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CBS News
10 hours ago
- Politics
- CBS News
Undocumented street vendors decide to stay at home amid ICE operations
Many undocumented street vendors have decided to stay home as fears of immigration raids grow in Los Angeles. "I don't go out, " street vendor Lidia said in Spanish. "I am scared." Lidia and her husband, who are both undocumented, are just two of the thousands of vendors staying home after hearing about the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, according to immigrant rights advocate Sergio Jimenez. "ICE has been showing up in Pico Rivera, Home Depots, street vending communities in South Central, Boyle Heights, downtown L.A.," Jimenez said. "You just don't know when you're going to get hit by ICE." Her 10-year-old son Gerardo, who is a citizen, said he and his sister don't go outside anymore. "It just feels like you're trapped in your home because if you go outside, you're risking getting taken away by ICE," Geraldo said. Instead of being a kid, Geraldo is left worrying if he'll wake up with his parents by his side. "They normally go to sell on the street, but now they don't. They just stay here," he said. "We don't really go out much — just if it's important or necessary." Fearing that ICE may come to their home, Lidia and her husband posted a sign on their window saying, "This house does not open for ICE." On the back of the sign is a list of the family's rights, which they said gives them some peace of mind. "We are not criminals," Lidia said. The decision to stay at home and give up their only source of income means the family does not have money for rent or food. To help the family, local nonprofits, including Community Power Collective, launched a fundraiser. "This is the third initiative where we fundraise funds for street vendors," Jimenez said. Jimenez said the donations will go towards the family's living expenses. "Everything they need, but we understand that is not going to be enough," Jimenez said. While Jimenez can help Lidia's family, he says she is one of thousands of vendors in the same situation. L.A. organizers said the work is far from done but every donation helps keep a family together. "There's fear all over the place," Jimenez said.
Washington Post
a day ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
As Trump shuts out migrants, Spain opens its doors and fuels economic growth
MADRID — When night falls on the other side of the Atlantic, her 32-year-old cousin, a house cleaner in New York, huddles inside a dim basement apartment, terrified of ICE raids. But in a burgeoning quarter of the Spanish capital, where immigrant-staffed restaurants tempt newcomers with Dominican chicharrones and Venezuelan empanadas, Edith Chimbo sat in the sunlight, musing about the Spanish Dream. 'My cousin told me, 'Go to Spain'' said Chimbo, 22, who landed in Madrid earlier this year from the Ecuadorian highlands. Armed with a college degree but no work permit, she's cleaning houses under the table, just like her cousin in the United States. Yet she is counting on something in the weeks ahead that her kin almost certainly cannot: legalization. 'Here,' she said, 'we have hope.' As the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers brings tear gas, protests and raids to the streets of the United States, Spain is positioning itself as a counterpoint: a new land of opportunity. In this nation of 48 million with long colonial links to the New World, an influx of predominantly Latin American immigrants is helping fuel one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. The Spanish economic transformation is unfolding as the center-left government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has streamlined immigration rules while offering legal status to roughly 700,000 irregular migrants since 2021. A landmark bill now being negotiated in the Congress of Deputies could grant legal amnesty to hundreds of thousands more — most of them Spanish-speakers from predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America. Those newcomers often enjoy visa-free travel to Spain, even as Madrid controversially works with Morocco, Mauritania and other countries to block irregular arrivals from the African coast, though Sánchez has also called for tolerance toward migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa. Spain's approach is attracting at least some migrants rejected or barred from the United States, including Venezuelans who are now subject to President Donald Trump's travel ban. The number of Venezuelans applying for humanitarian protection in Spain surged to 36,923 between January and May, a 36.4 percent spike from the same period last year. With no visa requirements, all Venezuelans need is a valid passport and a plane ticket. In May, the most recent period available, applicants enjoyed a 98.6 percent acceptance rate. 'My hopes and plans for the United States ended overnight,' said Alexander Salazar, 34, a Venezuelan living in Peru who found out in February that his U.S. visa, on humanitarian grounds as an LGBTQ+ migrant, had been suspended. His plan now is to join other family and friends who have already left for Spain. 'That's where my road leads,' he said by telephone from Lima. Sira Rego, a minister in Sánchez's government, said she was glad to see immigrants choosing Spain. 'It makes me feel a certain pride because it represents the kind of country we want to build: a welcoming country with rights.' Sánchez now finds his party embroiled in a political corruption scandal that has sparked calls for new elections. Still, Spanish lawmakers across the political spectrum have adopted a less demonizing approach toward immigration — at least from some countries — than many of their American and European counterparts. Even the far-right Vox party has appeared moderately welcoming of some Spanish-speaking, culturally similar immigrants from Latin America. Spain, which like most European countries has an aging population, for decades was more a source of outward emigration than a destination for immigrants. It first emerged as a tempting target for foreign job seekers during its economic boom in 2000s. More recently, it has experienced a historic post-pandemic surge, with 2.67 million people born outside the European Union arriving between 2021 and 2023 — an 85 percent increase compared with the previous three year period. Many of its immigrants, particularly from Latin America, arrive legally, either with work or student permits or as tourists, and later seek to change their status. Yet the country still harbors a hidden mass of migrants without legal permission to work. The government has no official figure of how many could be legalized under the new bill, but estimates suggest anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million. Critics point to Spain's unemployment rate — over 10 percent, the highest in the European Union, though less than half what it was a decade ago — as evidence that welcoming migrants is wrongheaded. They argue it suppresses wage growth, increases competition for Spanish workers and threatens Spanish identity. Some opinion polls also show a hardening public stance on migration. Yet the legislative amnesty push came not from a government plan but a grassroots effort backed by civil actors including small-town mayors, companies, migrant advocates and the Catholic church. Spain also has a history of normalizing irregular migrants who can prove steady work, with the last large-scale amnesty under the center-left government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2005. Should Sánchez survive the corruption crisis — and Spain's economy continue to thrive — his policies could set up this nation as the antithesis of Trump's America: a migrant-friendly progressive paradise. Under Sánchez, Spain has leaned in as few other nations to diversity, equity and inclusion. A new government rule effective May 1 compels companies with more than 50 employees to enact antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ workers. The government is also forging a close economic relationship with Beijing, generating large-scale investment including Chinese auto giant Chery's first factory in Europe. No policy has been as transformative to Spanish society as the stance on immigration, which officials and economists say is helping to reverse population decline and boost social welfare funding at a moment when baby boomers are retiring. Immigration is also helping drive the strongest period of economic growth since Spain's construction boom in the mid-2000s. Between 2022 and 2024, average GDP per capita increased 2.9 percent — the strongest of the E.U.'s four largest economies. A report published this year by the Bank of Spain estimates that up to 25 percent of that growth was linked to the influx of foreign workers paying taxes, filling jobs, renting homes and purchasing goods and services. 'Spain is a complete anomaly, a country where the government is easing the arrival of migrants, and migrants have been absolutely existential to the dynamism of the economy,' said Gonzalo Fanjul, co-founder at porCausa Foundation, a research group on migrant issues. Experts and officials say the arrival of large numbers of Latin American immigrants, who speak Spanish and are overwhelmingly Catholic, has led to fewer societal divisions over assimilation than in countries like Sweden or Germany, which have experienced a large influx of Muslims. 'I really doubt that there is any other country in the world where migration is playing as much a role in economic growth right now as it is in Spain,' said Juan Cerruti, an Argentine émigré to Spain and now the global chief economist at Madrid-based Banco Santander. Immigrants are filling labor gaps not only in Spain's lower-wage tourism, construction and agricultural sectors, but also in the more highly skilled tech and medical sectors. In an office park on the edge of Valencia, companies such as Avantio, a digital services and software provider for the tourism industry, have leveraged Spain's streamlined immigration rules to employ foreigners and grow business. Company officials say they have turned to foreign labor for positions that otherwise might take up to a year to fill. Almost 73 percent of the company's hires in 2024 were born outside Spain, mostly in Latin America. 'We hire people from outside because we need them, we don't differentiate' based on where they are from, said Rebeca Jorge, Avantio's director of human resources. Spain has also changed its rules to help legalize the status of migrants with proof of long-term work, to ease access to work visas for new immigrants, to loosen work restrictions on student visa-holders and to simplify family reunification rules. Those simplified rules could aide Chimbo, whose mother immigrated from Ecuador to Spain a decade ago and became a citizen. Chimbo arrived on a three-month visa in April and is now applying for long-term legal status and the right to work through family reunification. She said she is confident that if that fails, the amnesty legislation could aid her. Before arriving, she considered following her cousin to the United States — a path Chimbo's father tried before being detained and deported from Texas last year. Speaking on a video phone from her dark basement apartment in a New York City suburb, her cousin Cristina said she warned Chimbo away from the United States. 'I'm afraid all the time now … whenever I'm outside, taking the bus to work … I'm afraid,' said Cristina, who is trying to apply for asylum but frets about her chances. 'I've seen the videos. I've seen what they're doing to migrants in the U.S.,' Chimbo said. 'Here, my biggest fear is Mondays, when I have to go to work.' Two hundred and twenty-five miles east of Madrid, in the orange blossom-tinged air of Valencia, men from Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, Senegal and a host of other countries labored on crews rebuilding infrastructure and erecting new apartments following the devastating floods that hit the region in October. This year, Spain offered legal status to more than 22,000 irregular migrants in the affected area — helping populate an army of construction workers and filling other key jobs in the rebuilding effort. It was a decision driven by humanitarian concern for migrants unable to access government aid following the disaster. But it was also driven by pragmatism. 'I asked the Spanish government for this,' said José Vicente Morata, president of the Valencia Chamber of Commerce. 'We needed these people to have an identification number, the number to be able to exist in Spain. There was a bottleneck in the procedures, [and] we needed workers.' The region has now evolved into a mini-test case of Spain's legalization efforts. After the floods, Gerardo López Mateu, mayor of the nearby village of Real, struggled to find workers willing to work in the town's ongoing cleanup effort. He had four positions open — three of them now filled by migrants. 'We still can't fill the fourth job,' he said. There are some jobs that 'Spaniards just don't want to do.' One of his workers is Ibra Bayane, a 24-year-old Senegalese who arrived in Spain by sea in 2021, living ever since off the precariously shadow economy. He'd pick oranges or deliver food. At best, he said, he'd earn the equivalent of $35 a day. As a documented migrant, he has been able to get a driver's license for the first time and access basic medical care. Now, he can also travel back to Senegal to visit family without risk. His salary is no fortune — 60 euros a day — about $70 — for cleanup work in the hot southern Spanish sun. But it's twice what he was earning before — and enough to afford a small room with a vase of fresh flowers on a desk, and a large window that brings a cooling breeze. 'My life is better now,' he said. 'I can live.' José Bautista contributed to this report.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Spanish-language journalist who documents immigration raids detained for ICE after protest arrest
A Spanish-language journalist known for documenting immigration raids could face deportation proceedings after police arrested him on charges of obstructing officers and unlawful assembly as he was covering a weekend protest outside Atlanta.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Spanish-language journalist who documents immigration raids detained for ICE after protest arrest
A Spanish-language journalist known for documenting immigration raids could face deportation proceedings after police arrested him on charges of obstructing officers and unlawful assembly as he was covering a weekend protest outside Atlanta.
CTV News
4 days ago
- Politics
- CTV News
Spanish-language journalist who documents immigration raids detained for ICE after protest arrest
Police tell Spanish-language reporter Mario Guevara to move back during a protest on ICE raids and deportation arrests on Chamblee Tucker Road in Atlanta on Saturday, June 14, 2025. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) Savannah, Ga. — A Spanish-language journalist known for documenting immigration raids could face deportation proceedings after police arrested him on charges of obstructing officers and unlawful assembly as he was covering a weekend protest outside Atlanta. Mario Guevara, who fled El Salvador two decades ago and built a large following as an independent journalist covering immigration in the Atlanta area, was broadcasting live on social media Saturday at a protest in DeKalb County when officers arrested him. The video shows Guevara standing on a sidewalk with other journalists, filming police in riot gear walking through a parking lot, before he stepped into the street as officers approached. 'I'm a member of the media, officer,' Guevara tells a police officer right before he's arrested. The video shows Guevara wearing a bright red shirt under a protective vest with 'PRESS' printed across his chest. Guevara was jailed in DeKalb County, which includes parts of Atlanta, on charges of obstructing police, unlawful assembly and improperly entering a roadway. His attorney, Giovanni Diaz, said a judge granted Guevara bond on Monday, but he was kept in jail after Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed an extra 48-hour hold on him. 'He's not a legal permanent resident, but he has authorization to remain and work in the United States,' Diaz said in a phone interview, adding that Guevara has an adult son who is a U.S. citizen and an application pending for his green card. If ICE agents take custody of Guevara, Diaz said, his case would move to federal immigration court for potential deportation proceedings. Diaz insisted that Guevara has a strong case for being allowed to stay in the U.S. But he said that President Donald Trump's aggressive approach to immigration enforcement has added 'another level of anxiety.' A spokesperson for the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, Cynthia Williams, confirmed that Guevara was being held for immigration authorities. An ICE spokesperson in Atlanta did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Guevara fled El Salvador with his family in 2004, saying he was beaten and repeatedly harassed because of his work as a political reporter for the newspaper La Prensa Grafica. They immigrated to Georgia, where Guevara worked as a reporter for Georgia's largest Spanish-language newspaper, Mundo Hispanico, before launching his own online news site, MGNews. Guevara's coverage of immigration raids, often documented live with help from a network of tipsters, has earned him a big social media following that exceeds 782,000 on Facebook alone. Like hundreds of communities across the U.S., DeKalb County saw crowds gather Saturday to protest the Trump administration. County officials said in a news release that police were dispatched to confront protestors marching toward an interstate onramp. Officers fired tear gas and made at least eight arrests. Guevara was photographed at that protest by news outlets including The Associated Press. The video he recorded leading up to his arrest shows him standing beside a shopping center a distance from police vehicles blocking a roadway. Guevara doesn't appear to be near any crowds or confrontations when police arrested him. Diaz said Guevara is well-known by local and federal authorities after his years of documenting immigration enforcement. 'He's been doing this type of work for 20-plus years, and now he gets detained,' Diaz said. 'It's concerning. He's a member of the press. And he doesn't seem to be committing any crime.' Russ Bynum, The Associated Press
