Global Nation Archives - The World from PRX

This story was reported in collaboration with El Tímpano, a news outlet designed for and with Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. Every Tuesday since the stay-at-home orders took hold last year, Dinora Hernandez heads to the food bank near her home in Oakland, California, to get milk, coffee, rice, canned fruit and oatmeal. She says that the assistance has been a lifeline for her, her three young kids and her mom in El Salvador. Related: Addressing migration requires long-term commitment, says analyst on Harris visit to Guatemala “It lets me send cash to my mom back home, to cover the basics,” said Hernandez, who managed to continue working minimal hours at a restaurant in Oakland during the pandemic, but has yet to return to her full-time schedule. Hernandez’s determination to keep sending cash home, like many others around the world, startled Dilip Ratha, a lead economist at the World Bank who focuses on remittances. During the pandemic, the world’s top economists like Ratha were surprised by the amount…

On a Tuesday in May, several dozen people gathered in front of an administrative building in Woodstock, Illinois, a town of about 25,000 people, 54 miles northwest of Chicago. Organizers held up signs that read: “Community not cages,” and “Cancel the ICE contract.” The McHenry County Board would meet inside that building later that evening. On their voting agenda was a resolution to phase out the county jail’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — also known as ICE — and stop detaining undocumented immigrants. Immigration advocates around the county, like those in Woodstock, have waited since January for President Joe Biden to address immigration detention after he announced changes to contracts between the Department of Justice and private prisons. Biden said his goal is to end racial disparities and pave the way for fair sentencing. Related: Immigration rights activists call on Biden to end private detention Most recently, the administration terminated its contracts with two county jails, the…

It had been 15 years since Alfonso, 60, last crossed the US-Mexico border. He never dreamed he would be back, but Alfonso sat eating rice and beans at a migrant shelter in Sonoyta, a town in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, alongside his 25-year-old son, Ricardo. Providing for his children was his motivation for crossing the border four times, decades ago, but his son was the reason he went back. Both Ricardo and his father requested to only use their first names, because Ricardo wanted to cross over undetected by US officials. A 30-foot border wall outside the town of Sonoyta, Mexico, placed along the US-Mexico border during the Trump administation, as seen from the Mexican side.Ana Adlerstein “He was afraid of doing it alone,” Alfonso said. “As I’d done it before, he asked me to come with him to help.” And so he did. Related: Why are so many migrant families arriving at the southern US border? Most news coverage about migrants on the border focuses on families, women and unaccompanied minors. But…

In November 2019, about 40 people packed into a conference room at the Westchester Regional Library that sits at the heart of Miami-Dade’s suburban Cuban American community. The group whispered among themselves and occasionally raised their voices in exasperation, seeking answers to a problem that continues to affect thousands of South Florida families to this day. The topic of concern: the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program. For years, the program has served as a straightforward, legal way to reunite Cuban families in the US. Related: Biden slow to restore refugee admissions program The issues with the program were complicated by geopolitics. After staff at the US Embassy in Havana were mysteriously injured in what the US believes to be sonic attacks, the Trump administration all but shut down the embassy and removed staff at the end of 2017. And as the staff went away, all of the families that were enrolled in the program were left in limbo, with no one to conduct the necessary interviews and to…

There’s been a steady focus on migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. But refugees — less in the spotlight — have seen their chances of entry to the US grind to a halt, leaving them in unexpected limbo. Many refugees have already been vetted and approved for entry through official US and United Nations agencies, but President Joe Biden has yet to make an official commitment to rebuilding the US refugee program. Related: Plans for a refugee camp on Lesbos is too isolating, critics say Basuze Madogo, who helps resettle refugees through World Relief, a nonprofit based in Memphis, Tennessee, has recently needed to inform families that relatives who they hoped to welcome at airports would not arrive as scheduled — at least not yet. Madogo even had to break the news to his own brother. He thought his wife, from Democratic Republic of Congo, would join him in Tennessee in March. “It left him very devastated. … But I told him in a way to give him hope. That it wasn’t an issue of his wife’s case, it was more…

Adareli Ponce tried for 20 years to get an H-2A visa allowing her to work on farms across the US. But Ponce said that time and time again, farm labor recruiters in Mexico told her farm work is better suited for men. “There wasn’t much opportunity for me as a woman.” Adareli Ponce, seasonal worker, Hidalgo, Mexico “There wasn’t much opportunity for me as a woman,” she said. Related: Nantucket businesses struggle without seasonal summer workers But last summer, Ponce and more than a dozen workers’ rights groups saw an opportunity to speak out against the gender discrimination and pay inequity that she and many others have faced as seasonal workers. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced the 26-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and with it came an enforceable labor chapter allowing certain workers in Mexico to unionize. It also gives migrant workers like Ponce a pathway to filing complaints directly with each government. Ponce, now 38, and another female worker submitted…

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.” Eduardo Dolande, plumber, Houston, Texas “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…

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…

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…

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.” Lu Rocha, therapist, Chicago “When I was 5 or 6 years old, I walked around with my…