Before leaving her home in Los Angeles, Laura looks up at the sky and whispers a prayer: “Please God, make me invisible.” She fears encountering immigration agents, getting detained, and being deported to Guatemala. It is the same prayer she has repeated since she arrived in the United States 40 years ago. Since then, seven presidents have served, and there have been multiple failed attempts to regularize millions of undocumented people. But Laura continues to live in the shadows, now with less hope than ever of changing her immigration status.

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Since May 28, dozens of people have been coming to the Fairmount Heights Library in Prince George’s County, Maryland, looking for more than books. Bread, vegetables, fruit, cereal: the facilities built to feed minds will now also feed stomachs thanks to an initiative by the county’s District 5, which has installed a free grocery store inside the local library. The idea was born to help the neediest families, whose finances have suffered in recent months. In addition to inflation — which has driven gasoline prices to new highs because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and raised the cost of basic goods — the loss of SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), pared back under the Trump administration, has hit low-income households hard.

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Seventeen months of Donald Trump’s presidency have taken a toll on his popularity among Latinos. In the 2024 election, one factor that helped the Republican return to the White House was historic support from the Latino community, primarily among men. If Hispanics have traditionally leaned toward the Democratic Party, the 2024 vote reversed that trend and, among men, Latino votes favored Trump. However, one in four Latino voters who supported him would not do so again. That is what the latest bipartisan poll released Wednesday by the Latino organization UnidosUS shows: 67% of respondents disapprove of the president’s performance, compared with 30% who approve. Sixty-eight percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction. The survey was conducted among 3,000 Latino voters between April 27 and May 14.

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It’s not a house: it’s a casita. The diminutive of casa — Spanish for “house” — is important. Not because it minimizes or diminishes what it describes, but because it implies affection, intimacy, and family. In the Caribbean, diminutives have the ability to smooth over complex topics.

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Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to Black and Latino minorities in Louisiana, issuing a ruling that weakens the protections of the Voting Rights Act. The decision also legitimizes an aggressive redistricting effort in favor of the Republican Party that will dilute Black electoral power across the South, and by its broad reach, it strikes Latino voters equally. Days later, in Virginia, the state Supreme Court struck down a redistricting plan approved just weeks earlier by referendum, nullifying an electoral map redesign that would have allowed Democrats to gain seats through multiracial coalitions. Until then, recapturing the House of Representatives in November’s midterms had seemed almost certain. Now, no one is so sure.

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