NOTE: The English translation of our twenty-first Spanish-language Public Health Policy Reviews weekly video newsletter:
Welcome to the twenty-first week of our Public Health Policy Reviews Spanish language digital newsletter.
The week of June 30th through July 4th concluded with our feature on the US House of Representatives’ passage of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” nicknamed the OBBB, which the Senate reworked from the original House-approved version earlier that week.
After back-to-back overnight sessions in both chambers of Congress, the House finally passed the final iteration of President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Thursday, July 3rd, 2025.
Mr. Trump then signed the OBBB on Independence Day, July 4th, during a televised ceremony in Washington, DC.
Until June, President Trump primarily implemented his policy agenda through unilateral executive orders.
Mr. Trump’s widespread migrant deportations, his haphazard tariff policies, the dismantling of the Department of Education, and defunding of a vast array of other federal agencies–all happened with the stroke of the President’s executive signature.
At the same time, the GOP willingly complied with Trump, and Congressional Democrats pretended to be helpless against the President.
That changed this week, as Republicans commanded center stage in delivering Donald Trump’s first big legislative win of his second term.
President Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax cuts to America’s millionaires and billionaires will translate into removing 17 million people from Medicaid and kicking 11.8 million more off SNAP and public-school lunch programs for needy children.
The answer from President Trump and the GOP to the possible civil unrest caused by the passage of the OBBB is to massively increase funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or “ICE.”
“ICE” will now become a larger federal agency than the combined size of the FBI, the DEA, and the US Bureau of Prisons.
The Big Beautiful Bill designates more than $100 billion for ICE and border enforcement funding through September 2029.
The increased funding includes $45 billion for detention capacity and $46.5 billion for the border wall and infrastructure.
In Texas, a devastating flood deluged the central region of the state over the July 4th weekend.
As of Tuesday, July 8th, 2025, the death toll has reached at least 108.
The majority of the fatalities were reported in Kerr County, where 87 people have died, including 30 children.
Tragically, this includes at least 27 individuals from Camp Mystic, a girls’ summer camp located in Kerr County.
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J*VILLAINS - available on Amazon.com, at X-Libris Books, and Ampersand Books.
J-Villains is the debut novel from writer Y. Kerry Sara.
Written in epistolary form, J-Villains is the story of Shibel Assad - an immigrant graduate exchange college student from Iraqi-Kurdistan attending Journalism school at Columbia University in Manhattan.
Shibel's roommate is Constantin Stoian, a naturalized American citizen originally from Romania. He is a former U.S. Army officer and a right-wing militarist who supports Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 American presidential campaign and the aftermath of the election in 2017.
Both Shibel and Constantin consider themselves enemies of Islamic Jihadism and critics of the American Judeo-Christian tradition.
But Constantin, who also works as a college professor, hides some terrifying secrets that will eventually threaten the physical safety and mental sanity of anyone who is near him.
J-Villains is a story about the true value of family, modern media, consumer culture, the roots of American culture, and the power of self-expression.
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