Juan Carlos Chavez

Thousands of Tampa Bay residents sought shelter this week from hurricane conditions.

Low wages and high expenses make it hard for Florida’s migrant works to brace for, and recover from, impact.

A 30-year-old man is facing a murder charge in connection with the shooting last month.

“We have to be cautious,” an activist said. False promises could lead to legal peril.

For over four years, Andrés Arenas has been serving as a spiritual leader and musical director at Iglesia Vida Nueva, a Pentecostal church in West Tampa, where the congregation mainly consists of families from Latin America.In 2019, Arenas came from Bucaramanga, in north-central Colombia, accompanied by his wife, to support this church and contribute to its growth. Attendees gather three times a week to pray, raise their voices in songs of praise and share stories of faith in the building at 610…

Wander Franco’s legal team is in flux as the Tampa Bay Rays’ All-Star shortstop faces possible criminal charges relating to an alleged sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl that could send him to prison and end his Major League Baseball career.On Tuesday, one of Franco’s two defense attorneys in the Dominican Republic told the Tampa Bay Times in a text that he’s no longer representing the 22-year-old.“I am not Franco’s lawyer anymore,” Juan Francisco Rodríguez Consoró said. He would not sa…

Carlos Bohorquez hopes to receive good news about his residency status by mail before the end of the year. But he is resigned to the uncertainty and constant waiting.Bohorquez, a 41-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who lives in Riverview, filed for asylum in 2014. It took eight years before he had his petition approved, which allows him to stay in the U.S. as long as conditions in his home country don’t improve. But he still hasn’t heard back on his bid to stay here permanently.Like him, thousands…

Legislation that Gov. Ron DeSantis helped push into law last year restricting migrant labor has become a cornerstone of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.Some support the measure as necessary for workforce regulation. Others say the new law has exacerbated an already tight labor market.Yet while the 2023 law is considered one of the nation’s toughest crackdowns on illegal immigration, its effectiveness hinges in part on the reliability of a federal online system that checks the im…

In 2023, a surge in migration highlighted the escalating crisis at the U.S. southern border. Here were some of the most important developments:Federal authorities made more than 2.2 million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023, one of the highest ever recorded, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The arrival of tens of thousands who left homes in the Caribbean and Latin America represented a challenge not only for government agencies but also for nonprofit organizations, commun…

Yusmier Mesa hasn’t lost hope, but he’s afraid.He left Cuba four years ago and reached the United States by traveling through Latin America. It was a long and dangerous journey, similar to one that José Manuel Garces made.Mesa and Garces don’t know each other, but they share more than one thing in common. Both Cubans were released by United States immigration officials after crossing the southern border with a form known as I-220A. That’s a form that allows the holder to have a temporary driver’…

Misael Lopez-Velasco, 29, always called his family in Mexico twice a day and sent money every two weeks to support his wife and kids, ages 2 to 10.A proud father who came to the United States a year and a half ago to work in construction, Lopez-Velasco played bass for a Mexican folk band called Tierras de Juárez.On Sunday morning he and four others died in a three-vehicle crash in southeastern Hillsborough County in a wreck that shut down State Road 674 for hours until it reopened at 2 p.m. Alon…

Mohammad Hammad owns a hookah lounge in Temple Terrace where people come every day to smoke, talk and watch Middle East news on large screens mostly tuned to Al Jazeera.“This is a place where we socialize,” said Hammad, a Palestinian American who immigrated to the United States in 2005. “We are all friends, we are like a family.”But soon after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Hammad said an anti-Palestinian protester along E Fowler Avenue near the University of South Florida alerted him that h…

An EgyptAir Boeing 787 landed at Tampa International Airport on Wednesday morning carrying 47 Americans evacuating from Israel, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management.It was the second time this week that a plane carrying people fleeing from the crisis in Israel landed at Tampa International Airport.Project Dynamo connected the state with 23 of the passengers, said Bryan Stern, the CEO and founder of the nonprofit agency. He said those passengers included an Army vet, a spouse…

Dalia Mousa-Fakhouri’s mother came to Florida at age 2, with a birth certificate that listed her place of birth as “Jerusalem, Palestine.” Her father was born in Texas to immigrant parents, and his family wound up in Florida as well.To Mousa-Fakhouri, who lives in Jacksonville, Gov. Ron DeSantis has long represented a populist vision of the state not so different from the promise her grandparents sought, a place with “equal opportunity for people to work and live and make money.”The past few day…

On the first day of her jungle journey, Erlinda Mendoza fell into a deep hole while climbing one of the many mud-slick mountains along the treacherous Darién Gap passage connecting South and Central America. Within seconds, her body sank into the heavy, stinky mud.She began to panic. For 15 minutes, she was stuck.“I saw death in Darién,” Mendoza said.It was a rainy afternoon when her adult son, who was crossing the Darién with her, and a group of others managed to pull Mendoza out of the hole. T…

Touted as the most effective and ambitious immigration measure in the nation by supporters, SB 1718 also came with its share of criticism when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law earlier this year.Much of the backlash was aimed at a part of the law that imposed felony charges for transporting immigrants without legal status into Florida.Three months after the law went into effect, how many people have been charged with the new crime?The total — so far — is three, according to records from the s…

Dominican attorney Juan Arturo Recio said the investigation into Tampa Bay Rays All-Star shortstop Wander Franco regarding an alleged relationship with a minor is in a preliminary stage and could take months.Recio, who also works as a general editor for ESPN Deportes in the Dominican Republic, said Wednesday that if Franco does not have a lawyer who could speak on his behalf, getting one would be “a good idea.”“It’s important to understand that in our legislation, there are no consensual relatio…

A Tampa Bay advocate warns about driving without a valid license.

Tampa residents weigh in on potential contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Ahead of 2024 presidential election, Poder Latinx wants women to be “agents of change” in Florida.