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.
West of Miami is Big Cypress National Preserve, an expanse of prairie, bog, and hardwood forest that includes dwarf cypress trees. These rarely grow taller than 15 feet. They provide roosting sites for bluebirds, food for the cypress fox squirrel, and scratching posts for the Florida panther and black bear.
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.
On November 2, 2014, Jennifer Harper called 911 about a domestic dispute with her husband. But when Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s Weston home that night, they decided to take her, not her husband, into custody.
In 2012, Miami-Dade County became one of the first places to test a gunshot-detection technology called ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to alert police to gunfire. But after a year of the pilot program, the county abandoned the system over concerns about its effectiveness: Officers were able to confirm only 50 shootings of 1,000 supposedly detected by ShotSpotter, and the department couldn’t point to a single crime the technology helped solve.
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…
This past May 11, county commission candidate and longtime GOP insider Alex Diaz de la Portilla glad-handed seniors at the Little Havana Activities and Nutrition Center. Slinging heaping plates of paella right alongside him was Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo, a fellow Trump-backing MAGA warrior who was among Diaz de la Portilla’s biggest backers in his failed bid for office.
In 2016, after years of financial mismanagement left Opa-locka nearly $8 million in debt, Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of financial emergency and placed city officials on a restrictive spending diet. A state oversight board tasked with keeping the city on track warned that the belt-tightening might take some getting used to…
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.
Yesterday New Times published a profile of controversial SoundCloud artist XXXTentacion. The 20-year-old rapper, whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy, is on house arrest while awaiting trial for a long list of disturbing charges, including witness tampering, witness harassment, false imprisonment, and aggravated battery of a pregnant victim. The piece reported that Onfroy’s alleged victim, Geneva Ayala, started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for her extensive hospital bills.
In January 2016, 15-year-old Alder Hill was bicycling home through Liberty City when someone jumped him, dragged him into a grassy field, and sprayed his body full of bullets. Dozens of people soon gathered at the murder scene, some snapping photos of the dead teen and uploading them to social media.
Let’s be completely honest, Miami. Many Heat fans are only now getting over the fact that LeBron James left four years ago to return to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. We had to journey through a full 12-step process to reach acceptance, and along the way, many Heat fans had to collect a medallion at each achievement.
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.
Every morning for the past 25 years, a flock of blue and gold macaws has flown into Daria Feinstein’s backyard in Coral Gables. They swoop between surrounding homes and over boats docked on the nearby canal to perch on Feinstein’s royal palms and poincianas or maybe have a bite to eat on the artificial nests she’s set up for them.
At 10 a.m. Monday, the students of March for Our Lives gathered at Pine Trails Park in Parkland to announce the latest phase of their gun-control movement: a national tour to register young voters. Focusing on cities where the debate over gun control is particularly charged, the 60-day campaign will…
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.
