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The human cost of immigration enforcement came into sharp focus this week with the death of Pierre Damas Bel, a twenty-year-old Haitian student who took his own life last month after being required to wear an ankle monitor. Bel had lost his legal status in July when the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians. His family buried him over the weekend.
On a different front, a Chicago woman who is an American-born citizen is suing the federal government after being shot five times by an immigration officer. The lawsuit puts renewed pressure on the administration over the conduct of enforcement operations and raises serious questions about accountability when citizens are caught in the crossfire.
Shifting to the startup world, a company called Melius, built by former engineers from the fintech firm Ramp, has raised twenty million dollars after scrapping their original product entirely. The pivot appears to be working — the company crossed one million dollars in annualized revenue within just two months of relaunching. It is a rare story of a clean reset that actually stuck.
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