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For Immediate Release
March, 10 2009, 01:08pm EDT
Contact:
Ali Jost, 202-730-7159
Kawana Lloyd, 202-730-7087
Workers From Across Nation Lobby Congress to Get Economy Back on Track With Employee Free Choice Act
Rep. Miller, Sen. Harkin introduce bill to make it easier for workers to bargain with employers for better wages and healthcare
WASHINGTON
On Tuesday, Congressman George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill to make it easier for workers to bargain with their employees for better wages and healthcare. At the same time, hundreds of workers from across the country descended on Washington to lobby their own Members of Congress on the importance of the bill. The workers, who represented more than 30 states and a number of unions, related their personal stories of being fired or harassed when they attempted to form a union, in addition to how forming a union could improve their lives and the products and services they provide.
"Right now, millions of working families are struggling-losing their jobs, their health care, and their retirement benefits. They're working harder than ever before, yet they're not able to share in the prosperity they helped create," said Anna Burger, SEIU Secretary-Treasurer. "To really fix this economy, we must rebuild the middle class. The solution is simple: create good jobs that support a family, so they buy more products and put money back into our economy. That's what the Employee Free Choice Act will do."
Congress is expected to take up the legislation, which has the support of President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary Solis and majorities in both houses of Congress, sometime this session.
The Employee Free Choice Act seeks to accomplish three simple goals:
* It restores the option of "majority sign-up," in addition to elections, to ensure that workers, not employers decide how to form a union. That is, when a majority of workers sign cards saying they want to form a union, this legislation levels the playing field so they have a fair chance to do so;
* It creates meaningful penalties for employers who break the law to harass or fire workers;
* It ensures that workers have a fair chance at winning a contract guaranteeing their wages and benefits.
All day Tuesday, workers shared their stories of forming unions with their Members of Congress and participated in a hearing from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee on the importance of unions in building the middle class.
Testifying before Congress, SEIU 32BJ member Kelly Badillo related how his union helped him and his family get back on their feet in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 tragedy. "My story exemplifies that businesses and unions can work together for the benefit of hardworking Americans like me. My daughters are grown and have jobs of their own, but I can only hope they can enjoy a strong voice on the workplace like I have had," said Badillo.
Last week, the Center for Economic Policy Research, an independent research organization for economic and social issues, released a report showing that the number of workers who were illegally fired when they tried to form a union had risen sharply in the past decade. In 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, 30 percent of union election campaigns had an illegal firing.
With 2 million members in Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico, SEIU is the fastest-growing union in the Americas. Focused on uniting workers in healthcare, public services and property services, SEIU members are winning better wages, healthcare and more secure jobs for our communities, while uniting their strength with their counterparts around the world to help ensure that workers--not just corporations and CEOs--benefit from today's global economy.
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'Who Is Hiding Behind These Masks?' Raskin Demands Answers on ICE Hiring of Jan 6 Attackers
"The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration."
Jan 13, 2026
Congressman Jamie Raskin got right to the point in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as he sought an answer to a question several Democratic lawmakers have raised in recent months regarding the Trump administration's recruiting practices as it seeks to flood American communities with immigration officers.
"How many pardoned January 6th insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?" Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked the two officials.
The congressman wrote to Bondi and Noem as video evidence continues to mount of federal agents' violent tactics in communities across the US following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent's fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Good last week.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said Raskin, "seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists."
He pointed to "white nationalist 'dog whistles'" it's used in its recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of "extremist militias" like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters.
Potential ICE recruits have been bombarded by messages from DHS calling on them to help "defend the homeland" and images like one of a white Uncle Sam caricature standing at a crossroads with signs pointing one way—labeled "INVASION" and "CULTURAL DECLINE"—and another, labeled "HOMELAND" and "LAW AND ORDER." The image and caption appeared to be a reference to the white nationalist text Which Way, Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson.
The groups and militias apparently being targeted by the recruitment push coordinated with one another on January 6, 2021 as their members and leaders were among those who stormed the US Capitol in an effort to stop former President Joe Biden's electoral victory from being certified.
One of President Donald Trump's first actions after taking office last year was pardoning more than 1,500 people convicted of participating in the attempted insurrection, and dozens of them have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes including child sexual assault, possession of child pornography, and domestic violence.
Other Democratic lawmakers have previously raised alarm about the lax hiring requirements DHS has put in place as it seeks to grow its ranks of ICE agents, with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) noting in an October letter to Noem that in its push to hire more so-called "patriots," ICE has "changed the age requirements for new recruits."
"DHS announced that applicants now can apply at the age of 18 and there is no age cap. ICE also removed its Spanish-language requirement—shortening the training program by five weeks—and is pursuing additional ways to expedite training," wrote Durbin. "The loosening of hiring standards and training requirements is unacceptable and will likely result in increased officer misconduct—similar to or worse than what occurred during a small surge in hiring US Customs and Border Protection officers in the early 2000s."
On Monday, Raskin pointed out that ICE agents have been permitted to go to great lengths to hide their identities with masks as they've tackled people to the ground, "detained and battered multiple pregnant women," threatened people and confiscated their cellphones for filming them—a protected activity under the First Amendment—and rammed open the door of a home in Minneapolis as they apparently began "door-to-door" operations.
"Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?" wrote Raskin.
"Who is hiding behind these masks?" he continued. "How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration."
He demanded the release of records related to the solicitation or hiring of anyone charged or investigated for participating in the January 6 attack.
Raskin's letter was sent as independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on leaked documents showing that ICE and Border Patrol officials on the ground are struggling to cope with both staffing and legal compliance issues following Good's killing.
"While Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration preen about justifying last week’s shooting and trumpet their war on 'domestic terrorism,' DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments," wrote Klippenstein, detailing efforts within the agency to find around 300 volunteers to deploy in Minneapolis, "in part due to opposition within the ranks."
Following DHS' aggressive recruiting push that appears to designed to appeal to extremist militias, "there might be some immature knuckleheads who think they are out there trying to capture Nicolás Maduro, but most field officers see a clear need for deescalation," a high-ranking career official at DHS told Klippenstein. “There is genuine fear that indeed ICE’s heavy handedness and the rhetoric from Washington is more creating a condition where the officers’ lives are in danger rather than the other way around.”
Officials are reportedly pushing to rein in the agents whom the Trump administration has unleashed on communities including Minneapolis, where ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Good while she was sitting in her car after she had reportedly been given conflicting orders by officers.
While Trump has suggested Good was to blame for her killing because she was "disrespectful" to the officers and videos have surfaced of agents attacking and threatening people for filming and observing them, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino sent a "legal refresher" to agents in the field, reminding them that protesters who use profanity, insults, and rude gestures are not breaking any laws.
Noncompliance with law enforcement and recordings of ICE agents are protected activities, the document reminds officers.
Sarah Saldaña, a former director of ICE, also recently said that DHS' decision to frame its recruiting push as a "war effort" would inevitably result in a federal anti-immigration force that views itself as being at war with the communities it's sent to.
DHS is promoting a viewpoint among recruits that “the quicker we get out there and run over people, the better off this country will be,” Saldaña told the Washington Post days before Good was killed. “That mentality you’re fostering tends to inculcate in people a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85% of what you do.”
A DHS official who spoke to Klippenstein said that "the claim is that recruiting is up, but there is also dread that the gung-ho types that ICE and the Border Patrol are bringing in have a propensity towards confrontation and even violence.”
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Pentagon Partners With Musk's AI Chatbot Despite Child Porn Scandal and Owner's Embrace of White Nationalism
"If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk," said a tech expert at Public Citizen.
Jan 13, 2026
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform's artificial intelligence chatbot "Grok" has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of nonconsenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.
But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk's chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new "AI acceleration strategy."
During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”
As the Associated Press noted, it's a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses "such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons."
While it's unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models "that won't allow you to fight wars" and will seek to act "without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications," before adding that the Pentagon's AI will not be "woke” or “equitable.”
He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.
Hegseth's embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration's dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president's 2024 election campaign.
But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).
It's perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom's media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation's Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.
The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.
One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.
[image or embed]
— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 12:37 PM
It's only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an "anti-woke" and "truth-seeking" alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.
Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk's factually dubious pet theory of "white genocide" in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was "instructed" to talk about.
Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.
The billionaire's steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump's second inauguration.
But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must "reclaim our nations" or "be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided" and that "if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered," necessitating "white solidarity."
While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk's AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).
In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out "ASAP," the General Services Administration announced a "OneGov" agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.
That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who'd also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was "gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information." She added that Grok's propensity toward "inaccurate outputs and misinformation" could "harm DOD's strategic decisionmaking."
Following this week's announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, "allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns."
"Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace," he added. "If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”
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Press Freedom Groups to Congress: Drop Subpoena of Journalist Over Reporting on Venezuela Attack
"This is a dangerous assault on press freedom, as well as the US people’s right to know."
Jan 13, 2026
A coalition of press freedom and civil liberties groups on Tuesday implored US lawmakers to immediately rescind their subpoena of investigative journalist Seth Harp, who named the commander of the elite Army Delta Force unit that carried out the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this month.
In a letter to House leaders, Defending Rights & Dissent, the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, and more than a dozen other organizations warned that "by issuing this subpoena, Congress is undermining one of the most cherished American freedoms."
"The subpoena has few parallels or precedents in recent history and poses a grave danger to the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom," the letter reads. "There is zero question that Harp’s actions were fully and squarely within the protections of the First Amendment, as well as outside the scope of any federal criminal statutes."
The effort to subpoena Harp was led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who accused the journalist of the "doxxing a US Delta Force operator" by posting to X a then-publicly available bio of Col. Chris Countouriotis. Harp identified Countouriotis as "the current commander of Delta Force, whose men just invaded a sovereign country, killed a bunch of innocent people, and kidnapped the rightful president."
The House Oversight Committee approved the subpoena—with the support of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the panel's top Democrat—in a voice vote last week.
X, a platform owned by self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk, locked Harp's account and required him to delete the post on Countouriotis before he could regain access. Luna also referred Harp to the US Justice Department, urging it to "pursue criminal charges" against him.
Harp, an Iraq War veteran who authored a book exposing crimes committed by US Special Forces units, dismissed Luna's "doxxing" accusations and said the identities of military officers who "participated in this illegal and provocative act of war" against Venezuela are "the legitimate subject of journalistic scrutiny."
"I'm not the only one they're going after with these bogus 'doxxing' allegations," Harp wrote on X, "but they would have to radically restructure the fundamental architecture of US law to criminalize reporting the names of government officials involved in breaking news stories."
In their letter to House leaders on Tuesday, the press freedom coalition stressed that while "journalists have a right under the First Amendment to publish even classified information... none of the information published by Harp was classified."
Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, said in a statement that Luna attack on Harp "is clearly designed to chill and intimidate a journalist doing some of the most significant investigative reporting on US Special Forces."
"Her own statement makes clear that far from having a valid legislative purpose, she seeks to hold a journalist ‘accountable’ for what is essentially reporting she dislikes," said Gibbons. "This is a dangerous assault on press freedom, as well as the US people’s right to know. It is shameful it passed the committee."
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