Press Room

Tiffany Williams, advocacy director for the Institute for Policy Studies' Break the Chain Campaign, a D.C.-based migrant workers' rights organization that's also part of Freedom Network, says she and other social workers are seeing "more fear and reluctance" about coming forward, particularly in states with aggressive immigration enforcement laws, like Arizona and Georgia, and since the expansion of the Secure Communities initiative, a federal fingerprinting program to identify undocumented immigrants. "What we've seen on the ground is that the more aggressive they are with these [enforcement] programs, where they're allowing local police to arrest people for being undocumented, the more that the Secure Communities programs and others are growing, the less likely it is that an immigrant survivor would be willing to come forward and ask for help," Williams says, referring to victims of trafficking and other crimes.

"It impedes our work significantly," she adds.

To Miriam Pemberton, a national-security analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, the new study should prompt a major re-assessment of the regular military budget (not including the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), which grew by nearly 50 percent in real terms to more than half a trillion dollars – over the decade that followed 9/11.

“We need to bring that budget back to where it was when these wars began,” she told IPS. “Those savings need to be re-invested in the needs that have been neglected over the past decade, foremost among them, in my view, being the urgent need to address the climate crisis by investing in a transition to a clean energy and transportation economy.”

In the first five years after the reactor closed, Sacramento County child-cancer rates for ages zero to 19 fell 13.6 percent, while the rest of the state remained virtually unchanged, according to the report.

After five years, the child-cancer county rate remained below the state's incidents.

“The federal government, unfortunately, has been caught up in a conflict of interest about the effects of ionizing radiation mainly because of its role in establishing nuclear weapons and usage of atomic energy to generate electricity,” said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, who focuses on nuclear disarmament, environmental, and energy policies.

“I think we need to keep a careful eye on how the government proceeds in doing these studies, and that I think there needs to be much more support for independent studies of this kind.”