Global Nation

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story was originally produced by Houston Public Media and has been updated for The World. 

For the last three weeks, Houston plumber Eduardo Dolande has been working long hours to help repair burst pipes in local homes and businesses.

Just in his own Houston neighborhood of Cypress, Dolande, who has worked as a plumber for 21 years, said he's helped about a dozen families with their pipes — as a favor, free of charge. The destruction he’s seen inside some homes looks like something out of a movie, he said.

“It's just wet sheetrock everywhere, and then the insulation that was up in the attic was on the floor. ... It just looked horrible."

“It's just wet sheetrock everywhere, and then the insulation that was up in the attic was on the floor,” Dolande said, “It just looked horrible."

One of the damaged homes was his own. At one point, he ran out of supplies to fix his own pipes after using them to help his neighbors. His plumber friends eventually helped him find some replacement parts, which have been in short supply since the storm.

He had to cut open parts of his ceiling in two bathrooms and other parts of the house to reach busted pipes and repair them. Since he knew to turn off his water before the freeze, the damage in his own home was minimal — but the family still had water all over the floors while they tried to fix multiple burst pipes. 

Dolande said his neighborhood was also hit hard by Hurricane Harvey, but that the freeze was worse because it took people by surprise. 

“No power, no water,” Dolande said. “People get desperate over that.” 

Related: Freezing temps wreak havoc on utilities in US and Mexico

“I've never seen that much damage in homes,” he said. “Never.”

In the aftermath of the storm, plumber Eduardo Dolande also had to fix the pipes in his own home.

Credit:

Courtesy of the Dolande family

Texas' largest insurer, State Farm, has reported more than 44,000 claims in the state related to the winter storm. That's more than 10 times the total number of burst pipe claims they saw nationally in 2020. 

And immigrant workers — like Dolande, who is from Panama — are critical to repairing that damage, according to Jeremy Robbins, director of the New American Economy think tank. 

“As people are trying to build back, they're trying to repair their houses, they're trying to figure out how to survive the damage, immigrants are playing outsized roles in so many of the professions that are essential to the Texas economy,” Robbins said. 

The group’s analysis of 2019 American Community Survey data found that in the city of Houston, about 40% of plumbers and 63% of construction workers are foreign-born.

In Texas, 27% of the state’s plumbers and 40% of construction workers are foreign-born, though immigrants make up about 17% of the population. And the share of immigrant workers is even higher when other labor-intensive jobs are taken into consideration.

“If you look at drywall installers or ceiling tile installers and tapers, more than 75% of them nationwide are immigrants."

“If you look at drywall installers or ceiling tile installers and tapers, more than 75% of them nationwide are immigrants," Robbins said. 

Related: From 'aliens' to 'noncitizens' – a Biden word change that matters

Houston plumber Eduardo Dolande shows where pipes burst inside his own home during the Texas freeze.

Credit:

Elizabeth Trovall/Houston Public Media 

These workers will play a critical role as second responders, since many ceilings — like Dolande’s — have been damaged from burst pipes. 

Steven Scarborough, strategic initiatives manager for the Center for Houston's Future, said without immigrants, weeks-long repair wait times would last even longer.

“Imagine all these stories you've heard, how long people [are] waiting for plumbers, and increase that by 37%,” he said. 

Related: Blackouts across northern Mexico highlight country's energy dependence

Though these immigrant workers are essential to storm recovery in Houston, many come from communities that tend to be disproportionately impacted by catastrophic events.

A Rice University survey found nearly two-thirds of Hispanic immigrants in Houston could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency expense. And those families are also less likely to reach out for aid in a crisis, Scarborough said. 

Eduardo Dolande and his wife, Mitzila Guerra, became United States citizens after immigrating from Panama.

Credit:

Elizabeth Trovall/Houston Public Media 

Eduardo Dolande is a citizen — but many Texas plumbers and hundreds of thousands of construction workers are undocumented. And they’ve become a convenient political punching bag for Republicans in recent years. 

During a press conference earlier this week, Governor Greg Abbott told Texans, “There is a crisis on the Texas border right now with the overwhelming number of people who are coming across the border.” Abbott often frames unauthorized immigration as a threat. 

The governor also recently reopened the state and lifted the mask mandate — a move that confounded Jessica Diaz, who works with day laborers and other immigrant workers as legal manager for the Fe y Justicia Worker Center in Houston. 

“I want to understand what his point of view is…how we came to the conclusion that this is a good idea?" she said.  

Diaz said she’s concerned about lifting the mask mandate while less than 10% of the state has been fully vaccinated. 

During the pandemic, her organization has received nearly 400 safety and health complaints. She said day laborers  — who offer cheap, immediate repairs — put themselves in vulnerable situations to secure work.

“Whoever gets in the car the fastest is the one that’s going to get the job. You don’t even ask how much they’re going to pay you. You don’t even ask about the employer, who they are or where they’re taking you." 

“Whoever gets in the car the fastest is the one that’s going to get the job. You don’t even ask how much they’re going to pay you. You don’t even ask about the employer, who they are or where they’re taking you,” Diaz said.  

In the four weeks after Hurricane Harvey, the University of Illinois found that more than a quarter of day laborers had experienced wage theft. 

The Fe y Justicia Worker Center is already investigating wage theft claims from workers who helped with winter storm recovery. 

“This is something we have seen repeatedly since Hurricane Harvey. Houston, in general, is a city that is in constant reconstruction mode,” she said. 

The pattern of disaster, recovery and abuse is all too familiar — and Diaz said she doesn’t see anything changing soon. 

Eduardo Dolande, who first came to the United States as a tourist in his early 20s, and became a citizen through his wife, Mitzila Guerra, said he hopes people can see that immigrants like him — including those without legal status — are helping the city rebuild. 

“We are everywhere. We are helping everybody,” Dolande said. “Whether they say they don't need us, or they don't want to accept it, it is so obvious.”

Last month President Joe Biden instructed the Department of Justice to end contract renewals with private prisons as a first step to end racial disparities and pave the way to fair sentencing. 

But Biden, who ran on promises to make sweeping changes to immigration policy, left private immigration detention untouched, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to continue renewing contracts with these private facilities. 

For years, immigrants in detention and advocacy groups have documented a lack of oversight and physical and mental abuse at the facilities. Today, about 80% of immigrants in detention centers are in private detention, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report. 

Advocates say that ending the migrant detention system is one more piece of the puzzle in achieving racial justice and ending migrant abuse. 

In 2020, 170,000 people cycled through detention, which is an unusually low number compared to other years. The pandemic, along with former President Donald Trump’s tough policies on immigration contributed to those lower numbers. Policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” kept asylum-seekers on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border. 

Related: Reuniting families after Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policy 

Still, detention continues to be a lucrative business.

The US government used to oversee immigration detention. But that changed after 9/11 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Immigration detention expanded after that, and US officials turned to private prison companies to manage this work. The companies jumped right in. 

“They [companies] started seeing the federal government as a place to have these more lucrative contracts,” said Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an immigration detention advocacy group.

The group has tracked the increasing privatization of the detention system during the Trump administration, with more multimillion-dollar contracts signed by key companies such as CoreCivic Inc and GEO Group. 

Related: The winding journey to reunite families separated at the US border

During the pandemic, many immigration detention centers have also become COVID-19 hot spots. These private companies say they take safety seriously, especially during the pandemic. Immigrants are given face masks and medical attention, they say. 

But addressing abuse and neglect is only the beginning of a much larger detention problem, Shah said.

It’s also about racial justice.

“What we know about these systems [is] that [they] disproportionately target people of color and Black people, and we're seeing that even now, in the context of who is currently in detention and who is being deported."

“What we know about these systems [is] that [they] disproportionately target people of color and Black people, and we're seeing that even now, in the context of who is currently in detention and who is being deported,” she said. 

Biden said he wants to address racial inequity inside detention centers, too. 

But unwinding these contracts might be more of a battle. Last August, the Trump administration renewed contracts with GEO Group and CoreCivic, Inc., in Texas, to run two facilities for an additional 10 years. 

Any steps Biden takes now need clear deadlines to phase out these and other private contracts, said Jesse Franzblau, a policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provides direct legal services to immigrants. 

Franzblau said giving these companies a two-year deadline is reasonable, and the federal government has the authority to do so. 

“But they need direction from above to start carrying that out,” he said. 

Advocates also stress the fact that nearly one-third of immigrants held in detention centers don’t have a criminal record. And many others have minor nonviolent offenses. 

Shah points to other options. 

“There are models that include GPS monitoring that are just alternative forms of detention. And so, I think the alternatives that do work are, one, people should just be with their families,” she said. 

GPS monitoring involves ankle bracelets to track people while their immigration cases go through the courts. States like California and Florida do this more than other states, although the practice has also come under scrutiny. 

Shah said it’s possible that Biden could be holding back on dealing with immigration detention as a way to leverage his other immigration goals. 

But with Alejandro Mayorkas’ recent appointment to secretary of Homeland Security, along with Biden’s recent executive orders addressing deportations and travel bans, Shah said there could be some shifts in how the agency operates around detention. 

Still, advocates like Shah and Franzblau say ending contracts with private detention centers is only a fractional part of a larger, problematic system. There are other aspects to address — like county jails. An executive order phasing out private contracts might not apply to county jails that also contract with the federal government to detain immigrants. 

Johannes Favi is an immigration rights activist. 

Credit:

Courtesy of Johannes Favi

“It’s just horrible to live in detention, you know, you just want to give up on everything."

“It’s just horrible to live in detention, you know, you just want to give up on everything,” he said. 

Favi overstayed a 2013 visitor visa and was in the process of applying for a green card, which his wife, a US citizen, sponsored. During a court hearing for a previous financial crime he pled guilty to, immigration officials arrested him. 

He spent 10 months in a county jail, 60 miles south of Chicago. He was released in 2020, right as the coronavirus pandemic began to spread inside that facility. 

Favi is now living in Indianapolis, Indiana, and continues to advocate for detained immigrants. 

For him, detention — privatized or not — is the same. 

“So, I really wish the Biden administration can break the whole system down, you know, detention for profit, you know, private detention, county jail.”

For now, immigrants like Favi and those working to dismantle the detention system altogether will wait to see how — and when — Biden might change it. 

It was a rare rainy morning in National City, California, just a few miles north of the border between the United States and Mexico.

Nora Vargas, a Planned Parenthood executive and community college board member, was going door-to-door trying to do something no Latina had done before — win a seat on the powerful San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

Related: What impact will Latino voters have on North Carolina in the future?

For over two decades, the five-person board has been filled exclusively by white people, and, until just recently, was entirely Republican in a county that’s begun to swing hard toward Democrats.

“Happy Sunday from National City!” Vargas said to her phone, from underneath a rain jacket. “It’s actually raining a lot, but we’re here to knock on doors.”

Her board district is overwhelmingly Latino and filled with immigrants. But demographics aren’t destiny — and Vargas squared off against seven other candidates, including the area’s state senator. She had to work for every vote.

“Folks in the community would say, ‘We’re going to give you a chance, but we’re going to be watching you. Because politicians come here, they ask us for things, but they never come back.’ That’s the piece that’s really important. We have to deliver for our communities.” 

“Folks in the community would say, ‘We’re going to give you a chance, but we’re going to be watching you. Because politicians come here, they ask us for things, but they never come back.’ That’s the piece that’s really important. We have to deliver for our communities,” Vargas said.

Vargas squeaked into the top-two general election by a margin of 800 votes. Eight months after that, she won a commanding victory — becoming the first immigrant, the first Latina, and the first Democrat to represent her district.

Related: This young Latina calls health insurance ‘life-changing.’ She hopes Biden will help everyone get it.

Now, a month after taking office, Vargas is the vice chair of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, constantly shuffling between press conferences regarding the coronavirus vaccine rollout, and lengthy meetings trying to appropriate federal relief funds. It’s exhausting, but even deep into the evening, she’s still radiating energy as she speaks about it.

“I still wake up every morning thinking, ‘Wow, I get to be a supervisor,” she said.

Vargas was born in Tijuana. Her mother was a US citizen, and her father was a Mexican citizen, something that’s pretty common in the cross-border megalopolis of San Diego and Tijuana.

Going back and forth between two nations is where she believes her political journey began.

“I think when I realized that I was in a very unique state because I was able to cross the border, that’s when it hit me,” she said. “[I thought] ‘What can I do to make the world better for other people, who don’t have the life experience and privilege I have?’ I think that politics was an avenue for me to do that.”

For Latinas in San Diego, there wasn’t much of a roadmap to political power. Local political offices were handed out by powerful party machines, not leaving much of a path for young people looking to get involved in politics.

So, Vargas had to look elsewhere.

Related: Latino teen hopes the Republican Party can reform itself

“To be a Mexicana, a Latina, and then later on, what my friends would say, an honorary Chicana, I really count my blessings where going away for college was encouraged. I needed to see the world. I needed to learn,” Vargas said.

Watching her own mother work in local nonprofits, and her grandmother run a cross-border business, she realized that they were “unintentional feminists.” She brought their perspectives to a Jesuit university in San Francisco, where people with far more wealth and far less diverse life experiences were trying to figure out what was best for immigrant and low-income communities.

“Having those conversations about what feminism was and what women’s rights were had me trying to figure out what does that mean to communities of color, for people who don’t have access or opportunities.”

“Having those conversations about what feminism was and what women’s rights were had me trying to figure out what does that mean to communities of color, for people who don’t have access or opportunities,” she said.

Vargas found a place to organize and center her work at Planned Parenthood where she eventually became an executive.

“I was a patient at Planned Parenthood, and in my household, no one talked about sex or sexuality or reproductive health care,” she said. “There’s a lot of myths, and in the Latino community, there’s a taboo about speaking about sexuality. It was eye-opening for me that these services were available for young women.”

Access to health care was a fundamental part of Vargas’ campaign. The county’s board of supervisors has the power to build new hospitals, curb pollution and direct millions of dollars to better health outcomes.

But in San Diego, for decades, that board has not reflected the diversity of the border region.

“Particularly since the ’90s, the board definitely had a complexion,” explained University of San Diego politics professor Carl Luna. “It was white and Republican. There was gender diversity, but that was it.”

Related: After 2020 election, first-time Latino voter worries about a divided US

In many places in the country, local governments like a city council or town board would hold considerable power over local spending. But in California, the county board of supervisors holds the money bags. And the San Diego County Board of Supervisors is sitting on a vast amount of funding from state and local taxes. 

“Seldom anywhere in America do five people have so much power,” Luna said.

In the recent past, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors’ Republican majority has built up a huge reserve of funds, adhering to more conservative values of government. While not entirely in step with all the priorities of the Trump administration (especially when it came to the environment), the board voted in early 2018 to support the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state of California’s “sanctuary policies” for immigrants.

That began to change in November 2018, when the first Democrat in decades, Nathan Fletcher, won a seat on the board. He pushed the other supervisors in a more progressive direction, including funding a shelter for asylum-seekers who had just crossed the border.

But Fletcher, now the board’s chairman, recognizes that the board needs to lean heavier on Vargas than on some other members, given the diversity of life experience she brings to the board. The rest of the board remains white.

Vargas was immediately put in charge of the county’s vaccine distribution efforts to the Latino community. 

“Nora Vargas, the burden she faces is she has to work harder to give voice and perspective to the community she represents. Because that community has never had representation at the same level.” 

“Nora Vargas, the burden she faces is she has to work harder to give voice and perspective to the community she represents. Because that community has never had representation at the same level,” Fletcher said.

Vargas believes that reaching the community in ways they’ll not only understand but also trust, is the key to ending the pandemic in Latino border communities, which have been devastated by COVID-19.

“I’m talking and I can just code-switch like that,” Vargas explained, switching into Spanish. “And I did it today, and we were talking about environmental justice and I switched because language shouldn’t be a barrier. After the press conference, I started getting texts from people saying like, ‘Thank you for doing that,’ and that it meant the world to them. But it’s who I am, it’s my community and I want them to understand that they’re being heard.”

Latinas, in particular, are leading the way into political office in the state and the country, says Dr. Inez González, who runs MANA De San Diego, a national organization helping Latinas get involved in public service. 

“People want to make a difference, but people need to know where the power is,” said González. "There’s certain boards, like the water district board, that people don’t pay attention to.”

Right now, in the same district that Vargas represents, Latinas are the mayors of National City and Chula Vista. But important positions all over the county are up for grabs if there’s a structure for Latinas to succeed.

MANA De San Diego pushed Vargas to join her first nonprofit board, and they want young Latinas, who turned out in November’s election, to start running for office now — and not wait for seats to open up.

For Vargas, that’s the most important part of her journey. She’s hired several young community organizers to work for her.

“I really want to make sure it’s not as hard as it was for me. My commitment is to try to make sure that the system is really shaken so that the opportunities are there for women and communities of color to rise,” Vargas said.

She hopes that after her, San Diego County politics will never be the same. 

Editor's note: This article was produced as a project for the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2020 National Fellowship.

Like many therapists, Lu Rocha uses breathing techniques, meditation and yoga in her practice, but she also asks clients about their personal beliefs: “What stories have you heard about in your own family, your own community, what did they do for healing?” 

Some tell her that they pray with a rosary. Others, from parts of Latin America, say their grandmothers used to rub an egg on their bodies to ease headaches. They believe the egg absorbs negative energy. Rocha gets it — her parents are from Mexico. She also gets what many of her clients have faced — years of the Trump administration’s tough immigration policies. 

"...[T]hese past four years is trauma just about every week. And my people are tired, my people are sick, my people are dying.”

“When I was 5 or 6 years old, I walked around with my birth certificate because raids always happened and pickups with the immigration always happened,” said Rocha, who lives in Chicago. “But this is different this time; these past four years is trauma just about every week. And my people are tired, my people are sick, my people are dying.” 

Rocha is a member of the Latinx Therapists Action Network, which now has a presence in 20 US states. To take part, therapists must be committed to supporting immigrant communities and the movements allied with them.

Deportations, family separation and detention have long taken a toll on the mental health of many immigrants in the US, along with the advocates who defend them. But the pandemic and uncertainty about immigration policies have magnified inequalities that were already present for marginalized communities, compounding their trauma. 

Related: The pain of family separations is still being felt. What could Biden do? 

Rocha has seen this firsthand over the past four years but especially leading up to the 2020 presidential election. 

“I had DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] recipients and we were creating safety plans,” said Rocha who specializes in trauma, serving communities of color and immigrants.

She also had pregnant clients who were undocumented and fearful that if they were to get deported, there wouldn’t be anyone to care for their children.

Related: Challenges await the distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine 

“This is the reality for my people,” Rocha said.

Therapy can be too expensive for uninsured undocumented immigrants — that’s why some of the therapists in the nationwide network offer sliding-scale fees regardless of immigration status. Historically, these services are not easy to come by for uninsured patients, and especially for those who are undocumented immigrants with very limited options. 

Before the pandemic, 93% of Latinos who suffered from mental illness or substance abuse were not getting treatment, according to the latest survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 

Francisca Porchas is the founder of the Latinx Therapist Action Network. Her work was inspired by the experiences of activists advocating in immigrant communities and the emotional toll that it took on them.

Credit:

Courtesy of Puente

Francisca Porchas, a longtime immigration rights activist, created the therapists’ network in 2019. Porchas’ fight against deportation and immigration detention with groups like the Puente movement in Phoenix exposed her to a lot of trauma, and she realized that suffering affected activists, too. But there weren’t any healing support networks. 

“I'm an organizer. I know how to bring people together,” she said about her idea. “And so I want to bring healers, therapists, different types of folks together to really support and bring the kind of resources to the community that's needed,” she said.

Over two years, Porchas got 84 therapists to join the network. It took time to find therapists who are, in some cases, immigrants themselves and might understand what it is like for someone to experience deportation. 

Related: Addressing mental health toll of hurricanes in Honduras

For Porchas, healing is political and when therapists stand up against homophobia, racism and discrimination, it makes a difference. Without that understanding, there’s a risk that someone who needs help might give up. That almost happened to Rey Wences, 29, a human rights organizer in Chicago. Wences didn’t feel understood by therapists in the past. “I had to do a lot of background explaining the context of immigration law. Spending that time talking about immigration policy and just like demystifying some of the misconceptions that this therapist had,” Wences said.

Listen to a version of this story in Spanish here. 

Wences heard about the Latinx Therapists Action Network through Porchas and found a therapist who stuck because of shared values. 

Related: Mental health concerns for students of color heightened amid pandemic 

The network is also working to expand its reach online through workshops. Recently, they held a Facebook Live event with therapist Brenda Gándara, hoping to connect with Spanish speakers. Gándara spoke about anxiety and provided grounding techniques to some of the participants. A few wrote in the comments section online that they had experienced anxiety and stress, and others asked for techniques to help teenagers facing it. Over 500 people have viewed the Facebook session.

This past summer, the therapists got a request from Siembra, an immigrant rights group in North Carolina, that said its community was overwhelmed with grief, fueled by the pandemic, job losses, evictions and anxiety about immigration enforcement. 

Sandra, 40, who had to quit her restaurant job to care for her children now at home for school, connected with the network through a workshop organized for Siembra. Sandra, originally from Mexico, asked to use her first name only because she’s undocumented. 

“If I go to the store and the police pull me over and I get deported? And I’m jobless. So many things, the stress became unbearable."

“If I go to the store and the police pull me over and I get deported? And I’m jobless. So many things, the stress became unbearable,” she said in an interview in Spanish.

Related: Stockholm's mental health ambulance could help the US rethink policing 

Sandra got depressed when the pandemic started, and she felt anger toward her four children. Because she lives in a rural area, she couldn’t find a Spanish-speaking therapist who understood her culture and circumstances.

Through the Latinx network, she attended a workshop and learned breathing techniques. A therapist also described her anxiety in a manner no one had before, using words she understood. She was also reminded of more traditional ways to heal, like connecting with her ancestors. Sandra liked that suggestion. Now, every few weeks, she pours herself a cup of tea, and talks to her deceased grandmother and mom, as if they were at the table with her.

“With that cup of tea, I can have long conversations with them, even if they’re not here,” she said. They still exist in her mind and they’ll never leave her, she said. “They are my respite, my connection and my peace,” she said. 

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

Growing numbers of Latinos in Georgia have come out to support the Black Lives Matter movement over the past few months — and increasingly, it’s shaping how they could vote in the upcoming US general election. 

Jerry Gonzalez, the executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, recently took part in a recent Black Lives Matter protest in Atlanta. GALEO is focused on getting Latinos in Georgia to the polls.

“Police killing unarmed Black and brown people is really something that has not been addressed systemically,” he said at the protest. “And Latinos stand in solidarity with the African American community in making sure that justice is served.”

Racial justice and police brutality are also important to 20-year-old Leticia Arcila, a first-generation, Mexican American who will vote in her first presidential election this November. 

“It's just so frustrating to see how many people have to die and have to face fear every day in order for you to understand that this is wrong,” she said. “It's just so hard to wrap my mind around that some people truly don't believe that Black lives matter.” 

Related: For this young Latina voter, pandemic highlights need for 'Medicare for All' 

The Latino vote could be pivotal in this election and could help turn some red states blue — or at least more purple. Most Latinos in the US tend to vote for Democratic candidates, but around a third voted for Trump in 2016. As a bloc, their votes — and the issues they care about — could be influential, particularly in a close election.  

In Georgia, a battleground state, there are more eligible Latino voters than there were in the 2016 midterm election. And in 2016, Donald Trump won Georgia by just over 211,000 votes; now, there are more than 240,000 Latinos registered to vote in the state.

On Friday, Trump visited Atlanta, where he appealed to Black voters by unveiling his plan for Black economic empowerment and expressing his support for making Juneteenth a federal holiday. The president also spoke about police brutality and the recent deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of police — though he said the Black Lives Matter movement is hurting the Black community. 

He did not address Georgia’s Latino community, though he also recently made a campaign stop in Florida to appeal to Latino voters there. 

Related: How Puerto Ricans in central Florida may decide the US election

Arcila, for her part, said she doesn't like the way US officials nationally and locally have handled the coronavirus pandemic. She's watched how other countries have approached it and seemed to be containing the coronavirus more effectively. 

That’s influencing how she votes, too. 

“Other countries are getting their things together and they're actually taking care of their people and they're looking out for their citizens,” she said. “And I'm over here struggling, working a cashier job, risking my health and my family's health because I have to pay my car, because I have to pay my school, because I have to help my mom with rent.”

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

By her first day of college last week, Marlene Herrera had moved several times since the coronavirus pandemic hit. 

First, her mother, three aunts and cousins all moved into one house to save money. Now, Herrera, who is 18, splits her time between that house, her father’s house and another house with an aunt. She's helping take care of three younger cousins while also taking classes on Zoom. 

Amid the shuffle, Herrera didn’t know whether she’d been counted in this year’s census. Her mother said she had been — as one of 13 people in her aunt’s household. Though Herrera will vote in her first presidential election this November, not all of her family members will be eligible to do so, given their varying immigration statuses. But being counted in the census ensures they’ll play a small part in the US political process.

Herrera’s housing situation is typical for US families whose finances have fluctuated during the pandemic. Like hundreds of thousands of workers across the country, her mother was briefly laid off and faced delays before her unemployment insurance kicked in. Those income gaps have led families to double and triple up to keep a roof over their heads. 

Marlene Herrera, 18, will vote in her first presidential election this November.

Credit:

 Adriana Heldiz/The World

The instability is one reason census organizers are worried about a possible undercount among Latino communities. A Brookings survey from late July found that 29% of Latino families have had someone in their household lose their job during COVID-19, and that 49% of Latino renters are having trouble paying their rent. Latinos, especially young Latinos, have already been undercounted in previous censuses. Past undercounts have led to less federal funding for predominantly Latino neighborhoods and less representation in Congress.  

Another worry for Latino advocates and census workers is that they’re running out of time to find and count everyone. 

Related: 'COVID-19 is in charge of the census,' says former US Census Bureau director

After initially extending the census deadline to the end of October, the Trump administration announced last month that in-person counting efforts would end Sept. 30. The Census Bureau said it will end door-knocking operations in the San Diego area and other parts of the country on Sept. 18. 

Some Latino organizers say getting Latinos counted in the census can bring about even more change than casting a single vote. While elections take place once or twice a year, getting counted in the census means one person’s existence will be used again and again to provide funding to their community for the next decade. The census counts people regardless of their immigration status. 

The CARES Act, the pandemic relief funding bill Congress passed in March — was allocated in part based on the 2010 census. 

Paola Aracely Ilescas, a community health specialist, organizes agricultural workers from Mexico and Central America who work in avocado fields in northeast San Diego County. Most of them can’t vote because they are not US citizens: They're either legal permanent residents, undocumented or work on temporary visas. Their children, many of whom are US citizens, are still too young to vote. 

So for the workers to participate politically, Ilescas wants them to get counted in the census.

“We tell them, 'You count yourself this year, you’re making sure you count for the next ten years'.”

“We tell them, 'You count yourself this year, you’re making sure you count for the next ten years',” said Aracely Ilescas, who works for Vista Community Clinic, a nonprofit health center. “You don’t count yourself this year, you basically are not receiving or don’t exist for the next ten years. And guess what? We’re going to lose $2,000 each year for each person that doesn’t count for the next ten years.”

But Aracely Ilescas says it’s hard to get a community that’s been relentlessly targeted by immigration enforcement to answer questions from government workers who are now knocking on doors tracking down people who haven’t yet answered the census. 

“Many of them have said other people have expressed distrust,” she said. “Are they really employees or are they faking to be employees in order to get them? Because for years we’ve been saying, ‘Don’t open the door to ICE officials. This is your right.’ Now we’re saying, ‘Open the door!’”

That transition, she explains, requires trust between organizers pushing for an accurate census count and local communities. But in California, where 27% of the population is immigrants, other issues — such as wildfires and the pandemic — are taking priority.

Related: Pandemic, privacy rules add to worries over 2020 census accuracy

On a recent sweltering day in San Marcos, an inland city in southern California, wildfires threatened rural communities. Arcela Nunez-Alvarez, a community organizer, had planned to lead volunteers to pass out census literature. Instead, they helped with relief efforts when the fires reached area farmworkers.

Nunez-Alvarez trains workers to become community leaders. 

“We work with a lot of adults, many have very limited formal education. They’ve had to work their entire lives, but care about their community,” Nunez-Alvarez said, standing outside of a low-income housing development beside a box of signs reminding people to fill out the census. She grew up in the area and understands the importance of messaging: it needs to come from someone they trust.

“These leaders live in apartment complexes like this one here, around us,” she said. “They’re members of the community, they speak the language of the community, they look like the community that we’re trying to reach.”

While many community members can’t vote, she says, that doesn’t mean they don’t play a role in getting resources to their areas. 

“We think that being counted in the 2020 census is a foundational part of participating in democracy, and that’s what we’ve been sharing with families.”

“These are communities that have been politically disengaged or disenfranchised and undercounted in the census,” she said. “We think that being counted in the 2020 census is a foundational part of participating in democracy, and that’s what we’ve been sharing with families. We’re talking about millions of people nationally that risk being left out of the census.”

The efforts by groups like hers have been paying off. As it stands, the cities of Vista and San Marcos are ahead of their final self-response rate from 2010 by 5%. That means government census takers have less ground to cover. 

But concerted efforts by organizers with deep connections to the community aren’t always so successful. In City Heights, a dense, immigrant-heavy neighborhood of San Diego, the census response rate is still lagging behind that of 2010. 

Related: Census 2020 ads don't do enough to dispel immigrant fears, advocates say

An undercount would narrow the political power of Latinos in their own communities, says Rosa Olascoaga, a 24-year-old community organizer in City Heights, California.

“If our undocumented communities or our immigrant communities are scared to get counted, then we lose thousands and thousands of dollars every time we get counted, because the government doesn’t see us living here,” she said. “And that leaves us fighting for crumbs when we know we deserve more.” 

She works for Mid-City Community Action Network and focuses on the transportation needs of local immigrants. In a car-centric city like San Diego, the census is one of the few ways to get funding for buses, trolleys and safer streets. 

Ultimately, she knows the census — and this year’s election — must take a backseat to people’s immediate needs during the pandemic. Disillusionment with the government among Latino communities is high. And organizers like her can’t go door-to-door allaying people’s fears the way they did before the pandemic. Olascoaga hears those sentiments but hopes the community still prioritizes voting.

"I understand the government already made you feel that it doesn’t matter. These systems don’t work," she added, wishing that impactful, in-person activism were still possible in 2020. "It hurts that we can’t have those face-to-face interactions." 

Time is running out for Latino communities — encompassing people who are undocumented, immigrants and US citizens — that have just a few weeks to make themselves count. 

And a decade to live with the results.

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

It’s March 31, 1992.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and California Gov. Jerry Brown Jr. are both at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York, debating about education in urban America and sparring over tuition affordability — and gun control — just before the Democratic Party's presidential primaries.

Related: This young Afro Latino teacher and voter wants to be a model for his students

It’s pandemonium outside the college and all Nodia Mena can do is soak it in.

“I don't know anything about US politics, but it was such a huge enthusiasm,” she said. “Someone invited me to go around, we couldn't even get into the event. I mean, it was so many people, so many cars, and that was all new for me.”

This experience was Mena’s first introduction into American politics.

Mena is Afro Honduran and moved to the US nearly 30 years ago. She left Honduras when she was 19, but was able to vote for the first time before leaving.

She said the lack of change in her country led her to not take voting seriously.

“It was always whoever got into power will always do the same thing, they may have relied on corruption and so on. My very first vote was a rebellious vote. I voted for the least likely to win the party. I just felt like it didn't matter, like we didn't count. As a Garifuna, a Black woman in Latin America, my vote didn't matter.”

“It was always whoever got into power will always do the same thing, they may have relied on corruption and so on,” Mena said. “My very first vote was a rebellious vote. I voted for the least likely to win the party. I just felt like it didn't matter, like we didn't count. As a Garifuna, a Black woman in Latin America, my vote didn't matter.”

Related: How a trip to Honduras shaped one young US Afro Latino voter's identity

However, after seeing the enthusiasm toward politics in 1992, Mena started to take it more seriously and researched politicians and how the US government operates. The more she researched, the more interested she became. 

In 2008, that feeling intensified.

Then the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, ran his campaign on the slogan, “Change we can believe in,” and the chant, “Yes, we can.”

“It wasn’t until Obama when I really started paying way more attention to what was going on,” she said. “The fact that he was there as a Black man, but his message, the way in which he connected with people, how generally he presented himself to people, it resonated with me personally.”

Mena canvassed for his campaign and made sure she connected with the people she spoke to, to encourage voter enthusiasm.

“I realized that we needed to, as Afro descendants, get involved with the decisions that are being made for us,” she said. 

Her Afro Latina identity puts her in an interesting dynamic when candidates try to solicit her vote. Mena said candidates usually either go for the Black vote or the Latino vote, but never the Afro Latino vote. However, the fact that candidates don’t reach out to Afro Latinos isn’t an issue for her.

Related: This first-time Afro Latino voter is undecided. His biggest issue? Education.

“I don't think politicians should continue to think about people as ‘this is Indian,’ “this is Black,” ‘this is Latino,’” she said. “I think that this is the time where we should strive towards equity.”

“I don't think politicians should continue to think about people as ‘this is Indian,’ “this is Black,” ‘this is Latino,’” she said. “I think that this is the time where we should strive towards equity.”

As a Spanish-language instructor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Mena makes sure that she informs her students about Afro Latino history.

“In Latin America, that solidarity is nonexistent, as far as the non-Black Latinos with the Black Latinos. As a matter of fact, when you say Latinos, it does not include me in that group. You have to specifically say, 'Afro Latinos.' Why?”

These questions about Afro Latino solidarity with Latinos and African Americans are questions that she poses with her son, Brayan Guevara. The two of them, along with his other siblings, talk about everything, but especially race and politics.

“She'll always have MSNBC or something on and she's the type of person that always wants me to make up my own mind,” he said. “She never really told me, ‘Hey Brayan, you need to be a Democrat.’ She will always just try to ask me my opinions on things so I can be informed.”

Guevara is a sophomore at Guilford Technical Community College, where he is studying to become a teacher. He’s a first-time voter.

It took him a while to embrace his Afro Latino identity, but now that he has, he sees the importance of having teachers of color in the classroom, much like his mother.

“How teachers treat Black kids, which I have experienced in my time — it’s just the stigma that they already have for these kids,” Guevara said. 

As Guevara and his mom navigate through this year’s election, he has no issue stating that Mena has been a big part of his political journey.

“She’s the only influencer I’ve ever had,” he said. “I don’t really look up to anybody else.” 

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

With a record 32 million Latinos eligible to vote this year, many political observers expected to see lots of Latino politicians and representatives at the virtual Democratic National Convention this year.

The convention aims to attract a diverse group of voters, with a speaker lineup that includes former First Lady Michelle Obama and former Ohio Republican Gov. Tom Kasich. 

But Latino organizations argue the programming missed the mark. Though many national Latino leaders are taking part in daytime DNC panels, only three Latinas made the prime-time slots. They include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will only get 60 seconds to talk Tuesday night and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. 

“I am disappointed to see a lack of Latino leaders,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, executive director for Care in Action, a nonprofit advocacy group for domestic workers. Morales Rocketto is also a digital strategist who worked for the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. 

The convention is the first time many voters tune in to the election and presents an opportunity to showcase what the Democratic Party can do for Latinos, she says. But with a lack of Latino representation, she adds, that might be a tough sell.

Related: As Election Day nears, it's not about winning the 'Latino vote.' It's about making a real connection.

Morales Rocketto and others expected Julián Castro, the only Latino to run for president this election cycle, to have a more prominent role during the convention’s televised portion. He did take part in other virtual panels, briefly speaking at the Hispanic Caucus Meeting the first day of the convention.  A Twitter hashtag #LetJulianSpeak trended the weekend before the convention’s start, signaling many Castro fans were unhappy.  

“I’d be lying to you if I said I’m not disappointed that there aren’t more Latinos and Latinas generally speaking on that program, and that there’s not a Native American, not a Muslim American.”

“I’d be lying to you if I said I’m not disappointed that there aren’t more Latinos and Latinas generally speaking on that program, and that there’s not a Native American, not a Muslim American,” Castro said during an interview last week with MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez. 

“If you think about the beautiful coalition that has become the Democratic Party over the last few years, I’m not sure it’s fully represented on that stage. But more important than the speaking, than the talking, is really the doing.”

Still, he says, he wants voters to focus on what presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his vice president pick, Kamala Harris, can do in a new administration. 

Related: Trump, Biden boost efforts to reach Texas Latino voters

The question remains whether the campaign has done enough to tap into an increasingly young Latino voting bloc, many who had been fervent Bernie Sanders supporters. 

According to the Pew Research Center, members of the growing cohort of US-born Latinos tend to be young, with a median age of 20.   

Many, like 18-year-old Izcan Ordaz from Texas, are not staying up to watch the DNC. But they are paying attention. 

“Personally, I haven’t been too involved with the Democratic Convention. I’m not planning on watching the entire thing, I’m just planning on watching some highlights from it,” Ordaz said.

Related: BLM protests are shaking up how this young Latino voter views US politics

However, Ordaz says he hopes for more debate on an economic stimulus package and solutions to issues with mail-in ballots. 

Many have criticized the Biden campaign’s Latino outreach as too little, too late. Still, one thing the campaign has done to attract Latino voters, about one-third of whom tend to vote for Republican presidential candidates, is to enlist Republican strategist and CNN political commentator Ana Navarro to rally Biden voters in Florida. Navarro, who fled communism in Nicaragua, is not a fan of President Donald Trump.

That may dilute some of the Trump campaign’s messaging of Biden and other Democrats as communists and communist sympathizers. 

But Morales Rocketto, like many Latino activists, says the Biden campaign still needs to prove itself. 

To be Latino during an election season can feel like landing on a movie set of a suspenseful, high-stakes drama. It’s a story of contradictions. You are a star of the show — Latinos are projected to become the largest, nonwhite racial or ethnic electorate in 2020 — but it is usually set to a predictable, one-note soundtrack: “immigration, immigration, immigration.” An audience of pundits dissects the “Latino vote,” while advocates recite well-rehearsed lines: “Latinos are not a monolith. Ignoring the Latino vote will cost candidates at the polls.”

And perhaps the only reason the Latino vote narrative captivates political writers, pundits and especially candidates is because they want to know: “How does the story end?”

Related: Getting out the vote for the 2020 election: Lessons from Bernie Sanders' Latino outreach

Sure, action sequences turn on whether Democrats can rally Latinos or whether an incumbent president, whose political emblem is a border wall, has alienated Latinos who vote for Republicans. But it’s a story that comes down to the question: Will they show up on Election Day?

The answer depends, in part, on whether our stars feel like heroines on camera or specimens under a microscope, and whether they feel they are part of the US electorate or outsiders: “them,” “the other.”

“It matters a great deal, especially for those who are not politicized who have not developed an interest to engage or desire to engage with politics.”

“It matters a great deal, especially for those who are not politicized who have not developed an interest to engage or desire to engage with politics,” said Angela X. Ocampo, author of the forthcoming book, “Politics of Inclusion: A Sense of Belonging and Latino Political Participation.”

Before our stars became Latino voters, say researchers and voting rights advocates, daily experiences informed their enthusiasm for casting a ballot. To reach the ballot box, Latinos often must first traverse a battlefield of messages from the political left and right that casts Latinos as the perennial outsider. They will have shielded themselves from media coverage often portrays Latinos as rootless newcomers and asks that all-too-familiar question: “Where are you from?” Which presumes that the answer is: “Not here.” They will have faced a barrage of rejecting encounters, with nearly 38% of Latinos reported to the Pew Research Center in 2018 that they had been told to “go back,” chastised for speaking Spanish, or been on the receiving end of offensive slurs in the previous year. They will have pushed through the psychological impact of violent events, such as the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, which was provoked by racist backlash against Latinos as a growing political force in Texas.

Related: The pandemic upended this Latino teen's senior year. Now it's upended his politics.

“After that terrible event, we were left at the mercy of a fear created for us,” writes Ilia Calderón, a national news anchor for Univision, in her new memoir, “My Time to Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race.” The fear extended far beyond El Paso or Texas, beyond Mexicans and Mexican Americans, reaching Calderón, an Afro Latina thousands of miles away in Miami and but to Latinos across the country.

“We already had to deal with how the color of our skin makes some look at us a certain way when we walk into a store, what it means to be a woman walking around certain areas at certain times, but now we have to add our papers, last names, or nationality to the mix,” Calderón said.

From these experiences, “many Latinos in the U.S. learn that their standing in the U.S. social fabric is limited and below that of others,” writes researcher Ocampo, adding that it holds true for people whose roots run generations deep, or who arrived decades ago and raised their children.

A sense of belonging — meaning, how society perceives you — along with feeling respected and valued — can be powerful forces to mobilize or discourage voting. In his eulogy for the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis on July 30, former President Barack Obama said a central strategy to voter suppression is to convince people to “stop believing in your own power.”

Though Latinos possess a strong American identity, researchers have found Latinos register a lower sense of belonging than whites but slightly higher than Blacks. And given the nation’s racist hierarchy, Latinos, who can be of any race, with darker skin have a more tenuous sense of belonging than lighter-skinned Latinos. In 2018, the Pew Research Center found that following the election of Donald Trump, 49% of Latinos had “serious concerns” about the security of their place in the US. The implications can be significant. Ocampo found that a strong belief in belonging to US society can change the probability of voting by up to 10%, translating into tens of thousands of votes.

Demographics, though, seem to have little effect. Even in a state like Texas, where Latinos will soon become the largest demographic, they are underrepresented in nearly all areas of leadership. A forthcoming, statewide study by the Texas Organizing Project about Latinos’ relationship with the electoral system turned up a solid strain of unbelonging, particularly among working-class Latinos in urban areas.

“We are an ‘other.’ We still feel it,” said Crystal Zermeno, director of electoral strategy for the Texas Organizing Project.

That perception becomes a challenge when trying to convince eligible voters that the ballot box belongs to them.

“A lot of times working-class Latinos, they feel like voting is for other people. It’s not where they belong.”

“A lot of times working-class Latinos, they feel like voting is for other people. It’s not where they belong.”

Political campaigns may run on promises of better access to health care, tighter border security and help with college tuition. But to get the message across, candidates and parties need to make an authentic connection.

“I needed to make an emotional connection with an old, angry, white, Jewish man from Vermont [Sanders] with a demographic with an average age of 27, to say, ‘I understand your plight,’” said Chuck Rocha, a senior adviser during Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign effort to turn out Latino voters and recently released the book, “Tío Bernie: The Inside Story of How Bernie Sanders Brought Latinos into the Political Revolution.”

Sanders’ immigrant roots may have opened a door. But the connection comes from communicating, “You are part of our community and we’re part of your community,” Rocha said.

Related: Trump, Biden boost efforts to reach Texas Latino voters

Belonging, or at least the semblance of it, is a tool that Republicans use — including President Trump. With Trump’s “build that wall” chant; fixation on border security, and derogatory references to asylum-seekers and other migrants, Trump has drawn clear and powerful boundaries on belonging. Contained within his rhetoric, rallies and campaign videos is a choreography for performing American identity, patriotism and citizenship.

“Who do you like more, the country or the Hispanics?” Trump asked Steve Cortes, a supporter and Hispanic Advisory Council member, during a 2019 rally in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. During his 2020 State of the Union Address, Trump momentarily paused his typical vilification of asylum-seekers and other migrants to recognize one Latino: Raul Ortiz, the newly appointed deputy chief of the US Border Patrol  — a servant of surveillance.

“He’s putting forth a clear version of what it means to belong and not to belong and who is a threat and not a threat,” said Geraldo Cadava, author of “The Hispanic Republicans: The shaping of An American Political Identity from Nixon to Trump.”

In the long term, Cadava says, Trump’s strategy is untenable because of the demographic direction of the nation. But in the immediate term, it is meant to rally his base and solidify support among voters in key states. Inviting Robert Unanue, CEO of Goya Foods, a major food brand favored by Latinos, to the White House in July, provoked backlash when the CEO praised the president. Still, for Latino Republican voters, it suggested that the White House is open to them.

This, combined with a weeklong, Hispanic outreach campaign that centered on promises to play up Latino business opportunities, in the eyes of Trump’s supporters, Cadava said, “he looks like a perfectly electable candidate.” It’s an image tailored for an existing base, which stands in contrast to the scene of Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to survivors of Hurricane Maria.

Overtures of belonging can also be seen in a move by Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, who is up for reelection, to co-sponsor legislation to fund a National Museum of the American Latino. But advocates warn such messages ring hollow when matched with policies. Cornyn, a Trump supporter and lieutenant to Sen. Mitch McConnell, has aggressively backed repealing the Affordable Care Act even though his state has the highest uninsured rate in the nation — 60% of the uninsured are Latino. With news coverage of Latinos generally centered on border and immigration issues, and 30% of Latinos reported being contacted by a candidate or party, according to a poll by Latino Decisions, the lasting image is likely a photograph of a museum. This may explain why Cornyn is 10 points behind his Democratic challenger. To this, some say Democrats have failed to summon a vision of the nation that includes Latinos.

“We [Latinos] are part of the America, the problem is we haven’t made them part of the public policy and politics of our country because we don’t spend the time to reach out and make the connection to that community.” 

“We [Latinos] are part of the America, the problem is we haven’t made them part of the public policy and politics of our country because we don’t spend the time to reach out and make the connection to that community,” said Rocha, who led a campaign by Sanders that scored record turnout among Latinos.

Related: This young Afro Latino teacher and voter wants to be a model for his students

Missing in American politics for Latinos is “a showman, somebody who stands up and who isn’t afraid of consequences to stand for our community the way [Trump] stands for racist rednecks. We haven’t seen that.”

Left is a roadmap of patriotism, of citizenship that positions Latinos in a neverending border checkpoint, not located in South Texas or Arizona, but built around the notion of an American.

“There are these tests being administered to see where these people are going to fit in the greater scheme of things if we have to deal with them,” said Antonio Arellano, acting executive director of Jolt Institute, a voter mobilization organization in Texas. “Patriotism can be displayed in many different ways, this administration has tainted nationalism by dipping it into the red cold racist filled paint that has been emblematic of America’s darkest moment in history.”

In a scathing opinion piece for The New York Times, Alejandra Gomez and Tomás Robles Jr., co-founders of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) accused political leaders of deserting Latino Arizonans, leaving them as scapegoats to a right-wing political agenda that was built on excluding and attacking immigrants and Latinos.

“The thing is, people want community. They want to belong to something that helps them make sense of the political world,” they wrote. “But they don’t trust politics or Democrats because both have failed them.” 

While unbelonging may drive some people from the polls, it can also be a mobilizing force.

Following the 1990s’ anti-Latino and anti-immigrant campaign in California, that resulted in policies, such as denying education and housing to undocumented imigrants political groups harnessed the outrage and pain among Latinos in that state. In the 2000s, facing deportation, the young Latinos known as the “Dreamers” transformed their noncitizen status into a political asset and became a reckoning force across the nation. Millennials, in particular, reported to Ocampo their outsider status was a catalyzing force for political participation.

LUCHA and other advocacy groups have provided something candidates and parties have not: belonging. “We are reminding them and they are true leaders in our community, creating spaces to be themselves authentically in the world,” Gomez told me.

These advocacy groups have become a political force in Arizona, backing progressive candidates and galvanizing Latinos, not by stoking party loyalty but as “independent power organizations,” Gomez told me. In a state where Latinos are nearly a quarter of eligible voters, LUCHA and other groups helped roll back anti-immigrant laws and elected community leaders and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to the US Senate by promoting a platform created not by a party, but by their community.

In late summer, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, made belonging a central feature in “The Biden Agenda for the Latino Community.”

“President Trump’s assault on Latino dignity started on the very first day of his campaign. … Trump’s strategy is to sow division — to cast out Latinos as being less than fully American.” 

“President Trump’s assault on Latino dignity started on the very first day of his campaign. … Trump’s strategy is to sow division — to cast out Latinos as being less than fully American,” it says.

Biden’s agenda includes a host of policy offerings including a public option for health care, immigration reform and addressing climate change. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, if the strategy will amount to policies wrapped up in an anti-Trump message. And this brings to mind a critical point that Rocha made about appealing to Latino voters: Latinos changed Sanders himself, by courting them he gained a more complete portrait of the nation. Belonging, after all, is reciprocal.

Come Election Day, whether someone coming off a double shift or mourning family members who died in a pandemic, or a student facing down a deadline for a paper will take a few hours — Latinos stand in lines that are twice as long as whites — a ballot cast will be the end result of a long journey, an epic drama that began long before a campaign season. 

Ernestina Mejía knew people were getting sick all around her this spring. She heard co-workers coughing in the bathroom at work. Others whispered about colleagues looking feverish.

Mejía wasn’t surprised. She works at Primex Farms, a dried fruit and nut producer based in Wasco, California, about 130 miles north of Los Angeles. Mejía, who moved to the US from Mexico a decade ago, sorted pistachios indoors on an assembly line, working in close proximity to others. Primex offered them no masks, no gloves and no protection against the coronavirus, she said.

Then, in mid-June, Mejía fell ill.

“I started feeling shivers and a terrible cough that wouldn’t let me sleep,” she said in Spanish.

Mejía, along with her husband and youngest daughter, had contracted the virus. So did 99 of Mejia’s coworkers, or about a quarter of Primex’s 400-person workforce, according to a tally by the United Farm Workers, a farmworkers’ union. One of her Primex colleagues, Maria Hortencia Lopez, 57, died on July 13 from COVID-19, according to friends and the UFW. Meanwhile, Mejía said, Primex did not acknowledge that people were falling ill.

Horrified at the outbreak, Mejía and other Primex employees took part in a one-day strike in late June to protest what they viewed as their employer’s failure to protect them. They also demanded an investigation by the state’s attorney general.

Their situation highlights the tightrope farmworkers must walk to protect their health and jobs while avoiding retaliation from their employers. Within weeks, at least 40 Primex workers, many of whom were active in the strike, were terminated, former workers told The World. Others said they feared the same fate if they spoke up.

From the start of the pandemic, warnings were clear that farmworkers — deemed “essential” to the nation’s food supply and thus exempt from lockdown orders — would be at high risk for COVID-19. Across the US, an estimated 2.5 million farmworkers often work in cramped spaces, carpool to work and live in crowded homes. Many are immigrants and refugees. They’re part of an industry where safety and labor standards are notoriously weak, but many workers cannot leave their jobs because they’ll fall into poverty. The stakes are even higher for undocumented workers, whose legal status leaves them vulnerable to immigration enforcement.

Related: Farmworkers are now deemed essential. But are they protected?

Now, those early warnings are bearing out as outbreaks are reported at farms and food processing plants across the US. In July, dozens of farmworkers at a dorm-style housing facility in Southern California tested positive for the coronavirus. In southwest Florida, Doctors Without Borders has noted high rates of infections among farmworker communities and is providing them with COVID-19 testing and virtual medical consultations.

Employers’ lack of disclosure to employees about workplace infections is not unusual. Jesse Rojas, a business consultant Primex hired to speak to the media on its behalf, told The World the company has been following official safety guidelines and has been “very proactive in communicating with employees.”

In a statement to the local ABC television station, the company attempted to distance itself from the possibility that its workers were infected on-site.

“Primex cannot control the circumstances or monitor what employees are doing outside on their own time,” it said. “Primex is known as one of the cleanest plants in the industry.”

Mejía, along with several current and former Primex workers, also said that the farm did not provide masks for several months as the coronavirus surged across the country. When it did, cloth masks were provided for sale on-site for $8 each.

“That’s not something we can afford,” said Mejía, who earns $13 per hour. In the end, she said she purchased handmade masks from a co-worker for $4 apiece.

Primex denies selling masks to employees. 

“The company has never charged employees a dime for a face mask.”

“The company has never charged employees a dime for a face mask,” Rojas said.

Since the strike, Mejía, who is now back at work, said conditions at the processing plant have improved somewhat. For instance, employees’ work breaks are now staggered to avoid crowding. Masks and gloves are available for free.

“Things are better,” she said. “I just hope that they stay like that once the spotlight moves away.”

Yet, Mejia still hears people coughing at work. She knows her co-workers worry about missing a paycheck or losing their jobs. Many immigrant workers are blocked from unemployment insurance and have been left out of federal relief bills for the coronavirus.

Related: California hospital translates coronavirus information for immigrants

Some US lawmakers are pushing for broader federal help — and more safety at farms. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, a Democrat of California whose district includes the heavily agricultural Salinas Valley, has co-sponsored bills that aim to loosen eligibility requirements so that workers, regardless of their immigration status, have access to financial aid during the pandemic. But those initiatives have not succeeded at the federal level. Panetta and others are pushing to reimburse farms for personal protective equipment, or PPE.

“We're basically doing our job and making sure that the funding is there so that they can have this PPE,” Panetta said. “You want to make sure that these producers are requiring that their employees wear the PPE.”

There are still no national mandates to protect workers — only nonbinding guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s a problem, said Armando Elenes of United Farm Workers, which supports the workers at Primex.

“They’re recommendations, not requirements,” Elenes said. “That makes it difficult to enforce because they have no teeth.”

Related: US seafood workers fight unsafe conditions amid pandemic

Meanwhile, workers have paid a high price on farms that have been slow to protect them.

Another farmworker, Anastacio Cruz, who harvested white button mushrooms at a farm south of San Francisco for about 13 years, contracted the coronavirus this spring. California declared its shelter-in-place order in mid-March. But Cruz, who spoke to The World in Spanish, said he continued to work indoors without a mask and did not worry about the risks.

“You just think that nothing is going to happen, right?” said Cruz, who migrated to the US from Oaxaca, Mexico.

Anastacio Cruz, center, a farmworker, leaves Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California, where he spent more than six weeks after contracting the coronavirus, on June 29, 2020. 

Credit:

Courtesy of Natividad Medical Center

Then, his body started aching. In April, he was hospitalized at the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas for 13 weeks. His youngest daughter, Isela, sat next to Cruz.

“It was a very hard situation and very slow progress,” she said. “He was, like, six weeks in a coma.”

His hospital stay included 50 days on a ventilator, during which Isela enrolled him in Medicaid. Cruz is now recuperating at home. During an interview over Zoom, he pointed to the small tubes pushing oxygen through his nose. 

“I’m not sure when I will work again. I’m telling people to take care of themselves, wear the mask, so that people don’t go through this. It’s hell for the family.”

“I’m not sure when I will work again,” he said. “I’m telling people to take care of themselves, wear the mask, so that people don’t go through this. It’s hell for the family.”

Cruz did not want to name the mushroom farm where he worked, concerned it could hurt his chances of returning to his job. Though Cruz was laid off with two weeks’ pay, he said his employer told him he could come back.

Speaking up can be risky, as María Irma Escobedo knows all too well. After working for nearly two years sorting pistachios at Primex Farms, she was one of at least 40 workers whose jobs, facilitated through a staffing agency, were terminated. Many of those terminated were active in the workers’ strike and said they received no warning they would be let go.

“I know this was retaliation against us,” Escobedo said. “Now, we’re out of work. My only source of income. And this was my fear from that start, that this would happen for speaking out.”

The United Farm Workers said it will file charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging Primex failed to protect them and illegally retaliated against them for protesting.

Rojas, speaking on behalf of Primex, told The World the staffing cuts are based on usual seasonal reductions. He did not answer questions about year-to-year comparisons or allegations by Primex workers and the UFW that new people are being hired to work at the plant, sourced by another staffing agency, to replace the workers recently let go.

Escobedo said that she will continue to fight back, albeit from home.

In June, she tested positive for COVID-19 and was hospitalized for three days, she said. She is still recovering.

Jonathan, an asylum-seeker from Haiti, has a collection of bus tickets from his trip last fall from Florida to the US-Canada border. The last bus dropped him off in Plattsburgh, New York, a little over 20 miles from Canada. Then, he took a taxi to the border. 

But he didn’t go to an official border crossing. Instead, he followed instructions from other asylum-seekers. 

“My friend sent me every [piece of] information,” said Jonathan, who asked to use only his first name because his asylum case is pending.

That information included videos posted online of an informal crossing point north of Plattsburgh. The spot, a country road that reaches a dead end in a gravel patch at the border, has become so popular with asylum-seekers that police now wait, 24/7, on the Canadian side to detain new arrivals.

But like tens of thousands of other asylum-seekers trying to reach Canada from the US in the past four years, Jonathan took this route to avoid a bilateral deal between the two countries known as the Safe Third Country Agreement. Signed in the wake of 9/11, the deal allows both the US and Canada to turn back asylum-seekers who present themselves at official border crossings if they first passed through the other country. In practice, it has more frequently impacted asylum-seekers arriving in Canada after having lived in or transited through the United States. 

But last week, a Canadian judge ruled the agreement violates asylum-seekers’ rights because of what happens after people are turned back to the US if they arrive at official border crossings. Detention conditions to which returned asylum-seekers may be subject in the US violates asylum-seekers’ protections under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the judge found.

Related: Canadian court weighs whether the US is safe for asylum-seekers

Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, which was a party to the legal challenge, explained that those who do arrive at the US border at official crossing points and are turned back are returned to US border agents. 

“You may very well end up in detention for an extended period of time. In immigration detention centers, sometimes commingled with criminal convicts. That’s very commonplace.”

“You may very well end up in detention for an extended period of time. In immigration detention centers, sometimes commingled with criminal convicts. That’s very commonplace,” Neve said. 

In her ruling Wednesday, Canadian Federal Court Justice Ann Marie McDonald focused on the experience of plaintiff Nedira Mustefa, an asylum-seeker who is originally from Ethiopia.

After being turned back from Canada, Mustefa spent a month in a New York county jail, which included time in solitary confinement until she was released on bond. Unable to get halal food in jail, Mustefa lost 15 pounds. 

McDonald wrote: “Although the US system has been subject to much debate and criticism, a comparison of the two systems is not the role of this Court, nor is it the role of this Court to pass judgment on the US asylum system.”

However, she continued: “Canada cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences that befell Ms. Mustefa in its efforts to adhere to the [Safe Third Country Agreement].” 

The ruling leaves the agreement in place for the next six months to allow the government to respond. Amnesty International Canada and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers have urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government not to appeal. 

Related: As asylum-seekers trek north, Canada examines border loophole

Mayor of Plattsburgh, Colin Read, says that despite the notoriety of the back road where Jonathan crossed, some families still approach official border crossings because they either do not know of the agreement or think they fall under exempted categories. 

The first family of asylum-seekers he encountered back in 2017 had tried to apply for asylum at the Champlain–St. Bernard de Lacolle border crossing, a half-hour drive north of Plattsburgh, New York.

According to Read, the father of the family had $2,000 in his pocket to begin what the family hoped was a new life in Canada. Turned back from Canada as ineligible to enter and apply for asylum, he was detained by US border officers who found the sum suspicious. 

Eventually, Read said, “He’s … transported to Buffalo, which is the main [immigration] detention center in our region, and there's a wife and a bunch of kids in hand with no place to go.”

Their situation became the catalyst for locals to form a group called Plattsburgh Cares, which has provided support to immigrants attempting to reach Canada in increasing numbers since the start of the Trump administration. 

Those, like Jonathan, who cross between official ports of entry — having reached Canadian soil — have the right to apply for asylum. Jonathan is now living in Montreal while awaiting his asylum decision.

These irregular border crossers became politically contentious in Canada, with some politicians characterizing them as rule breakers. If the Safe Third Country Agreement lapses, they will be allowed to apply for asylum at normal border crossings. 

A spokesperson for Canadian Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said Wednesday that the government is “currently reviewing” the decision.

Craig Damien Smith, associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the University of Toronto, noted the six-month suspension expires just days after the US presidential inauguration in January. 

“The big question is whether or not more people will decide to come as a result of this decision. We don't know that,” he said. “It's very difficult to say. And I think that much of this will depend on what happens in the November election.”

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

The coronavirus pandemic turned Jacob Cuenca’s life upside down just before he graduated high school.

“Literally everything was fine, you know, I was going to school, worrying about my math test, and all of a sudden there's no school for, like, three months,” he said. “We had no prom night, no senior brunches.”

Cuenca, who is 18, now finds himself in a kind of purgatory in between high school and college, stuck at home in a town just south of Miami, one of the nation's epicenters for the coronavirus. He graduated from high school but has chosen to delay his freshman year at the University of Denver in Colorado for at least one semester to avoid some of the disruption brought on by the pandemic.

Politically, Cuenca finds himself in a kind of purgatory as well. He registered to vote for the first time in March as a Republican. He considered himself a reluctant supporter of Republican President Donald Trump. 

But the pandemic has shaken up Cuenca’s politics, too. Trump’s handling of the pandemic has made him reconsider his support for the president. Instead, Cuenca has become a hesitant supporter of presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

His journey offers a snapshot into the psyche of a first-time Latino voter in Florida, a must-win swing state.

“I think Joe Biden and Trump are both pretty bad people. But if I had to choose a lesser evil it would be Joe Biden.”

“I think Joe Biden and Trump are both pretty bad people,” Cuenca said. “But if I had to choose a lesser evil it would be Joe Biden.”

The problem with Biden is that he’s old, out of touch, and will say anything to get elected, Cuenca said. And it doesn’t help that Biden was one of the authors of a 1994 law that is broadly credited as being one of the primary reasons for mass incarceration in the US, he added.

Still, a Democrat in the White House could help pass new social programs in a time of financial crisis that has impacted his own family, Cuenca pointed out.

Related: Trump's pandemic response has this conservative Latino teen considering Biden

Family debates over politics

Cuenca’s mother also says she is underwhelmed with her options for the November election.

Nohemi Cuenca is a Mexican American who leans left and isn’t impressed with any of the candidates in the race. For her, it’s almost an existential moment for democracy.

“We should have good quality candidates that you can say, ‘Wow, we can get behind that person.’ I don’t feel like that for any of them, to tell you the truth,” she said. “Bernie Sanders, yeah, I felt it 100% that he should have been the person.”

“I think it’s a really sad time for us in the United States when it comes to politics.”

“Why they picked Joe Biden?” she asked, rhetorically. “I don’t know. [He's so] out of touch. But so is Trump. So I think it’s a really sad time for us in the United States when it comes to politics.”

Nohemi Cuenca said she is “up in arms” about who to vote for, because “neither of them, I feel, is any good.”

The Cuenca household is politically mixed. Family discussions can get passionate from all sides. But Nohemi Cuenca said talking politics with her children’s father, a Republican and staunch Trump supporter, is always informative and respectful.

“He’ll disagree with me or I’ll disagree and we have our opinions and we talk. But I listen to what he has to say. He listens to me as well,” she said. “Same with the kids. When they inform me of something that maybe I was wrong with, didn't know correctly, they will correct me. So — ‘OK, let me do my research and look about it.’ So, we all take it in stride.”

Related: Latino groups fight voter suppression efforts as US election nears

A welcome distraction

Talking politics can feel like a welcome — if inescapable — distraction from the coronavirus itself. 

Jacob Cuenca has rarely left home for the last several months, besides taking bike rides around the neighborhood. He spends his time inside playing video games and sleeping in. Originally, he hoped to get a summer job before going to school. But his prospects are tough with such a high unemployment rate, he said.

The situation makes his mother nervous about the world her son is entering as a college student, with high unemployment, social unrest and an ongoing public health crisis. 

Their family can’t afford to pay the two weeks of mandatory off-campus quarantining Jacob Cuenca’s university would require because he’d arrive from a state with a high COVID-19 caseload. This factored into him delaying his start date to January.

Until then, Jacob Cuenca finds himself with a lot of time on his hands.

“I’ve been contemplating the world and what’s been going on right now,” he said.

He's been thinking about what he considers Trump's failures, as well as the lack of alternatives. A prime example, he said, is the US response to the protests that began after a police officer in Minneapolis killed George Floyd.

“Their response has been more to instigate it than try to quell the looters and the rioters,” he said of the Trump administration. “Both sides, too, because Democrats are just...holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya' and they think that’s gonna solve every problem."

But he sees himself aligning more and more with an idea that’s become popular on the left, one that emerged from the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I do think people can do better without the police and defunding them,” he said. “I think they should defund the police and put it all into education and make universities and stuff like that for free. I really do think that.”

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

With four months left until Election Day in November, US presidential candidates are ramping up their campaigns — and their efforts to court Latino voters.

In Texas, a key state for the presidential race, both US President Donald Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, have boosted their Latino outreach in recent weeks. Some 5.6 million Latinos are eligible to vote in Texas. They comprise about 30% of all eligible voters in the state, the third-highest rate in the country. 

Related: Latino groups fight voter suppression efforts as US election nears

Trump visited the city of Dallas in June shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, to meet with faith leaders and law enforcement and discuss health and justice disparities. Biden, meanwhile, debuted his first general election TV ad on Tuesday in Texas, a state that a Democartic presidential nominee has not won in more than 40 years. Recent polls show Biden has a real shot this year at turning Texas blue, or at least purple. 

Texas held its US Senate Democratic primary runoff elections on Tuesday. It was the first election to take place in the state since the pandemic began. Their primary elections, held March 3, or Super Tuesday, took place a few weeks before the pandemic shut down much of the country.

Despite a sharp recent increase in confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the state, many Latinos still went to the polls and many arrived prepared: They wore masks and brought their own hand sanitizer. Some even brought their own stylus pen to fill out their ballot. 

“I didn’t feel like my health was at stake or anything,” said Maria Cruz, 63, a Dallas County resident and former educator. She came out to vote with her two adult daughters despite undergoing cancer treatment.  

“We can’t tell future generations that things were bad or good if we haven’t done our part to get the representation.”

“We can’t tell future generations that things were bad or good if we haven’t done our part to get the representation,” she said. 

One of Cruz’s daughters, Susana Cruz, 39, said the family has a tradition of making voting a family event — and it was no different during the pandemic. 

“It’s really important for us as Latinas to come out and vote,” Susana Cruz said. “This was definitely a priority today and we were coming out to make sure we choose people that are going to be representing us locally.”

Latinos are paying attention to that representation — at all levels of government. 

In Tuesday’s runoff election, one candidate for US Senate, Candace Valenzuela, won the Democratic nomination for Texas’ 24th Congressional District, which includes Dallas, and other populous counties in North Texas, with 60% of the vote. She made her identity as an Afro Latina central to her campaign.

This victory puts Valenzuela on track to becoming the first Afro Latina in Congress if she wins in November. 

After spending almost his entire adult life in a cell, Chanthon Bun was released from San Quentin State Prison in California earlier this month. Officials dropped him off at a bus stop three miles away. 

Bun had not expected to go free — rather, he expected to leave prison and go straight into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Bun arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1986 after his family fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He entered the prison system at 18 for the armed robbery of a computer store. Though Bun, now 41, has legal permanent residency in the US, his felony conviction made him a target for potential deportation once he had completed his prison sentence. 

But ICE was not there to pick up Bun when he was released July 1, and that may be because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Prison-to-ICE transfers are routine in the US for some non-citizen immigrants who have charges or convictions. Every year, thousands of immigrants are released from prison and put into ICE detention, where they face deportation. Immigrant rights advocates have fought this policy for years. But it has come under renewed scrutiny with the pandemic as many detention centers throughout the country have experienced coronavirus outbreaks. As of July 10, 3,090 detainees have tested positive at detention centers nationwide, among a total detained population of about 22,600. Many advocates and detainees believe that total is an undercount because of a dearth in testing. 

Bun was already feeling sick with symptoms of COVID-19 before his release from San Quentin. The prison is experiencing a severe outbreak of the virus, with more than one-third of the inmates and staff testing positive. 

Related: 'Emergency releases' from prison reduce risk of virus spread, criminal justice expert says

Bun’s condition made his lawyer nervous. 

“We were deeply concerned, and I was getting letters from Bun as he was watching the outbreak spread around him,” said Anoop Prasad, a longtime immigration lawyer with Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, a nonprofit based in San Francisco. “He was increasingly panicked and felt like a sitting duck sitting in a cell, and it was a matter of time before COVID came and got him.” 

Prasad also worried that Bun’s transfer to an immigration detention center could be deadly and dangerous to others. 

“We knew very well that if he gets transferred to ICE, he very well may infect other people and he very well may not survive.”

“We knew very well that if he gets transferred to ICE, he very well may infect other people and he very well may not survive,” Prasad said.  

Social distancing in detention

A growing number of groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights are also highlighting these risks. 

"Folks should be released to their family members, where they can shelter in place. There is no social distancing in a crowded detention center,” said Luis Suarez, field advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, a coalition of immigrant rights organizations.

Weeks before Bun’s release, Prasad and others launched a public campaign, holding rallies and phone banks to stop the authorities from handing over Bun and other inmates to ICE. 

 Immigrant rights advocates in San Francisco demanded the release of Chanthon Bun from San Quentin State Prison, along with other inmates showing symptoms of the coronavirus.

Credit:

Courtesy of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus

Meanwhile, an ICE agent informed Bun that he would be picked up from prison and taken into ICE custody. 

“Inside, we all know about the ICE holds,” Bun said, referring to ICE’s requests to law enforcement officials to detain immigrants in jail or prison until they can be transferred to ICE’s custody. 

The public pressure campaign seemed to work: ICE did not pick up Bun. He was so sure ICE agents would detain him that he hadn’t arranged for any friends or family to meet him at the bus stop, even after two decades in prison.  

“I had my medication ready ... because I knew I was really sick. I was getting ready for myself, to protect myself when I got to ICE.”

“That was the biggest surprise ever,” Bun said. “I had put together a safety pack for myself to go to ICE. I had collected a little hand sanitizer. I had my medication ready ... because I knew I was really sick. I was getting ready for myself, to protect myself when I got to ICE.”

Related: California governor halts deportation of 2 Cambodian refugees, thwarting Trump administration

Some California lawmakers have also pressured local prison officials and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to stop the prison-to-ICE transfers because of the risks during a pandemic. San Quentin was largely virus-free until a larger transfer of inmates occurred in May from a prison with many positive cases in Chino, California. The number of people with the virus at San Quentin escalated rapidly after that transfer.  

In an early July hearing before California’s senator, lawmakers grilled Ralph Diaz, who runs the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, about the ICE transfers. Diaz said the current policy would not change. 

“If an individual has served their term and their term is up and there is a hold or a warrant by ICE as a pickup, then they are picked up by ICE just like any law enforcement agency,” Diaz said. 

ICE didn’t respond to interview requests about the transfers or Bun’s case and why the agency did not pick him up.

Life after prison

For the moment, Bun is happy to be out of prison, yet he still faces the threat of deportation. The day he was released, he headed straight to a church in San Francisco to protect himself from potential contact with ICE. The government agency’s policy includes churches on its list of hands-off “sensitive locations.” The name and location of the church are undisclosed.  

Related: The sanctuary church movement is on the rise again in California 

He is also recuperating from the virus, for which he tested positive after he was released. His spiking fever has eased. 

Now, it’s “the cough and body pains,” Bun said. Volunteer nurses are monitoring his conditions as he self-quarantines in a living area connected to the church. 

For Bun, it’s a surreal new chapter in his life. Before coming to the US, he and his family were resettled as refugees, after fleeing Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge’s genocide during the 1970s and spending time in exile in Thailand and the Phillippines. 

Chanthon Bun, middle, and his family shortly after arriving in the United States in the early 1980s after fleeing Cambodia and the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge. 

Credit:

Courtesy of Chanthon Bun

“I don’t think the United States was ready for kids like me. I got in trouble a lot, right? And people didn’t understand why. When I was scared, I fought. When I thought I could get away, I ran.”

“I don’t think the United States was ready for kids like me,” he said. “I got in trouble a lot, right? And people didn’t understand why. When I was scared, I fought. When I thought I could get away, I ran.” 

Years passed, and Bun never applied to become a US citizen.

“I never thought about doing that,” he said.

Then, at 18, he entered prison, where he maintained his green card, or legal permanent residency. Yet, as a non-citizen, his conviction, for second-degree robbery, makes him a target for ICE.

Bun said it feels strange to seek shelter from ICE when he has spent almost all of his life in the US.

“This is my country now, too. I’ve been here since I was a kid," he said. "I know everything about this country. So, how am I different than you?” 

In the meantime, Bun said that he is thinking of the community he built in San Quentin, including other immigrants like himself, who face twin threats: deportation and now COVID-19.

“There’s a lot of immunocompromised older gentlemen in those buildings so I’m praying that they survive this,” he said.

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

Brayan Guevara comes from a long line of educators: His mother is a college instructor, and his grandparents were teachers in Honduras. 

Now, Guevara is on the same path. The 19-year-old is a sophomore at Guilford Technical Community College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wants to become a teacher.

Before the pandemic and while school was still in session, Guevara spent his weekdays as a teacher’s assistant at Irving Park Elementary in Greensboro helping kids with their schoolwork and classroom behavior.

“At the time I was working with kindergarteners and first graders,” he said. “They're still in their fundamental stage where they need to do [work on] three-letter words or four-letter words. I will just help them do that and mostly get their own behavior in check.”

The lack of Latino educators in the US is one reason Guevara, who is Afro Latino, is pursuing his career path. He wants to change the way teachers interact with students, especially minorities. And he wants to serve as a model for his students — especially those who are Black, Latino and Afro Latino — so that they, too, see a future for themselves in education.

“How teachers treat Black kids, which I have experienced in my time — it’s just the stigma that they already have for these kids."

“How teachers treat Black kids, which I have experienced in my time — it’s just the stigma that they already have for these kids,” Guevara said. 

Related: This first-time Afro Latino voter is undecided. His biggest issue? Education.

The North Carolina Society of Hispanic Professionals is working to address the lack of Latino educators, especially those who are Afro Latino. The nonprofit promotes education among Hispanic youth in North Carolina.

But there needs to be more intention when it comes to recruiting Latino educators, said the group’s board chair, MariaRosa Rangel.

“If we truly believe in equity and if we really want to make a difference, we need more Latino teachers.”

“If we truly believe in equity and if we really want to make a difference, we need more Latino teachers,” she said. “We also lose a lot of students because they don't see themselves reflected in the curriculum, they don't see themselves as reflected in the classroom.”

Guevara shares his love of teaching with his mother, Nodia Mena, a Spanish language instructor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. 

Mena received her teaching certificate while she was living in Honduras. She immigrated to the US in the 1990s, and worked in the corporate world in New York. After several years, Mena moved to North Carolina and earned her master’s in Spanish literature, then began teaching.

Like her son, teaching is her passion. And as an Afro Latina educator, she wants to expose her students to a world that is inclusive of all races.

“I realized that most of the Latino students are not aware of the presence of Afro descendants in Latin America, the lack of presence in the media,” she said. “It does not include Afro descendancy in it, and it's hurtful for me.”

Related: How a trip to Honduras shaped one young US Afro Latino voter's identity

The rise of Latinos in higher ed

The proportion of Latinos in higher education in the US is growing. In 1990, only 10% of recently arrived Latino immigrants older than 25, had a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2018, roughly a quarter of Latino immigrants had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

While this increase is welcomed by organizations that promote Latino education, more work needs to be done to close the gap. Only 24% of Latino adults in the US have an associate’s degree or higher — compared to 44% of all US adults.

it’s a myth that Latinos don’t value education, said Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, a national nonprofit aimed at increasing Latino student success in higher education. And the US presidential election in November will give Latinos a chance to dismantle that myth.

“I think that Latinos represent the potential for how to redesign and restructure education that can serve all students of all backgrounds better by starting with this young group.”

“I think that Latinos represent the potential for how to redesign and restructure education that can serve all students of all backgrounds better by starting with this young group,” she said. "It has to be part of the voting opportunities because the elections impact investment in education. And disproportionately, that’s increasingly going to be authentic, and it has to be the way we’re investing in our future generations of populations.”

With Election Day four months away, Guevara hopes President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, will start talking more about the issue closest to him: education. 

Where the candidates stand on the topic may be the deciding factor on who gets his vote, he said, especially when it comes to student loan debt.

“As a broke college student, we don't want to have a burden of the four years that we spent just to even get our degree,” he said. 

Guevara’s mother hopes presidential candidates will take Latinos seriously when they talk about education.

“As soon as we are identified as being immigrants, then we are treated with that stigma, the negative stigma and then all of a sudden, whatever comes out of our mouth is really seen as deficient,” Mena said.

Teaching and inspiring students is what Guevara wants to continue doing and to follow in the footsteps of his grandparents and his mother.

“God puts you on this Earth for a reason,” he said. “I know I'm still young, but this is my purpose.”

Monday brought disappointing news for Harvard University sophomore Noah Furlonge-Walker. 

Due to the coronavirus, all of the university’s undergraduate classes will be held online this fall, and fewer than half of students will be allowed on campus. 

The same day, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that international students like Furlonge-Walker would be stripped of their student visas if their coursework is entirely online. Under the new rules, international students must leave the country — or would not be allowed in — if they cannot take classes in person. 

“I was pretty upset about it because it couldn't have come at a worse time,” said Furlonge-Walker, who returned to his home country, Trinidad and Tobago, after Harvard closed its campus in response to the pandemic in March. “It was a lot of news to take in on one day, and it just felt like the US was making it particularly hard on international students.”

ICE’s announcement left many international students wondering whether they would be able to complete their degrees or return to their lives in the US. It also left universities scrambling to rethink some of the pandemic contingency plans they’ve made for fall — and to find ways to keep their students in the country. Some experts say it’s the Trump administration’s way of forcing universities to reopen before it’s safe to do so.

Universities and advocates for international students were quick to slam the new rules. 

Harvard, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sued the federal government Wednesday, saying the guidelines “threw all of higher education into chaos.” The suit seeks to temporarily block the government from enforcing the policy, saying it was not implemented properly. Dozens of universities signed on to an amicus brief in support of the Harvard and MIT. And many released statements saying they are studying the guidelines and looking for ways to support international students. California also filed a similar lawsuit Thursday.

ICE's guidance “imposes a blunt, one-size-fits-all approach to a complex problem.”

Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow said in a statement Tuesday that ICE's guidance “imposes a blunt, one-size-fits-all approach to a complex problem.”

The American Council on Education called the announcement “horrifying.”

“This guidance raises more questions than it answers and unfortunately does more harm than good,” it said in a statement. “Regrettably, this guidance provides confusion and complexity rather than certainty and clarity.”

Some 1.1 million students were enrolled in US universities during the 2018-19 school year, according to the Institute of International Education. Most of them are on F-1 student visas. The federal government provided special exemptions that allowed them to study remotely during the coronavirus outbreak in March. Usually, those on student visas may attend a maximum of one class online; the rest must be in person.

Related: Visa restrictions on Chinese students will disadvantage US, says Queens College president

But the pandemic is far from over in the US, and many universities have opted to continue offering remote instruction in the upcoming school year. According to the Chronicle for Higher Education, which is tracking more than 1,000 universities around the country, 9% will have remote instruction and 24% will implement a hybrid model, which offers a mix of in-person and online classes. 

Under ICE’s guidelines, students will be allowed to take more than one class online if they’re enrolled in colleges and universities offering hybrid classes. But students and their universities have to go through a certification process. 

In an interview with CNN, Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said the guidelines give more flexibility for international students because typically their visas only permit them to take one class online. 

“If a university …  don’t reopen this semester, there isn’t a reason for a person holding a student visa to be in the country.”

“If a university …  don’t reopen this semester, there isn’t a reason for a person holding a student visa to be in the country,” Cuccinelli said. “They should go home, and then they can return when the school opens.”

Rachel Banks, senior director for public policy and legislative strategy with NAFSA: Association of International Educators, called ICE’s new rules “frustrating and disappointing.” 

“[International students] have to make a decision — if they’re here they have to leave and take courses from abroad, or they need to transfer to another US institution that is offering in-person and hybrid classes,” she said. 

Banks said these options are not practical. She cited one survey from the Institute of International Education that found the majority of international students remained in the US after the coronavirus pandemic hit — as many as 92% remained at more than 400 institutions that responded to the survey. Those students may have also signed leases and made arrangements to stay close to their campuses for the upcoming academic year. And transferring universities is not an easy feat with schools planning to restart classes as soon as next month. 

Related: Coronavirus closures leave international students in limbo

Even if students decide to take the remote classes in their home countries, there are issues around timing and the need for proper technology, said Katsuo Nishikawa Chávez, director of International Engagement at Trinity University, a small private college in San Antonio, Texas, where 10% of the student population is international. For example, students in Asia would be taking classes in the middle of the night. Students might not have proper internet connection or face censorship issues in their home countries.

“It's impractical — so, that student might quit and go study in Australia,” Chávez said.

For universities, it makes the already intricate calculations of what to do in the fall even more difficult.  

“It's a very complex calculus at this stage,” Banks said. “It is so late in the process, many schools are making the decision whether to be in-person, hybrid, based on the current situation for the virus and what is most safe for students and faculty members ... That's what needs to drive these decisions.”

Related: These DACA recipients hit a ceiling in the US. So they left.

Even institutions that offer hybrid classes could shut down again depending on fluctuating circumstances around COVID-19. The ICE guidelines state that students would have to leave even if they started the year with in-person instruction, but later have to switch to online instruction. 

“Imagine a second wave hits, students would have to go home,” Chávez said. “And now, all of a sudden, in the most dangerous time to travel, we're packing up thousands of people into airplanes and sending them abroad. It's irresponsible.”

Furlonge-Walker is not sure if his own visa will be valid if he remains at home for the whole academic year, though some immigration experts believe that international student status can be maintained while taking remote classes abroad. At this point, Furlonge-Walker says, there are still a lot of unknowns for the coming school year. 

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel with the American Immigration Council, said ICE’S new policy is in line with the Trump administration’s broader effort to curb immigration overall during the pandemic. 

“We're the only country in the world to ban immigrants, supposedly for economic competition reasons as a result of the coronavirus.”

“We're the only country in the world to ban immigrants, supposedly for economic competition reasons as a result of the coronavirus,” he said. 

But creating more hurdles for international students is counterproductive to the goal of restarting the economy, according to Banks.

“International students are innovators and entrepreneurs," she said. "We wouldn't have Silicon Valley if we didn’t have international students.”

Universities announced that they will continue to study the guidelines and will provide support to international students. 

The University of Arizona said in a statement that it's trying to find ways to ensure international students can have "quality in-person educational experience" in the fall. At Northwestern University, which planned to offer a mix of in-person and online classes, adminsitrators said they will help make sure international students can remain eligbile to study on campus according to the new guidelines.

For American universities, catering to international students is big business. Each year, more than 1 million come here to study. About a third are from China.

But come fall, many may be absent. This week, the Trump administration announced that international students would not be allowed to enter or remain in the US if their colleges and universities are online-only this fall. The move drew swift backlash from higher education administrators and advocates. Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against the government Wednesday to block the measure.

Unlike domestic students, international students often pay full tuition — which helps universities to fund scholarships and their general operations. International students injected nearly $45 billion into the US economy in 2018. 

For some international students, remote learning could mean attending classes in the middle of the night, dealing with spotty or no internet access, losing funding contingent on teaching, or having to stop participating in research. Some are considering taking time off or leaving their programs entirely.

Frank Wu, president of Queens College in New York, has written about the US government's complicated relationship with students from China. He joined The World's host Carol Hills for a conversation on the Trump administration's new guidance and its impact on international students in the US. 

Related: Universities scramble to help international universities stay in US after new visa restrictions 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Reuters contributed to this report. 

For the past four years, Reyna Isabel Alvarez Navarro has reported to work at a crawfish processing plant in Crowley, Louisiana, bundled in two pairs of pants, two sweaters and a hat. She spent her days inside a freezing room where up to 100 employees worked elbow to elbow peeling crawfish. 

The cold, crowded conditions weren’t new for the 36-year-old seasonal worker from northern Mexico. But it turned out to be the perfect setting for the novel coronavirus to spread: This spring, several dozen workers in the plant fell ill with COVID-19, including Alvarez Navarro. 

Her working conditions also made it difficult for her to obtain medical care. Alvarez Navarro and other migrant workers from her region have come to Louisiana and other states in the US every year on H-2B visas for temporary foreign workers. They stayed for the crawfish farming season, which usually runs from January to July, and lived in employer-provided dorms along with up to 40 people. They were paid $2.50 per pound of peeled crawfish — amounting to $600 to $700 per week.

H-2B workers’ visas tie them to their employer, explained Evy Peña, communications director with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant worker’s rights group with offices in Mexico and the US. Workers rely on their employers for things like transportation and housing.

“And this means that their access to basic services, including food and medical services, depends on their job,” Peña said.

But Alvarez Navarro’s employer did not provide her with health care or help her obtain it — not even after placing her and many of her co-workers in quarantine once they showed symptoms of the coronavirus. Their effort to seek treatment kicked off a legal battle with their employer over dangerous work conditions for seasonal workers during the pandemic.

While the Trump administration is temporarily suspending some employment-based visas, visas for workers essential to the food chain are still being granted. Crawfish is one of Louisiana’s largest industries — and amid the pandemic, seafood workers are considered essential. The seafood industry could face some of the same problems the meatpacking and poultry industries saw earlier this year: meat shortages and plant closures after workers fell ill. 

Related: Migrant farmworkers in US deemed essential — but lack basic protections

Alvarez Navarro started feeling ill in April. First came headaches. Then a cough and shortness of breath. Many others fell ill too. Most kept working, but at some point, Alvarez Navarro and many others became too ill to work. 

Without access to treatment, Alvarez and another sick co-worker, Maribel Hernandez Villadares, decided to go to a hospital with the help of a friend who spoke English.

“And when the friend called our boss, the boss said he had reported us to immigration authorities because we had run away.”

“And when the friend called our boss, the boss said he had reported us to immigration authorities because we had run away,” said Hernandez Villadares, a 29-year-old worker with several crawfish harvest seasons under her belt. 

Without a job, H-2B workers don’t have the authorization to work in the US — and that creates a domino effect, Peña said.

“So losing a job, losing their immigration status means that not only could they get blacklisted, but also their family members, maybe even their entire community. So when we're talking about a financial burden, it's not only individual, it's also collective,” Peña said.

Both Alvarez Navarro and Hernandez Villadares filed a whistleblower complaint against their former employer, Acadia Processors LLC, saying they were fired without a valid reason. 

Acadia Processors LLC didn’t respond to an interview request from The World. But a spokesperson told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser newspaper the company didn’t fire the workers — rather, it said, they “fled the scene” and “abandoned their jobs.”

Related: For undocumented workers, demanding better work conditions could mean deportation

Complaints about worker safety and employer safety are common and have persisted during the pandemic, according to advocacy groups and former seafood workers. 

Mario Alberto Chávez Galomo, a migrant worker from the state of Mexico, worked as a crawfish fisherman under one employer for eight years. He recalls many instances of retaliation, as well as unsafe working conditions. 

“We were forced to finish the season — even if we fell ill.”

“We were forced to finish the season — even if we fell ill,” said Chávez Galomo, who now works in construction. “Often, we had to endure tough living conditions, too. No potable water, inside the dorms. Also, long hours fishing during heavy rainfall and lost wages.”

Chávez Galomo says these issues were rampant before the pandemic and is not surprised the situation has worsened this year. He and other workers have organized and spoken out against their treatment, and are encouraging more workers to speak up. 

If employers are not willing to change and mobilize during the pandemic, the responsibility to enforce guidelines falls on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Labor Relations Board. 

“And unfortunately since there’s been no enforcement throughout this crisis, the guidelines have been rendered meaningless to workers in seafood processing plants where they’re not being implemented,” said Sabina Hinz-Foley Trejo, lead organizer with the Seafood Workers Alliance in New Orleans, a workers rights group.

On June 25, months into the pandemic, OSHA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released temporary guidelines for the seafood industry. The guidelines say workers need to be spread out and shifts should be staggered in order to minimize the spread of COVID-19.  

But Trejo says those guidelines still don’t address a major problem facing migrant workers: retaliation by employers.

That leaves workers like Alvarez Navarro and Hernandez Villadares in an impossible position. They rely on the crawfish industry to feed their families in Mexico. 

“I came here to work and to sustain my family. That need makes you capable of withstanding a lot.”

“I came here to work and to sustain my family,” Alvarez Navarro said. “That need makes you capable of withstanding a lot.”

She has stayed quiet in the past about treatment and unsafe working conditions in the crawfish processing plants. But the pandemic convinced her to speak out, she said — even at the risk of not getting hired again.  

“This time I forgot about all of that, because, honestly, this situation we went through, I was feeling hopeless,” Alvarez Navarro said. 

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

A few weeks ago, 18-year-old Izcan Ordaz joined his high school classmates for his first protest. They called for racial justice as part of a national wave of Black Lives Matter activism. A few days later, he marched again in Keller, an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, not usually known for protests.

But similar to many places across the country, residents turned out in larger numbers than expected. Keller police estimated 3,000 people showed up. 

“I really assumed it was just going to be mostly young people, mostly a lot of minorities,” Ordaz said. “But when I got there I found that it was predominantly white Americans and lots of older families, lots of children.” 

Izcan Ordaz, left, poses with a Fort Worth, Texas, police officer at a recent Black Lives Matter protest near his high school.

Credit:

Courtesy of Izcan Ordaz

Ordaz, who recently graduated from Central High School in Fort Worth, will vote in his first presidential election this November. He falls somewhere in the middle of the US political spectrum: more conservative than his parents, but not too far to the right. Ordaz believes in capitalism and a free-market economy. And two major recent events — the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests — are shaking up how he views US politics. 

Back in April, Ordaz’s biggest concerns were getting through the pandemic, the state of the US economy and finishing high school virtually.

Related: This Latino teen voter worries about prom, graduation — and the economy

Now, the issue of racial justice is also top of mind. Ordaz said he felt compelled to do something after watching the viral video of a white Minnesota police officer press his knee into the neck of George Floyd, a Black man.

What happened to Floyd wasn’t right and was painful to watch, Ordaz said. Floyd’s death reflects a larger problem of racial injustice in the country, he added — and that’s why he’s speaking up.

“I think as young people living in the United States, it really is our job to start to step up and to really make the future of the United States go in a different direction.”

“I think as young people living in the United States, it really is our job to start to step up and to really make the future of the United States go in a different direction,” he said. 

As a young Latino, Ordaz is part of a demographic that is changing the US — politically, culturally and demographically. Approximately every 30 seconds, a Latino in the US turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Latinos’ sheer numbers make them an important voting bloc: This fall, they could surpass Black voters for the first time, making them the largest racial or ethnic voter group after whites, according to the Pew Research Center.

Related: Every 30 seconds, a young Latino in the US turns 18. Their votes count more than ever.

Ordaz said it’s his generation’s responsibility to not commit the same mistakes made by previous generations. While he credits older generations for paving the way in the fight for racial equality, he believes his generation can do more.

He points to high-profile cases, such as the 1992 protests that erupted in Los Angeles after four police officers who were videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King were acquitted at trial.

“This police brutality has been a recurring issue in the United States that hopefully by the time we get to our parents’ age will not still be an issue,” Ordaz said.

Max Krochmal, an associate history professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said it’s promising to see a new wave of activism around racial justice, which has taken cues from the 1960s civil rights movement. 

That movement pushed the country as far as white Americans were willing to go, said Krochmal, who also chairs comparative race and ethnic studies at the university. In the '60s, Black activists marched and demanded equal rights. They won access to public accommodations, such as restaurants and movie theaters. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Other changes around racial equality occurred in the 1960s, but the movement eventually plateaued, Krochmal said. And in some ways, he feels like the nation has moved backward. 

“So I see the current Black Lives Matter movement as picking up that torch, as saying that the things that the nation identified that were wrong in the wake of the last wave of urban rebellions are still wrong.”

“So, I see the current Black Lives Matter movement as picking up that torch, as saying that the things that the nation identified that were wrong in the wake of the last wave of urban rebellions are still wrong,” Krochmal said. “And indeed, sometimes they’re worse, and that the nation needs to come to grips with that.”

Krochmal said the country still needs to deal with underlying issues such as racialized economic inequality, police brutality and the lack of adequate political representation.

There is hope, though.

“What we’re seeing right now that I think is amazing and remarkable is that young people … are out on the streets for the first time ever,” Krochmal said. “I think most of the time, students feel alienated from that history, but right now there’s a sense among them that they’re out doing it, that they are themselves making history and they’re empowered and they’re emboldened and they believe in the capacity for change. They’re incredibly optimistic.”

Ordaz feels that, too. He believes his peers are more tolerant and accepting of others. He uses his first name as an example of that tolerance: “Izcan” comes from the Aztec language Nahuatl and means “behold.”  He says he used to feel self-conscious about it — but at school, he’s gotten compliments on it.

“The bottom line is that Gen Z as a whole does not agree with racism. It is not a political issue.”

“The bottom line is that Gen Z as a whole does not agree with racism,” Ordaz said. “It is not a political issue. Typically, the things that I see on the media or even in person, young people are normally the ones who stand against racism when it happens from older generations.”

Ordaz’s mother, Xochitl Ortiz, said she’s proud of her son for standing up for issues he believes in. She reflected on that while sitting outside her home one recent evening.

“My husband and I are just amazed that he’s able to articulate and just really see at his young age, just the ideas that he has,” she said.

Discussion: The Latino conservative vote in the 2020 election

Xochitl Ortiz, left, helps her son Izcan Ordaz to try on his graduation gown outside their home in Keller, Texas, May 28, 2020. Ordaz graduated last week.

Credit:

Ben Torres/The World

Ortiz and her husband don’t shy away from talking with their son about difficult topics, such as racial disparities, discrimination and the history of slavery. 

And she accepts that sometimes they may have different views. 

“It’s just really neat to see how he takes in information and doesn’t just quickly jump to make a decision but really kind of investigates,” she said. 

Just what impact this new movement will have on the ballot box in November remains to be seen. Krochmal said he’s noticed alliances forming between grassroots protest groups and those working toward making political changes.

“What we’re witnessing is grassroots organizing in the electoral arena among people who ordinarily don’t participate in that and we’re seeing folks paying attention to local politics, particularly local politics, who’ve never noticed it before,” he said.

As for Ordaz, he said he still plans to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden. He’s critical of how President Donald Trump has politicized the coronavirus pandemic, and Ordaz doesn’t like the comments he’s made about Black Lives Matter protesters. He believes the president’s actions have polarized the country.

He said: “I personally feel that the role of any leader anywhere, anytime should always be to try to create some kind of unity with the people he’s hoping to lead.”

Evan Matthew Fuchs contributed audio for this story.

Two years ago, after living in the United States for more than two decades, Madai Zamora headed to the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, and boarded a one-way  flight to Mexico.

She’d been in the US since she was three years old when she crossed a checkpoint with her family at the California-Mexico border using another child’s US passport. She grew up undocumented. By the time she left the US at 26, Zamora had spent several years enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. It offered her — and some 800,000 other DACA holders — a work permit and reprieve from deportation for two years at a time. 

But she’d felt deep unease since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, especially when one of her siblings faced deportation. Zamora decided to leave the only home she’d known. Her sister and mom drove her to the airport.

“My mom hugged me and said, ‘I'm not crying. You're not leaving. I'm going to pretend that you're going on vacation, and you'll be back one day’.”

“My mom hugged me and said, ‘I'm not crying. You're not leaving. I'm going to pretend that you're going on vacation, and you'll be back one day’,” Zamora said. “We all grew up like this. Just hold it in, we’re not going to cry.”

Today Zamora lives with her husband in San Luis Potosí in central Mexico, a medium-sized city that doesn’t feel too big or small. By leaving the US, she joined a small but growing global community of people who once had DACA and gave up on a country that has struggled to pass comprehensive immigration reform for a generation. 

Madai Zamora, a former DACA recipient who moved to Mexico, graduated from Johnson C. Smith University, in Charlotte, North Carolina, earning a BA in English and Spanish in 2017. 

Credit:

Courtesy of Madai Zamora

Their decisions are agonizing. Despite having greater legal protections than other undocumented immigrants, many DACA holders hit limits in their personal and professional lives in the US. DACA does not offer a path to legal permanent residency or citizenship. Some recipients figure they may find greater opportunities and more stability elsewhere. But leaving the US often means leaving behind family and hometowns.

Former President Barack Obama launched DACA by executive order in 2012 for qualified young undocumented immigrants who had entered the country as minors. In September 2017, the Trump administration announced it would rescind the DACA program, triggering a years-long legal fight. On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to cancel DACA. For many DACA recipients and their families, the court’s decision was a relief. 

Related: SCOTUS ruled in favor of DACA. A permanent solution is still needed, advocates say.

Fear of the United States’ hardline immigration climate ultimately drove Zamora to leave. She recalled meeting with an immigration agent about her sibling’s case. The conversation terrified her. 

“Throughout our whole interaction, he basically told me, like, where I went to school, where I work, what car I drove, where I lived, like about everyone in my family,” she said. “The anxiety that I already had escalated. I didn't want to deal with that anymore.”

In Mexico, Zamora has found work teaching English, which she studied in the US.

It is a huge trade-off. By leaving the United States and seeking residency elsewhere in the world, DACA recipients may face a ban on returning to the country for up to 10 years — known as an “unlawful presence bar” — based on their years in the US without papers.  

“Leaving is not an easy decision,” Zamora said. For her, being away from her family has been especially rocky. 

“My first Thanksgiving, it was a mess,” Zamora said. She connected with her family by phone. “While I was on FaceTime, I held it in. I didn't cry. But as soon as I hung up, the tears came down.”

Other DACA recipients choose to leave the US because they hit a professional ceiling. 

Nancy, a former DACA holder, was born in Togo and arrived in the US with her family on tourist visas when she was nine. When those visas expired, the threat of deportation her family faced was constant. 

“Every three months or so, we'd report to immigration to let them know where we were at. At some point, I would literally get sick from having to go to immigration. I was scared. I would have nightmares.”

“Every three months or so, we'd report to immigration to let them know where we were at,” she said. “At some point, I would literally get sick from having to go to immigration. I was scared. I would have nightmares.”

By her early 20s, Nancy qualified for DACA. She worried less about deportation. But her parents still face that threat every day, which is why she asked The World to withhold her last name. 

Related:  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: A timeline

For years, she studied and earned a doctorate in education with a focus on health sciences education. With DACA, Nancy could also start her own consulting firm offering global data analysis. 

But she began hitting barriers as her business grew. The United Nations became a steady client, which brought opportunities to travel internationally. Yet traveling abroad with DACA, including for professional purposes, requires seeking permission from US immigration officials. The ability to return to the country is not guaranteed. 

In 2018, Nancy left the United States for Ontario, Canada, where she was granted legal residency and is on a path to citizenship. 

Now 30, she is also traveling. She has a world map hanging on her wall, the kind that features gold foil that is scratched off to signify countries visited. Since leaving the United States, Nancy has scratched off France, Belgium, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria — travel that would have been extremely complicated with DACA.

“There's a ceiling with DACA. Yes, you can work, but there is a ceiling. And that ceiling I wanted to shatter.” 

“There's a ceiling with DACA,” she said. “Yes, you can work, but there is a ceiling. And that ceiling I wanted to shatter.” 

“I'm not spending my life waiting on the possibility of immigration reform when there are other countries that would willingly give me residency,” Nancy said. “I think that's what helped me get on that plane and leave everything behind.”

In the meantime, Zamora has connected with tight-knit groups in Mexico, including Otros Dreamers en Accion (ODA), a nonprofit that assists people born in Mexico who have returned to the country by choice or through deportation. 

“I didn’t know anyone when I returned to Mexico,” said ODA co-founder Maggie Laredo, who lives in Mexico City. Part of ODA’s mission is to help returnees push through government bureaucracy, such as locating or re-validating a birth certificate, in order to document themselves in Mexico.  

Zamora is also documenting her life on a YouTube channel called “Diary of a Native Foreigner.” In one video, she shows how she sometimes has to hike up several flights of stairs to her building's rooftop to turn the water on for her apartment. 

She also interviews people like her who grew up in the US and returned to Mexico. In another video, she speaks with Yovany Díaz, who migrated to the United States with his family when he was a child, crossing the Rio Grande into Texas. He grew up in Georgia and eventually qualified for DACA. Díaz, 28, worked as a manager at a McDonald’s in the US and planned to go to a state university. 

However, Díaz said that he could not afford to study as Georgia blocks in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. In 2015, Díaz returned to study in Mexico. In the video, he tells Zamora he misses his friends and wants to attend his 10-year high school reunion later this year, but is doubtful he will receive a US visa in time. When Zamora asks him if he ever sees himself returning to live in the US again, he says no. 

“I would like to live peacefully here,” he says.  

It’s unclear how many people with DACA have left the US. But Zamora said it is crucial to keep track of one another, especially during the rough times. 

“There will be a period where you question everything, where you're depressed, where you're gonna want to go back,” she said. “So having this support system is super, super important.”

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that immigrants denied asylum under streamlined proceedings cannot contest those decisions in court.

The case involved a Sri Lankan farmer named Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, a member of the Tamil ethnic minority, who said he feared persecution. The justices ruled in favor of the Trump administration in its appeal of a lower court ruling that Thuraissigiam had a right to have a judge review the government's handling of his asylum bid.

The ruling, written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, found that limiting judicial scrutiny in this rapid deportation case, known as expedited removal, did not violate key safeguards of individual liberty in the US Constitution. It is likely to impact thousands of potential asylum-seekers, who already face long odds in gaining asylum. 

Related: Trump proposes harsh asylum rules disqualifying many applicants

Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, spoke with The World's host Marco Werman about the implications of the ruling.

Related: US and Mexico are blocking kids from asking for asylum because of coronavirus

This interview has been condensed and edited. Reuters contributed reporting.

Pavithra Rajesh, a Northeastern University sophomore from India, frantically packed her bags and boarded a plane home when the college abruptly shut down in March.

“I’m a very careful planner. ... So, telling me that within three days you have to figure out where you’re going to go, move things into storage, figure out how you’re going to do online classes from a country whose time zone is so different from the one I’m in right now — it was pretty nerve-wracking.”

“I’m a very careful planner,” Rajesh, 18, said. “So, telling me that within three days you have to figure out where you’re going to go, move things into storage, figure out how you’re going to do online classes from a country whose time zone is so different from the one I’m in right now — it was pretty nerve-wracking.”

Related: International students are in coronavirus limbo. So are universities.

Back home, Rajesh quarantined herself in her parents’ apartment in the southern city of Bangalore for 14 days. The journalism major and theater minor took her last three weeks of spring courses online. India is 9.5 hours ahead of eastern daylight saving time. 

“Every night I was up till almost 3 a.m., 4 a.m.,” she said.

Looking ahead to the fall, Rajesh and her parents worry about her returning to campus in just two months.

“I’d be transiting through three very crowded airports,” she said. “The US right now has quite a lot of cases. It’s pretty vulnerable.”

So are the finances for universities like Northeastern, where more than a third of all students come from abroad — many from India and China — with most paying full freight. Hundreds of thousands of international college students sent home this spring are still stuck there because of travel and visa restrictions. Major colleges in the Boston area, which were already losing enrollment because of the anti-immigrant political environment, are bracing for losing still more students this fall.

The Trump administration had already been tightening travel and visa restrictions on foreign students and workers. Now, both the federal government and the pandemic are preventing international students who aren’t already in the US from returning in time for the fall semester. That’s all leading to a lot of confusion and anxiety for students.

“The pandemic, as well as the political difficulties between China and the United States, has ushered in a period of enormous uncertainty."

“The pandemic, as well as the political difficulties between China and the United States, has ushered in a period of enormous uncertainty,” said Bill Kirby, a history professor who teaches Chinese studies at Harvard University. 

Kirby points to a recent study by the Institute of International Education that finds nearly 90% of colleges expect international enrollment to decrease next semester.

“And some 70% anticipate that some international students won’t be able to get to their campuses for in-person classes this fall,” said Kirby, adding that the virus and uncertainty on campuses are damaging the country’s global relationship with China, India and other countries.

“Parents always worry about the health of their children,” Kirby said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least some pause, even if the world were to open up immediately, about sending students to a place where the public health systems are clearly not as robust as they are in Europe or Japan or Korea.”

If international students take their studies and dollars elsewhere, that would have devastating effects on Boston’s economy.

“We are — particularly in higher education — in a highly globalized and interdependent world. This is the most serious thing that's ever happened [to American higher education] without any question whatsoever."

“We are — particularly in higher education — in a highly globalized and interdependent world. This is the most serious thing that's ever happened [to American higher education] without any question whatsoever,” said Phillip Altbach, founder of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

“International students spend a lot of money in this area, not only the direct tuition cost for universities but also housing and other expenses that they have around town,” said Altbach.

International students contribute about $4 billion to the state’s economy each year, nearly a tenth of the more than $40 billion they spend in the entire US economy, according to the Association of International Educators. Colleges that are overly dependent on international dollars are going to take a big hit, said Altbach.

“In the Boston area, that includes, of course, Boston University and Northeastern particularly, but also smaller schools like the Berklee College of Music, Emerson [College] to some extent,” he added.

Students and researchers from other countries bring significant brainpower to their work in the US, Altbach said.

"If you look at Silicon Valley or the biotech industry here in Massachusetts, international students, scholars and high-skilled immigrants are a key part of the labor force for these industries, so it's a huge hit and a terrible mistake for the country," he said.

It remains unclear how many international students will want — or be able — to return this fall.

Related: What the US can learn from other nations with free college tuition

This month, Northeastern announced its Boston campus and dorms will reopen in the fall and students will have the option to take classes in-person, online, or a mixture of both. This summer, the university is surveying thousands of international students about their plans for the fall and developing online platforms for any students who see a delay in returning to Boston.

Sitting in her room in Bangalore, Rajesh says she’s eager to get back in the classroom.

“I don't think anyone can say that online classes will ever match up to the worth of an in-person class,” she said. “For me, doing three weeks of online classes from India was hard for sure. I don't think I could do that same thing for three months.”

Still, she’s skeptical about whether students packed into dorms would be willing to follow social distancing guidelines and wear masks.

“There's so many people, so little residence halls on campus,” she said. “I don’t really know how that is going to play out.”

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

For the last few months, Michelle Aguilar Ramirez’s life has been consumed by the stress of the coronavirus pandemic and classes on Zoom — and more recently, the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle and around the country. 

“Ever since the movement, ever since the death of George Floyd, it has been like a constant stir in my household,” she said. 

Aguilar Ramirez is a first-generation Guatemalan American living in Seattle. She’ll turn 18 in September and plans to vote for the first time in the November presidential election. Like many people, Aguilar Ramirez is grappling with what she’s experiencing — not just the images of police brutality in the media, but how to implement meaningful change. 

“I have a couple of friends who believe that the protests are useless because there's always going to be inequality and injustice in America,” she said. “I also have other friends who stand with me with the same belief that there needs to be a change made now, and we need to demand it in any sort of way.” 

Before the Washington state primary in March, Aguilar Ramirez supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee. When he dropped out of the race, she was lukewarm about former Vice President Joe Biden. And as the pandemic hit this spring, Aguilar Ramirez lost the bandwidth to stay connected to politics. 

But the BLM protests have reignited her commitment. 

Related: Pandemic stress overshadows US election for this young Latina voter

Aguilar Ramirez will be one of the 400,000 eligible Latino voters in the state to cast a vote in November. And while Washington does not wield the Latino voting power of places like Florida or California, it’s among the top 15 states in the US when it comes to eligible Latino voters. 

“I'm going to vote for Joe Biden. There's a couple of things that are iffy here and there, but you know, I prefer him than something else,” she said, not naming US President Donald Trump.

So far, Aguilar Ramirez has been watching the national conversation on race and politics play out online from home. That’s because earlier this year, she tested positive for COVID-19. Some of her family members have recently started showing symptoms, too — so out of precaution, she hasn’t joined the protests in person. 

On her Snapchat and Instagram, she’s seen a mix of virtue signaling, education and organizing, and overall support for the Black Lives Matter movement. 

While most of her network seems tuned in to what’s happening, Aguilar Ramirez said, it’s frustrating to see some of her peers appropriate black culture but then not speak out when it comes to systemic issues like racism. For her, it’s not an option. 

“I have faced my own share of racism, so the minimum that I can do is go protest, the minimum that I can do is sign petitions, donate money, vote, text, call, email. I believe that my place in the movement is to become an advocate for my black brothers and sisters.”

“I have faced my own share of racism, so the minimum that I can do is go protest, the minimum that I can do is sign petitions, donate money, vote, text, call, email," she said. "I believe that my place in the movement is to become an advocate for my black brothers and sisters.”

This passion ripples out into her home where she’s engaging with her mom and aunt in difficult conversations around racism in the Latino community and how to be an ally to the Black Lives Matter movement. 

And it hasn’t been easy. 

“I don't like having these kinds of conversations with my family members, simply because I know there's deep-rooted racism that has been brought up in us, even like the generation before me and the generation before that.” 

Related: Every 30 seconds, a young Latino in the US turns 18. Their votes count more than ever. 

Aguilar Ramirez thinks part of the struggle is the divide in the kinds of media her family consumes. In her opinion, Spanish-language stations, such as Univision and Telemundo, aren’t telling the whole story.

She’s not the only one who's taken notice. A petition with over 11,000 signatures is calling on Univision to include a more historical context on racial divides in the US. It’s also calling on Latino media outlets to book more Afro Latino guests and host a town hall on police violence and social movements.

“Both of these platforms are showing only the bad parts of the protests, the looting, the riots, the protests that have gone wrong. And they are not presenting the bigger picture,” Aguilar Ramirez said. 

She said she'll push through these difficult conversations and take a stance at the ballot box. The young voter recognizes that democratic change isn’t limited to the presidential election, but also includes races for county sheriffs, state attorney general, and other state and local offices. 

“The whole movement, overall, has impacted me on how exactly my vote amplifies the voices of others,” she said. “I can't stay mute, just because I don't like certain candidates. I’d rather have something that fits most of the things that I believe in instead of having nothing and staying voiceless.”

This story first aired on KERA Texas. Read and listen to the original here. 

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Hotel Flamingo in Ciudad Juárez has been filling up with guests.

When they arrive, they have to go through a thorough disinfection process. First, they step inside a tray filled with diluted bleach to clean off the soles of their shoes. Then it's on to a handwashing station, where they're instructed to scrub with a generous amount of soap and follow up with a big squirt of hand sanitizer.

Finally, they receive a fresh face mask, and the hotel coordinator sprays their shoes with an alcohol mixture.

These guests aren't tourists on vacation. They're people who tried to cross into the US but, for a variety of reasons, have been sent back to this border city and need a safe place to stay.

Doctor Dayaites Rios is pictured through the window in the attending physician's room while Doctor Leticia Chavarria stands below on May 30, 2020 at Hotel Filtro in Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

Credit:

Paul Ratje/KERA News

'We're taking migrants off the street'

Migrant shelters, which are trying to control the spread of COVID-19, can't immediately take them in. So Hotel Flamingo has been temporarily converted into a "filter hotel" — a space where they can quarantine for 14 days before transferring to a longer-term shelter.

"We're taking migrants off the street and away from the risk of potential infection," said Leticia Chavarria, the hotel's medical coordinator. "We have them here for two weeks, and if during that time they don't present any symptoms, then another shelter can receive them."

Once guests have washed up, hotel coordinator Rosa Mani guides them to a waiting room with well-spaced out chairs and explains how things work. Every guest will go through a preliminary health screening, then receive a private room.

"We're taking migrants off the street and away from the risk of potential infection. We have them here for two weeks, and if during that time they don't present any symptoms, then another shelter can receive them."

"One of the first questions is if someone feels ill, if someone has a headache, a fever, or any symptom related to COVID," said Mani, who is with the World Organization for Peace. "If someone says yes, then immediately they're the first person we care for."

There's an isolation wing for people with COVID symptoms or who have come into contact with someone who's infected, and another wing for everyone else.

Protocols are strict. Once a doctor goes up to the isolation area, she can't come down until her shift is over. Anything she needs gets sent up in a bucket on the end of a rope, which Chavarria jokingly refers to as an elevator.

Rosa Mani, coordinator of Hotel Filtro, speaks to Portugese interpreter Flor Cedrella who was donning personal protective equipment and had just spoken to a Brazilian migrant in quarantine on May 30, 2020 at Hotel Filtro in Ciudad Juárez.

Credit:

Paul Ratje/KERA News

Many groups came together to rent out the hotel, stock up on cleaning and medical supplies and transform it into a quarantine center, including the International Organization for Migration, the World Organization for Peace, Seguimos Adelante and several government entities.

Related: Trump proposes harsh asylum rules disqualifying many applicants

It can accommodate up to 108 people and is currently about three-quarters full. Recently, several medically vulnerable migrants and their families were transferred there from the government-run Leona Vicario shelter, where there has been a cluster of COVID-19 cases. Seven of them have since tested positive for the virus. According to Mani, they are currently in isolation and are not experiencing health complications.

Some hotel guests have been forced to wait in Mexico as their asylum cases play out in US immigration court, as part of the Trump administration's Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). They've been living in Juárez for months or longer — renting out rooms or apartments — and suddenly found themselves in need of new housing during the pandemic, unable to afford rent now that work has dried up. Some have also lost financial support from relatives in the US, who are also hurting due to the coronavirus and can no longer send money.

Others have been rapidly expelled from the border, under a public health directive issued as concern about COVID-19 grew.

Michael Margolis, an American volunteer with NGO Seguimos Adelante disinfects buckets used by migrants for washing clothes on May 30, 2020 at Hotel Filtro in Ciudad Juárez. Hotel Filtro was set up by non profits as a place for migrants, many of which have been rapidly expelled from the US due to the pandemic, to quarantine at before being placed in a shelter.

Credit:

Paul Ratje/KERA News

A temporary safe haven

That includes a Honduran mother who arrived at the hotel with her two children: an 11-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. She asked that her name not be used, out of fear for her family's safety.

On a sunny afternoon in late May, she stood outside her room, taking in some fresh air while her son played behind her, stacking blocks into small towers.

Through a face mask, she recalled a journey that started last winter when, she said, a local gang tried to extort her.

"I sold candy," she said. "What I earned was only enough to cover my family's expenses."

When she couldn't pay, "they didn't give me any option except to leave my country. They told me I had less than twelve hours to leave my country or they would kill me, along with my children."

So she fled. She could not have predicted that a global pandemic would dramatically alter her plans. But by the time she reached the US-Mexico border, coronavirus had reshaped daily life and public policy in both countries.

In late March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an emergency public health order that the Trump administration has used to expel unauthorized migrants at the border in a matter of hours, including asylum seekers. Officials take down basic identifying information in the field and then almost immediately send people back into Mexico or their home countries.

A Cuban volunteer doctor tends to migrants under observation on the second floor of Hotel Filtro in Ciudad Juárez on May 30, 2020.

Credit:

Paul Ratje/KERA News

Administration officials say this order helps prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the US, though dozens of public health experts have pushed back against the statement, arguing in a May letter to the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services that "there is no public health rationale for denying admission to individuals based on legal status."

After crossing the border, the Honduran mother claimed authorities detained her so roughly she was left with bruises and ripped clothes.

"They grabbed me worse than you would an animal," she said.

Related: US and Mexico are blocking kids from asking for asylum because of coronavirus

She said they took her photograph and fingerprints, then dropped her at an international bridge without any explanation.

"They didn't tell me anything," she said. "They just did that, without giving me any reason. It was really ugly."

She wasn't sure where to go. As a diabetic, she knew she was at an elevated risk for complications from the coronavirus and worried about what might happen to her children. But the Mexican governmental agency Grupo Beta brought her to the filter hotel.

She's grateful to them.

"If I were on the street, I don't know what I'd be doing," she said.

A place to wait and hope

It's difficult to think past the next two weeks. Going back to Honduras isn't an option, the woman said. But for 14 days, her family has a safe place to stay.

A few small touches make the space feel more homey. Her children painted flower pots during an outdoor art class, led from a distance by a volunteer teacher. She's placed them on the windowsill.

"I'm not lacking for anything here," she said. "They're giving me medical care, food, a place to sleep."

That medical care includes two daily checkups.

Doctor Yuneisy Gonzales, 37, from Cuba, is pictured at work on May 30, 2020 at Hotel Filtro in Ciudad Juárez. She volunteers as a doctor at Hotel Filtro, which was set up by nonprofits as a place of quarantine for migrants that have been rapidly expelled from the US due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Credit:

Paul Ratje/KERA News

"We go room to room," said Yuneisy Gonzales, one of six doctors who work at the hotel. They're volunteers, though they receive a small, mostly symbolic stipend. "We can't enter the rooms because we try to maintain all the safety measures. We check temperature, oxygen saturation levels, heart rate. We do a short physical exam."

Gonzales identifies with the guests here, because she is a migrant as well. She left Cuba last year, was placed in MPP, and has been living in Juárez while she pursues her asylum case. Before the filter hotel opened, she worked at a fast food restaurant — a far cry from her previous life as a general practitioner.

"It had been more than a year since I'd practiced medicine. You miss your profession. Because medicine is a profession that you study but also that you feel, and you like helping people."

"It had been more than a year since I'd practiced medicine," she said. "You miss your profession. Because medicine is a profession that you study but also that you feel, and you like helping people."

When Gonzales heard the hotel was seeking doctors, she was eager to sign up. It may not seem like much, she said, but monitoring people for 14 days means when they go back into the community, they won't be spreading coronavirus.

"For me, it's a huge honor to get up every day at six in the morning, get ready, come here, and put on my white coat," she said. "There's no comparison."

Related: Mexico: The ‘waiting room’ for thousands of migrants trying to get into the US

Gonzales' next asylum hearing is scheduled for July, though it's not clear if immigration court will be open by then.

"Sometimes you lose hope because it's been very hard," she said. "But I haven't considered giving up my case."

For now, this hotel has given her a sense of purpose — and so many others a place to shelter — while they wait.

In a major blow to the Trump administration, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program can continue.

The program was created by former President Barack Obama in 2012, and it prevents immigrants who came to the US as children, often without authorization, from being deported and gives them work permits. In 2017, the Trump administration rescinded DACA, arguing it was unlawful.

Thursday’s much-anticipated ruling ended a yearslong legal battle around how the Trump administration ended the program. It provides some relief to the approximately 650,000 DACA recipients in the country.

The president voiced his displeasure in a tweet, saying the ruling was “horrible and politically charged.”

But supporters of the program are celebrating, including Juan Escalante, a digital campaign manager, with FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration policy group. Escalante is also a DACA recipient.

“I'm supremely elated and excited,” said Escalante. “The courts have sided with DACA recipients and with Dreamers and handed a defeat to the Trump administration by telling them that their acts and their actions to try to eliminate the program back in 2017 were in fact, illegal.”

The 5-4 decision called the Trump administration's move in 2017 "arbitrary and capricious."  

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the Trump administration did not provide enough justification for ending the program. But, the court leaves open other ways for the Trump administration to end the program, as long as it provides adequate reasoning for it.

Meanwhile, in a dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the ruling makes way for political battles to be fought within the court rather than the executive and legislative branches.

Escalante spoke with The World’s Marco Werman about his reaction to the ruling and why there’s still a long road ahead in the fight for more permanent protections for DACA recipients.

Related:  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: A timeline

Related: Trump ended DACA. This woman is suing to keep the program alive.

Related: DACA health workers risk their lives to fight COVID-19 while they await SCOTUS ruling

This interview has been condensed and edited.

On Thursday, the Trump administration issued a proposal that would dramatically reshape the asylum system in the United States.

The proposal includes a number of changes that would make it more difficult for applicants to gain asylum in the US — including changing which applicants would get asylum hearings in the first place. 

Applications based on people fleeing gangs, terrorists, “rogue” government officials or “non-state organizations” would no longer be recognized, meaning that those fleeing persecution from organizations like ISIS would not qualify for protection.

Last July, the Trump administration established another set of rules — requiring migrants fleeing their homelands to apply for asylum in one of the first countries they pass through. 

Related: Pandemic disrupts remittances, leaving immigrants' families without lifelines 

Currently, asylum claims have essentially been halted by border closures after Donald Trump declared a public health emergency because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Luis Cortes-Romero is an immigration lawyer in Seattle. He spoke with The World's host Marco Werman about the potential impact of the proposal. 

Related: Greece's new asylum law 'poses continuous traps' for refugees 

Related: Migrants struck in Panama rainforest amid coronavirus

Related: How the US immigration system nearly tore this LGBTQ couple apart  

Related: Trump ended DACA. This woman is suing to stop him.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

This story is part of "Every 30 Seconds," a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

Leticia Arcila didn’t want to take any chances when it came to casting her vote in the Georgia state primary Tuesday, June 9. 

This year, state officials pushed back the primary twice due to the coronavirus pandemic. Then they sent absentee ballot request forms to all of the state’s nearly 7 million registered voters — an unprecedented step to “prioritize the health and safety of Georgians,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. 

But Arcila, a 20-year-old first-generation Mexican American living in Atlanta, insisted on voting in person Tuesday. This year is her first time voting in a presidential election cycle. 

Related: For this young Latina voter, pandemic highlights need for 'Medicare for All'

Arcila said she looked forward to casting her vote, but it’s bittersweet: she had planned to vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who dropped out of the race in April. To make matters worse, Georgia voters faced chaos at many polling locations Tuesday amid reports of broken voting machines, lack of provisional ballots and hours-long lines.

Georgia’s primary was originally scheduled for March 24. State officials pushed it back to May 19, due to fears about COVID-19. Finally, they pushed it back even further to June 9. In the meantime, Sanders left the race. 

“I literally needed, like, three days just in my room after I saw that Bernie dropped out. I just didn't want to see Twitter. I didn’t want to see CNN. I didn’t want to do anything.”

“I literally needed like three days just in my room after I saw that Bernie dropped out,” Arcila said. “I just didn't want to see Twitter. I didn’t want to see CNN. I didn’t want to do anything.”

Eventually, she recovered. If she wanted to, she could still vote for Sanders. His name is still on primary ballots in some states, including Georgia. If Sanders earns 25% of the Democratic Party’s delegates, he can secure representation on committees at the party’s convention — allowing him to heavily influence the Democratic platform on issues like health care and college tuition. 

Despite her admiration for Sanders, Leticia has resigned herself to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“If you know that the country is going to go a certain way, it makes sense to do everything possible to try and get Trump out,” she said. “[That’s] basically what I'm trying to go for.”

Although Leticia is determined to vote, that might not be the case for every Latino in Georgia. 

“I think Joe Biden still has a lot of work to do in the Latino community and reaching out to the Latino community.”

“The polling indicates that the Bernie supporters among the Latino community were upset about the [primary] outcome, but they're not necessarily not going to participate in the election,” said Jerry Gonzalez, the executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, or GALEO. “I think Joe Biden still has a lot of work to do in the Latino community and reaching out to the Latino community.”

Related: Can Biden turn out Latinos to vote? Advocacy groups aren't sure

GALEO is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group focused on engaging Latinos in Georgia in the voting process. Gonzalez says as a group, young Latinos haven’t coalesced around Biden’s candidacy yet.

“I've seen the staff changes that are happening and additions that are happening on the [Biden] campaign,” Gonzalez said. “So, I certainly think that there's going to be a significant amount of outreach associated with that.”

There are signs the Biden campaign is finally investing in targeting Latino voters. It recently hired Julie Chávez Rodriguez as a senior adviser working on Latino outreach. Chávez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of civil rights leader César Chávez, has previously worked for Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California and served as deputy director of political engagement for the Obama administration.

Investing in Latino voters in Georgia could pay off big for any campaign. According to Gonzalez, when GALEO began in 2003, there were about 10,000 Latinos registered to vote in Georgia. Now, there are almost 240,000. Gonzalez points out that some recent elections in Georgia have been won by thin margins. For example, President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by 211,141 votes.

“If we show up to vote, the Latino community can determine a competitive statewide race.”

“If we show up to vote, the Latino community can determine a competitive statewide race,” Gonzales said.

Getting people to vote during the pandemic, though, could be a challenge. Gonzalez says because Latinos haven’t traditionally voted via absentee ballots, GALEO will spend time explaining that process. 

“The particular instructions are confusing and there's a lot of ways in which your vote can be disqualified if you don't follow all the particular steps associated with that process, so there's going to be a lot of education around that,” he said.

Arcila doesn’t need to be convinced that voting is important. She just wishes she had a candidate who promises the things Sanders did, including universal access to healthcare. 

Arcila was laid off shortly after the pandemic spread in Georgia and doesn’t have health insurance. But even though she thinks Biden lacks bold ideas, she’s committed to voting for him.  

“The country is going to vote one way or another, and so I guess we might as well just go for the thing that's going to help us in the end and if that's Biden, then it's Biden,” she said.

Still, Arcila says Georgia’s delayed primary makes her feel like she missed out on shaping who the Democratic candidate would be.

“It's hard to kind of accept because you kind of feel like it's your future,” she said. “And you want to conquer it and make something amazing out of it. It kind of feels almost, like, taken away from you."

Malika Dahir, a Somali American and mother of three in Minneapolis desperately needed an outlet to talk about George Floyd’s killing and everything that has happened since.

Floyd is a black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. His death has sparked protests and riots in the Twin Cities and around the world.

Related: 'No one is above the law,' St. Paul BLM organizer says

Dahir talked after her kids had gone to sleep, and as her husband headed out the door to spend the night guarding their mosque.

While younger Somalis got involved in Black Lives Matter long ago, Dahir said even the older generations of the Somali community now believe African Americans are being treated unjustly.

“With this incident, there’s no question about it,” Dahir said.

As Somali Americans come to these realizations, Dahir says, they need a place to talk about it. So, this past weekend she organized a dua — a prayer gathering — to create a space for all women who identify as black, but centering African American women’s voices.

“I felt like, wait a minute, I can't be the only one. I can't be the only one who needs that outlet to vent, to scream and or maybe cry.”

Malika Dahir, a Somali American in Minneapolis, is aggrieved over the killing of George Floyd. She is shown with two of her children in front of a mural memorializing Floyd near where he died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Credit:

Courtesy of Malika Dahir

No one was allowed to record, so the women could speak freely. And for three hours, they shared the moments they had tried to forget — when they experienced racism but tried to move past it because they thought there was nothing they could do.

Related: The power of protest: Part I

One woman remembered a man in a car throwing a drink at her mother and yelling a racial slur. Others had filed reports about abusive police behavior and never heard back. Many expressed gratitude for a place where they could speak their truth, safely.

“It was just, you know, just powerful and I slept that night for the first time since all of this started. I actually slept.”

Dahir feels more support and cohesion across Muslim communities than ever before, and she believes African Americans are also feeling this support. And that’s the whole point, Dahir said. 

She can’t imagine how African Americans have borne the racism she’s experienced for whole generations. She said at least now, Somalis can show African Americans that they’re no longer alone.

To listen to the full story, click the audio player above. Editor's Note 6/4/2020: This story has been updated with more information on how Somali Americans got involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

College seniors are feeling especially wistful this May. For many, walking across the graduation stage would have represented the culmination of a lengthy struggle. But the coronavirus pandemic has canceled most ceremonies. 

Florida International University graduate Juliette Herrera, a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was feeling especially blue after the coronavirus pandemic erased her plans for a celebration.

”When the graduation was canceled, that was really devastating. I definitely cried about it a lot,” Herrera says. “I really didn't want much. I just kind of wanted my family to be there. My mom, my dad, my brother and sister and whoever else I could manage to scrape tickets for.”

Herrera, 28, was born in Venezuela, and came to the US when she was four years old. When she discovered she lacked legal documentation, she knew getting a college degree wouldn’t be easy. But she was able to realize her dream with the help of DACA, the Obama-era program that protects undocumented immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the US as children. DACA status meant she could collect a scholarship and string together part-time jobs to help complete her degree. (The US Supreme Court is expected to rule any day now on whether the Trump administration may end the program.) 

Still, Herrera spent nearly a decade reaching the milestone. She looked forward to proudly walking across a graduation stage this month. But she kept her disappointment in perspective. 

“Half of me was like, ‘You know, this stinks. Like, this is horrific.’ And the other half of me is like, ‘You know what? Check yourself. You have health. You have a job still.'”

“Half of me was like, ‘You know, this stinks. Like, this is horrific'," she says. "And the other half of me is like, ‘You know what? Check yourself. You have health. You have a job still.'”

Related: DACA health workers risk their lives to fight COVID-19 as they await Supreme Court ruling

Herrera’s family and friends saw how crushed she was, so they found another way to celebrate her achievement. On a recent Sunday morning, she says she was home making breakfast when her father asked her to step outside. She thought she was collecting an Amazon delivery. 

“I opened the door, I peeked out and I saw one of my best friends waving, like, a huge Venezuelan flag. I started to hear all of the honking,” she says. “I had to put on shoes. I even forgot my face mask, which, in retrospect, I hate that I did that. But I then went downstairs and then I looked to my left and it was literally a caravan of cars.” 

Dozens of Herrera’s friends and family had organized a parade in her honor. They filed past her apartment, some on foot and some in vehicles. Many brought signs and Mardi Gras beads.