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Uprising’s guest expert Courtney Morris, assistant professor of African American and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, analyzes today’s news headlines:

An undocumented Mexican national named Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez has thrust San Francisco’s Sanctuary city status onto the national spotlight. Sanchez, who has been charged with the shooting death of a young white woman named Kathryn Steinle last week, is a multiple felon who reportedly reentered the US without papers several times. According to AP, Sanchez claims the shooting was an accident, and “said he found a gun wrapped in a shirt on the pier and it went off in his hands.” San Francisco, like several other US cities, has a policy of not cooperating with federal immigration officials to deport undocumented immigrants. Now, because of the Sanchez case, that policy is coming under fire, not just from Republicans but also Democrats. California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have both called it into question, as has Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Some have compared Sanchez’s case to the 1986 case of Willie Horton. Click here for an Associated Press article, and here for a Huffington Post article about the story.

Democratic Presidential Candidate and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders continues to draw crowds of thousands to his campaign events, breaking records. His Monday night speech in Portland, Maine drew 9,000, just days after 10,000 Wisconsinites showed up to hear him preach his revolutionary rhetoric of democratic socialism. Sanders’ poll numbers in crucial swing states are creeping dangerously close to Hillary Clinton’s, prompting Clinton’s staffers to admit that they are worried. But the New York Times this morning is less optimistic. In an op-ed, Nate Cohn wrote that “the Sanders surge is about to hit a wall: the rank and file of the Democratic primary electorate.” Cohn claimed that for Sanders to beat Clinton he would need to do what Obama managed in 2008, which was to win “more than 80 percent of black voters, perhaps the least liberal demographic group in the Democratic Party.” Click here for a Time.com article, here for a Hill.com article, and here for a New York Times article about the story.

And finally Pope Francis is touring various Latin American nations this week. In Ecuador on Tuesday, he warned President Rafael Correa against relying too heavily on the fossil fuel industry and urged greater protection of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants. Today he heads to Bolivia where, according to the Guardian, “he is expected to pray at the site where the body of a Jesuit priest, Father Luís Espinal, was found in 1980 after he was kidnapped, tortured and killed by paramilitaries.” Pope Francis has at various times been criticized by Latin American activists for not speaking out forcefully enough against bloody dictatorships and wars in Bolivia and Argentina. Still, he maintains a reputation for being the most progressive pope in recent memory. Writing on Truthdig.com this week however, Roisin Davis said, “Something’s Missing From Pope Francis’ ‘Radical’ Vision of Equality: Women.” Calling attention to the myriad ways in which Latin American women face exploitation, Davis hoped, “he’d get around to addressing gender inequality eventually. But lest we forget, the Vatican is—and always will be—a patriarchal institution based on sexual hierarchy.” Click here for a Guardian newspaper article, here for a New York Times article, and here for a Commondreams article about the story.