REGAN HUIZENGA: Last week, The Daily reported on an Evanston resident held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, allegations of discriminatory behavior in Northwestern’s Graduate Program in Genetic Counseling and Mayor Daniel Biss’ support of unionized Starbucks workers during a recent news conference.
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From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Regan Huizenga.
RUBY DOWLING: And I’m Ruby Dowling. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of the top headlines from the past week.
REGAN HUIZENGA: El Diario Editor Marisa Guerra Echeverria reported on an Evanston resident being taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last week.
Marisa, thank you for being here.
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: Of course, thanks for having me.
REGAN HUIZENGA: You reported that an Evanston resident was detained by ICE. Can you explain what happened?
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: Yes, so Evanston resident, 26-year-old (Evanston/Skokie School District) 65 father Jesús Eugenio Castro was detained at a routine immigration check-in at the ICE Chicago Field Office. I believe this was, I believe this was Monday, May 18, which coincidentally happened to be his birthday, according to his wife, Aline Hernandez, who I spoke with.
And essentially, the entire family had gone to this routine check-in. It was the first regarding their application for asylum when they first entered the country in 2022, and they didn’t really expect anything out of it — anything eventful out of it.
And so the whole family was there, and took a bit of back and forth, but officers told Aline that her husband would be in detention and that, allegedly, she could either choose between letting him be detained and sent off to Mexico and for her to undergo a sort of supervisory process, or for the whole family to be detained and deported in one go. And that was, as you can understand, a very, very, very tough decision and tough situation for the family to be in.
At the time, they didn’t have a lawyer, an immigration lawyer on hand who could help them. And Jesús remained detained and the family was able to leave that day. And so it took a few days, but they tracked Jesús’ detainment and where he is now, and they’re fighting to get him back.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Where is he now, and what will come next?
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: He was detained in the Chicago Field Office, and that same day he was sent over to a detention center in Indiana. And then from there, he was sent over to a detention facility in Christian County, Kentucky, where he still is.
The family is in contact with him and is able to call him, but understandably, he’s not doing very well, and neither are they. And so his next court hearing for his immigration case will be Monday, June 1.
REGAN HUIZENGA: You mentioned that you talked with his wife for your story. I was wondering what she had to say about her husband and their family, and how this has affected them.
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: Yeah, I talked to Aline last week and she is, similar to Jesús, a young mother. She’s 26 years old as well. Both of them are from the Mexican state of Guerrero. I’m also Mexican, so I kind of knew of the area that they were from. They both have young children, a daughter that most recently had to graduate preschool without her father in attendance, and also a young son.
And so she had kind of explained to me a bit about who her husband is and kind of how much of a family man he is. She said that he was muy “buena gente,” as in a really kind person, is great with children, and he’d often take his kids over the weekends either to go for vanilla ice cream — their favorite — or go take them out to parks.
And she said that their history in Mexico, he’d always been there, really reliable guy and had always been there for her family when times were tough and has been very attentive to detail as a partner and as a parent.
So, understandably, the family is really struggling right now. I believe Aline will also undergo some immigration proceedings in November, as reported by the Evanston RoundTable.
REGAN HUIZENGA: What has the response from community members been like so far?
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: Yeah, of course. It’s been a lot of community members gathered around this family to raise funds and to offer support, especially given that Aline is a young mother and does not currently work, since her husband was the primary breadwinner.
So I know Evanston Latinos and Sanctuary Evanston had to put up the original, not GoFundMe, but fundraising, like, and they’ve managed to raise thousands of dollars to find legal immigration, legal services but also just general like support and supplies for the family.
I also know that several community members, especially community Latino leaders like Jacqueline Mendoza and Stephanie Mendoza, have also been helping the family in terms of trying to navigate this difficult time. I’d also talked to them during reporting, and what I found kind of really resonant was that they said that a lot of the times, even though there is kind of an obligation to the City of Evanston, there’s also an obligation to the Latino community and kind of taking care of each other. And that really stuck with me, being a Mexican myself.
REGAN HUIZENGA: And have city officials said anything about this?
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: So city officials were actually among the first to hear about what had happened. So Alderman Matt Rodgers (8th) had heard from a member of the community that a resident was detained, and he forwarded that information along to community advocates to better help the family. And so there has been that.
This is something that public officials, like Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, have said have existed long before (Operation) Midway Blitz. I got to talk to him for the story, and he kind of mentioned that Midway Blitz was, quote, “a truly brutal and terrifying massive escalation.”
REGAN HUIZENGA: Thank you, Marisa.
MARISA GUERRA ECHEVERRIA: Thank you.
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RUBY DOWLING: Next, I sat down with Print Managing Editor Isaiah Steinberg to talk about the recently uncovered allegations of discriminatory behavior within NU’s genetic counseling program.
Isaiah, thanks for being here today.
ISAIAH STEINBERG: Thank you for having me.
RUBY DOWLING: To start off, this is a super comprehensive piece, but for listeners who might not have read the entire article yet, what’s the central finding?
ISAIAH STEINBERG: Sure. I think the central finding is probably that there were a bunch of systemic issues that sources alleged within the genetic counseling program. It’s a graduate program in Feinberg (School of Medicine) at Northwestern, and so I initially found the story from poring through lawsuits that had NU as a party, and I found one by a former faculty member named Annie Bao.
And she was suing the University for a myriad of things, but I think chief among them that you’d find if you read the lawsuit complaint, was racial discrimination was really the most central allegation, I should say, in the lawsuit.
And so there were just a lot of things in there accusing program leadership of various discriminatory acts and offensive comments. And so one of the things that she mentioned in the lawsuit complaint, and her attorneys mentioned in there, was that the issues that she raised extended to the student experience as well, and not just to her and not just to faculty.
And so my kind of angle based off that was I wanted to talk with students to see if the problems, if they experienced the same problems that she did around the same time, and then if students today experience those same problems.
And so basically what I found was that a lot of the students who were students in the program at the same time as Annie Bao, who was a faculty member, they also experienced a lot of these issues, whether that be microaggressions or instances of bias or, you know, unequal treatment from rotation supervisors. These are off-site clinical rotations, operating under a little bit less supervision from NU than like a classroom setting, and so, in that instance, students faced discrimination from certain supervisors and also from some of the program leadership as well. They overheard a lot of the same things, and yeah, I think that’s kind of the gist of it, obviously, these are all allegations.
RUBY DOWLING: You begin the story by talking about the dissolution of a BIPOC affinity group within the program, under the claim that it was discriminatory against white students. Under NU’s policy, groups like these have to include all students, both in policy and in practice. In your conversations with sources, did you find that the group was meeting these standards?
ISAIAH STEINBERG: Yeah, so one of the things I will say that definitely was the focal point of the story because that’s something that almost every former student who I spoke with brought up the same thing, that the story of disbanding of this BIPOC affinity group by program leadership for allegedly discriminating against white students was really the focal point or really the keystone of all of these allegations for them, sort of the biggest example.
It’s not entirely clear whether the BIPOC affinity group would have accepted a non-BIPOC, you know, like a white student who tried to join it, purely because it wasn’t around for very many months by the time it was disbanded. And the sources that I spoke with said that up to the point where the group was disbanded, that no white students to their knowledge had actually tried to join it, and so that’s kind of untested.
To my knowledge, the group did have some form of official documentation, perhaps a charter or a constitution or something like that, I’m not sure. But because a lot of my sources were former students and all of those documents that they had were on their Northwestern emails, which they don’t have access to anymore, that made it really difficult to confirm a lot of their claims around the group, which is why a lot of the story is really focused on just where their experiences kind of intersect and where they can corroborate each other.
RUBY DOWLING: You also wrote that current students had more positive associations with the program or experiences with the program than former students. Did you find any evidence that the program has changed since the lawsuit?
ISAIAH STEINBERG: Yeah, to some extent. I think, you know, the evidence, like I said, it was really a source, a story that was centered on the sources and understanding the source’s experience, and it was very emotional for a lot of them.
However, in terms of, you know, the paper trail, it’s hard to say. There’s not a lot there outside of the lawsuit, just because all of those emails have been deactivated. And with a lot of the, you know, I wasn’t able to speak with any current faculty members. Of course, I reached out to, you know, dozens more former students, and I spoke with, and I reached out to a ton of current and former faculty members and, you know, I kind of struck out on a lot of the sourcing there, understandably.
But so I think in terms of what’s changed since then, the current students and the recently graduated students who I spoke with, who were in the program after Annie Bao was fired, said that the program does kind of center D&I, whether that be cultural competency or just understanding, you know, social disparities that can lead to different health outcomes, access to healthcare. Things like that have really been priorities, and I haven’t heard as much from those sources about specific instances of discrimination, microaggressions, alleged bias.
Obviously, you know, again, stressing that these are all allegations, but there were certain things in Northwestern’s response to Annie Bao’s complaint where it did specifically acknowledge that these things happened. For example, there was an Office of Equity (now the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX Compliance) investigation that found that there was a specific faculty member whose actions violated some of the University’s policies. The University did acknowledge this in its response and agreed that that did happen. So, the paper trail, I would say, for the most part, stops there.
And yeah, since then, it sounds like they still want to see accountability. They’re still hoping that the program leadership will actually talk to them honestly about the issues in the lawsuit and what allowed that to happen, what caused it and why some people are still there. But overall, their experiences don’t exactly match up with those of the former students who I spoke with who really had a lot of concerns about their time in the program.
RUBY DOWLING: All right, Isaiah, thanks for coming on The Weekly.
ISAIAH STEINBERG: Thank you.
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REGAN HUIZENGA: I’m with Assistant City Editor Max Turetzky, who reported on a news conference on Tuesday where Mayor Daniel Biss joined unionized Starbucks workers.
Max, thank you for being here.
MAX TURETZKY: Thank you for having me.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Can you talk about some of the context leading up to that event?
MAX TURETZKY: Yeah, so there are several unionized Starbucks, in Evanston, across America, but there are several in Evanston, and since November there have been strikes at many Starbucks locations across America as Starbucks Workers United is trying to come to a finalized union contract with Starbucks. And they’ve alleged that Starbucks hasn’t engaged in good faith negotiations and is, you know, violating certain labor practices.
So this specific event was a protest against Starbucks for allegedly violating Evanston’s Fair Workweek Ordinance. They were saying that Starbucks had scheduled them with less than 14 days notice, which is one of the things that the Fair Workweek Ordinance requires. And initially, this was supposed to be a protest against the city, but Mayor Biss decided to join them a few days beforehand, so it ended up becoming more so a press conference where Biss joined the unionized baristas to talk about the behavior they were alleging from Starbucks.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Can you describe what the news conference was like?
MAX TURETZKY: There were several Starbucks baristas, a couple other labor organizers, a couple of people who came just to show their support, and Mayor Biss was there as well. So was Alderman Juan Geracaris. They joined the baristas and the other labor activists who were supporting Starbucks Workers United.
And so Biss said that the city had received reports of, or credible reports of truly disturbing behavior from Starbucks, including alleged violations of the Fair Workweek Ordinance and, you know, other allegations that we’re not fully clear about, I guess, as of now. The city looks like they’re investigating, based on what we’ve heard. Yeah, that was the tenor of the news conference, basically.
REGAN HUIZENGA: I know you talked to some baristas for your story. What did they have to say?
MAX TURETZKY: Yeah, so the baristas who are members of the union, they have been very involved trying to force Starbucks to come to the table to make an agreement with them. They have alleged that management at Starbucks locations in Evanston has not been negotiating fairly with them, has engaged in unfair retaliation against Starbucks baristas for trying to unionize.
Immediately after the press conference, several of the unionized baristas and other labor organizers went to go canvas other non-unionized Starbucks in Evanston to try to convince their baristas to unionize as well. So there’s definitely a union drive going on. They want to unionize as many Starbucks as possible in Chicago and in Evanston.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Has there been any response from the Starbucks company?
MAX TURETZKY: The city said they’re looking into it, but we don’t have too many concrete details yet.
As for the response from Starbucks, a spokesperson gave us a statement: “Starbucks has continued to engage in good faith,” and has put forward comprehensive proposals that build on their competitive pay and industry-leading benefits. It goes on like that, but Starbucks didn’t respond to any of the specific allegations put forth by Mayor Biss, just mainly Biss saying that they’re continuing to negotiate with the union in good faith.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Thank you, Max.
MAX TURETZKY: No problem. Thank you for having me.
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REGAN HUIZENGA: Here are the other top headlines from the week:
City Council delays vote to decide acting mayor appointment rules.
REGAN HUIZENGA: Sueños Music Festival celebrates Latino excellence through stellar performances, community building.
RUBY DOWLING: Northwestern Lacrosse clinches 9th national title with comeback win over North Carolina.
REGAN HUIZENGA: And ‘They’ve just all become buds’: Northwestern students collaborate with older adults on a production of ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Regan Huizenga.
RUBY DOWLING: And I’m Ruby Dowling
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported by Ruby Dowling and Regan Huizenga, and produced by Ruby Dowling.
The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor in chief is Anavi Prakash.
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Email: [email protected]
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Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— Evanston resident in ICE custody
— ‘Brushed under the rug’: Alumni allege discrimination in Northwestern genetic counseling program
— Biss backs baristas in Starbucks labor dispute, alleges ‘truly abusive behavior’
