This past January 21, Luisana Perez, a Venezuelan immigrant living in Miami, traveled to D.C. to march alongside nearly half a million others protesting Donald Trump’s misogynistic comments. Later that day, she found herself in a room of like-minded women, all seeking to get more involved in local politics. They were brought together by Emily’s List…
In January, experts from the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere issued Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez a stern warning: If he bowed to President Donald Trump’s toothless demand to crack down on so-called sanctuary communities, they said, he’d be opening the county up to expensive lawsuits.
Few states have more at stake in the #Resistance than Florida, where immigrants are nearly a quarter of the population, hundreds of thousands would be left without insurance under the GOP’s Obamacare repeal, and climate change threatens to swallow the entire coast. Florida’s Democrats have never needed good candidates more.
Evan Ross is a little-known but well-connected lobbyist in Miami-Dade County. He’s also fairly active within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party: He’s the former chair of the Miami-Dade Young Democrats and is now a precinct captain within the local party. He’s used to operating behind the scenes and keeping a low profile in the local press.
Data shows Florida’s Stand Your Ground law is awful. The rule lets you kill anyone you want in self-defense, even if you’re the person who started a fight. In the years since the law went into effect, the state’s murder rate has shot up dramatically. The law has been used to exonerate…
These days, #Resisting Trump apparently encompasses a really broad spectrum of activities. On one hand, you’ve got your labor activists fighting for living wages, housing advocates battling for affordable homes, and a growing base of voters in both parties calling their representatives and asking them to institute single-payer healthcare. On…
Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach this year spawned two scandals over casually racist politicians. City Commissioner Michael Grieco, who is running an embattled campaign for mayor, demanded the city cancel Urban Beach Week, the city’s largest celebration centered on black tourists, after two people were shot this year, including one killed by cops.
After six years of screaming about repealing Obamacare, the GOP hilariously fell on its face this week. There are a multitude of reasons Sen. Mitch McConnell shockingly delayed a vote on the American Health Care Act: the gaping schism between conservative Republicans who want to slash all spending…
Local Democrats seem to have made their opinion very clear: They want Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, to resign over her decision not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black, schizophrenic inmate who some witnesses said was scalded to death inside a burning-hot prison shower.
On November 14, just a few days after Donald Trump’s election, Chuck Redding was driving home in Sarasota in a car with marriage equality and pride bumper stickers. Suddenly, Redding noticed a man in a Jeep Cherokee tailing him. Once Redding parked in the driveway, the bearded man jumped out, banged on Redding’s window, and yanked the door open.
Hollywood, Florida, has three streets named for men who murdered people in order to keep black people enslaved. One of those three people also helped found the Ku Klux Klan. Hollywood has known about this for years, because efforts to rename the street signs only really jump-started after New Times Broward-Palm Beach’s Chris Joseph wrote a story in 2015 pointing out the real history of the streets’ namesakes.
In March, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle decided not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black prisoner with severe schizophrenia who multiple witnesses said had been placed in a scalding-hot prison shower and burned to death. Rainey had been serving a nonviolent cocaine-possession sentence.
As Democrats go, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a dreadful candidate. Her donor pool is dominated by corporate raiders and predatory capitalists, the list of important bills she’s written is slim, and she helped drive her party toward catastrophic losses while she was the head of the Democratic National Committee. In theory, it should be easy to challenge her by refusing to take money from corporations, supporting single-payer health care, and generally being progressive in a post-Trump, post-Brexit world.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: By almost every expert analysis, the American Health Care Act is a moral nightmare that will seriously harm the poor and defenseless. Cutting $880 billion from Medicaid will bankrupt families and strip coverage from 200,000 poor black and Hispanic children in Florida. That should be reason enough not to support it.
On Thursday, Tim Canova — the Nova Southeastern University Law Professor, former D.C. legislative aide, and Wall Street economics expert — announced that he’s running for congress for the second year in a row. Canova’s campaign last year was perhaps the most hotly covered 2016 congressional race after Bernie Sanders…
Inside the Oval Office, President Trump sits behind the resolute desk. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio sits to his right, Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart to his left. Both men whisper their plans on how to take down Raúl Castro. The two agree to conduct their negotiations in secrecy, passing handwritten notes to Trump through intermediaries like Gov. Rick Scott.
Just behind the Manuel Artime Theater, an elderly Cuban man in a fedora stood with a microphone. “Donald Trump is a true patriot that wants liberty for Cuba,” he hollered in Spanish into the mike. Then he offered his personal theory about why Barack Obama wasn’t hard enough on the regime: Obama, he yelled, was gay and in a homosexual relationship with Raúl Castro!
For Juan Morales, a graduate student at Florida International University, Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to his college campus today dredges up memories from when he was 14 years old of the brutally divisive politics in his homeland, Venezuela. At a school with a heavily immigrant and international student population, he…
In late June 2015, Giancarlo Sopo got off a plane in Havana, Cuba, where his cousins waited for him in a 1980s-era Lada. He wasn’t sure what they looked like, but was immediately embraced by his relatives, who recognized him from photos. He stayed for ten days in Santos Suarez, a suburb just outside the city, in the same home where his family had lived for four generations.
Donald Trump has a curious relationship with Miami. The Magic City, in many ways, represents everything Trump rails against. We live in a chaotic melting pot of people from around the world — and have one of the highest percentages of undocumented residents in the United States. Miami also voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, which is not the kind of move to endear yourself to a guy pathologically obsessed with whether he won the popular vote.
Marco Rubio wants you to know he’s very tough on Russia. He even sponsored a bill to rename the street outside the Russian embassy after a slain opposition leader. Take that, Vlad!
Last week, the Miami Herald outed Daniel Perez, a Miami Republican running for an open House seat, for taking his engagement photos in Cuba — a move that could seriously hurt his chances with older Cuban Republicans who might see celebratory wedding photos as a tacit endorsement of Barack Obama’s detente with the Castro regime…
