In a statement, Mike Gonzalez, vice president for communications at Heritage, told the Washington Examiner that Richwine was no longer with the conservative think tank, but did not offer further explanation. “It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters,” said Gonzalez.

Richwine co-wrote a report released by the Heritage Foundation Monday concluding that the latest bipartisan immigration bill would cost at least $6.3 trillion because of the likelihood that new citizens would be dependent on federal benefits. The report drew an immediate backlash from prominent conservatives, including Grover Norquist, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who tweeted that the study was “misleading and designed for headlines.”

By mid-week, the Washington Post had unearthed Richwine’s 2009 dissertation, in which he contended that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.” Richwine earned his PhD in public policy from Harvard that year. Richwine has also said that Latinos–unlike the Irish–are unable to assimilate.

Yahoo News reported Thursday that Richwine had also written two articles in 2010 for the website AlternativeRight.com, founded by self-described “nationalist” Richard Spencer. Richwine’s articles argued that Hispanics are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites.

The Heritage Foundation had already begun to distance itself from Richwine after his dissertation drew flak. “The Harvard paper is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings do not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations,” said spokesman Gonzalez in his statement.

Hall will be joined by Jim Shelton, acting deputy secretary at the DOE; David Johns, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans; and African-American educators from across the country.

The event is part of Teacher Appreciation Week and will involve a discussion on a variety of topics including class size, teaching in urban communities, and college readiness.

Watch the live stream right here:

Standing alongside the president, vice president, and Dr. Jill Biden, first lady Michelle Obama said Tuesday that through their initiative Joining Forces—a nationwide campaign designed two years ago to connect servicemen and women, veterans, and military spouses with the resources needed to find jobs—businesses have hired 290,000 veterans or military spouses, and they have pledged to hire or train another 435,000 in the next five years.

“These men and women are some of the most talented, accomplished, dedicated people you will ever meet,” said the first lady, speaking about the military families she’s met in her time at the White House. “And that’s why two years ago, when the four of us came together to launch Joining Forces right here in this very room, our goal was to create an initiative that was worthy of their character and their service…Since then, this nation has truly joined forces in so many amazing ways.”

Since the creation of Joining Forces and Obama’s challenge to the private sector, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans dropped to 9.2% in March of 2013—still well above the national unemployment rate of 7.6% for that same period. At the event Tuesday, the first lady signaled there was still work to be done for the jobless and the more than one million veterans who remain at risk of homelessness due to poverty.

She went on to speak about doctors and nurses who have incorporated bold responses to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other traumatic brain injuries into their practices. She spoke of schools training teachers to become more responsive to the needs of military children in their classrooms. And she spoke of the extraordinary showings of appreciation seen around the country from community groups, houses of worship, and “citizens from every walk of life.”

But few initiatives have had a broader impact on military families than those designed to create jobs. “These efforts are about so much more than a paycheck,” said the first lady. “This is about giving these men and women a source of identity and purpose. It’s about providing thousands of families with financial security, and giving our veterans and military spouses the confidence that they can provide a better future for their children.”

Before launching Joining Forces in 2011, post-9/11 veterans were having an especially difficult time translating their military experience into qualifications for the civilian workforce. In June of that year, one million veterans were unemployed, and the jobless rate for veterans who signed up for service after September 11, 2001, had risen to 13.3%—well above the national unemployment rate.

Post-9/11 veterans, especially younger ones, were struggling in particular because the industries most likely to hire them—mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and utilities—were the industries hit hardest by the 2008-2009 recession. Active military personnel typically do not have the industry-recognized certifications that reflect the skills and experience gained in the military. And that just “does not make any sense,” said President Obama on Tuesday.

“If you can save a life on the battlefield, then you sure as heck can save one in an ambulance and a state-of-the-art hospital,” said the president. “If you can oversee a convoy of equipment and track millions of dollars of assets, then you can run a company supply chain or you can balance its books. If you can lead a platoon in a war zone, then I think you can lead a team in a conference center…Hiring our veterans and military spouses is not just the patriotic thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.”

Since Obama’s challenge to the private sector, businesses like Walmart and Blackstone have vowed to single handedly hit his target of offering 100,000 jobs to veterans. The president signed into law tax credits for business that hire unemployed veterans and wounded warriors, and he proposed making those tax breaks permanent in his budget. Last June, the president also directed the Department of Defense to establish the Military Credentialing and Licensing Task Force, which rolled out a new program on Monday designed to enable service members to earn IT certification before they transition from military service.

Despite the slight down-tick in veteran unemployment, however, the Obama administration has not escaped criticism on its handling of veterans’ issues. On Monday, a bipartisan group of 67 senators sent a letter to the White House urging the president to resolve the nearly 900,000 disability claims currently pending within the Department of Veterans Affairs’ system. And last September, lawmakers ripped a $1 billion White House proposal to create federal jobs for recent military vets, stopping it cold in the Senate.

Both Obamas pledged on Tuesday to keep working for veterans and military families.

“Today is not the finish line,” said the first lady. “Today is simply just a mile marker, and we’re not going to stop until every, single veteran or military spouse that is searching for a job has found one.”

Watch NewsNation host Tamron Hall and Kevin Schmiegel, executive director of Hiring Our Heroes, discuss the Obama Administration’s veteran employment outreach below:

The Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to approve the bill, Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013, and the House passed it with overwhelming support on Friday. The measure suspends employee furloughs–a forewarned consequence of the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester–by allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift $253 million from other accounts.

When it comes to this Congress (and the last one), “unanimous” and “support” aren’t words you hear very often. Soon, questions were raised as to why Congress took action on this effect of the sequester and not on other programs that were hurt–like Meals on Wheels or Head Start. Criticis said lawmakers acted so quickly only because the flight delays directly burdened them and other wealthy travelers.

“The speed with which Congress made this decision last week, and the near unanimity of the decision speaks volumes about who the real priorities are for the members of Congress,” said Democratic strategist and BET columnist Keith Boykin on NewsNation Monday. “On the one hand, you have gun background check legislation that took months and months, and still didn’t get the support of Congress, even though 90% of the American people support it. But then you have this bill for FAA furloughs, because members of Congress need to travel and business people need to travel, and suddenly within 24 hours, both houses of Congress are able to pass this legislation.”

The FAA was forced to furlough 13,000 air traffic controllers beginning last Sunday among its 47,000 employees. About 40% of last week’s flight delays were a result of too few controllers in towers, said the FAA. Airports resumed normal operations as of late Sunday night, even though typos delayed the bill’s delivery to the president for signature.

Though he intends to sign the fix, President Obama blasted lawmakers in his weekly address for insisting on spending cuts, and then maneuvering to redress the ones that applied to them.

“Maybe because they fly home each weekend, the members of Congress who insisted on these cuts finally realized that they actually applied to them too,” said President Obama in his address posted Saturday. “So Congress passed a temporary fix. A band aid. But these cuts are scheduled to keep falling across other parts of the government that provide vital services for the American people. And we can’t just keep putting band aids on every cut.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney echoed the president’s call for Congress to take meaningful action on ending the sequester. In his daily briefing Monday, Carney said:

“We hope that Congress would show the same kind of unified passion when it comes to helping families whose kids are getting kicked off of Head Start; or seniors who are losing access to the Meals on Wheels program; or families whose breadwinners have lost their jobs because they are involved in defense industries or in military communities; or overall, the 750,000 people who won’t have jobs because Congress decided, or Republicans specifically decided, that sequester was a good idea, a political victory, a way to shore up their base and win praise from the Tea Party. Bad policy begets bad consequences, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

The attack, which was carried out by two brothers who immigrated to the United States as children, has become a sticking point for a handful of conservatives opposed to moving the bill forward through the legislative process. The first 90 minutes of the hearing included several references to Boston as well as other terrorist attacks.

“The tragic events that occurred in Boston and the potential terrorist attacks of the US-Canadian railroad are reminders that our immigration system is directly related to our sovereignty and national security matters,” said ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Tuesday. “We know that the 9/11 hijackers abused our immigration system by overstaying their student visas. We also know that people enter legally and stay below the radar.”

Grassley went on to highlight some immigration failures in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased 26-year-old Boston bombing suspect, whose name was misspelled on a list of passengers flying to Russia in January 2012, according to an official who spoke with the Associated Press. The new immigration system would only perpetuate similar types of errors, argued Grassley.

“It has been reported that the older Boston bomber traveled to Russia, and his name was misspelled on his airline ticket,” said Grassley. “If this bill were to pass as is, we will continue to rely on airline personnel to properly type a name into a computer, and not on biometrics identifiers.”

Napolitano conceded that “there was a mismatch” with Tsnarnaev’s plane ticket, but that the system did still “ping,” alerting U.S. authorities to his departure. The reason the system did not ping upon Tsnarnaev’s return, she said, was because “the FBI text alert on him at that point was more than a year old and had expired.” Napolitano added that the new bill would safeguard against similar mistakes. “By the way, the bill will help with this because it requires that passports be electronically readable as opposed to having to be manually input,” she said. “It really does a good job of getting human error, to the extent that it exists, out of the process.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who first spoke about the spelling SNAFU on Monday, continued to press Napolitano about the error, and argued that the Boston attack could still be tied to a larger terrorist plot. “I would like to talk to you more about this case—how this man left, where he went,” said Graham. “And when we say there was not a broader plot here, I just don’t know how in the world we know that at this early stage.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect behind the bombings, told the FBI Tuesday that he and his brother acted alone. An investigation into the brothers’ cell phones and computers led law enforcement officials to believe that “nobody else was involved” in the explosions that left three people dead and more than 200 injured last Monday.

In her opening statement, Secretary Napolitano noted her commitment to uncovering the intelligence failure that led to last week’s attack, and making sure that it never happens again. Immigration reform, she argued, would be critical to protecting Americans, not detrimental to it.

“All of us here are committed to finding out why this happened, what more we can do to prevent attacks like this in the future, and making sure those responsible for this unconscionable act of terror face justice,” said Napolitano. “Knowing who they are is critical to public safety,” she said of the roughly 11 million immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally. “Indeed, as we just saw in Boston, information from our legal immigration system often supports response and investigation.”

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s furloughs have officially begun, resulting in delays of more than an hour and a half at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports on Monday, and about 400 delays across the country on Sunday–the first day of the staffing cuts.

The furloughs, or temporary unpaid employee leaves, are the result of the nearly $1 trillion in automatic, arbitrary, across-the-board spending cuts–known as the sequester–that began in March of this year. $637 million of those cuts have to come from the FAA’s budget, forcing the the administration to furlough 47,000 employees for up to 11 days between now and the end of the fiscal year.

The result? About 15,000 fewer air traffic controllers, more space between flights, and ultimately, longer delays for passengers. Some southbound flights out of New Jersey didn’t even make it to their destination and had to be sent back because the Washington area air traffic control system was just too overwhelmed, said Raymond Adams, president of the air traffic controllers union at New Jersey’s Newark airport, in a tweet.

On Friday, the airline industry and the nation’s largest pilots’ union filed a lawsuit against the FAA over its decision to furlough air traffic controllers, arguing that the administration could cut its budget in other ways. But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Monday that furloughs were inevitable, given the way the FAA’s operations budget is structured.

“The FAA, unlike other agencies, is personnel-heavy,” said Carney during Monday’s White House briefing. “When 70% of your budget–of your operating budget–is personnel, you cannot avoid, when the cuts are as deep as they are in the sequester, the kinds of actions that are taken–these furloughs. That’s the unfortunate fact of arbitrary, across-the-board cuts like this.”

Four Republican and four Democratic senators, informally known as the “Gang of Eight,” have formally unveiled a wide-ranging immigration bill designed to overhaul the nation’s failing system. The bill’s authors–including Sens. Schumer, Graham, McCain, Durbin, Rubio, Flake, Bennet, and Menendez–stood side by side on Thursday to present their proposed solution.

“We all know that our immigration system is broken, and it’s time to get to work on fixing it,” said Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who was first to speak at Thursday’s press conference. “Immigration reform is vital to securing our borders, jump-starting our economy, and ensuring fuller access to that great American dream.”

On the other side of the aisle, rising star Sen. Marco Rubio, who earlier in the day defended his legislation against attacks from conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh, also spoke of the need for reform. “We have a broken legal immigration system,” said Rubio. “It’s cumbersome, it’s complicated, it’s bureaucratic. And it does not reflect the needs of the 21st century.”

Despite the senators’ apparent unified front, however, the road to drafting the 844-page legislation was not a smooth one. The bill is the product of 24 meetings among the senators themselves and marathon sessions between staff members that went on for months. If passed, it would enact the most significant overhaul of immigration laws in nearly three decades.

The main provisions of the plan include a 13-year pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S.; $4.5 billion to secure the U.S.-Mexico border; new visa programs for high and low skilled workers; and a shift to a system that more evenly balances granting visas based on family ties, and granting them based on merit.

So far, reactions from both the left and the right have been tepid.

“It’s not a bill that I would have written,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday. But, she added, “my hope would be that by the time we leave here at the end of July, that this will be the law of the land.”

Speaker Boehner gave a similarly lukewarm response to the proposed legislation, but he offered its authors his congratulations on successfully working across the aisle. “I’m sure there’s parts of it I would agree with, parts that I would disagree with,” said Boehner on Thursday. “But the fact is that they’ve worked together in a bipartisan fashion to craft this bill.”

Reformers argue that while the legislation may not be perfect, the fact that it exists at all is progress, and should not go unnoticed. Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva advocated setting criticisms aside and focusing on moving the legislation forward.

“There are issues with this bill that can be better,” said Grijalva on NewsNation Thursday. “The pathway issue needs to be better defined; the length is too long; I think there’s an overabundance of resources on security without any oversight. There’s issues there… But the fact remains that an assertive and aggressive move to move this legislation is the only way to go… The worst thing we could do is take no action.”

During a Tuesday morning press conference alongside Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino among others, Warren offered gratitude on behalf of the entire congressional delegation to those who responded quickly in the wake of the attack. “We want to extend our thanks to the first responders, to the firefighters, to the police officers, to the EMS, to everyone on the scene, including the volunteers, who came and helped those in trouble and helped save lives,” she said. “We are deeply grateful.”

Warren also thanked President Obama for his active involvement, and for his pledge of unconditional support to the city of Boston. “The president of the United States has pledged his full support in all efforts, both to keep the city safe, and to find the person who did this,” she said. “We did not have to reach out to the president; the president reached out to us.”

On Monday, Obama promised to bring “the full weight of justice” to those responsible for the deadly attack, but so far law enforcement authorities have no one in custody. Both the Boston police, and the FBI are currently investigating.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Warren expressed her shock and sadness at how a Patriots Day of celebration turned into what she described as “a day of tragedy.”

“The Boston Marathon is always a day of great celebration, and today it was turned into tragedy,” she said on Monday in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been hurt, and their families.”

The 63-year-old senator and former Harvard University professor embraced a message of solidarity with the families of those who were wounded or killed, and expressed fear of what the attackers would “take away from us.”

“During the marathon, we are one family,” she said. “We cheer for each other, we carry each other across the finish lines. And when tragedy strikes, we are also one family. We hurt together, we help each other together.”

Warren, who was elected to represent the state of Massachusetts last November, was on her way to Washington, D.C., when the first bomb exploded shortly shortly before 3 p.m. on Boylston Street in the heart of the city. Warren learned of the attack after stepping off the plane at Ronald Reagan National airport, where upon receiving the news, she quickly boarded another plane back to Boston.

“I literally never left the airport, I stepped right back on the plane,” she told the Telegraph. “This is family. This is family.”

It was a sentiment echoed in her brief remarks on Tuesday—one of unity and resolve and, ultimately, optimism. “Boston will survive,” she said.

As NBC’s First Read points out, even if the gun control bill–proposed last week by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican–gets the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate without any “poison pill” amendments, the bill may still have to overcome a major legislative hurdle:  the so-called Hastert rule–or “majority of the majority” doctrine–which allows the Speaker of the House to block a vote on a bill if the majority of the majority party (in this case, the GOP) does not support it.

Last week, two Republican congressmen, Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas. and Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, sent a letter to Speaker Boehner asking that he enforce the Hastert rule and not bring up any bill in the House without a majority of the Republican party’s support.

“Under the precedents and traditions of the House, we would ask that no gun legislation be brought to the floor of the House unless it has the support of a majority of our caucus,” wrote Broun and Stockman.

But if history is any indication, this type of Republican pressure will hold little sway over John Boehner, who has broken the Hastert rule five times before as Speaker of the House. “As we’ve seen in the past–with the fiscal-cliff deal and Hurricane Sandy relief–the House is willing to bring legislation to the floor that isn’t supported by a ‘majority of the majority’ if it has garnered 70 or more votes in the Senate,”  wrote NBC’s First Read team.

70 votes may not even be necessary, argued Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on NewsNation Monday. What will matter more to Speaker Boehner in violating the so-called Hastert rule is “whether the political pressure around the country is so great that it would be so damaging to the Republican brand to bottle the bill up in the House,” said Schiff, who cited the recent poll numbers showing nine in ten Americans in favor of expanded background checks. “I think it would be a disaster for Republicans to keep this up, keep this from getting a vote, or trying to add poison pills and kill it.”

He had been in a relationship with a man from Britain for nearly seven years. His partner’s employer-sponsored visa had expired. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law that prohibits federal marriage benefits from being given to same-sex couples, prevented him from sponsoring his partner’s green card.

“I was faced with this horrible and totally un-American decision,” he told NewsNation’s Tamron Hall Wednesday from London, his new home. “While I don’t regret that decision at all, this has been the most difficult and humbling period of my entire life.” His story was outlined in detail by The New York Times.

As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the future and the constitutionality of DOMA, Perlberg’s story is a reminder of the severe consequences the law has already had on the lives of many bi-national same-sex couples. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates there are around 40,000 LGBT couples in the United States who cannot take advantage of the immigration procedures that are available to straight people.

Before they moved to London, Perlberg, an attorney, felt like he was finally achieving professional success. The couple built a life together in New York. Perlberg had to pick up and leave his career, adjust to a new country, and face significant financial costs; it took him 11 months to find another job.

The process was tumultuous, but “we’re the lucky ones,” Perlberg said. “There are so many people who don’t have an England or a Canada or a Holland or a country like that to go to. Families are split apart. You can imagine when there are children involved what that means, and the financial implications of what that means.”

The initial bipartisan “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal does not specifically mention LGBT couples. The White House, however, has said its wants final immigration legislation to allow U.S. citizens to be able to sponsor a visa for their same-sex partners.

Current guidelines at the Department of Homeland Security tell agents to take LGBT relationships into account in deportation proceedings, but there is no guarantee.

Cases could also be resolved if the Uniting American Families Act is included in a comprehensive immigration package. The legislation lets American citizens or permanent residents, regardless of sexual orientation, sponsor their foreign partner’s legal immigration to the country.

But the future of immigration rights for LGBT couples also hangs in the balance as the Supreme Court considers gay marriage cases.

If the court strikes down DOMA, Perlberg says he isn’t sure whether they would immediately move back to the United States and live as a married couple back in New York.

“You can’t just snap your fingers and get your life back,” he said. “This wasn’t a blip. This was a major, major hardship and sacrifice that I’ve had to endure and that so many other people have had to endure.”