By Robin Hernandez

Co-written by Amanda Wang

Society Needs help. 

Recently, over the past few months, it has been brought to my attention, that there’s been a lot of things happening that people aren’t speaking about, saying the wrong things for or just brushing them off as “a phase of struggle”. I know while reading this, you can have mixed emotions such as anger, fear, or sadness, so you’ve been warned, and there will be a small summary at the end if you don’t want to read all of this, but this is a very important topic, that I think even as middle schoolers, we should all know about.

Discrimination against many communities

Starting with the discrimination against the Hispanic community. When the American president began his term, he ordered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to continue deporting people, specifically un-documented people living in America. These requests have caused quite a few Ice agents to resign. However, even more have started to join. In addition to deporting documented and undocumented people, they have also been taking immigrants and asylum seekers to detention camps. in some cases, even murdering them. Additionally, on January 7th, 2026 in Minneapolis, Reneé Nicole Macklin Good, a US citizen, was shot and murdered by ICE agents.

Additionally, many babies have been tear gassed by ICE officials, which can cause a multitude of medical complications. The most known case of this involves a six month old baby with their parents. When ICE agents sprayed teargas in the family’s car, causing airbags to deploy, further causing the child to have their breathing pause for a while, making the mother perform CPR on the child. There have also been many letters from innocent children found in these concentration camps. One line taken directly from a letter of twelve year old Ender “…going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here.” The conditions in these camps are incredibly bad, as medical care providers are not well trained, you need to pay for clean water, and the food is about the same as prison food. 

On February 24th, 2026, a man by the name of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee, was found dead at a coffee shop. He was in ICE custody for a few hours, before they learned he was in fact a U.S citizen and had his papers. He was then brought to border patrol for a few more hours, where they then brought him to a closed coffee shop, 5 miles away from his home. He was blind. The officers knew this. Yet they still dropped him off at a coffee shop 5 miles away from home, with no form of communication since he didn’t have any devices and spoke very little English. He was found dead, still at that same coffee shop on February 24th because he had zero food, water and shelter, which people literally need to survive.

Additionally, sometime in February 2026, president Donald Trump made it legal for ICE agents to target not only people that they suspect are undocumented, but now also people who they suspect are transgender. This puts not only people identifying as transgender or under the trans umbrella, but also cis (people who identify under the same gender and sex as birth) people who don’t fit the stereotype for their gender. 

ICE, despite being formed in 2001 and not doing much, has become notorious for taking and murdering innocent citizens since 2025, and these are only a few examples of this. 

Additionally, the discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community

 For those who don’t know, LGBTQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual spectrum (Aromantic,  Asexual, Agender, etc), and the + is for the other genders and sexualities like pansexual, pangender, genderfluid, omnisexual, etc. In 2019, a Lesbian couple was attacked by multiple men on a bus in London for not kissing. They were beaten up severely, with many injuries. The attackers, 5 teenage boys, have been arrested for the assault, but the couple and LGBTQIA+ community have been traumatized again. there have been many attempts of making same-sex marriage (when two people of the same gender like man and man or woman and woman get married) illegal. Plus, there have been many attempts at preventing Transgender and Non-Binary people from accessing simple medical and daily care such as trying to stop Trans people using the bathroom of their gender and trying to make them use their assigned birth gender bathroom, denying access to surgeries, and more. Another thing regarding transgender specimens, in Kansas, officials have been demanding the drivers licenses of transgender folk, forcing them to hand over their licenses. Similarly, in the summer of 2025, Texas passed House Bill 229, making it so that it strictly defines “sex” as male or female based on biological reproductive systems, which further more targets transgender and also Intersex folks. 

AI, yay or nay?

Over the past few years, a surge in the usage of Generative Ai has begun, which has been having an effect on many, so I would also like to discuss this.

As you’ve probably heard someone at least once, whether through social media or real life, you’ve probably heard people saying “AI is bad!” and “Ai is good!” but you might’ve not thought much about it, or you have your opinions set straight and cannot deal with hearing anything from the other opinion. I will give reasons for why Artificial Intelligence is both good and bad. 

First off, there are multiple types of AI’s, that being: Generative AI, Text to Speech, Coding, Medical, predictive, computer vision, agentic, and many others.

Generative AI

Now, this type of AI is often the type people immediately think of. This type of AI is most often used for generating pictures, texts, scanning through documents, and simple questions. These programs are trained off real human work without permission, which is one of the reasons many people dislike gen ai. Additionally, the data centres for these AI’s run on clean, fresh drinking water, and because of how many people use generative ai daily whether meaning to or not, this has caused a massive water shortage announced by the United Nations. These data centres are harmful for humans and animals, as it not only takes the water, but also pollutes the water and air, causing even more pollution than we already had. Common generative AI softwares include: chatgpt, google gemini, Sora AI (which recently got shut down as of April 26), Claude, Grok, MetaAI, and Suno AI.

An important thing to mention when discussing gen ai, is the use of ai chatbots. Common chatbots include: Character.ai, polybuzz.ai, Chai.ai, and Jenova.ai, just to name a few. These are very damaging, as not only are they generative AI and have all those attributes, but they are also incredibly damaging to people’s mental health. These bots are programmed to respond based on what you’ve said. If you’ve told it you like dogs over cats and ask if you should get a dog or cat, it will say dog, because you’ve told it you like them better. Because of this, there are many reports of children, teens, and even adults who have killed themselves because the AI bot told them to. In some cases, they’ve even given victims details on how to.

All in all, this type of AI is very harmful.

Text to Speech/ Speech to Text

Another common type of AI is text to speech. This type, unlike gen ai, does not use water or have data centres.

Coding

A third type of AI that is commonly used is AI for coding. 

When you are coding, you might turn to an AI, which can help you with figuring the remaining code and finding bugs.

Medical

In the medical field, there’s a big chance you will use Medical AI. This type of AI helps with clinical decision support and image analysis, like scanning through the information given in a CT scan, x-ray and MRI scans . in clinical decision, the AI can help healthcare providers make decisions regarding things such as treatments and medications, mental health, and other patient needs, by giving them quick access to the information regarding the patients they are tending to. 

Predictive

This AI has been used by probably everyone in this school. Predictive AI is the AI when the program, like its name, predicts what you’re going to do. It’s commonly found in social media, like your For You Page on YouTube or the videos and posts you get on Instagram and TikTok. Another time you’ll see predictive AI is when you are typing into your search engine or a google doc, and you see recommended results or autofill. Those are also types of AI.

Agentic

Agentic AI is AI that can act on its own. This includes chatbots, learning agents and the Alexa that most people have in their homes now. AI agents make decisions just like humans which is quite scary when you think about it deeply. 

SUMMARY

To conclude, the topics I explained are just a small chunk of the news that has been going on recently. There’s been many other hate acts going on but it would be a whole 10 page essay if I decided to write about everything that has been happening recently. Plus, some of the issues recently are inappropriate and I can’t talk about it in school. Even though these two overviews of AI and discrimination to the LGBTQ+ and hispanic community is really quite worrying. If you want to learn more, you may read some of the articles we linked below. Thanks for reading!

Resources used:

Other actions happening the world for you to read about: