Carlos Curbelo, the congressman who represents South Miami-Dade County and the Florida Keys, is up for reelection this year. He’s a Republican but is trying oh so desperately to convince voters he’s a moderate with a conscience. He’s not one of those mean, racist conservatives! He just hates taxes!
This past April 23, Maribel Torres’ father called Miami-Dade County Police to say he hadn’t heard from his daughter in months. He suspected that her husband, 36-year-old Jimmy Torres, might be involved in her disappearance.
Living in a home with more than one room shouldn’t really be considered a luxury in 21st-century America. The richest nation on the planet certainly has the resources to make sure single working parents or janitors on 12-hour shifts aren’t forced to live in hovels. Yet here we are: The nonprofit National Low-Income Housing Coalition released a report yesterday titled “Out of Reach,”…
Carlos Curbelo, the allegedly moderate Republican U.S. representative who represents South Miami-Dade and the Florida Keys, is staking his reelection effort on passing a bill protecting “Dreamers,” a class of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Curbelo’s 26th congressional district is a Democrat-heavy swing area that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the congressman seems terrified he might lose his seat this November.
Thanks to the incredible work of the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, Americans learned in September 2016 — two months before the presidential election — that Donald Trump’s web of personal charities seemed about as legitimate as vending machine companies run by the Genovese crime family. Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer Prize for doggedly tracking how Trump, among other things, used a quarter-million dollars from his charity to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit corporations.
Last week, activists warned that the Glades County Detention Center was abusing Muslim detainees and refusing to let them observe Ramadan. Lawyers with the groups Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice warned there were only eight days of the Islamic holy month left and begged ICE and Glades County Sheriff David Hardin, who runs the jail, to change their ways before time ran out.
This past October 31, Jose Alfonso, a former City of Miami cop working as an investigator for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office, was heralded as a hero after he used his government-issued gun to wound an armed robber at a CVS in Perrine. Barely seven months later, on June 4, Alfonso was fired. The reason: He had repeatedly threatened to shoot and kill his co-workers…
Carlos Curbelo, the congressman for South Miami-Dade and the Florida Keys who voted in 2017 for a failed Obamacare-repeal package and successful tax cut for the wealthy, appears to be trying to pin his 2018 reelection bid on a last-ditch effort to reinstate the DREAM Act. Curbelo’s district voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016…
The GEO Group, the second-largest private-prison operator in America, is headquartered in Boca Raton and loves greasing the Florida political system. GEO is one of the most powerful political donors in the state. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican politician who hasn’t accepted a few thousand dollars in campaign bucks from the giant, and more than a fair share of local Democrats have done the same.
In a small village like Biscayne Park, where crime is rare and local cops often have little to do besides keep an eye out for minor crimes such as car burglaries and vandalism, keeping pristine stats is all that matters. When your department has only a few dozen crimes a year to investigate, it looks pretty bad if you can’t solve them.
Before deporting anyone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are supposed to ask refugees, asylum seekers, and anyone else they meet at the nation’s borders whether they’re fleeing persecution in another country. José Crespo-Cagant says that after he came out as gay while living in Mexico in 2002, he was fired…
Rapper XXXTentacion, a Broward County musician named Jahseh Onfroy, has a startling history of alleged physical and verbal abuse toward women. New Times last week published a startling look at Onfroy’s career: In a long-form profile, reporter Tarpley Hitt spoke to both Onfroy, who is living in his Parkland home on house arrest, as well as Onfroy’s alleged victim and former girlfriend, Geneva Ayala.
North Miami Beach Mayor George Vallejo pleaded guilty in April to a raft of campaign-finance violations, including diverting at least $5,000 in campaign money to shell corporations he and his family used to pay off personal expenses. Vallejo, age 51, stepped down as mayor and received three months of house arrest plus probation.
The chef-turned-television-host filmed several episodes of his shows in Miami. He would always ask local chefs and celebrities to act as tour guides and ambassadors. The list of Miamians tasked with showing him around included Kris Wessel, Michelle Bernstein, Michael Schwartz, and Richard Hales.
When 92 Somali detainees were flown from Louisiana to Dakar, Senegal, and then inexplicably taken to Miami at the end of 2017, immigration lawyers representing the group were particularly worried about one thing: While some of the detainees were being held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome Processing Center in West Miami-Dade…
By the middle of 2016, it seemed like Marco Rubio had become a failed presidential candidate doomed to sit at home on his couch going bald while watching Donald Trump confuse the lyrics of “God Bless America” with the theme song from Growing Pains. Improbably, since he took office, Trump has instead let Senator Rubio influence every major Latin American policy decision…
American’s incarceration rate is absurdly, stupidly high. The United States imprisons more of its population than noted human-rights scofflaws such as Cuba, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — by a huge margin.
When gun store owner Ted Budd successfully ran for Congress in North Carolina in 2016, he recorded an ad about how much he loves weapons. The ad included shots of him selling guns, cocking a rifle outdoors, and loading an assault-style rifle. In 2012, Budd speculated that the Sandy Hook massacre likely led to increased sales at his shop.
When 72 percent of Florida voters chose to legalize medical marijuana via a 2016 ballot initiative, most of them expected to be able to light up bongs, bowls, and blunts stuffed with newly legal cannabis. Because nothing is ever easy in Florida, that wasn’t the case: The state Legislature outlawed smoking medical pot and instead legalized only edibles, vaporized pot, and cannabis oil.
Slightly more than three months after David Hogg was forced to hide in a closet to avoid being shot to death in a school massacre, some monster today prank-called a SWAT team to the teen’s house. Thankfully, the Miami Herald reports Hogg wasn’t home at the time — but that doesn’t make the prank any less heinous and cruel.
In 2014, James Eric McDonough walked into Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle’s office, placed his cell phone on the chief’s desk, and began recording. Rolle later claimed McDonough never warned him he was capturing their conversation, which, if true, might have been a violation of Florida’s “wiretapping” laws requiring that all parties consent to being recorded. Rolle contacted Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who sent McDonough a letter threatening to arrest him if he ever recorded the chief like that again.
In 1996, Democrats and Republicans of all stripes were united in what they then referred to as “welfare reform,” a project designed to make it more difficult for low-income Americans to obtain benefits such as food stamps or Medicaid. By making it harder to get assistance, politicos argued, the poor would try harder to get work. After passing a law banning felons with drug convictions from receiving food stamps, the feds said the reforms would also strike a blow to drug crimes.
