Attorneys and volunteers with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project used to go into Vermont's prisons and meet with every immigration detainee, using their phones and computers for language interpretation, according to Jill Martin Diaz, executive director of the organization.
But they say that access changed this fall after Jon Murad took over as interim commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections. Since then, attorneys with the organization said the department has made it harder to meet and work with their clients, citing language barriers and lack of meeting space.
Murad denies those claims and says he has merely enforced policies that predate his time as commissioner, cutting off practices that shouldn't have been allowed under his predecessor.
Federal immigration authorities use Vermont prisons to hold often more than a dozen immigration detainees at a time per a contract agreement with the federal government. Though detainees can be held in any Vermont prison, they're most commonly brought to two facilities: Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington and Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans Town.
As President Donald Trump has ramped up his mass deportation campaign, federal immigration authorities often swiftly shuffle people they detain around the country. And the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project has been the main organization routinely providing legal services to all immigration detainees in Vermont.
"I think it's really important to capitalize on this opportunity that Vermont can be where we disrupt this arrest-to-deportation pipeline that is happening across this country," said Hillary Rich, an attorney at the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The issue has raised the eyebrows of legislators focused on the state's prison system and prompted them to write the Corrections Department a memo directing its officials to develop a memorandum of understanding with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project to guarantee cooperation between the organization and the department.
Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.
The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.
Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur.
The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.
She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.
“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Galetti said.
CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively cut costs since succeeding founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, said in June that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.
The layoffs announced Wednesday are Amazon’s biggest since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, Amazon and other Big Tech and retail companies have cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line following the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s workforce doubled as millions stayed home and boosted online spending.
The job cuts have not arrived with a company on shaky financial ground.
In its most recent quarter, Amazon’s profits jumped nearly 40% to about $21 billion and revenue soared to more than $180 billion.
Late last year after layoffs, Jassy said job cuts weren’t driven by company finances or AI.
“It’s culture,” he said in October. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”
Hiring has stagnated in the U.S. and in December, the country added a meager 50,000 jobs, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November.
Labor data points to a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.
While economists have described the labor situation in the U.S as a “no hire-no fire” environment, some companies have said they are cutting back on jobs, even this week.
On Tuesday, UPS said it planned to cut up to 30,000 operational jobs through attrition and buyouts this year as the package delivery company reduces the number of shipments from what was its largest customer, Amazon.
That followed 34,000 job cuts in October at UPS and the closing of daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during the first nine months of last year.
Also on Tuesday, Pinterest said it plans to lay off under 15% of its workforce, as part of broader restructuring that arrives as the image-sharing platform pivots more of its money to artificial intelligence.
Shares of Amazon Inc., based in Seattle, rose slightly before the opening bell Wednesday.
Prominent Republicans and gun rights advocates helped elicit a White House turnabout this week after bristling over the administration’s characterization of Alex Pretti, the second person killed this month by a federal officer in Minneapolis, as responsible for his own death because he lawfully possessed a weapon.
The death produced no clear shifts in U.S. gun politics or policies, even as President Donald Trump shuffles the lieutenants in charge of his militarized immigration crackdown. But important voices in Trump’s coalition have called for a thorough investigation of Pretti’s death while also criticizing inconsistencies in some Republicans’ Second Amendment stances.
If the dynamic persists, it could give Republicans problems as Trump heads into a midterm election year with voters already growing skeptical of his overall immigration approach. The concern is acute enough that Trump’s top spokeswoman sought Monday to reassert his brand as a staunch gun rights supporter.
“The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens, absolutely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
Leavitt qualified that “when you are bearing arms and confronted by law enforcement, you are raising … the risk of force being used against you.”
That still marked a retreat from the administration’s previous messages about the shooting of Pretti. It came the same day the president dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, seemingly elevating him over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who had been in charge in Minneapolis.
Within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Bovino suggested Pretti “wanted to … massacre law enforcement,” and Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and acted “violently” toward officers.
“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort, went further on X, declaring Pretti “an assassin.”
Bystander videos contradicted each claim, instead showing Pretti holding a cellphone and helping a woman who had been pepper sprayed by a federal officer. Within seconds, Pretti was sprayed, too, and taken to the ground by multiple officers. No video disclosed thus far has shown him unholstering his concealed weapon -– which he had a Minnesota permit to carry. It appeared that one officer took Pretti’s gun and walked away with it just before shots began.
