What happened
The House yesterday gave final approval to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol using a budget reconciliation process that bypassed the need for any Democratic votes. The bill passed 214-212 along party lines. The Senate narrowly approved the bill last week. The funds are expected to pay for President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown through the rest of his term. 

Who said what
The bill’s passage capped “months of bitter gridlock that began in late January” when Democrats demanded reforms to ICE after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, The Wall Street Journal said. This was a “major victory” for GOP leaders, The New York Times said. “But what began as a measure that unified Republicans eager to support” Trump’s hard-line deportation campaign had “devolved in recent weeks into a political albatross.” 

The legislation “got sidetracked” over the $1 billion request for Trump’s White House ballroom, The Associated Press said, and by thwarted bipartisan efforts to block his “politically toxic” $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The ballroom funds were “scrapped,” but like the $140 billion Republicans gave ICE and Border Patrol last year, this new $70 billion “will come with virtually no strings attached.”

What next?
Trump was expected to sign the package into law today.

What happened
A federal audit released yesterday detailed waste, neglect and deadly abuse at ICE’s largest immigration detention facility, Camp East Montana in Texas. The Government Accountability Office attributed most of the camp’s “significant, pervasive issues” to ICE and the Army awarding an expedited $1.3 billion contract to a contractor with no experience running detention facilities. The mismanagement, the GAO found, “created unsafe conditions that contributed to detainee deaths and suffering” and “millions of wasted tax dollars,” The Associated Press said. 

Who said what
ICE wasted $11.5 million on meals and other expenses before the first detainees arrived at the desert tent camp in August, the report said, and a guard lost a loaded firearm that was never found. Three detainees have died in custody, and in the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos — ruled a homicide by the medical examiner — the contractor failed to provide ICE with required use-of-force reports, and evidence “was missing or destroyed.” 

What next?
“Camp East Montana needs to be shut down, the contractor investigated” and “the crime of destruction of evidence referred to law enforcement,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas). A Homeland Security Department spokesperson said that “far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading” under a new contractor. 

Spinal cord injuries are “notoriously difficult to treat,” Rhys Blakely said in The Times of London. But researchers in Switzerland think a solution may be in sight: injectable microrobots.

When the spinal cord is damaged, nerve fiber regrowth can be hampered by scarring, and the nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. But studies by a team at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich suggest that microrobots, made from stem cells with magnetic nanoparticles, could coax these cells to repair and regenerate.

The studies were carried out on zebrafish and mice, so there’s “still a long way to go” before microrobots can be tested on humans, Blakely said. But the results are promising, and scientists the world over are intrigued by the idea of “microscopic repair crews guided by magnets.”

Further research is needed before these microrobots can be tested on humans, but the Zurich team is already thinking about ways they can be used in other medical settings. The “reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system” demonstrates the great deal of “application potential,” said study leader Professor Salvador Pané i Vidal. With adaptations, microrobots could be used in wound healing and to make cardiology and oncology treatments “safer, more controllable and more effective.”

Different microrobots have already been shown to be successful in other areas of medicine, according to the medical news site Healthcare in Europe. Formed in droplets, they are effective at “precision-targeted drug delivery,” outperforming IV delivery in the amount of drug that reaches the target tissue.