Panama

Venezuelan Migrants Faced Dangerous Journey To Flee Country

Hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants continue arriving in New York City in what has become a crisis in the big apple.

Michel, a Venezuelan migrant, says leaving Venezuela with his wife and five children was not an easy decision.

“When you make the decision to leave your country, it is not easy for us. It is not easy,” said Michel.

Francelys Guedez says she didn’t want to see her 12 year-old son continue living under a dictatorship in Venezuela.

“I don’t want the dictatorship that exists in my country to live,” said Guedez.

Michel Sagues is a Venezuelan migrant.

“I regretted it after being there,” said Sagues.

For Sagues, the dangers he and his family could encounter on their journey gave them pause about leaving Venezuela. But home was too far away to turn back, and the future of his 20-month-old son was in his hands.

All of these parents are bound by the same conviction: their love for their children.

And they are some of more than 6,300 migrants seeking asylum in New York City in recent weeks.

“They already asked me for some documents, I think for registration,” said Sagues.

Michel says he started the process of enroll his five children in school.

But for all of the migrants, language is a major obstacle.

NEWSY’S AXEL TURCIOS: How was the process when you tried to enroll your child in school?

MICHEL SAGUES: To be honest, it was a bit complicated because the school district doesn’t have many people on staff who speak Spanish. I think one of the staff got kind of annoyed because he couldn’t understand me, and I wasn’t able to understand him.

The New York City Department of Education announced Project Open Arms, a support plan for asylum-seeking families.

It’s a program that allocates more bilingual staff to help these migrants enroll their children in schools.

However, Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, says the Department of Education needs to do more.

“We need them to take this on more aggressively to ensure that the students are not just getting the basic educational supports in school, but that they’re also getting the services in school that are going to help them continue to succeed in the educational environment,” said Awawdeh.

The migrants are being bused to New York City from the Texas-Mexico border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Abbott has acknowledged it’s a protest against what he calls President Joe Biden’s out-of-control border policies overwhelming Texas communities.

And it’s targeting Democratic city mayors like Eric Adams in New York City.

“Texas Gov. Abbott is using asylum seekers as political pawns in his efforts to build his own profile across the nation and also to get his poll numbers to increase in the state of Texas,” said Awadeh.

Most of the migrants are from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Cuba and crossed the Darién Gap, a lawless stretch of dangerous, mountainous rainforest standing across Colombia and Panama.

Jaison Manrrique crossed the region with his five-year-old daughter and wife.

“As a father I never thought to put my daughter through those conditions, sleeping on the bank of a river without knowing if in the early morning the water level was going to rise and drag us,” said Manrrique.

According to UNICEF, at least 5,000 children entered the jungle between January and June 2022.

“In the group that came behind us, there were many women, and they were all raped. Even 13-, 14-year-old girls who came in the group were raped. The men in the group were beaten,” said Guedez.

After crossing the Mexico border into Texas, the migrants say they were seeking asylum, which allows them to legally stay in the U.S. before seeing a judge.

Immigration Attorney Isadora Velazquez says these migrants go through a process called “credible fear interview.”

“They determined that this person could qualify for potential asylum. This may also apply to parents that come with their children and even if they have removal orders their children may qualify for a benefit. They don’t want the child to be at burden so the parent might be allowed in,” said Velazquez.

The immigration attorney says having an asylum claim doesn’t give them automatic benefits.

“When they do file property, they still have to wait 150 days to get a chance to apply for the work permit. Once they apply for a work permit the average wait is at least three months,” said Velazquez.

Without a work permit, they can not legally work in the country.

In the meantime, five-year-old Jaisbeli Manrrique knows what she wants.

She wishes to go to school and learn English.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

What America’s Port Crisis Looks Like Up Close

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.

The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.

“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”

As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.

turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting. It stands as a gnawing source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once-hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.

Germany’s industrial fortunes are sagging, why inflation has become a cause for concern among central bankers, and why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.

On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages. Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories that depend on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.

But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems. It is not merely that goods are scarce. It is that products are stuck in the wrong places, and separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.

The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks. The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations.

Vietnam, a hub for the apparel industry, was locked down for several months in the face of a harrowing outbreak of Covid. Diminished cargo leaving Asia should provide respite to clogged ports in the United States, but Mr. Lynch dismisses that line.

“Six or seven weeks later, the ships come in all at once,” Mr. Lynch said. “That doesn’t help.”

Early this year, as shipping prices spiked and containers became scarce, the trouble was widely viewed as the momentary result of pandemic lockdowns. With schools and offices shut, Americans were stocking up on home office gear and equipment for basement gyms, drawing heavily on factories in Asia. Once life reopened, global shipping was supposed to return to normal.

But half a year later, the congestion is worse, with nearly 13 percent of the world’s cargo shipping capacity tied up by delays, according to data compiled by Sea-Intelligence, an industry research firm in Denmark.

Many businesses now assume that the pandemic has fundamentally altered commercial life in permanent ways. Those who might never have shopped for groceries or clothing online — especially older people — have gotten a taste of the convenience, forced to adjust to a lethal virus. Many are likely to retain the habit, maintaining pressure on the supply chain.

“Before the pandemic, could we have imagined mom and dad pointing and clicking to buy a piece of furniture?” said Ruel Joyner, owner of 24E Design Co., a boutique furniture outlet that occupies a brick storefront in Savannah’s graceful historic district. His online sales have tripled over the past year.

On top of those changes in behavior, the supply chain disruption has imposed new frictions.

Mr. Joyner, 46, designs his furniture in Savannah while relying on factories from China and India to manufacture many of his wares. The upheaval on the seas has slowed deliveries, limiting his sales.

He pointed to a brown leather recliner made for him in Dallas. The factory is struggling to secure the reclining mechanism from its supplier in China.

“Where we were getting stuff in 30 days, they are now telling us six months,” Mr. Joyner said. Customers are calling to complain.

His experience also underscores how the shortages and delays have become a source of concern about fair competition. Giant retailers like Target and Home Depot have responded by stockpiling goods in warehouses and, in some cases, chartering their own ships. These options are not available to the average small business.

Bottlenecks have a way of causing more bottlenecks. As many companies have ordered extra and earlier, especially as they prepare for the all-consuming holiday season, warehouses have become jammed. So containers have piled up at the Port of Savannah.

Mr. Lynch’s team — normally focused on its own facilities — has devoted time to scouring unused warehouse spaces inland, seeking to provide customers with alternative channels for their cargo.

Recently, a major retailer completely filled its 3 million square feet of local warehouse space. With its containers piling up in the yard, port staff worked to ship the cargo by rail to Charlotte, N.C., where the retailer had more space.

Such creativity may provide a modicum of relief, but the demands on the port are only intensifying.

On a muggy afternoon in late September, Christmas suddenly felt close at hand. The containers stacked on the riverbanks were surely full of holiday decorations, baking sheets, gifts and other material for the greatest wave of consumption on earth.

Will they get to stores in time?

“That’s the question everyone is asking,” Mr. Lynch said. “I think that’s a very tough question.”

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<