Latest news with #Flores
NBC News
4 days ago
- Politics
- NBC News
Hispanic colleges targeted by lawsuit push back in court
The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities is joining a legal fight over the fate of a federal program aimed at addressing educational disparities in higher education. This week, the association, better known as HACU, filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit that seeks to dismantle the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program — which provides federal grants to universities and colleges with a student body that is over 25% Latino. The program created by Congress provides grants to universities already educating the majority of the nation's Hispanic college students to expand their ability to help 'Hispanic students and other low-income individuals complete postsecondary degrees.' HACU is now part of the effort started last month by the Students for Fair Admissions — the same group behind the legal challenges that resulted in the Supreme Court striking down college affirmative action programs in 2023 — and the state of Tennessee to sue the Department of Education over the HSI program. They allege it ' discriminates based on ethnicity ' and are calling on the federal court to deem it unconstitutional. The association representing Hispanic universities also alleges that the lawsuit unfairly characterizes the HSI program, since the added resources from the grants benefit the entire student body of the institution. "We want our side of the story to be heard by the court before they decide on the case," Dr. Antonio R. Flores, president and chief executive officer of HACU, told NBC News on Friday. Flores said HSI-designated schools don't automatically get grants based on the number of Hispanic students on their campus. They must 'compete among themselves' to access the money and must prove that the majority of their students are low-income and that they 'spend less money per student than their peer institutions.' "This is not about preferential treatment. It is about equitable resource allocation for institutions,' Flores said. In court filings Thursday, Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee did not oppose HACU's motion to join the case as a defendant. The Department of Education has not yet responded to the complaint in court. It also did not respond to an email from NBC News seeking comment on Friday. To identify which colleges and universities serve the majority of the nation's Hispanic students, Congress defined Hispanic-Serving Institutions as those that have at least 25% of its full-time student population be of Hispanic or Latino descent. The HSI designation is based on geography and demographics, Fran Fajana, an attorney at LatinoJustice representing HACU in this case, told NBC News. 'It's not because the institution went out of its way to recruit a lot of Latino students.' The percentage of Latinos with a college degree still lags far behind white students. In 2022, about 21% of Latino adults over 25 had a bachelor's degree, compared to 42% for non-Hispanic whites, according to census figures. Students for Fair Admissions, which is led by conservative activist Ed Blum, referred to the 25% requirement as an ' arbitrary ethnic threshold" when it published a news release about the lawsuit on June 11. "This lawsuit challenges a federal policy that conditions the receipt of taxpayer-funded grants on the racial composition of a student body," Blum said in a statement last month. The Office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in another statement from that the "rule leaves many needy students out in the cold." "The HSI program's discriminatory grant standards are just as illegal," Skrmetti said in the statement. Their lawsuit is part of a series of legal challenges brought forward in recent years — following the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action — against schools, scholarships, internships and other educational programs that mention race or ethnicity in their criteria. Once an institution is competitively awarded a grant, there is no requirement in the HSI program limiting how those resources are distributed across the school, Fajana said. "Whether they've gotten the resources to expand their science program laboratories [or]capacity building," she said, "those resources are not limited to Latino students." A 2023 study from the Urban Institute found that the investments made by HSI-designated institutions increased the number of students of all races and ethnicities who completed college and obtained bachelor's degrees. "What is at stake?" Flores said, "Success in advancement of, not just the Latino community, but all of the students who go to HSIs and benefit from the funding."
New York Post
5 days ago
- Sport
- New York Post
‘That was a crazy time': 10 years later, remembering wild night Wilmer Flores wasn't traded
Access the Mets beat like never before Join Post Sports+ for exciting subscriber-only features, including real-time texting with Mike Puma about the inside buzz on the Mets. Try it free The Mets will be in San Francisco on Friday night, just shy of the 10-year anniversary of the non-trade that helped turn their 2015 season around, the one that involved (or at least almost involved) Wilmer Flores. Flores is now in his 13th year in the majors — and sixth with the Giants — but anyone who was around Queens during their last World Series season remembers the infielder's role in helping get the Mets back to October. Advertisement It started on July 29, 2015, as the Mets were in the process of losing to the Padres at Citi Field and reports surfaced that Flores had been traded to the Brewers — along with Zack Wheeler — in exchange for Carlos Gomez. With the crowd buzzing, word got to Flores that he had been traded by the team he had signed with out of Venezuela in 2007.
San Francisco Chronicle
22-07-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump's immigration raids are wreaking havoc on California's economy and schools
The Trump administration's unrestrained assault on immigrants has battered California's economy and driven down attendance at its schools, a pair of recent reports contend. Taken together, the studies by researchers at UC Merced and Stanford University assert that President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda is having cascading effects that extend beyond California's under-siege immigrant communities. Examining monthly population totals from the U.S. Census Bureau, UC Merced found that nearly 465,000 California workers withdrew from the labor force the week of June 8, when federal immigration authorities descended on Los Angeles-area neighborhoods and work sites to arrest nearly 2,800 people. The drop in workers depressed private-sector employment by 3.1% from May. In the past four decades, only the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession saw greater monthly declines in private-sector workers, said associate sociology professor Edward Orozco Flores, the report 's lead author and faculty director at UC Merced's Community and Labor Center, a public research institution based in the San Joaquin Valley. The data can't explicitly say which workers stayed home or were laid off and furloughed, and doesn't indicate which industries experienced the greatest declines. But the effects were not limited to Southern California, Flores said. 'Geographically, there was no statistical difference between L.A. and the rest of the state,' he said. The reason, he surmised, was the immigration enforcement tactics on display in the state. Along with sending federal immigration agents and thousands of military troops to Los Angeles, the Trump administration has dispatched masked immigration agents to health clinics, schools, home improvement stores and immigration courts in other parts of the state, including San Francisco, where protesters clung to an unmarked ICE van leaving a courthouse earlier this month. 'What's become clear is this administration is making a remarkable spectacle around immigration enforcement,' Flores said. 'The majority of it (the worker loss) seems some kind of response to a very visible display of immigration enforcement.' Trump's California crackdown exacted a geo-specific toll in the world's fifth-largest economy, the UC Merced report shows. While the state's labor force declined significantly, the U.S. as a whole experienced a half-percent increase of roughly 563,000 workers between May and June. Most of the evaporated workers in California — 271,541, or 58% — were American citizens. Flores said there are several reasons why this would be the case, and they revolve around how interwoven the immigrant population is into the state economy. When crops go unharvested by predominantly immigrant farmworkers, the rest of the agricultural supply chain is paralyzed. When immigrants stop shopping at supermarkets and retail stores, managers reduce their employees' hours. When the immigrants who make up a significant proportion of in-home caregivers are too afraid to leave their homes, the working adults in those homes also can't go to work. 'We have long known that noncitizens do not work in a vacuum,' Flores said. 'When noncitizens are not working, it harms the entire supply chain.' Gov. Gavin Newsom noted the implications for California's economy earlier this month, when he called for an end to the raids in Los Angeles. 'Instead of targeting dangerous criminals, federal agents are detaining U.S. citizens, ripping families apart, and vanishing people to meet indiscriminate arrest quotas without regard to due process and constitutional rights that protect all of us from cruelty and injustice,' Newsom said in a July 7 statement. 'Their actions imperil the fabric of our democracy, society, and economy.' Even before Trump's recent escalation in California, parents in the state's agricultural epicenter were keeping their children home from school at alarmingly irregular rates in response to heightened immigration enforcement, according to a Stanford report released in June. On Jan. 7 — a day after Congress certified Trump's election victory — Border Patrol agents from the agency's El Centro sector conducted an unusual immigration sweep 300 miles north of their post in rural Kern County. Their Operation Return to Sender resulted in 78 arrests and about 1,000 detentions, criticism by Biden administration officials, an ACLU lawsuit and a spike in student absenteeism at southern valley school districts touched by the dragnet. Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Thomas S. Dee examined three years of daily attendance figures from five school districts in four counties — Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare — whose districts serve more than 500,000 students, more than 70% of whom are Hispanic. He found that, in January and February, absences jumped by an average of 22% across all the districts and by about 30% among the youngest students — those in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. 'That's a period where kids are learning really critical foundational skills, such as how to read,' Dee said. As with the economy, the effects are manifesting with nonimmigrant students and families. Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, said the Fresno-based nonprofit's educational partners have reported widespread fears among all their students, including U.S.-born students with immigrant parents and friends. 'It extends beyond the undocumented individual,' he said. Some 5.5 million U.S.-born children live with a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to a Center for Migration Studies analysis of census data. The California Legislature has considered 23 immigration enforcement-related bills this year, seven of which concern schools. Bills to deny access to federal immigration authorities to schools if they don't have a warrant or a court order and to require schools to notify parents and staff when immigration authorities are on school grounds require two-thirds support to pass. Dee said public schools are still grappling with a post-pandemic knot of chronic absenteeism, sagging enrollment and declining funding, problems he expects the raids to exacerbate. He said fall enrollment figures will help indicate how California's schools, whose funding is tied to enrollment, responded to the Trump administration's immigration incursions. 'What we're seeing could eventually become reduced enrollment if families flee the region,' he said. 'There are reasons to be concerned.' Dee also acknowledged the Trump administration would likely be untroubled by this result, as another one of its priorities is dismantling the public education system. 'It seems consistent with other ways in which the administration has been creating disruptions and even chaos in education,' he said, noting the administration's 'evisceration' of the Department of Education and its threats to Title I funding, intended to address achievement gaps among lower-income students. As for what happens next, Flores pointed to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Along with adding as much as $6 trillion to the national debt, Trump's signature domestic policy achievement will supercharge immigration enforcement by $170 billion and turn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country's largest law enforcement agency. 'No one has a crystal ball, but I think it would be reasonable to expect that this trend will continue and possibly even worsen,' Flores said. 'If this is the effect we're seeing due to the escalation of June 8 and we can expect further escalations, it is difficult to imagine that things simply go back.'
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Yahoo
Housing activist who 'reclaimed' state-owned home dies amid eviction protest
Benito Flores, who more than five years ago seized a state-owned home in El Sereno to protest against homelessness in Los Angeles, has died. A 70-year-old retired welder, Flores had been fighting to remain in the home. Last month, he and a group of supporters prevented Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies from evicting him from a small duplex on a narrow street in El Sereno. As part of the eviction defense, Flores constructed an elaborate tree house 28 feet high in an ash tree in the home's backyard, where he planned to retreat if police attempted to haul him out. In the six weeks since the failed eviction attempt, Flores continued to fortify the property, including building additional defenses in a second tree in the backyard. Supporters believe that Flores died after falling out of that tree. Read more: Elderly man builds tree house to protest eviction from state-owned home On Friday afternoon, a neighbor found him unresponsive on the ground near the tree with his safety harness broken, said Roberto Flores, who operates a private community center in El Sereno and helped organize the ongoing protests. "He's a martyr for human rights, for the decent right of housing for everyone," said Roberto Flores, who is not related to Benito. Benito Flores was the final holdout in a protest that captured nationwide interest when it began in March 2020. Flores and a dozen others occupied empty homes owned by the California Department of Transportation, which the agency acquired by the hundreds a half-century ago for a freeway expansion that never happened. Read more: Another group of homeless moms and families are taking over a house — this time in L.A. The activists, who call themselves "Reclaiming Our Homes," argued that the true crime wasn't breaking into empty houses, but rather that publicly owned homes were left vacant while tens of thousands of people lived on the streets of Los Angeles. Backed by a wave of public support, the dozen "Reclaimers" were allowed to stay legally in Caltrans-owned homes for two years through a temporary lease agreement managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. When that expired in late 2022, Flores and many Reclaimers attempted to remain in the properties, saying the alternatives offered by the housing authority were insufficient to keep them permanently housed. But as eviction threats mounted, some of the protesters began accepting settlements to leave and others were evicted. Flores continued the fight. He told The Times on the eve of the June eviction attempt that he wanted to make a statement about political leaders failing to provide housing for all who need it. Flores suffered from diabetes and said if he was removed he would have had no other option except to sleep in his van — where he lived for 14 years before the home seizure. Read more: 'I'm going to resist': Protesters who seized state-owned homes five years ago prepare for eviction battle 'Who is supposed to give permanent housing to elders, disabled and families with children?" Flores told The Times last month. "It is the city and the state. And they are evicting me.' About 50 mourners gathered at Flores' home Friday night for a vigil and ceremony honoring his life and activism. His body, covered with a white sheet, remained in the backyard and supporters placed flowers on it after paying their respects. The official cause of death remains under investigation. Personnel from the L.A. County Medical Examiner arrived at the property Friday evening to remove the body and begin their examination. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
19-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Housing activist who ‘reclaimed' state-owned home dies amid eviction protest
Benito Flores, who more than five years ago seized a state-owned home in El Sereno to protest against homelessness in Los Angeles, has died. A 70-year-old retired welder, Flores had been fighting to remain in the home. Last month, he and a group of supporters prevented Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies from evicting him from a small duplex on a narrow street in El Sereno. As part of the eviction defense, Flores constructed an elaborate tree house 28 feet high in an ash tree in the home's backyard, where he planned to retreat if police attempted to haul him out. In the six weeks since the failed eviction attempt, Flores continued to fortify the property, including building additional defenses in a second tree in the backyard. Supporters believe that Flores died after falling out of that tree. On Friday afternoon, a neighbor found him unresponsive on the ground near the tree with his safety harness broken, said Roberto Flores, who operates a private community center in El Sereno and helped organize the ongoing protests. 'He's a martyr for human rights, for the decent right of housing for everyone,' said Roberto Flores, who is not related to Benito. Benito Flores was the final holdout in a protest that captured nationwide interest when it began in March 2020. Flores and a dozen others occupied empty homes owned by the California Department of Transportation, which the agency acquired by the hundreds a half-century ago for a freeway expansion that never happened. The activists, who call themselves 'Reclaiming Our Homes,' argued that the true crime wasn't breaking into empty houses, but rather that publicly owned homes were left vacant while tens of thousands of people lived on the streets of Los Angeles. Backed by a wave of public support, the dozen 'Reclaimers' were allowed to stay legally in Caltrans-owned homes for two years through a temporary lease agreement managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. When that expired in late 2022, Flores and many Reclaimers attempted to remain in the properties, saying the alternatives offered by the housing authority were insufficient to keep them permanently housed. But as eviction threats mounted, some of the protesters began accepting settlements to leave and others were evicted. Flores continued the fight. He told The Times on the eve of the June eviction attempt that he wanted to make a statement about political leaders failing to provide housing for all who need it. Flores suffered from diabetes and said if he was removed he would have had no other option except to sleep in his van — where he lived for 14 years before the home seizure. 'Who is supposed to give permanent housing to elders, disabled and families with children?' Flores told The Times last month. 'It is the city and the state. And they are evicting me.' About 50 mourners gathered at Flores' home Friday night for a vigil and ceremony honoring his life and activism. His body, covered with a white sheet, remained in the backyard and supporters placed flowers on it after paying their respects. The official cause of death remains under investigation. Personnel from the L.A. County Medical Examiner arrived at the property Friday evening to remove the body and begin their examination.
