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Tag: migrant

  • Pakistan’s defense minister says that there is now ‘open war’ with Afghanistan

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    Pakistan’s defense minister early Friday said that his country had run out of “patience” and now considers itself in an “open war” with neighboring Afghanistan after both sides launched strikes following what Islamabad described as an Afghan cross-border attack.In a post on X, Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif said Pakistan had hoped for peace in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO forces and expected the Taliban to focus on the welfare of the Afghan people and regional stability. Instead, he alleged, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan “into a colony of India,” gathered militants from around the world and begun “exporting terrorism.”Video above: Shiite Muslims take part in a rally to condemn Israeli strikes on Iran “Our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us,” he said. There has been no reaction from Afghan government officials to Asif’s comments.Pakistan has frequently accused neighboring India of backing the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army and the Pakistani Taliban, allegations New Delhi denies.His remarks came hours after Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, as well as in Kandahar in the south and Paktia province in the southeast, according to Pakistani officials and Afghanistan government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid. Pakistan says the strikes were in retaliation for Afghan cross-border attacks.The escalation comes months after Qatar and Turkey mediated a ceasefire between the two sides.Both governments have issued sharply differing casualty claims and said they inflicted heavy losses on the other. The claims could not be independently verified.Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry said overnight that 55 Pakistani soldiers had been killed, including some whose bodies were taken into Afghanistan, and that “several others were captured alive.” It said eight Afghan soldiers were killed and 11 wounded. The ministry said it destroyed 19 Pakistani army posts and two bases and that the fighting ended around midnight, about four hours after it began Thursday.Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said two Pakistani soldiers were killed and three wounded.Mosharraf Ali Zaidi, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, denied that any Pakistani soldiers had been captured. In a post on X, he said at least 133 Afghan fighters were killed and more than 200 wounded. He also said 27 Afghan posts were destroyed and nine fighters captured. He did not specify where the casualties occurred but said additional losses were estimated in strikes on military targets in Kabul, Paktia and Kandahar.In Islamabad, two senior security officials said Afghan forces at some border posts had raised white flags, a gesture typically interpreted as a request to halt firing. The officials said Pakistani forces were continuing what they described as a strong retaliatory response to “unprovoked aggression” by the Afghan Taliban and had destroyed several key Taliban posts along the border.The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Asif also accused the Taliban government of denying Afghans basic human rights, including rights for women that he said are guaranteed under Islam, without providing details or evidence.He said Pakistan had tried to maintain stability both directly and through friendly countries. “Today, when attempts were made to target Pakistan with aggression, by the grace of God, our armed forces are giving a decisive response,” he said.Authorities in Pakistan said dozens of Afghan refugees who were waiting to return home from the northwestern Torkham border have been taken back to safer places following the eruption of clashes.Pakistan launched a sweeping crackdown in Oct. 2023 to expel migrants without documents, urging those in the country to leave of their own accord to avoid arrest and forcible deportation and forcibly expelling others. Iran also began a crackdown on migrants at around the same time.Since then, millions have streamed across the border into Afghanistan, including people who were born in Pakistan decades ago and had built lives and created businesses there.Last year alone, 2.9 million people returned to Afghanistan, the U.N. refugee agency has said, with nearly 80,000 having returned so far this year.Afghan reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Associated Press writers Riaz Khan and Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan, Eduardo Castillo in Beijing and Elena Becatoros in Athens, Greece, also contributed to this story.

    ISLAMABAD, Islamabad Capital Territory —

    Pakistan’s defense minister early Friday said that his country had run out of “patience” and now considers itself in an “open war” with neighboring Afghanistan after both sides launched strikes following what Islamabad described as an Afghan cross-border attack.

    In a post on X, Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif said Pakistan had hoped for peace in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO forces and expected the Taliban to focus on the welfare of the Afghan people and regional stability. Instead, he alleged, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan “into a colony of India,” gathered militants from around the world and begun “exporting terrorism.”

    Video above: Shiite Muslims take part in a rally to condemn Israeli strikes on Iran

    “Our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us,” he said. There has been no reaction from Afghan government officials to Asif’s comments.

    Pakistan has frequently accused neighboring India of backing the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army and the Pakistani Taliban, allegations New Delhi denies.

    His remarks came hours after Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, as well as in Kandahar in the south and Paktia province in the southeast, according to Pakistani officials and Afghanistan government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid. Pakistan says the strikes were in retaliation for Afghan cross-border attacks.

    The escalation comes months after Qatar and Turkey mediated a ceasefire between the two sides.

    Both governments have issued sharply differing casualty claims and said they inflicted heavy losses on the other. The claims could not be independently verified.

    Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry said overnight that 55 Pakistani soldiers had been killed, including some whose bodies were taken into Afghanistan, and that “several others were captured alive.” It said eight Afghan soldiers were killed and 11 wounded. The ministry said it destroyed 19 Pakistani army posts and two bases and that the fighting ended around midnight, about four hours after it began Thursday.

    Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said two Pakistani soldiers were killed and three wounded.

    Mosharraf Ali Zaidi, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, denied that any Pakistani soldiers had been captured. In a post on X, he said at least 133 Afghan fighters were killed and more than 200 wounded. He also said 27 Afghan posts were destroyed and nine fighters captured. He did not specify where the casualties occurred but said additional losses were estimated in strikes on military targets in Kabul, Paktia and Kandahar.

    In Islamabad, two senior security officials said Afghan forces at some border posts had raised white flags, a gesture typically interpreted as a request to halt firing. The officials said Pakistani forces were continuing what they described as a strong retaliatory response to “unprovoked aggression” by the Afghan Taliban and had destroyed several key Taliban posts along the border.

    The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

    Asif also accused the Taliban government of denying Afghans basic human rights, including rights for women that he said are guaranteed under Islam, without providing details or evidence.

    He said Pakistan had tried to maintain stability both directly and through friendly countries. “Today, when attempts were made to target Pakistan with aggression, by the grace of God, our armed forces are giving a decisive response,” he said.

    Authorities in Pakistan said dozens of Afghan refugees who were waiting to return home from the northwestern Torkham border have been taken back to safer places following the eruption of clashes.

    Pakistan launched a sweeping crackdown in Oct. 2023 to expel migrants without documents, urging those in the country to leave of their own accord to avoid arrest and forcible deportation and forcibly expelling others. Iran also began a crackdown on migrants at around the same time.

    Since then, millions have streamed across the border into Afghanistan, including people who were born in Pakistan decades ago and had built lives and created businesses there.

    Last year alone, 2.9 million people returned to Afghanistan, the U.N. refugee agency has said, with nearly 80,000 having returned so far this year.

    Afghan reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Associated Press writers Riaz Khan and Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan, Eduardo Castillo in Beijing and Elena Becatoros in Athens, Greece, also contributed to this story.

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  • Firmness, flattery and phone calls: How Mexico’s president won over Trump

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    MEXICO CITY — He has called Colombian President Gustavo Petro “a sick man” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator.” He once slammed French President Emmanuel Macron as “publicity-seeking,” and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest and weak.”

    President Trump is known for hurling scathing insults at world leaders.

    Then there’s Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. The U.S. president has described her, at turns, as “fantastic,” “terrific” and “elegant.”

    In a social media post Thursday, he offered his most glowing compliments yet, extolling Sheinbaum as “wonderful and highly intelligent” and saying Mexicans “should be very happy” to have her as their leader.

    Trump’s emphatic praise for Sheinbaum is surprising, given their marked differences in temperament and politics.

    Sheinbaum, a leftist known for her patience and pragmatism, labeled Israel’s U.S.-backed war in Gaza a “genocide” and condemned the recent U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

    She disagrees with Trump on three of his firmly held beliefs: that the U.S. should raise tariffs on Mexican imports, expel migrants en masse, and attack drug traffickers inside Mexico.

    But Sheinbaum is keenly aware of how Trump’s actions on trade, immigration and security could plunge Mexico into turmoil, potentially threatening her own popularity and the legacy of the ruling party founded by her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

    So she has tread strategically, requesting frequent phone calls with Trump, making concessions on issues such as security and heaping praise right back at him. She described her conversation with Trump on Thursday as “productive and cordial” and added: “I had the pleasure of greeting his wife, Melania.”

    So far, her tactics have worked. Trump’s repeated threats of sweeping tariffs on Mexican goods and drone attacks on cartel targets have not yet come to pass.

    Managing Trump has been one of the biggest — and perhaps most consequential — focal points of Sheinbaum’s presidency. “It’s not something that just happened today,” she said recently of her relationship with Trump. “Communication, coordination, and defending the people of Mexico … are constants.”

    Sheinbaum has been quelling nerves in Mexico since Trump’s election in late 2024, just weeks after she assumed the presidency. She promised to forge strong bonds with the incoming U.S. leader, who is widely disliked here for his diatribes against immigrants. Sheinbaum vowed to emulate Kalimán, a beloved Mexican comic-book superhero known for defeating villains with “serenity and patience.”

    She has sought to command Trump’s respect in other ways, holding massive public rallies that demonstrate widespread support for her government. “We will always hold our heads high,” she said at one event shortly before Trump took office. “Mexico is a free, independent, and sovereign country. We coordinate, we collaborate, but we do not submit.”

    In some ways, Trump has actually galvanized support for Sheinbaum by sparking a surge in nationalism. Polls show most Mexicans approve of her handling of the bilateral relationship. According to a poll conducted by El País newspaper, her approval rating soared to 83% in May after she persuaded Trump to postpone the implementation of heavy tariffs. It now stands around 74%.

    Still, some political analysts point out that Trump may like Sheinbaum because, despite her talk of defending Mexico’s sovereignty, she has actually acquiesced to him many times, particularly on issues of security.

    “The list of concessions to Trump accumulated in a single year far surpasses in scope and depth those made by supposedly more ‘subservient’ governments,” wrote columnist Jorge Lomonaco in El Universal newspaper.

    Sheinbaum has deployed Mexican troops to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border. She has sent dozens of accused drug criminals to the U.S. to face trial there, sidestepping the standard extradition process to do so. She imposed tariffs on some imports from China and other countries, and her government reportedly paused shipments of oil to Cuba, signaling a possible end to what Sheinbaum had lauded as a “humanitarian” effort to aid the embattled island nation — another possible target of Trump.

    “In public, Sheinbaum’s government has maintained a sovereign and patriotic rhetoric, but it is evident that, in private, it has been very docile with the U.S.,” Lomonaco wrote.

    Trump’s discourse with Mexico continues to be infused with threats. While he calls Sheinbaum a “good woman,” he also said in May that she is “so afraid of the cartels she can’t even think straight.”

    Many believe Trump’s decision to send U.S. special forces to arrest Maduro and his wife in Caracas could embolden him to launch a U.S. military attack on cartels in Mexico — a move that Sheinbaum would clearly see as crossing a red line, and could probably ignite a political crisis here.

    “I do think there’s a real risk of a strike on Mexican soil against cartels, especially after what happened in Venezuela,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

    Mexico, he said, is attempting “a delicate balance of keeping U.S. authorities happy without falling into this perennial game of trying to appease the White House and do everything that Trump wants.”

    Trump has also threatened to pull out of a trilateral trade deal with Canada, which was negotiated during his first term. The U.S., Mexico and Canada must launch a joint review of the free trade pact by July 1, its sixth anniversary, to determine whether the nations intend to renew it for 16 more years or make modifications. Trump has called the deal “irrelevant,” but the pact is fundamental to a Mexican economy heavily dependent on cross-border trade.

    Meantime, a controversy arose last week surrounding the mysterious capture in Mexico of Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who faces federal charges in California of running a billion-dollar drug-trafficking ring.

    Sheinbaum dismissed reports that FBI agents on the ground in Mexico participated in the the arrest of Wedding, who, according to U.S. authorities, had been hiding for years in Mexico.

    Sheinbaum insisted that Wedding turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and, at a news briefing, displayed a photograph that she said depicted Wedding outside the embassy.

    But Canadian media said the image was probably fake, a creation of artificial intelligence. Sheinbaum dodged questions about the image’s authenticity. Wedding’s lawyer, Anthony Colombo, disputed Sheinbaum’s account that Wedding turned himself in. “He was arrested,” Colombo told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Santa Ana, where Wedding entered a not guilty plea. “He did not surrender.”

    Sheinbaum was able to weather the dispute, but the episode again raised questions about how far the Mexican president is willing to go to keep Trump happy.

    “It would be very very concerning — and certainly illegal under Mexican law — if the FBI operated and arrested an individual on Mexican soil,” said Flores-Macías, who added: “I think there are some clear signs that this took place without the involvement of Mexican authorities.”

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.

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    Kate Linthicum, Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Deported to danger: Returning migrants discover a Mexico transformed by cartels

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    MEXICO CITY — Adrián Ramírez hadn’t been to his hometown in western Mexico for more than two decades. When he finally returned there early last year after being deported from the United States, he found the place transformed.

    Ramírez remembered the town as vibrant. But the discotheque where he used to dance through the night in his 20s was gone. The bustling evening market, where locals gather for tacos, now empties out early. After 10 p.m., cartel members wielding military-grade weapons take control of the streets.

    “It is no longer the same Mexico of my childhood,” said Ramírez, 45, who asked to be identified by his middle and last name for security reasons. “There was more joy, more freedom. But that’s not the case anymore.”

    Anyone returning to their hometown after decades away will note changes — old businesses close and new ones open, some people move away and others die. Adjusting to such shifts has long been part of the Mexican migrant experience.

    But many of the tens of thousands of people who have been deported to Mexico by the Trump administration have spent decades in the U.S. and are discovering that their country has also changed in more profound ways.

    Criminal groups, better armed and better organized than in the past, now control about a third of Mexican territory, according to an analysis by the U.S. military. Gangs have branched out beyond drug trafficking to extort money from small businesses and dominate entire industries, such as the avocado and lime trade. In some regions, criminals charge taxes on just about anything — tortillas and chicken, cigarettes and beer.

    Military forces provide security during a meeting about the Michoacan Plan for Peace and Justice, at the facilities of the Morelos barracks in the XXI Military Zone in Morelia, Micoacan, Mexico, in November.

    (Enrique Castro / AFP via Getty Images)

    Parts of Michoacán, the state where Ramírez is from, now resemble an actual battlefield, with criminal groups fighting each other with grenade launchers, drones rigged with explosives and improvised land mines.

    Returning migrants are vulnerable to violence because they stand out. Many speak Spanglish. Their stylish haircuts, often with fades on the sides, set them apart in rural communities. So does their gringo-style attire, like baggy pants and T-shirts touting their favorite sports teams — Dodgers, Raiders, Dallas Cowboys. Ramírez said that even his mannerisms, which had changed from years up north, quickly identified him as an outsider.

    Cartels single out returning migrants for kidnapping or extortion because they are perceived to have money, said Israel Concha, who runs Nuevo Comienzos, or New Beginnings, a nonprofit with offices in Las Vegas and Mexico City that supports deportees. Returnees often don’t know how to navigate cartel-run checkpoints or local rules set by criminal groups.

    “We’re an easy target,” Concha said.

    Concha said he was abducted and tortured by cartel members in 2014 after he was deported to Mexico. He said 16 migrants from his organization’s support group have been assassinated or disappeared since he founded his organization.

    Ten of those cases happened in the last year.

    In May, a recently returned man vanished after leaving his job at a hotel in the central state of Querétaro, Concha said. His parents, giving up hope of finding him alive, held a funeral and a Mass for him in October.

    Ramírez left his town in Michoacán state for the United States when he was 21, hoping to save money so he could come back home and build a house of his own.

    But life happened — Ramírez got married and had three children — and he stayed. He was washing cars and driving for Uber in Nashville before he was deported.

    Returning to Michoacán was bittersweet. He cried with happiness as he hugged his mother and siblings for the first time in years. But shortly after, he was interrogated by a cartel member on the street who wanted to know his name and what he did for a living. Another cartel member photographed him while he strolled the town plaza.

    His town had once been famous for its cheese production. Now its most dominant industry is fuel theft, a booming multimillion-dollar enterprise in Mexico. Criminals with the Jalisco New Generation cartel recently burned down the town’s two gas stations and killed the owner to assert their control over the pueblo, Ramírez said. They then set up their own illegal stations, leaving locals no choice but to buy from them.

    The authorities were no help.

    Ramírez learned from his family that the mayor had been handpicked by the cartel. The police are also in cahoots with criminals. After a relative suffered an accident, the cops who responded ended up extorting money from him, Ramírez said.

    Ramírez began to fear for his life. He wondered whether it might be time to leave, and if so, where he would go.

    A growing number of Mexicans are being forced to flee their communities because of violence, data show. The conflict-ridden states of Michoacán, Chiapas and Zacatecas have seen particularly high levels of displacement.

    Israel Ibarra, a migration expert at the College of the Northern Border, said migrants returning to war-torn communities often end up having to leave again.

    “They are not only becoming deported people,” he said. “They will experience double-forced displacement.”

    That is what happened to a man who returned to a town few hours away from where Ramírez grew up, in the mountains of Michoacán. A local rancher hired the migrant to manage his herd of cattle.

    Contracting outsiders requires vetting and approval by the regional faction of the cartel, which the rancher had not done. No locals had dared help the rancher repair his fence and care for his herd because of the cartel requisites, leaving the rancher with a limited employment pool.

    The migrant, who declined to provide his name because he feared for his life, didn’t fully recognize the power wielded by cartels and took the job. The rancher also paid better than others, to the consternation of the Jalisco cartel, which controls wages in the area.

    One morning, sicarios arrived at the migrant’s home and fired round after round of bullets into the building. The worker fled out the back door as gunmen stormed in.

    “They left me in ruin,” he said. “They took everything.” He went into hiding in Michoacán’s capital.

    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum touts data showing that homicides fell during her first year in office. But the number of people being disappeared has surged across the country, particularly in cartel-controlled regions. And shocking acts of violence continue to make headlines.

    “For people who left a long time ago, many of them are coming back to communities that are much more violent than they were when they left,” said Andrew Selee of the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute.

    In Michocán in the fall, the Jalisco cartel is accused of assassinating a prominent mayor who had vowed to hold criminals accountable. In December the group detonated a car bomb in a municipality located along a top cocaine-trafficking route, killing four police officers.

    Deportations to Mexico were fewer last year than either of the two previous years, according to data from the country’s National Migration Institute. But President Trump’s hard-line deportation campaign means fewer migrants who were returned to Mexico are attempting to cross back into the the U.S., experts said.

    Sheinbaum’s government launched a reintegration program called México te Abraza, or Mexico welcomes you with open arms, that has provided limited support to those returning, according to migrant advocates.

    Under the program, migrants are supposed to be given around $100 and a bus ticket to their hometown. But Concha said that some don’t receive the money and that migrants need much more help. “The program doesn’t work,” Concha said. “We need something more comprehensive that also supports emotional and mental health.”

    Ramírez wants to return to the U.S. to be with his family but is afraid of ending up in detention there.

    He misses his children, and dreams of buying them plane tickets so they can visit. But he is afraid of exposing them to Mexico’s violence. “It’s a very different kind of life here,” he said. “It hurts me what’s happening.”

    He decided to leave his pueblo a few months ago. The town where he is now living seems more tranquil, although it is also controlled by the Jalisco cartel. After he got a job at a tortilleria, his new employer warned him: Cartel members may stop by to ask him where he’s from.

    This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom that covers stories from Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border.

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    Steve Fisher, Kate Linthicum

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  • ‘We just want our lives back.’ Maduro’s gone, but what’s next for 8 million Venezuelans who fled?

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    MEXICO CITY — Andrea Paola Hernández has one sister in Ecuador and another in London. She has cousins in Colombia, Chile, Argentina and the United States.

    All fled poverty and political repression in Venezuela. Hernández, a human rights activist and outspoken critic of the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, eventually left, too.

    Since 2022 she has lived in Mexico City, working odd jobs for under-the-table pay because she lacks legal status. She cries most days, and dreams of reuniting with her far-flung relatives and friends. “We just want our lives back,” she said.

    One of Maduro’s darkest legacies was the exodus of 8 million Venezuelans during his 13-year rule, one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. The flight of a third of the country’s population ripped apart families and has shaped the cultural and political landscape in the dozens of nations where Venezuelans have settled.

    The surprise U.S. operation to capture Maduro this month has prompted mixed feelings among the diaspora. Relief, but also apprehension.

    From Europe to Latin America to the U.S., those who left are asking whether they finally can go home. And if they do, what would they return to?

    ‘An ounce of justice’

    Hernández was distressed by the U.S. attack, which killed dozens of people and is widely seen as illegal under international law. Still, she celebrated Maduro’s arrest as “an ounce of justice after decades of injustice.”

    Andrea Paola Hernández, 30, an Afro-Indigenous, queer, feminist activist and writer from Maracaibo, Venezuela, stands for a portrait on the roof of her building on Friday in Mexico City. Hernández left Caracas in 2022.

    (Alejandra Rajal / For The Times)

    She is wary of what is to come.

    President Trump has repeatedly touted Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, saying little about restoring democracy to the country. He says the U.S. will work with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as Venezuela’s interim leader.

    Hernández doesn’t trust Rodríguez, whom she believes is as responsible as anyone else for Venezuela’s misery: the eight-hour lines for food and medicine, the violent repression of street protests and the 2024 election that Maduro is widely believed to have rigged to stay in power.

    Hernández blames the regime for personal pain, too. For the death of an aunt during the pandemic because there was no electricity to power ventilators; for the widespread hunger that caused her mother to tell her children: “We can have dinner or breakfast, but not both.”

    Hernández, who believes she was being surveilled by Maduro’s government, says she will return to Venezuela only after elections have been held. “I’m not going back until I know that I’m not going to be killed or put in jail.”

    ‘Our identity was shattered’

    Many in the diaspora are trying to reconcile conflicting emotions.

    Damián Suárez, 37, an artist who left Venezuela for Chile in 2011 and who now lives in Mexico, said he was surprised to find himself defending the actions of Trump, a leader whose politics he otherwise disdains.

    “We were fragmented and demoralized, and then someone came along and imprisoned the person responsible for all of that,” Suárez said. “When you’re drowning, you’re going to thank the person rescuing you, no matter who it is.”

    A man in black clothing stands in an art gallery.

    Damián Suárez at his studio in the Condesa neighborhood on Friday in Mexico City. He arrived from Venezuela in 2011 and works as an artist and curator.

    (Alejandra Rajal / For The Times)

    Many countries have denounced the attack on Caracas and Trump’s vow to “run” the country in the short term as an unacceptable violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty.

    For Suárez, those arguments ring hollow. For years, he said, the international community did little to mitigate the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

    “A cry for help from millions of people went unanswered,” Suárez said. “The only thing worse than intervention is indifference.”

    A work of embroidery art.

    One of the first embroidery art works made by Damián Suárez as a child on display in his studio, in la Condesa in Mexico City. To this day, he uses string as his primary material, a form of resistance and defiance rooted in the hand-labor traditions of the community he comes from.

    (Alejandra Rajal / For The Times)

    Suárez, who is organizing an art show about Venezuela, blames Maduro for what he sees as a “spiritual void” among migrants who lost not just their physical home but also the people who gave meaning to their lives.

    “Our identity was shattered,” he said, comparing migrants with “plants ripped from their soil.”

    And though Maduro now sits in a jail in Brooklyn facing drug trafficking charges, Suárez said he will not go back to Venezuela.

    He has a Mexican passport now and helped his family migrate to Mexico City. After years of feeling stateless, he’s finally planted roots.

    Building lives in new countries

    Tomás Paez, a Venezuelan sociologist living in Spain who studies the diaspora, says that surveys over the years show that only about 20% of immigrants say they would return permanently to Venezuela. Many have built lives in their new countries, he said.

    Paez, who left Venezuela several years ago as inflation spiraled and crime spiked, has grandchildren in Spain and said he would be loath to leave them.

    “There isn’t a family in Venezuela that doesn’t have a son, a brother, an uncle, or a nephew living elsewhere,” he said, adding that 50% of households in Venezuela depend on remittances from abroad. “Migration has broadened Venezuela’s borders. We’re talking about a whole new geography.”

    Migrants left Venezuela under diverse circumstances. Earlier waves left on flights with immigration documents. More recent departees often take clandestine overland routes into Colombia or Brazil or risked the dangerous journey across the Darien Gap into Central America on their way north.

    The restriction of immigration law across Latin America has made it harder and harder for migrants to find refuge. One fourth of Venezuelan migrants globally lack legal immigration status, Paez said. And a majority don’t have Venezuelan passports, which are difficult to acquire or renew from abroad.

    ‘So tired of politics’

    Throughout the Western Hemisphere, enclaves of Venezuelans have sprouted up, such as one in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, a Mexican town near the border with Guatemala.

    Richard Osorio ended up there with his husband after a stint living in Texas. Osorio’s husband was deported from the U.S. in August as part of Trump’s crackdown on Venezuelan migrants. Osorio joined him in Mexico after a lawyer told him that U.S. immigration agents might target him, too, because he has tattoos, even though they are of birds and flowers.

    The pair are undocumented in Mexico and work for cash at one of the Venezuelan restaurants that have sprung up in recent months.

    On the day of the U.S. operation that resulted in Maduro’s arrest, hundreds of Venezuelans cheered the news in a local square. Osorio was working a 14-hour shift and missed the party. It was fine. He didn’t have the energy to celebrate.

    “I’m so tired of politics, of these ups and downs that we’ve experienced for years,” Osorio said. “At every turn, there’s been suffering.”

    Richard Osorio poses for a portrait in Juarez, Mexico.

    Richard Osorio poses for a portrait in Juarez, Mexico, in July.

    (Alejandro Cegarra / For The Times)

    He had a hard time conjuring warm feelings for Trump given the U.S. president’s war on immigrants, including the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans that he claimed were gang members to an infamous prison in El Salvador.

    Maduro and Trump, he said, are more alike than many people admit. Neither cares for human rights or democracy. “We felt the same way in the U.S. as we did in Venezuela,” Osorio said.

    He said he wouldn’t return to Venezuela until there were decent jobs and protections for the LGBTQ+ community. Life in southern Mexico was dangerous, he said, and he wasn’t earning enough to send money to relatives back home.

    But returning to Venezuela didn’t feel like an option yet.

    Daring to dream

    Hernández, the writer and activist, said many in the diaspora are too traumatized to imagine a future in Venezuela. “We’ve all been deprived of so much,” she said.

    But when she dares to dream, she pictures a Venezuela with free elections, functioning schools, hospitals and a vibrant cultural scene. She sees members of the diaspora returning, and improving the country with the skills they’ve learned abroad.

    “We all want to go back and build,” she said. The question now is when.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • The Supreme Court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with key exceptions

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    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ended the first year of President Trump’s second term with a record of rulings that gave him much broader power to control the federal government.

    In a series of fast-track decisions, the justices granted emergency appeals and set aside rulings from district judges who blocked Trump’s orders from taking effect.

    With the court’s approval, the administration dismissed thousands of federal employees, cut funding for education and health research grants, dismantled the agency that funds foreign aid and cleared the way for the U.S. military to reject transgender troops.

    But the court also put two important checks on the president’s power.

    In April, the court twice ruled — including in a post-midnight order — that the Trump administration could not secretly whisk immigrants out of the country without giving them a hearing before a judge.

    Upon taking office, Trump claimed migrants who were alleged to belong to “foreign terrorist” gangs could be arrested as “enemy aliens” and flown secretly to a prison in El Salvador.

    Roberts and the court blocked such secret deportations and said the 5th Amendment entitles immigrants, like citizens, a right to “due process of law.” Many of the arrested men had no criminal records and said they never belonged to a criminal gang.
    Those who face deportation “are entitled to notice and opportunity to challenge their removal,” the justices said in Trump vs. J.G.G.

    They also required the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. He is now back in Maryland with his wife, but may face further criminal charges or efforts to deport him.

    And last week, Roberts and the court barred Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago to enforce the immigration laws.

    Trump had claimed he had the power to defy state governors and deploy the Guard troops in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Chicago and other Democratic-led states and cities.

    The Supreme Court disagreed over dissents from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

    For much of the year, however, Roberts and the five other conservatives were in the majority ruling for Trump. In dissent, the three liberal justices said the court should stand aside for now and defer to district judges.

    In May, the court agreed that Trump could end the Biden administration’s special temporary protections extended to more than 350,000 Venezuelans as well as an additional 530,000 migrants who arrived legally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Venezuela.

    It was easier to explain why the new administration’s policies were cruel and disruptive rather than why they were illegal.

    Trump’s lawyers argued that the law gave the president’s top immigration officials the sole power to decide on these temporary protections and that “no judicial review” was authorized.

    Nonetheless, a federal judge in San Francisco twice blocked the administration’s repeal of the temporary protected status for Venezuelans, and a federal judge in Boston blocked the repeal of the entry-level parole granted to migrants under Biden.

    The court is also poised to uphold the president’s power to fire officials who have been appointed for fixed terms at independent agencies.

    Since 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, the government has had semi-independent boards and commissions led by a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

    But Roberts and the court’s conservatives believe that because these agencies enforce the law, they come under the president’s “executive power.”

    That ruling may come with an exception for the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency whose nonpartisan stability is valued by business leaders.

    Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, the former legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court has sent mixed signals.

    “On the emergency docket, it has ruled consistently for the president, with some notable exceptions,” he said. “I do think it significant that it put a halt to the National Guard deployments and to the Alien Enemies Act deportations, at least for the time being. And I think by this time next year, it’s possible that the court will have overturned two of Trump’s signature initiatives — the birthright citizenship executive order and the tariffs.”

    For much of 2025, the court was criticized for handing down temporary unsigned orders with little or no explanation.

    That practice arose in 2017 in response to Trump’s use of executive orders to make abrupt, far-reaching changes in the law. In response, Democratic state attorneys and lawyers for progressive groups sued in friendly forums such as Seattle, San Francisco and Boston and won rulings from district judges who put Trump’s policies on hold.

    The 2017 “travel ban” announced in Trump’s first week in the White House set the pattern. It suspended the entry of visitors and migrants from Venezuela and seven mostly-Muslim countries on the grounds that those countries had weak vetting procedures.

    Judges blocked it from taking effect, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the order discriminated based on nationality.

    A year later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and upheld Trump’s order in a 5-4 ruling. Roberts pointed out that Congress in the immigration laws clearly gave this power to the president. If he “finds that the entry of … any class of aliens … would be detrimental,” it says, he may “suspend the entry” of all such migrants for as long as “he shall deem necessary.”

    Since then, Roberts and the court’s conservatives have been less willing to stand aside while federal judges hand down nationwide rulings.

    Democrats saw the same problem when Biden was president.

    In April 2023, a federal judge in west Texas ruled for anti-abortion advocates and decreed that the Food and Drug Administration had wrongly approved abortion pills that can end an early pregnancy. He ordered that they be removed from the market before any appeals could be heard and decided.

    The Biden administration filed an emergency appeal. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court set aside the judge’s order, over dissents from Thomas and Alito.

    The next year, the court heard arguments and then threw out the entire lawsuit on the grounds that abortion foes did not have standing to sue.

    Since Trump returned to the White House, the court’s conservative majority has not deferred to district judges. Instead, it has repeatedly lifted injunctions that blocked Trump’s policies from taking effect.

    Although these are not final rulings, they are strong signs that the administration will prevail.

    But Trump’s early wins do not mean he will win on some of his most disputed policies.

    In November, the justices sounded skeptical of Trump’s claim that a 1977 trade law, which did not mention tariffs, gave him the power to set these import taxes on products coming from around the world.

    In the spring, the court will hear Trump’s claim that he can change the principle of birthright citizenship set in the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship it to newborns whose parents are here illegally or entered as visitors.

    Rulings on both cases will be handed down by late June.

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  • Supreme Court may restrict asylum claims from those arriving at the southern border

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    WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a Trump administration appeal that argues migrants have no right to seek asylum at the southern border.

    Rather, the government says border agents may block asylum seekers from stepping onto U.S. soil and turn away their claims without a hearing.

    The new case seeks to clarify the immigration laws and resolve an issue that has divided past administrations and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Under federal law, migrants who faces persecution in their home countries may apply for asylum and receive a screening hearing if they are “physically present in the United States” or if such a person “arrives in the United States.”

    Since 2016, however, the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations responded to surges at the border by adopting temporary rules which required migrants to wait on the Mexican side before they could apply for asylum.

    But in May, a divided 9th Circuit Court ruled those restrictions were illegal if they prevented migrants from applying for asylum.

    “To ‘arrive’ means ‘to reach a destination,’” wrote Judge Michelle Friedland, citing a dictionary definition. “A person who presents herself to an official at the border has ‘arrived.’”

    She said this interpretation “does not radically expand the right to asylum.” By contrast, the “government’s reading would reflect a radical reconstruction of the right to apply for asylum because it would give the executive branch vast discretion to prevent people from applying by blocking them at the border.”

    “We therefore conclude that a non-citizen stopped by U.S. officials at the border is eligible to apply for asylum,” she wrote.

    The 2-1 decision upheld a federal judge in San Diego who ruled for migrants who had filed a class-action suit and said they were wrongly denied an asylum hearing.

    But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to review and reverse the appellate ruling, noting 15 judges of the 9th Circuit joined dissents that called the decision “radical” and “clearly wrong.”

    In football, a “running back does not ‘arrive in’ the end zone when he is stopped at the one-yard line,” Sauer wrote.

    He said federal immigration law “does not grant aliens throughout the world a right to enter the United States so that they can seek asylum.” From abroad, they may “seek admission as refugees,” he said, but the government may enforce its laws by “blocking illegal immigrants from stepping on U.S. soil.”

    Immigrants rights lawyers advised the court to turn away the appeal because the government is no longer using the “metering” system that required migrants to wait for a hearing.

    Since June 2024, they said, the government has restricted inspections and processing of these noncitizens under a different provision of law that authorizes the president to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of alien” if he believes they would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

    The government also routinely sends back migrants who illegally cross the border.

    But the solicitor general said the asylum provision should be clarified.

    The justices voted to hear the case of Noem vs. Al Otro Lado early next year and decide “whether an alien who is stopped on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border ‘arrives in the United States’ within the meaning” of federal immigration law.

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    David G. Savage

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  • Appeals court rules Trump administration can end legal protections for more than 400,000 migrants

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    A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Trump administration can end legal protections for around 430,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest twist in a legal fight over Biden-era policies that created new and expanded pathways for people to live in the United States, generally for two years with work authorization. The Trump administration announced in March it was ending the humanitarian parole protections.“We recognize the risks of irreparable harm persuasively laid out in the district court’s order: that parolees who lawfully arrived in this country were suddenly forced to choose between leaving in less than a month — a choice that potentially includes being separated from their families, communities, and lawful employment and returning to dangers in their home countries,” the judges wrote. “But absent a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits, the risk of such irreparable harms cannot, by itself, support a stay.”In a two-page ruling, the court lifted a stay issued by a district court and is allowing the administration to end humanitarian parole for those groups while the lawsuit plays out. The ruling Friday is a victory for the Trump administration, but doesn’t change anything on the ground.Esther Sung, the legal director of Justice Action Center, a co-counsel in the case, said the ruling “hurts everyone.”“People who came here from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela did everything the government asked of them, and the Trump administration cruelly and nonsensically failed to hold up the government’s end of the bargain,” Sung said. “While we are deeply disappointed by this decision, we will continue to advocate zealously for our clients and class members as the litigation continues.”A district court issued a stay in April halting the administration’s decision, but the Supreme Court lifted the lower court order at the end of May with little explanation.The Trump administration had argued the appeals court should follow the Supreme Court and reverse the district court ruling.The protections for people fleeing turmoil in their home countries were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference, the Justice Department said in a court filing.Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that ending parole on a case-by-case basis would be a “gargantuan task” that would slow the government’s efforts to press for the removal of the migrants.“The Secretary’s discretionary rescission of a discretionary benefit should have been the end of the matter,” lawyers for the government wrote in their brief.Plaintiffs, including people who benefited from the legal protections, urged the appeals court to endorse the district court ruling, which found that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could not categorically end protections for these groups, but instead had to evaluate each case individually. They also cited the district court’s finding that Noem ignored the humanitarian concerns that led to the legal protections in the first place.“The district court applied the law correctly and did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that Secretary Noem’s action inflicted irreparable injury on the class members (among others) and that the public interest and balance of the equities tip sharply in favor of preliminary relief,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote in a brief.Republican President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people. Since taking office, he has sought to dismantle Biden administration policies that expanded paths for migrants to live legally in the U.S.The Trump administration’s decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said in court papers, calling it “the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.”

    BOSTON —

    A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Trump administration can end legal protections for around 430,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

    The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest twist in a legal fight over Biden-era policies that created new and expanded pathways for people to live in the United States, generally for two years with work authorization. The Trump administration announced in March it was ending the humanitarian parole protections.

    “We recognize the risks of irreparable harm persuasively laid out in the district court’s order: that parolees who lawfully arrived in this country were suddenly forced to choose between leaving in less than a month — a choice that potentially includes being separated from their families, communities, and lawful employment and returning to dangers in their home countries,” the judges wrote. “But absent a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits, the risk of such irreparable harms cannot, by itself, support a stay.”

    In a two-page ruling, the court lifted a stay issued by a district court and is allowing the administration to end humanitarian parole for those groups while the lawsuit plays out. The ruling Friday is a victory for the Trump administration, but doesn’t change anything on the ground.

    Esther Sung, the legal director of Justice Action Center, a co-counsel in the case, said the ruling “hurts everyone.”

    “People who came here from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela did everything the government asked of them, and the Trump administration cruelly and nonsensically failed to hold up the government’s end of the bargain,” Sung said. “While we are deeply disappointed by this decision, we will continue to advocate zealously for our clients and class members as the litigation continues.”

    A district court issued a stay in April halting the administration’s decision, but the Supreme Court lifted the lower court order at the end of May with little explanation.

    The Trump administration had argued the appeals court should follow the Supreme Court and reverse the district court ruling.

    The protections for people fleeing turmoil in their home countries were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference, the Justice Department said in a court filing.

    Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that ending parole on a case-by-case basis would be a “gargantuan task” that would slow the government’s efforts to press for the removal of the migrants.

    “The Secretary’s discretionary rescission of a discretionary benefit should have been the end of the matter,” lawyers for the government wrote in their brief.

    Plaintiffs, including people who benefited from the legal protections, urged the appeals court to endorse the district court ruling, which found that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could not categorically end protections for these groups, but instead had to evaluate each case individually. They also cited the district court’s finding that Noem ignored the humanitarian concerns that led to the legal protections in the first place.

    “The district court applied the law correctly and did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that Secretary Noem’s action inflicted irreparable injury on the class members (among others) and that the public interest and balance of the equities tip sharply in favor of preliminary relief,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote in a brief.

    Republican President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people. Since taking office, he has sought to dismantle Biden administration policies that expanded paths for migrants to live legally in the U.S.

    The Trump administration’s decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said in court papers, calling it “the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.”

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  • Inside the windowless shipping container where analysts hunt migrants by drone

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    FT. HUACHUCA, Ariz. — Inside a windowless and dark shipping container turned into a high-tech surveillance command center, two analysts peered at their own set of six screens that showed data coming in from an MQ-9 Predator B drone.

    Both were looking for two adults and a child who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and had fled when a Border Patrol agent approached in a truck.

    Inside the drone hangar on the other side of the Ft. Huachuca base sat another former shipping container, this one occupied by a drone pilot and a camera operator, who pivoted the drone’s camera to scan 9 square miles of shrubs and saguaros for the migrants. Like the command center, the onetime shipping container was lit mostly by the glow of the computer screens.

    The hunt for the three migrants embodied how advanced technology has become a vital part of the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the border.

    The Department of Homeland Security allocated 12,000 hours of MQ-9 drone flight time this year at the Ft. Huachuca base, and says the flights cost $3,800 per hour, though an inspector general report in 2015 said the amount is closer to $13,000 when factoring in personnel salaries and operational costs. Maintenance issues and bad weather often mean the drones fly around half the allotted hours, officials said.

    With the precipitous drop in migrant crossings at the southern U.S. border, the drones are now tasked with fewer missions. That means they have the time to track small groups or even individual border jumpers trekking north through the desert.

    This type of drone, first used in warfare, was operated by the National Air Security Operations division of Customs and Border Protection at the Army base about 70 miles south of Tucson. A reporter was allowed to observe the operation in April on the condition that personnel not be named and that no photographs be taken.

    An air interdiction agent, left, programs an unmanned Predator aircraft from a flight operations center near the Mexican border at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Ariz., in March 2013.

    (John Moore / Getty Images)

    The drone flying this day was mounted with a radar, called Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, or VaDER, that could identify any moving object in the drone’s sight, and pinpoint them with color-coded dots for the two analysts in the first container. The program had already located three Border Patrol agents, one on foot and two on motorcycles, searching for the migrants. The analysts had also identified three cows and two horses, headed toward Mexico.

    Then, one of the analysts spotted something.

    “We got them,” he said to his colleague, who had been scanning the terrain. “Good work.”

    The analyst dropped a pin on the migrants and the VaDER program began tracking their movement in a blue trail. Now, he had to guide agents on the ground to them.

    “We’ve got an adult male and a child, I think, tucked in this bush,” the analyst radioed to his team, as he toggled between the live video to an infrared camera view that showed the heat signature of every living thing in range. The analyst saw his Border Patrol colleagues approaching on motorcycles.

    The roar of the oncoming machines scared up a bird, the tracking program showed. The migrants began running.

    “OK, it looks like they’re starting,” the camera operator said into the radio to the Border Patrol agents. “They’re hearing the bikes. They hear you guys.” The camera operator and the other personnel spoke in the professional, matter-of-fact tone of 911 operators.

    One adult and the child began scrambling up a hill. “They’re moving north and west, mainly,” the camera operator said. “Starting to pick up the pace going uphill.”

    The agents rushed in on the pair and detained them. It was a mother and her child. The drone team turned its attention to the third person, who was stumbling through the brush and making a beeline for the Mexican border.

    “If you cut due south from your current location,” the drone pilot said to the camera operator. “You should pick up some sign.”

    The camera operator, as directed, panned across the desert, scanning farther and farther south.

    “I’ve got them,” he said when he spotted someone running. He radioed the coordinates to the Border Patrol team.

    By now, the man, carrying a backpack, had scaled a hill.

    “He’s on the ridgeline right now, working his way up due south, slowly,” the camera operator radioed.

    Then the man dropped something.

    “Hey, mark that spot,” the camera operator said. “He just threw a pack, right here where my crosshairs are at. ”

    Agents would go back later and see if the backpack contained drugs, an analyst said. “Usually, if it’s food or water, they’re not going to do that,” he said.

    On this spring morning, the drone wasn’t the only airborne asset deployed. A helicopter had joined the chase to catch the southbound man, who stumbled, got up and kept running.

    “He took a pretty good spill there,” an analyst said into the radio.

    “We have a helo inbound, three point five minutes out,” the camera operator said.

    A helicopter came into the drone’s view. It swooped in, circling the location of the man, who was by now hiding under a bush.

    “You just passed over him,” the camera operator radioed the helicopter pilot. “He’s between you and that saguaro.”

    With a keystroke, he switched to infrared vision to find the man’s heat profile through the brush to make sure he still had him.

    Guided by the camera operator, the pilot landed the helicopter in a cloud of dust near the cowering target. The video feed showed agents jump out of the aircraft, detain the man and load him into the helicopter. The chopper lifted off and tilted back north toward a nearby Border Patrol post. “Thanks, sir, appreciate all the help,” the analyst said to the helicopter pilot.

    Mission accomplished, the drone pilot turned the MQ-9 back along the U.S.-Mexico border, scanning the vast desert in search of more migrants. The military is planning to deliver a third MQ-9 drone to the base this fall after spending a year retrofitting it for civilian authority use.

    Fisher is a special correspondent. This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.

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    Steve Fisher

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  • DeSantis spends millions on Florida Keys base preparing for migrant surge that hasn’t come

    DeSantis spends millions on Florida Keys base preparing for migrant surge that hasn’t come

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    A view on May 09, 2024, of trailers located on Aregood Lane that are part of a state base camp in Islamorada to help with an increase in maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti.

    A view on May 09, 2024, of trailers located on Aregood Lane that are part of a state base camp in Islamorada to help with an increase in maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti.


    Pedro Portal

    pportal@miamiherald.com

    Tallahassee

    Reality Check is a Herald series holding those in power to account and shining a light on their decisions. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email our journalists at tips@miamiherald.com.

    The southernmost outpost of Ron DeSantis’ battle against illegal immigration stands sentinel off the Overseas Highway, watching for a wave of migrants that hasn’t materialized.

    For more than a year, pilots and boat captains have come and gone from a small grid of air-conditioned trailers in the Florida Keys, running missions on the water and in the sky in search of Cubans and Haitian migrants desperate enough to cross the Straits of Florida.

    At a cost of about $20 million and counting, the makeshift base camp — erected on Plantation Key early last year after DeSantis declared a state of emergency over illegal immigration — has become one of the more expensive initiatives in the governor’s campaign to keep undocumented immigrants out of the state. DeSantis says it’s also among his most successful.

    “I think the message is, the last thing you want to do is to get on some boat and think you are going to come through from any of these islands and come to the state of Florida,” DeSantis told reporters in March.

    But a closer look at federal data and the state’s own records raise questions about whether the site — run by a politically connected disaster-management contractor — was established to address a problem that dissipated almost as soon as the generators began to run.

    Figures kept by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard show the rush of vessels that overwhelmed the Keys in early 2023 had reduced to a relative trickle just as DeSantis’ administration entered a no-bid agreement with the Deerfield Beach-based contractor Ashbritt to set up trailers, showers, bathrooms and a mess hall for Florida law enforcement officers and soldiers.

    In January 2023, federal data shows there were 1,357 encounters with migrants who traveled by sea and succeeded in making landfall in Florida. Those numbers dropped by nearly 80% the following month, and have remained there. So far this year, an average of 126 migrant encounters have been reported each month in the Miami sector, the CBP designation for operations along most of Florida’s coastline.

    A makeshift migrant boat floats just offshore Long Key in the Florida Keys Friday morning, Feb. 3, 2023. The U.S. Border Patrol said 29 people from Cuba were aboard.
    A makeshift migrant boat floats just offshore Long Key in the Florida Keys Friday morning, Feb. 3, 2023. The U.S. Border Patrol said 29 people from Cuba were aboard. U.S. Border Patrol

    DeSantis and state officials have attributed the drop to the state’s boats, planes and personnel deployed to the coast, saying they have helped federal immigration officials intercept migrants more efficiently. In March, the governor said the state’s efforts since January of last year had led to the interdiction of 670 vessels carrying over 13,500 migrants.

    “We have an incredible amount of resources that are now on display to be able to prevent [illegal immigration],” DeSantis said in March. “The Coast Guard does by and large a good job but they are under-manned … We are filling those gaps.”

    Marnie Villanueva, a spokeswoman for the Division of Emergency Management, which coordinates the state’s immigration-enforcement efforts in the Keys, added that the state’s efforts have allowed the Coast Guard to “patrol deeper waters and interdict a great number of illegal vessels, sooner.”

    But officials with the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security dispute the notion that Florida’s outpost has made a material difference.

    The governor’s office has been unable or unwilling to show how DeSantis arrived at figures that, it turns out, are bigger than the federal government’s own statistics tracking migrant encounters across a vast swath of ocean. Coast Guard officials said that between January 2023 and the end of last month, Coast Guard crews performed 9,911 repatriations at sea across the entire region — spanning from the Florida Straits all the way to the waters of Puerto Rico and the Mona Passage to Hispaniola, where Florida officials provide no assistance in federal operations.

    “Currently, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low,” a Coast Guard official told McClatchy and the Herald/Times last week.

    The drop in migrant arrivals also coincided with the launch of a new federal parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that penalized nationals from those countries crossing illegally into the United States, while offering them a new lawful pathway to entry. Land and sea crossings dropped across the U.S. southern border after the program went into force.

    Few examples of impact

    DeSantis has in recent years spent millions on initiatives to address what he calls an immigration emergency, including sending the Florida National Guard, state law enforcement officers and the Florida State Guard to the Texas border. Most prominently, the Florida Legislature created a $12 million program to allow DeSantis to fly undocumented immigrants out of Florida, only to change the law to allow the governor leeway outside of state lines after his administration said it had trouble finding migrants in the state and had to search for them in Texas.

    RELATED CONTENT: Company hired to arrange DeSantis’ migrant flights is tied to high-level state official

    In the Florida Keys, DeSantis has sent the State Guard, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission law enforcement personnel on the water, Florida Department of Law Enforcement pilots to run reconnaissance missions in the air, and Florida Highway Patrol troopers with drones to surveil the area.

    The DeSantis administration declined to answer repeated questions about staffing at the site, including how many people are currently at the camp and whether the campsite was at capacity each month.

    The administration also did not provide details on the number of interceptions personnel have conducted since the camp was set up. By comparison, the governor’s office in 2021 was able to provide detailed numbers on encounters and criminal arrests made by state personnel while at the Texas border.

    At least one local official, the Keys’ top law enforcement officer, Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay, says he is “thrilled” to have the state resources working in the area.

    Ramsay, a critic of the state and federal government when migrant landings were becoming a daily occurrence in late 2022 and early 2023, believes the efforts have deterred migrants from arriving at Florida’s shores. When that happens, his deputies are sometimes required to stay with newly arrived migrants until federal officials can take them into custody.

    Ramsay said in an interview that the state’s resources have “taken the burden off the sheriff’s office so we can focus on investigating and preventing crime.”

    The state, however, provided only three examples of its personnel engaging with migrant vessels. Two of those were in the Keys, involving a 60-foot yacht carrying about 30 Haitians and a Cuban chug transporting 16 people who were eventually repatriated. The third was up in Central Florida, 200 miles north of the Keys, involving undocumented immigrants, firearms, night vision gear and drugs.

    DeSantis has acknowledged the surge of migrants the state was expecting hasn’t come, though he claims it’s because of the state’s efforts.

    “We have not seen a large uptick in vessels coming from Haiti which we are on guard against,” DeSantis said in April, when gangs attacked Haiti’s core institutions and desperate Haitians fled the country. “We have a lot of flotillas out there deterring that from happening and I think it has been successful so far.”

    Most of the time, Florida’s pilots and boat captains are assisting federal authorities — something that Florida has been doing for decades. At least one agency involved in the immigration operation, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, says it does not track the number of times officers arrive on a scene to assist other agencies.

    An immigration emergency

    View of trailers located on a lot on Aregood Lane, on Islamorada, that are part of a state base camp to house police officers sent to the Keys to help with an increase in maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti back in January 2023, on Thursday May 09, 2024.
    View of trailers located on a lot on Aregood Lane, on Islamorada, that are part of a state base camp to house police officers sent to the Keys to help with an increase in maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti back in January 2023, on Thursday May 09, 2024. Pedro Portal pportal@miamiherald.com

    DeSantis’ 2023 emergency declaration — still in place today — allowed his administration to quickly and without bids sign a contract to open the site with Ashbritt, a politically connected disaster-management company known for scoring big government jobs following natural disasters, including after Hurricane Irma in 2017.

    Documents show the company told the state it could erect a fully operational base for 100 people within 72 hours, and a site was quickly made available in vacant lots in Islamorada owned by a Florida corporation that, in turn, lists the company’s co-founder as its main officer.

    Once the deal was reached, the DeSantis administration paid Ashbritt $2.1 million, and a site capable of accommodating 100 state personnel into white, air-conditioned trailers was set up in Plantation Key. Each month, the state has chosen to keep the deal going, though purchase orders show the cost each month has dropped as staffing has decreased.

    Shutting the site down is also an option, though the state has so far kept the arrangement going.

    “We can scale down as soon as tomorrow,” Ashbritt officials have said in their correspondence with the state. “Please let us know.”

    Ashbritt referred questions to the DeSantis administration.

    A company with close allies

    While Ashbritt is largely known for debris removal following natural disasters, the company has been dipping its toes in the immigration sector.

    In 2022, AshBritt was hired to build a makeshift wall along the Arizona-Mexico border with shipping containers and industrial grade fencing. The goal was to stem “the influx of migrants illegally crossing the border.” Ashbritt was later hired to take down the same wall it was hired to build.

    This contract came after Ashbritt co-founder Randal Perkins had to pay a $125,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission to settle charges that AshBritt made an illegal $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2018. AshBritt claimed the payment had been charged internally to a personal account the company maintains for Perkins, records show. The commission ruled the company’s violation was not knowing or willful.

    Ashbritt also has close ties with the DeSantis administration and the governor.

    U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, served as the former general counsel for Ashbritt before DeSantis picked him to serve as the state’s director for the Division of Emergency Management in 2018. Holly Raschein, a former Republican lawmaker who DeSantis appointed to the Monroe County Board of Commissioners in September 2021, is the government relations director for the company. Sara Perkins, who served in DeSantis’ transition team, is the company’s vice president of business affairs.

    Executives at Ashbritt also helped fuel DeSantis’ fundraising efforts last year when his presidential campaign was running low on cash and after the campaign announced it was letting go of more than a third of its staff.

    Federal campaign filings show that in late September, five executives at the company each gave $3,300 — the maximum amount allowed during a primary — to both the DeSantis’ presidential campaign and an associated political action committee, for a combined $33,000 in donation.

    At the time of those donations, Ashbritt was months into its agreement with the state to house state personnel responding to immigration in the Keys.

    Months later, the hum of the generator-powered trailers continues and there is nothing to suggest the state intends to shut it down any time soon.

    “Florida will continue to dedicate personnel and resources to protect the state from illegal immigration and maintain law and order for the safety of residents,” Villanueva, the Division of Emergency Management spokeswoman, said in a statement.

    Miami Herald reporter David Goodhue contributed to this report.

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  • Elon Musk, America’s richest immigrant, is angry about immigration. Can he influence the election?

    Elon Musk, America’s richest immigrant, is angry about immigration. Can he influence the election?

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    WASHINGTON — 

    Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal were speaking to a crowd of business leaders in 2013 about creating their first company when the conversation seemed to go off script. Originally from South Africa, Kimbal said the brothers lacked lawful immigration status when they began the business in the U.S.

    “In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said, according to a recording of the interview from the Milken Institute Global Conference.

    “I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied with a laugh.

    Eleven years later, Elon was back at the Milken Institute last month in Beverly Hills, talking once again about immigration. This time, he described the southern border as a scene out of the zombie apocalypse and said the legal immigration process is long and “Kafkaesque.”

    “I’m a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster,” Musk said at the conference. “So I’m in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration but having a secure southern border.”

    Musk, the most financially successful immigrant in the U.S. and the third-richest person in the world, has frequently repeated his view that it is difficult to immigrate to the U.S. legally but “trivial and fast” to enter illegally. What he leaves out: Seeking asylum is a legal right under national and international law, regardless of how a person arrives on U.S. soil.

    But as the election year ramps up and Republicans make border security a major theme of their campaigns, Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly extreme. The chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, who purchased the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, has sometimes used his giant microphone to elevate racist conspiracies and spread misinformation about immigration law.

    Musk’s business manager did not respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for SpaceX and Tesla. X does not have a department that responds to news media inquiries.

    While Musk’s views are clear, what’s murkier is his influence. Some see him as an influential opinion maker with the power to shape policy and sway voters, while others dismiss him as a social media bomb thrower mainly heard within a conservative echo chamber.

    “If you haven’t heard it already, I’m sure you’re going to see members of Congress citing Elon Musk and pointing to his tweets, and that’s a scary concept,” said Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro), who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

    She says she believes Musk is influential with her Republican colleagues who are “always looking for new anti-immigrant talking points.”

    Polling shows immigration is a top issue for voters. For the third month in a row, it was named by respondents to an open-ended April Gallup poll as the most important problem facing the U.S.

    The November election that’s shaping up as a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump will be the first presidential contest since Musk bought X — a site Trump had been banned from for inciting violence before Musk reinstated his account last year.

    Musk used the platform to come to Trump’s defense last week after the former president was criminally convicted for falsifying records in a hush money scheme. “Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Musk wrote on X, calling Trump’s crime a “trivial matter.”

    After meeting with Trump in March, Musk told former CNN anchor Don Lemon that he’s “leaning away” from Biden, but doesn’t plan to endorse Trump yet. He also said he won’t donate to any presidential campaign.

    Campaign contribution records show Musk regularly donated to both Republicans and Democrats through 2020. That includes a handful of donations to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said his relationship with Musk dates back to his time as San Francisco mayor but that they’ve never discussed immigration.

    “I think people have formed very strong opinions on this topic,” Newsom said. “I don’t know that he’s influencing that debate in a disproportionate way. Not one human being has ever said, ‘Hey, did you see Elon’s thing about immigration?’”

    How Musk talks about immigration on X

    Last year Musk visited the Eagle Pass, Texas, border, meeting with local politicians and law enforcement to get what he called an “unfiltered” view of the situation.

    He also helped spread viral reports falsely claiming the Biden administration had “secretly” flown hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. to reduce border arrivals.

    “This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Musk wrote March 5 on X. “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11.”

    But the migrants in question fly commercial under a program created by the Biden administration, exercising the president’s authority to temporarily admit people for humanitarian reasons. The program allows up to 30,000 vetted people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela lawfully relocate to the U.S. each month and obtain work permits if they have a financial sponsor.

    Contrary to Musk’s claim that the administration is looking for Democratic voters, those arriving under the program have no pathway to citizenship. The claim gives fuel to extremist ideologies such as great replacement theory, the racist conspiracy that there’s a plot to reduce the population of white people.

    Elon Musk, wearing a black Stetson hat, livestreams while visiting the southern border in September in Eagle Pass, Texas. Musk toured the border along the bank of the Rio Grande with Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).

    (John Moore / Getty Images)

    Earlier this year, Musk targeted a controversial bill in the California Legislature that would help immigrants with serious or violent felony convictions fight deportation using state funds. Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) pulled the bill after Republicans slammed it on social media, garnering the attention of Musk, who wrote about it on X: “When is enough enough?”

    In February, shortly after a bipartisan group of senators released details of a border security bill that had gone through lengthy negotiations, Musk again echoed great replacement theory, writing on X: “The long-term goal of the so-called ‘Border Security’ bill is enabling illegals to vote! It will do the total opposite of securing the border.”

    Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) shot back.

    “No, it’s not focused on trying to be able to get more illegals to vote,” Lankford said on CNN. “That’s absurd.”

    Musk’s immigration journey

    There’s a particular irony in Musk attacking the program that allows limited arrivals for humanitarian reasons while simultaneously saying he favors legal immigration, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer, professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA. The program offers would-be migrants a lawful pathway to reach the U.S. and reduced arrivals at the border from the beneficiary countries.

    “That shows a very deep confusion about a fairly basic point about immigration law and the way the policy works,” Arulanantham said. Musk’s lack of criticism of a similar program for Ukrainians illustrates the undercurrent of racism accompanying attacks on the program for Latin American migrants, he added.

    Musk amplifying false claims is counterproductive to rational immigration policy, Arulanantham said.

    “Every voice adds to the pile, and the louder the voice, the marginally greater the addition to the pile,” Arulanantham said. “He is a very loud voice.”

    David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor who studies platform moderation, said Musk’s promotion of misleading or false statements, including those about immigrants, is concerning because he can influence conversations on X in a way no one else can.

    “There’s already a pretty robust kind of alarmist approach to immigration, so Musk might only add a little bit of fuel to a pretty big fire,” Kaye said. “But the fact is he’s got a ton of followers. To the extent he promotes disinformation, I think that’s a cause for concern for the United States having fair and fact-driven debates over immigration.”

    Musk’s own immigration story is described in the biography “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. Musk left South Africa in 1989 for Canada, where his mother had relatives, Isaacson wrote. While in college he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating, enrolled at Stanford but immediately requested a deferral.

    He and his brother Kimbal had invented an interactive network directory service, like a precursor to Google Maps.

    Just before pitching the idea to a venture company, Kimbal was stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport on his way back from a trip to Toronto “who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane,” Isaacson writes in the book. So a friend picked him up and drove him into the U.S. after telling another border agent that they were seeing the David Letterman show.

    After finalizing the investment, the firm found immigration lawyers to help the Musk brothers get work visas, according to Isaacson.

    Once Musk married his first wife, he became eligible for U.S. citizenship, and took the oath in 2002 at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

    Musk’s recent commentary on immigration and other political issues appears to be a reversal from his views a decade ago, said Nu Wexler, who has worked in policy communications at tech companies and for congressional Democrats.

    Wexler recalled when Musk left Fwd.us, the political action organization spearheaded by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 to advocate for immigration reform. Musk left because Fwd.us backed conservative lawmakers who wanted immigration reform but supported oil drilling and other policies that went against Musk’s environmental priorities.

    “I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes,” Musk told the news site AllThingsD at the time.

    When Zuckerberg created Fwd.us, it made smart business sense for tech executives to make the business case for immigration reform, Wexler said. Now, immigration is a more divisive issue and executives on the left are less willing to dive into politics.

    “At some point he decided that being the main character was helpful personal branding,” Wexler said of Musk. “I don’t know if he’s going to change minds on immigration, although he might be able to fire up the base.”

    Alex Conant, a GOP consultant and partner at the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, said Musk’s influence could grow if Trump wins the election. If an immigration bill were to take shape at that point, Musk’s endorsement or rejection could shape the debate, he said.

    “That’s the sort of scenario where all the sudden he might have some power,” he said.

    There appears to be growing evidence for that possibility. Trump and Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the billionaire, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. If Trump reclaims the White House, Musk could provide formal input on border security policies.

    Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

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    Andrea Castillo

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  • ‘Migrant influencer’ in custody after videos on legal loopholes

    ‘Migrant influencer’ in custody after videos on legal loopholes

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    (NewsNation) — A man who came to the U.S. illegally from Venezuela is now in custody after going viral for bragging about getting free money from America and encouraging other newcomers to take advantage of U.S. laws protecting squatters.

    In one TikTok video, Leonel Moreno, now being called the “migrant influencer,” explained squatting laws and suggested how to take advantage of them. His account has now been removed from the platform.

    “I learned that there is a law that says if a house is not inhabited, then we can take it,” he said. “Here in the United States, terrain deformation also applies, and I think that will be my next business: invade abandoned houses.”

    Moreno crossed into the country illegally in April 2022 in Eagle Pass, Texas and was paroled, but authorities say he never showed up to his initial check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    When Moreno was initially processed, he was placed in the Alternatives to Detention program, where he was given a cell phone as a tracking device.

    But because he didn’t follow the rules, Department of Homeland Security sources told NewsNation he was listed as a preorder absconder and was terminated from the program.

    These sources later confirmed to NewsNation that Moreno was in custody.

    Moreno has an order to appear in a Florida court in February of 2025, but authorities had trouble tracking him down. The address he initially provided was for Catholic Charities in Miami, but sources said he now has a possible address listed in Ohio.

    Also in Ohio, Fermin Garcia-Gutierrez is another man allegedly taking advantage of the system and gaps in intelligence.

    Law enforcement in Butler County, Ohio, said Garcia-Gutierrez has been in Sheriff Richard Jones’ jail 11 times, using seven different names and three different dates of birth. According to Jones, Garcia-Gutierrez has been reported eight times, yet the 46-year-old keeps returning successfully.

    Garcia-Gutierrez’s latest arrest was for possession of drugs and weapons while intoxicated and obstructing. His story is not the only one, with Jones saying since 2021, the county has housed nearly 1,000 immigrant inmates with ICE detainers.

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    Ali Bradley

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  • Supreme Court extends block on Texas law that would allow police to arrest migrants

    Supreme Court extends block on Texas law that would allow police to arrest migrants

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    The Supreme Court on Monday indefinitely extended its block on a Texas law that would give police broad powers to arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the U.S. while the legal battle it sparked over immigration authority plays out.Related video above: Migrants camp on Texas bridge in freezing temperaturesThe one-page order signed by Justice Samuel Alito did not set a deadline, instead extending the stay “pending further order.”Opponents have called the law, known as Senate Bill 4, the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since an Arizona law more than a decade ago, portions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court.The Texas Attorney General has said the state’s law mirrored federal law and “was adopted to address the ongoing crisis at the southern border, which hurts Texans more than anyone else.”The Biden administration sued to strike down the measure, arguing it would usurp core federal authority on immigration, hurt international relations and create chaos in administering immigration law. Civil rights groups have argued the law could lead to civil rights violations and racial profiling.A federal judge in Texas struck down the law in late February, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals quickly stayed that ruling, leading the federal government to appeal to the Supreme Court.The Supreme Court in 2012 struck down key parts of an Arizona law that would have allowed police to arrest people for federal immigration violations, often referred to by opponents as the “show me your papers” bill. The divided high court found then that the impasse in Washington over immigration reform did not justify state intrusion.The battle over the Texas immigration law is one of multiple legal disputes between Texas officials and the Biden administration over how far the state can go to patrol the Texas-Mexico border and prevent illegal border crossings.Several Republican governors have backed Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts, saying the federal government is not doing enough to enforce existing immigration laws.The case is unfolding as record numbers of asylum seekers arrive in the United States and immigration emerges as a central issue in the 2024 election.

    WASHINGTON —

    The Supreme Court on Monday indefinitely extended its block on a Texas law that would give police broad powers to arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the U.S. while the legal battle it sparked over immigration authority plays out.

    Related video above: Migrants camp on Texas bridge in freezing temperatures

    The one-page order signed by Justice Samuel Alito did not set a deadline, instead extending the stay “pending further order.”

    Opponents have called the law, known as Senate Bill 4, the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since an Arizona law more than a decade ago, portions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court.

    The Texas Attorney General has said the state’s law mirrored federal law and “was adopted to address the ongoing crisis at the southern border, which hurts Texans more than anyone else.”

    The Biden administration sued to strike down the measure, arguing it would usurp core federal authority on immigration, hurt international relations and create chaos in administering immigration law. Civil rights groups have argued the law could lead to civil rights violations and racial profiling.

    A federal judge in Texas struck down the law in late February, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals quickly stayed that ruling, leading the federal government to appeal to the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court in 2012 struck down key parts of an Arizona law that would have allowed police to arrest people for federal immigration violations, often referred to by opponents as the “show me your papers” bill. The divided high court found then that the impasse in Washington over immigration reform did not justify state intrusion.

    The battle over the Texas immigration law is one of multiple legal disputes between Texas officials and the Biden administration over how far the state can go to patrol the Texas-Mexico border and prevent illegal border crossings.

    Several Republican governors have backed Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts, saying the federal government is not doing enough to enforce existing immigration laws.

    The case is unfolding as record numbers of asylum seekers arrive in the United States and immigration emerges as a central issue in the 2024 election.

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  • Arizona and Nevada make up 3% of the U.S. population — and are vital to picking a president

    Arizona and Nevada make up 3% of the U.S. population — and are vital to picking a president

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    LAS VEGAS — 

    When President Biden flies into Nevada on Monday and to Arizona the following day, he’s likely to compliment the West’s natural beauty, pay homage to the unmatched political power of the Culinary Workers Union and nod to local Democratic elected officials.

    Another truth about his visit to the two Southwestern states may remain unspoken: Though together they are home to only about 3% of the U.S. population, Arizona and Nevada are expected to have an outsize influence on the outcome of the 2024 presidential race.

    With Arizona’s 11 electoral votes and Nevada’s six, the states collectively hold more voting power than Georgia, another closely contested state that both Democrats and Republicans believe they can win — as Biden and former President Trump engage in the first rematch of presidential contenders in nearly 70 years.

    Having secured enough delegates last week to become their parties’ presumptive nominees, the two oldest major-party candidates in American history are facing off in a presidential rematch that most people saw coming and many hoped to avoid.

    The race pits a president languishing in the polls against a challenger facing multiple criminal indictments. It gives citizens asking for change a chance to vote for more of the same, unless they opt for a long-shot third-party candidate.

    Many Americans have said they don’t like it. They wish the stress of a country that feels perpetually at odds would just stop.

    “Everything is kind of haywire and crazy,” Trevean Rhodes, a security guard at a Las Vegas supermarket, said last week. “Normalcy is a thing of the past.”

    Nevada has gone to the Democrats in four straight presidential elections, but by thin margins. Biden won Arizona in 2020, though Republicans prevailed in all but two of the last 12 presidential cycles there.

    Recent public polling in both battleground states shows Biden trailing Trump, but both sides have said they expect close contests. And both states have already received substantial attention, especially from the Democrats.

    Vice President Kamala Harris visited Phoenix recently to talk about abortion, and in late January stopped in Las Vegas, where she called Trump a threat to democracy. Biden’s trip this week will take him to Reno, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

    His events in Arizona are expected to focus on Latino voter engagement, sources familiar with his travel told The Times. The trip comes amid a $30-million advertising barrage from Biden’s campaign across all of the battleground states. (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia are the others.)

    Former President Trump, in Las Vegas for the Nevada GOP’s caucuses last month, blasted his rival’s handling of migrants entering the U.S. from Mexico.

    (Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

    Trump, stopping in Las Vegas before Nevada’s GOP caucuses in early February, slammed Biden’s handling of the mounting number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and called human trafficking of migrants “a weapon of mass destruction” against the U.S.

    Even as the candidates gear up for their marathon to election day with more than seven months to go, interviews with more than two dozen voters, elected officials and political consultants in Arizona and Nevada revealed a collective ennui about Biden vs. Trump 2.0.

    “There’s a voter fatigue, I think,” said Arizona House Minority Whip Nancy Gutierrez, a Democrat. “People are just sick of being bombarded, with no bipartisanship and no working together on many of the same issues.”

    Democrats say Biden must do more to highlight what they claim as his accomplishments, including job creation tied in part to an infrastructure law that brought public works to Nevada and Arizona, and passage of a bipartisan gun control measure that increases background checks for younger firearm buyers.

    They also cite the president’s efforts to protect access to abortion and contraception via executive orders after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe vs. Wade, and his support for a robust U.S. presence internationally, including through aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

    Republicans plan to rely on what they contend was America’s stronger standing during Trump’s four-year tenure in Washington, citing high levels of employment and lower inflation as hallmarks of his administration.

    Donald Trump, framed by blurred heads in a crowd, standing and pointing

    Trump, working to stay connected to his base in Arizona after his failed efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, appears at a right-wing gathering in Phoenix in 2021.

    (Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)

    Trump also claims credit for building up the wall dividing the U.S. and Mexico to reduce illegal crossings, as well as for pushing through $3.2 trillion in tax cuts, appointing Supreme Court justices who rejected the nationwide right to abortion, pulling the U.S. out of trade agreements he said hurt American workers, and clearing the way for the U.S. to become the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas.

    The state of the economy, a perennial centerpiece of presidential electioneering, is cited more than any other issue as the top concern in Nevada, which saw its unemployment rate spike to more than 30% during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Unemployment in the state is just over 5% now, still the highest in the country. But even some with jobs express concern that high inflation has made it harder for them to pay their bills.

    At a supermarket on the east side of Las Vegas last week, two men demonstrated the breadth of the disagreement about how the economy is doing.

    Alberto Cardona said he didn’t care about all of the economists saying inflation had tapered off.

    The electrician said they were “lying,” and he saw proof, literally, in the pudding. He said he paid 99 cents for a carton of pudding at the supermarket when Trump was president. Now it costs $1.47. He blamed Biden and other Democrats for the upswing, saying they supercharged inflation by overspending “and printing money that they don’t have.”

    “Everything’s terrible right now. I’m living paycheck to paycheck, trying to support my family,” said Cardona, 50. He said he would vote for Trump.

    A few minutes later, Fernando Alcazar pronounced himself ready to vote for Biden.

    “Look at what he’s done and where the country is headed,” said the 52-year-old gambling industry consultant. “The economy is good, and we’re going in the right direction.”

    Though inflation has climbed much higher in earlier eras, the low inflation of the last two decades or so has made the recent upswing feel disabling, especially to younger people, said Stephen Miller, research director at the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

    But he said people’s views of the economy could be reshaped in the coming months.

    “Between now and early fall, if grocery prices come down and gasoline prices come down, the mood will change,” Miller said. “We’ll see.”

    Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat who represents Clark County in the U.S. House and chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said that’s why it’s key for Biden to remain on point.

    “You can’t only focus on the accomplishments, of which there are many,” Horsford said. “You’ve also got to talk about what you plan to do going forward.”

    President Biden, surrounded by supporters, smiles for those taking selfies with him in the background

    Biden smiles for supporters’ selfies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, last week after speaking on improving healthcare and lowering prescription drug prices.

    (John Locher / Associated Press)

    In both Nevada and Arizona, Democrats say access to abortion should be a winning issue for Biden. They described a wave of anger among their voters that followed the reversal of Roe.

    Organizers hope to put measures supporting abortion access on the ballot in both states. Though a Nevada law protects access to abortion there, a political action committee is gathering signatures to qualify a measure that would enshrine abortion access into the state Constitution. The measure would apply for pregnancies of up to 24 weeks. Activists in Arizona are charting a similar course.

    Republicans have a ballot measure of their own in Nevada: one that would require voters to present identification when they go to the polls.

    The proposal responds to belief among conservatives that elections have seen widespread tainting by ineligible voters casting ballots. Though claims of such voter fraud have seldom been substantiated, they are accepted as a matter of faith, and are therefore highly motivating, to many in the GOP.

    Several people, many in plastic raincoats, next to a barbed-wire-topped wall, a few pacing as others huddle around a campfire

    Immigration is a major campaign issue again. Here, migrants from Colombia wait at the southern border for U.S. officials to transport them to apply for asylum.

    (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

    With migrant crossings from Mexico to the U.S. hitting a high in recent months, even Democrats in cities well north of the border have expressed concern about the burden newcomers put on infrastructure and public services.

    Republicans plan to focus intensely on the issue.

    Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is running for U.S. Senate in Arizona’s Republican primary this summer, said Biden’s policies supporting migrants underscore an inherent unfairness in the minds of voters he’s met. Along with the economy, Lamb said, nothing angers his constituents more than the sense of disorder at ports of entry and in communities where migrants enter the country.

    “They’re very angry with the misappropriation of tax funds used to put these people up in hotel rooms, to give them transportation on airplanes and to give them, in some cases, gift cards, while we have American veterans and we have Americans who are homeless and are struggling,” Lamb said.

    Democrats like Alcazar, the gambling industry consultant in Vegas, said it’s unfair and inaccurate to blame Biden for the surge of migrants. He noted that the White House had hammered out an immigration overhaul deal with congressional Republicans that included increased border security, only to have the GOP back away when Trump signaled his opposition.

    “It was their chance to step up and do something about the issue,” Alcazar said. “But they didn’t follow through. Instead, they wanted Trump politics.”

    President Biden speaking at a lectern with a presidential seal as Arizona's flag is displayed on a large screen

    In a nod to Arizona’s many Republican voters, Biden honored the late Sen. John McCain last fall in remarks on democracy in Tempe, Ariz. The two served across the Senate aisle from each other for over two decades.

    (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

    As the oldest president at 81, Biden has faced repeated questions about his mental acuity and fitness to serve.

    Robert Bailey, a political independent, said he has voted for candidates of both parties in the past, but wouldn’t consider Biden this time.

    “He can’t remember things he needs to remember,” said Bailey, 57, a street performer in Las Vegas. “People just help him stay in office and get his job done.”

    Some say Trump, 77, also shows signs of aging.

    But more challenging critiques grow out of the dozens of criminal charges he faces — on allegations of illegality related to his attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia and his stashing of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and of obstruction of justice; of having a role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory; and of falsifying records related to hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

    “We understand that Trump wants to take us backwards,” said Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, a Democrat. “You have Donald Trump running a campaign of creating doomsday scenarios and seeking retribution against his political opponents.”

    Romero said Biden has a list of accomplishments that her constituents will feel the benefits of for decades. She cited the nearly $100 million that’s flowed to her city from the infrastructure and inflation-reduction measures he’s championed.

    In Nevada, meanwhile, the Biden campaign will remind 12,000 residents about the student loan relief they got from the administration, and tell 22,000 seniors not to forget how Democrats capped the price of their insulin prescriptions.

    Diane Farajian, 65, said that Trump was slow to respond to the coronavirus surge, and that he makes her uneasy. The retired Las Vegas blackjack dealer plans to vote for Biden, though she said she usually supports Republicans for the White House.

    “We need good people in there,” Farajian said. “There was just so much trouble when Trump was in office.”

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    Benjamin Oreskes, James Rainey

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  • Opinion: The open-air camps outside San Diego are a healthcare crisis for migrants

    Opinion: The open-air camps outside San Diego are a healthcare crisis for migrants

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    An hour and a half east of San Diego in late October, surrounded by haphazard makeshift tents, an asylum seeker lies in the desert with his leg propped up. Our team of volunteer physicians and medical students learned that he sustained a serious foot injury on his perilous journey to the United States. By the look of his swollen and seeping wound, the antibiotics he has been taking for the last 10 days are not warding off infection. He’s been taking half the prescribed dose of antibiotics because he’s not sure how long he’ll be traveling and doesn’t want to run out.

    While we dress his wound, a doctor on our team steps away, motioning for the rest of us to follow. We find ourselves conflicted over the limited options, not knowing when this patient will next access medical care. Moreover, once he is transferred from this site to an official detention facility, his medications, including antibiotics, may be confiscated. After considering these factors, we all come to the same conclusion: If he does not receive proper care, this injury could cause permanent damage, or worse, a fatal blood infection. So what happens next?

    For the last two months, we have mobilized local healthcare providers to help asylum seekers in rural San Diego County. A handful of uninhabitable places around the small town of Jacumba Hot Springs have become open-air detention sites for hundreds of asylum seekers. Migrants wait in the desert to be transferred to an official detention facility for processing. While some are transported within a few hours, many spend days without consistent access to food, water or medical care, with no shelter from increasingly harsh environmental conditions.

    Migrants have been told by Border Patrol agents that if they leave the sites to seek medical care, their asylum process may be significantly delayed or endangered. Yet since Jacumba is not an official detention center, these asylum seekers are denied the basic resources and services required by Border Patrol policy for those in custody.

    We see a medical crisis unfolding. People are suffering from deep tissue infections and ulcers, acute appendicitis, seizures, heart attack symptoms and pregnancies with complications. We provide services with whatever donated supplies we can get our hands on. We wash dust-filled eyes with saline, hand out Vaseline for cracked skin and provide face masks to limit the spread of upper respiratory infections that overwhelm the sites. Plastic spoons serve as splints for broken fingers, children are examined in makeshift tents and cough drops are handed out by the hundreds.

    On any given day, volunteers in different fields are providing critical services for hundreds of migrants in Jacumba, supported by donations, mutual aid groups and nonprofit teams including Border Kindness and Al Otro Lado.

    As temperatures approach freezing and winter rains fall, we are increasingly concerned about frostbite, hypothermia and exacerbations of chronic health conditions such as asthma and diabetes. At least one preventable death has been reported at an open air site along the border. We fear that the next one could occur in Jacumba.

    International and U.S. laws recognize seeking asylum as a human right. We have a responsibility to provide safe conditions for migrants when they exercise that right.

    To ensure that no further harm is done, local, state and federal authorities need to stop utilizing loopholes, or sidestepping legal responsibility, to detain migrants in “unofficial” camps where they are experiencing dehumanizing, preventable suffering. If hundreds of people are being kept by our country at a site, that location should be acknowledged as a detention center with the obligation to meet detainees’ basic needs.

    As our day at the site comes to a close, we rejoin the migrant with the leg infection and our colleagues who have finished changing his dressing. We share our concerns and coach him through communicating with medical staff at his next destination, most likely an official detention center. A minute in, we pause — this is too much information to remember. Someone produces a marker, and one physician begins writing on the waterproof tape. She scrawls out a note to Border Patrol and instructions for the next medical team, signing her name at the bottom as she would a prescription. Right now, this is the best we can do out here.

    Sadie Munter and Karyssa Domingo are second-year medical students in San Diego, where Weena Joshi is a practicing pediatrician.

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    Sadie Munter, Karyssa Domingo and Weena Joshi

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  • Latinos Fed Up With Broken Borders, Moving To GOP: 'I Want Trump Back'

    Latinos Fed Up With Broken Borders, Moving To GOP: 'I Want Trump Back'

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    Opinion

    Public Domain/CBP

    America’s broken borders are a problem for all Americans, not just the poor souls who live along the border with Mexico.

    But especially, and understandably, for Latino Americans.

    ‘I Want Trump Back’

    As a trip to El Paso, Texas revealed to reliably left-leaning Politico Magazine:

    The growing appeal of a pro-Trump, hardline immigration mentality was even evident here, in a city where more than 80 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino, and in a county where Biden pummeled Trump by more than 35 percentage points three years ago…

    “Get the key and lock the gates,” said Rick Delgado, a Navy veteran who told me he leans Democratic and who keeps a U.S. Customs and Border Protection number in his phone.

    He said he thinks Biden is “doing whatever he can.” But it was the state — not the Biden administration — that had strung razor wire on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and passed legislation that would authorize police to arrest migrants .

    Compared to Biden, Delgado said, Texas’ hardline Republican governor, Greg Abbott, “is doing a better job.”

    …

    “It’s getting really bad with a lot of the people coming in,” said Simental, who was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and immigrated with her family when she was 12. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, she said. But lately, she’s thinking differently about it.

    “Now,” she told me, “I want Trump back.”

    These stories seem to sound quite a bit different than the usual narrative heard from the talking heads on the TV networks or in the angry ramblings of liberals online. There are some obvious reasons for that.

    RELATED: Kellyanne Conway Says For Democrats It’s Always January 6: They Get In Electric Vehicle And ‘Go Get An Abortion’

    Latinos Also Want to Fix Broken Border

    The typical assumption by many Democrats is that Latino voters would reject Trump because of his stance on enforcing the southern border.

    But as it turns out, they want the border enforced too. They feel similar effects as everyone else – hits to wages, fewer available jobs, drugs in their neighborhoods, and more.

    Politico went to El Paso likely looking for a narrative that was decidedly anti-Trump.

    What they found seems to be an entirely different picture.

    Kellyanne Conway Says For Democrats It’s Always January 6: They Get In Electric Vehicle And ‘Go Get An Abortion’

    Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
    The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”

    is a professional writer and editor with over 15 years of experience in conservative media and Republican politics. He has been a special guest on Fox News, Sirius XM, appeared as the guest of various popular personalities, and has had a lifelong interest in right-leaning politics.

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    John Hanson

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  • California's Padilla personally warned Biden not to fold to GOP on immigration to aid Ukraine

    California's Padilla personally warned Biden not to fold to GOP on immigration to aid Ukraine

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    WASHINGTON — 

    Sen. Alex Padilla approached President Biden at a campaign fundraiser at a sprawling, multilevel mansion in the Pacific Palisades last weekend to offer a warning.

    Biden was at the palatial home of investors José Feliciano and Kwanza Jones to court donors and talk about his administration’s record, but Padilla pulled the president aside to discuss negotiations playing out behind the scenes in the Senate.

    Padilla was worried that Biden was about to set a harmful precedent. The White House, he knew, was considering agreeing to permanent immigration policy changes to win Senate Republicans’ support for roughly $110 billion in one-time aid to Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies.

    Oct. 2022 photo of President Biden greeting, from front right, Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and his wife Angela Padilla, after arriving on Air Force One at LAX.

    (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

    “The primary message I was seeking to convey is warning [Biden] that Republican senators were dragging him into territory that was harmful policy,” Padilla told The Times in a Thursday interview. Biden “was listening intently” and asked when Padilla was last in contact with staffers in the West Wing, the senator said.

    Padilla would not comment further on Biden’s response but said that since Thanksgiving, he has on “at least a daily basis” been in contact with the aides in the West Wing, including White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president.

    “I wish we were having a conversation and making sure we get [the change] right,” Padilla said. “I think right now we’re in the conversation of making sure we don’t get it wrong.”

    Padilla’s concerns — and his fierce lobbying of the White House — signal that the Ukraine, Israel and border policy deal Biden and Senate leaders are hoping to strike may have trouble winning widespread Democratic support.

    Congress must pass a supplemental funding bill soon in order to get Ukraine the help it needs to fend off Russia’s invasion, argue Biden, Senate leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited Washington this week.

    White House officials and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas intervened this week after it became clear that a bipartisan group of senators had failed to reach a deal. Zients, White House chief of staff, met with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and dropped by negotiations on Capitol Hill on Thursday to emphasize that Biden supports more funding for border security and is open to immigration policy changes, according to a White House official.

    “The president actually does really think we need to do something on the border,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks.

    Republicans have pushed for provisions that would allow border officials to expel migrants without screening them for asylum; expand the detention of immigrants, including families; expand the use of fast-tracked deportations from the border to the interior of the U.S.; and limit who can seek asylum. Republicans also sought to end the president’s authority to fast-track humanitarian entry to the U.S., which Biden has turned to repeatedly to welcome tens of thousands of migrants from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela and Cuba.

    The White House is seriously considering two of the GOP’s proposals: Allowing border officials to swiftly expel migrants if the number of arrivals at the border exceeds a certain level and raising the standard used to initially determine whether a migrant might qualify for asylum.

    “There is not yet an agreement on principles,” a congressional staffer familiar with negotiations told The Times. “Legislative text is a long way off. Negotiators are continuing to make progress towards a deal.”

    Though Republicans insist a deal is out of reach, Democratic negotiators and White House officials have signaled they were open to moving closer to GOP demands on border policy in order to reach a deal before the year’s end. “We’re making progress,” a White House aide said Thursday. “We’re not there yet. But the conversation is going in the right direction.”

    Late Thursday, Schumer cut senators’ holiday short, requiring them to stay in Washington next week for votes. It is unclear when or whether legislative text will emerge or a floor vote be scheduled. And even if the White House and Senate come through with a Christmas miracle, they would still need support from Democrats, who like Padilla have expressed deep concern, and the Republican-controlled House, which is in recess until January.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) signaled Thursday he would not recall his chamber back to Washington.

    “For some reason, the Biden Administration waited until this week to even begin negotiations with Congress on the border issue,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “While that work should continue, the House will not wait around to receive and debate a rushed product.”

    House Republicans earlier this month approved a $14-billion package to bolster Israel’s efforts in the Gaza Strip. The bill, though, slashed funding approved by Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, making it dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Under Johnson, the House has not approved additional funding for Ukraine or American allies in the Pacific. House Republicans, though, are pushing the Senate negotiators to include their May immigration bill in any deal with the White House.

    That legislation, which amounts to a wish list of GOP immigration priorities, would crack down on unlawful immigration by limiting asylum, codifying former President Trump-championed border policies, extending the border wall, criminalizing visa overstays and mandating that companies verify employees’ legal eligibility to work.

    Much of what is being considered in negotiations would hamstring U.S. Customs and Border Protection while failing to deal with the root cause of migration, said Jason Houser, who was chief of staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement until March.

    Houser also worried that negotiations could revive a version of the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which allowed border officials to quickly expel migrants without considering their requests for asylum. Under the Trump-era policy, arrivals of migrants at the border actually increased, in part because many migrants re-crossed the border immediately after being expelled. Expulsion is not the same as formal deportation, a process that can come with consequences such as criminal prosecution and a five-year ban from the U.S.

    Making it easier for border officials to expel migrants won’t lower the number of people trying to cross the border because some countries will not readmit citizens that the U.S. turns away, Houser said. Expelled migrants — and the human traffickers who move them across borders — would simply try again.

    Kerri Talbot, executive director of the advocacy group Immigration Hub, hopes the negotiations will ultimately fail. Resurrecting an expulsion authority not linked to national public health would be a “blunt tool” that would fail to consider the circumstances of each case, she said.

    Talbot also worries that the White House is weighing raising the legal bar migrants have to clear in their first interview with a border agent to avoid being fast-tracked for deportation.

    “Almost no one has an attorney at that stage,” said Talbot, a veteran immigrant advocate who helped write the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate. “So some people with valid cases will get blocked.”

    The White House would be making a political mistake by conceding to Republicans’ demands, Talbot and Beatriz Lopez, also of Immigration Hub, wrote in a Tuesday letter to White House staff.

    “The majority of voters in America are pro-immigrant and pro-orderliness — not for separating families, deporting long-settled immigrants or ending our asylum system,” they wrote. “Accepting GOP demands is accepting a deficit in support for President Biden in 2024.”

    Other experts, though, say that come next November, a border policy deal might not harm Biden’s reelection chances.

    Much of the reported White House concessions “is a signal that the Biden administration is trying to court the middle if not the right wing on immigration,” said Tom Wong, a political science professor and the founding director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego. Although the move could alienate people on the left, voters in the middle “are most consequential” in presidential elections, Wong said.

    “The Biden administration is taking a political risk by moving to the right on immigration,” Wong said. But for people on the left, a second Trump term “would be far more dangerous to our immigration system than a second Biden administration giving in on some Republican policy proposals,” he added.

    Padilla would not say how he would vote on any bill. He, like other senators, is still waiting to see what negotiators produce. But he said he would be hard-pressed “to concede bad policy to Republicans and have nothing to show for helping Dreamers, agriculture workers, essential workers and other long term residents of the United States working, paying taxes, contributing to the strength of our economy.”

    “That would be a horrible place to be in going into [the next election],” Padilla said. “When [Biden] ran for president, he talked about restoring the soul of the nation, staying true to our democratic values and speaking on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees.”

    “When you hear of a lot of ideas that are being entertained, it is absolutely concerning,” Padilla said.

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    Erin B. Logan, Courtney Subramanian, Andrea Castillo

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  • L.A. hotels hire migrants from Skid Row homeless shelter to replace striking workers. Gascón investigates

    L.A. hotels hire migrants from Skid Row homeless shelter to replace striking workers. Gascón investigates

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    When Norelis Vargas heard about housekeeping work at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, she did not hesitate to sign up.

    Vargas, 39, who migrated from Venezuela and entered the U.S. about three months ago seeking asylum, had been living with her husband and four children for months at Union Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter on Skid Row, and needed the income. But when she arrived at Four Points by Sheraton on Oct. 6, Vargas said she was surprised to find a group of hotel employees picketing.

    “I thought, it’s good they are fighting for their rights,” Vargas said. But she said she felt uncomfortable. “The people outside, it was their job, and I was the one replacing them.”

    Vargas is among those from Skid Row’s migrant population who have been recruited in recent weeks to work at unionized hotels in Santa Monica and near Los Angeles International Airport where workers have gone on strike. In addition to the Four Points by Sheraton hotel, migrants were hired at the Le Meridien Delfina Santa Monica and the Holiday Inn LAX, according to interviews with migrants employed as temporary workers and organizers with Unite Here Local 11.

    Now Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón is launching an investigation into working conditions for migrants hired at hotels based on information brought to him by Unite Here Local 11, which represents workers involved in the largest U.S. hotel strike. Gascón said he is concerned about potential wage theft and violations of child labor law.

    “We are going to make sure this is investigated thoroughly. It will be a fair and impartial investigation,” Gascón said at a news conference Monday in front of Le Meridien Delfina.

    “If there are violations of the law, there will be severe consequences for this. We want to make sure that our community understands there will be no tolerance for the exploitation of refugees,” Gascón said, citing reporting by The Times on the issue.

    Gascón recently claimed the endorsement of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor in announcing his reelection campaign.

    Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón announced at a Monday news conference that he is launching an investigation into working conditions for migrants hired at hotels.

    (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

    At Monday’s news conference, state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) expressed outrage over the allegations against the hotels and staffing agencies.

    “It makes me furious,” said Durazo, who represents Central and East L.A., and once served as president of Unite Here Local 11.

    The hotel’s actions are “indefensible,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the advocacy organization Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles. “Staffing agencies, companies taking advantage of the desperation of the individual to try to begin their life, and then not pay them their proper earnings, not give them a full accounting of their hours worked — we see this every day here in L.A.”

    Since more than 15,000 workers began intermittent strikes at about 60 Southern California hotels in early July, employers have been replacing those union members with managers and temporary workers recruited through apps, such as Instawork, staffing agencies and by other means.

    For the record:

    4:33 p.m. Oct. 23, 2023An earlier verison of this story misspelled Hannah Petersen’s last name as Peterson.

    Unite Here organizer Hannah Petersen, who has been working with the migrants, said some hired at Le Meridien Delfina were among hundreds of migrants Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shipped on buses to L.A. this year as a political stunt meant to harness anti-immigrant sentiment and deride “sanctuary” cities across the country.
    Frank Wolf, a pastor at Echo Park United Methodist Church, is among those who have greeted migrants arriving on buses from Texas.

    “They were exhausted and they were tired and they were scared when they came to Los Angeles,” he said at the news conference. “It’s heart-wrenching to find out that some of these very workers that we welcomed on those buses are being exploited.”

    Refugees and asylum seekers are legally allowed to seek work in the U.S. Federal labor law allows employers to hire replacement workers during unfair labor practice strikes and economic strikes, but unions typically condemn the use of so-called scab labor.

    Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said employers who hired migrants “had stooped to a new low” by tapping a vulnerable group of workers to undermine employees striking for a living wage.

    “I can’t believe they are forcing these people, who are so desperate, to cross the picket line,” Petersen said. “Instead of addressing L.A.’s housing crisis, the hotel industry prefers to exploit the unhoused as strikebreakers to avoid paying their own workers enough to afford housing themselves.”

    Owners and operators of the three hotels did not respond to requests for comment. Real estate investment group Pebblebrook Hotel Trust owns Le Meridien Delfina Santa Monica, and Capital Insight owns Four Points LAX. Highgate Hotels operates both hotels. The Holiday Inn LAX is owned by a subsidiary of Chinese firm Esong Group and is operated by Aimbridge Hospitality.

    Eleven people living at the Skid Row shelter confirmed they had been hired at hotels where employees were protesting outside. Most had migrated from Venezuela or Colombia. Many did not provide their names, fearing repercussions.

    They described heavy cleaning loads and long hours. Some said they were given no prior information on how much they would be paid hourly, although others said they were told on their first day that they would be paid $19 an hour. Migrant workers said they were not told and did not know the name of the agency that recruited them.

    Venezuelan migrant Sebastian Atencio, 34, showed up at Le Méridien Delfina Santa Monica on Sept. 26 during a recent wave of strikes. Atencio said he was given a heavy workload and forced to work without breaks. He was hired to wash dishes at another hotel — but they also asked him to clean bathrooms during the same shift, which he said he felt was unsanitary.

    One migrant worker, a 17-year-old student at Belmont High School who requested anonymity, said he skipped two days of school to clean rooms at the Holiday InnLAX.

    He and his mother, who secured work as a housekeeper at the Holiday Inn, received payment via banking app Zelle from an agency called Arya Staffing Services Inc. Aimbridge Hospitality did not respond to questions about whether staffing agencies it used had secured appropriate permits to employ minors.

    A review of an Oct. 13 pay stub for a worker hired at the Four Points by Sheraton shows that person obtained hotel work through staffing agency AV Professional Services.

    Alinne Espinoza, who is listed as the registered agent for both staffing agencies, said her business is properly licensed and operates legally.

    “Our company works with many different types of people that come from our local community,” she said in an email. “We work hard on a daily basis to incorporate as many people as possible into the labor market under competent, dignified and just conditions.”

    A woman in a red shirt talks to workers outside Union Rescue Mission

    Unite Here Local 11 organizer Hannah Petersen speaks with workers outside the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row.

    (Suhauna Hussain / Los Angeles Times)

    Outside the Skid Row shelter on a recent evening, Petersen introduced herself in Spanish to a group of migrants who had been hired at striking hotels. Several pushed strollers. Young children crowded around their parents, one sucking a green lollipop.

    “My name is Hannah,” she said to the group. “The union is out there fighting for the rights of immigrant workers.”

    Many migrants living at the shelter had told her they wanted permanent jobs, she explained, and so that day she and other organizers would be gathering information to help them create their resumes.

    Some of the shelter’s residents approached the organizers, who were armed with clipboards, and fielded questions about the migrants’ work experience, scribbling their answers down. Other migrants, concerned that the organizers were working for immigration authorities, left.

    Petersen, the daughter of the union’s co-president, said she first encountered homeless migrant workers Sept. 27 when she was protesting alongside Unite Here Local 11 members at Le Meridien Delfina.

    Hotel housekeepers, front desk workers, cooks and other employees are seeking new contracts with higher wages and improved benefits and working conditions. The union members say they don’t earn enough to afford housing near their jobs.

    But hotel operators say the union is overreaching in its demands for raises and employer support of housing initiatives unrelated to hotel operations, including a measure set for the 2024 ballot that would require hotels in Los Angeles to rent vacant rooms to homeless people. American Hotel & Lodging Assn. Chief Executive Chip Rogers called it a “dangerous demand,” citing a September poll the industry group commissioned in which 72% of respondents said they would be reluctant to book a hotel room in Los Angeles “if hotels there are forced to house homeless people next to paying guests.”

    Petersen said it is hypocritical for hotels to oppose homelessness measures while employing unhoused people as replacement workers during the strike.

    Keith Grossman, an attorney representing a group of more than 40 Southern California hotel owners and operators in negotiations with Unite Here Local 11, said in an email that hotels “did not knowingly use unhoused individuals, if they even did so.”

    “I do wonder how a hotel is supposed to know whether a person is homeless if they list an address and show up bathed and clean and sober?” he said. “This appears to be another red herring generated by Local 11.”

    Unite Here Local 11 has previously criticized hotels’ strike-time use of Instawork, an app that matches businesses with short-term, seasonal workers in hospitality.

    In July, the union filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against Instawork and hotel management company Aimbridge. In one allegation, the union said the company violated federal labor law by disqualifying workers hired through the app from future work when they miss a single shift, even if they do so to participate in legally protected activity, such as respecting a strike.

    Vargas, the worker hired at the Four Points hotel, was among a handful of people remaining that evening outside Union Rescue Mission. The rest had dispersed, distrustful and worried that union organizers were sent by immigration authorities. Vargas said she hoped the other residents would come around.

    “I’m going to be the one who finds good work so they know it’s not a lie,” Vargas said.

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    Suhauna Hussain

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