Good morning. The Supreme Court blocked President Trump’s effort to overhaul mail voting ahead of the midterm elections. And the United States now has weapons in space. We’ve got more below, including the winners of the Emmy Awards. I’m going to start, though, with three stories from inside the immigration crackdown.
Trouble in paradiseIn late July, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, a legal protection that had allowed 330,000 of them to live and work in the United States. All politics is local: The change is a ruinous blow to the tourist economy of Key West, reports David Ovalle, who covers Florida. Of the 25,000 people who live on or around the island, one immigration lawyer told him, at least 5,000 are Haitian. Key West is tiny. It’s not easy to avoid running into a federal immigration agent. “There’s no outrunning anybody here,” the leader of an immigrant support group said. The result? Haitian hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks, Uber drivers and supermarket workers — they’re disappearing. Some have been detained and deported. Others stay home or call in sick, even if they have valid work permits. “Many Haitians — along with Hispanic immigrants — have stopped riding bicycles to work, a common form of transportation in Key West, for fear of attracting law enforcement attention,” David writes. The Department of Homeland Security puts it this way: “Temporary Protected Status is exactly that — temporary,” the agency told David in response to a question about enforcement activity in the Florida Keys. “For too long, T.P.S. has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent.” My colleague Frances Robles lives in Key West. I asked her what she’s been seeing in her life and on the streets. “My hairdresser was picked up and detained for over a month and eventually returned to his home country,” she told me. “My cleaning lady quit and went back to Nicaragua with her husband. She said, ‘I don’t want to go to prison.’” The labor shortage is likely to intensify in coming months. It is still the slow season in America’s southernmost city. The snowbirds will soon arrive. In cages
Let’s stay in Florida for a moment longer. How bad were conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the mosquito-infested immigration detention center deep in the Everglades that closed this summer? Zoo-like, according to a report from the independent watchdog overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. The facility didn’t comply with national standards for medical care, food service, physical hygiene or recreation. Agents there confined migrants in “small metal enclosures” for an hour at a time. They called these pens “calming areas.” Facility workers said that some detainees asked to spend time in them. But the department’s inspector general found at least one instance in which an enclosure was used to discipline a detainee who had “failed to comply with a lawful command.” The structures each provide only about 18 square feet of floor space — roughly the size of a restroom stall. (That’s less than a quarter of the national detention standard of 75 square feet.) It “does not align with standards for humane treatment,” the report said. Catch-22Let’s say you’re an immigrant who is in the country legally. Can you prove it? My colleague Minho Kim spoke to 35 immigration lawyers about the process. He discovered that immigrants who use the Freedom of Information Act to seek documents that prove their legal status are either getting rebuffed or receiving heavily redacted paperwork. The government says the documents don’t exist. Or it provides them with critical information struck out. The lawyers say that puts their clients at risk of deportation. Minho laid out how Kafkaesque the experience can be: In February, Cipriano Alarcon-Galvez, 54, a Mexican national, asked citizenship services for a copy of the green-card petition filed in 1993 by his mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, on his behalf. That 33-year-old petition may make Mr. Alarcon-Galvez eligible for permanent residency and amnesty for coming to the United States without permission as a child. But more than half of the records he received were fully redacted, according to the government responses reviewed by The Times. Another request filed by his mother yielded copies of green-card petitions, but all of her children’s information was redacted. A Freedom of Information Act official at the citizenship services agency confirmed in an email to his lawyer that the petition existed, but said Mr. Alarcon-Galvez should file a request with the State Department instead. Alarcon-Galvez has four daughters who are U.S. citizens and has lived in Oceanside, Calif., for decades. He is now facing deportation. Read more about the FOIA strategy here. Related: A coalition of states and local governments sued the Trump administration over a policy that would restrict green cards for immigrants using public assistance.
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