María Elvira Salazar wore a dark blouse and a striking pearl necklace when she arrived at journalist Juan Manuel Cao’s studio in Miami. She took a seat, tucked her hair behind her ears, made sure she had good lighting and found the best camera angle. She’s well trained in the ways of television.
© Elizabeth Frantz (REUTERS)
The state of Tennessee has ordered a stay on the execution of a woman who was sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow student when she was 18. If it had been carried out as planned on Wednesday, Christa Pike, now 50, would have been be the first woman put to death in the mid-southeastern state in more than two centuries.
© George Walker IV (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
The Trump administration’s immigration policy and the state of the economy are prompting a shift of Latino voters back toward the Democrats. Although many remain undecided, a new poll shows that in the November midterms, Democratic congressional candidates will receive between six and 10 percentage points more of the Hispanic vote compared with Kamala Harris’s 2024 results. By contrast, Republicans would lose five points of the votes Trump won among this electorate. On November 3, all seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for election, as well as 36 governorships.
© Lynne Sladky (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
Known as the tomato capital of the United States, Immokalee is an agricultural community in southern Florida. A couple of hours from cosmopolitan Miami, palm trees stand beside dirt roads where cucumber, pepper, and eggplant are grown; hens roam the yards of small houses and people carry shovels and hoes. Although it is part of Collier, one of the state’s wealthiest counties, there is no hospital with a labor and delivery ward or specialists to handle an obstetric emergency. Pregnant people must drive up to an hour to receive care.
© Desirée Yépez
The U.S. midterm elections are not limited to Tuesday, November 3. For millions of voters, Election Day will begin much earlier, either through in-person early voting or by casting a mail-in ballot, despite recent attempts by President Donald Trump to restrict and overhaul mail-in voting.
© Jenny Kane (AP)
In recent months, the Donald Trump administration has been proudly releasing statistics on migrant arrests. Nearly 51,000 detentions were recorded in August, setting a new record that surpassed July’s 50,208, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. But while the administration celebrates increased operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), business owners lament the effects on the labor market. “I’ve already lost several employees. There’s nobody to work,” says Carlos Raba, a chef of Mexican descent.
© Jim Vondruska (REUTERS)
It is around 9:00 p.m. and Karla De Anda’s phone rings. The number is unknown to her. On the other end, connected to the free Wi‑Fi at a Miami airport terminal, a woman is sobbing uncontrollably. Her name is Rosa. She has just had her bags packed for her. A coworker told the family they both worked for that Rosa had been secretly talking to a stranger about the wages she was owed. The family would not hear any more: they bought her a one‑way ticket to her country of origin and put her in a taxi to the airport. Karla, who barely knows her, asks a single question: “Do you want to stay or not? Just answer me.” Between sobs the woman says yes. She hangs up, gets out of the departure line, and an hour later Karla is waiting for her at the arrivals gate with another activist, ready to take her to her home that same night.
Just 20 minutes from Denver International Airport, plans are under way for an ambitious project on a stretch of empty land larger than Manhattan’s Central Park.
© Jessie Wardarski (AP / LAPRESSE) (AP)
In a beautiful and vivid essay on home, time, and family, Diane Roberts reflects on the house that her parents built, and their family’s land in Leon County, Florida, to which she feels deeply connected. I especially love Roberts’s thoughts on a home versus a house—the latter is composed of construction materials, but “home implies a complex neural network of family association and feeling, layers of experience, a shared past.” Despite the tragedies the home holds, it is ultimately a place of memory and meaning.
Home and time are as tangled as the skunk vine and Confederate jasmine choking my backyard fence. I suppose that’s to be expected. My house holds our history and the indispensable relics of former houses, objects cherished by the now-dead: the tiny rocking chair my grandfather made for my mother when she was three; the 1960 TR3 in the barn my brother never quite got around to fixing; the two old rosebushes dug up from the Washington County farm, replanted at Great-Aunt Rilla’s house in Chipley, then dug up again and transported to our front yard. The house didn’t simply belong to us, it was us—our mother, our father, Brad, and me.
A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids because of visas issues, sparking a custody battle that could upend the lucrative, largely unregulated industry. Emi Nietfeld spent more than a year reporting this rollercoaster of a feature. One particularly harrowing turn involves the father hiring people to retrieve the babies for him:
As the men continued knocking on her door, Simpson’s phone convulsed with notifications. Zhou messaged her nonstop. He called 53 times. “If you don’t give my babies to us, we have to report to the police. And you will be arrested immediately,” he warned. Then came pleas—or were they threats? “Think about your daughter,” he wrote, referring to Simpson’s 5-year-old. “I don’t think you want to have her be live without you for several years!”
Halfway across the world, Zhou paced in his apartment, chest seizing in panic. Over and over, he’d tried to explain his predicament to Simpson. He was still waiting for his visa interview; without her help, he couldn’t get his kids home. Running out of money and options, he’d hired the handlers as a last resort. Now, as his calls and messages went ignored, he feared she’d fallen in love with his children and would never let them go.
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