Pennsylvania's 12th District just got a new representative. And now it needs another one.
Less than three weeks after he was sworn into office, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) has announced he's stepping down. Marino is going to "take a position in the private sector" after "spending over two decades serving the public," he said in a Thursday statement. He didn't exactly say what that private sector job is, but broke down three of the eight bills he's introduced that became laws in the press release.
Before easily winning his seat last fall, Marino served as a four-term senator for Pennsylvania's 10th District, which was redistricted into the 12th. President Trump nominated him to be the federal "drug czar" in 2017, but he withdrew his name after a report showed he pushed for a pharmaceutical industry-backed bill that stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its biggest tool to fight prescription opioids entering the black market. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will now have to schedule a special election for the heavily Republican district, per Politico.
Marino's decision is especially ironic seeing as just last week, he introduced an amendment to the constitution that would let representatives serve 4-year terms. In a statement accompanying the proposed amendment, Marino said he'd "serve 12 years and then let new blood and ideas take the reins," but apparently he let go a few years early. Kathryn Krawczyk
A new program in California is helping former inmates get back on their feet by pairing them up with people who have rooms to spare, NPR reports.
The Homecoming Project, run by nonprofit organization Impact Justice in Alameda County, California, gives subsidies to those who are willing to rent a room to a recently-released former inmate. The group covers the formerly incarcerated person's rent for six months and goes through a lengthy screening process to find a good home for them. Not only does the organization aim to help former inmates return to a normal life as quickly as possible rather going from prison into restricted communal living, but they also hope to fight misconceptions about ex-convicts in general, they told NPR.
"Project Homecoming says you're a person and we're going to treat you like a person and give you the footholds and the scaffolding to be able to come back home and to be a full member of society just like anybody else," said Alex Busansky, who runs Impact Justice.
Coordinator Terah Lawyer also told NPR that "most of our hosts are familiar with redemption and change and want to be a part of helping be the stepping stone for someone's second chance." There are currently only six former inmates participating in the program, but Impact Justice says it is looking to expand to 25 this year. Brendan Morrow
The Trump administration has owned up to taking 2,737 migrant children from their families after they crossed the border. A government report shows that number is probably way off.
Family separation is largely attributed to Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, and previous counts usually just included children split from their parents after the policy took effect in spring 2018. But the Office of Refugee Resettlement actually saw a "steep increase" in family separations that started in summer 2017, a report issued Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services' Inspector General says. "Thousands of children may have been separated" during that time, the report says — and the government never tracked just how many.
Even before zero tolerance took hold, "HHS faced significant challenges identifying which children in its care had been separated by" the Department of Homeland Security, and which had just arrived alone, assistant inspector general Ann Maxwell told BuzzFeed News. That meant the government had no accurate count of which children were separated, and couldn't easily find those children's families after a July 2018 lawsuit ordered their reunification. Separated children "were still being identified more than five months after the original court order" to find their families or sponsors, the report says.
Since the lawsuit, DHS intake forms now indicate whether a child was separated and include parental information. But Maxwell is still skeptical if they've recorded enough data to eventually reunite a child with their family, she told reporters Thursday. Based on this report, the inspector general's office plans to issue recommendations to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Read more about the report's findings at BuzzFeed News and read the whole report here. Kathryn Krawczyk
