Rachel Kincaid

Dear Katrice and Geraldine, We are deeply concerned about the manner in which The Marshall Project has been treating our members and approaching the bargaining process. Recently, The Marshall Project leadership has betrayed our organization’s values and compromised our position in the industry and the journalism we pursue. It’s time for that to change. The guild has worked tirelessly and in good faith on proposals that would keep high-quality health care affordable for Marshallers. We have also been steadfast in asserting that all recognized members deserve due process and fair treatment required under the law. The organization, in turn, has increasingly taken anti-worker stances that have eroded trust and created a culture that makes it difficult to do the work that makes us proud. Since the organization has taken such a hardline stance, refusing to work with the guild on the items listed below, we will be filing unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board and stepping up our public efforts to make it clear that we demand fair treatment.

The following recent actions by the organization have taken an immense toll on the workers of The Marshall Project: 1. The organization has repeatedly denied steward representation to a member facing a Performance Improvement Plan and possible termination, as well as denying another member representation in their termination meeting last week. This denial is illegal, egregious, and completely out of line with standards across our industry and the labor movement going back decades. We are shocked that the organization would take such a hypocritical and prohibitive stance on this, given our mission. The union has filed an Unfair Labor Practice about this illegal violation of members’ Weingarten rights and demands that members be allowed steward representation in any meeting they feel is appropriate. 2. The organization has caused a retaliatory ripple effect with its actions against one employee that has touched an entire newsroom in Cleveland with negative effects that go against the stated purpose of collaboration with local media and our ability to make good on promises we made to readers. When the organization recognized members it had a duty to follow the law and not proceed with layoffs without bargaining. We have filed an Unfair Labor Practice for the illegal layoff of employees and management retaliation.

3. The organization made a unilateral change to our outside employment policy without bargaining, changing expectations to require managerial approval. We have always maintained a workplace where outside work is permitted and the organization’s sudden termination of Chris Vazquez without a steward, without an opportunity to stop the freelancing project, and without severance is unjust and defies our values. 4. The organization is employing a strategic erosion of status quo through small changes to past practice while we bargain our first contract, including erasure of our cost-of-living adjustment, a significant change to our health insurance, and modifying the evaluation process. The organization has inconsistently complied with requests for information, which does not reflect good faith in bargaining. The Marshall Project, in retaining union-busting law firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis, is willingly participating in the erosion of worker protections across our industry, a project that takes advantage of the current anti-worker political environment. When The Marshall Project voluntarily recognized our union last year, it touted a “longstanding commitment to a fair, equitable and inclusive workplace, with generous benefits.” We are demanding a return to these values.

Today, we sent a letter to @themarshallproject.org‬ leadership expressing concern about their denial of bargaining obligations. Management has repeatedly denied members Weingarten rights, engaged in an illegal layoff, and more — we need your help to demand that management bargain in good faith.

Really need journalists to push back on this bullshit. When they say this, just ask them point blank: "Are you saying that because one Latino man committed a murder, another Latino man deserves a life sentence? Do you think all Latino men interchangeable?"

Miriam Jordan By Miriam Jordan Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent. April 22, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful. The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela. That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world. But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on the list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.

NEW from @nytimes.com: A bone-chilling account. A Venezuelan man detained alongside the 238 sent to El Salvador on March 15 seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. His name isn't among the names of those sent to CECOT that day and no one spotted him among those men. He's just... gone.

The Austin-Area Teen Trump Disappeared to El Salvador Eighteen-year-old Daniel Terán was taken from his home and shipped to a notorious prison on the charge that he is a gang member. The government hasn't produced evidence supporting the claim, says his ...

Here’s a story about a kid-a legal immigrant to the US-who Trump deported to the worst prison in the world. The kid wasn’t in a gang & didn’t have tattoos. Your federal government in action: no due process, no common sense, no decency. www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic... @texasmonthly.bsky.social

BREAKING: More journalists have died in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 than in both World Wars and other major wars, combined.

Our new report outlines the costs of war to journalists – and the journalism we all rely on. [THREAD, 1/8] watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/p...

She told Michigan cops she was attacked. Now she faces deportation by the feds A woman told Van Buren Township police a co-worker attacked her. But federal immigration officials also learned about her; they plan to deport her.

Over 60% of "prostitution" charges in the US result from sex workers becoming victims of crimes. When non-violent actions are called "crimes", the victims of ACTUAL violence are often called "criminals". www.freep.com/story/news/l...

What The Corrections Officer Strike Means To Incarcerated People Like Me | Defector On Feb. 17, an illegal wildcat strike was initiated by corrections officers with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). One of their primary demands is to repe...

really glad to see this piece in Defector by Robert Pastore, who has spent a cumulative seven years in solitary confinement, explaining the impact the corrections officers' illegal strike has had on prisoners
defector.com/what-the-cor...

LGBTQ federal workers brace for a McCarthyist purge "They’re not asking people ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?'"

LGBTQ federal workers say they're terrified they're about to be fired for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or past efforts to support other queer and trans employees—in other words, a second Lavender Scare.

Honored to have their trust with this story: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trans and nonbinary folks, what questions do you have about travel and your documents right now? We are working on answers for a lot of scenarios

Long before Trump’s inauguration, user activity monitoring was already mandated for federal agencies and networks that handle classified information—the result of an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in the wake of a massive breach of classified diplomatic cables and information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. The capability is part of government-wide insider-threat programs that greatly expanded after Edward Snowden’s leak of classified surveillance documents in 2013 and again after an Army specialist murdered four colleagues and injured 16 others at Fort Hood in 2014. The US government’s current approach to digitally monitoring federal workers has largely been guided by a directive issued by the Committee on National Security Systems in 2014, which orders relevant agencies to tie user activity to “specific users.” The public portions of the document call for “every executive branch department and agency” handling classified information to have capabilities to take screenshots, capture keystrokes, and intercept chats and email on employee devices. They are also instructed to deploy “file shadowing,” meaning secretly producing facsimiles of every file a user edits or opens.

The insider threat programs at departments such as Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs, also have policies that protect unclassified government information, which enable them to monitor employees’ clicks and communications, according to notices in the Federal Register, an official source of rulemaking documents. Policies for the Department of the Interior, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporate, also allow collecting and assessing employees’ social media content. These internal agency programs, overseen by a national task force led by the attorney general and director of national intelligence, aim to identify behaviors that may indicate the heightened risk of not only leaks and workplace violence, but also the “loss” or "degradation" of a federal agency’s “resources or capabilities.” Over 60 percent of insider-threat incidents in the federal sector involve fraud, such as stealing money or taking someone's personal information, and are non-espionage related, according to analysis by Carnegie Mellon researchers. “Fraud,” “disgruntlement,” “ideological challenges,” “moral outrage,” or discussion of moral concerns deemed “unrelated to work duties” are some of the possible signs that a worker poses a threat, according to US government training literature.

NEW: We spoke with federal workers grappling with symptoms of paranoia around technology due to DOGE's incursion, including some fearful of their own home networks, and take a hard look at the range of tools the government currently uses to monitor its workforce:

www.wired.com/story/survei...

A moral stain on all of us

Does sex trafficking significantly increase during the Super Bowl?

No. Research has found there is neither a correlative nor causal relationship between the Super Bowl and sex trafficking. Agencies specifically working to address trafficking have found little or no increase during the Super Bowl.

The serious concerns over how the Order will detrimentally impact transgender youth cannot be overstated. One Washingtonian, as her parents describe her, was a bright and gentle soul who loved playing musical instruments, trying new things, and playing Magic the Gathering. She was excited to learn Japanese and the impact of gender-affirming care was immediately clear to her family. Her parents described that “her joy was clear with every new milestone in her transition. She was so happy to get to the next step, to get closer to presenting in a way that was true to herself.” But the day before the presidential election, she shared, “[t]omorrow I get to find out if I’m illegal.” After the election, she asked her parents if they could move to Canada because she was fearful of new restrictions on transgender youth and worried about losing access to gender-affirming care. In January 2025, she took her life. After the Order issued, her parents expressed that the outlook for transgender futures looks scary and shared fears of what ending gender-affirming care would have meant for their daughter’s access to therapy, puberty-delaying medication, hormones, and hope of surgery. Her parents have expressed fear for the many lives who depend on gender-affirming care and that what happened to their daughter does not happen to any other children.

In a new lawsuit filed against Trump by state AGs, a family with a trans kid shares she died by suicide last month citing fears Trump would deny her access to gender-affirming care. "Her parents have expressed fear...that what happened to their daughter does not happen to other children."

If you work with trans patients for a NYC health care system and have insight into recent changes in policy or practice, I want to talk to you.
Off-the-record unless and until we agree otherwise.
Email: nick@hellgatenyc.com.
Signal: NickPinto.11

thinking about how lots of the Wired people currently leaving the nyt et al in the dust used to work at Gawker/Gizmodo Media Group and could have been doing this reporting there as we speak if a series of soulless rich people hadn't deliberately and systematically destroyed the company

Massive protest at Children’s National in DC.

A former patient is speaking who they used in promotional to show how much they care about trans kids.

Now the hospital is one of a small few nationwide complying with trumps unlawful EO to end trans care.

Mainstream media paved the way for Trump's anti-trans policies | Xtra Magazine OPINION: Years of questionable coverage manufactured consent for Trump’s executive order targeting gender-affirming care

Great piece by @ziyajones.bsky.social

"Each piece has helped to build a top-of-mind fear and discomfort surrounding transness in a population that in all likelihood scarcely thought of trans people at all a mere decade ago." xtramagazine.com/power/politi...

Downloaded CDC Data And Where To Find It Journalists and scientists are downloading a bunch of public health data they suspect might be at risk of deletion. Instead of all of us privately reinventing the wheel over and over, what if we share...

If you're a journalist downloading CDC data today, please consider filling out this form so we have a centralized guide to who has what. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

How Journalists Can Investigate Deaths in Prisons and Jails When you get a tip about a death or multiple deaths in your local jail or prison, there are concrete steps you can take to start investigating.

I love when journalists share the nitty gritty of how we uncover information.

An employee working for an agency funded by federal grants working in HIV care just told me that their manager said the CDC website is expected to come down "in its entirey" and "to save what they might need." Targethiv.org, run by the Health Resources and Services Administration, is already down.

I have heard from internal sources that OPM and HHS personnel have started going through notices of NIH and other funding opportunities to scrub any language about DEI or gender.

New York mag is the last great magazine because of the incredible work and long hours its skilled employees put in week after week. There'd be nothing to look at or read or enjoy without them. They deserve a fair bargain! Join me in pledging your support:

Trump-Education-EO

BREAKING: Trump signs an executive order that attempts to restrict all schools that receive federal funds from protecting trans and nonbinary students or supporting diversity measures, while at the same time purporting to advance "patriotic education." www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

it’s bad and it’s gotten exponentially worse in the past 6 months. if you write anything involving deep research/old books/forgotten periodicals you’re probably noticing “wiki creep,” because it’s one of the few resources left standing. the internet as an archive is disappearing, has disappeared.

The Future Of West Coast Wildfire Is Whiplash | Defector Since Jan. 7, devastating fires in and around Los Angeles have burned more than 40,000 acres of land, an area slightly larger than Washington, D.C. They have razed or damaged more than 12,300 homes an...

grateful to Danielle Touma, a climate scientist at UT Austin, for contextualizing the dangerous cycle helped stoke the LA wildfires and will stoke the fires of the future
defector.com/the-future-o...

Of course, there are ways to staff hand crews without recruiting prison labor, but few would be as cheap in a state that has faced profound budget deficits in recent years. According to CDCR’s website, incarcerated fire crew members make between $5.80 and $10.24 per day, and earn an additional $1 per hour when responding to emergencies, up to $26.90 over a 24-hour shift. That reflects a pay raise enacted in April, which roughly doubled the salary ranges for all incarcerated laborers in the state. Legally, one of the reasons that the state can pay incarcerated firefighters around a dollar an hour for this dangerous and vital work is that under the U.S. and California constitutions, involuntary servitude is permitted as punishment for a crime.

www.themarshallproject.org/2025/01/11/l...

thanks @taniel.bsky.social :) and congrats @justadcohen.bsky.social! an honor and a pleasure to work with Andrew and the living archive of criminal justice journalism he's created with Opening Statement 💌

‘I refuse a cheap death’: Israel kills Palestinian journalist in Gaza Israel kills Mohammad Hijazi, taking the number of media workers killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 to 220.

Palestinian writer, poet and journalist Mohammad Hijazi has been killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, according to his family, taking the total number of journalists killed since the start of Israel's war to 220.

Pregnant Kentucky woman cited for street camping while in labor She told a police officer she was in labor. The Louisville Metro Police Department lieutenant cited her for unlawful camping as the ambulance arrived. She had a baby later that day.

NEW from @sylviaruthg.bsky.social: A pregnant homeless woman in Louisville was in labor and waiting for an ambulance when an LPMD lieutenant came upon her. He detained her and cited her for unlawful camping (Safer Kentucky Act) as the ambulance arrived. She had a baby later that day. There's video.

After a young woman was shot dead in Texas, a medical school harvested her body parts Aurimar Iturriago Villegas left Venezuela hoping to lift her family out of poverty. When she was murdered, her corpse became a commodity in the U.S. body trade.

This was a tough one to report.

After a young migrant was murdered in Dallas, her mother wanted her remains returned to Venezuela.

Instead, officials in Texas cut up her daughter’s body and assigned prices to the parts undamaged by the bullet that killed her. 1/ www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...