chronic absenteeism has been a signature priority of the Rhode Island Department of Education under Democratic Gov. Dan McKee. In August, McKee celebrated the fourth consecutive year of decline in chronic absenteeism rates, which are now down 14.4 percentage points from a pandemic-era peak.

Report co-author Robert Morrison — who took music classes himself as a teen, and worked in the music and instrument industries for years before becoming an arts education researcher — offered that the arts are worth more than what they might do for attendance.

“The arts have legitimacy for their intrinsic value in their own right,” Morrison said.

The attendance finding, he added, is a “bonus.”