San Juan’s sidewalks: An obstacle course for people with disabilities
For El Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
As was their routine every afternoon, Antonio Luis Ruiz Ramos and a classmate were walking home from school in Río Piedras. It was an October day in 2003, and it was raining heavily, so the two teenagers took shelter under the balcony of a business on 65th Infantry Avenue in San Juan. When the rain began to let up, Ruiz Ramos continued walking, but instead of stepping on solid ground, he fell into an open manhole that had been hidden by the floodwaters. Inside the manhole, his body was swept away by the current. Although emergency crews arrived at the scene, it was too late. They found his lifeless body.
Asylum-seekers are desperate for lawyers. Scammers are filling the gap.
I have lost everything,’ one asylum seeker facing deportation said. ‘It was my error, because I trusted these people.’
In the months leading up to his immigration hearing, Leon Garcia was desperate for legal advice.
All of the nonprofits he contacted had long waiting lists, and Garcia, who is seeking asylum in the United States from South America, needed to find an attorney in time for his November court date.
Out of options, Garcia, who, like others in this piece is using a pseudonym to avoid retaliation, messaged a lawyer on WhatsApp he heard about from fellow bike messengers.
The attorney agreed to take his case, so Garcia wired the first payment: $3,200 through a Western Union transfer. He promised to pay the remaining $2,800 once the work was completed…
Where pa’lante meets sumud: Puerto Ricans organize in solidarity with Palestine
For Mondoweiss
The Zoom camera clicks on and Natalia Ibrahim Abufarah Davila, 35, appears. The Palestinian-Puerto Rican organizer has a soft aura and wears glasses, her face framed by a side part and thick braid. Born to a Palestinian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Abufarah Davila grew up between the two cultures and has since become a familiar face within Puerto Rico’s solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation.
Translation is hard for asylum-seekers. Trump is making it harder.
For Mission Local
In mid-August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up and detained Elias Gonzales, along with five other immigrants, during a routine workday in East Oakland.
Gonzales spent the next two months at a Tacoma, Washington, detention facility — an experience that his attorney, Abby Sullivan Engen, said left him traumatized.
Gonzales (a pseudonym) is a speaker of an indigenous Mayan language, and struggles with a hearing problem. Within the facility, ICE failed to provide an interpreter to explain legal documents or other procedures, leaving him isolated and unsure of what was happening.