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    A private prison firm wants to detain immigrants in this Kansas town. Its residents are pushing back

    It was a lovely May evening in Leavenworth, Kansas, but instead of strolling along the Missouri River or gardening, a group of locals sat on squeaky folding chairs at the public library to discuss their mission: how to stop a private prison behemoth from warehousing immigrants down the road.This was happening in a famously pro-prison town, home to one of the oldest federal penitentiaries, and where Donald Trump won more than 60% of the vote in 2024. Besides the military and the Veterans Affairs medical center, prisons are the largest employer in this community, 30 miles north-west of Kansas City. With federal immigration detention facilities around the country packed due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, the private prison industry is experiencing a boom. Stock prices of companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic soared as they gained scores of contracts.But when CoreCivic applied earlier this year for a permit in Leavenworth to reopen a prison with a troubled history to hold immigration detainees, city officials balked. And local residents – including some former prison employees – pushed back.That evening at the library, the citizens waited to hear whether a federal judge would decide if Leavenworth had the right to tell CoreCivic to buzz off. Regardless of what happened in court, organizers of this “teach-in” were preparing attendees for the next possible round of the fight. Over homemade chocolate chip cookies and sun tea, they talked about how to get letters published in the Leavenworth Times and reminded attendees to politely pester elected officials.Local organizer (and cookie baker) Rick Hammett suggested to the crowd that political and corporate interests had stirred fears of immigrants ahead of the 2024 election cycle to benefit private prisons.“To be profitable, private prison firms must ensure that prisons are not only built but also filled,” Hammett said. “Which is how you end up with a scare tactic over migrants to drum up a reason to put people in jail.”In early June, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported the most immigrant arrests in a single day in its history: more than 2,200 people.Ashley Hernandez, an organizer for the Sisters of Charityof Leavenworth, lamented that CoreCivic has portrayed those who oppose the Ice detention facility as “out-of-town” agitators. But this room is full of locals, she noted. “They’re the outside organization.”The Sisters of Charity is a Catholic convent – they prefer the term “community” – that has been in Leavenworth longer than the prisons – even before statehood. Part of the Sisters’ mission is to “advocate for justice and systemic change” for exploited and marginalized people, Hernandez later explained.View image in fullscreenThe nuns “understand the history of injustices that have gone on in that prison, and they’ve never been OK with that”, she said.Leavenworth’s landmarks hint at a progressive past that dates to at least the 1850s, when Kansas opposed slavery and fought for admission to the US as a free state. The effort’s most radical proposal was the “Leavenworth constitution” which asserted that “all men are by nature equally free and independent”. Leavenworth’s city hall has statues of Lady Liberty and Abraham Lincoln; a nearby park has a plaque for women’s suffragist Susan B Anthony, who spent time here with her newspaper publisher brother. The landscape is dotted with little reminders that people who don’t have power can always fight for it.Many locals remember what happened when CoreCivic previously ran the detention center, housing mostly pretrial detainees for the US marshals from 1992-2021. They recall guards who were permanently injured by prisoner attacks and understaffing that undermined security, according to a federal audit.Mike Trapp, a local writer and activist who reserved the room for the library teach-in, said he’s seen some softening recently among his neighbors who were Trump voters. Even those who support the mass deportations “are on our side in not trusting CoreCivic to do the right thing”, he said.Scandals plagued the facility during its final years of operation – beatings, stabbings, suicides and alleged sexual assaults, according to court records. Leavenworth police said they were blocked at the gate from investigating crimes inside. The facility finally closed in 2021 as the Biden administration shifted away from private prison contracts.The city changed its ordinance since CoreCivic initially opened a prison here, just six miles south of the federal government’s own massive medium-security penitentiary, which has been operating since 1903. The rules now require a new prison operator to seek a city permit. CoreCivic paid a fee and applied for a permit in February to reopen its facility, now called the Midwest Regional Reception Center. But the firm quickly reversed course as residents’ opposition mounted.CoreCivic argued in court filings that because it retained employees in Leavenworth, it never really closed – and didn’t need a permit to reopen the facility. City leaders responded by suing in federal court, and then state court, seeking to block CoreCivic from repopulating the facility. In filings, the city argued the company previously ran an “absolute hell hole”, and the infamous American prison town did not want this one.In an editorial in the Kansas Reflector, critics of reopening the prison fumed: “CoreCivic has repeatedly shown that it is incapable of running a humane facility. Now, the company flouts city approval to move forward with an ICE center based on false promises.”View image in fullscreenSome in Leavenworth opposed the new facility because they feared undocumented immigrants could be released locally, leading CoreCivic to repeatedly promise that any agreement with Ice would strictly prohibit that.In early June, a state district judge sided with the city and issued a temporary injunction, saying the company needed a permit.David Waters, a lawyer for the city, said the case is about following the permitting process and not about “immigration policy, writ large”.A week later, CoreCivic filed a motion asking the district court judge to reconsider, arguing that the city failed to prove reopening the facility would cause “irreparable” future harm or that the company needed a permit.Leaders at CoreCivic have dismissed critics, saying the company has had more than 1,600 applicants for 300 jobs with a starting salary of $28.25 an hour, plus benefits.“We maintain the position that our facility, which we’ve operated for almost 30 years, does not require a Special Use Permit to care for detainees in partnership with ICE,” said Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs, in an email.He touted the company’s promises to Leavenworth: a one-time impact fee of $1m, a $250,000 annual fee and an additional $150,000 annual fee to the police department. This is in addition to the over $1m in annual property taxes CoreCivic already pays, Gustin said.The Reception Center originally expected “residents” as of 1 June. The company has posted numerous photos of its warden handing out $10,000 checks to veteran’s causes and the Salvation Army.In legal filings, CoreCivic argued that preventing the opening of its 1,000-plus bed facility would cost it more than $4m a month. In a federal financial disclosure filed in May, the company stated its letter agreement for the Leavenworth facility with Ice authorized payment up to nearly $23m for a six-month period “while the parties work to negotiate and execute a long-term contract”.Gustin said most of the concerns about safety and security of the facility were “concentrated in an 18-month period” over 30 years of operations and attributed staffing shortages to the Covid-19 pandemic and a tight labor market. “As with any difficult situation, we sought to learn from it,” he said.When CoreCivic previously operated the Leavenworth detention center, Tina Shonk-Little was detained there for about 16 months for insurance fraud. She described for the crowd that night at the Leavenworth library how medical and dental care in the facility was scant.“If you had a toothache, they just pulled it,” she said. Her smile bears the scars.View image in fullscreenShe recoiled when Hammett cited public records showing CoreCivic’s CEO earned more than $7m last year. Corporate leaders at CoreCivic and GEO Group gushed on recent earnings calls about the “unprecedented opportunity” they’re facing with Trump in office. Ads and text messages show CoreCivic is offering new guards $2,500 signing bonuses.Across the river in rural Missouri, cash-strapped sheriff’s departments are signing up to hold Ice detainees in small jails for $110 per night, per head, and to transport them as far as Kansas City for $1.10 per mile. Emails obtained through public records requests show that about a week after Trump was elected, CoreCivic leadership began contacting Leavenworth city officials about reopening their facility there.“They don’t want to do better. They are in it for profit,” Shonk-Little said. “They could give two shits about the people. The more people they have, the better off they are because it’s more money in their pocket.”Shonk-Little expressed sympathy for the corrections officers who worked there. “God bless the corrections officers who did what they could with what they had,” she said.Toward the back of the room sat Bill Rogers, a brick wall of a man who spends nearly two hours a day in the gym. He was one of those guards. A few minutes after her speech, Rogers stood suddenly, looking like a frog was lodged in his throat, as his eyes welled with tears.He spoke directly to Shonk-Little: “What courage … to come here. And everything you said was right. It was true. I remember. And as a former officer, I apologize. That’s all I can say.”She responded: “I’m sorry you were treated the way you were treated also.”They hugged.At a coffee shop the next morning, Rogers explained he was a high school dropout and heavy equipment operator who thought $20 an hour, plus benefits, working for CoreCivic sounded like a good gig.“I just needed a job,” he recalled. He started working as a correctional officer in 2016 and initially loved it.“I bet you 85% of those inmates I met? I would have hung out with them on the street. They were just decent people who made a mistake. I really believe that,” he said.Not long after Rogers started, the voluntary overtime shifts became mandatory. A 2017 audit by the Department of Justice found that understaffing was hurting safety and security at the facility. In recent court filings, lawyers for Leavenworth accused CoreCivic of gross mismanagement of the previous facility, resulting in “rampant abuse, violence and violations of the constitutional rights of its detainees and staff”.They referenced one incident in November 2018, when CoreCivic didn’t report the death of an inmate to city police for six days.It’s that death that haunts Rogers’ dreams. Dillon Reed was only 29 when he ended up at the Leavenworth facility on a drug charge, but Rogers remembered he was a funny, sweet kid who reminded him of his adult son.View image in fullscreen“He made me laugh,” Rogers said.Reed had an addiction, and alcohol and drugs were rampant inside the prison, Rogers said. On Thanksgiving Day in 2018, Reed was found dead in his cell. Rogers was working in a different section of the facility, but he was called to remove Reed’s body from his cell. An autopsy later showed that Reed likely died of sudden cardiac death, with a mixture of alcohol and drugs in his system.Rogers still can’t talk about it without getting choked up. Calling an ambulance quickly could have saved Reed, he said.“When that door came open? I didn’t see an inmate. I saw a young man … and I saw my son,” he said. “I don’t care that he was an inmate … he was a human soul. He shouldn’t have died. We had a job to do, and it didn’t happen that day.”In 2020, Rogers was stabbed in the hand and had his head split open with a cafeteria tray by combative prisoners. Later that year, he was so fed up with the lack of security, he said, that when a prisoner came at him, he shoved the man against the wall – and was fired.Some of Rogers’ former detention officer friends will not talk to him anymore, because he’s been speaking out, he said. He said they tell him: “You didn’t do shit when you worked there, and now you’re running your mouth.”Marcia Levering, a former CoreCivic colleague of Rogers, is also speaking out about the attack by a prisoner that nearly killed her. She was working in February 2021, shortly before the facility closed, when a colleague opened the wrong security door. A prisoner who was angry at her beat her senselessly and stabbed her multiple times. She spent two months in the hospital and is now permanently disabled, struggling to pay her rent.“They’re not looking out for the safety of their inmates or staff,” Levering said of CoreCivic. “They’re looking out for their own self-interest, which is taking the taxpayers’ money to line the pockets of their higher-ups.”Lawyers for the city of Leavenworth filed a motion last week asking the state district judge to formalize the temporary injunction. The motion states that the “federal government might apply pressure on CoreCivic to defy or look for loopholes in this Court’s orders”, while noting that the company has “accelerated” activity at the detention center.Meanwhile, residents are planning a march against the detention center on 19 July. They plan to meet 10 days earlier at MoMos to make homemade protest signs.

    This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook More

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    Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

    Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More

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    Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone

    Donald Trump’s administration on Monday pushed forward in defending US rules easing access to the abortion drug mifepristone from a legal challenge that began during Democratic former president Joe Biden’s administration.The US Department of Justice in a brief filed in Texas federal court urged a judge to dismiss the lawsuit by three Republican-led states on procedural grounds.While the filing does not discuss the merits of the states’ case, it suggests the Trump administration is in no rush to drop the government’s defense of mifepristone, used in more than 60% of US abortions.Missouri, Kansas and Idaho claim the US Food and Drug Administration acted improperly when it eased restrictions on mifepristone, including by allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine and dispensed by mail.The justice department and the office of Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump said while campaigning last year that he did not plan to ban or restrict access to mifepristone. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, told Fox News in February that Trump has asked for a study on the safety of abortion pills and has not made a decision on whether to tighten restrictions on them.Last year, the US supreme court rejected a bid by anti-abortion groups and doctors to restrict access to the drug, finding that they lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA regulations.Those plaintiffs dropped their case after the high court ruling, but US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, allowed the states to intervene and continue to pursue the lawsuit.The US justice department moved to dismiss their claims days before Trump took office in January.In Monday’s filing, government lawyers repeated their arguments that Texas is not the proper venue for the lawsuit and that the states lack standing to sue because they are not being harmed by the challenged regulations.“Regardless of the merits of the States’ claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court,” they wrote.The three states are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021, including allowing for medication abortions at up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven, and for mail delivery of the drug without first seeing a clinician in person. The original plaintiffs initially had sought to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, but that aspect was rebuffed by a lower court.The Republican-led states have argued they have standing to sue because their Medicaid health insurance programs will likely have to pay to treat patients who have suffered complications from using mifepristone.They have also said they should be allowed to remain in Texas even without the original plaintiffs because it would be inefficient to send the case to another court after two years of litigation. More

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    Kansas Voters Will Decide Whether to Hold Open Elections for State Supreme Court

    A question on the ballot next year will ask voters to amend the Constitution to set open elections. Republicans said it would empower Kansans, while Democrats argued it would politicize the judiciary.The Kansas Supreme Court, made up mostly of jurists appointed by Democrats, has long served as a check on the Republican-dominated Legislature.The justices have established a statewide right to abortion. They have told Republican leaders that they were not spending enough on schools. And they have weathered repeated attempts to tip the court’s balance of power toward conservatives.But the high court, which is officially nonpartisan, could soon face major changes. Lawmakers decided on Wednesday to place a question on the primary ballot in August 2026 that would ask voters to amend the Kansas Constitution to set open elections for the court. If voters approve the change, justices would become free to campaign and hold leadership positions in political parties.The move, which follows efforts in other states to elect justices, would give Kansas Republicans a clearer path toward a conservative majority on the court and the possibility of revisiting issues like abortion. Conservative lawmakers said making the change would return power to voters.“It comes down to one thing: Do you trust the people of Kansas to select the seven people who run the third branch of our government and who have an enormous say over our government and how it’s run?” asked State Representative Bob Lewis, a Republican from western Kansas who supported placing the amendment on the ballot.Democrats criticized the effort to hold open elections, saying it would empower wealthy campaign donors and politicize the judiciary. They pointed to polarizing elections in places like North Carolina, where the results of a 2024 State Supreme Court election are still being disputed, and Wisconsin, where tens of millions of dollars have been spent ahead of a State Supreme Court election next month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Scenes From Eight States Battered by Weekend Storms

    A cross-country storm system tore through the South and the Midwest over the weekend, accompanied by tornadoes, dust storms and wildfires. Severe damage was reported in at least eight states.Number of reported deaths from storms and firesOfficials reported at least 40 deaths across seven states that have been attributed to severe weather in the South and Midwest. More

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    Tribes and Students Sue Trump Administration Over Firings at Native Schools

    A group of Native American tribes and students is suing the Trump administration to reverse its recent firing of federal workers at Native schools that they said has severely lowered their quality of education.The firings, part of the series of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency that have cut thousands of federal jobs since January, included nearly one quarter of the staff members at the only two federally run colleges for Native people in the country: Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque.Instructors, a basketball coach, and security and maintenance workers were among those who were fired or forced to resign in February. Although the total number of layoffs was not clear on Sunday, the reductions also included employees at the central and regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency. Some staff members, but not all, have been rehired, according to a statement from the Native American Rights Fund, which filed the suit on Friday in federal court in Washington. About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states.As a result of the cuts, dozens of courses at the two colleges lost instructors, according to the lawsuit. And because of the loss of support staff and maintenance workers, school dorms were quickly overrun with garbage, students reported undrinkable brown water, dining halls failed to adequately feed students, and widespread power outages hampered students’ ability to study.“Unfortunately, these firings were done without preparation and without regard to the health and safety of the students, and that is a continuation of a history of neglect and disrespect,” Jacqueline De León, a lawyer for the tribes and students, said. “We are here to fight to make sure that it doesn’t continue.”Lawyers with the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit against the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chiefs owner backs Harrison Butker’s political push for ‘traditional values’

    The owner of the Kansas City Chiefs said on Wednesday that he has no issue with kicker Harrison Butker forming a political action committee designed to encourage Christians to vote for what the Pac describes as “traditional values”.Butker announced his Upright Pac last weekend in a series of posts on social media.“One of the things I talk to the players every year about at training camp is using their platform to make a difference,” Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said. “We have players on both sides of the political spectrum, both sides of whatever controversial issue you want to bring up. I’m not at all concerned when our players use their platform to make a difference.”Butker is front and center on the website of the Upright Pac along with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, who earned the kicker’s endorsement in his re-election bid against Democrat Lucas Kunce.“We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government. But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great,” the Pac says on its website. “We are working to mobilize Christians across this country to make sure we protect these values at the ballot box.”Butker first made what he called a “very intentional” foray into politics in May, when he delivered a polarizing commencement address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. The three-time Super Bowl champion said, among other things, that most of the women receiving degrees were probably more excited about getting married and having children than working, and that some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America”.Butker also attacked Pride month and Joe Biden’s stance on abortion.The NFL distanced itself from Butker’s comments, issuing a statement afterward that said: “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”At training camp before the season, Butker said he was glad he had voiced his opinions. “I’ve just decided, ‘You know what? There’s things that I believe wholeheartedly that I think will make this world a better place,’ and I’m going to preach that,” Butker said. “If people don’t agree, they don’t agree, but I’m going to continue to say what I believe to be true and love everyone along the way.”The Hunt family has supported a group urging Missouri voters to reject a ballot measure that would overturn a near-total ban on abortion in the state through Unity Hunt, the company that oversees the assets of the Lamar Hunt family. The Chiefs have declined to comment on the $300,000 donation other than confirming to the Kansas City Star that the money was wired by Clark Hunt’s half-brother, Lamar Hunt Jr, through his account with Unity Hunt.Meanwhile, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said last month that he would not endorse Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election, even as the former president repeatedly referred to the player’s wife, Brittany, as a supporter of his campaign.“I don’t want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate,” Mahomes said. “My place is to inform people to get registered to vote. It’s to inform people to do their own research and then make the best decision for them and their family.”Those comments came less than a day after Taylor Swift, who is dating the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce and has become friends with the Mahomes family, endorsed Harris for the presidency. That led Trump to tell Fox News: “I actually like Mrs Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan. I like Brittany. I think Brittany is great.”Patrick Mahomes was asked on Wednesday about Trump’s references to his wife and said “at the end of the day, it’s about me and my family and how we treat other people.”“I think you see Brittany does a lot in the community. I do a lot in the community to help bring people up, and give people an opportunity to use their voice,” he said. “In political times, people are going to use stuff here and there, but I can’t let that affect how I go about my business every single day of my life, and trying to live it to the best of my ability.” More

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    Parts of Biden’s Student Loan Repayment Plan Blocked by Judges

    A part of the SAVE plan that would have cut monthly bills for millions of borrowers starting on July 1 was put on hold.Two federal judges in Kansas and Missouri temporarily blocked pieces of the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan on Monday in rulings that will have implications for millions of federal borrowers.Borrowers enrolled in the income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE, are expected to continue to make payments. But those with undergraduate debt will no longer see their payments cut in half starting on July 1, a huge disappointment for borrowers who may have been counting on that relief.The separate preliminary injunctions on Monday are tied to lawsuits filed this year by two groups of Republican-led states seeking to upend the SAVE program, a centerpiece of President Biden’s agenda to provide relief to student borrowers. Many of the program’s challengers are the same ones that filed suit against Mr. Biden’s $400 million debt-cancellation plan, which the Supreme Court struck down last June.“All of this is an absolute mess for borrowers, and it’s pretty shocking that state public officials asked the courts to prevent the Biden administration from offering more affordable loan payments to their residents at time when so many Americans are struggling with high prices,” said Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center. “It’s a pretty cynical ploy in an election year to stop the current president from being able to lower prices for working and middle-class Americans.”Eleven states led by Kansas filed a lawsuit challenging the SAVE program in late March in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The next month, Missouri and six other states sued in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Both suits argued that the administration had again exceeded its authority, and that the repayment plan was a backhanded attempt to wipe debts clean.The SAVE program, which has enrolled eight million borrowers since it opened in August, isn’t a new idea. It’s based on a roughly 30-year-old design that ties monthly payments to a borrower’s income and household size. But SAVE has more generous terms than previous plans and a heftier price tag. More than four million borrowers qualify for a $0 monthly payment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More