Nobody Wants To Sell For A Loss Like That

The De-Documented

When Ricardo and Yuli crossed the border in October of last year, they had the permission of the United States government. The couple’s petition to apply for asylum was granted following an interview at a Texas border crossing. After handling the required paperwork, the couple moved to Houston and received official work permits. Ricardo — who had run an informal taxi service in Havana — hoped to become a truck driver. In Houston, he acquired his U.S. drivers’ license, a used Honda, and began studying for the commercial trucking license exam. He and Yuli took jobs at a local car wash to make ends meet in the short-term.

In April, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the status of more than 900,000 people who had been vetted at the border for valid asylum claims by DHS personnel. Ricardo and Yuli were among them. Without papers and work permits, they were promptly fired from the car wash. The life they had been planning for over a year was suddenly cast into doubt.

In March, the Office of Refugee Resettlement — which during the Biden years offered small monthly payments to Cubans and Haitians entering the asylum process — said it no longer had enough money to continue the program, and the checks stopped coming. On the campaign trail, Trump had attacked the program as part of his deceptive narrative that the Biden administration was giving thousands of dollars to people in the country “illegally.” But the program was a lifeline for Ricardo and Yuli. They spent their first $300 check on 10-kilo bags of beans and rice at Costco, not realizing that they would not need to stockpile like they had in Cuba, where they endured constant and severe food insecurity, as well as rolling blackouts.

“We had no idea what to get, so we just got everything,” said Yuli.

In April, the Trump administration began encouraging the 900,000 people who had entered the U.S. using the CBP One app to self-deport. That’s when Ricardo and Yuli lost their work permits. In May, a member of Ricardo and Yuli’s CBP One group, who had crossed the border with them in October 2024, received an email from Customs and Border Protection informing them, “It’s time for you to abandon the United States,” and warning him that he was at risk of deportation if he chose not to return to Cuba voluntarily.

Since the email was sent only to the leader of the group, not to Ricardo and Yuli, they were not sure whether it applied to them. They felt the “confusion and dread” that the American Immigration Council says is the characteristic response to the Trump administration’s executive orders.

Without a work permit, Ricardo and Yuli were forced to look for clandestine employment at factories that pay hourly wages of between $8 and $11. On the assembly line, packaging cosmetics or food products, workers are not allowed to talk to one another and are fired on the spot if they speak during their 10-hour shifts. “I’ve worked more in the past nine months than I worked in the rest of my 52 years combined,” Yuli said. Many of the factory employees are migrants in the same position, including several pregnant women who have decided, without any other option, to keep working until they go into labor.

Since losing their parole status, both Ricardo and Yuli have questioned their decision to leave Cuba. Yuli still believes she made the right choice; Ricardo regrets the migration. But even if he wanted to go back, Ricardo has sold his house and car to pay for the journey, so he would be returning to an inferior life. “I would return home to nothing,” he said.

Since May, dozens of people who entered the U.S. using the CBP One app have been arrested by ICE agents after routine court appearances across the country. Through a loophole, even when a judge moves to dismiss a deportation order against an immigrant, ICE agents can still arrest the immigrant after the hearing and put them into expedited removal proceedings. It’s a Catch-22: fail to show up at a hearing out of fear of an ICE arrest, face an automatic deportation order; show up and get snatched off the street and deported immediately. Ricardo and Yuli have begun to expect deportation one way or the other, unless they are able to acquire green cards prior to their asylum hearing.

Exhausted by anxiety and toil, Ricardo and Yuli limit themselves to their apartment, the supermarket and the factory. “This is not what we imagined at all,” said Yuli. “But we’re here and we have no other choice.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-de-documented/

Second international fugitive wanted in Mexico arrested in Odessa, ICE says

ODESSA, Texas — A second person has been arrested in connection with a warrant out of Mexico for murder and kidnapping charges, according to a post by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Facebook.

Cesar Ricardo Rodriguez-Villarreal was arrested in Odessa on a charge of impaired driving when ICE’s El Paso office discovered he was wanted in Mexico on homicide and kidnapping charges.

This marks the second international fugitive arrest in Odessa in recent days. The first was Lizbeth Nohemi Villarreal-Portillo, who was also wanted in Mexico on similar charges. It is unclear if the two arrests are connected.

ICE said it intends to return Rodriguez-Villarreal to Mexico to face the charges.

https://www.newswest9.com/article/news/crime/second-international-fugitive-wanted-mexico-arrested-odessa-ice/513-800550d9-c6c3-4799-9d4b-bea2cd903f6c

Inside Huntington Park’s long deportation summer

Huntington Park High School Principal Carlos Garibaldi was preparing to host a graduation on his campus when frantic colleagues radioed him: Immigration is coming.

A fleet of trucks and vans was speeding up Miles Avenue in front of the school’s main building. But the fleet didn’t swoop in. They made a quick right toward a Home Depot next to the high school’s baseball field.

Armed federal agents swarmed out to chase after day laborers and food vendors. Eyewitnesses said at least four people were detained. The crowd was smaller than usual that morning, though. That’s because Huntington Park City Councilmember Jonathan Sanabria had arrived minutes earlier, after receiving a tip, to yell out that la migra was coming.

“Some people didn’t believe me,” the first-term councilmember told me, his voice catching.

The June 9 Home Depot raid kicked off a month of chaos in a city synonymous with Latino immigration in the Southern California imagination. Once a hub for blue-collar white families, Huntington Park is now 97% Latino, with 89% of households speaking a language other than English and 47% of residents foreign-born, according to the Census.

Some have blamed the corruption scandals that seem to spring up every few years on the makeup of the City Council, which has been majority Latino for the past generation.

Then-Mayor Tom Jackson stepped down in 2000 after he was caught on tape saying, “We have to come to the realization that the entire country of Mexico cannot come to California, and if we make it tough for them to come here, they won’t come.” By 2015, however, Huntington Park had become so hospitable to immigrants that a city councilmember appointed two of them living in the country illegally to serve on city commissions — a first in California.

Sanabria feels this reputation has led the Trump administration to punish Huntington Park with high-profile actions, using force better suited to a battlefield: “They know our demographics. They know exactly who we are.”

Businesses aren’t open or display signs stating that walk-ins aren’t welcome. Popular restaurants like El Gallo Giro and Tam’s are mostly empty. The weekly farmer’s market at Salt Lake Park is a proverbial ghost town. Traffic flows faster. Events and classes are canceled. Once-buzzing neighborhoods are quiet.

At a resource fair organized by local nonprofits a few weeks ago, Isabel Rangel and some friends picked up free fruit cups and toiletries. It was the first time the women had left their homes in weeks — and only because the giveaway was on their street.

“I haven’t even gone to work,” Rangel said in Spanish as her friends nodded. “The kids don’t even want to go outside, even though they’re from here. They just say, ‘La migra, la migra,’” added Rangel, a Mexican immigrant who works in a factory and has lived in Huntington Park for 24 years.

Pacific Boulevard, where mid-century buildings evoke a bygone era, is desolate. Even a victory by Mexico’s men’s soccer team over the U.S. in the July 6 Gold Cup final, which would usually inspire fans to spill onto the sidewalks and streets, drew only a few cars waving the Mexican flag.

On a recent day, Juan Perez stood outside a quinceañera shop that houses his photography business. He leaned on a plastic display with postcards highlighting his work and red business cards educating people about their rights if ICE detained them.

“It’s been so dead that business owners now get to park right in front of our stores,” the 37-year-old said with a weak laugh, as if he needed to find a silver lining. “We’ll be lucky if we can get to the end of the year this way.”

A few blocks down, Paola Martinez sat in front of her mother’s massive clothing depot, which has stood on Pacific for 35 years. It was 1 p.m., and I was the first person she had greeted all day.

“There’s a sadness here, but what are we going to do?” the native of El Salvador said. “We can’t do anything.”

Iris Delgado, 33, has strolled the Home Depot parking lot nearly every day with a cart of water bottles for day laborers and a cellphone to occasionally livestream. The L.A. County Department of Health epidemiologist is a co-founder of the Huntington Park Run Club, which regularly met up for jogs until the raids.

“We would go on runs and realize, ‘Hey, ICE picked up someone there. Oh, God, there’s another place,’” she said shortly after helping to lead a morning protest calling for a boycott of Home Depot for repeatedly allowing ICE onto its properties. “I don’t identify as an activist. But are we going to let this happen? The basic guideline of a good community is to take care of each other, so we’re here.”

In the 1970s, when Rosario Marin was a teenager recently arrived from Mexico City, deportations were a part of daily life in Huntington Park.

“My mom would come home from work and say ‘Mija, la migra came,’” said Marin, who served on the Huntington Park City Council from 1994 until she was appointed U.S. treasurer in 2001. “They’d come in, and people would just run. They’d be caught, and you’d see them within a week.”

Her family was part of a stream of Mexican migrants who moved into Southeast L.A. County as the region’s factories shut down and white residents left.

Nearby cities, including Cudahy, Maywood and South Gate, also saw dramatic demographic shifts. But nothing matched what happened in Huntington Park, the region’s oldest city. The percentage of Latino residents went from 36% in 1970 to 97% just 20 years later.

The local and national media were transfixed. A 1990 Times story reported, “Nowhere in Southern California has the dramatic influx of Latin American immigrants been more acutely felt than in Huntington Park.” A New York Times article that same year called the city a “testing ground” for whether California could successfully acclimate Latinos into its fabric; a 2000 follow-up deemed it “a citizenship incubator.” Frequent clashes between Mexican soccer fans and police on Pacific — especially a 1998 free-for-all that led to 31 arrests — prompted dispatches painting the place as an out-of-control Mexican colony.

Marin, who now lives in Walnut Park, thinks the mass deportations hitting Southern California are “heartless” and that Homeland Security’s claim of focusing on violent criminals is “nonsense.”

As a councilmember and mayor, she pushed for police to crack down on gangs and people selling fake green cards.

“They [criminals] threatened me and followed me around, so I know how difficult it is. Let’s take them out,” Marin said. “But el paletero? Give me a break.”

“I’m the former treasurer of the U.S., and I now feel like I have to carry my passport with me at all times,” she concluded. “That shows you the level of fear this community feels toward its government.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-11/huntington-park-deportations-history

‘I now feel like I have to carry my passport with me at all times’

It’s the hollowcost Rosario.

One+ by Rocket Mortgage® is a 1% down payment option

You’ve done your homework. You know you can afford the mortgage payment and handle the maintenance. The down payment is the last obstacle, but it’s a big one. After all, homes aren’t getting any cheaper. With One+ by Rocket Mortgage, you can get into a home with as little as 1% down.1 You’ll also receive a 2% grant from Rocket Mortgage.

This loan option has several benefits. Chief among them is the ability to put down as little as 1% and get into a home. Rocket Mortgage is providing a grant of 2% of the loan amount. Under this scenario, you would enter your home with 3% equity. Clients who qualify may contribute up to 3% down while still receiving the 2% grant.

This is available for both first-time and repeat home buyers. There are no restrictions on where you can live or where you move from. The program is available nationwide.

But before we go too much further, let’s show a sample loan. We’ll use a $250,000 assumed purchase price. This is a 30-year fixed loan with an interest rate of 7%.

-You bring $2,500 for a down payment (.01 × $250,000 = $2,500).
-Rocket Mortgage covers 2% of the loan amount (.02 × $250,000 = $5,000).
-Your monthly principal and interest payment is $1,613.36.

Because this is a conventional loan product tied to affordable housing goals, there are several requirements you should know about. Here’s a brief rundown:

-You can’t qualify if you make higher than 80% of the median income in the area in which you’re looking to buy. For example, if you live in Macomb County, Michigan the area median income is $90,800. You can’t use more than $72,640 to qualify for this ($96,200 × 0.8 = $76,960).
-You need a qualifying FICO® Score of 620 or better.
-This is for single-unit primary residences only.
-When combined with our 2% grant, your initial down payment can be no more than 5%.
-There’s a $350,000 upper loan limit on this conventional option.

Although there are income limits, there’s one other important note to make. This is qualifying income. If you can meet debt-to-income ratio (DTI) requirements without using bonus income or putting another borrower on the loan, it doesn’t need to be included in your qualifying income. This could give you some breathing room.

https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/one-plus