An immigration meeting was held last night as Reno Police restated what they do and don’t do in terms of people’s status, while many keep checking the JuntosSeguros.com website where the location of ICE officers is reported anonymously and images are posted from across the country, with a zip code search available.
On the refugee resettlement front, the Department of State reliant Northern Nevada International Center is wondering how it will house many Afghan refugees who recently arrived, before a suspension was put on all incoming flights with others who had been promised a new life in the U.S., including Northern Nevada, on external standby. Meanwhile, those recently arrived need to find housing, but with what funds now?
Other local groups and non profits reliant on federal funding are wondering if their programs and staff will have to be cut as well. In local institutes and on the UNR campus, local scientists with grants in the works are scrambling to take out words such as climate change from their applications, in hopes they will still get their funding despite sweeping changes on those fronts.
We’ve also received concerning messages we need to look into about alleged disappearing gender affirming care in local hospital rooms, with former patients now referred to California instead.
Nationally there’s renewed fixation on Elon Musk and his newfound powers in the new Trump administration. Locally, we’ve already been feeling for quite some time what one unhoused man we interviewed once called the “Teslafication” of our local economy. In 2023, don’t forget, Nevada approved over $330 million in tax breaks for Tesla as part of this area’s Gigafactory expansion.
We recently asked the City of Reno about their own stated forays into the technofetishistic brosphere, with at one point Mayor Hillary Schieve proposing to sell the downtown Space Whales as a non-fungible token or having announced the country’s first city-backed blockchain ledger with digital data.
Here’s hoping that with the current political winds, Blockchains Inc. won’t come around again into these parts with its dystopian “smart city” push. What effects are you feeling locally due to actions from Washington D.C.?