Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, joins Democrats in bid to stop dismantling of Ocean Observatories Initiative

• US politics live – latest updates

A group of Democratic senators and one Republican, as well as two Democratic House committees, sent letters on Monday to the National Science Foundation asking it to reverse course on its plan to dismantle a sprawling ocean monitoring network, with House lawmakers going further and accusing the agency of acting illegally.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386m. Over the last decade it has tracked ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, climate change and extreme weather, producing data freely available to the public and informing more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run another 15 to 20 years.

When the Donald Trump administration launched its largest operation targeting migrants in the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, last December, several members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were detained. They were not criminals, undocumented residents, or even migrants. They are U.S. citizens who became victims of the racial profiling ICE agents have used in their raids, sanctioned by a controversial Supreme Court ruling that allowed officials to rely on facial features, the language spoken, or an English-speaking accent to choose their targets. In addition to the obvious consequences the practice has had in the Latino community, where thousands of citizens have been stopped during operations, Native Americans have also fallen victim to the subjective criteria used by officials.

Seguir leyendo