Maria and Julio talk about Uvalde, the fight for gun legislation and what to expect from the Republican presidential race. Then in our roundtable, they’re joined by Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media and host of its investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: The Plot Against Equality, to discuss the wave of anti-trans legislation across the country.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Don’t miss Futuro’s new documentary with FRONTLINE about Uvalde. You can watch it here, and let us know your thoughts!

• Legislators have introduced more than 400 anti-trans bills this year so far, more than the previous four years combined, according to this Washington Post analysis.

• “Three states want to stipulate how, and whether, autistic transgender youth and those with mental health conditions are able to access gender-affirming care — a new tactic aimed at the intersection of two marginalized groups,” write Orion Rummler and Sara Luterman in this piece for The 19th News.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File

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Maria and Julio reflect on the one-year anniversary of the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas and the lasting impacts on the community. We go deeper in our roundtable to look at how families of victims– especially mothers, both past and present, bring about change. Maria leads the discussion with Keith Beauchamp, award-winning filmmaker and producer on the film “Till,” and Monica Muñoz Martinez, historian and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

ITT Staff Picks:

• A new FRONTLINE documentary with Futuro Investigates and The Texas Tribune seeks to answer the lingering questions after the tragedy. You can watch the trailer here.

• “Parents have been fighting for a full accounting, but a promised city investigation hasn’t happened and a lot of information is bottled up in the district attorney's own investigation,” writes Suzanne Gamboa about the families fighting for justice in Uvalde one year later, in this piece for NBC News.

• Following the Uvalde school massacre last year, Loyola Professor Elliott Gorn wrote “Publishing grim photographs of mass killings might do some good in reforming America’s insane gun regime. But it won’t be because gun rights fundamentalists see the light,” for The Chicago Sun-Times.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay, File

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Julio and guest co-host Fernanda Santos discuss the latest with immigration and the abortion ban in North Carolina. Then in our roundtable, Maria is joined by Josie Duffy Rice, journalist and writer, and Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic, to unpack what’s happening at the border, violence against unhoused people, and the growing issue of gun violence in this country.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Adam Serwer talks about the fantasy of violence that drives right-wing Republicans, in this piece for The Atlantic.

• Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes about the unreciprocated love immigrants have for the American dream, and how they are the secret weapon in the fight against authoritarianism, in this article for The New York Times.

• Dylan Scott writes about the GOP’s empty promises to support women and families after Roe, in this piece for Vox.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Michael Conroy

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Maria and guest co-host Fernanda Santos talk about former President Donald Trump being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. And they get into two recent tragedies in Texas that left multiple people dead. Then in our roundtable, Julio is joined by Kamau Franklin, the founder of Community Movement Builders, and Jacqueline Echols, board president of the South River Watershed Alliance in Georgia, to discuss the movement to stop the building of a massive police training facility in Atlanta, dubbed “Cop City.”

ITT Staff Picks:

• Lawyer Corey Rayburn Yung explains to Slate why Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, but not rape.

• “An average 6th grader can look at those facts and determine that while we all have mental illness in our societies the reason only America is awash is gun violence is because we are awash in guns,” writes Heather Digby Parton in this column for Salon.

• Micah Herskind writes, “the struggle to Stop Cop City is a battle for the future of Atlanta,” in this primer on why Atlanta leadership wants to build the police facility on forest land, for Scalawag.

Photo credit: AP Photo/R.J. Rico

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Julio and guest co-host Jamilah King discuss Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s reaction to the horrific mass shooting in Cleveland, Texas and the lawsuit between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Then in our roundtable, Maria and Julio are joined by Danielle Moodie, host of the podcast Woke AF Daily and co-host of The New Abnormal and Democracy-ish podcasts, to talk about the 2024 presidential election, the impact of Twitter on the media, and the legal battle over access to the abortion pill, mifepristone.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Eugene Robinson talks about Greg Abbott’s inappropriate response to the massacre in Texas and how the U.S. having more guns than people and a lack of gun control is what ultimately leads to mass shootings, in this opinion piece for The Washington Post.

• Norman Eisen and Josh Stanton analyze the lawsuit between Disney and DeSantis in this opinion piece for MSNBC.

• “Although emergency orders in time-sensitive cases had long been a part of the high court’s work, in recent years the volume, breadth, and partisan valence of the justices’ rulings in such matters had changed,” writes Adam Serwer in this piece for The Atlantic.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh

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Maria and Julio discuss President Biden’s reelection bid, the departures of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, and the latest on Uvalde. Then in our roundtable, guest host Fernanda Santos steps in to lead a discussion with Fernanda Echavarri, senior producer for Futuro Studios, and Tina Vasquez, editor-at-large for Prism, about their explosive two-part investigation, “Head Down,” which examines the abuse of migrant workers under the H-2A visa program. 

You can listen to the “Head Down” investigation here. 

ITT Staff Picks: 

• “Finding someone willing to spread manufactured white fury for an hour every weeknight on Fox won’t be difficult,” writes Renée Graham, in her analysis of Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News, for The Boston Globe.

• “He was, in his way, a people person. He understood how to reach, teach and challenge them, how to keep them honest, how to dedicate his fame to a politics of accountability, more tenaciously than any star of the civil rights era or in its wake,” writes Wesley Morris on the legacy of Harry Belafonte, for the New York Times. 

• Tina Vasquez discusses the abuse of migrant workers uncovered by the “Head Down” investigation through the stories of Diego and Mario, two H-2A workers from Mexico, in this article for Prism. 

Photo credit: Fernanda Echavarri

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Fernanda Santos and Jamilah King step into the co-host chairs to discuss the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl and a New York Times report about migrant child labor in the U.S. Then in our roundtable, Maria and Julio get into the latest attacks on reproductive rights and the state of the Supreme Court with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor of Rewire News Group, and co-host of the podcast Boom! Lawyered.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• “A white man shot an unarmed Black teen and remained free for days. When community leaders and activists say Ralph and his family deserve better, clearly the bungled arrest of the perpetrator is evidence that justice is being served slowly,” writes Toriano Porter in this opinion piece for the Kansas City Star.

• “Certain antisocial forces are trying their darndest to prevent all of our children from growing up and maturing into the kind of people who can make this democracy functional. And people keep putting them in power,” writes Imani Perry for The Atlantic.

• Garnet Henderson writes about the Online Abortion Resource Squad, which provides accurate and supportive information about abortion on Reddit, via Rewire News Group.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Nathan Howard

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Maria and Julio discuss the ProPublica report about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepting luxury trips from major Republican donor Harlan Crow. They also talk about the Tennessee legislature’s expulsion of two Democratic members. Then in our roundtable, we get into the nuances of the Latino Muslim community with Rahim Ocasio, co-founder of the Latino Muslim organization Alianza Islamica, and Hazel Gómez, board member and faith-based community organizer with Dream of Detroit.

ITT Staff Picks: 

• Read the full ProPublica report detailing the extent of the luxury vacations Justice Clarence Thomas received as a gift from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

• “I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced. We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans — Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer — are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight,” writes Justin J. Pearson in this opinion piece for The New York Times. 

• This article for NBC News examines the growing demographic of “mixed ethnicity” Latinos and how they navigate their Latinidad.

Photo credit: Rahim Ocasio

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We’re back with a brand new episode and new format! Maria and Julio break down the criminal arraignment of former President Donald Trump and discuss Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ comments on immigration. Then, we dive into President Biden’s immigration policy with Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, and Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Dhruv Mehrotra writes about the potentially illegal tool that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using to gather data from abortion clinics, elementary schools, and news organizations, in this article for WIRED.

• Alex Samuels talks about Biden’s move to a more right-wing stance on immigration, in this article for FiveThirtyEight.

• “Although blanket coverage of Trump exposes viewers to his more unfavorable qualities, his political messages get through loud and clear. He gets to define the debate, his opponents, and even the people covering him. And both Trump and his staff are aware of this dynamic, which is why they always try to make him the center of attention. Human beings tend to remember sensational lies and smears, but can get fuzzy about the dry fact-checks that debunk them,” writes Adam Serwer in this article for The Atlantic.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Fernando Llano

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This next episode of our Best of ITT series takes us back to 2016, and our conversation with  Mike German, fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program. Maria and Julio talk to Mike about what he learned about the white supremacist movement  during his time as an undercover FBI agent, and how the media is missing the real story.

ITT Staff Picks:

• Nazgol Ghandnoosh writes about white supremacy’s hold on legal institutions and how it disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous communities, in this article for The Sentencing Project.

• “Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats” writes Michael German in this article for Brennan Center.

• More than 300 members of the far-right group, The Oath Keepers, are also members of the Department of Homeland Security, according to this article by Nick Schwellenbach that was published in POGO.

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