A controversial Texas law has become a blueprint for other states. Immigrant communities are worried
CNN
Iowa is nowhere near the US-Mexico border, but a new immigration law there mirrors parts of a measure passed in Texas. Immigrant communities are worried.
Maria Acosta’s heart sinks every time she hears the question. “Señora, do I need to move?” Immigrants in Iowa keep asking her. And Acosta says she doesn’t know how to respond. “I feel powerless. I feel frustrated,” says Acosta, a community organizer for the Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice. “What can I tell people? I can’t tell them, ‘Oh, no, everything is going to be fine.’ I don’t know if everything is going to be fine. Right now, it’s not fine at all.” Last month, Iowa lawmakers swiftly passed a bill that would allow local police to arrest some undocumented immigrants and give state judges the power to order deportations. And Wednesday, the state’s governor signed it. The law isn’t scheduled to go into effect until July 1, but Acosta and other advocates say concern and confusion are already running high in immigrant communities. “It affects me when I see the fear on their faces. They don’t know what to do,” Acosta says, “even though they’ve been living here for 10 or 15 years, and this is their home.”
The CIA has sent the White House an unclassified email listing all new hires that have been with the agency for two years or less in an effort to comply with an executive order to downsize the federal workforce, according to three sources familiar with the matter – a deeply unorthodox move that could potentially expose the identities of those officers to foreign government hackers.