Rob Hiaasen’s newspaper columns were funny — actually, honest-to-god funny. In 2015, he noted his daughter had adopted a South Florida manatee named Squeaky as a gift for him; Hiaasen then spent part of a newspaper column wondering what advice to give his newly adopted sea-cow son. He decided on “Be safe.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart sure loves cigars. He enjoys them so much that at a February 14 federal budget hearing, the GOP congressman railed against the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to impose new regulations on the cigar industry. He claimed the rules were needlessly “burdensome” and unfair.
The Broward Transitional Center is basically a jail for people who haven’t committed crimes. It’s designed to hold “low-level” immigrant detainees slated for deportation after they’ve been arrested on minor charges — such as driving without a license — or picked up on no criminal charges at all.
For years, the Civilian Investigative Panel (CIP) has been warning the Miami Police Department that its cops keep refusing to use their body cameras. Despite the fact that more than $1 million in federal and local public money had been spent on the cameras, the CIP — an independent group that looks into complaints against police — found in 2016 that dozens of cops still weren’t recording or uploading footage. In 2017, the CIP criticized MPD a second time for not fixing the problem.
Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez said last evening that if an August 2017 memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office accusing his cops of lying was accurate, his officers would indeed have been guilty of perjury and “committed a crime.”
Earlier this year, investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department and state prosecutors discussed whether to charge or discipline a group of MDPD officers for perjury, but they ultimately declined to do so. That’s according to documents New Times obtained today from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in the case of Ephraim Casado, who was beaten on camera after being pulled over for allegedly littering and driving recklessly.
Ephraim Casado allegedly did nothing but throw a bottle from his car March 27, 2017. According to documents and footage New Times obtained, Miami-Dade County cops responded by repeatedly punching him in the face, grinding his body into the asphalt, and painfully hoisting him into the air by his arms before arresting him on charges of “resisting an officer without violence.”
In late 2016, a 17-year-old Guatemalan teen fled her home. Her father was a prominent local politician and had been receiving repeated extortion threats over the past year. He had continually refused to pay, so his enemies warned they would kidnap his daughter. The threat was serious enough that she made the long, treacherous journey to the United States, where her aunt and uncle lived, to seek asylum.
The entire state of Florida has been in something of an uproar after New Times reported Monday that the Trump administration had quietly re-opened a camp for child migrants in Homestead and placed nearly 1,200 children there without informing the public. Since then, politicians, reporters, and protesters have descended on…
Florida senator, immigration-detention-contractor-donation-taker, and walking logical fallacy Marco Rubio decided today, out of the kindness of whatever exists where his heart ought to be, to tour the Homestead Temporary Shelter of Unaccompanied Children. And because he is Marco Rubio and said words in public today, a bunch of protesters rightfully…
His House Children’s Home, a Miami Gardens facility that has housed young migrant children for the federal government, was accused in Broward County court of letting a small child fatally suffocate underneath a blanket. The boy was not an immigrant but a young minor brought to the facility in 2007 after being taken from his parents in Broward by the Florida Department of Children and Families.
The U.S. government has been sending unaccompanied immigrant minors to a Miami Gardens shelter called His House Children’s Home since at least 2008. In the past decade, the facility has been reportedly investigated by child-welfare advocates for abuse and has been cited by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for “possibly” failing to follow policy when handling the cases of at least 652 children.
Before Miami-Dade County’s now infamous child-migrant camp opened back up in 2018 under President Donald Trump, the facility operated under Obama from 2016 through April 2017. And while the facility was up and running the first time, one worker at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children was sentenced to…
Running a detention camp for migrant children taken from their parents is not great for PR. Two days after New Times broke news that the Trump administration had quietly sent more than 1,000 migrant children to a guarded compound in Homestead, Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola is threatening to ban one of the contractors running the facility, Comprehensive Health Services, from doing business in his city.
Nearly 48 hours after New Times first reported that the federal government had quietly reopened a child-migrant compound outside Miami and placed an estimated 1,000 kids there, the U.S. representative from the district where the facility stands says he is “troubled” by the fact that other sitting lawmakers were rejected from entering the facility.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has responded to news of a child-migrant camp opening in his state by, in part, throwing a bunch of other politicians under the bus. In a two-page letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) yesterday, Scott disclosed that “Florida’s congressional delegation” and “state and local officials” were told…
In Homestead, a federal compound housing as many as 1,000 migrant children is managed in part by a federal contractor based in Cape Canaveral called Comprehensive Health Services, which has held a contract at the Homestead camp since February 2018. Sen. Bill Nelson says 94 children at Comprehensive Health’s facility have been taken from their parents by U.S. immigration agents.
An estimated 1,000 migrant children are being held at a heavily guarded federal compound outside Miami. Yesterday guards at the facility threatened to arrest a New Times reporter who arrived at and first reported that the prison-like facility was operational. They later made similar threats to reporters from the Miami Herald and WPLG.
After New Times yesterday broke the news that President Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement had quietly reopened a heavily guarded compound outside Miami and placed an estimated 1,000 children there, reporters descended. Security guards at the facility first threatened a New Times journalist with arrest and later did the same to reporters for the Miami Herald and WPLG, who stuck around to photograph the site near Homestead Air Reserve Base.
XXXTentacion, a sensational rapper whose skyrocketing career was rocked by criminal charges of domestic abuse, was shot dead in Deerfield Beach this afternoon. TMZ first reported the shooting, which was later confirmed by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Witnesses on the scene posted graphic images of the rapper motionless in the driver’s seat of a BMW. BSO pronounced him dead around 5:40 p.m.
Roughly 1,000 migrant children are being held inside a secured compound in Homestead, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said today. It’s unclear whether the children crossed the border on their own or whether they were taken from their parents under President Trump’s new policy, which the United Nations says violates international law and which Catholic leaders have decried as “evil.”
Since 2000, Florida has cut its jail admissions rates, pretrial detention populations, and prison admission rates by a huge margin. The state’s urban communities have slightly decreased their arrest and imprisonment rates and slowly (very slowly) tried to become less arrest-happy.
