Carey L. Biron

Republican President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch the largest deportation effort in American history when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated there were 11 million immigrants without legal status in 2022.

A critical shortage of U.S. affordable housing may become even more so as developers face fast-rising insurance premiums, driven in part by a mysterious third-party “crime score” that some owners say could put them out of business. 

Nearly every community in the country is struggling with a lack of affordable housing options as prices exploded in the last half-decade, pushing the issue to the center of the presidential election. 

Nine U.S. states have tightened voter ID laws since the last presidential election - rules that risk locking out hundreds of thousands of transgender voters, many in battleground states.

More than 200,000 trans voters risk problems matching their face or name to their identity papers at next week's polls, a potentially significant number in some too-close-to-call states.

Ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election, U.S. cities are racing to safeguard momentum on what backers see as historic action on environmental justice and a range of new efforts to tackle racial, economic and geographic inequality.

After the COVID pandemic and protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, racial and economic inequality moved to the centre of federal policymaking.

With the cost of housing becoming a key issue in next month's U.S. elections, renters could be a critical voting bloc, and campaigners hope that could lead to real gains.

U.S. coastal waters are a public good increasingly at risk of privatisation, threatening local economies that have depended on the sea for generations, fishermen and environmental advocates warned.

Critics point to efforts to open up waters to industrial-scale fish farms, a federal permit system they say is stacked against small or new operators, and even coastal real estate development squeezing out independent businesses.

Running U.S. elections has always been a complicated job for local officials, requiring the corralling of hundreds of volunteers, staying on top of ever-changing legal requirements, and now also combatting misinformation and disinformation.

Running elections "has become one of the most high-profile responsibilities that county government does," said Jennifer Liewer, deputy elections director for communications for Maricopa County in Arizona.

From pen and paper to AI and algorithms - the path to legal redress is growing faster for many poor Americans as artificial intelligence helps close a yawning U.S. justice gap.

Be it fighting evictions or domestic violence, the sort of bureaucratic logjam that often stymies low-income defendants could ease as AI bolsters overstretched legal aid teams once armed with little more than a lined, yellow pad.

When Asher first attended a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in 2022, only a dozen or so people were there, but now as many as 60 turn up with most newcomers dealing with addictions to online sports betting.

Asher, who asked that Context use a pseudonym to protect the privacy of his recovery group, was drawn into gambling by online poker.

Local government is getting into the U.S. grocery business - but can city officials ever hope to run a corner store the way Mom and Pop used to do?

With the demise of thousands of grocery shops - victims of hostile market forces that were hastened by the pandemic - "food deserts" have opened up and left many rural and urban neighbourhoods without good options.