In late September 2020, eight Cameroonian asylum seekers reported suffering torture at the hands of facility and immigration officials at the Adams County Correctional Facility in Natchez. Black immigrants’ lives are under attack—not only in Mississippi, but nationwide.
The bloody murders of three Guatemalans—a brother, sister and her unborn child—in their home in Canton is fueling long-standing anger among the Hispanic population who feel they are victims of frequent robberies and assaults in the community.
President Joe Biden is dissolved the 1776 Commission, a group that includes ex-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant. Former President Donald Trump appointed the committee late last year, tasking them with formulating a national plan for “patriotic education.”
Here is a recap of 2020, the stories that defined the year and this fledgling publication’s immense impact so far.
Whichever candidate or party they support, many Latinos want media outlets to do more to go deeper on both the candidates’ ethics and the issues they say they represent.
After 14 years in construction, Joaquín García (not his real name) thought that working inside a poultry plant during the warm season of 2019 would be more comfortable, so he took a job at one in Mississippi. He was arrested on Aug. 7, 2019, in one of the largest ICE workplace actions in history. Nine months later, he was released from jail to face a new problem: COVID-19 had reached his family and killed some Hispanic workers in the meat-processing facilities around him. (In English and Spanish.)
Carmen Quintero, 21, and her 2-year-old son Miguel (not their real names), left Ocotepeque, Honduras, to begin a dangerous journey through Guatemala and Mexico that
An immigrant with a “severe” case of COVID-19 who was arrested in last year’s Mississippi ICE raids is “at risk of dying” in an ICE prison, his family says.
Valdez Market sits in the Country Club Village Shopping Center on Old Canton Road, where it took over the site after a Winn-Dixie closed, virtually straddling the border between the capital city and its northern suburb of Ridgeland. It is an area that has seen demographic shifts in recent years, particularly in the large influx of Spanish-speaking residents in the area.
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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).
