The nation’s largest facility for unaccompanied immigrant children is holding more kids than it can safely accommodate during a low-category hurricane. That’s what Homestead officials told a delegation from Amnesty International during a tour of the facility earlier today.
In recent weeks, the for-profit shelter in Homestead that houses thousands of migrant children has come under fire from multiple directions. Lawyers released dozens of affidavits from kids inside the facility who described being lonely, terrified, and even suicidal. Multiple presidential candidates visited the detention center while in town for the Democratic debates, and some — notably Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — called for the shelter to be shut down altogether after saying the children held there are being treated “like little prisoners.”
This past April 14, the Federal Election Commission sent former Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez a letter asking what she’d done with $43,550 that had been donated to her 2018 general-election campaign for U.S. Congress. The FEC was asking, of course, because Rosen Gonzalez didn’t actually compete in that year’s general election…
Miami Commissioner Keon Hardemon, who represents portions of Overtown, Wynwood, Little Haiti, and other areas of central Miami, will likely resign from his seat early to run for a Miami-Dade County Commission seat in 2020. His current city term ends in 2021, and he’s barred from running again due to term limits.
Since its inception, Senate Bill 168 was something critics said Florida never needed. The bill, which originated from an anti-immigrant extremist group, sought to force municipalities across the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and to ban towns from self-designating as sanctuary cities despite the fact no city in Florida does that. Nevertheless, state legislators passed the bill, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law last month.
The politician who previously represented Homestead in Congress — former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo — seemingly did little to raise awareness about the kids inside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. But the Democrat who replaced him, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, has made the detention center one of her main priorities.
Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro oversaw thousands of extrajudicial killings, countless arbitrary political detentions, torture, and the use of excessive force against protesters, according to a new United Nations report. And that was just in the past 18 months.
The political price of being a cog in the Trump administration’s immigrant detention and deportation machine is getting steeper. Outrage over the callous treatment of immigrant families in the U.S. has distilled into outrage toward the companies willing to help the federal government carry out its anti-immigrant agenda.
Opa-locka is a city that pretty much shouldn’t exist. The FBI raided City Hall in 2016. City services are broken to the point that straight-up human feces recently flooded city streets. To fix the mess, officials brought in ex-County Manager Merrett Stierheim, a man who’s seen his fair share of political shenanigans, but Stierheim quit and said the place wasn’t fixable. Some of the city’s own residents in 2017 tried to mount a (failed) campaign to dissolve Opa-locka entirely.
Sweetwater, the Miami-Dade city best known as the home of Florida International University, is equally famous for a corruption scandal by its former mayor, who was sentenced to prison in 2014. But now, the city is bearing the burden of yet another ex-mayor’s misbehavior.
Miami is utterly sweltering today. Earlier this morning, WeatherUnderground reported that — with humidity taken into account — the temperature felt like 115 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Yet tons of immigrants are stuck in the heat this week at South Florida’s main Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar, where ICE keeps immigrants waiting outdoors in what is essentially a caged pen for hours at a time.
In 2018, the Florida Democratic Party said it would stop taking donations from private, for-profit prison firms. So, after New Times first reported last month that the party had accepted a $10,000 check from inmate-transport company G4S Secure Solutions — a company that also runs private prisons in other countries — activists cried foul. Now, the party says it will return the money.
Miami summers have a way of defeating the weak-willed. Locals, who already don’t go to the beach that much, truly stop sitting by the ocean. You start ordering takeout for dinner every night because it’s too hot to carry groceries outside. Walking your dog for 15 minutes will annihilate any hairstyle and force you to take a shower before doing anything else that day.
A contingent of Parkland moms was outside the Arsht Center in Miami Thursday night.
New York politics and Miami politics are not the same. This may seem like an obvious statement. But at a rally today for striking workers at Miami International Airport, New York City mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Bill de Blasio broke the most obvious rule of Miami politicking.
The scene outside the Arsht Center last night was, predictably, a circus. As part one of the 20-candidate Democratic presidential debates got underway, the Proud Boys, a Q-Anon guy, and several proud “deplorables” mingled with Twitter castaway Laura Loomer on one side of Biscayne Boulevard. On the other side stood the Miami Democratic Socialists of America, climate activists in swim goggles, “Hands Off Venezuela” folks, and a guy with a sign comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
Months before President Donald Trump announced plans for massive immigration raids, members of his administration were busy cooking up plans to deport asylum-seeking families released into the U.S. Their solution? Create special expedited dockets for newly arrived families in ten immigration courts in cities including Miami, Houston, San Francisco, and Chicago.
A subset of workers at Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport — two of the largest economic engines in Miami-Dade and Broward counties — announced this morning that they will go on strike to demand better wages and working conditions at their respective airports.
A whole lot of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are visiting the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children this week. Not all of them, however, appear to have concrete plans of action as to what to do about the kids inside the shelter. But during a visit today, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a straightforward demand: Shut the place down.
Thirty miles south of the stage where Democratic candidates will appear for this week’s presidential debates, thousands of children are being held in the country’s only unlicensed, privately run shelter for immigrant kids. At the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, some have described crying themselves to sleep or worrying they might never be released.
Over the last few weeks, lawyers have reported harrowing stories of alleged neglect, health hazards, and abuse inside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, the largest child-migrant compound run by the Trump administration. Attorneys claimed bathrooms were covered in mildew.
Hope gave way to further disillusionment last week for a group of exiled Venezuelans living in Miami, as word surfaced that the Trump administration’s interest in the crisis-stricken country was reportedly waning.
