Latest news with #Pichardo
NBC News
30-07-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Progressive group endorses four Latinas in competitive House districts
With the midterm elections over a year away, a progressive Latino group is announcing its support for four Democratic candidates who could be the first Latinas to represent their congressional districts. Latino Victory Fund, an organization focused on increasing Latino political representation, is endorsing Marlene Galán-Woods and JoAnna Mendoza in Arizona's 1st and 6th districts, respectively; Denise Powell in Nebraska's 2nd District; and Carol Obando-Derstine in Pennsylvania's 7th District. They will face Democratic primary challengers in districts many expect to be among the most competitive on the midterm map next year. The early endorsements unlock a number of benefits for the candidates, including social media rollouts, direct contributions to their campaigns from the group's political action committee and access to a national network of funders, CEO and President Katharine Pichardo told NBC News before the endorsements were announced. 'These are all outstanding candidates,' Pichardo said. 'They are top-notch advocates and professionals who have their fingers on the pulse of their communities.' While Latinos have traditionally leaned Democratic, recent elections have shown a shift toward the Republican Party. In 2024, Donald Trump captured an ethnically and racially diverse coalition of voters and made substantial gains among Latino voters, winning 48% of the Hispanic vote, while Democrat Kamala Harris won 51%, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. By contrast, Joe Biden won 61% of the Hispanic vote in 2020, compared with 36% for Trump. Latinos make up almost 20% of the U.S. population but only 2% of the country's elected officials. Pichardo argued that supporting Latino candidates is necessary 'because representation matters — you need people in office who are going to be consistent with our values as a community and that have the lived experiences that allow them to be good representatives for our community.' The Latina candidates come from diverse backgrounds. Galán-Woods, a Republican-turned-Democrat, is making a second run for Congress in an Arizona district that includes parts of north Phoenix, Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. The seat is held by Republican David Schweikert, who won his 2024 race by 2 percentage points. Galán-Woods, a Cuban American, will face Amish Shah in the Democratic primary; Shah defeated her last year and became the Democratic candidate. Mendoza, a Mexican American veteran and the daughter of farmworkers, is seeking to unseat Mexican-born Rep. Juan Ciscomani, a Republican, in Arizona's 6th District. The district stretches throughout parts of Pima County and much of Tucson and Cochise counties. Ciscomani won a second term last year by a comfortable margin. Other potential Democratic candidates have filed paperwork indicating their interest in the race. Powell, of Cuban and Chilean descent, co-founded Women Who Run Nebraska, an organization that motivates women to run for office, and she is running in Nebraska's 2nd District. Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who has a reputation as a centrist, recently announced he would not seek a sixth term. Previous election cycles have featured tight races between Bacon and his Democratic opponents. Several other Democrats have announced their candidacies, including John Cavanaugh, a state senator whose father, John J. Cavanaugh III, represented the district, which includes Omaha, from 1977 to 1981. Obando-Derstine would be running to represent Pennsylvania's 7th District, a seat held by Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Obando-Derstine, born in Colombia, previously served on Gov. Tom Wolf's Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs and worked for Sen. Bob Casey. The district is considered one of the most competitive in the country and one of the most expensive. Two other Democrats are running, including Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, who has been in Democratic politics for 15 years. The GOP holds a narrow majority in the House, with 219 Republicans and 212 Democrats. Historically, the president's party tends to lose ground in midterm elections as voters punish the party in office. Trump's approval numbers are around 43%, a historically low number compared with other presidents, though it is slightly higher than in his first term, according to an NBC News analysis. But the Democratic Party's image is at its lowest point in three decades, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. In the past, Latino Victory Fund has made high-six-figure investments in support of Latina candidates, Pichardo said. 'These are trailblazing Latinas that will be making history — but at the end of the day, how we bring back Latinos is really through a plan,' she said, 'including a focus on building a new coalition that speaks to voters on the issues that matter most to them.'
USA Today
25-07-2025
- Business
- USA Today
ICE raided a popular swap meet. Now vendors and and customers are coming back.
Gerardo Pichardo used to set out his electronics and Amazon overstock products for sale in an indoor space at the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet. But after an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on June 14 at the Los Angeles area hub for Spanish-speaking Latino vendors, he said he now sets up outside, "with only essential things, so if anything happens I can get out of here fast." Vendors such as Pichardo say fear of ICE has meant a loss of customers and fewer vendors this summer. Some vendors stopped showing up, and the ones who continued selling said their business declined, though it is slowly recalled that a few years ago, he saw a tribute to Maná — a Mexican rock band — perform at the swap meet. He remembered a crowd of people drinking and dancing to the music. Two such concerts have been canceled since the raid. The swap meet is a place where customers find deals for as low as a dollar, attend live performances and enjoy a sense of community. A month after the raid, canopies shielding vendors from the sun speckled the outdoor lot, with goods laid out on tables and the ground. Signs read '$1' or "$2." Vendors called out to the occasional passing customer. Still, a lot of aisles remained empty. Some vendors left early. A man selling kitchen supplies packed up his antiques and silverware two hours ahead of closing time. But the community spirit of the swap meet is still alive with him and many others. He sold a toaster for $2 to a skeptical customer, telling him that if it didn't work, he could bring it back. Cecilia Soriano, who has been selling groceries at the swap meet for a year and a half, said her business has been cut in half since the raid. She hasn't seen some of her regular customers in weeks. The day of the raid, a woman came around to inform vendors about ICE agents in the area. When her customers passed by, Soriano warned them. Pichardo, who has been selling at the swap meet for five years, also remembers the day of the ICE raid. He was sitting in the booth with his dad when he heard someone on the phone mention that ICE was two blocks away. Many vendors left. He packed his products into his truck and drove away. As he exited the lot, he saw two unmarked white vans outside. Not long after, according a statement the Santa Fe Swap Meet's statement posted on Instagram, more than 110 armed federal agents in tactical gear, alongside a military helicopter, raided the swap meet and detained at least two people hours before a concert with five Mexican bands was supposed to take place. 'It was a regular day until somebody said 'ICE,'' Pichardo said. 'Then everyone was panicking. They knew ICE was in the area, but they didn't know they would come in.' A friend who has been selling clothes at the swap meet for nearly 10 years hid in a shipping container for several hours until everybody left to avoid the chaos of the raid, Pichardo said. In its statement on Instagram, the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet said of the raid that they 'were given no notice of their arrival and at no point' consented to ICE enforcement. 'To be clear, the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, and its personnel did not coordinate with ICE or participate in any preplanning of immigration enforcement with federal officials,' they said in the statement. 'These actions were completely out of our control.' Swap meet managers declined to comment on the effects of the raid on vendors and customers. The raid at Santa Fe Springs reverberated elsewhere. At the Vineland Swap Meet in La Puente, California, vendors also said they've seen a decline in business, even though their swap meet has not been raided. Felipe, who asked that his last name not be shared because he fears ICE will target his family, has been selling packaged food, restaurant supplies and knickknacks at the Vineland meet with his parents for over 15 years. He also said that business had declined in the last month since the ICE raids, but it is slowly increasing. In an interview on July 16, he said that day was the busiest it had been since the raids started. Still, not everything has returned to normal. He said that there was a woman across from his booth that initially sold clothes but started selling tools at Vineland; since the raids started, her spot has been empty. She was there longer than his family was. He said it is sad not seeing her and wondering if it is because of fear. His family also has regular customers, and he said there are many he hasn't seen since the raids started, but for the most part many still go to be supportive. It is the way his family sustains their livelihood. 'I think a lot of people are afraid, so they don't, they don't drop by,' Felipe said. 'I think it's recently been picking it back up, but it's still slow.' Wendy Alma Flores, who has been at a booth ath the Vineland meet giving senior citizens information about Medicare for a year and a half, said that she was initially scared for her clients and she was even afraid to go to the meet because she didn't want to put anyone at risk. She said many vendors didn't have a choice and returned because they needed the income. But she said she believes more people are showing up because they are learning about their rights, getting more educated and learning how to protect themselves. As a local, Flores said she has been going to the swap meet since she was a kid and remembers walking through the lines of vendors with her family. Now she has her own booth with regulars who sit with her just to have a conversation. 'It's good to see people come back and just see the community united again,' Flores said. 'People actually care about each other.' At the Santa Fe Springs meet, almost five weeks after the raid, Soriano saw a weekly customer she fondly refers to as 'güera' return for the first time. She said the woman usually buys candy, fruit-juice punch and Gatorade. She has been encouraging more people to come back to the swap meets. 'A lot of these people, they're family to me,' Soriano said. The community is starting to rebuild. In a July 17 interview, Pichardo said it was the busiest the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet had been in weeks. He said the rebuilding of the community speaks to the resilience of Latinos in Los Angeles. 'That's the Latino community. We do come together in a time of need, and we do support each other when it's necessary,' Pichardo said. 'It's started picking up already.'
Miami Herald
21-04-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Lines at Miami's DMV offices stretch for hours. What's being done?
Kimberly Pichardo, 27, took a spot in the DMV line around 9 a.m. on a cloudless Wednesday afternoon, back when her phone was fully charged and she wasn't worried about the afternoon pickup time at her son's school. But as 2 o'clock approached under the Miami sun, a couple dozen people still stood between Pichardo and the Miami Central DMV office inside a shopping center off the Dolphin Expressway. Teachers had dismissed her son's class about a half-hour earlier, leaving Pichardo to scramble for a plan B while her phone's battery remained alive. 'I called my mom to pick him up right before my phone died,' Pichardo said. 'What can I do?' For people like Pichardo needing a driver's license issued or updated in South Florida, there's no easy answer to that question beyond the obvious one: get in line and wait. Online portals for the 15 DMV offices in Broward and Miami-Dade routinely show no openings available — even eight weeks out. Lines for walk-up slots at the offices start forming hours before the doors open — and sometimes even the night before. While the staff did eventually open their doors to everyone in line the day Pichardo arrived, waits lasted hours. 'It's a mess,' Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez said as he approached the afternoon line outside the Central office, an operation he recently inherited from the state. 'We've got to fix it.' For now, Florida still controls all five driver's-license offices in Broward and seven of the 10 in Miami-Dade. Until January, those were the only two counties in Florida that still had appointed tax collectors, meaning they were also the only two counties to have state-run DMVs. A constitutional amendment passed in 2018 now requires all counties to elect their tax collectors. In November, Miami-Dade voters elected Fernandez, a Republican software company owner, and Broward voters elected Abbey Ajayi, a Democrat and veteran of that county's Tax Collector's Office. Those elections also triggered the slow-moving end to the state running DMV offices in South Florida. State rules require elected tax collectors to run licensing offices in their counties, and now Broward and Miami-Dade fall under that mandate. While an Ajayi spokesperson said the Broward Tax Collector's Office plans to take over state DMV offices next summer, Fernandez is adding them to his portfolio already. Last month, he took over the Northside Justice Center DMV office (15555 Biscayne Blvd. in North Miami) and said he expects to take over the DMV's Mall of the Americas location (7795 W. Flagler St. near Westchester) sometime in May. He also brought driver's-license services to the Tax Collector's Office headquarters in downtown Miami (200 NW Second Ave.). The takeover comes as DMV offices are overwhelmed by demand in South Florida, with visa crackdowns spurring more immigrants to secure government identification and a May 7 deadline looming for the federal Real ID program, which requires U.S. citizens to have up-to-date licenses or a passport if they want to board a domestic flight. (In Florida, a Real ID-compliant license has a star on the upper right corner.) Fernandez promises major improvements on wait times and says progress is already underway in the three DMV locations his staff now runs. 'We inherited a crisis,' he said. A representative for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles was not available for comment this week. Andrew Lopez, director of motorist services under Fernandez, said the Tax Collector's Office has expanded staffing at the Central office in the past few weeks. On the day of Pichardo's visit, there were 33 windows open inside, up from about a dozen when the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles turned it over to Fernandez earlier this month. With more windows open, more people are being seen — Lopez said the average daily count is now about 700 customer visits on an average day, up from about 450 when the Tax Collector's Office took over. Fernandez said he added credit-card scanners to each window, saving a trip to the cashier's section for customers who don't want to pay in cash. He also says Central is seeing a reduction in no-show appointments after improved scheduling software eliminated the ability to book unlimited time slots with a single phone number. Fernandez said the old software his office inherited allowed driving schools to tie up hundreds of time slots a day for students, even though most of the appointments were never used. Fernandez backed legislation recently approved by the County Commission imposing fines on anyone caught 'scalping' a DMV appointment. He's also predicting more appointment availability as Central and the other former state-run offices shift fully to appointments made under the new system. Fernandez said Central each day has about 400 appointments made under the state reservation framework — time slots the Tax Collector's Office inherited. He said the last of those state-made appointments — which Fernandez said tend to mean lots of no-shows — should be retired sometime in May, and he thinks it will be easier for people to make an appointment after that. He expects his office's booking software to also utilize AI technology to steer people to their closest DMV office, as well as speed the processing time at windows by helping staff inspect the documents required for new or modified driver's licenses. Whatever improvements may be coming, Pichardo's experience highlights the current struggles for getting a license issued, updated or renewed in South Florida. Here are some tips to make the process a bit less frustrating: Beat the early birds in DMV lines This is easier said than done, with some people camping out overnight to secure their slots in line. A 72-year-old Broward resident named Harvey told the Herald he arrived at the Sunrise DMV office at 3 a.m. to wait for the 8 a.m. opening. 'I was No. 77 in line,' he said. Harvey, who asked that his last name not be published, said the people in the front of the line had arrived at 9 the night before. Nina Dape drove the 20 miles between her home in Hollywood and the Miami-Dade Tax Collector's main office in downtown Miami on a recent morning, arriving around 3:30 a.m. 'I was sixth in line,' the 19-year-old student said. The first person there — who didn't want to give his full name — said he'd arrived at 12:30 a.m. Both were let into the downtown office the moment the doors opened at 8:30 a.m. Getting to the DMV early is key, given that the number of slots for walk-in customers at some offices can be quite limited. With only eight DMV windows, the downtown Miami office typically accepts 30 walk-ins at the start of the day but will accommodate more depending on the number of no-shows for appointments, a spokesperson said. Don't wait to hunt for a DMV appointment in Broward or Miami-Dade Appointments on the state and county online booking portals aren't impossible to get — but they're probably going to require some advanced planning. In the middle of April, the state's Miami Gardens DMV office had some morning appointments available — but not until mid-June. Carlos Castillo, 41, was able to get a new Florida license two hours after arriving at the Central office on a recent afternoon, thanks to securing a 2 p.m. appointment he'd made weeks earlier. The Illinois transplant said he went online on Feb. 26 and that April 16 was the earliest slot he could reserve. He said he was stunned the wait was so long to get a license with his new address. 'In Chicago, it's pretty straightforward,' he said. Prepare to camp to get a driver's license renewed For large DMV offices like Central (at 3721 NW Seventh St. in Miami), endurance can make the difference between a wasted day that ends with no license and a long day that ends with getting a license renewed or issued. Anthony Martinez, 27, arrived at Central roughly the same time as Pichardo. By 1 p.m., he said there would have been even more people ahead of him if not for an endurance gap. 'The reason we're here is so many people gave up and left,' he said. 'This is ridiculous.' Like Pichardo, Martinez did make it to the front of the line at the Central DMV office that day after about a five-hour wait. The line on the unshaded sidewalk in the shopping center parking lot grew and contracted throughout the day. It finally vanished around 4 p.m. after Tax Collector staff came out to instruct the last group of people to come inside the air-conditioned office. Jorge Bonet had been there since 10:30 am. Five hours later, his wife drove by to drop off a chocolate shake and McChicken sandwich from McDonald's. 'I haven't eaten anything all day,' he said.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Yahoo
Homicide in South Austin: Teenager shot, killed; teenage suspect turns himself in
The Brief Police investigating homicide in South Austin Teenager killed near 6400 block of Bradsher Drive at around 10:13 p.m. on March 30 AUSTIN, Texas - The Austin Police Department is investigating after a teenager was killed near the 6400 block of Bradsher Drive. The backstory Austin police say they responded at around 10:13 p.m. on March 30 and when officers arrived, they found an unresponsive male with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground outside a residence. Life-saving measures were administered, but the victim, later identified as 16-year-old Matthew Pichardo, was pronounced dead at the scene at 10:34 p.m. Police did talk to witnesses and the investigation revealed Pichardo had been shot by another juvenile male who fled the scene. APD says the juvenile suspect later turned himself in to Gardner Betts Juvenile Center within a few hours. The juvenile has been charged with first-degree murder. Police believe this was an isolated incident. What's next Anyone with information should contact the Austin Police Department at 512-974-TIPS. Tips can be sent anonymously through the Capital Area Crime Stoppers Program by visiting or calling 512-472-8477. A reward of up to $1,000 may be available for any information that leads to an arrest. This case is being investigated as Austin's 10th homicide of 2025. The Source Information from Austin Police Department.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Yahoo
Police: Rockford man admits to robbing a Mobil Gas Station in Loves Park
LOVES PARK, Ill. (WTVO) — Loves Park Police arrested Ony Pichardo, 32, for allegedly robbing a Mobil Gas Station by indicating he had a firearm. On Feb 12, around 9:15 p.m., officers were called to the Mobil in the 5900 block of Forest Hills Road for a call from the attendant reporting that a man driving a black Kia Sportage just robbed the convenience store. The attendant told authorities she suspected the suspect was armed when she heard a clicking sound when he put his hand in his hoodie pocket. After an investigation of surveillance footage, police determined the suspect to be Pichardo. Officials went to his address in the 900 block of Van Wie Avenue and talked to the woman whose name was listed as the owner of the Sportage. She told authorities she had not seen the SUV since that night. Officers then responded to a house in the 3300 block of Cottonwood Street where they found the vehicle used in the robbery parked in the garage. Pichardo was eventually taken into custody after attempting to run from officials. Pichardo admitted to police he robbed the gas station for two Monster energy drinks, two packs of Newport cigarettes and all the money in the register, but denied having a firearm. The suspect told authorities he used the money to buy $40 worth of crack cocaine. Officers recovered the stolen items and money from the residence on Cottonwood. Pichardo is charged with robbery and aggravated robbery while indicating possession of a firearm. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
