Diana Baptista

MEXICO CITY - To supercharge a mass deportation crackdown, U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing what he calls his "Big Beautiful Bill" for lawmakers to direct $168 billion to increased immigration enforcement.

The bill projects $75 billion in funding to be aimed at expanding the detention and deportation operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigration Forum.

The United Nation's agency for labour voted in June to develop global binding standards on gig work to better protect app-based workers and ensure their access to benefits.

The move by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to establish protections and benefits for gig workers, whose labour is largely unregulated around the world, has been described by Human Rights Watch as a "positive breakthrough."

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI's data centre in Memphis has been met with resistance by some residents worried about a lack of transparency and potential environmental harm.

Environmental groups in the area found that the data centre, used to power the Grok chatbot, runs with 35 gas turbines, which exceeds the 15 turbines for which the company submitted permits to provide 300 megawatts of electricity to the data centre.

Data centres powering artificial intelligence (AI) systems are moving into cities and towns and encountering local resistance, a report by UK-based consultancy Computer Says Maybe shows.

Communities are responding to the centres by campaigning against the extraction of water supplies, toxic emissions from the energy sources they use and scant accountability by governments and big tech companies, the report says.

U.S. President Donald Trump's hardline approach to immigration is changing migration patterns in the Americas and creating ripples throughout the continent, according to a report by the Mixed Migration Centre, a research group.

As the Trump administration cracks down on immigration and ramps up mass deportations, there has been a steep decline in migrants heading north to the United States, including people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and the perilous Darién Gap jungle that connects Panama to Colombia, the report said.

U.S. President Donald Trump's crackdown on migration has left thousands of migrants stranded in Mexico as organizations helping them have been forced to limit their operations and cut staff due to budgets slashed by the U.S. freeze on foreign aid.

Since Trump froze foreign aid funds in January, numerous local and international organisations and shelters working near the U.S.-Mexico border say they are struggling to provide migrants, including families with children, with housing, legal, psychological and medical services.

From federal workers to foreign students, the Trump administration is using surveillance tech to track and target critics of his agenda – creating a "chilling effect" on free speech, a privacy expert told Context.

The Trump administration has said it will begin screening the social media of immigrants and visa applicants for what it called anti-Semitic activity, which will serve as grounds to reject their immigration requests.

There is growing opposition to the exploitation of critical minerals like cobalt and lithium, according to research by the Institute of Development Studies, a research organization affiliated with the University of Sussex in Britain.

The study comes as the global race intensifies to secure those minerals for the clean energy transition.

Last year was the worst on record for internet shutdowns as governments increasingly used digital blackouts to control and suppress citizen rights, according to a report by Access Now.

The internet advocacy watchdog documented 296 shutdowns in 54 countries, leading to disrupted communications, economic challenges, and restricted access to vital services.

While African nations sacrifice health and education services to repay foreign loans, wealthy polluting countries owe the continent more than 50 times more than Africa's total debt for damages caused by climate change, according to a new report by international charity ActionAid.

ActionAid calculated that Africa is owed around $36 trillion in climate reparations by rich countries against $646 billion owed by the continent to wealthy nations, private creditors, and global financial institutions.