Trump v. AFGE | Layoff wave | Video game strike ends

Thursday, June 12, 2025

STRIKES

► From Deadline — SAG-AFTRA Suspends Video Game Strike After Securing Tentative Deal With Major Developers — The union announced Wednesday that the work stoppage will end at 12 p.m. PT. The strike suspension has received the consent of both the Interactive Media Agreement negotiating committee as well as National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. While the deal reached earlier this week still needs the approval of the National Board and the membership at large, SAG-AFTRA members will now be able to return to work on productions under the Interactive Media Agreement, including publicity and promotion.

LOCAL

► From the Seattle Times — WA agencies see largest wave of layoffs since Great Recession — Layoffs were predicted, and state agencies had not been filling positions to soften the blow on workers, but they will still have impacts in several parts of state government, with cuts expected to affect approximately 1,000 positions. The Department of Social and Health Services, the largest agency with over 18,350 staffers, has to cut 731 positions statewide, although about 430 are vacant, said Adolfo Capestany, senior communications director for DSHS. The remaining 300 are filled and there will be layoffs, he said.

► From the Yakima Herald-Republic — Protesters, including former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, blocking bus from taking refugees — More than 100 demonstrators were blocking federal agents in Spokane early Wednesday evening from leaving a downtown immigration office reportedly with refugees who were detained at court hearings earlier in the day. About 75 people, including former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, gathered outside the facility in the afternoon just north of Riverfront Park to prevent a bus with the young men from departing to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. Later, they deflated the bus’ tires and blocked law enforcement from leaving in patrol cars on the opposite side of the building.

► From KREM — Fear is the daily reality for undocumented immigrants in America — James is undocumented, so the simple task of going to work carries a risk. Before he starts driving, he does a quick Sign of the Cross. One wrong encounter with immigration enforcement is all it would take for him to lose everything. For years, fear lived in the background. Now it rides shotgun everywhere James goes. Across town, Loretta, also undocumented, keeps busy while she waits for her work permit to be renewed. She bakes cakes and crochets purses and scarves for people to buy. When she does have her work permit, she works at a warehouse nearby.

► From the Seattle Times — Seattle considers banning controversial rent-setting software, RealPage — A Seattle City Council committee on Wednesday advanced a bill to bar landlords from subscribing to software platforms that compile rental information to recommend rent prices. The proposal targets the platform RealPage, which some of biggest property management firms in the country use. The service has drawn media scrutiny, lawsuits and a Department of Justice challenge. RealPage compiles data from multiple landlords about their properties and uses an algorithm to recommend rent levels to property owners and managers who subscribe to the service. Critics say that because the platform goes beyond browsing publicly available data and taps into proprietary information, it amounts to collusion among landlords to keep rents high.

AEROSPACE

► From the Seattle Times — Trump’s FAA administrator pick questioned about safety and pilot training standards at hearing — The air traffic controllers union backed Bedford’s nomination because of his support for the effort to modernize the outdated system and bolster controller hiring. Two different radar outages this spring in a facility that directs planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport highlighted the problems because the FAA had to limit flights at the airport after five controllers took trauma leave after the problems. Pilots’ unions and Democrats have raised concerns that Bedford may support weakening the 1,500-hour experience standard for airline pilots that was adopted after a 2009 crash or even might consider allowing some airlines to operate with only one pilot.

ORGANIZING

► From Jacobin — The Biggest Recent Union Wins Were in Art and Bacon — What do arts faculty in New York City and bacon processing workers in Wichita, Kansas have in common? I asked ChatGPT this question, hoping for some connective thread for this article, and it spat the following back at me: “They both spend their days transforming raw material into something people either deeply savor or completely misunderstand. (And neither gets paid what they’re worth.)”

NATIONAL

► From the New Republic — Trump Is Planning a Nationwide Crackdown Targeting Blue Cities — The Trump administration is readying tactical ICE units known as “special response teams” to conduct large raids in five Democratic cities, according to MSNBC. They will be in New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and northern Virginia. While it’s unclear when exactly the raids will start, all ICE agents in those areas have been told to stand by.

► From the AP — Abrego Garcia’s lawyers ask judge to fine Trump administration for contempt — Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia have asked a federal judge in Maryland to impose fines against the Trump administration for contempt, arguing that it flagrantly ignored court orders for several weeks to return him to the U.S. from El Salvador. The attorneys also are asking U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis to compel the release of documents the federal government withheld by claiming they contain protected state secrets. Or as an alternative, the lawyers suggested a special master to investigate the government’s “willful noncompliance” of court orders.

► From the Los Angeles Times — Beleaguered L.A. immigrant advocates are now threatened with federal probes — A Republican senator from Missouri threatened an investigation on Wednesday into one of Los Angeles’ most established immigrant organizations, accusing it of “bankrolling the unrest.” Salas, a longtime immigrant rights activist who pushed for sanctuary state laws and has organized dozens of peaceful protests over the years, said the accusations are false and pointed to the years of peaceful organizing the group has done in Los Angeles. “This is trying to take away the spotlight from the pain and suffering that this administration is causing,” she said. “I refuse to make it about anybody else but them.”

► From the Alaska Daily News — Dozens of ICE detainees transferred to Alaska are being held at an Anchorage facility — Forty men in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody were transferred from an Outside facility to Alaska’s jail system in recent days through what state officials called a “longstanding arrangement” between Alaska and the federal government. ICE has not answered questions about where the men came from, and why they were transferred to an Alaska jail facility. At least two came from a Tacoma immigration detention facility and were transferred back there Monday, the Alaska Department of Corrections said Tuesday.

Editor’s note: in a Facebook post, La Resistencia identified the men as, “Retish Singh and Daniel Lopez, formerly detained at Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). Singh and Lopez have consistently spoken out against ICE and GEO Group, the private prison profiteers that operate NWDC. Often times, they’ve simply asked for improved conditions inside detention; that alone has made them targets.”

► From the Seattle Times — Supreme Court rules for girl with epilepsy in opinion that could affect education access lawsuits — The Supreme Court sided with a teenage girl with a rare form of epilepsy on Thursday in a unanimous ruling that could make it easier for families like hers to go to court over access to education. The girl’s family says that her Minnesota school district didn’t do enough to make sure she has the accommodations she needs to learn, including failing to provide adequate instruction in the evening when her seizures are less frequent.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From Vox — The enormous stakes in a new Supreme Court case about Trump’s mass firings — The plaintiffs, meanwhile, primarily argue that Trump’s proposed firings are so widespread that they would fundamentally transform the federal government in ways the president cannot do on his own…This argument will be familiar to anyone who followed the many fights over executive power during the Obama and Biden administrations. In those fights, the Republican justices frequently ruled that, when the executive branch attempts to do something that is too ambitious, the courts must block it — even in some cases where the executive’s action was authorized by a broadly worded federal statute. The stakes in the AFGE case, in other words, are even broader than the immediate dispute over whether Trump can fire so many government workers that entire federal programs cease to function. The case also will reveal whether the rules that the GOP justices invented to constrain Democratic presidents like Obama and Biden also apply to Republican presidents like Trump.

► From the Washington Post — ICE sets quotas to deliver on immigration crackdown on employers — The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division has ordered its 30 regional offices to meet quotas on inspections of employers’ documentation of their workers’ immigration status, according to three immigration lawyers and a former Department of Homeland Security government official familiar with the agency’s operations. The number of notices of inspection, known as I-9 audits, has increased “tenfold” since January, three lawyers said. The inspections can be a precursor to workplace raids and have recently been used by the Trump administration as a method for detaining undocumented workers without judicial warrants, according to immigration advocates and lawyers.

► From the AP — Trump administration’s use of troops to help with immigration raids faces test in court –President Donald Trump’s use of troops to help carry out intensified immigration raids faces its biggest challenge yet on Thursday, when a federal judge is set to weigh a request from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to put an emergency stop to the practice. Newsom has warned that the military intervention is part of a broader effort by Trump to overturn norms at the heart of the nation’s democracy.

► From Pro Publica — Senators Demand Transparency on Canceled Veterans Affairs Contracts — Following a ProPublica investigation into how DOGE had developed an error-prone AI tool to determine which VA contracts should be killed, a trio of lawmakers said the Trump administration continues to “stonewall” their requests for details. The group, which included Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, as well as Rep. Mark Takano, said that despite repeated requests, the agency has disclosed incomplete and inaccurate lists that failed to specify exactly which contracts have been canceled.

► From Wired — Senators Warn DOGE’s Social Security Administration Work Could Break Benefits — In a new letter addressed to SSA commissioner Frank Bisignano, senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden say that DOGE’s plans to “hastily upgrade” Social Security IT systems could disrupt the delivery of benefits or result in mass data losses. The warning comes after WIRED reported in March that DOGE officials were planning to rebuild SSA’s code base in a matter of months. The move, originally spearheaded by Steve Davis, one of Elon Musk’s key lieutenants and a leader at DOGE, could result in total system collapse, experts told WIRED at the time.

► From the New York Times — Senate Republicans Want to Trim Some of Trump’s Tax Cuts in Domestic Policy Bill — At $2.4 trillion, the cost of the legislation that barely passed the House is already huge. So Senate Republicans are now hunting for ways to save money, a hazardous task that could involve shaving the ambitions of their colleagues in the House or in the White House…Senate Republicans want to make the business write-offs a permanent feature of the tax code, a change that they and some economists believe would help encourage more companies to expand. As one way to cover that cost, Senate Republicans are looking at ways to further curb eligibility for a tax cut for overtime pay, including by setting a lower income ceiling for the break and by more strictly defining what counts as overtime, lawmakers said.

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