Earlier this year, an estimated 3,000 kids sat inside the Homestead child-migrant compound waiting to be reunited with sponsors and family members around the country. But now, the facility is rapidly shedding children. This is, possibly, because the facility can only hold 1,200 kids safely during a low-level hurricane, and hurricane season began June 1.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle has been Miami-Dade County’s top prosecutor since 1993. In that time, she has won six straight reelection bids. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of Miami-Dade politics, in many cases she ran unopposed.
For every high-decibel speech delivered by President Donald Trump on the evils of the Nicolás Maduro regime, for every raucous call to solidarity with the people of Venezuela, there has been an equally deafening silence when it comes time to help Venezuelans who have fled from the chaos in their country.
A new report from New American Economy, a bipartisan, pro-immigration group, offers a clearer picture of the economic impact of immigrants in Miami: how much they pay in taxes, how many of them are homeowners and entrepreneurs, and how essential they are to various local industries.
It’s best to start tuning out CNN and MSNBC until the cable news networks stop enabling President Donald Trump’s gaslighting of America.
Donald Trump’s many defenders in Florida — Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Matt Gaetz, et cetera — are currently twisting themselves into pretzel-knots to avoid admitting the Preiisident’s tweets, words, and general demeanor are brazenly racist and dangerous. He told four congresswomen of color to leave…
With its new rule eliminating asylum for most migrants at the southwestern border with Mexico, the Trump administration has bolted shut one of the few remaining legal entryways for Venezuelans seeking safety in the Unites States.
Former Donald Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller’s reputation was already in shambles before today. Miller was the communications director for Trump’s 2016 campaign and was in line to become White House press secretary but ultimately resigned after he admitted to having an affair with a Miami-based Trump staffer, A.J. Delgado, and fathering a lovechild with her.
This past spring, activists were unable to stop the Florida Republican Party from passing Senate Bill 168, a demonstrably racist “sanctuary city” ban that was originally pitched by an anti-immigrant extremist group. And so, a group of nine civil-rights organizations has teamed up with the City of South Miami to instead try to take down the new law in federal court.
Predictably, Florida Republicans are cowardly keeping their mouths shut today as Donald Trump doubles down on one of the most openly racist tirades he’s made during his already racist tenure as president.
The nation’s largest facility for unaccompanied immigrant children is holding more kids than it can safely accommodate during a low-category hurricane. That’s what Homestead officials told a delegation from Amnesty International during a tour of the facility earlier today.
In recent weeks, the for-profit shelter in Homestead that houses thousands of migrant children has come under fire from multiple directions. Lawyers released dozens of affidavits from kids inside the facility who described being lonely, terrified, and even suicidal. Multiple presidential candidates visited the detention center while in town for the Democratic debates, and some — notably Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — called for the shelter to be shut down altogether after saying the children held there are being treated “like little prisoners.”
This past April 14, the Federal Election Commission sent former Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez a letter asking what she’d done with $43,550 that had been donated to her 2018 general-election campaign for U.S. Congress. The FEC was asking, of course, because Rosen Gonzalez didn’t actually compete in that year’s general election…
Miami Commissioner Keon Hardemon, who represents portions of Overtown, Wynwood, Little Haiti, and other areas of central Miami, will likely resign from his seat early to run for a Miami-Dade County Commission seat in 2020. His current city term ends in 2021, and he’s barred from running again due to term limits.
Since its inception, Senate Bill 168 was something critics said Florida never needed. The bill, which originated from an anti-immigrant extremist group, sought to force municipalities across the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and to ban towns from self-designating as sanctuary cities despite the fact no city in Florida does that. Nevertheless, state legislators passed the bill, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law last month.
The politician who previously represented Homestead in Congress — former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo — seemingly did little to raise awareness about the kids inside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. But the Democrat who replaced him, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, has made the detention center one of her main priorities.
Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro oversaw thousands of extrajudicial killings, countless arbitrary political detentions, torture, and the use of excessive force against protesters, according to a new United Nations report. And that was just in the past 18 months.
The political price of being a cog in the Trump administration’s immigrant detention and deportation machine is getting steeper. Outrage over the callous treatment of immigrant families in the U.S. has distilled into outrage toward the companies willing to help the federal government carry out its anti-immigrant agenda.
Opa-locka is a city that pretty much shouldn’t exist. The FBI raided City Hall in 2016. City services are broken to the point that straight-up human feces recently flooded city streets. To fix the mess, officials brought in ex-County Manager Merrett Stierheim, a man who’s seen his fair share of political shenanigans, but Stierheim quit and said the place wasn’t fixable. Some of the city’s own residents in 2017 tried to mount a (failed) campaign to dissolve Opa-locka entirely.
Sweetwater, the Miami-Dade city best known as the home of Florida International University, is equally famous for a corruption scandal by its former mayor, who was sentenced to prison in 2014. But now, the city is bearing the burden of yet another ex-mayor’s misbehavior.
Miami is utterly sweltering today. Earlier this morning, WeatherUnderground reported that — with humidity taken into account — the temperature felt like 115 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Yet tons of immigrants are stuck in the heat this week at South Florida’s main Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar, where ICE keeps immigrants waiting outdoors in what is essentially a caged pen for hours at a time.
In 2018, the Florida Democratic Party said it would stop taking donations from private, for-profit prison firms. So, after New Times first reported last month that the party had accepted a $10,000 check from inmate-transport company G4S Secure Solutions — a company that also runs private prisons in other countries — activists cried foul. Now, the party says it will return the money.
