News & Commentary

September 21, 2023

Linh Tang

Linh is a student at Harvard Law School.

On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security introduced a series of policies that provide deportation protection and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants. Under these new policies, approximately 472,000 Venezuelans will become eligible for work permits under Temporary Protected Status. DHS also aims to approve work permits within one month for immigrants who entered the country under humanitarian parole programs established earlier this year. These new policies are intended to manage the recent increase in migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border and frustration at the delay in authorizing work permits for asylum-seekers and other migrants.

Federal agencies proposed a new rule on Wednesday that reduces the fees for filing medical billing arbitration cases under the No Surprises Act to $150 per dispute and requires any future changes to the fees be set through rule-making. The new medical billing rule, proposed by the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Internal Revenue Service, is a response to an August ruling in Texas district court that the prior $350 fee violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not providing parties with notice and an opportunity to comment. Medical providers had also criticized the $350 fee as prohibitive for smaller practices to arbitrate billing disputes with insurers.

This deep dive on employees’ religious objections to DEI training and policies provides an insightful take on the “tricky legal landscape” of workplace diversity measures. These measures include inclusivity policies that require the use of workers’ preferred names and gender-affirming pronouns. The recent uptick in workers seeking faith-based exemptions from these workplace policies “add[] an extra wrinkle” to the spur of legal challenges to diversity measures following the Supreme Court’s end to affirmative action in higher education earlier this summer.

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