ALEX BLOG

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Nearly two weeks after anice stormknocked out power to her home, Barbara Bishop still finds herself trying to flip the lights on and looking in her fridge for food that has since spoiled.

Winter Weather Mississippi

Bishop, 79, and her 85-year-old husband, George Bishop, live in a rural area near Oxford, Mississippi, where ice-coated trees snapped in half, bringing down power lines and making roads nearly impassable.

After the storm hit, the Bishops took in their son, granddaughter and two children, whose homes lost both power and water.

The family endured days of bitter cold with nothing but a gas heater to keep them warm. For a few days, they lost water.

"It's just been one of those times you just have to grit, grit your teeth and bare it," Bishop said.

Nearly 20,000 customers remained without power in northern Mississippi on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. That is down from about 180,000 homes and businesses without power in Mississippi shortly after the storm struck late last month.

Lafayette County, where Oxford is located, had the most remaining outages of any county on Friday, with about 4,200 customers without power, followed by Tippah County with about 3,500. Panola, Yalobusha and Tishomingo counties all had more than 2,000 customers without power.

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After days of bitter cold, temperatures in Oxford reached 70 degrees on Friday, but the chunks of ice still littered the ground in shaded areas.

Downed trees had been gathered into large piles on the sides of roads, some burned and still smoldering. While much of the worst damage had been cleared, in some places, power lines still hung low over roads and laid strewn about in parking lots. Everywhere, tree limbs dangled precariously.

Across the street from the Bishops, Russ Jones and his wife have no electricity or water. For days, they used five-gallon buckets filled with water to flush toilets, cooked on their gas stove and stayed warm by their fireplace.

"It's been a shock to the system," Jones said, adding that he and his wife began staying with friends who have power a few days ago.

On Friday, Jones' yard was teaming with volunteers from Eight Days of Hope, a nonprofit that responds to natural disasters. The volunteers cleared snapped tree limbs and hauled away a large tree that had fallen in Jones' backyard.

The organization arrived days after the storm and has helped dozens of homeowners clean up their yards and patch damaged roofs. It has also served more than 16,000 free meals.

Jones said it was a relief to know he had one less thing on his plate. When a volunteer handed him a free T-shirt and a blanket for his wife, he held back tears.

"It's just beyond anything I could ever imagine," he said.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Attorneys for the federal government have until next Thursday to reach an agreement with human rights lawyers who are seeking to ensure the right to counsel for people detained at anImmigration and Customs Enforcementfacility in Minnesota, a judge said Friday.

Advocates said people held at the facility on the edge of Minneapolis who face possible deportation are denied adequate access to lawyers, including in-person meetings. Attorney Jeffrey Dubner said detainees are allowed to make phone calls, but ICE personnel are typically nearby.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel told Justice Department attorney Christina Parascandola that there seemed to be a "very wide factual disconnect" between what the human rights lawyers allege and the government's claims of adequate access at what ICE depicts as only a temporary holding facility.

Parascandola said people detained at the facility have access to counsel and unmonitored phone calls at any time and for as long as they need. She conceded she had never been there.

Brasel called her argument "a tough sell," noting there was far more evidence in the case record to back up the plaintiffs' claims than the government's assurances.

"The gap here is so enormous I don't know how you're going to close it," the judge said.

Rather than ruling on the spot, Brasel told both sides to keep meeting with a retired judge who's mediating and who has helped narrow some of the gaps already. She noted at the start of the hearing that both sides agreed that "some degree of reasonable access" to legal counsel is constitutionally necessary but that they differed on the details of what that should look like.

If the sides don't reach at least a partial agreement by 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, the judge said she'll issue her order then. She didn't specify which way she'd rule.

A member of Congress decries conditions at detention center

The facility is part of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, which is a center of ICE operations and has been the scene of frequent protests.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Kelly Morrison, of Minnesota, said in a statement Friday that conditions at the detention center continue to be poor. The physician said she learned in her visit Thursday night that the facility has no protocols in place to prevent the spread of measles to Minnesota from Texas. At least two cases were reported at a major ICE detention center in Texas this week.

Some Minnesota detaineesincluding families with childrenhave been sent to the Texas facility, and some have returned to Minnesota after courts intervened, including5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramosand his father.

"It's abundantly clear that Whipple is not at all equipped to handle what the Trump Administration is doing with their cruel and chaotic 'Operation Metro Surge,'" Morrison said in a statement. "I am stunned by the inability or unwillingness of the federal agents to answer some of the most basic questions about their operations and protocols."

Even though afederal judge ruled Mondaythat members of Congress have the right to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities, Morrison said in a statement that agents attempted to deny her entry for nearly a half-hour and demanded that she leave before eventually letting her in.

On herfirst attemptlast month, Morrison and fellow Minnesota Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Angie Craig were turned away.

After she was able to enter the facility last weekend, Morrison said no real medical care was being offered to people held there.

Craig and Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum said they were turned away despite the court order when they tried to visit the facility overnight.

"We have heard countless reports that detainees are being held in unlivable conditions at Whipple," the two representatives said in a statement. "We have every reason to believe that this administration is once again lying through their teeth and trying to hide what we all know to be true -- that they are ignoring due process and treating immigrants as political pawns, not people."

Man charged with fel ony for wrecking anti-ICE sculpture

A supporter of the immigration crackdown who posted a video on social media of himself kicking down an anti-ICE sculpture outside the Minnesota state Capitol in St. Paul was released from jail Friday after being charged with a felony count of damage to property.

Lt. Mike Lee, a spokesperson for the Minnesota State Patrol, said Capitol Security observed Jake Lang, 30, of Lake Worth, Florida, damaging the display Thursday afternoon. He was arrested a short distance away. The ice sculpture spelled out "Prosecute ICE."

At his first court appearance, Lang was released pending trial but ordered to stay at least three blocks away from the Capitol. Court records don't list an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

Lang wasdrowned out by a large crowdlast month when he attempted to hold a small rally in Minneapolis in support of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Lang was previously charged with assaulting an officer and other crimes before receiving clemency as part of President Donald Trump's sweeping intervention on behalf of Jan. 6 defendants last year.

President Donald Trump told reporters he didn't see the entire video before it was shared on his social media platform late Thursday night that included a racist animation of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama depicted with the bodies of apes and suggested he won't apologize for it.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday evening, Trump said he only saw the first part of the since-deleted video that focused on debunked claims about the 2020 election.

"I guess during the end of it, there was some kind of picture people don't like. I wouldn't like it either, but I didn't see it," Trump said. "I just, I looked at the first part, and it was really about voter fraud."

At the end of the video, the Obamas' faces appear abruptly on the bodies of apes without explanation with the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" playing over it. The video then ends back on imagery of the election conspiracy video footage.

Asked if he would apologize for the video, Trump said, "No, I didn't make a mistake. I mean ... I look at a lot of, thousands of, things, and I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine."

Asked if he condemned the racist portion of the video, Trump said, "Of course I do."

The video was shared on the president's social media account at 11:44 p.m. ET on Thursday. Following the backlash after the video was posted, the White House at about noon Friday said the post had been taken down from the president's page.

The Obamas had no comment when ABC News reached out to their representatives for a response. They have not publicly commented on the post, but later Friday night, they did make their first comments since the incident -- wishing team USA good luck at the Winter Olympics in a social media post.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when first asked for comment early Friday, had said, "This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public."

Later Friday afternoon, a White House official told ABC News that a "staffer erroneously made the post."

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Asked by reporters Fridays who posted the video, Trump said he saw the video first -- but not the racist portion at the end, he claimed -- and then gave it to "the people" to have it posted to his account.

The meme video referenced by Leavitt was shared in October by the Hardin County Republican Party of Kentucky on Facebook, which led the chairman to issue an apology and deleted the post after swift backlash noting the long history of racist tropes depicting Black people as apes or monkeys -- a tool of slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize them.

The video reposted by Trump overnight included only imagery of the Obamas.

Trump's overnight repost was condemned by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, some of whom had called for it to be taken down and for the president to apologize.

Republican Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and also the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, posted on X: "Praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The President should remove it."

Trump told reporters he later spoke with Scott over the phone on Friday.

During the conversation, Trump told Scott that the video had been posted by a staffer by mistake and that he would take it down, according to a source familiar with the call. The post was later removed.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black leader of a party in Congress, wrote on X: "President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. Donald Trump is a vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder."

"Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry," Jeffries wrote.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker wrote in a post: "This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, wrote in a post: "Racist. Vile. Abhorrent. This is dangerous and degrades our country -- where are Senate Republicans? The President must immediately delete the post and apologize to Barack and Michelle Obama, two great Americans who make Donald Trump look like a small, envious man."

Before she arrived at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center last fall, Kelly Vargas said, her 6-year-old daughter was thriving. Maria loved school and spent her afternoons drawing and playing with her cat.

But Vargas said that within days of the family's being detained and sent to the prisonlike facility in South Texas — where guards patrol the halls and the lights never turn off — her daughter began to unravel.

After years without accidents, Maria started wetting her pants and her bed. She cried through the night, asking when she and her parents would return to their apartment in New York. She begged to start breastfeeding again.

Vargas, who was deported to Colombia with her family in November after having spent nearly two months at Dilley, said she never imagined the United States could act so callously.

"How are they going to do this to a child?" Vargas told NBC News, speaking in Spanish. "How could this happen here?"

Accounts from detained families, their lawyers and court filings describe the federal detention center in Dilley as a place where hundreds of children languish as they're served contaminated food, receive little education and struggle to obtain basic medical care.

The center was thrust into the national spotlight last month after Immigration and Customs Enforcementtook Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy, to the facility following his father's arrest in Minneapolis — an encounter captured in a photograph showing the boy in a blue bunny hat as he was taken into federal custody.

The image ricocheted across the country, igniting outrage from lawmakers and the public. To many Americans, it was a sudden introduction to the harsh realities of ICE'sincreasing reliance on family detention. But to Vargas and the lawyers who have spent months tracking conditions at Dilley, Liam's fearful expression — andhis father's accountof the child falling ill while detained — captured something painfully familiar.

"Liam is all the kids there," said Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which monitors conditions at the facility under a long-standing federal court settlement. "Just like Liam, we've had families tell us how their children have been horribly sick and throwing up repeatedly, refusing to eat and becoming despondent and listless."

Those concerns have taken on new urgency in recent days after health officials confirmedtwo measles cases among people detainedat Dilley. Advocates and medical experts warn that a highly contagious disease spreading inside a crowded facility housing young children — some already medically vulnerable — poses an acute public-health risk.

Lawyers representing families at Dilley say they have struggled to get clear answers from the Department of Homeland Security about the outbreak, including any steps being taken to limit its spread or verify whether children are vaccinated.

DHS defended its use of family detention in a statement to NBC News after this article was published. The agency said detainees at Dilley are provided "comprehensive medical care" and other basic necessities and that it was taking action to contain the spread of measles.

"Medical staff is continuing to monitor the detainees' conditions and will take appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection," the agency said Friday.

Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, whichhas a contractto run the facility that's expected to bring in $180 million annually, referred questions about Dilley to DHS and said in a statement that "the health and safety of those entrusted to our care" is the company's top priority.

Since April, when the federal governmentresumed large-scale family detentionas part of the Trump administration's vow to dramatically escalate immigration arrests and deportations, an estimated 1,800 children had passed through Dilley as of December, according to figures provided by court-appointed monitors. About 345 children were being held there with parents that month, Wolozin said. Some families remain for a few weeks; others have been detained for more than six months.

Family detention was common during the Obama administration, and it expanded in President Donald Trump's first term, before being largely halted under President Joe Biden. Unlike earlier iterations of family detention, many of the children now held at Dilley are U.S. residents, apprehended not at the border but at their homes, outside schools, in courthouses and during routine immigration check-ins.

The Trump administration has argued the practice allows parents and children to remain together while removal proceedings are pending. But advocates and human rights groups say detaining children is harmful and never warranted, noting that families with pending immigration cases have historically been allowed to remain together outside detention, including through the use of ankle monitors.

The overwhelming majority of parents detained with children are sent to Dilley, a sprawling complex set amid scrubland an hour south of San Antonio, far from the communities where the families had been living.

As immigration lawyers began sounding the alarm about conditions at the facility, the Trump administrationfiled a motion last springtooverturn a decades-old legal settlementrequiring basic rights for immigrant children in federal custody — safeguards that advocates say DHS is already violating. The protections, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement,trace back to a 1985 class-action lawsuitagainst the federal government alleging that immigrant children were being held in unsafe conditions.

Interviews with immigration lawyers, Liam's father and the Vargas family and dozens of sworn declarations from detained familiesfiled as part of the recent Flores litigationdescribe a facility that functions far more like a prison than a child care center: constant surveillance, rigid schedules, overnight bed checks. Parents report that many children stop eating, lose weight and become withdrawn.

Families describe sleeping in crowded, dorm-style rooms with little privacy and filthy shared bathrooms. Outdoor areas are largely concrete and tightly supervised, parents say, and there are few toys or activities to occupy children indoors.

"It is a prison where we are keeping children as young as 1 year old," said Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School and director of its Immigrants' Rights Clinic, who has represented several detained families. "We're keeping children there who are currently breastfeeding. It's unconscionable."

Food is a recurring source of distress. Court filings describe meals that are greasy, heavily seasoned or inappropriate for preschoolers and infants. Several parents said they found worms or mold. Some children survive largely on crackers and juice. One mother said she resorted to sucking pasta sauce off noodles for her child, hoping he would eat.

"My younger son does not eat the food here, he is hungry all the time," another mother wrote in a sworn declaration submitted to federal court. "He will only accept breastmilk and it is not enough for him. He is growing. He is two and a half, and he needs to eat."

Parents of children too young to grasp what was happening said they struggled to keep up a facade of normality. Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, Liam's father,told Noticias Telemundohepassed the time by retelling storiesfrom episodes of "Bluey," the popular children's show about a family of blue heeler dogs, and recounting happy memories. He could do little else "except hug him and tell him everything would be OK," Conejo said.

Education is an afterthought at Dilley, parents and lawyers say. Children get no more than an hour of daily instruction, and overcrowding means some are turned away. The work consists largely of worksheets and coloring pages, parents say. Older children say they're bored, falling behind and missing their teachers and classmates.

"Inside the classroom, there are two women laughing in English and watching YouTube," a 14-year-old detainee wrote in a sworn declaration. "I was in 9th grade before I came here. If I had to go back to my country now, I'd have to repeat the grade because of all the school I've lost."

Medical care also is often cursory, families report, even when children show signs of serious illness or injury. In several cases described in court declarations, children — including some with developmental delays or chronic conditions — regressed while they were detained, losing language skills, wetting themselves or engaging in self-harm. Some parents said their complaints were dismissed until their children's conditions worsened significantly.

Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who has represented families at Dilley, described a child suffering from appendicitis who collapsed in pain after having been denied meaningful medical attention. The child passed out in a hallway vomiting and writhing, Lee said, only to be offered Tylenol.

The psychological toll can be just as severe. During a recent visit, Lee said, a 5-year-old girl described a recurring nightmare: A large animal chases her, but she can't outrun it because she's trapped in a cage.

She and her siblings "wake up crying for their mom every night because they're worried they're going to get separated from her," Lee said.

Lawyers representing detainees argue that prolonged confinement in harsh conditions — coupled with repeated warnings about family separation — is meant to coerce parents into abandoning pending asylum claims that could allow them to remain in the U.S.

DHS tells detained families, "Well, if you want this to stop, agree to give up your case," said Javier Hidalgo, legal director for RAICES, which provides legal support for immigrant families in Texas, including at Dilley. "We've heard that time and time again."

Kelly Vargas said she and her husband felt that pressure from the moment they arrived at Dilley with their daughter, Maria.

The family came to the U.S. in 2022 after having fled Colombia and settled in New York, where they checked in regularly with immigration officials. They had applied for special visas for human trafficking victims,saying they were subjected to forced laborand death threats while they were traveling through Mexico.

After they were arrested during a September check-in and sent to Dilley, Vargas said, officers repeatedly pressured her and her husband to drop their visa applications.

"He told us that if we didn't deport ourselves, they were going to take our daughter from us," she said. "Our daughter would be left in the custody of the state, where not even our lawyers would know where she was."

At first, Vargas said, she and her husband resisted, determined to fight for the life they had built in New York, where he worked in construction during the day and she worked as a waitress and cleaner overnight. They initially told Maria they were on vacation in Texas, but the girl knew better. She would drop to her knees and beg to go home to see her cat, Milo. At times, Vargas said, she screamed so intensely that even staff members appeared shaken.

"Get me out of here," she would cry. "I want to leave."

Maria's health quickly declined, Vargas said. She developed a persistent cough and struggled to eat, losing weight as the days passed. Then, Vargas said, a staff member who was cleaning accidentally struck her daughter in the eye with a mop, drawing blood.

Despite her daughter's continued complaints of blurred vision, sensitivity to light and hearing problems, Vargas said, doctors dismissed her concerns and delayed further evaluation.

In a statement, DHS said Maria received appropriate medical care for her eye injury, which it said was the result of the girl striking her own eye with a broom handle. At a follow-up appointment two days later, a pediatrician "observed no redness, swelling and no vision problems," the agency said.

With her daughter ailing, Vargas said, she and her husband finally agreed to leave the country.

They were deported to Colombia in November. The family received "full due process" before their removal, the DHS statement said.

Vargas worries they'll never fully heal from their two months at Dilley. Maria still has vision problems and headaches. The sweet girl who loved her teacher and played with Barbies is now fearful and withdrawn, talking often about her weeks in Texas and the workers who watched over her.

Whenever she sees a police officer, she tenses.

"It's the bad men," she says.

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Nearly two weeks after anice stormknocked out power to her home, Barbara Bishop still finds herself trying to flip the lights on and looking in her fridge for food that has since spoiled.

Winter Weather Mississippi

Bishop, 79, and her 85-year-old husband, George Bishop, live in a rural area near Oxford, Mississippi, where ice-coated trees snapped in half, bringing down power lines and making roads nearly impassable.

After the storm hit, the Bishops took in their son, granddaughter and two children, whose homes lost both power and water.

The family endured days of bitter cold with nothing but a gas heater to keep them warm. For a few days, they lost water.

"It's just been one of those times you just have to grit, grit your teeth and bare it," Bishop said.

Nearly 20,000 customers remained without power in northern Mississippi on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. That is down from about 180,000 homes and businesses without power in Mississippi shortly after the storm struck late last month.

Lafayette County, where Oxford is located, had the most remaining outages of any county on Friday, with about 4,200 customers without power, followed by Tippah County with about 3,500. Panola, Yalobusha and Tishomingo counties all had more than 2,000 customers without power.

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After days of bitter cold, temperatures in Oxford reached 70 degrees on Friday, but the chunks of ice still littered the ground in shaded areas.

Downed trees had been gathered into large piles on the sides of roads, some burned and still smoldering. While much of the worst damage had been cleared, in some places, power lines still hung low over roads and laid strewn about in parking lots. Everywhere, tree limbs dangled precariously.

Across the street from the Bishops, Russ Jones and his wife have no electricity or water. For days, they used five-gallon buckets filled with water to flush toilets, cooked on their gas stove and stayed warm by their fireplace.

"It's been a shock to the system," Jones said, adding that he and his wife began staying with friends who have power a few days ago.

On Friday, Jones' yard was teaming with volunteers from Eight Days of Hope, a nonprofit that responds to natural disasters. The volunteers cleared snapped tree limbs and hauled away a large tree that had fallen in Jones' backyard.

The organization arrived days after the storm and has helped dozens of homeowners clean up their yards and patch damaged roofs. It has also served more than 16,000 free meals.

Jones said it was a relief to know he had one less thing on his plate. When a volunteer handed him a free T-shirt and a blanket for his wife, he held back tears.

"It's just beyond anything I could ever imagine," he said.

HAVANA (AP) — After a day spent selling books, Solanda Oña typically boards a bus from a wealthy seaside district inHavanato her home in the city's working-class center.

APTOPIX Cuba Daily Life

But on Thursday night, the bus never came. The 64-year-old bookseller spent the night sleeping in a nearby restaurant instead, worried that this could be the new normal if the gas that fuels the island runs out.

Anxieties simmered in Havana on Friday, a day after CubanPresident Miguel Díaz-Canelwarned that U.S. efforts to block oil supplies would take a heavy toll on the Caribbean nation and asked Cubans to endure further sacrifices to weather the impending hardship.

Many Cubans, already reeling from years of deepening economic crisis, were left asking: What more can we sacrifice?

"I'm very worried," Oña said. "Before, things were always difficult. But there was always one bus. One way to get home. Now, there are none."

By Friday morning, working class residents like Oña were already seeing an inkling of what the future might hold.

Already unreliable public buses stopped running altogether, leaving many stranded for hours. Others were left walking large distances or hitchhiking.Long gas lines and black outs, a constant on the island, have grown even worse as U.S. President Donald Trump presses down on Cuba with an increasingly heavy hand.

Last week, Trumpsigned an executive orderthreatening to impose tariffs on countries providing oil to Cuba, a move that couldfurther cripple an islandplagued by a deepening energy crisis.

On Friday, the national transportation company also said it was cutting routes in the east of the island while the University of Havana said it would cancel some events and push for more remote learning, citing "energy deficits."

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Meanwhile, much of the city of 2 million – schools, banks, bakeries and shops – continued to operate as usual, underscoring how normal the crisis has become on the Caribbean island. Taxis, shared electric motorcycles and other transportation organized by some employers were still working in Havana's capital. However, taxi fares remain far out of reach for the many Cubans living on a state salary of less than $20 a month.

While the U.S. announced$6 million in aid to Cubans Thursday night, severing the island from its primary energy sources has dealt a blow to the nation, especially to civilians who often bear the brunt of the economic crisis. Cuba only produces 40% of the oil it consumes.

The island's communist government says U.S. sanctions cost the country more than $7.5 billion between March 2024 and February 2025, substantially more than the year before.

The crisis deepened after Venezuela — once Cuba's primary oil-rich ally — ceased shipments in January, following aU.S. military operation that captured then-President Nicolás Maduro. Then, in late January Mexico, a long vocal ally of Cuba,halted its oil exports to the island.

Left with few alternatives, many Cubans now say the current economic turmoil U.S. policies have wrought on their daily lives is comparable to the severe economic depression in the 1990s known as theSpecial Period, following cuts in Soviet aid.

"What does it mean to not allow a single drop of fuel to reach a country?" Díaz-Canel said. "It affects the transportation of food, food production, public transportation, the functioning of hospitals, institutions of all kinds, schools, economic production, tourism. How do our vital systems function without fuel?"

For Cristina Díaz, a 51-year-old mother of two, the answer was to walk to her work as a house cleaner. She was joined by packs of others in the capital that strolled along the side of the road on Friday, once again adapting to a new reality.

"We're living as best we can," Díaz said. "What can I do? I live here, I was born here and this is my lot. I have to walk to get to work and to be able to feed my children."

Follow AP's coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean athttps://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

A journalist couple from Peru who crossed the border into the U.S. claim the death threats they received in their home country because of their work are proof their lives were in danger.

But their most recent asylum petition was denied, and their attorney and several legal advocates say this shows how much tougher it's gotten to be granted asylum amid a steep decline in the rate of approvals.

Deyvi Soria, a former producer at a Peruvian television channel, said that in late 2022 his doorbell rang at his home in Lima and, when he opened the door, he found an envelope at his doorstep and, in the distance, he saw a man running.

"The note they left at our house said directly that we should stop speaking ill of the party and the leader (then former President Pedro Castillo), because that could cost us our lives and the lives of our families," said Soria. "And the note had no return address, and then we received a second one with three bullets," he added.

Soria produced a program on UCI TV, a Lima-based channel where he worked alongside his wife, E.M., who requested only her initials be used for fear of reprisals. E.M. was one of the program's hosts, reporting on Castillo's administration. Though the show wasn't focused on politics, it covered the corruption and conspiracy chargesthat ultimately led to an 11-year sentence for the former president.

Soria said they started seeing people come by their house and they felt very threatened, so they quit their jobs and reported the threats to the police. When they didn't receive protection from the Peruvian authorities, Soria and his wife decided to leave with their two daughters for Mexico, and from there they crossed the border into the U.S., where they were placed in removal proceedings. The couple then applied for asylum and protection under the Convention against Torture.

Last month, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the highest administrative body for the review of immigration cases in the U.S.,analyzed the case of Soria and his wifeand dismissed their appeal for asylum, concluding that "a death threat that is vague, anonymous, or used merely to intimidate, by itself, does not rise to the level of severity required to establish persecution."

Denise Gilman,director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texasat Austin, disagreed with the BIA's ruling. "What that decision says is that having a very well-founded fear through death threats is not enough to win an asylum case," she said. "So, basically what this means is that a person has to wait to be seriously injured or even killed to qualify for asylum."

International organizations have warned that Latin America remains the deadliest region for the press outside of war zones. In itsmost recent report, Reporters Without Borders counted the murder of 17 reporters in 2025 alone.

In Peru, theNational Association of Journalistsrecorded 458 attacks against the press last year, including the murder of three reporters, something that had not happened since 2016 and that was common in the '90s during the armed conflict against the Shining Path terrorist group.

"Our fear is that something might happen to us if we return, because right now Peru is one of the most unsafe countries in Latin America. If you felt somewhat safe before, you don't anymore, because before they threatened you, but now they're killing you," Soria said, "and now the court here tells us that death threats aren't enough."

A denial and an appeal

When Soria and his family first sought asylum, their case was heard in an immigration court in Miami in 2024. The judge acknowledged that the threats were linked to Soria's political opinion as a journalist critical of the government, the family's attorney, Bradley Westerhold, said.

However, the immigration judge concluded that the threats did not reach the level of past persecution and denied the family's asylum application.

Westerhold then appealed the couple's case to the BIA, asking the board to adopt a more protective line, like that of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit,which has recognized that death threats, on their own, can constitute stalkingin certain circumstances.

The board, however, took a more restrictive interpretation, in line with other courts, and held that threats "rarely" constitute stalking if there is no evidence that the aggressor had an "immediate capacity" to carry them out.

Westerhold thinks the ruling sends a dangerous signal. "It doesn't mean that threat cases can never be approved," he says. "But now the threats have to be connected to more serious physical harm, or there has to be something more than just the threat itself."

Noticias Telemundo requested comments on the decision from the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which referred the request to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency of the Department of Justice.

In response, EOIR spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly stated in an email that the agency does not comment on decisions, but added that immigration judges "consider all evidence and arguments presented by both parties and decide each case in a timely, impartial, and lawful manner."

Soria's attorney is filing a request to review the case with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

TheTRAC data centerat Syracuse University estimates that the monthly asylum approval rate in courts fell to 19.2% in August 2025 — a drop of nearly half compared to a 38.2% approval rate in August 2024. Areport by the Congressional Research Service,also based on official data, goes further and estimates that the annual asylum approval rate in immigration courts in fiscal year 2025 is only 12%.

The backlog in U.S. immigration courts has reached record highs, withmore than 3.7 million cases pending.Joseph Edlow, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,announced last Novemberthat he had decided to suspend "all asylum decisions until we can ensure that all foreign nationals are investigated and vetted to the fullest extent possible."

Jennifer Bade, an immigration lawyer based in Boston, Massachusetts, often represents cases like that of the Soria family. She said people who receive threats don't usually wait to see what will happen to them in their countries, but rather go to the authorities and in many cases, when they see that they don't receive answers or protection, they decide to go into exile.

"My main problem with this case is that who in their right mind would wait to see if the threat is credible, when there are already people who have received similar threats and then died ... Everyone would be in survival mode and would want to leave. So, I think this decision is quite harsh," Bade said.

The lawyer said the decision "is going to make cases like this or similar situations much more difficult, especially for those people for whom it is not safe to return to their countries of origin."

An earlier version of this story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.