by Ariana Figueroa, Arkansas Advocate
August 20, 2025

WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration moves to expand immigrant detention centers across the country through state partnerships, more than 60 Democratic lawmakers Wednesday pressed top immigration officials for details regarding a quickly constructed facility in the Florida Everglades, dubbed by Republicans as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“Brushing aside concerns from human rights watchdogs, environmentalist groups, and Tribal nations, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has greenlit the construction of this expansive detention facility that may violate detained individuals’ human rights, jeopardize public and environmental health, and violate federal law,” according to the letter signed by 65 Democratic members of Congress.

The letter comes after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday announced a partnership with the state of Nebraska to open a 300-bed federal immigration detention center for its version of “Alligator Alcatraz,” dubbed the “Cornhusker Clink.”

Another facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana, nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer,” is being constructed to hold 1,000 immigrants.

Democrats addressed the letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, DHS Office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons and Acting Head of FEMA David Richardson.

DHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment regarding the letter from Democrats.

Lawsuits in Florida

As the Trump administration aims to carry out its plans of mass deportations, partnerships with states to detain immigrants for removal are key but are also provoking opposition.

The facility in the Everglades, where state and federal officials aim to detain up to 5,000 immigrants, is currently facing a legal challenge in federal court from immigration advocates over allegations of limited access to attorneys for detainees.

There is also a second lawsuit from environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe to pause construction of the site, arguing it violates federal environmental laws.

“Experts worry this novel state-run immigration detention model will allow Florida to create an ‘independent, unaccountable detention system’ that runs parallel to the federal detention system,” according to the letter.

Other states following Florida’s lead? 

Democrats also expressed concern that the facility in the Everglades would serve as a model for other states.

“Beyond human rights and due process issues, this plan raises serious environmental concerns,” according to the letter.

In the letter, Democrats are asking for information about the legal authority for the state of Florida to construct and operate a migrant detention facility; the agreement between the state and DHS related to the operation of the facility; and measures that are being taken to ensure clean water, food, temperature regulation and medical care are provided for detainees, among other things.

“Human rights experts have condemned the plan as ‘cruel and inhumane’ by design,” according to the letter. “Construction progressed at ‘turbo speed,’ and it remains unclear whether the facility has plans to ensure medical care, rapid hurricane evacuation, access to counsel, and sufficient infrastructure for sewage, running water, and temperature controls, despite being located in one of the ‘hottest parts of the state.’”

Democrats are also seeking inspection reports, environmental review documents and contracts of private vendors that are operating the facility.

The letter asks for a response by Sept. 3.

Democratic senators who signed the letter include: Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Tina Smith of Minnesota.

Democratic representatives who signed the letter include: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kathy Castor, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Frederica S. Wilson, Lois Frankel and Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida; Hank Johnson and Nikema Williams of Georgia; Betty McCollum of Minnesota; Rashida Tlaib and Shri Thanedar of Michigan; Valerie P. Foushee of North Carolina; Chuy García, Bradley Scott Schneider, Delia C. Ramirez, Danny K. Davis, Sean Casten, Mike Quigley and Jonathan L. Jackson of Illinois; Pramila Jayapal, Suzan K. DelBene and Adam Smith of Washington; Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia; Dina Titus of Nevada; Glenn Ivey and Sarah Elfreth of Maryland; Gwen S. Moore of Wisconsin; Luis Correa, Juan Vargas, Mark Takano, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Thompson, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, John Garamendi and Jim Costa of California; Janelle S. Bynum, Suzanne Bonamici, Maxine Dexter and Andrea Salinas of Oregon; Yvette D. Clarke, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Paul Tonko and Dan Goldman of New York; Sylvia R. Garcia, Jasmine Crockett and Veronica Escobar of Texas; Wesley Bell and Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri; Summer L. Lee and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania; Jahana Hayes of Connecticut; Brittany Pettersen of Colorado; Yassamin Ansari of Arizona; Seth Moulton and James P. McGovern of Massachusetts; Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island; and Sarah McBride of Delaware.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

The post ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ probed by Dems as ICE detention centers multiply in states appeared first on arkansasadvocate.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content primarily reflects a Center-Left perspective by highlighting concerns raised by Democratic lawmakers regarding immigrant detention centers, focusing on human rights, environmental issues, and legal challenges. It emphasizes criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the expansion of detention facilities, aligning with typical Center-Left priorities on immigration reform and social justice, while maintaining a factual tone without overtly partisan language.

by Paige Gross, Arkansas Advocate
August 19, 2025

While some states and the federal government take their time in considering how artificial intelligence can and should be used, municipalities across the U.S. have been forging their own way in making AI policies for their government employees.

“AI is generally useful,” Boston’s Chief Innovation Officer Santiago Garces said. “But it is a set of technologies that also carries unique risks that need to be considered. And I think that our employees are generally concerned about accuracy, privacy, security and intellectual property.”

Boston was among the first cities in the U.S. to make a set of guidelines for its employees, rolling out a document outlining the purpose of generative AI in government work, sample use cases, and a set of principles in May 2023.

Garces and his team watched the rollout and quick growth of ChatGPT in 2022, and believed that AI tools were going to have widespread adoption within most industries very quickly. Use of AI felt inevitable in most of the tedious or repetitive tasks of government employees, and Garces said they wanted to work with their employees to figure out the ethical use of AI, instead of resisting it.

“The notion behind the guidelines was enabling this city to be able to get into this period of responsible experimentation, so that we could learn,” Garces said. “Instead of just waiting to see what happened, we would look at managing the risk in a way that was proactive, and engage with all of our workforce as partners in learning.”

What do the guidelines say?

Boston is far from alone in enacting its own AI policy. Many other cities and counties across the U.S. have developed similar policies in recent years, usually in the form of “guidelines” that steer how a government employee may evaluate AI’s accuracy or efficiency with specific tasks.

Guidelines can mirror some state legislation, and dictate when not to use the technology, like with confidential information or in making life-altering decisions such as hiring. The guidelines are meant to stay open-ended and to be flexible with changing state regulations, several city tech officials said.

In Lebanon, New Hampshire, the city’s AI policy is purposefully meant to be changed and shaped with the influence of state or city laws, Melanie McDonough, the city’s chief innovation and AI officer, said.

“We’re trying to build a policy that’s robust, that can withstand the pace at which AI is changing,” she said. “Policy is harder to change. Guidelines can be updated more frequently just to say, ‘oh, be aware, we’re actually not allowing the use of this particular feature internally because it doesn’t have enough protection.’”

The city’s policy, first released in December 2023, drew a lot from the Biden-era 2022 White House AI Blueprint. It’s centered on how city workers may use AI operationally, how they can center privacy and protection in their use and how they may navigate new AI as it becomes more pervasive in everyday life.

Boston’s guidelines outline the purpose of generative AI, and call it a tool — “We are responsible for the outcomes of our tools,” the policy says. The guidelines list several principles including empowerment, inclusion, respect, transparency, accountability, innovation, risk management, privacy, security and public purpose, and includes a list of “dos” and “do nots” in how to uphold those principles while using AI.

“We were thinking about how we capture the risk and opportunity specific to the technology in a way that does not create conflicting or additional things that might conflict with existing regulations,” Garces said of Boston’s policy.

Tempe, Arizona released a similar policy for its city workers just a month after Boston in 2023. Its principles also include ideas about the purpose and scope of the technology, and talks about human-centered approaches to using AI, and human responsibility with AI outcomes.

One of its creators, Stephanie Deitrick, Tempe’s chief data and analytics officer, said she began thinking about an AI framework about a year and a half before the city released it, as she was researching data, bias and inequity when it came to machine learning algorithms. When ChatGPT released, Deitrick said she realized that generative AI chatbots would soon be in the hands of everyday people, and she felt the city needed safeguards.

All new AI tools are reviewed by a governance committee, Tempe’s Director of Information Technology Jared Morris said, and state and federal legislation is reviewed and incorporated as needed. Though Tempe’s policy specifically talks about AI use, Deitrick said it’s broad enough to apply to any technology city workers use.

“These are our values, and we are going to make sure that whatever governance we have aligns with these values,” she said of Tempe’s policy. “And then it lays out the responsibility to the city, IT, the departments and the users that they have to participate in governance, and they are active users who are actively responsible for what they’re doing.”

AI uses in local government

Garces’ team is looking to update its 2023 guidelines, and surveyed its workforce this spring about how they currently use AI.

Of those surveyed, 60% of employees said that they use AI in some form at least once a week, and 78% said that they were interested in learning more about generative AI. Most of the current uses are for drafting memos, proofreading emails, and some data analysis or code generation, Garces said.

A few employees use multimodal models that can help generate images or videos. Garces said one of the city’s departments recently used Google’s Veo 3 to create a 20-second video about best practices on trash disposal. A preliminary quote for the educational video was around $20,000 for traditional film-making, but using AI cost the department about $30 in credits through Google, he said.

“You start seeing the potential impact in helping us do things that were either out of our reach or being able to do them faster or being able to do them for less money,” Garces said.

In Tempe, city employees have about 150 different applications of AI in their work, Morris said, with employees reaching a high point of about 100,000 uses in a given month. Many of these AI uses are “off the shelf,” models like ChatGPT that can assist with writing or research tasks. But others are paid models, like a partnership with AI company Axon, which does real-time object recognition that Tempe uses for a “whole of city” approach, Morris said.

For example, if someone calls into the emergency department about a person in distress in a blue car, the object recognition system can alert officials to blue cars out on the road, and get police or medical staff to them.

The city’s guidelines are careful to outline the potential harms decisionmaking and generative AI tools are capable of contributing to, Morris said. Though they use object recognition, they aren’t using facial recognition technology, he said.

“We’re really careful, trying to be very, very careful on anything that could possibly deprive anyone of liberty or job opportunities,” Morris said.

Why strike out on their own?

McDonough said her team found it more difficult to operate without an AI policy than with one, as she realized how important the technology was going to be. She said developing a policy for city government is different than one at the state or federal level — “we go and answer to a city council and we answer to the public.”

“In some ways, if people aren’t buying into what they’re hearing at the federal level, we don’t want them to get lost in the weeds,” she said. “Like, okay, here’s where we are. This is our policy, right here. You live in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and this is what we’re talking about.”

In Tempe, Deitrick said she felt that AI was so powerful that there was real potential for something to go wrong if the city didn’t outline how it expected its employees to use the technology.

“I think without policy and strong governance, not that mistakes won’t happen — but it just opens the door to very loose intentioned use of technology and data,” Deitrick said. “I think it makes us more intentional in what we’re doing and requires people to have the conversation.”

Garces echoes McDonough, saying that city workers might feel a pull to be more connected and responsive to their constituents than those in higher levels of government. And they may be able to act faster on societal developments, like AI, that have the power to drastically change the lives of the people in their city.

“We think that there’s a duty in trying to make sure that our constituents are informed and that they participate in these things,” Garces said.

Garces said he’d be happy for state or federal government officials to take inspiration from the policies that Boston and other cities have developed.

“My hope would be that state and federal regulators are working together with cities and not working against them,” Garces said. “Because I think that we have a lot of information and knowledge about how some of these things are starting to occur.”

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

The post Cities across the US are embracing AI guidelines for local government workers appeared first on arkansasadvocate.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content reflects a Center-Left bias primarily due to its focus on progressive urban governance embracing technology responsibly and ethically. It highlights the proactive use of AI policies in cities with an emphasis on inclusion, transparency, privacy, and public accountability — values typically aligned with centrist-to-left political attitudes. The piece shows confidence in government intervention and regulation to manage innovation and protect citizens, aligning with pragmatic progressivism. However, it avoids extreme ideological language or partisanship, maintaining a balanced and pragmatic tone.

by Jacob Fischler, Arkansas Advocate
August 18, 2025

President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European allies at the White House Monday celebrated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s concession of NATO-like security protections for Ukraine as part of a future peace deal between the two countries.

In a social media post on Monday night, Trump said he called Putin after the meetings were over and began arrangements for a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, at a location to be determined. After that meeting, all three would meet, Trump said.

At the White House earlier, Zelenskyy and officials from Western Europe called Putin’s acceptance of security guarantees for Ukraine protecting the nation against another attack a major step toward ending the three-year-old war. 

Dating to before the war, one point of tension between Ukraine and Russia has been Ukraine’s increasingly warm relationship with the West, with potential membership in NATO a major issue for Putin.

But Trump said Putin accepted something like it during the pair’s meeting in Alaska last week.

“The Alaska summit reinforced my belief that, while difficult, peace is within reach,” Trump said before a group meeting in the White House’s East Room. “In a very significant step, President Putin agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine.”

Trump and Zelenskyy met one-on-one in the Oval Office before a handful of European leaders joined them for a multilateral meeting in the East Room.

During introductions for the multilateral meeting, Zelenskyy said it had been his best meeting with Trump to date, and he was “very happy” with Trump about the possibility of winning security guarantees.

“We spoke about it, and we will speak more about security guarantees,” he said. “This is very important that (the) United States gives such (a) strong signal and is ready for security guarantees.”

The other attendees Monday were NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Finnish President Alexander Stubb.

‘Article 5-like’

Several European allies highlighted the issue of security guarantees for Ukraine, which they compared to the NATO charter’s Article 5 that compels every member state to defend any other member that has been attacked.

“It’s very good to hear that we’re working on the security guarantees,” von der Leyen said. “Article 5-like security guarantees: so important.”

The next step in the peace process would be to set up direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy, possibly also to include Trump.

Trump said he had spoken to Putin “indirectly” on Monday and that he planned to phone the Russian president following the meeting with European leaders.

Ceasefire needed?

Before meeting with Putin, Trump had supported a ceasefire as a path toward a permanent end to the war, though he came out of the Alaska summit closer to Putin’s position that a ceasefire was not necessary before a final peace agreement.

Monday, he said he would like a ceasefire to immediately end violence, but that it was not strictly necessary from a diplomatic point of view. The United States had helped negotiate the ends of other conflicts without a temporary ceasefire in place, he said.

“All of us would obviously prefer an immediate ceasefire while we work on a lasting peace,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s necessary.”

Germany’s Merz pushed back, saying a ceasefire should be a precondition for a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting.

“I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire,” Merz said. “So let’s work on that, and let’s try to put pressure on Russia, because the credibility of these efforts we are undertaking today are depending on at least a ceasefire from the beginning of the serious negotiations.”

Smoother meeting with Zelenskyy in suit

At the open-press portion of Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy, the two appeared on friendlier terms than they had during the Ukrainian leader’s last Oval Office visit in February, when Trump and Vice President JD Vance complained Zelenskyy was not appreciative enough of U.S. aid.

As the February meeting turned heated, Trump told Zelenskyy he had “no cards” to fight Russia on his own or make demands of the United States.

But Monday, Trump resisted an option to return to that argument, brushing off a reporter’s question about which country had “better cards.”

And Zelesnkyy also wore an all-black suit Monday after a writer at a pro-Trump media outlet questioned him at the February meeting about wearing military-style attire.

“You look fabulous in that suit,” the same writer said Monday.

“I said the same thing,” Trump echoed.

Last updated 6:14 p.m., Aug. 18, 2025

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

The post Trump, Zelenskyy exit White House talks hopeful about security guarantee for Ukraine appeared first on arkansasadvocate.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Right

This content portrays former President Donald Trump in a positive light, emphasizing his diplomatic efforts and constructive engagement with European leaders regarding the Ukraine conflict. The article highlights Trump’s role in advancing security guarantees for Ukraine and presents his interactions with allies and adversaries in a favorable, solution-focused manner. While it includes perspectives from European leaders, the overall tone and framing suggest a moderate conservative stance with a focus on Trump’s leadership and diplomatic initiatives.