Tampa nonprofit helps rescue 2 adopted children from escalating violence in Haiti
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Two families have been united with their adopted children who were trapped in Haiti's escalating crisis.
'It's everything we could have ever imagined,' said Angela Howell-Edgerly. 'It's just a dream come true. It really is.'
Gov. DeSantis proposes $1K rebate checks to cover Florida homeowners' property tax
The Gray Bull Rescue Foundation embarked on a mission to help two 6-year-old girls escape the island nation as violence continues to erupt.
'We've been waiting for this for six years,' said Brock Blankenship. 'It's so long to finally have this happen. It's beyond anything we could have imagined.'
Their escape from Haiti comes at a critical time.
'The human rights situation in Haiti has reached yet another crisis point,' said UN human rights chief Volker Türk in a social media post. 'Gangs are uniting to spread terror, armed with powerful weapons. The illicit flow of arms into the country must stop. The Haitian people cannot be forgotten. Their suffering must end.'
The unrest has been weighing heavy on several adoptive families, especially over the last year when gang violence reached new heights in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince.
'The current condition of the country warrants immediate action,' Howell-Edgerly said. 'They threatened to come back and kill the children and the nannies. We scrambled to try and get help, and at first, we couldn't get help.'
Howell-Edgerly and her husband spent seven years navigating Haiti's adoption process for their daughter, Rosie.
However, last March, her effort to unite with Rosie in America came to a standstill when the government collapsed.
Uncertainty turned into fear when Rosie's living conditions became more dire each day.
'Some children have had to flee orphanages, including our daughter, due to surrounding gunfire and bullets penetrating walls,' Howell-Edgerly said.
Howell-Edgerly contacted the Grey Bull Rescue Foundation to assist.
The nonprofit organization is a veteran-led, international rescue agency based in Tampa.
Grey Bull Rescue specializes in rescuing Americans from conflict zones across the world when the U.S. Government does not have access or a presence.
'Now, after a last-minute clearance and a high-stakes rescue, these families will be together,' read a statement from the Grey Bull Rescue Foundation. 'Their journey has been filled with heartbreak, resilience, and unwavering determination.'
However, more than a dozen adopted children are still trapped in Haiti and waiting to be evacuated to the U.S.
Adoptive families are putting pressure on elected officials and the State Department to expedite the process.
'There are means to do so,' said Christopher Edgerly. 'They did it last year when they evacuated nearly 40 children. They could do the same thing today. They just seem to be slow walking everything right now.'
For more information about Grey Bull Rescue Foundation, click here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump announces $1,000 government-funded accounts for American babies
Donald Trump unveiled a federal program Monday providing $1,000 government-funded investment accounts for American babies, getting backing from top business leaders who said they plan to contribute billions more to an initiative tied to 'the big beautiful bill'. At a White House roundtable with over a dozen CEOs, including from Uber, Goldman Sachs and Dell Technologies, Trump relayed the details of 'Trump accounts' – tax-deferred investment accounts tracking stock market performance for children born between 2025 and 2029. 'For every US citizen born after December 31, 2024, before January 1, 2029, the federal government will make a one-time contribution of $1,000 into a tax-deferred account that will track the overall stock market,' Trump said. The accounts will be controlled by guardians and allow additional private contributions up to $5,000 annually. Trump called it 'a pro-family initiative that will help millions of Americans harness the strength of our economy to lift up the next generation'. Related: Trump's 'big, beautiful' bill is built on falsehoods about low-income families | Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson CEOs from major companies including Michael Dell, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and Vladimir Tenev of Robinhood committed billions for employees' children's accounts. Trump praised the executives as 'really the greatest business minds we have today' who are 'committed to contributing millions of dollars to the Trump account'. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, also at the roundtable, championed the program, saying: 'It's a bold, transformative policy that gives every eligible American child a financial head start from day one. Republicans are proud to be the party we always have been. It supports life and families, prosperity and opportunity.' The program passed the House as part of a massive budget bill but faces stiffer Senate Republican resistance over the broader package. The accounts cannot be implemented as a standalone program and depend entirely on passage of what Trump calls the 'one big, beautiful bill' that is 'among the most important pieces of legislation in our country's history', claiming it's 'fully funded through targeted reforms' including welfare changes and a proposed remittance tax. However, the congressional budget office last week found the bill would also add $2.4tn to the national debt over the next decade while cutting Medicaid and food assistance programs. The CBO analysis showed the bill, which passed the House by a single vote and no Democratic support, would leave 10.9 million more Americans without healthcare by 2034. The treasury-funded accounts, previously called 'Maga accounts' resemble existing 529 college plans but with lower contribution limits – leading some financial advisers to say the Trump accounts may not offer the best investment incentives. The move is also not without precedent: the United Kingdom operated a similar Child Trust Fund with government seed funding from 2002-2011 before discontinuing the program, while Singapore runs the Baby Bonus Scheme that includes government-matched savings accounts for children. Trump was optimistic about returns, saying beneficiaries would 'really be getting a big jump on life, especially if we get a little bit lucky with some of the numbers and the economies into the future'. Johnson warned that failure to pass the legislation would result in 'the largest tax increase in American history' and pushed for swift congressional action on what he called 'pro-growth legislation' that would 'help every single American'. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Hill
40 minutes ago
- The Hill
DOGE's Supreme Court victory is a huge loss for Americans' privacy
The six justices comprising the far-right majority on the Supreme Court just radically endorsed a sweeping intrusion into the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans by the Department of Government Efficiency or 'DOGE,' without so much as the pretense of a justification. One must seriously wonder what their endgame really is, because it's not about upholding the law. With the exception of a reference to the Treasury Department, the Constitution says nothing about federal agencies. Congress creates them pursuant to its Article I powers to legislate. But Congress did not pass any legislation creating the Department of Government Efficiency. It was declared into existence by President Trump via executive order when he took office in January. What's more, for the real federal agencies that Congress actually creates, Article II of the Constitution mandates that their officers — the agency heads or 'secretaries' — must be appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The outgoing 'head' of DOGE, Elon Musk, was neither. Congressionally created agency heads are also confined to the job descriptions established under a governing statute for each particular agency. For DOGE, Trump directed the actual federal agencies to create 'DOGE Teams' to 'coordinate their work' with Musk and to 'advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President's DOGE Agenda.' This kind of uber-power over agencies is constitutionally unprecedented. The point of mandating Senate confirmation of agency heads is of course to enable elected representatives of the people to gather information about a candidate's qualifications and possible disqualifying characteristics, such as conflicts of interest that would make it difficult or impossible for an officer to neutrally exercise the duties of their office. According to an April report from Senate Democrats, Musk and his companies faced upwards of $2.37 billion in legal liability stemming from 65 pending or potential federal investigations, regulations and litigation across 11 agencies relating to his companies — including Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reported in February that Musk would simply 'excuse himself' if a conflict of interest arose. That cynical strategy failed. In firing tens of thousands of federal employees, including over a dozen inspectors general, Musk managed to muck around with numerous agencies that regulate him — such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is now nearly defunct, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is grossly inappropriate self-dealing. A lawsuit filed by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees complained that Musk's DOGE team members were violating a slew of federal laws, including the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Social Security Act, the Tax Revenue Act of 1976 and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014. The Privacy Act protects citizens' sensitive data unless government access is 'for a necessary and proper purpose' and mandates that 'adequate safeguards' be in place 'to prevent misuses of this information.' Information cannot even be shared between agencies without the consent of the people whose personal data is implicated. In April, a federal judge in Maryland agreed that Trump's unfettered data-collection effort was legally dubious, finding that the pretense that it was necessary to detect 'fraud, waste and abuse' was not enough to overcome the myriad statutory protections for individual Americans' private data. The judge issued an order temporarily enjoining DOGE from harvesting unlimited amounts of information from the Social Security Administration — which may include birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, drivers' license numbers, tax return information, bank account information, credit card numbers, employment and wage histories, citizenship and immigration records, and detailed medical records. Trump's executive order requires agencies to give the DOGE teams 'full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.' The lawsuit is thus a standoff between Trump's roving DOGE snoops and the rule of law itself. In a terse order issued without full briefing or oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts — on behalf of the six conservative justices in the majority — sided with DOGE, reversing the district court's temporary injunction and allowing Musk's minions to access a treasure trove of personal data while the district court's decision is on appeal. Normally, when a district court issues an order, that order holds while it is appealed (absent some finding of exceptional circumstances). In this case, DOGE was positioned to possibly get what it wants down the line, either from the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit or from the Supreme Court in due course, while the case makes its way through the system. In the meantime, the status quo of keeping statutory protections in place for regular Americans would stand — just like it has under every president before Trump. Instead, Roberts found that it is DOGE — not the American people — that would irreparably suffer if the legal questions are given time to percolate on appeal. DOGE gets the goods immediately. If the plaintiffs manage to secure a ruling affirming the district court on appeal many months from now, thus undoing the Supreme Court's stay, the damage will already have been done. The data is already breached. There is no longer a remedy. To justify his decision, Roberts properly cited the four-part test for granting a temporary stay of an injunction: Trump must show that he will likely win under the various federal laws that otherwise protect the data, that he'd be irreparably damaged without a stay, that the stay will not 'substantially injure' other parties (like Americans who want their personal data to remain secure) and that a stay is in the broader public interest. The wrinkle is that Roberts didn't bother to actually analyze any of these factors. He just summarily concluded they were satisfied. Too bad for the plaintiffs — and too bad for the American people, whose personal data is now in the hands of DOGE and anyone else it cares to share it with. Roberts simply reasoned that the DOGE team must get access to the records 'for those members to do their work.' In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that 'the 'urgency' underlying the government's stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes.' The majority nonetheless is 'jettisoning careful judicial decision-making and creating grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process.' Since the landmark 1803 decision Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court's job has included holding the other branches of government accountable to federal statutes. By baldly eschewing its constitutional role while hiding behind a veneer of legitimacy, today's conservative majority is much like DOGE, the entity it put above the law: a fake. Kimberly Wehle is author of the book 'Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why.'
Atlantic
41 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Red Tape Isn't the Only Reason America Can't Build
The buzziest idea in Democratic politics right now is the 'abundance agenda,' which criticizes liberals for saddling government programs with bureaucratic red tape that delays those programs to the point of never delivering. Few examples seem to illustrate the point better than rural broadband. As part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, Congress allocated $42.5 billion in subsidies to a new Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. Its required 14 procedural steps to actually get this funding to internet service providers, or ISPs—companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Frontier—along with significant labor, environmental, and domestic-production requirements, seem to fit the pattern of a well-intentioned program that has been stuffed with too many bells and whistles. (One of us, Asad Ramzanali, worked on broadband issues including BEAD in both the House of Representatives and the White House.) Thus, three and a half years after the law passed, shovels have still not broken ground on any project funded by this program, as the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently explained to an incredulous Jon Stewart, who lamented the 'incredibly frustrating, overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine that keeps people from getting broadband.' Figuring out how to provide high-speed internet to all Americans has been an important public-policy goal for decades. As the coronavirus pandemic made painfully clear, broadband is crucial to full participation in society. And multiple empirical studies have shown that increased broadband access is correlated with stronger economic growth. Yet more than 7 million homes and businesses still do not have access. But the current political debate misunderstands the nature of the problem at almost every level. When it comes to broadband, procedural simplicity on its own hasn't worked in the past and won't work in the future. The deeper issue is that the United States government has abandoned the full range of policy tools that would actually get the job done. Any effort to achieve 'abundance' must start by recognizing that red tape isn't the only reason America can't seem to build anymore. The BEAD program does seem overcomplicated. It requires the Federal Communications Commission to complete a national map of where broadband is currently missing, the Commerce Department to distribute funding to states, state-level broadband offices to allocate subgrants to internet service providers, and the ISPs to deploy cables to connect homes to the internet. The numerous intermediate steps—initial planning grants, five-year action plans, map challenges, final plans, and more—sound like the kind of red tape that blocks progress and generates distrust in government. The solution seems glaringly obvious: simplify the steps. Cut out all the middlemen and empower the FCC to provide money directly to ISPs as efficiently and quickly as possible. Any reasonable person would reach that conclusion. The first Trump administration had the same thought. In 2020, the FCC rolled out a multibillion-dollar program called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). To allocate the money, the FCC quickly identified areas that had insufficient service. It then held a reverse auction of small geographic plots, awarding the subsidy to whichever ISP submitted the lowest bid for each plot. There was no notice of funding opportunity. No planning grants. No five-year action plans. No subgranting process. No state broadband offices. And no labor, environmental, small-business, or diversity requirements. ISPs quickly bid a cumulative $9.2 billion to serve high-speed broadband to 5.2 million homes and businesses. Jerusalem Demsas: Not everyone should have a say In many ways, RDOF was a neoliberal economist's dream—an efficient allocation of scarce public resources distributed through a competitive process. But removing bureaucratic steps turned out not to result in a better outcome. Without accurate mapping data to understand where need existed, RDOF allowed ISPs to bid on serving such locations as an empty patch of grass, industrial-park storage tanks, and a luxury resort that already had broadband. Without proper due diligence, other providers committed to projects that were not technically or financially feasible. As a result, the RDOF program still hasn't delivered much broadband to Americans. More than one-third of the bids have already been deemed in default, according to the FCC. In other words, nearly 2 million of the 5.2 million promised locations will never get service under the program, and that number is likely to keep growing. Worse, many of these locations may not get service from BEAD, either, because RDOF was assumed to cover them. Within that context, Congress's approach to the BEAD program—making sure that broadband maps are accurate; that state governments, who know their residents and needs best, develop thorough plans that will ensure long-lasting service; and that communities have opportunities to provide input—is less baffling. With the benefit of hindsight, the process should have been simpler. But Congress was clearly responding to the failures of RDOF, which meant more checks in the system. Why is internet service a problem that the government needs to solve, anyway? The answer is that private-sector companies seek to maximize profits, but in many rural areas, building networks is unprofitable. There might not be enough customers to offset the onetime costs of construction or even the ongoing costs of repairs, customer service, and overhead. To date, the federal government's approach to promote service in unprofitable areas has almost exclusively been to subsidize private companies. The first federal broadband subsidies go back to at least 1995. Since then, the U.S. has put more than $100 billion into broadband expansion, primarily into rural areas, across more than 100 federal programs. Like RDOF, many of these programs have severely underperformed. This is what happens when government loses the ability, or the will, to undertake more direct interventions in the market and to challenge, not merely subsidize, corporations. A century ago, America faced a problem almost identical to the broadband shortage: rural electrification. Well into the 20th century, life in much of rural America was little changed from the 19th. Without electric appliances—refrigerators, washing machines, even lamps—running a farm was backbreaking, round-the-clock work. By 1935, private providers had electrified more than 80 percent of nonfarm households but only 11 percent of farm households. That year, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress created the Rural Electrification Administration to address this problem. At first, REA Administrator Morris Cooke hoped to partner with private electricity companies, not unlike our current subsidy-heavy approach for broadband. However, those companies argued that rural electrification would not be financially self-sustaining. Even with government support, they proposed building out to only 351,000 new customers, which would leave millions unconnected. The New Dealers recognized that subsidies to private firms could only go so far. So they turned to three other strategies. First, when the private sector was unable to serve all Americans, the REA organized communities across the country to develop their own, cooperatively owned electricity-distribution networks, funded by the federal government. The REA encouraged state laws to charter these cooperatives, provided engineering support to build infrastructure, and assisted cooperatives in negotiating for sources of electrical power. Second, the New Deal created public options. Federal government–owned providers, most famously the Tennessee Valley Authority, were established to generate electricity at affordable rates. These public options functioned as an important 'yardstick,' in Roosevelt's words, to evaluate the performance of the private sector. If the private sector refused to offer electricity at affordable rates, the TVA could step in to sell electricity directly to cooperatives instead. Third, private-sector electricity providers were classified as public utilities subject to strict regulation. The government couldn't build public plants to generate power across the entire country or successfully organize every community. So it required electric companies to expand services to cover everyone in their existing and adjacent service areas, even households that were unprofitable to serve. These utilities were required to set prices that allowed them to turn reasonable but not excessive profits. George Packer: How Virginia took on Dominion Energy The REA was a success. By 1940, a quarter of farm households were electrified, and by 1953, that figure had risen to 90 percent. That same year, retail rural electricity rates approximated rates found in urban areas. A similar approach could be applied to rural broadband today. Local governments could offer public broadband—as happened in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has one of the fastest broadband networks in the world, run by the municipally owned electric company, a public option that competes with Xfinity and AT&T. Cooperatives could purchase internet service in the same way as they buy electricity. And public-utility regulations could require broadband providers to cover areas adjacent to their service areas at a reasonable price in exchange for rate regulation. So why has the federal government focused on subsidizing for-profit ISPs rather than using the mixed approach that worked during the New Deal era? Consider what happened in Chattanooga. After its municipal model proved successful, ISPs saw a threat and mobilized. They successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass laws restricting public options in broadband. Twenty-five states, including Tennessee, had such laws on the books in 2019, according to a report by BroadbandNow. In Congress, Democrats have repeatedly proposed federal legislation to preempt such state laws, but those proposals have languished. And although some of the state limits on public options have been repealed, 16 states still restrict municipal broadband. Lobbying from ISPs might likewise explain why the FCC has never used its existing legal authority to require ISPs to expand service at mandated affordable prices. (A conservative appeals court foreclosed that option for the FCC only recently.) The lesson of rural broadband is that some government failures are due not to procedural excess, but to giving up on regulatory tools that might antagonize Big Business. Unfortunately, learning this lesson again may now cost us $42.5 billion. Last week, the Department of Commerce rolled back many procedural hoops of the BEAD program—ostensibly with the same goals as RDOF. It's tempting to think that America can learn how to build again without having to wage difficult battles against powerful corporate interests, simply by eliminating bureaucratic red tape. But if efficient building were really so easy, we'd already be doing it.
