South Florida activists used to joke that locals couldn’t be bothered to protest anything — the weather is either too hot, too rainy, or too darn nice for people to stand outside chanting for civil rights. But that’s changed. The Trump presidency has ignited a sustained groundswell of political action and anger, even in apathetic South Florida.
Soccer star and professional attractive person David Beckham spent a small portion of Thursday’s carnival-esqe city commission meeting complaining that anonymous Miamians haven’t been smiling at him as often lately. Only one woman publicly flashed him on Thursday! Poor Becks. Many Miami residents are, rightfully, skeptical about Beckham’s latest proposal in…
Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by slightly more than 100,000 votes. At least according to the official recount numbers, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida in 2000 by fewer than 600 votes. Had the constantly ineffectual Florida Democratic Party gotten its act together decades ago and…
Ever since David Beckham and his new partners, Jorge and Jose Mas, abruptly abandoned their Overtown stadium plans and pivoted to the Melreese Country Club, skeptics have piled on about potential hangups: the traffic, the loss of a city-owned golf course, the last-minute proposal that could hand the Mas brothers…
For the last 24 hours, Miami officials have been furiously pushing the latest pitch from David Beckham and financier Jorge Mas for a new soccer stadium at Melreese County Club, largely by insisting the deal would pour millions into city coffers. City Manager Emilio Gonzalez repeatedly estimated that…
Technically, Melreese Golf Course is a green space. In satellite views of Miami, it is a large space that is green. The grass and smattering of trees around the links are, in fact, green. This is undeniable. But is Melreese a “green space,” as claimed by some opponents of David…
Y’all ready for two full days of civility? Who’s eager to reach across the aisle to catch some T-shirts? Everybody ready to get those lighters waving for Democratic fundraiser and billboard tycoon Tom Steyer? Prepared to watch Libertarian tax-extremist Grover Norquist shatter a beer bottle and cut his chest open onstage…
The Trump era has been horrible for many of us, but few have suffered more than immigrants and those seeking asylum from oppressive regimes. But Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown has been fantastic for South Florida’s massive private-prison corporation, Boca Raton’s GEO Group. According to a breakdown of current ICE contracts…
If it feels like you’ve already spent a full college education watching David Beckham and his partners flail around for a place to build a soccer stadium, you are not hallucinating. Miami is now living through Year Five of Beck’s never-ending Major League Soccer drama. This season promises a new…
When Julia O’Donoghue, a political reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, first saw the tweet from an anonymous political account called LA Conservatives, she had to walk away from her computer to calm down. Just hours after a gunman had murdered five journalists and their coworkers at The Capital Gazette, The Times-Picayune shared…
While our big, sweaty grandpa president is busy tweeting that immigrants don’t deserve due-process in immigration courts, the business bearing his name (which he pretty much still runs) is trying to hire more foreign workers. According to federal Department of Labor documents BuzzFeed first dug up yesterday, the Trump Organization has…
At a gala fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party in Hollywood on Sunday, party leaders including Chair Terrie Rizzo stood onstage and repeatedly condemned the Trump Administration for imprisoning immigrant children at detention facilities across the country. But when a group of activists proposed a ban on all political donations…
All weekend, the Internet dunked on Marco Rubio for tweeting that he does not like when reporters say the word “fuck” in print, as in, “Go fuck yourself Marco Rubio;” “Marco Rubio is a whiny fucking brat;” or “Stop trying to take away our fucking civil rights.” It’s still not entirely…
Here’s yet another reason why it’s definitely cool to confront politicians when they’re off the clock: You just might get someone to speak their mind about controversial issues.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart sure loves cigars. He enjoys them so much that at a February 14 federal budget hearing, the GOP congressman railed against the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to impose new regulations on the cigar industry. He claimed the rules were needlessly “burdensome” and unfair.
In late 2016, a 17-year-old Guatemalan teen fled her home. Her father was a prominent local politician and had been receiving repeated extortion threats over the past year. He had continually refused to pay, so his enemies warned they would kidnap his daughter. The threat was serious enough that she made the long, treacherous journey to the United States, where her aunt and uncle lived, to seek asylum.
The entire state of Florida has been in something of an uproar after New Times reported Monday that the Trump administration had quietly re-opened a camp for child migrants in Homestead and placed nearly 1,200 children there without informing the public. Since then, politicians, reporters, and protesters have descended on…
Florida senator, immigration-detention-contractor-donation-taker, and walking logical fallacy Marco Rubio decided today, out of the kindness of whatever exists where his heart ought to be, to tour the Homestead Temporary Shelter of Unaccompanied Children. And because he is Marco Rubio and said words in public today, a bunch of protesters rightfully…
In April 2017, just a few weeks before Sweetwater’s elections, Commissioner Isolina Maroño and mayoral candidate Saul Díaz were riding in a car together when they were stopped by police. Officers found inside the vehicle multiple absentee ballots belonging to Maroño’s relatives.
His House Children’s Home, a Miami Gardens facility that has housed young migrant children for the federal government, was accused in Broward County court of letting a small child fatally suffocate underneath a blanket. The boy was not an immigrant but a young minor brought to the facility in 2007 after being taken from his parents in Broward by the Florida Department of Children and Families.
The U.S. government has been sending unaccompanied immigrant minors to a Miami Gardens shelter called His House Children’s Home since at least 2008. In the past decade, the facility has been reportedly investigated by child-welfare advocates for abuse and has been cited by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for “possibly” failing to follow policy when handling the cases of at least 652 children.
Running a detention camp for migrant children taken from their parents is not great for PR. Two days after New Times broke news that the Trump administration had quietly sent more than 1,000 migrant children to a guarded compound in Homestead, Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola is threatening to ban one of the contractors running the facility, Comprehensive Health Services, from doing business in his city.
