Republican Governor Overturns Voters and Repeals Paid Sick Leave

With the stroke of a pen, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed off on legislation repealing the paid sick leave provision of a ballot measure that roughly 58 percent of Missourian voters approved in November.

The now-struck provision, which went into effect in May but will cease at the end of August, required employers to give workers one hour of earned paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, and 56 hours (or just seven days) of paid sick time per year. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees were only required to give workers 40 hours per year.

In a statement touting how “conservative leadership” supports Missourian “families,” Kehoe called the provision, which would have helped an estimated 728,000 private sector employees in the state, “onerous.”

In November 2024, the paid sick leave mandate passed with 1.69 million votes—not far off, notes Elizabeth Crisp of The Hill, from the 1.75 million with which Kehoe took the governorship in November. Republican lawmakers sprang into action to walk back the will of their constituents after the ballot measure passed, and, within months, a bill to repeal it had passed the state House along partisan lines.

Senate Republicans passed the bill after using a rare procedural maneuver to quash a Democratic filibuster. The bill garnered the votes of all but one Republican lawmaker, Lincoln Hough, who thought his fellow Republicans should have let debate run its course.

“Our rules of that chamber are unique to foster compromise and push people to negotiate,” Hough told The Springfield Daily Citizen at the time, calling the vote a “degradation of the institution of the Missouri Senate.”

When the legislature sent the bill to Kehoe’s desk, Senate Minority Leader Dough Beck told St. Louis Public Radio: “What we saw today was the Republican supermajority, whether they did it because of corporate greed or their corporate overlords telling them what to do, they took away sick pay for millions of workers in the state of Missouri.”

Then they came for the children: even in self-designated sanctuary cities such as Manhattan, apparently no one is safe from the ire of federal immigration agents under the Trump administration.

Youman Wilder, a baseball coach for middle and high school students, was leading a group of 11 kids through batting cage practice near 72nd Street in Riverside Park last month when he caught ICE agents interrogating some of the minors.

“I go over quickly and the agents are asking the kids inappropriate things like where they are from, their country of origin, so I say, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ and I tell the officers that their questions are inappropriate, and that I’m going to tell my kids not to answer them,” Wilder told the West Side Rag.

Wilder said the officers identified themselves as ICE agents, were armed with guns and tasers, and had “ICE” printed across the front of their tactical vests.

The coach—who received his master’s degree in law—told the kids that they didn’t need to answer the agents’ questions, instructing them to instead line up on the opposite side of the batting cages. But ICE didn’t like that: Wilder said that’s when one of the agents raised their voice at him, accusing him of being a “YouTube lawyer.”

“I said no, I just know how the Constitution works,” Wilder told Eyewitness News.

But the agents continued to threaten him, per Wilder, talking about cuffing the coach and openly questioning what the kids would “have to lose by answering” if they were in the U.S. legally. “I told them that they still have their Fifth and Fourth Amendment rights, and that they don’t have to speak to you or help with any investigation,” Wilder told the Rag.

All the kids, according to Wilder, were born in the U.S. and are U.S. citizens, born to parents from Africa, South America, and Mexico.

“It’s all about civics. If you don’t know your rights, they will trample on them,” Wilder told the Rag. The coach also expressed his shock and dismay at the amount of people who watched the interaction but failed to intervene.

“There were people watching and the agents were telling them to move back, that they would be arrested for interfering, and not to take pictures,” Wilder told the Rag. “The worst thing is that the six or seven people who were watching, followed their orders!”

“I never in my life thought this was going to happen in the Upper West Side in New York City,” Wilder told Eyewitness News. “That whole thing, until it happens to you, you’re not aware? It happened to us.”

Wilder has since changed the location and practice times for his team, but some kids and their parents have been so rattled by the event that they haven’t returned to practice.

“I knew that they could arrest me, but I knew that they couldn’t keep me,” he said. “My whole thing is that I’m African American, and most of my kids are Latino and Black, so it was all about how do I get these kids home. I never raised my voice. I just talked about the law. And I was just focused on how can I get these kids to where they need to go, when they are in my care.”

Wilder was “the only thing that stood between those kids in Riverside Park and a Florida detention center buried deep in the Everglades,” Upper West Side Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal wrote in a newsletter earlier this month. Rosenthal told Eyewitness News that Wilder was right to intervene and had the legal authority to do so.

Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota: 3,000 arrests per day, per Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s demands.

President Trump on Friday morning threw barbs at Trump-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, against whom he’s railed over and over again in recent months due to the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates.

The central bank’s decision not to do so, however, seems to rest ultimately at the feet of Trump’s economic mismanagement, as Powell said earlier this month that the Fed would have lowered rates this year were it not for Trump’s tariffs.

But as TNR’s Timothy Noah observes, Trump interprets Powell’s judgment as evidence that he “wants him to fail, because Trump is incapable of not taking anything personally.” As a result, the Fed chair has of late been on the receiving end of innumerable schoolyard insults from the president: “numbskull,” “dumb guy,” “major loser,” “low IQ,” “Trump hater,” and so on.

“I think he’s doing a terrible job,” Trump told reporters on Friday, though he said he wouldn’t oust Powell. “I think we should be three points lower interest rate. He’s costing our country a lot of money. We should be number one, and we’re not, and that’s because of Jerome Powell.”

The president was quick to clarify that the United States is “number one in the world,” just not “in terms of interest,” before going on to credit himself for the country’s purported transformation from a “dead country” to “the hottest country” (a new favorite adjective of his).

“I’ll tell you a little simple—a little simple language,” Trump said. “One year ago, our country was a dead country. We were going nowhere except down. We were the laughingstock all over the world. And now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re number one everywhere, anywhere in the world. And that’s all they’re talking about, is our country.”

In reality, America’s image in the eyes of the world has, per the Pew Research Center, declined during Trump’s presidency. The U.S. is being seen as an increasingly unserious and unstable country on the international stage. And, as with Trump’s gripes with Powell, this undoubtedly owes in no small part to the president’s chaotic approach to trade policy and erratic leadership more broadly.

Immigration Czar Tom Homan just enthusiastically confirmed what we already knew: ICE is using indiscriminate racial profiling tactics to detain immigrants. 

“People need to understand, ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain ‘em and question ‘em,” Homan said when asked about a Los Angeles federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on his west coast immigration crackdown. “Get our typical facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions ... agents are trained what they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them is not probable cause, it’s reasonable suspicion. We’re trained on that. Every agent gets 4th amendment training over and over again.” 

What does the federal government think an immigrant looks like? Homan is essentially saying that ICE has the right to kidnap and question any Latino person they happen upon. It’s easy to see why so many law-abiding communities and families have been living in abject fear for months, scared to go to work or school or, in some cases, even leave their homes. 

Homan’s framing of probable cause and the 4th amendment is not new, nor is it unique to the Trump administration. Homan got his initial experience on this issue working for President Obama as ICE’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement in 2014, the same year the Obama Administration reaffirmed the use of racial profiling by federal immigration agents because they couldn’t do their jobs “without taking ethnicity into account.”  

While Homan’s current comments point to increased brutality in the near future, it’s important to remember how we got here if we want to move forward on immigration in a way that is actually humane, and not handled via a gestapo-style federal militia. 

A federal judge shredded Justice Department lawyers Friday over their shoddily constructed case to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully removed to El Salvador earlier this year.

During a hearing, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis once again proved that she doesn’t suffer fools as she torched the government’s lawyers for failing to produce an ICE detainer for Abrego Garcia. Xinis had made the request Monday and gave the government until Thursday to fulfill the order.

When the lawyers said they were still working on it, the judge didn’t buy it.

“You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it in my view,” Xinis said, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney. The presumption of regularity gives particular deference to the executive branch for certain facts and details.

Xinis had heard roughly four hours of testimony on Thursday from Thomas Giles, assistant director for ICE enforcement and removal operations, who said that the government hadn’t yet determined what third country it planned to deport Abrego Garcia. Giles said that the government wouldn’t even begin to consider where to send him until he was back in the custody of ICE. Xinis was outraged that Giles hadn’t provided basic answers.

The judge said it was “insulting to [her] intelligence” that Giles would testify without having consulted with the office that would handle the case, according to Lawfare’s Anna Bower. As the hearing continued, she became increasingly frustrated that the government still offered no answers on its plan to remove Abrego Garcia.

Giles had claimed that Abrego Garcia would “get a fear interview if he claims fear of return” or if he has a fear “of being returned to a third country.” But Xinis hit back at the government’s claim that Abrego Garcia might be treated like any other migrant detainee in ICE custody, noting that nothing about his case has been business as usual. “That’s not credible,” she said. “I’m just telling you, I’m not buying that.”

The government argued that Giles’s testimony had demonstrated what happened to detainees like Abrego Garcia. “Name me one alien like Mr. Abrego, who has experienced what happened to him,” Xinis fired back.

Xinis said that the government’s claim that the decision of where to send Abrego Garcia would be left to a desk officer “defies reality.”

The judge asked how the government’s claims square with a March 2025 memo and a July 9 email stating that if a third country made assurances to prevent torture or persecution, that “no further procedures” were necessary. While the government initially said that Abrego Garcia would still receive a fear interview, they eventually admitted the procedure outlined in the memo and email would likely apply to him.

The judge also slammed the government for attempting to deport Abrego Garcia after spending months claiming that he was a so-called “leader” of MS-13, while providing only paltry evidence. “What’s that going to do for any country that this man has to face a third party removal to?” she asked.

Abrego Garcia had previously received a protective order preventing his removal to El Salvador, for fear of violence—which the government ignored by removing him there earlier this year. The Maryland man was returned from El Salvador to Tennessee to face two flimsy charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. Despite a judge ordering Abrego Garcia’s release from pretrial detention, he still remains in custody after claiming that he feared he’d be deported by immigration authorities—who confirmed that was their plan. But the details of that plan are still unclear.