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A federal lawsuit filed by immigrant advocacy groups in July accuses the Trump administration and its immigration enforcement agencies like ICE of engaging in systemic racial profiling during raids and detentions targeting individuals of color, primarily those perceived as immigrants. A U.S. District Judge issued a temporary restraining order, and the order was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Aug. 1. The Trump administration has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing the restrictions hinder their ability to enforce immigration laws. We get some local context from South Florida immigration attorney, Amanda Velazquez. She represents several clients who have been detained in Key West while going about their daily lives, who had documents that allow them to be in the country while awaiting hearings, despite having no criminal record.

Maternity group homes for young pregnant women and mothers who are homeless or lack support have existed in the United states since the 1800s. The number of these group homes declined starting around 1970 after the U.S. Supreme Court made birth control legal through two landmark decisions. But the number of maternity homes has grown by nearly 40 percent in the past two years. We talk with the reporter whose recent feature in the New York Times “These Maternity Homes Offer Sanctuary, but It Can Feel Oppressive” highlights how some of these homes in Florida are licensed and regulated, and are subject to oversight and inspections — while others don’t face oversight or inspections that are made public.

Thunderstorm Aversion or storm anxiety is when dogs experience significant fear or anxiety during storms. Loud noises are the most obvious trigger, but dogs can react to other storm-related cues like lightning flashes, the sounds of wind or rain hitting the home, changes in barometric pressure, and even static electricity in the air. We learn about Thunderstorm Aversion and ways veterinarians try to help dogs and their owners. And we learn about a three-year, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of a new treatment that’s hoping to become a medical solution.

Katherine Stewart is an investigative reporter and author whose work focuses on issues around religious liberty, politics, policy, and education. Her work appears in the New York Times op ed, on NBC, in the New Republic, and in the New York Review of Books. In her latest book, "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" Stewart lays out how the Religious Right in the United States has portrayed itself as a social movement focusing on cultural issues, but is actually a well-organized political movement that has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement that seeks to gain political power and to impose its vision on all of society.

While the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences — or IFAS — is probably most often associated with ‘growers and farmers and issues around agricultural’ their work goes far beyond that, including helping individuals and businesses, as well as growers, before, during, and after natural disasters like Hurricane Ian. We sit down with David Outerbridge, director of the UF/IFAS Extension office in Lee County to talk about the work they’re still doing helping people recover from Ian’s landfall last September. We also check in with Asmaa Odeh, Project Director for the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council to learn about SWFL Fresh: Choose Local, Choose Fresh.

Dr. Robert Hilliard has worn many hats over the course of his life. Born in 1925, Hilliard served as a soldier in World War II. Since then, he's been a journalist, educator, author, playwright, and humanitarian activist. He lives in Southwest Florida these days and is a member of the nonpartisan nonprofit Floridians for Democracy. At the age of 99 and having lived the life he’s lived, we invited him back into the studio to reflect on the place we find ourselves politically in this country. And get his take on what he calls open fascism in the modern political right, with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 being a prime example.

The United States has become increasingly polarized in recent years. New research published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace seeks to better understand what happens when democracies become ‘perniciously polarized’ — that’s when polarization has divided a society into two mutually antagonistic political camps, where each side sees the other as a threat to the country’s future. According to this research, polarization in the United States reached the level of pernicious in 2015 and remains so to this day.

While lots of research has been conducted on how being in space affects plant biology, no research had ever been done on exactly what the trip up into space does to a plant and its genes. That is, until last Thursday, when UF Space Biologist, Dr. Rob Ferl, loaded himself and some small tubes with plants in them that are specially designed to allow him to freeze their genes in place at specific times — which he did at certain points of the flight on the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. This process will allow him and his research team to see exactly how that transit up into space, and then back down again, causes the plants to turn certain genes on or off to adapt to that voyage. We talked with him just a few hours after he returned to Earth.

Southwest Florida is a great place to produce food and other ag products — but only if growers are able to remain profitable. In order to assess what local growers and producers think about the future of Southwest Florida’s agriculture industry, Florida Gulf Coast University’s Center for Agribusiness recently wrapped up a large study titled “Agribusiness in Southwest Florida: The Next 25 years.” A team of researchers conducted in-depth interviews with representatives from 30 local farm operations and compiled what they found in the new report. We talk with the study’s three co-authors to get an overview of what came out of those conversations.

On one day every January, a Point-in-Time — or PIT — Count is conducted in counties to document the number of people who are experiencing homelessness on a single night. The PIT Count in Collier County this past January found a 230% increase in the number of people over the age of 60 who were homeless as compared to the previous year. So, we check in with the CEO of St. Matthew’s House in Naples, to get a sense of what they’re facing.