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Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Los Angeles residents build aid network for immigrants living in fear
* Los Angeles residents build aid network for immigrants living in fear Community mutual aid network supports undocumented Angelenos * Fear of deportation forces many to hide at home * Thousands of dollars donated for groceries By Rachel Parsons LOS ANGELES, - One recent Tuesday morning, volunteer Kelly Flores parked her car outside a stranger's house in a working class neighborhood of South Los Angeles and unloaded groceries worth almost $200. A petite woman met her at the front gate and, as she thanked Flores for the bags of food, she started to cry. Sonya, who asked that her real name be protected because she is undocumented, said she has rarely left her house in the past month, afraid of being arrested by federal immigration agents and deported. Huge swaths of Los Angeles, home to once-vibrant immigrant communities, have become ghost towns in the wake of increasingly volatile and militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids throughout the county, resulting in thousands of arrests since President Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants in January. Between 11 million and 13 million people live in the United States without legal status, roughly 900,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to the USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute. The Trump administration claims 140,000 people have been deported since he took office in January, but some estimates suggest only about half of that number have been removed from the country. Nationwide, 59,000 people are being held in detention, according to the nonpartisan American Immigration Council. Too scared to go to work, Sonya and scores of other residents without legal status have turned to rapid-response teams of volunteers to get food and basic necessities for their families. The response effort is an outgrowth of the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a group of 65 grassroots nonprofit organizations that document and warn communities of ICE activity. In June alone through the 26th, the latest date for which there was information, 2,205 people in the Los Angeles area were arrested by ICE, according to records released by the agency. The figure does not include arrests made by other agencies such as Customs and Border Protection. As raids became more frequent in June, anxious residents began calling the Coalition's hotlines with requests. "They weren't necessarily asking for free food," said Lupe Carrasco Cardona, the organizer and chairperson of the Association of Raza Educators, a nonprofit in the coalition. "In some cases it was, 'Can you go shop for us?'' she said. Others needed help paying rent, she said, or someone to accompany them to a doctor's visit or immigration appointment because they were afraid to go alone. The calls kept coming, so Carrasco Cardona put out a request for donations. So far, the project has raised more than $7,500 in mostly small amounts through Venmo and PayPal that have paid for groceries for more than 60 families. "We do not consider this a charitable act," Carrasco Cardona said. "We consider this an act of mutual aid because they contribute to our society in meaningful ways with their labor," she said. "This is just us giving back to them." The employment of undocumented immigrants, many from Mexico and Central America, sustains multiple industries. A June report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute showed the California economy could lose more than $212 billion in gross domestic product from direct and indirect economic activity from undocumented workers, with the biggest hits to construction and agriculture. 'UNDER SIEGE' The fear and isolation have taken a toll on Sonya's family, she said. "I'm scared," she said, in tears, adding that she does not let her children go to a nearby park to play. "I don't know how to keep them safe." After the Trump administration rescinded guidance in January that limited or prevented immigration activity near schools and hospitals, ICE agents were spotted in hospitals in Los Angeles. Federal officials have claimed they are only entering these buildings as escorts to detainees needing medical attention. Although some of Sonya's children are U.S. citizens, her eldest daughter, who is pregnant and due in August, is not. But the family is afraid to go to the hospital for the delivery after seeing reports of immigration agents entering medical facilities, she said. Los Angeles used to feel "like a safe haven," Flores said after she left Sonya's house. "Now the city's been under siege." In June, the Trump administration federalized and deployed 4,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quash protests in response to increasing immigration raids and to aid ICE agents. 'HANG ON TO THAT HOPE' Carrasco Cardona and Flores, both schoolteachers, are part of a core group of seven to nine volunteers buying groceries and making deliveries. Most are teachers, and they worry about what will happen when they go back to work when the school year starts in mid-August. The start of the school year will give three of Sonya's children a much needed diversion, but she worries they could be targeted going to or from school or she might be arrested while they are away and they would not know what happened to her. For now, the family has put systems in place. When Sonya needs to do laundry, for example, she sends one daughter to the laundromat first to make sure there are no immigration agents in sight, and then she goes. It is one of the only times she will leave the house. Seeing such fear and anxiety daily, the volunteers try to reassure the immigrants that there is a community that supports and cares for them. "We want them to know you are not alone," Carrasco Cardona said. "They need to hang on to that hope as long as they can to get them through this," she said. PayPal Holdings Inc This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
Hindustan Times
29-07-2025
- Climate
- Hindustan Times
U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data
* U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data U.S. to suspend data sharing from three meteorological satellites after July * Data loss hinders ability to monitor hurricanes accurately * Hurricane forecasters left using half of previous remote sensing data By Rachel Parsons LOS ANGELES, - Nine months after Hurricane Helene ripped through Shirley Scholl's home in Florida, inundating it with four feet of storm surge and sewage, her family can finally see some rebuilding progress. Crews working on the skinny island of Clearwater Beach just off the coast have started to elevate the remains of the structure more than 13 feet to meet new federal building regulations in response to the devastating hurricane. The disaster in September 2024 killed at least 250 people and caused nearly $79 billion in damages, making it the deadliest hurricane in the U.S. in 20 years, according to the National Weather Service. "We had to take everything in the whole house down to the studs," said Lisa Avram, Scholl's daughter, who is overseeing the reconstruction. But as families rebuild from last year's storms, this year's Atlantic hurricane season is underway, with even more risk than before. Not only do forecasters warn it will likely be busier than average, with three to five "major" hurricanes predicted, but the job of forecasting has become more challenging. The U.S. Department of Defense last month surprised hurricane forecasters by announcing it was suspending data sharing from three of its meteorological satellites, cutting the available data that meteorologists use by about half. The data sharing has helped forecasters accurately pinpoint the size, location and intensity of hurricanes for two decades. "It's all sorts of problematic," said Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist with television station WPLG in Miami, Florida, and formerly of the National Hurricane Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . NOAA issued an internal message announcing the service would end no later than June 30. After a last minute intervention by the space agency NASA, NOAA announced the service would extend until no later than July 31 and was being suspended to "mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk." "[The data sets] were really important for telling us how strong a hurricane currently is, but also how strong it might get," Lowry said. These are not run-of-the-mill satellites tracking things from high above the clouds as seen on radar images but operate in low polar orbits using microwaves to 'see into' a hurricane in ways other satellites cannot, according to Lowry. Without them, the ability for forecasters to issue early warnings is hobbled, he said. "With less time to prepare for a hurricane, people can't evacuate. You have a lot more people and lives that are at risk," Lowry said, adding that emergency management services cannot pre-position resources such as search-and-rescue teams that look for survivors. The loss of data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program means the amount of remote sensing information forecasters can access drops by half, Lowry said. With three fewer government satellites available to forecasters, the remaining satellites may only produce information on a strengthening hurricane every six to 12 hours instead of every few hours, giving storms a much bigger window to grow without being observed, he said. Traditional satellites offer limited detail during the day and produce even less at night. "The concern is what many in our community would call a 'sunrise surprise,' where you go to bed at eight o'clock at night and it's a tropical storm," Lowry said. "And we wake up in the morning and it's on the doorstep, and it's a Category Three or Four hurricane," he said. 'GIANT LOSS' Thousands of miles from the tropical hurricane zone, sea ice is closely tracked by the DMSP satellites as well. Climatologists who study polar sea ice and climate change have used these data sets for decades, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. Losing access is "quite shocking," Labe said. "These satellites … have really told the story of Arctic climate change for the last almost five decades now," he said. "It's been a real key data for cryosphere science," allowing observation of long-term sea ice variability and trends, he added. Coastal communities such as those in Alaska rely on sea ice information to help prepare for storms and flooding and make decisions about transportation and hunting. Labe said other satellites controlled by countries such as Japan have the same capability. But Japan's systems have not been operating as long, and now there is a "scramble" to match timelines of different satellites so there is no gap in the record. Climate scientists need "more data, not less," and the satellites served a wide variety of climate research, he said. "It's a giant loss," Labe said. A U.S. Navy spokesperson confirmed in an email that DMSP data sharing would end on July 31. The DMSP is scheduled to be discontinued altogether in September 2026," given it "no longer meets our information technology modernization requirements," according to the spokesperson. In Florida, Lisa Avram and her family live day-to-day on tenterhooks. Losing satellite information seems like a "seriously dangerous proposition" for herself and other storm survivors who have their houses in various phases of the elevation. "We're in hurricane season, so when your house is up in the air, they're even more dangerous because they're not secured," she said. "I worry every time the wind blows here if my mom's house is going to be OK." This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
