Las Notis is a daily news column that gets you up to speed on the political, media + other goings-on in the United States, Latin America, and the diaspora—all in one quick digest.
Here’s your glimpse at what’s going on today:
- Dawn Wooten, a nurse employed at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint this week, charging Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with subjecting immigrants to horrific conditions, including medical neglect, refusal to test for COVID-19, and hysterectomies that were conducted on women who didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Wooten had previously spoken to The Intercept and called mistreatment in the detention facility “the silent pandemic.” [The Guardian]
- A federal court has ruled that the Trump administration can phase out temporary protection statuses for more than 300,000 people from Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti who have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades. The ruling could mean people from Sudan, Nicaragua and Haiti with this status are expelled as soon as March, and El Salvadorans with this status could be expelled as early as November 2021. [NBC Latino]
- Venezuela’s chief prosecutor claimed that a U.S. citizen was arrested in the country recently and charged with an alleged terrorist plot to sabotage oil refineries and electrical services. The man reportedly had three Venezuelan co-conspirators help with the plot. [NYT]
- After botched primaries on the island, Puerto Rico’s elections commission Juan Ernesto Dávila has announced he will resign from his post, effective immediately. However, he has denied that his resignation has to do with pending lawsuits because of the primaries and said instead he is doing so for the well-being of his family, friends and church community. [NBC Latino]
- Authorities say that about 8,800 unaccompanied children have been expelled from the United States along the Mexico border, part of a broader effort of the Trump administration that many critics say exploits the pandemic and effectively ends opportunities for asylum. Many children were being detained in hotels until a U.S. district judge in Los Angeles ruled that the use of hotels for detention violated a 20-year-old settlement on the treatment of children in custody. [Al Jazeera]
- Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco took home the Leoncino d’Oro Award, one of the top prizes at the Venice Film Festival, for Nuevo Orden, a dystopian film in which the wealthy ruling class is replaced by a militarized regime. The film stars Diego Boneta, Naian González Norvind, and Mónica del Carmen [Mitu]
- Today’s Google Doodle honors Felicitas Mendez, a Puerto Rican civil rights pioneer and business owner who played a critical role fighting school segregation in California in the 1940s. She sued the school district in her town in Westminster, California, after her children were denied enrollment because of their skin color in an all-white school. A federal district court ruled her favor in 1946. [CNN]