ReportWire

Tag: Race and ethnicity

  • Storm decimates 2 Alaskan villages and drives more than 1,500 people from their homes

    JUNEAU, Alaska — JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — More rain and wind were forecast Wednesday along the Alaskan coast where two tiny villages were decimated by the remnants of Typhoon Halong and officials were scrambling to find shelter for more than 1,500 people driven from their homes.

    The weekend storm brought high winds and surf that battered the low-lying Alaska Native communities along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the southwestern part of the state, nearly 500 miles (800 km) from Anchorage. At least one person was killed and two were missing. The Coast Guard plucked two dozen people from their homes after the structures floated out to sea.

    Hundreds were staying in school shelters, including one with no working toilets, officials said. The weather system followed a storm that struck parts of western Alaska days earlier.

    Across the region, more than 1,500 people were displaced. Dozens were flown to a shelter set up in the National Guard armory in the regional hub city of Bethel, a community of 6,000 people, and officials were considering flying evacuees to longer-term shelter or emergency housing in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

    The hardest-hit communities included Kipnuk, population 715, and Kwigillingok, population 380. They are off the state’s main road system and reachable this time of year only by water or by air.

    “It’s catastrophic in Kipnuk. Let’s not paint any other picture,” Mark Roberts, incident commander with the state emergency management division, told a news conference Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to continue to support that community, but it is as bad as you can think.”

    Among those awaiting evacuation to Bethel on Tuesday was Brea Paul, of Kipnuk, who said in a text message that she had seen about 20 homes floating away through the moonlight on Saturday night.

    “Some houses would blink their phone lights at us like they were asking for help but we couldn’t even do anything,” she wrote.

    The following morning, she recorded video of a house submerged nearly to its roofline as it floated past her home.

    Paul and her neighbors had a long meeting in the local school gym on Monday night. They sang songs as they tried to figure out what to do next, she said. Paul wasn’t sure where she would go.

    “It’s so heartbreaking saying goodbye to our community members not knowing when we’d get to see each other,” she said.

    About 30 miles (48 kilometers) away in Kwigillingok, one woman was found dead and authorities on Monday night called off the search for two men whose home floated away.

    The school was the only facility in town with full power, but it had no working toilet and 400 people stayed there Monday night. Workers were trying to fix the bathrooms; a situation report from the state emergency operations center on Tuesday noted that portable toilets, or “honey buckets,” were being used.

    A preliminary assessment showed every home in the village was damaged by the storm, with about three dozen having drifted from their foundations, the emergency management office said.

    Power systems flooded in Napakiak, and severe erosion was reported in Toksook Bay. In Nightmute, officials said fuel drums were reported floating in the community, and there was a scent of fuel in the air and a sheen on the water.

    The National Guard was activated to help with the emergency response, and crews were trying to take advantage of any breaks in the weather to fly in food, water, generators and communication equipment.

    Officials warned of a long road to recovery and a need for continued support for the hardest-hit communities. Most rebuilding supplies would have to be transported in and there is little time left with winter just around the corner.

    “Indigenous communities in Alaska are resilient,” said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “But, you know, when you have an entire community where effectively every house is damaged and many of them will be uninhabitable with winter knocking at the door now, there’s only so much that any individual or any small community can do.”

    Thoman said the storm was likely fueled by the warm surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, which has been heating up because of human-caused climate change and making storms more intense.

    The remnants of another storm, Typhoon Merbok, caused damage across a massive swath of western Alaska three years ago.

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    Johnson and Attanasio reported from Seattle.

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  • Black residents worry new congressional district could be lost in Supreme Court case

    BATON ROUGE, La. — BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — For nearly three decades, the small town of Mansfield was represented in Louisiana’s congressional delegation by white Republicans, even though its population is about 80% Black and leans heavily Democratic.

    That changed with the election last year of U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat who was able to win after a newly drawn political map carved out a second Black majority congressional district in the state.

    Mansfield Mayor Thomas Jones Jr. said he and others finally feel as if their communities are being represented in the nation’s capital.

    “We feel connected, like we have somebody that’s helping us,” he said.

    Fields’ seat, and what Jones describes as the benefits of having him in Washington, might disappear depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a case it will hear Wednesday.

    The district Fields represents is the result of a hard-fought battle by civil rights groups representing Black voters in the state. Leaders in predominantly Black communities across the 218-mile-long (350-kilometer-long) district said they feel he finally gives them a voice to represent their needs.

    But opponents say the district was unconstitutionally gerrymandered based on race. If the court eventually rules in favor of the plaintiffs, the decision could have a ripple effect far beyond this one district in Louisiana. It potentially will kick out the last major pillar of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act and prevent Black voters from challenging political maps that dilute their influence.

    Louisiana’s new 6th Congressional District, which roughly traces the Red River, runs across the state in a narrow, diagonal path. It stretches from the state capital, Baton Rouge, in southern Louisiana to Shreveport, in the state’s northwest corner.

    The district encompasses part or all of 10 parishes. It connects swaths of the state that some argue are vastly different in their priorities, geography, economies — even their gumbo recipes.

    Fields is aware of criticism about the district’s snakelike shape that helped make it majority Black, but he argues that it’s contiguous and said all the state’s congressional districts are geographically large, representing both urban and rural areas. More importantly, he said, the district gives “people of color an opportunity, not a guarantee, to elect a candidate of their choice.”

    “You tell me I have to jump a certain height, I can work on that. You tell me I’ve got to run faster, I can work on that as well,” he said. “But you tell me I got to be white, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

    In 2022, Louisiana’s GOP-dominated Legislature drew congressional boundaries that maintained one Black majority district and five mostly white districts, in a state with a population that is about one-third Black. A federal judge later struck down the map for violating the Voting Rights Act, and in a major case the following year the Supreme Court found that Alabama had to create its own second majority Black congressional district.

    Rather than being forced to have a judge draw its map, the Republican-controlled Louisiana Legislature and its Republican governor passed the current map that created a second Black majority district.

    Black residents now account for 54% of registered voters in Fields’ district, up from 24% under the previous boundaries.

    Throughout much of the South, older Black residents still remember Jim Crow-era methods around voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes that were designed to disenfranchise them.

    In Louisiana, civil rights groups argued that the lack of a second majority minority congressional district was a modern-day effort to dilute Black voting strength. For decades, with a brief exception in the 1990s, Louisiana had just one majority Black district.

    “It almost feels like when you only have one Black congressman, that he’s a congressman for everybody that’s African American in the state,” said state Rep. Denise Marcelle, a Black Democrat in East Baton Rouge Parish.

    When the second majority Black district was being created, some leaders said it didn’t necessarily matter whether their area was included in it. That it existed at all was more important.

    “I’m not married, necessarily, to the current makeup of the maps. … I’m not even married to the representative being Congressman Fields,” said Baton Rouge Councilman Cleve Dunn Jr., a Black Democrat. “We just knew with having a second congressional district represent a minority population, then the person who sits in that seat will represent the values of the Congressional Black Caucus. That’s the important thing.”

    Dunn said he had a rapport with the Republican who represented the district before it was redrawn and said he was accessible. But he also saw the world politically in a different way, Dunn said.

    “We feel positive that we have a representative who understands the plight of our people, the need of our people, and is going to fight for things for our people,” he said.

    Community leaders in Fields’ district listed an array of needs: supplying low-income housing, protecting and expanding Medicaid, keeping rural hospitals open, addressing food deserts and providing money for community centers and other infrastructure.

    Some said the benefits have been tangible in the short time Fields has been in office — from helping residents access Social Security benefits to working toward securing federal funding for local projects. Several people mentioned Fields’ visibility in the district.

    “The key thing, quite frankly, that I have done in the past nine months is to connect Congress to the people,” Fields said.

    Jones, the mayor of Mansfield, said during his nearly 20 years working in local government, he can’t recall a time a congressman held a town hall meeting in his community. Fields has held three.

    Among the priorities for the town of 4,000 has been obtaining grant money to fix and replace its ailing sewage system, which backs up in people’s homes and overflows into the streets when it rains.

    Jones said he has been asking for funding for five years. While the town has received limited money that was used to make patchwork repairs, he said with Fields’ help it is in line to be approved for a grant next year that he hopes will solve the system’s problems.

    It was the first time Jones could recall any member of Congress reaching out to say they might be able to make some appropriations and to ask for a list of the town’s priorities.

    “I feel like he’s reaching down to make sure that someone knows our needs and gets us some help,” Jones said.

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    Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Supreme Court takes up Republican attack on Voting Rights Act in case over Black representation

    WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican attack on a core provision of the Voting Rights Act that is designed to protect racial minorities comes to the Supreme Court this week, more than a decade after the justices knocked out another pillar of the 60-year-old law.

    In arguments Wednesday, lawyers for Louisiana and the Trump administration will try to persuade the justices to wipe away the state’s second majority Black congressional district and make it much harder, if not impossible, to take account of race in redistricting.

    “Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill wrote in the state’s Supreme Court filing.

    A mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting already is playing out across the nation, after President Donald Trump began urging Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines to make it easier for the GOP to hold its narrow majority in the House of Representatives. A ruling for Louisiana could intensify that effort and spill over to state legislative and local districts.

    The conservative-dominated court, which just two years ago ended affirmative action in college admissions, could be receptive. At the center of the legal fight is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long had the landmark civil rights law in his sights, from his time as a young lawyer in the Reagan-era Justice Department to his current job.

    “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in a dissenting opinion in 2006 in his first major voting rights case as chief justice.

    In 2013, Roberts wrote for the majority in gutting the landmark law’s requirement that states and local governments with a history of discrimination, mostly in the South, get approval before making any election-related changes.

    “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Roberts wrote.

    Challenges under the provision known as Section 2 of the voting rights law must be able to show current racially polarized voting and an inability of minority populations to elect candidates of their choosing, among other factors.

    “Race is still very much a factor in current voting patterns in the state of Louisiana. It’s true in many places in the country,” said Sarah Brannon, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project.

    The Louisiana case got to this point only after Black voters and civil rights groups sued and won lower court rulings striking down the first congressional map drawn by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature after the 2020 census. That map created just one Black majority district among six House seats in a state that is one-third Black.

    Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court but eventually added a second majority Black district after the justices’ 5-4 ruling in 2023 that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama’s congressional map.

    Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the Alabama outcome. Roberts rejected what he described as “Alabama’s attempt to remake our section 2 jurisprudence anew.”

    That might have settled things, but a group of white voters complained that race, not politics, was the predominant factor driving the new Louisiana map. A three-judge court agreed, leading to the current high court case.

    Instead of deciding the case in June, the justices asked the parties to answer a potentially big question: “Whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”

    Those amendments, adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, were intended to bring about political equality for Black Americans and gave Congress the authority to take all necessary steps. Nearly a century later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, called the crown jewel of the civil rights era, to finally put an end to persistent efforts to prevent Black people from voting in the former states of the Confederacy.

    The call for new arguments sometimes presages a major change by the high court. The Citizens United decision in 2010 that led to dramatic increases in independent spending in U.S. elections came after it was argued a second time.

    “It does feel to me a little bit like Citizens United in that, if you recall the way Citizens United unfolded, it was initially a narrow First Amendment challenge,” said Donald Verrilli, who served as the Obama administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer and defended the voting rights law in the 2013 case.

    Among the possible outcomes in the Louisiana case, Verrilli said, is one in which a majority holds that the need for courts to step into redistricting cases, absent intentional discrimination, has essentially expired. Kavanaugh raised the issue briefly two years ago.

    The Supreme Court has separately washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering claims, in a 2019 opinion that also was written by Roberts. Restricting or eliminating most claims of racial discrimination in federal courts would give state legislatures wide latitude to draw districts, subject only to state constitutional limits.

    A shift of just one vote from the Alabama case would flip the outcome.

    With the call for new arguments, Louisiana changed its position and is no longer defending its map.

    The Trump administration joined on Louisiana’s side. The Justice Department had previously defended the voting rights law under administrations of both major political parties.

    For four years in the 1990s, Louisiana had a second Black majority district until courts struck it down because it relied too heavily on race. Fields, then a rising star in the state’s Democratic politics, twice won election. He didn’t run again when a new map was put in place and reverted to just one majority Black district in the state.

    Fields is one of the two Black Democrats who won election to Congress last year in newly drawn districts in Alabama and Louisiana.

    He again represents the challenged district, described in March by Roberts as “a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other,” picking up Black residents along the way.

    If that’s so, civil rights lawyer Stuart Naifeh told Roberts, it’s because of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the persistent lack of economic opportunity for Black Louisianans.

    Fields said the court’s earlier ruling that eliminated federal review of potentially discriminatory voting laws has left few options to protect racial minorities, making the preservation of Section 2 all the more important.

    They would never win election to Congress, he said, “but for the Voting Rights Act and but for creating majority minority districts.”

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    Associated Press writer Gary Fields contributed to this report.

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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  • The MacArthur Foundation’s ‘genius’ fellows: The full 2025 class list

    The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its 2025 class of fellows on Wednesday, a prize often called the “genius award.”

    The MacArthur fellows receive a $800,000 prize paid out over five years that they can spend however they choose. The foundation selects fellows over the course of years and consider a wide range of recommendations. Fellows do not apply for the recognition or participate in any way in their selection.

    The 2025 fellows are:

    Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, 37, Madison, Wisconsin, an atmospheric scientist whose research deepened knowledge about what drives weather patterns in the tropics.

    Matt Black, 55, Exeter, California, a photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty and inequality in the United States.

    Garrett Bradley, 39, New Orleans, a filmmaker who leverages many types of material, including archival and personal footage, to tell almost lost and intimate stories, especially about the lives of Black Americans.

    Heather Christian, 44, Beacon, New York, a composer, lyricist, playwright and vocalist who creates complex, immersive musical theater performances that interweave the sacred and mundane.

    Nabarun Dasgupta, 46, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, an epidemiologist who helped create tools to identify unregulated substances in street drugs and designed other harm reduction interventions.

    Kristina Douglass, 41, New York, an archaeologist whose research revealed new understandings of Indigenous conservation practices in places sensitive to climate variability.

    Kareem El-Badry, 31, Pasadena, California, an astrophysicist who developed new approaches to understanding existing datasets that have revealed new knowledge about how stars form and interact.

    Jeremy Frey, 46, Eddington, Maine, an artist whose mastery of Wabanaki basket weaving both carries on traditional practices and finds new possibilities in the materials and techniques.

    Hahrie Han, 50, Baltimore, a political scientist whose research illuminated what helps people participate in civic life and how to help them connect across differences to solve collective problems.

    Tonika Lewis Johnson, 45, Chicago, a photographer and activist who created participatory projects that reveal the consequences and legacy of segregation in her neighborhood of Englewood on the city’s South Side.

    Ieva Jusionyte, 41, Providence, Rhode Island, a cultural anthropologist whose diverse ethnographies investigate the ethical and practical issues that national border policies create for workers and communities who live in border regions.

    Toby Kiers, 49, Amsterdam, an evolutionary biologist whose research helped document how plants, microbes and fungi cooperate to trade the resources that each need to survive.

    Jason McLellan, 44, Austin, Texas, a structural biologist whose research into viral protein structures helped advance the understanding of viruses and helped to develop new vaccines.

    Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 49, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a multidisciplinary artist whose projects in film and sculpture draw on personal testimonies and community archives to document and heal from histories of war and displacement.

    Tommy Orange, 43, Oakland, California, a fiction writer whose books illuminated the experiences past and present of Native Americans in the Oakland area.

    Margaret Wickens Pearce, 60, Rockland, Maine, a cartographer whose maps document the relationships of Indigenous people in North America to their land and that narrate histories, incorporate knowledge and detail the ongoing dispossession of Native people.

    Sébastien Philippe, 38, Madison, Wisconsin, a nuclear security specialist whose research revealed that past nuclear testing by France and the U.S. exposed many more people to radiation than was previously documented.

    Gala Porras-Kim, 40, Los Angeles and London, an interdisciplinary artist whose exploration of museum collections challenged conventions of curation and often highlight what is lost or unknown about cultural artifacts.

    Teresa Puthussery, 46, Berkeley, California, a neurobiologist and optometrist who identified a type of cell in the retina that helps clarify how humans process visual information.

    Craig Taborn, 55, Brooklyn, New York, a musician and composer known for his improvisations and collaborations and whose performances reveal the full range of the piano’s capacity as an instrument.

    William Tarpeh, 35, Stanford, California, a chemical engineer who developed techniques to extract valuable minerals from wastewater that can be turned into fertilizers or cleaning products.

    Lauren K. Williams, 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a mathematician whose research is in algebraic combinatorics and also contributed to solving problems in other areas through interdisciplinary collaborations.

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • This year’s MacArthur Foundation’s ‘genius’ award winners hold a mirror up to our world

    A political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences. A novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following. A photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America.

    Hahrie Han, Tommy Orange and Matt Black are among the 22 fellows selected this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and announced Wednesday. It’s a recognition often called the “genius award,” which comes with an $800,000 prize, paid over five years that fellows can spend however they choose.

    The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of recommendations, largely from their peers.

    “Each class doesn’t have a theme and we’re not creating a cohort around a certain idea,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. “But I think this year, we see empathy and deep engagement with community figures prominently in this class.”

    Through different methodologies, many of the fellows “boldly and unflinchingly” reflect what they see and hear from deep engagement with their communities, she said.

    Because fellows don’t apply or participate in anyway in their selection, the award often comes as a shock and sometimes coincides with difficult moments. Nabarun Dasgupta, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, had just left a team meeting where he shared that a longtime collaborator in harm reduction work had died when he saw multiple missed calls from a Chicago number, which then called again. It was the MacArthur Foundation.

    They were awarding him the fellowship in recognition of his work, which includes helping to start a testing program for street drugs to identify unregulated substances and helping to overcome a shortage of naloxone, which reverses an opioid overdose.

    To make sense of the intense moment that mixed deep loss and recognition, Dasgupta wrote the following in a journal.

    “We are surrounded by death every day. Sometimes, you have to give yourself a pep talk to get out of bed. Other mornings, the universe yells in your ear and tells you to keep going because what we’re doing is working.”

    In an interview with The Associated Press, he added, “I feel like this couldn’t have been any clearer of a signal that the work has to go on.”

    Other fellows were contacted by the foundation through email asking to speak with them about potential projects. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a Chicago-based artist, planned to take the call in the car. The foundation representatives tried to get her to pull over before breaking the news, but she declined.

    “They were definitely worried about my safety,” she said laughing, and she did then stop driving.

    Johnson’s projects are rooted in her neighborhood of Englewood, located on Chicago’s South Side. She has photographed the same addresses in north and south Chicago, beautified residents’ homes and made predatory housing practices visible. All together, her work reveals the very specific people and places impacted by racial segregation.

    “This award is validation and recognition that my neighborhood, this little Black neighborhood in Chicago that everyone gets told to, ‘Don’t go to because it’s dangerous,’ this award means there are geniuses here,” Johnson said.

    For Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the award is also a recognition of the talent and grit coming from Puerto Rico, where he is from, despite the hardships his community has endured. His research has uncovered many new findings about what drives weather patterns in the tropics, which may eventually help improve forecasting in those regions.

    Adames said usually one of his classes would be ending right when the foundation would publish the new class of fellows, so he was planning to end the lecture early to come back to his office. He said he’s having trouble fathoming what it will be like.

    “I am low-key expecting that a few people are just going to show up in my office, like right at 11:02 a.m. or something like that,” he said.

    Before getting news of the award, Adames said he was anticipating having to scale down his research in the coming years as government funding for climate and weather research has been significantly cut back or changed. He said he had been questioning what was next for his career.

    The prize from MacArthur may allow him to pursue some new theoretical ideas that are harder to get funded, he said.

    “I think people do care and it does matter for the general public, regardless of what the political landscape is, which right now is fairly negative on this,” he said about climate and weather science.

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • California makes Diwali an official statewide holiday

    LOS ANGELES — LOS ANGELES (AP) — California has become the third U.S. state to designate Diwali — the Hindu “Festival of Lights” — as an official statewide holiday.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law Tuesday to go into effect on Jan. 1. It would authorize public schools and community colleges to close on Diwali. State employees could elect to take the day off and public school students will get an excused absence to celebrate the holiday. The new law recognizes that Diwali is also celebrated by Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists.

    Pennsylvania was the first U.S. state to make Diwali a statewide holiday in 2024, followed by Connecticut earlier this year.

    Assemblymember Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose who coauthored the bill with Darshana Patel, an assemblymember from San Diego, said he grew up celebrating the festival with family members, but it was an experience that was isolated from the rest of his life.

    “To have South Asian children be able to proudly celebrate and share it with others is a significant moment,” he said.

    San Jose, a city in California’s Silicon Valley, has a sizable Indian American population. According to a 2025 Pew survey, 960,000 out of the nation’s Indian population of 4.9 million — or 20% — live in California. Hindu American organizations, including the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus in North America, advocated for the law.

    “The provisions that allow students to take the day off without repercussion and state employees to take paid leave are important leaps toward making Diwali truly accessible to those who celebrate,” said Samir Kalra, managing director of the Hindu American Foundation.

    Diwali, which falls on Oct. 20 this year, is derived from the word “Deepavali,” which means “a row of lights.” Celebrants light rows of lamps to symbolize the victory of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. The holiday is celebrated with festive gatherings, fireworks displays, feasts and prayer.

    While Diwali is a major religious festival for Hindus, it is also observed by Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. The origin story of Diwali varies depending on the region. All these stories, across faiths, have the same underlying themes of good triumphing over evil and light over darkness.

    Sikhs, for example, celebrate Bandi Chhor Divas — a day that overlaps with Diwali — to commemorate the release of Guru Hargobind, a revered figure in the faith, who had been imprisoned for 12 years by the Mughal emperor Jahangir.

    Puneet Kaur Sandhu, Sacramento-based senior state policy manager for the Sikh Coalition, said her organization worked with Ash Kalra to make sure the bill’s language included celebrants from other religions whose holidays coincide with Diwali as well.

    “It’s so meaningful that all of us in the community can take this day to celebrate,” she said.

    Rohit Shendrikar, board chair for the South Asian Network in Southern California, said this law not only recognizes the South Asian community in California, but also the impact its members have had on the state.

    “I think about my parents’ immigrant experience when they moved here in the 1960s,” he said. “I celebrate Diwali together at home with my parents and my children, who will now have the opportunity to share their traditions and customs with friends. It helps build a bond between Californians.”

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Newsom signs law aimed at fighting antisemitism in schools

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Tuesday aimed at combating antisemitism in schools.

    The California Legislative Jewish Caucus said the law will help respond to alarming harassment against Jewish students. But critics, including educators and pro-Palestinian advocates, said it could inadvertently obstruct instruction on complex issues in the classroom.

    “California is taking action to confront hate in all its forms. At a time when antisemitism and bigotry are rising nationwide and globally, these laws make clear: our schools must be places of learning, not hate,” Newsom said in a statement.

    The law creates an Office of Civil Rights with a governor-appointed coordinator who will develop and provide training to help school employees identify and prevent antisemitism. The coordinator has to consult with the State Board of Education to make recommendations to the Legislature on policies to address anti-Jewish discrimination in schools.

    The new civil rights office could cost the state about $4 million annually, including money for six staffers, according to the Government Operations Agency, which oversees departments in the Newsom administration.

    Students in public schools nationwide are generally protected against discrimination through state, federal and district policies. But lawmakers in states including Missouri, Vermont and Tennessee have pushed further by introducing legislation aimed specifically at combating antisemitism at K-12 schools. The efforts come amid political tensions in the U.S. over Israel’s war in Gaza.

    Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill earlier this year that would have banned teachers from promoting antisemitism in schools. She said the bill was about attacking teachers, not about combating antisemitism.

    President Donald Trump’s administration has paused or frozen federal funding at colleges, including the University of California, Los Angeles, over allegations that they failed to adequately respond to antisemitism. UC President James B. Milliken has said the cuts, which are being litigated, won’t address anti-Jewish acts and that the university system’s efforts to address antisemitism went ignored.

    The Anti-Defamation League, which supports the new law, tracked 860 antisemitic acts reported to the group last year at non-Jewish K-12 schools nationwide. Reports include harassment, vandalism and assault. That’s a 26% decrease from the previous year but much higher than the 494 reported in 2022.

    Lev Miller Ruderman, a Jewish student at San Lorenzo Valley High School near the coastal city of Santa Cruz, said at a legislative hearing that school officials did not take an antisemitic act on campus seriously during his freshman year.

    Another student used school materials to make a Nazi flag and pinned it to Ruderman’s back, he said. Ruderman walked past numerous students across campus before a teacher asked him about it, he said.

    “I felt sad, confused and overwhelmed,” said Ruderman, who spent the rest of the school year at home.

    The civil rights office does not need legislative approval for educational materials for teachers. But some educators have criticized a part of the law requiring that all teacher instruction “be factually accurate” because they say it could unintentionally stifle learning.

    Many controversial subjects have conflicting facts depending on perspective, said Seth Bramble, a California Teachers Association manager. Not being allowed to teach those facts reinforces rote learning over critical thinking and gives advocates “a new legal tool to disrupt instruction and to threaten educators,” she said.

    A previous version of the bill set specific requirements for “instructional materials regarding Jews, Israel, or the Israel-Palestine conflict,” including that they be balanced, accurate, don’t promote antisemitism and don’t label Israel as a settler colonial state.

    The law no longer references Israel’s war in Gaza, but critics have said it could still have a chilling effect and prevent open discussion on contentious issues in the classroom.

    “Teacher discourse on Palestine or the genocide in Gaza will be policed, misrepresented, and reported to the antisemitism coordinator,” Theresa Montaño with the California Faculty Association said in a statement.

    Democratic state Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who co-authored the bill, said in September that lawmakers had to push back against harassment, bullying and intimidation that Jewish students face.

    “When swastikas are painted on elementary school playgrounds, when a Jewish student has a Nazi flag taped to their back, or is chased and yelled at, we will not turn a blind eye,” he said in a statement. “This bill is about affirming safe and supportive learning environments consistent with our state’s values.”

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  • Judge blocks Trump policy to detain migrant children turning 18 in adult facilities

    A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new Trump administration policy to keep migrant children in detention after they turn 18, moving quickly to stop transfers to adult facilities that advocates said were scheduled for this weekend.

    U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to not detain any child who came to the country alone and without permission in ICE adult detention facilities after they become an adult.

    The Washington, D.C., judge found that such automatic detention violates a court order he issued in 2021 barring such practices.

    ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond Saturday to emails seeking comment.

    The push to detain new adults is yet another battle over one of the most sensitive issues in President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda — how to treat children who cross the border unaccompanied by adults.

    The Associated Press reported Friday that officials are offering migrant children age 14 and older $2,500 to voluntarily return to their home countries. Last month a separate federal judge blocked attempts to immediately deport Guatemalan migrant children who came to the U.S. alone back to their home country. Some children had been put on board planes in that late-night operation before a judge blocked it.

    “All of these are pieces of the same general policy to coerce immigrant youth into giving up their right to seek protection in the United States,” said Michelle Lapointe, a lawyer for the American Immigration Council, one of the groups that asked Contreras to intervene in a filing made just after midnight Saturday.

    Unaccompanied children are held in shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which isn’t part of ICE. Contreras’ 2021 order instructed federal officials to release minors who turn 18 from those shelters to “the least restrictive setting available.” He ruled that is what’s required by federal law as long as the minor isn’t a danger to themselves or others and isn’t a flight risk. Minors are often released to the custody of a relative, or maybe into foster care.

    But lawyers who represent unaccompanied minors said they began getting word in the last few days that ICE was telling shelters that children who were about to turn 18 — even those who had already-approved release plans — could no longer be released and would instead be taken to detention facilities, possibly as early as Saturday. One email from ICE asserted that the new adults could only be released by ICE under its case-by-case parole authority for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” From March through September, ICE has paroled fewer than 500 people overall.

    The plaintiffs argued that “release on parole is all but a dead letter” and that children aging out of shelters would experience lasting harm from unnecessary and inappropriate adult detention” in jails that might be overcrowded or in remote locations. The plaintiffs said that was especially true because some of the clients they cited had been victims of trafficking or had been abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents.

    U.S. border authorities have arrested children crossing the border without parents more than 400,000 times since October 2021. A 2008 law requires them to appear before an immigration judge before being returned to their countries.

    Children have been spending more time in government-run shelters since the Trump administration put them under closer scrutiny before releasing them to family in the United States to pursue their immigration cases.

    The additional scrutiny includes fingerprinting, DNA testing and home visits by immigration officers. Over the summer, immigration officers started showing up and arresting parents.

    The average length of stay at government-run shelters for those released in the U.S. was 171 days in July, down from a peak of 217 days in April but well above 37 days in January, when Trump took office.

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  • 79-year-old US citizen injured in Los Angeles immigration raid files $50M claim

    LOS ANGELES — A 79-year-old man in Southern California filed a claim against the federal government Thursday for $50 million in damages, saying federal agents violated his civil rights when they tackled him during a Sept. 9 immigration raid at a car wash business.

    Rafie Ollah Shouhed, the owner of a car wash in Los Angeles, suffered several broken ribs and chest trauma, elbow injuries, and has symptoms of a traumatic brain injury, according to the claim. Shouhed is a naturalized U.S citizen from Iran.

    Video surveillance footage from inside the car wash shows a federal officer running in through a hallway. The agent encounters Shouhed and knocks him to the ground before running past him. In footage from outside the car wash, Shouhed walks toward a federal officer who appears to be detaining one of his employees. Shouhed briefly grapples with a second officer, before a third officer runs in and tackles him to the ground.

    The claim was filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection.

    In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said authorities arrested five people from Guatemala and Mexico “who broke our nation’s immigration laws” from the car wash and that Shouhed “impeded the operation and was arrested for assaulting and impeding a federal officer.”

    Shouhed and his attorney V. James DeSimone denied the accusation at a press conference Thursday.

    “What can I do for you? Can I help you?” Shouhed recalled saying to the officers.

    He said he wanted to tell agents he had documents to show his employees were eligible to work. There is no audio on the surveillance footage.

    “This is the way ICE is operating in our community,” DeSimone said. “They use physical force, they don’t speak to the people in order to ascertain who is there legally in order to do their job. Instead, they immediately resort to force.”

    After Shouhed was detained, he said he showed an officer at the detention center his ID. He was held for 12 hours and released without charges, the claim says.

    The agency has six months to settle or deny the claim, after which Shouhed can file a lawsuit in federal court.

    Several other U.S. citizens have also filed civil rights claims against the government for being wrongly detained during federal immigrant enforcement operations in Southern California. They include Andrea Velez, who was detained June 24 on her way to work in downtown Los Angeles. She was held for two days and faced a charge for obstructing a federal officer that was eventually dropped.

    Federal immigration officers have also come under scrutiny for their aggressive tactics in raids. While DHS has usually defended its tactics, the agency issued a rare rebuke of one of its officers Friday after he shoved an Ecuadorian woman to the floor at a courthouse in New York.

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  • Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’ brings revolution to the (very) big screen

    LOS ANGELES — Paul Thomas Anderson spent about 20 years writing “One Battle After Another.” After two decades, it’s never felt more relevant.

    The epic action thriller, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” hits theaters Friday. With a running time of 2 hours and 50 minutes, “One Battle After Another” wastes no time immersing audiences in its politically charged world.

    The revolution will not be televised, but it will be placed at the front and center of Anderson’s film. The director isn’t there to make his audience comfortable, star Teyana Taylor says, as he zeros in on themes of immigration, racism and systemic corruption showcased at their most absurd.

    “I feel like PTA calls out a lot of things that are trying to get swept under the rug,” Taylor told The Associated Press, referring to the director by his nickname. “And that’s what I respect. This is really waking, shaking and baking some s—. Like, you gotta shake the table.”

    Taylor’s character, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is a member of the Weather Underground-inspired French 75 revolutionary group. From the film’s first scene, we see the French 75 take matters into their own hands, liberating undocumented detainees, destroying corrupt political offices and launching their own form of justice, one right after the other. The group is peppered with members portrayed by musicians-turned-actors like Dijon Duenas, Alana Haim, and Shayna McHayle and notable actors like Regina Hall and Wood Harris.

    “I mean, this movie is based on some of the revolutionaries and anarchists of the late ’60s, the Weathermen that were fighting for civil rights, environmentalism too at the time, capitalism, Vietnam,” star Leonardo DiCaprio told the AP. “But it’s about the implosion of that too, about the extremes that people go to for their own ideology.”

    DiCaprio portrays Bob Ferguson, known in the French 75’s initial scenes as Ghetto Pat, known for his knowledge of explosives and undying devotion to both Perfidia and the revolution. Together, Perfidia and Pat seem unstoppable, until the racist and xenophobic Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) sets out end the group to fuel his rise to power.

    “And this is a movie, fast-forward, in today’s day and age, where you see this sort of systematic breakdown that comes from it, if it’s not done with grace and purity and consistently, the whole sort of— our revolution is dismantled and our past comes back to haunt us,” said DiCaprio. “So that’s what I love that Paul did. He shows extremity on both sides of the spectrum and how no one seems to be communicating or getting things done in the right way nowadays.”

    The film jumps 16 years into the future. Perfidia has disappeared and DiCaprio’s character lives under a new alias in a sanctuary city as a paranoid, stoner dad with his teenage daughter, Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti). Everything is seemingly mundane until Lockjaw reappears, forcing the father-daughter duo on the run.

    “There’s a lot of moments where I was like, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do this, but thankfully I had amazing scene partners and a great support system to kind of assure me that I was here to do my job and I knew exactly that I could do it,” Infiniti said.

    “One Battle After Another” is Anderson’s most expensive project to date and shot entirely in VistaVision — a decades-old format that’s been revived in recent years by movies like “The Brutalist.”

    Benicio del Toro, who plays karate instructor Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, says blending improv scenes with DiCaprio and shooting in the antique format forced the actors and Anderson to have unwavering faith in each other’s decisions, knowing they only had a limited amount of takes. His character, also the head of an undocumented migrant hideaway, hopes his storyline will be an example of showcasing compassion beyond political affiliation.

    “I wouldn’t be pompous enough to say movies change people. But it might just open a door that leads to another door that leads to a hallway to another door,” he said.

    DiCaprio says portraying Bob Ferguson is his own version of freedom of speech, allowing him to “shine a light on certain issues about humanity and different subject matters.”

    “I’m always searching for a movie that doesn’t necessarily have meaning but is thought-provoking, that holds a mirror up to who we are as a society, as people, of humanity,” said DiCaprio. “And that’s what I think the heart of this movie is, is how to find humanity in a world that is incredibly divided. … It’s not a film where there’s a specific sort of ideology that Paul is putting into it. It’s saying this is who we are, this is the world we live in.”

    For Taylor, the 20-year-old script’s relevance is evidence of American history continuing to repeat itself.

    “It didn’t need a change; it didn’t need to be updated because it was all still so relevant,” said Taylor. “It’s time to wake up, and it’s time to shed light on the necessary conversations.”

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  • As enrollment falls, districts mull which schools to close

    Thomasina Clarke has watched school after school close in her once thriving St. Louis neighborhood, which was hit by a tornado this spring and whose population has plummeted in recent decades.

    “It’s like a hole in the community,” Clarke said. She fears a new round of closure discussions could strip the historically Black community of a storm-damaged high school, whose alumni include Tina Turner and Chuck Berry.

    St. Louis Public Schools is among the districts nationwide weighing how many urban schools to keep open due to shrinking budgets, the falling birthrate and a growing school choice movement. A district-commissioned report released this year found that the school system has more than twice the schools it needs.

    Such decisions are gut wrenching. It’s a financial strain to operate half-empty schools, but research shows kids often fare badly after closures.

    Elsewhere, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston and Norfolk, Virginia, are considering shuttering schools, while a public outcry over potential closures has stopped them — for now — in Seattle and San Francisco.

    From 2019 to 2023, enrollment declined by 20% or more at nearly 1 in 12 public schools — roughly 5,100, according to a report published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank. Many were chronically low-performing schools in high poverty neighborhoods, the report found.

    Public school enrollment is projected to tumble 5.5% between 2022 and 2031, largely due to changing demographics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Other factors include the shift by some students to private education or homeschooling and some immigrant families’ decisions to leave the country.

    Federal funds allowed many schools to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite tumbling enrollment numbers. But now the relief money is gone, and those under-populated schools are a problem, said Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

    “The takeaway is pretty clear,” Smith said: Public school enrollment is declining. “It’s going to continue to fall for years to come. And so generally, state and local policymakers have to adapt to this new reality.”

    Chicago shuttered around 50 schools in 2013 — the largest school closure in U.S. history. Afterward, fighting and bullying increased as displaced students settled into new schools, said Marisa de la Torre, managing director and senior research associate at the UChicago Consortium on School Research.

    Test scores dipped in the schools slated for closure, and while the displaced students’ reading scores eventually recovered, math performance issues persisted for years.

    “There were a lot of communities pitted against each other,” de la Torre said. “It was a very long process, a lot of uncertainty. All of this really affected the staff and the kids.”

    Under pressure from the Chicago’s powerful teachers union, the city issued a moratorium on closures through 2027. Around a third of classroom seats remain empty.

    St. Louis Public Schools’ student population plummeted from 115,543 in 1967 to 18,122 last year, reflecting an exodus of families to the suburbs. That number could drop further as residents leave their tornado-damaged homes.

    Sumner and an elementary school — both in the Ville neighborhood — are among seven St. Louis schools that didn’t open this fall because of tornado damage. At a school board meeting in July, consultants argued that the district can’t support all its schools, which on average were built 79 years ago. Closures, they said, could free up money for improvements.

    Board member Donna Jones wasn’t buying it.

    “Stop playing like we’re not living in a catastrophe here,” she said.

    Several shuttered schools already dot the Ville. In June, Superintendent Millicent Borishade said the district remains committed to Sumner, saying there’s no plan to permanently close it. More recently, officials have been quiet on its fate. Frustrated, the teachers union issued a no-confidence vote against the superintendent.

    “It just adds more trauma already to those who are suffering,” said Ray Cummings, president of the American Federation of Teachers St. Louis Local 420. “Those neighborhoods need hope.”

    When the 150-year-old Sumner was considered for closure four years ago, a coalition including the nonprofit 4theVille and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival concocted a plan to save it by expanding its arts curriculum.

    Mack Williams, an instructor paid by 4theVille, turned lockers into museum displays honoring the school’s most well-known graduates, including tennis legend Arthur Ashe. There was a waiting list for his museum studies class and his students participated in a National History Day competition.

    School enrollment rose.

    Even now, Williams sees hope, despite Sumner’s estimated $2 million in tornado damage.

    “Yes, there’s damage, but it’s still standing and that’s reflective of the resilience of this community,” he said.

    Dakota Scott started at Sumner as a sophomore after struggling so much at a college preparatory magnet school that she was asked to leave.

    “At the time, I wasn’t really studious. I was kind of rough around the edges,” Scott said.

    But, she said, Sumner helped her get on track. She made a movie and joined choir, junior ROTC and student council. She competed in the history competition, and modeled in a Chicago fashion show with classmates.

    “From being a kid who was skipping class, I was a kid who was literally on time and attending all of my classes,” said Scott, now a University of Missouri freshman.

    Noting the “rich history” of the school and the once wealthy neighborhood, Clarke, who taught Sumner’s movie-making class as a volunteer, suggested all is not lost.

    “People left, the community land, businesses left. Schools left. Productivity left. Nothing but a lot of decay left,” she lamented. “And we’re trying to bring it back. Oh my gosh. If we could just get one fourth of what was going on.”

    ___

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Italian rapper Fedez apologizes for lyrics targeting Jannik Sinner after being accused of racism

    MILAN — MILAN (AP) — Italian rapper Fedez has apologized for publishing musical lyrics saying that tennis player Jannik Sinner speaks with “Adolf Hitler’s accent,” which prompted the musician to be accused of inciting racial hatred.

    Fedez recently posted an Instagram story featuring lyrics of a new song that said in Italian: “Italian has a new idol named Jannik Sinner. Pure-blooded Italian with Adolf Hitler’s accent.”

    A city council member in Bolzano — the capital of the German-speaking autonomous province of Alto Adige in northern Italy where Sinner is from — on Thursday filed a formal complaint with prosecutors over Fedez’s lyrics based on an article in Italy’s penal code that sanctions incitement of racial hatred and propaganda.

    “I wanted to take a paradox and it came off terribly, about athletes who are born and raised in Italy but often are not considered Italian due to the color of their skin and apply it to Italy’s top athlete,” Fedez said during a concert in Milan on Friday, according to the Gazzetta dello Sport.

    “I wasn’t able to pull it off and all I can do is apologize,” Fedez added. “If something like this isn’t understood, it’s because of a mistake made by whoever wrote it. So I take responsibility.”

    The reference to “pure-blooded Italian” recalls Italian fascist propaganda from the 1930s, according to Giuseppe Martucci, the city council member, who added that the reference to Hitler was unacceptable.

    “I felt it my duty to act and hold up the founding values of our constitution,” Martucci said. “We can’t allow language the evokes racism and hate to be normalized by public figures.”

    By winning four Grand Slam titles over the last two years, Sinner has exceeded Italy’s soccer stars to become the country’s most popular athlete. He lost the U.S. Open final to Carlos Alcaraz this month and lost the No. 1 ranking to his Spanish rival.

    This is not the first time that Sinner has faced an underlying sentiment that he isn’t fully Italian.

    Before he won his first Grand Slam title and opted not to play Davis Cup for Italy in September 2023 — saying he hadn’t recovered in time from tournaments in North America — he was widely criticized.

    “Caso Nazionale” (National Issue), said the front-page of Sportweek, the Gazzetta dello Sport’s weekly magazine, in a headline with a double meaning.

    Then when Sinner won his first Grand Slam title at the 2024 Australian Open, he was treated as a national hero on his return home and met with Premier Giorgia Meloni at the Chigi Palace.

    Sinner and Meloni posed for photos as they held aloft together first the Australian Open trophy and then the Italian flag. Sinner then gave Meloni a warm embrace to end the meeting.

    ___

    AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis

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  • Lawyers for firefighter ask judge to order his release from ICE facility

    Lawyers for an Oregon firefighter who was taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents while fighting a Washington state wildfire filed a petition in federal court Friday asking a judge to order his release from an immigration detention facility.

    The Oregon man, Rigoberto Hernandez Hernandez, and one other firefighter were part of a 44-person crew fighting a blaze in the Olympic National Forest on Aug. 27 when the agents took them into custody during a multiagency criminal investigation into the two contractors for whom the men were employed.

    Lawyers with the Innovation Law Lab said during a press conference that his arrest was illegal and violated U.S. Department of Homeland Security polices that say immigration enforcement must not be conducted at locations where emergency responses are happening.

    The Bear Gulch Fire, one of the largest in the state, had burned 29 square miles (75 square kilometers) by Friday and was 9% contained.

    The Border Patrol said at the time that the two workers were in the U.S. illegally so they were detained. Federal authorities did not provide information about the investigation into the contractors.

    Lawyer Rodrigo Fernandez-Ortega said they filed a petition for habeas corpus and a motion for a temporary restraining order that seeks the man’s release from the Northwest ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington.

    Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an email to The Associated Press that the two men were not firefighters — they were working in a support role cutting logs into firewood.

    “The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time,” she said. “U.S. Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.” A spokesperson for the Border Patrol declined to comment, saying they don’t comment on active or pending litigation.

    Six Democratic Oregon Congressional leaders sent a press release late Friday calling on the release of the firefighter. “It’s outrageous for the Trump Administration to trample on the due process rights of emergency responders who put their lives on the line to protect Oregonians’ safety,” said Sen. Ron Wyden. Sen. Jeff Merkley and four representatives said the arrests put communities in danger and stoke fear.

    After Hernandez was taken into custody in August, his lawyers were unable to locate him for 48 hours, which caused distress for his family, Fernandez-Ortega said. He has been in the Tacoma facility ever since, they said.

    Hernandez, 23, was the son of migrant farmworkers, his lawyer said. He was raised in Oregon, Washington and California as they traveled for work. He moved to Oregon three years ago and began working as a wildland firefighter.

    This was his third season working as a wildland firefighter, “doing the grueling and dangerous job of cutting down trees and clearing vegetation to manage the spread of wildfires and to protect homes, communities, and resources,” his lawyer said.

    Hernandez had received a U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and submitted his U-Visa application with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services the following year. The U-Visa program was established by Congress to protect victims of serious crimes who assist federal investigators.

    He has been waiting since 2018 for the immigration agency to decide on his application and should be free during the process, his lawyers said.

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  • A brutal beating by deputies was caught on tape. They were cleared anyway

    MANSFIELD, La. — The strip search lasted just six minutes, but when it ended, Jarius Brown had a broken nose, fractured eye socket and a badly swollen face.

    Never-before-published footage shows why: Two Louisiana sheriff’s deputies pummeled the naked 25-year-old, flinging him around the DeSoto Parish Detention Center laundry room while landing a flurry of 50 punches.

    In the aftermath of the 2019 assault, one of the deputies resigned and the other was suspended. Internal records show the sheriff’s office concluded “there was no way of defending” the deputies’ actions.

    Yet, that’s just what the Louisiana State Police did, an Associated Press investigation has found. After waiting months to analyze the graphic video and more than a year to even interview Brown, the agency cleared the deputies of wrongdoing. The state police ultimately supported the deputies’ claims that Brown had been the “aggressor” in an altercation that took place after he had been arrested on charges of stealing a car.

    The case might have ended there had federal prosecutors not eventually gotten involved and come to the opposite conclusion: Brown had been the victim of excessive force.

    The graphic footage remained under wraps for six years but emerged this month in Brown’s long-running lawsuit seeking damages for his injuries. Brown, now 32, declined to comment through his attorneys.

    Gary Evans, a former DeSoto Parish district attorney, said the case underscores the safety net the Justice Department long provided in smaller communities — a role many advocates fear has been thrown into doubt as the department dials back its civil rights enforcement amid President Donald Trump’s mandate to “unleash” the police.

    “This was a great miscarriage of justice at the state level, and it shows the system has broken down and doesn’t protect citizens,” Evans said. “In a community like this, the federal government is the only avenue for anything to get done.”

    Brown’s beating was just the latest in a litany of police misconduct cases in DeSoto Parish, a rural swath of piney woods and rolling farmlands south of Shreveport, Louisiana.

    A month before Brown was pummeled, another deputy was charged with malfeasance after tackling and repeatedly punching a man walking into a grocery store. He agreed to a permanent ban from law enforcement in exchange for the charges being dismissed. In another case, a DeSoto Parish deputy was charged with third-degree rape after ordering a woman he arrested to perform oral sex on him.

    Russell Graham, a state police spokesperson, declined to explain his agency’s conclusion that there “was not sufficient evidence” the deputies in Brown’s case committed a crime. He attributed delays in the investigation to the COVID-19 pandemic, which began six months after the beating.

    “LSP remains committed to thorough, impartial investigations and working with partners to ensure accountability and uphold public trust,” Graham wrote in an email to AP, adding the agency had “conducted a thorough investigation of this matter when it was presented to them.”

    Former deputy Javarrea Pouncy pleaded guilty to using excessive force and was sentenced last year to serve about three years in federal prison. He could not be reached for comment.

    The other deputy, DeMarkes Grant, who pleaded guilty to obstructing justice, was released from prison in April after serving a 10-month sentence. Grant told AP he was still “stressed out” and had “lost a lot” as a result of his conviction. He declined to say whether he regretted the beating.

    “What has happened has happened,” he said.

    Use of force experts questioned the divergent outcomes at the state and federal level, saying Brown never posed a threat and the beating was excessive.

    The grainy footage shows a handcuffed Brown calmly walking into the jail’s laundry room before disrobing. The beating begins halfway through the search, after the deputies confront Brown for not squatting as directed so they could fully search him.

    Neither deputy sought medical care for Brown after the beating, but the warden recognized the man needed attention and ensured he was taken to the hospital.

    “I don’t know how any objective evaluator of this incident could determine this was anything but excessive,” said Charles “Joe” Key, a former Baltimore police lieutenant who typically testifies in defense of police and reviewed the footage at AP’s request.

    Andrew Scott, a former police chief of Boca Raton, Florida, said there was nothing on the video that would have justified the beating. He could only surmise the deputies were “delivering retribution.” Any police official who justified the beating after watching the video, Scott added, is “not a competent or truthful expert.”

    Within days of the beating, DeSoto Parish Sheriff Jayson Richardson suspended Grant and elicited Pouncy’s resignation. He defended the state police probe in a recent interview, saying federal and state reviews weren’t an “apples to apples” comparison due to differing criminal statutes.

    Evans, the former district attorney, said local officials repeatedly thwarted his efforts to obtain the video.

    Louisiana State Police ultimately provided the beating video to Evans’ successor, Charles Adams, who closed the investigation in 2021. Regardless of what the video shows, Adams told AP, the state police report would have made a state prosecution “very difficult, if not impossible” because it concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of a crime.

    “That report would have been brought out and beat over our head,” Adams said.

    The state police report describes Brown as the aggressor and said the man told troopers he was “probably high” when he was attacked but that officers took “appropriate action” against him.

    State investigators also concluded the footage supported the deputies’ accounts of the attack. The U.S. Justice Department, however, charged both deputies with falsifying their reports, which Grant admitted were fabricated to create a “false narrative.”

    Weeks after the September 2019 beating at the jail, Brown pleaded guilty to ”unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars. State police interviewed Brown in jail in early 2021 and reported he “did not want anything done” about the beating and “was not interested in pursuing the matter criminally or civilly.”

    A local judge, Amy McCartney, dismissed the lawsuit Brown filed against the deputies, ruling in 2023 the beating did not constitute a “crime of violence.” An appeals court reversed that decision, and Brown’s lawyers are seeking damages for his injuries and medical expenses.

    “Jarius Brown survived a horrific, unprovoked beating,” said Brown’s attorney, Michael Imbroscio, adding he is “entitled to justice.” Brown also is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, which fought a lengthy legal battle related to the state’s statute of limitations on civil claims stemming from police violence.

    Brown’s father, Derek Washington, said the attack sent his son’s already unstable mental capacity “into a more severe case of schizophrenia and anxiety.” Today, Brown is fearful of crowds and closed-in spaces, he said, and “cannot function in society.”

    “He always thinks someone is trying to harm him physically,” Washington said. “Right now, my son is just a stranger, and I just want to get some semblance of him back.”

    ___

    Brook reported from New Orleans.

    ___

    Contact the AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

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  • Massive mural honoring NYC immigrants now fills entrance to St. Patrick’s Cathedral

    NEW YORK — New York’s iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral is unveiling a massive new mural that honors the city’s immigrants.

    Spanning the sides to the Manhattan landmark’s entryway, the 25-foot-tall (7.6-meter-tall) artwork of everyday immigrants and notable historical figures comes amid a federal crackdown on immigration that has divided many communities across the country.

    The piece was not intended as a political message, according to the Rev. Enrique Salvo, the Roman Catholic church’s rector, but nevertheless sends a message.

    “We want anyone that comes in to feel loved and welcomed,” said Salvo, who is himself an immigrant from Nicaragua. “It’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter what’s happening … politically. We have to treat everyone with love and respect.”

    The work, titled “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding,” also just brightens up the space for the 6 million visitors that come into the church every year, said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York who commissioned the piece.

    “It was very drab,” Dolan told reporters Thursday of the old entryway ahead of the mural’s official unveiling at Sunday Mass. “So, we thought at least we need to spark it up and get some illumination.”

    The mural, by local artist Adam Cvijanovic, in part honors Irish immigrants who contributed to the cathedral’s construction. One section depicts the Apparition at Knock, in which, according to Catholic lore, the saints Mary, Joseph and John the Evangelist appeared to locals in the Irish village in 1879 — the same year, Dolan noted, the cathedral opened its doors. Elsewhere, Irish immigrants are seen arriving on a ship.

    Other scenes show modern-day migrants alongside famous local figures, including journalist and social activist Dorothy Day, Pierre Toussaint, a former slave from Haiti who became a major philanthropist in the city, and former New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith, the first Roman Catholic to receive a major-party nomination for president.

    Cvijanovic said it was also important to him to represent Native Americans in the piece, which features St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint.

    Dolan praised the painter for creating what he described as “an effusive ode to the greatness of this city and those who came here, and those who have turned into their leaders.”

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  • Judge dismisses Indigenous Amazon tribe’s lawsuit against The New York Times and TMZ

    LOS ANGELES — A California judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Indigenous tribe in the Brazilian Amazon against The New York Times and TMZ that claimed the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography.

    The suit was filed in May by the Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the Amazon rainforest.

    Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Tiana J. Murillo on Tuesday sided with the Times, whose lawyers argued in a hearing Monday that its coverage last year was fair and protected by free speech.

    TMZ argued that its coverage, which followed the Times’ initial reporting, addressed ongoing public controversies and matters of public interest.

    The suit claimed stories by TMZ and Yahoo amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process. Yahoo was dismissed as a defendant earlier this month.

    Murillo wrote in her ruling that though some may “reasonably perceive” the Times’ and TMZ’s reporting as “insensitive, disparaging or reflecting a lack of respect, the Court need not, and does not, determine which of these characterizations is most apt.”

    The judge added that “regardless of tone, TMZ’s segment contributed to existing debate over the effects of internet connectivity on remote Indigenous communities.”

    “We are pleased by the comprehensive and careful analysis undertaken by the court in dismissing this frivolous lawsuit,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement Wednesday to The Associated Press. “Our reporter traveled to the Amazon and provided a nuanced account of tension that arose when modern technology came to an isolated community.”

    Attorneys for TMZ did not immediately respond to an email request for comment Wednesday.

    Plaintiffs in the lawsuit included the tribe, community leader Enoque Marubo and Brazilian journalist and sociologist Flora Dutra, who were both mentioned in the June 2024 story. Both were instrumental in bringing the tribe the internet connection, which they said has had many positive effects including facilitating emergency medicine and the education of children.

    N. Micheli Quadros, the attorney who represents the tribe, Marubo and Dutra, wrote to the AP Wednesday that the judge’s decision “highlights the imbalance of our legal system,” which “often shields powerful institutions while leaving vulnerable individuals, such as Indigenous communities without meaningful recourse.”

    Quadros said the plaintiffs will decide their next steps in the coming days, whether that is through courts in California or international human rights bodies.

    “This case is bigger than one courtroom or one ruling,” Quadros wrote. “It is about accountability, fairness, and the urgent need to protect communities that have historically been silenced or marginalized.”

    The lawsuit sought at least $180 million, including both general and punitive damages, from each of the defendants.

    The suit argued that the Times’ story by reporter Jack Nicas on how the group was handling the introduction of internet service via Starlink satellites operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography.”

    The court disagreed with the tribe’s claims that the Times article falsely implied its youth were “addicted to pornography,” noting that the coverage only mentioned unidentified young men had access to porn and did not state that the tribe as a whole was addicted to pornography.

    Nicas reported that in less than a year of Starlink access, the tribe was dealing with the same struggles the rest of the world has dealt with for years due to the pervasive effects of the internet. The challenges ranged from “teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography,” Nicas wrote.

    He also wrote that a tribal leader said young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats. The piece doesn’t mention porn elsewhere, but other outlets amplified that aspect of the story. TMZ posted a story with the headline, “Elon Musk’s Starlink Hookup Leaves A Remote Tribe Addicted To Porn.”

    The Times published a follow-up story in response to misperceptions brought on by other outlets in which Nicas wrote: “The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article.”

    Nicas wrote that he spent a week with the Marubo tribe. The lawsuit claimed that while he was invited for a week, he spent less than 48 hours in the village, “barely enough time to observe, understand, or respectfully engage with the community.”

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  • California Democrat turns to TikTok to reach Hispanic voters in governor’s race

    A Democratic candidate for governor of California will be giving TikTok a go, but with a caveat: He’ll only post videos in Spanish.

    At least for now.

    Former Biden administration Health Secretary Xavier Becerra is embracing the popular short-video app to target Spanish-language users. His campaign and surveys note that Hispanic adults use TikTok in much higher numbers than Black and white adults.

    Congress last year passed a ban on TikTok, but President Joe Biden, who signed the bill into law and was Becerra’s boss at the time, announced before leaving office that he wouldn’t enforce it. After the Supreme Court ruled the ban constitutional, President Donald Trump suspended it on his first day in office to give the China-based company ByteDance time to find a new buyer.

    Trump, a Republican, had tried to ban dealings with ByteDance during his first term, but he joined the platform last year and has millions of followers. He has repeatedly extended the deadline for ByteDance to find a buyer and hinted occasionally that there was a deal in place, but without offering details. The White House started its own TikTok account last month.

    Becerra’s new approach is part of an effort by Democrats to counter the rightward swing that was seen last year both in red states such as Texas and Florida and blue states such as California, New Jersey and New York, where Trump improved his numbers among Latinos.

    The idea is to lock in a key user base by pushing out content early on a platform politicians are still largely experimenting with. The effort comes when the Trump administration is phasing out multilingual services as part of the president’s push to make English the official language of the United States.

    Candidates running in the 2025 elections in New Jersey and Virginia are already adapting their campaigns to appeal to Hispanics, who may have stayed away from the polls or voted for Trump based on his economic promises. But strategists say that it’s still very much up for debate whether the trend will hold.

    “It’s critical to communicate in the language and on the platforms where voters spend their time and get their information,” Becerra said in a statement.

    A 2024 Pew Research Center survey concluded that while TikTok has seen significant user growth in a short time, the demographics were different depending on race and ethnicity. Nearly half of Hispanic adults reported using it compared with 39% of Black adults and 28% of white adults.

    Becerra’s campaign says it will push out a mix of videos with him speaking directly to the camera, policy explainers and behind-the-scenes clips from the campaign trail. It also plans to collaborate with influencers and publish videos created by supporters. All in Spanish.

    “The working-class Latinos Democrats need to win back aren’t necessarily going to a Spanish-language website, but they are scrolling and watching vertical video in their free time,” said José Muñoz, a Democratic strategist advising the campaign and a former press secretary at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

    In the New Jersey governor’s race this year, both Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill and Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli are participating in Spanish-language town halls on Univision, where Hispanic voters will ask the candidates questions. In Virginia, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger speaks Spanish in a radio ad about being a mother of three girls who attended public school.

    “I know how difficult things are for families these days,” she says in Spanish.

    One of Becerra’s challengers in the 2026 California governor’s race, Katie Porter, has quickly established herself as a leading contender in the Democratic primary and has already built a sizable following on TikTok, with more than half a million followers, compared with about 200,000 followers on Instagram and 164,000 on Facebook.

    In his introduction video, Becerra says his priority is to make housing more affordable and reduce health care costs.

    “I am the only candidate in this race who will speak to you in Spanish on this platform,” he said. “But I want this to be a two-way conversation. I want to learn what worries you the most and what you want from the next California governor.”

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  • The National Center for Civil and Human Rights expands at critical time in US history

    ATLANTA — A popular museum in Atlanta is expanding at a critical moment in the United States — and unlike the Smithsonian Institution, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights is privately funded, putting it beyond the immediate reach of Trump administration efforts to control what Americans learn about their history.

    The monthslong renovation, which cost nearly $60 million, adds six new galleries as well as classrooms and interactive experiences, changing a relatively static museum into a dynamic place where people are encouraged to take action supporting civil and human rights, racial justice and the future of democracy, said Jill Savitt, the center’s president and CEO.

    The center has stayed active ahead of its Nov. 8 reopening through K-12 education programs that include more than 300 online lesson plans; a LGBTQ+ Institute; training in diversity, equity and inclusion; human rights training for law enforcement; and its Truth & Transformation Initiative to spread awareness about forced labor, racial terror and other historic injustices.

    These are the same aspects of American history, culture and society that the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle.

    Dreamed up by civil rights icons Evelyn Lowery and Andrew Young, the center opened in 2014 on land donated by the Coca-Cola Company, next to the Georgia Aquarium and The World of Coca-Cola, and became a major tourist attraction. But ticket sales declined after the pandemic.

    Now the center hopes to attract more repeat visitors with immersive experiences like “Change Agent Adventure,” aimed at children under 12. These “change agents” will be asked to pledge to something — no matter how small — that “reflects the responsibility of each of us to play a role in the world: To have empathy. To call for justice. To be fair, be kind. And that’s the ethos of this gallery,” Savitt said. It opens next April.

    “I think advocacy and change-making is kind of addictive. It’s contagious,” Savitt explained. “When you do something, you see the success of it, you really want to do more. And our desire here is to whet the appetite of kids to see that they can be involved. They can do it.”

    This ethos is sharply different from the idea that young people can’t handle the truth and must be protected from unpleasant challenges but, Savitt said, “the history that we tell here is the most inspirational history.”

    “In fact, I think it’s what makes America great. It is something to be patriotically proud of. The way activists over time have worked together through nonviolence and changed democracy to expand human freedom — there’s nothing more American and nothing greater than that. That is the lesson that we teach here,” she said.

    “Broken Promises,” opening in December, includes exhibits from the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, cut short when white mobs sought to brutally reverse advances by formerly enslaved people. “We want to start orienting you in the conversation that we believe we all kind of see, but we don’t say it outright: Progress. Backlash. Progress. Backlash. And that pattern that has been in our country since enslavement,” said its curator, Kama Pierce.

    On display will be a Georgia historical marker from the site of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, pockmarked repeatedly with bullets, that Turner descendants donated to keep it from being vandalized again.

    “There are 11 bullet holes and 11 grandchildren living,” and the family’s words will be incorporated into the exhibit to show their resilience, Pierce said.

    Items from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. collection will have a much more prominent place, in a room that recreates King’s home office, with family photos contributed by the center’s first guest curator: his daughter, the Rev. Bernice King. “We wanted to lift up King’s role as a man, as a human being, not just as an icon,” Savitt explained.

    Gone are the huge images of the world’s most genocidal leaders — Hitler, Stalin and Mao among others — with explanatory text about the millions of people killed under their orders. In their place will be examples of human rights victories by groups working around the world.

    “The research says that if you tell people things are really bad and how awful they are, you motivate people for a minute, and then apathy sets in because it’s too hard to do anything,” Savitt said. “But if you give people something to hope for that’s positive, that they can see themselves doing, you’re more likely to cultivate a sense of agency in people.”

    And doubling in capacity is an experience many can’t forget: Joining a 1960s sit-in against segregation. Wearing headphones as they take a lunch-counter stool, visitors can both hear and feel an angry, segregationist mob shouting they don’t belong. Because this is “heavy content,” Savitt says, a new “reflection area” will allow people to pause afterward on a couch, with tissues if they need them, to consider what they’ve just been through.

    The center’s expansion was seeded by Home Depot co-founder and Atlanta philanthropist Arthur M. Blank, the Mellon Foundation and many other donors, for which Savitt expressed gratitude: “The corporate community is in a defensive crouch right now — they could get targeted,” she said.

    But she said donors shared concerns about people’s understanding of citizenship, so supporting the teaching of civil and human rights makes a good investment.

    “It is the story of democracy — Who gets to participate? Who has a say? Who gets to have a voice?” she said. “So our donors are very interested in a healthy, safe, vibrant, prosperous America, which you need a healthy democracy to have.”

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  • Annual Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations make adjustments in current political climate

    Each year during Hispanic Heritage Month, huge celebrations can be expected across the U.S. to showcase the diversity and culture of Hispanic people.

    This year, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns, a federally led English-only initiative and an anti-diversity, equity and inclusion push have changed the national climate in which these celebrations occur. Organizers across the country, from Massachusetts and North Carolina to California and Washington state, have postponed or canceled heritage month festivals altogether.

    Celebrated each year from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, the month is a chance for many in the U.S. to learn about and celebrate the contributions of Hispanic cultures, the country’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic minority, according to the U.S. Census. The group includes people whose ancestors come from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

    More than 68 million people identify as ethnically Hispanic in the U.S., according to the latest census estimates.

    Before there was National Hispanic Heritage Month, there was Hispanic Heritage Week, which was created through legislation sponsored by Mexican American U.S. Rep Edward R. Roybal of Los Angeles and signed into law in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

    The weeklong commemoration was expanded to a month two decades later, with legislation signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

    “It was clustered around big celebrations for the community,” Alberto Lammers, director of communications at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute said. “It became a chance for people to know Hispanic cultures, for Latinos to get to know a community better and for the American public to understand a little better the long history of Latinos in the U.S.”

    Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point to coincide with the anniversary of “El Grito de Dolores,” or the “Cry of Dolores,” which was issued in 1810 from a town in Mexico that launched the country’s war for independence from Spain.

    The Central American nations of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica celebrate their independence on Sept. 15 and Mexico marks its national day on Sept. 16, the day after the cry for independence.

    Also during National Hispanic Heritage Month, the South American nation of Chile observes its independence day on Sept. 18.

    The White House so far has not mentioned any planned events. Last year, President Joe Biden hosted a reception and issued a proclamation for the occasion.

    Hispanic was a term coined by the federal government for people descended from Spanish-speaking cultures. But for some, the label has a connotation of political conservatism and emphasizes a connection to Spain. It sometimes gets mistakenly interchanged with “Latino” or “Latinx.”

    For some, Latino reflects their ties to Latin America. So some celebrations are referred to as Latinx or Latin Heritage Month.

    Latin Americans are not a monolith. There are several other identifiers for Latin Americans, depending largely on personal preference. Mexican Americans who grew up during the 1960s Civil Rights era may identify as Chicano. Other may go by their family’s nation of origin such as Colombian American or Salvadoran American.

    Each culture has unique differences when it comes to music, food, art and other cultural touchstones.

    September typically has no shortage of festivities. Events often include traditional Latin foods and entertainment like mariachi bands, folklórico and salsa dance lessons. The intent is to showcase the culture of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and other Latin countries.

    Masked ICE agents carrying out President Donald Trump’s policies via workplace raids at farms, manufacturing plants and elsewhere — which has included detaining legal residents — led some to fear large gatherings would become additional targets for raids. Another obstacle heritage celebrations face is the perception that they’d violate bans on DEI programming — something Trump has discouraged across federal agencies. Some companies and universities have followed suit.

    Early in September, organizers of a Mexican Independence festival in Chicago announced they would postpone celebrations due to Trump’s promises of an immigration crackdown in the city.

    “It was a painful decision, but holding El Grito Chicago at this time puts the safety of our community at stake — and that’s a risk we are unwilling to take,” said the organizers of the festival.

    A new date has not yet been announced. Though Mexican Independence Day falls on Sept. 16, celebrations in Chicago typically span more than a week and draw hundreds of thousands of participants for lively parades, festivals, street parties and car caravans.

    “The fact that the federal government is sending troops as we start these celebrations is an insult,” Illinois state Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat, said at a news conference. “It is a fear tactic. It’s unforgivable.”

    Similarly, Sacramento’s annual Mexican Independence Day festival was canceled with organizers citing the political climate and safety concerns.

    Other events that have been canceled include the Hispanic Heritage Festival of the Carolinas, Hispanic Heritage Fest in Kenner, Louisiana and FIESTA Indianapolis.

    Ivan Sandoval-Cervantes, an anthropology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said when celebrations are canceled from the top down it affects how we see them throughout the country. Used to seeing celebrations in Las Vegas advertised, he has seen very little leading up to this year’s heritage month.

    “If it’s not being celebrated by a specific state that doesn’t mean they won’t be celebrated but they might go into the private sphere,” Sandoval-Cervantes said. “Where it’s safer to embrace the symbols or even speak Spanish.”

    In Mexico, the government launched a new appeal to raise awareness among Mexican migrants to take every possible precaution during the holidays because any incident, such as while driving, could lead to a deportation.

    “Rather than not celebrating, be cautious” and gather at the consulates, President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday.

    On Thursday, Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary said there would be more consular staff on duty to respond to any emergency. Mexican nationals stopped by U.S. authorities are advised to not flee, remain silent and not sign any documents.

    Chicago Latino leaders called on residents to remain peaceful during expected protests at Mexican Independence Day celebrations, arguing that any unrest could be used as justification for sending federal troops to the city.

    “We will not allow others to use our fear or our anger against us,” said Berto Aguayo, of the Chicago Latino Caucus Association. “We will not take the bait. We will know our rights. We will protect each other and peacefully protest.”

    ——-

    Associated Press writers Christine Fernando in Chicago and María Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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  • Trump administration takes first steps to restore Harvard’s funding, but money isn’t flowing yet

    WASHINGTON — Harvard University says it has started receiving notices that many federal grants halted by the Trump administration will be reinstated after a federal judge ruled that the cuts were illegal.

    It’s an early signal that federal research funding could begin flowing to Harvard after months of deadlock with the White House, but it’s yet to be seen if money will arrive. The government has said it will appeal the judge’s decision.

    Reinstatement notices have started arriving from several federal agencies, but so far no payments have been received, Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton said late Wednesday. “Harvard is monitoring funding receipts closely,” Newton said.

    A federal judge in Boston last week ordered the government to reverse more than $2.6 billion in cuts, saying they were unconstitutional and “used antisemitism as a smokescreen” for an ideological attack.

    The Trump administration started cutting federal research grants from Harvard in April after the Ivy League school rebuffed a list of wide-ranging demands from the government in a federal investigation into campus antisemitism. Harvard challenged the cuts in court, calling them illegal government retaliation.

    Harvard has been President Donald Trump’s top target in his campaign to reshape higher education, which has resulted in settlements with Columbia and Brown universities to end federal investigations and restore federal money cut by the Trump administration.

    Trump has said he wants Harvard to pay no less than $500 million as part any deal to restore funding. He reiterated the demand at an August Cabinet meeting. “They’ve been very bad,” Trump told Education Secretary Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.”

    Even as Harvard’s lawsuit played out, both sides had been negotiating the framework of an agreement that could end the prolonged conflict. So far, such a deal has been elusive.

    The government has opened numerous investigations against Harvard and attempted an array of sanctions, including moves to block the school from enrolling international students. A federal judge blocked the move in June after Harvard sued.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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