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'Pure evil' illegal migrant 'murdered boy, 15, then tried to rape youngster's mother'

'Pure evil' illegal migrant 'murdered boy, 15, then tried to rape youngster's mother'

Daily Mail​6 days ago
An illegal migrant has been accused of shooting dead a teen who tried to stop the Mexican national from raping his mother.
Gildardo Amandor-Martinez, 36, allegedly gunned down Luis Lopez, 15, after the brave boy heard his mother crying for help from the bedroom of their Morehead, Kentucky home on July 20.
She had been trying to fight off her boyfriend Martinez after he returned from a bar and tried to have sex with her, according to court documents obtained by the Lexington Herald Leader.
Luis entered the room upon hearing the commotion and asked his mother - who sustained bite marks and other injuries from the attack - if he should call the cops.
Martinez, allegedly naked on top of the horrified woman, told the boy to get out before he appeared to be leaving the apartment himself at around 2.30am.
But on his way out, Martinez fired a pistol through the bedroom door three times - striking Luis and his young sister, Naomi, 3.
The mother allegedly escaped from the house with her one-year-old, who she shares with Martinez, before realizing her three-year-old was still inside.
She ran back to the home and shouted for Naomi to run, she told police, adding that she heard more bullets ring as she sprinted away.
The mother was laying in bed with the baby she has with Martinez when he returned home demanding sex, Fox 56 reported.
Cops arrived at the residence and immediately declared Luis, who had been shot in the face, dead.
His sister was taken to a nearby hospital for her injuries. She is in critical condition.
Martinez ran from the home and was tracked down by authorities roughly 12 hours later and charged with murder, first degree assault and first-degree attempted rape.
On July 23, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced ICE pursued an arrest detainer against Martinez.
ICE detainers are 'legal requests to state or local law enforcement to hold illegal aliens in custody until they can be turned over to immigration authorities,' according to the DHS.
The agency also revealed Martinez is a 'criminal illegal alien from Mexico [who] attempted to enter the country THREE times under the Biden administration in 2021.'
On his third try, Martinez finally entered the US through the Southern border, but the date of his entry remains unclear.
'15-year-old Luis Lopez died trying to save his mother from this criminal illegal alien who was attempting to rape her,' Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.
'Gildardo Amandor-Martinez is a rapist and cold-blooded killer who should have never been in this country.
'The Biden administration's open-border policies allowed this monster to walk American streets and commit these evil crimes, including murder, assault, and attempted rape, against a mother and her children.'
Luis attended Rowan County Senior High School, where he would have been a sophomore in the fall. School officials described Luis as a 'sweet student.'
A fundraiser through DOVES of Gateway, a shelter that helps domestic violence victims, has been organized to support the devastated family.
The shelter partnered with Citizens Bank to create the Nunez Family Memorial Fund for funeral expenses for Luis.
'We grieve alongside the Nunez family and stand with them in this time of heartbreak,' the shelter said in a Facebook post.
Tributes from heartbroken relatives, loved ones and mothers empathizing with Luis's mom's pain have poured in on social media.
'When one momma cries, we all cry,' one woman, Kylie Burks, wrote. 'That woman always has a smile on her face and her world just shattered.
'This child died a hero and deserves all the love. My heart is broken for this family.'
His aunt also shared a tear-jerking tribute on Facebook, writing: 'My boy I love you, my heart is broken because you are gone.'
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Welcome to the nation's ‘super deportation center,' inspired by Amazon and FedEx but ‘with human beings'
Welcome to the nation's ‘super deportation center,' inspired by Amazon and FedEx but ‘with human beings'

The Independent

time39 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Welcome to the nation's ‘super deportation center,' inspired by Amazon and FedEx but ‘with human beings'

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice After he was arrested outside his Virginia apartment in March, Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri was briefly detained in the state before being put on a plane bound for an immigration detention center more than 1,000 miles away. Suri — who was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his Palestinian activism and his family ties to Gaza — arrived at the only ICE facility that doubles as an airport, without his attorneys having any idea where he was. Officers told Suri that he had entered the nation's 'super deportation center,' according to his attorneys. 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How Ice cancelled summer: hundreds of Latino festivals face impossible decision over fear of raids
How Ice cancelled summer: hundreds of Latino festivals face impossible decision over fear of raids

The Guardian

time6 hours ago

  • The Guardian

How Ice cancelled summer: hundreds of Latino festivals face impossible decision over fear of raids

For Orlando Gutierrez in Kansas City, the thought of cancelling his community's summer Colombian Independence Day festival first surfaced 'the week after the inauguration' in January, 'when the raids started happening'. The decision was rooted in 'trying to be safe', Gutierrez said. 'We're not talking about folks that are irregular in terms of their immigration status. You only have to look a certain way and speak a certain language and then you're in danger.' For decades prior to 2025, the event had gone on interrupted – 'in rain, in extreme heat' – and hosted thousands of Colombians and non-Colombians alike, Gutierrez said. 'Our mission is to share our culture with people that don't know it,' he added. 'To not have the opportunity – that's where it hurts the most.' In Donald Trump's second term as president, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been historically expansionist: it now aims for an unprecedented 3,000 minimum arrests a day. Its agents have thrown undocumented people, residents with protected legal status, and even American citizens into a deportation system that increasingly does not respect due process. Out of fear of being targeted indiscriminately, cultural and musical events from coast to coast – block parties and summer concerts in California; Mexican heritage celebrations in Chicago; soccer fan watch parties in Massachusetts – have been postponed or canceled altogether. Even religious gatherings are no longer perceived as safe from Ice. In San Bernardino, California, Bishop Alberto Rojas has dispensed his congregation from the obligation to attend mass out of fear of deportation raids. Every decision to cancel is heartbreaking. In Philadelphia, Carnaval de Puebla, which was scheduled for April, made the call to cancel in February, said organizer Olga Rentería. 'We believe this is not a time to celebrate,' Rentería explained, 'but a time to remain united, informed, and strong.' In Los Angeles, organizers of Festival Chapín, a celebration of Guatemalan culture, have postponed the event from this August to October. 'It was really hard to take that decision,' Walter Rosales, a restaurateur and one of the event's organizers, told the Guardian. 'We have a lot of attendees; more than 50,000 people every year. People have hotels, they have flights. We hire people to be there. But I think it was the best [choice.] The first thing we want is the security of the people.' Rosales said he hopes that by waiting a few months, Festival Chapín can take place amid a different political climate, one in which Ice sticks to promises made by Trump to target primarily undocumented people with criminal records. But mass raids are likely to get more frequent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, legislation forced through Congress by Republicans and signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July, will slash social programs while funding Ice at levels comparable to the budget of the US army. It means that even huge stars are questioning whether concerts are safe for their fans. When the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny announced a recent tour that skips the continental US altogether, social media speculation centered on the notion that the artist did not want to put his fans in Ice's crosshairs. That theorizing was in part fueled by Bad Bunny's own dips into the wider political conversation: he's called Ice agents 'sons of bitches' on social media and his 'NUEVAYoL' video – in which the Statue of Liberty is garlanded with the Puerto Rican flag – is a lovely and grand ode to New York's immigrants. Of avoiding the US on his upcoming tour, the artist himself has only said that, after touring regularly in the US in recent years, more dates at this time were 'unnecessary'. (A representative for Bad Bunny did not respond to a request for comment.) Gabriel Gonzales, the bandleader of the Los Angeles Latin music ensembleLa Verdad, said some of their gigs have had to be cancelled this summer. 'A lot of people are very scared to go out,' he said. 'It's kind of like the pandemic all over again.' But as La Verdad continue to perform around Los Angeles and elsewhere, Gonzales is finding new meaning in playing live amid the Trump administration's policies. 'It's not like a rebellion,' he said. 'It's more like a resistance. As musicians, we are there to take people away for a few moments. I see communities pulling together and I feel like everything is going to be OK.' For Joyas Mestizas, a Seattle-based Mexican folk dance youth group, which cancelled their annual festival this year, the plan is to be 'more creative' going forward. 'But we're not going anywhere,' said the group's co-director, Luna Garcia. 'If I have to teach kids out of my basement, I'll do it. The kids are going to dance.' For some organizers of cultural events for Latino communities, pushing through and executing their plans despite fears of raids has become its own kind of crusade. In July, federal agents were spotted on the premises of Chicago's National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture just days before the institution was scheduled to hold its annual Barrio Arts Festival. The museum said the agents entered the property, 'refused multiple requests to present a warrant, badge, or identification', and 'informed museum staff that they were assessing entry and exit points for upcoming events that may draw undocumented attendees'. (In a statement, homeland security said agents 'staged and held a quick briefing in the Museum's parking lot in advance of an enforcement action related to a narcotics investigation'.) In response to the presence of the federal agents, the museum decided not to cancel the festival – but, rather, to ensure it would go forward without endangering its attendees. Veronica Ocasio, the museum's director of education and programming, said that in the days before Barrio Arts, she and her team 'met non-stop' in order to create 'as tight a security plan as we could'. The museum is located inside Chicago's Humboldt Park; in order to cover the park's 200 acres, Ocasio and her co-organizers assembled a group of volunteer immigration advocates who created a trigger warning and stood guard on rotation for the entirety of the two-day festival. If Ice agents were spotted, the museum was ready to shut down the event, close the gates, and bunker in place – holding attendees inside until the agents left. The plan then called for Ocasio and other museum employees to stand out front with immigration attorneys, holding the fort. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois congresswoman, was also a key part of the museum's plan. In order to head off potential Ice raids, Ramirez as well as other elected officials were on the premises 'around the clock', she said. 'State representatives, city council folks, the mayor. All to protect constituents from homeland security.' 'The president has taken away people's healthcare so he can hire more Ice agents to terrorize communities,' added Ramirez, but that doesn't mean 'there's no oversight or accountability. At a time where the federal government wants to harm you, we will keep each other safe'. For Ramirez, Barrio Arts Festival was 'a beautiful showing of people saying to Ice, 'not here, not now, not ever'.' Beyond her support for local cultural events, Ramirez is attempting to push back on Ice action more broadly: she's a co-sponsor of the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act which would prohibit Ice from the now-common practice of carrying out their deportation actions while masked. 'People are freaking the hell out,' she said. 'They don't know whether it's an Ice agent who is going to criminalize them with no due process or it's someone who wants to rob them. No other law enforcement agency does this.' Ultimately, not only did the Puerto Rican event in Chicago go on without interruption, but it was 'our largest, most well attended Barrio Fest in our twenty-five year history', Ocasio said. 'We stood against intimidation and we created a blueprint for festivals in the city of Chicago.' The museum has already shared the safety plan it developed on the fly with organizers of upcoming events representing the local Colombian and Mexican communities. Ahead of New York's Colombia Independence Day festival – held in July in Corona, a working class neighborhood in Queens – organizers were similarly concerned about the possibility of Ice raids. They took precautions by bordering off the event, marking it as private, and creating a single entrance point where they would have stopped Ice agents operating without a warrant, organizers told the Guardian. Like Chicago's Barrio Arts Festival, they had lawyers on hand from a local legal services organization. Ultimately, like Barrio Arts, they too set a new attendance record, with around 20,000 festival goers. Catalina Cruz, a New York state assembly member who helped plan the Colombian festival, said that all the precautions she and her fellow organizers took 'doesn't explain why so many people came out – from all over the city and beyond'. She credited attendees with a certain kind of mental fortitude: 'I'm not in their minds, but I don't think they were giving a fuck about the president.' Of course, that fuzzy feeling of having put on a successful mass event for the Latino community in the era of all-pervading fear of Ice isn't a panacea. As Cruz put it: 'What would have really stopped [Ice] if they wanted to get in? As we have seen in the case of California' – where federal agents have forcefully and en masse raided parks and working farms – 'not a goddam thing.' Newly flush with cash thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, Ice is now actively recruiting waves of new agents – to, in their words, 'defend the homeland' – by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness. Tom Homans, the Trump administration's border czar, has promised to 'flood the zone' with Ice agents in New York and other sanctuary cities. But on that Sunday in Queens, the Colombian festival ticked along beautifully with no sight or sound of the federal government's aggressive deportation machine. Vendors pushed street-cart ceviche and plastic pouches full of high-octane primary-color beverages: 'Coctelitos, coctelitos!' Seemingly every other person wore the powerful yellow jersey of the Colombian national soccer team. Twentysomethings salsa'd next to older family members grooving in their wheelchairs. When a performer with serious pipes sang the Star Spangled Banner, everybody perked up. When she followed it up with the national anthem of Colombia, throat-bursting singalongs broke out. After she wrapped up, the DJ smashed the ehh-ehh-EHH horns and, all together, folks chanted: 'Viva Colombia! Viva Colombia!'

NFLPA hires David White as interim executive director
NFLPA hires David White as interim executive director

Reuters

time13 hours ago

  • Reuters

NFLPA hires David White as interim executive director

August 4 - Less than three weeks after NFL Players Association executive director Lloyd Howell Jr. resigned amid numerous allegations of impropriety, the union elected David White as it interim executive director on Sunday. White is the chief executive officer of consulting firm 3CG Ventures and the former national executive director and chief negotiator of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA). He was a finalist for the NFLPA post when a the board of 32 player representatives elected Howell in June 2023, according to multiple media reports. NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin said in a statement regarding the move by the Board of Player Representatives to appoint White, "This decision is the result of a comprehensive, player-led process. We understood the urgency to fill this role and did our due diligence to identify the right person to lead our union in this moment. "We have full faith in David to take the union forward and operate in the best interests of our membership. David has spent much of his career fighting for collectively bargained rights in the labor movement and is committed to putting players first in all the union does. We are confident that he will inspire solidarity and provide the necessary stability during this period of transition." White added in a statement, "I am grateful to the NFLPA's player leadership for entrusting me with the privilege and responsibility to guide their union as interim executive director. It's a duty I do not take lightly, and I'm committed to reestablishing trust and ensuring the union is serving its members best. I look forward to working with the entire NFLPA team to protect players' health and safety, secure their financial well-being, and further strengthen their voice to shape their futures." Howell stepped down on July 17 to no longer be a "distraction" for the NFLPA. During his tenure, he allegedly reached a confidentiality agreement with the NFL over a collusion case, worked for a private equity firm approved to pursue NFL minority ownership stakes and made inappropriate charges to the union, include a strip club visit. Former NFLPA president JC Tretter, considered a possible replacement for Howell, resigned from his job as the NFLPA's chief strategy officer after Howell's exit. Tretter was viewed as instrumental in getting the union to hire Howell, who also left a previous job at Booz Allen, where he was reportedly accused of sexual discrimination. --Field Level Media

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