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Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Paying Illegals $575 To Become 'Organizers'... And US-Born Residents Are Excluded
Boston taxpayers are funding a program that teaches immigrants how to organize, lobby city officials and advocate for political change, then hands participants $575 for completing it. Illegal immigrants are eligible, while U.S.-born Boston residents are not.
Boston Mayor Michelle WuThe Immigrants Lead Boston program, operated by Mayor Michelle Wu's Office for Immigrant Advancement, is a 10-week course for what the city calls emerging immigrant leaders.
Candidates must be Boston residents, at least 18 years old and immigrants. Separately, the city states that interested applicants are encouraged to apply "regardless of their immigration status."
So an illegal immigrant living in Boston can apply for the taxpayer-funded program and its $575 scholarship, while a U.S.-born resident cannot qualify under the city's stated requirement that candidates be immigrants.
According to Boston's own description, participants learn:
- Civic engagement and community organizing
- Public narrative and storytelling
- How to build leadership teams to produce community change
- How to navigate city government and engage city officials
- Immigration issues, racism and equity
Participants also conduct civic activities outside class and are expected to use the skills and relationships developed through the program to advocate for their communities.
"The scholarship rewards participants for their time and commitment to learn, lead, and advocate for their communities," the city says.
Way More Than $575 EachThe $575 is just what Wu is paying the aspiring organizers - while Boston's FY2026 budget documents allocate $100,000 to Immigrants Lead Boston, with the city saying the money will fund training for up to 40 emerging leaders in immigrant communities.
If all 40 positions were filled and every participant received $575, the scholarships themselves would total $23,000. The budget presentation does not itemize where the remaining $77,000 goes.
The program predates Wu. It began under former Mayor Marty Walsh in the fall of 2020, with an inaugural class of 18 participants. Wu's administration has continued and expanded it. The city's own alumni pages provide a fairly good picture of what some graduates have done with the training.
Members of the 2021-22 class advocated for driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Participant Griselda Polanco told the city: "I want to see an opportunity to give driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants."
Another participant, Marie Jacques Toussaint, said she wanted "access to a Driver's License for everyone, including the immigrant community."
Participants also drafted testimony on public-policy issues including housing, mental-health services and immigration. Massachusetts ultimately enacted the Work and Family Mobility Act, allowing residents who cannot provide proof of lawful presence to obtain standard driver's licenses if they meet the other requirements.
Wu's administration later created an advanced alumni program called Immigrants Lead Boston Lab: From Ideas to Action.
That curriculum was developed with 're:power,' which Boston itself describes as a national training organization of organizers, strategists and technologists dedicated to building social-justice movements. For nine weeks, graduates received additional instruction in public speaking, meeting facilitation, conflict management and community organizing.
Their goals are clear. From Immigrants Lead Boston Lab's own website:
"I want to participate more with City Life and the organizations that are fighting for rent control," said Adelaida Carbajal Rosales.
Viera Andrea Ilse said she was embarking on a mission to help immigrants obtain driver's licenses "regardless of immigration status."
Cindy Marchando said the program had taught her about "the inner workings of social justice movements" and coalition building, which she intended to apply to her advocacy work.
Another participant described the skills involved as "campaign and community organizing."
The current program is being run in partnership with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, or MIRA, which Boston describes as New England's largest coalition promoting immigrant and refugee rights and integration.
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Congress Ordered An Annual Accounting Of Terrorism; The Counting Has Stopped...
Authored by David E. Firester via RealClearDefense,
On May 1, 2026, the State Department released the 2024 edition of the Country Reports on Terrorism - a full year past the deadline in effect when the report came due, and months past even the more forgiving date Congress has since written into law.
No Annex of Statistical Information, the report's statistical backbone in years past, has been published with it.
And the report's own pages cite terrorism-incident rankings from the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center, or GTTAC - the same data program whose funding the department allowed to lapse in March.
The report is not optional. Federal law - 22 U.S.C. § 2656f, on the books since 1987 - directs the secretary of state to transmit to Congress each year "a full and complete report" on terrorism worldwide, including, "to the extent practicable, complete statistical information" on those killed, injured, or kidnapped "by each terrorist group during the preceding calendar year."
For two decades, professionals met that statistical requirement: the National Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2011, the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database from 2012 to 2017, and GTTAC's Record of Incident Database - GRID - from 2018 on. GRID was purpose-built for the statutory task. It applied the government's own definition of terrorism, named its sources, published its codebook, and put its methodology through peer review this year in the journal Democracy and Security.
In March, the funding stopped. The team behind GRID kept collecting for a time on its own; the public record now ends in mid-May. Ambassador Adam Blackwell, a GTTAC principal, told me that appeals to senior officials at the State Department, in Congress, and at the White House all failed, and that he finds the timing difficult to credit: the United States is engaged in active campaigns against Hamas, Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, and has newly designated cartels and gangs from across the hemisphere - Venezuelan, Salvadoran, Mexican, and Haitian - as foreign terrorist organizations. This is the moment Washington chose to stop counting.
Note the statutory asymmetry. The report is mandated unconditionally; only the statistics carry the qualifier "to the extent practicable." Defund the sole mechanism that made the statistics practicable, and the qualifier becomes an exit. The 2024 report's own compliance chapter makes the gap explicit: it states that the statistical requirement "is satisfied through the inclusion of a statistical annex to the report" - an annex that has not been published. The 2025 edition will be worse still, because the incidents of 2025 are not being systematically collected by anyone charged with the task.
The reflex answer - use the alternative datasets - does not survive contact with the data. I spent my doctorate inside those datasets, and their custodians have been admirably candid about the limits. By its own founding director's account, the Global Terrorism Database's source-validity rule excluded 28 percent of otherwise-eligible cases worldwide in an early-2014 sample - and 76 percent in Syria, precisely where the fighting was.
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, the other presumed substitute, measures political violence broadly and does some things well; it was never designed to be the statutory instrument. My dissertation documented what that costs. ACLED codes a suicide bombing only as a stand-alone event, never as part of a battle. Re-coding its Iraq narratives for 2016-2018 by hand, I found 860 suicide bombings where ACLED had coded 344 - and my recount landed within 1 percent of the Global Terrorism Database's independent tally, so the missing events were real. The same re-coding captured 48 percent more incidents than ACLED had coded in Afghanistan, and 111 percent more in Nigeria. ACLED's data are not without merit, as I wrote then. But extracting reliable answers from them requires heavy engineering that most consumers - congressional staff included - will never perform.
Methodology is not a technicality. Across 2018-2020, the years both instruments covered, GRID recorded 30 percent more incidents than the Global Terrorism Database and nearly twice the fatalities - and the two disagreed about whether global terrorism was rising or falling. The choice of instrument decides the trend line the government sees. Choose none, and there is no trend line at all.
There is precedent for the way back. When the Global Terrorism Database lost its State Department funding in 2018, allied governments - first Germany's foreign office, then Britain's - stepped in to keep collection alive, because the capability was too valuable to lose. GRID's case is stronger: the mandate is still on the books; the archive - public once again, and current through mid-May - and the trained pipeline still exist; and the gap to close is measured in weeks, not years. The cost of restarting collection is a rounding error against what the government spends to fight the groups it is no longer counting. The combatant commands consume this data. So do the insurers and reinsurers who price political-violence risk. So do the scholars and students who will train the next generation of analysts.
The 2024 report proves the mandate outlived the capability. The question Congress should be asking - and that any serious funder, public or private, should be answering - is who restores it. The threats were never in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether we intend to see them.
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87 Foreign Cruise Ship Employees Removed For Possession Of Child Abuse Material
Federal authorities have now pulled 87 foreign crew members off cruise ships under Operation Tidal Wave, a Customs and Border Protection initiative aimed at child sexual abuse material aboard the vessels.
Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations members prepare for a patrol in San Diego, on Sept. 23, 2026. John Fredricks /The Epoch TimesSix Philippine nationals on a cruise ship at the Port of Boston admitted to possessing child sexual abuse material, according to a Sept. 25 CBP statement. Julio Caravia, CBP's acting director of field operations, said authorities won't tolerate the exploitation of children and that the agency will keep identifying and arresting those involved.
The multiagency operation, led by CBP, targets crew members tied to the possession, production, procurement, distribution, or use of child sexual abuse and exploitation material.
As the Epoch Times notes further, the current phase of the operation has been in effect since mid-August, with 41 crew members removed in two previous phases.
In phase 1 of Operation Tidal Wave, which took place in San Diego in April, administrative enforcement actions were taken against 27 crew members from six vessels. These people were processed for removal and sent back to their home nations.
In phase 2, which took place in San Juan during June-July, enforcement actions were taken against 14 crew members from three vessels.
In the case of the Philippine nationals, they were processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act. This provision makes foreign nationals who admit to committing acts involving moral turpitude inadmissible into the United States.
CBP clarified that under federal law, people involved with child sexual exploitation material can face severe penalties, including removal from the country, 10-year inadmissibility into the United States, and criminal prosecution.
In addition to CBP, Homeland Security Investigations and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force were also part of the operation.
According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), its CyberTipline received more than 21 million reports last year related to child exploitation. CyberTipline receives reports of suspected child sexual exploitation from the public and electronic service providers.
More than 19 million reports were related to the manufacture, possession, and distribution of child pornography. Other reports included child sex trafficking, child sexual molestation, online enticement of children for sexual acts, and unsolicited obscene material sent to children.
In Operation Relentless Justice, conducted last year to tackle child exploitation in the country, 205 child victims were located, and 293 alleged offenders were arrested. And in April, the month-long Operation Iron Pursuit resulted in more than 200 child victims being rescued and more than 350 alleged offenders being arrested nationwide.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/29/2026 - 20:30