HOMESTEAD: The day before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a dozen immigrant families came to Nora Sandigo’s ranch to ask her to be a legal guardian of their children. Now they are insisting she come over to their homes to sign the necessary paperwork.
It’s a result of the many ways immigrants who are in the US illegally have changed their travel patterns as many try to stay home as much as possible and avoid going to the homes and offices of advocates such as Sandigo. Many fear they could be caught up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation after Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations and has terminated programs that had given immigrants a legal way into the US
In the past few weeks, Sandigo has received hundreds of calls from immigrant parents across the US She said she has been in at least 15 houses where parents have filled out paperwork so Sandigo could sign documents on behalf of their children at schools, hospitals and courts if they are deported. The power of attorney also allows her to help the children travel to reunite with their families.
“Now people are telling us that they are afraid to go out on the street, that they are afraid to drive, that they are afraid that they will stop them on the street,” said Sandigo, a 59-year-old mother of two daughters who lives in Homestead, a city of about 80,000 people south of Miami. “They have asked me to go to where they are instead of them coming to me.”
Immigration arrests under Trump
The White House has said over 8,000 immigrants who were in the country illegally have been arrested since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. ICE averaged 787 arrests a day from Jan. 23 to Jan. 31, compared with a daily average of 311 during a 12-month period that ended Sept. 30 during the Biden administration. ICE has stopped publishing daily arrest totals.
In Homestead, where many immigrants from Mexico and Central America live and work in nurseries and fruit and vegetable fields, some avoid the supermarkets and instead ask neighbors to do their grocery shopping. In front of stores like Home Depot, men no longer stand around looking for work. Others have even stopped going to Sacred Heart Church on Sundays.
“People have stopped coming, and when they come, they ask if the immigration officials came here,” said Elisaul Velazco, the owner of a clothing store downtown. “Everything is paralyzed. Sales have dropped by 60 percent.”
Parents fear their children will be taken from them
For years, Sandigo has prepared immigrant parents for the worst-case scenario: being separated from their children.
Now she goes to those parents instead of having them come to her.
One recent Sunday, she visited four houses and received documents involving over 20 children. In some cases, the children were born in the US and are citizens. The documents do not provide her full legal guardianship or transfer parental rights, but simply allow Sandigo to make decisions on their behalf.
Most parents fear if they do not name a legal guardian, their children will enter the foster care system, they will lose their parental rights and someone else will adopt their children.
Visiting immigrant parents’ homes
Julia, a 36-year-old Guatemalan woman who insisted she be identified only by her first name out of fear of deportation, waited a few minutes before opening the door for Sandigo as a group of people ran out the back door.
“It’s me, Nora, the lady you phoned to come,” Sandigo told her.
Julia opened the door a crack, saw Sandigo and then came out. Julia explained her husband had been detained days earlier while in a van with other immigrants on their way to a construction job.
After a brief conversation, Julia invited Sandigo, a notary and a volunteer into her small house.
Julia recalled that eight years ago her first husband, also Guatemalan, was deported, leaving her behind with their two American children, now 18 and 11 years old.
“We are afraid. I feel very sad with life because of what I am going through,” said Julia, her voice breaking and her eyes getting watery.
The notary asked Julia to show her daughter’s birth certificate and explained the son is an adult and doesn’t need a guardian.
“I don’t want my children to be taken away from me. If something happens to me, I want them with me,” she said before signing the power of attorney naming Sandigo as the legal guardian of the youngest.
In the backyard of another home, Albertina, a 36-year-old Mexican mother, held her 2-month-old baby while explaining what she wants for her six children if she is deported. Albertina also insisted only her first name be used.
“I am very afraid that they will grab me on the road and take me away. What’s going to happen to them?” she said of her children.
She asked Sandigo to take care of her two oldest daughters, 15 and 17, because they do not want to go to Mexico, while Sandigo should send the other four to her home country.
Sandigo has been a guardian for 2,000 children
Sandigo relates to the families she helps. A devout Catholic, she fled Nicaragua when she was 16, leaving behind her parents after the Sandinista government confiscated her family’s farm. She is now a US citizen.
About 15 years ago, she began offering to be a legal guardian to immigrant children. About 22 children of deported parents have lived in her house temporarily since then. More than 2,000 children have been under her guardianship, although some are now adults. Sandigo said she has assisted hundreds of those children.
“I feel empathy for them, solidarity, love for God. I want to do something,” she said.
Fearful immigrants ask Florida activist to sign guardianship papers for their children
https://arab.news/g8hp2
Fearful immigrants ask Florida activist to sign guardianship papers for their children
- Trump has terminated programs that had allowed immigrants a legal entrance to the US and has said all immigrants without authorization should leave
Prime Minister Carney says Trump’s trade war will lead to lower trade barriers within Canada
- Carney has set a goal of free trade within the country’s 10 provinces and three territories. Canada has long had interprovincial trade barriers
- Trump’s trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st state have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in Canadian nationalism
TORONTO: Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday eliminating trade barriers within Canada would benefit Canadians far more than US President Donald Trump can ever take away with his trade war as he made his case to retain power at the last debate ahead of the April 28 vote.
Carney has set a goal of free trade within the country’s 10 provinces and three territories by July 1. Canada has long had interprovincial trade barriers.
“We can give ourselves far more than Donald Trump can ever take away,” Carney said “We can have one economy. This is within our grasp.”
Carney said the relationship Canada has had with the US for the past 40 years has fundamentally changed because of Trump’s tariffs. If reelected Carney plans to immediately enter into trade walks with the Trump administration.
Trump’s trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st state have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in Canadian nationalism that has bolstered Liberal Party poll numbers.
Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is imploring Canadians not to give the Liberals a fourth term. He hoped to make the election a referendum on Justin Trudeau, whose popularity declined toward the end of his decade in power as food and housing prices rose and immigration surged.
But Trump attacked, Trudeau resigned and Carney, a two-time central banker, became Liberal party leader and prime minister last month after a party leadership race.
“It maybe difficult, Mr. Poilievre, you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they are both gone,” Carney said. “I am a very different person than Justin Trudeau.”
Public opinion has changed. In a mid-January poll by Nanos, Liberals trailed the Conservative Party by 47 percent to 20 percent. In the latest Nanos poll released Thursday, the Liberals led by 5 percentage points. The January poll had a margin of error 3.1 points while the latest poll had a 2.7-point margin.
“We can’t afford a fourth Liberal term of rising housing costs,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre accused Carney’s Liberals of being hostile toward Canada’s energy sector and pipelines. He accused the Liberals of weakening the economy and vowed that a Conservative government would repeal “anti-energy laws, red tape and high taxes.”
US Senator Van Hollen says he met wrongly deported man in El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR: Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met Thursday in El Salvador with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Abrego Garcia’s wife “to pass along his message of love.” The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US, saying he would have more details Friday.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.
A spokeswoman for El Salvador’s presidency said she had no further information.
The meeting came hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison Thursday while he was trying to check on Abrego Garcia’s well-being and push for his release.
The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, even as they let other cars go on.
“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.
US President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Abrego Garcia back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return. Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Abrego Garcia’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.
The Maryland senator told reporters Wednesday that he met with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr. Abrego Garcia by driving to the CECOT prison,” Van Hollen said Thursday.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and well-being,” Van Hollen said. He said Abrego Garcia should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.
“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.
While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held. He did not mention Abrego Garcia but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans.”
The fight over Abrego Garcia has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.
Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele extremely popular at home.
Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.” Officials there deny wrongdoing.
University protests blast Trump’s attacks on funding, speech and international students
- Berkeley rally part of planned nationwide protest supporting university independence
- “You cannot appease a tyrant,” emeritus professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich tells Berkeley rally
BERKELEY, California/CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Hundreds of students, faculty and community members on a California campus booed on Thursday as speakers accused the administration of President Donald Trump of undermining American universities, as he questioned whether Harvard and others deserve tax-exempt status.
The protest on the University of California’s Berkeley campus was among events dubbed “Rally for the Right to Learn!” planned across the country.
The administration has rebuked American universities over their handling of pro-Palestinian student protests that roiled campuses from Columbia in New York to Berkeley last year, following the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Trump has called the protests anti-American and antisemitic and accused universities of peddling Marxism and “radical left” ideology. On Thursday, he called Harvard, an institution he criticized repeatedly this week, “a disgrace,” and also criticized others.
Asked about reports the Internal Revenue Service was planning to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status, Trump told reporters at the White House he did not think a final ruling had been made, and indicated other schools were under scrutiny.
Trump had said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called “political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’“
“I’m not involved in it,” he said, saying the matter was being handled by lawyers. “I read about it just like you did, but tax-exempt status, I mean, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege, and it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard.”
“When you take a look whether it’s Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, I don’t know what’s going on, but when you see how badly they’ve acted and in other ways also. So we’ll, we’ll be looking at it very strongly.”
At Berkeley on Thursday, protesters raised signs proclaiming “Education is a public good!” and “Hands off our free speech!” Robert Reich, a public policy professor, compared the responses of Harvard and Columbia to demands from the administration that they take such steps as ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and putting academic departments under outside control.
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter on Monday, rejected such demands as unprecedented “assertions of power, unmoored from the law” that violated constitutional free speech and the Civil Rights Act.
Columbia had earlier agreed to negotiations after the Trump administration said last month it had terminated grants and contracts worth $400 million, mostly for medical and other scientific research. After reading the Harvard president’s letter, Columbia’s interim President Claire Shipman, said her university would continue “good faith discussions” with the administration, but “would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire.”
You cannot appease a tyrant,” said Reich, who served in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet. “Columbia University tried to appease a tyrant. It didn’t work.”
“After Harvard stood up to the tyrant, Columbia, who had been surrendering, stood up and said no.”
Columbia University in New York initially agreed to several demands from the Trump administration. But its acting president took a more defiant tone in a campus message Monday, saying some of the demands “are not subject to negotiation.”
About 150 protesters rallied at Columbia, which had been the scene of huge pro-Palestinian protests last year. They gathered on a plaza outside a building that houses federal offices, holding signs emblazoned with slogans including “stop the war on universities” and “censorship is the weapon of fascists.”
After Harvard’s Garber released his letter on Monday, the Trump administration said it was freezing $2.3 billion in funding to the university. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Wednesday the termination of two DHS grants totaling more than $2.7 million to Harvard and said the university would lose its ability to enroll foreign students if it does not meet demands to share information on some visa holders.
In response, a Harvard spokesperson said the university stood by its earlier statement to “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” while saying it will comply with the law.
CNN was first to report on Wednesday the IRS was making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status and that a final decision was expected soon.
Harvard said there was no legal basis to rescind it, saying such an action will be unprecedented, will diminish its financial aid for students and will lead to abandonment of some critical medical research programs.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to the President’s TRUTH.”
Under federal law the president cannot request that the IRS, which determines whether an organization can have or maintain tax-exempt status, investigate organizations.
Ronald Cox, a professor of political science and international relations at Florida International University in Miami, said during a small event Thursday that the international students are fearful.
“They don’t know if they could be deported, they don’t know if they can be directed to the El Salvadoran prison,” Cox said. “There’s been no due process. It’s kind of open season on the most vulnerable students.”
The protests were organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which includes groups such as Higher Education Labor United and the American Federation of Teachers.
Kelly Benjamin, a spokesperson for American Association of University Professors, said in a phone call that the Trump administration’s goal of eviscerating academia is fundamentally anti-American.
“College campuses have historically been the places where these kind of conversations, these kind of robust debates and dissent take place in the United States,” Benjamin said. “It’s healthy for democracy. And they’re trying to destroy all of that in order to enact their vision and agenda.”
Ukraine, US sign ‘memorandum of intent’ on resources deal: Kyiv
- US officials say boosting American business interests in Ukraine will help deter Russia from future aggression in the event of a ceasefire
KYIV: Ukraine and the United States on Thursday signed a “memorandum of intent” to move forward with a fraught deal for US access to Kyiv’s natural resources and critical minerals, Kyiv said.
“We are happy to announce the signing, with our American partners, of a Memorandum of Intent, which paves the way for an Economic Partnership Agreement and the establishment of the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on X.
Kyiv and Washington had planned to sign a deal on extracting Ukraine’s strategic minerals weeks ago, but a clash between presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in February temporarily derailed work on the agreement.
Trump wants the deal — designed to give the US royalty payments on profits from Ukrainian mining of resources and rare minerals — as compensation for aid given to Ukraine by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Svyrydenko did not publish details of the memorandum, but said work continued toward securing a final agreement.
“We hope that the Fund will become an effective tool for attracting investments in the reconstruction of our country, modernization of infrastructure, support for business, and the creation of new economic opportunities,” she said.
“There is a lot to do, but the current pace and significant progress give reason to expect that the document will be very beneficial for both countries.”
US officials say boosting American business interests in Ukraine will help deter Russia from future aggression in the event of a ceasefire.
Kyiv is pushing for concrete military and security guarantees as part of any deal to halt the three-year war.
Man who hijacked a small plane in Belize and was fatally shot was a US veteran
- The man was shot by a passenger who was licensed to carry a firearm, which he later turned over to police
BELIZE CITY: A US citizen hijacked a small Tropic Air plane in Belize on Thursday at knifepoint, injuring three others before being shot and killed, police said.
The assailant pulled a knife while the plane was in air, demanding the domestic flight take him out of the country, Police Commissioner Chester Williams told journalists.
The hijacker was identified as US citizen Akinyela Sawa Taylor, Williams said, adding that it appeared Taylor was a military veteran.
The plane circled the airspace between northern Belize and capital Belize City as the hijacking was underway, and began to run dangerously low on fuel, the police commissioner said.
Taylor stabbed three people on board, according to Williams, including the pilot and a passenger who shot Taylor with a licensed firearm as the plane landed outside Belize City.
That passenger was rushed to the hospital, as was Taylor, who died from the gunshot wound.
Williams said that it was unclear how Taylor boarded the plane with a knife, though he acknowledged that the country’s smaller airstrips lacked security to fully search passengers.
The attacker had been denied entry to the country over the weekend, according to police. The plane had been due to fly the short route from Corozal near the Mexican border to San Pedro, off the coast. Police said it was unclear how Taylor reached Corozal.
Belizean authorities have reached out to the US embassy in the country for aid in investigating the incident. Luke Martin, public affairs officer for the embassy, told journalists that it had no details on Taylor’s background or motivation so far.
According to information released by the airport, Taylor was a teacher in the United States. He was listed online as previously being a football coach at the McCluer North High School in Florissant, Missouri.
An employee at the school told Reuters that Taylor did not currently work there.
