Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal

With Ohio’s Haitian refugees losing their protected status Monday, Springfield’s large population has begun being terminated from their jobs, a pastor who works with the community said on Tuesday.

Without legal status, their work permits become invalid. They also face being forced to return to a nation that the International Rescue Committee says is “in the grip of an overwhelming humanitarian crisis.”

Right now, gangs control Haiti. Kidnapping, murder, and rape are rampant. And the pastor, Carl Ruby, said one Springfield 12-year-old faces having to return to a place where he saw animals feeding on murdered corpses when he was just five....

Ohio will lose 51,000 jobs and $5.3 billion from the state economy in 2029, according to a new analysis.

That’s the effect that cuts to Medicaid and food assistance under a massive 2025 spending law will have when they’re fully phased in. It’s also the consequence of Republicans allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of the last year, according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis which was published last week.

Those losses come despite $200 million in rural health money Ohio will get from a fund that Republicans built into the spending bill. The measure was meant to quell concerns that Medicaid cuts could close rural hospitals, the analysis said....

Combined with other factors, President Donald Trump’s big tariffs on Chinese goods are costing Ohio farmers and their counterparts in other states heavily, according to a new report.

The report shows Ohio farmers lost nearly $76 million of their exports to China this year compared to one year earlier.

Tariffs are taxes on imports, and since the start of his second term, Trump has imposed a shifting array of them on every country in the world — except Russia for some reason, according to the Atlantic Council’s Tariff Tracker....

President Donald Trump’s signature law of his second term provides vastly more benefits to the rich Ohioans than to any other group, and it also takes more away from Ohio’s most vulnerable families than most people might realize, a new analysis says.

This summer, congressional Republicans passed — and Trump signed — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and it was controversial.

It extended tax cuts he signed in 2017. The extension provides $1 trillion to the richest 1 % of Americans over the next 10 years. At the same time, it cut nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid funding and nearly $200 billion in food assistance over the same period....

It might seem like ancient history in Ohio. But it was only two years ago that Republican leaders were trying to make it almost impossible for voters in the highly gerrymandered state to amend the Ohio Constitution.

They issued dire warnings that wealthy “out-of-state special interests” would take control of the Ohio government if the state didn’t make it a lot harder to get amendments, such as those guaranteeing abortion and marijuana rights, into the founding document. The attempt went down in flames, and possibly down the memory hole.

Just two years later, Republican supermajorities in the Ohio legislature passed — and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed — a budget that gives the out-of-state billionaires who own the poorly run Cleveland Browns $600 million for a new stadium....