This story was originally published at Prism.

Two days before Christmas last year, Rachel Rubí and her mother, Maria Rubí, learned their rent would increase by 65% beginning February 2022. The two tenants have lived in a decades-old, two-story apartment building in Hialeah, a blue-collar and predominantly immigrant city within Miami-Dade County, for 25 years. Maria, who emigrated from Nicaragua, earns $14 an hour as a cashier at a store in the city.

This article was originally published at Prism

In 2017, Beth Vial needed to have an abortion. She was 26 weeks into her pregnancy, and there was no legal cutoff in her resident city of Portland, Oregon, but she needed a simple majority vote from the department board at the hospital to approve her procedure. She was short one vote, and she was running out of time.

Last week, workers at a Manhattan REI store filed for a union representation election, seeking what would be the first union at the outdoor equipment retailer. It didn’t take REI management long to start churning out anti-union messaging, including anti-union statements read by managers at captive audience meetings and workers being pulled into one-on-one meetings with managers.

Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series that seeks to create face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet regularly to socialize, get out the vote, support candidates, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert influence on the powers that be.

Hello Friday! As if on cue, our infrastructure continues to literally crumble, and the pittance put forward to fix the myriad issues BBB would have helped to ameliorate remain critical to our country’s future. The Biden administration is being pressured to make the moves that the majority of Americans support, come hell or high water—and the latter is coming, thanks to climate change.

The San Jose, California, City Council is requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay a fee in what the city says is the first ordinance of its kind in the U.S. The city council passed the law on Tuesday, and it will likely take effect in August.

By all accounts, Artemis Rayford was a happy, vibrant 12-year-old. He loved playing football and wearing his Tennessee Titans jersey. As a sixth-grader at Memphis, Tennessee’s Sherwood Middle School, Rayford had participated, just before the last year’s winter break, in a program his school coordinated with the Memphis Police Department—intended to discourage violence and gang activity. He and his fellow students learned about a new law passed in Jul.

Detained immigrants and their advocates scored a major court victory this week, reaching a “groundbreaking” settlement in a lawsuit filed nearly two years ago over unsafe pandemic conditions.

Under an agreement reached Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is barred from re-detaining immigrants previously released from two California facilities due to COVID-19. This could affect up to 250 people.

The social media platform TikTok continues to prove itself to be more than just a platform for viral dance videos and pranks. It now has one of its oldest users sharing the reality of the Holocaust through her story of surviving it.