They represent West Coconut Grove when it was a vital majority-Black neighborhood hidden among some of the most affluent areas in Miami that boomed with family businesses, local hangouts and sporting events. Some call it West Grove, Black Grove or Little Bahamas in a nod to its roots. Most just call it The Grove — a place steeped in cultural history transformed by the decades.

“When you talk about what is The Grove, you’re talking about true history of South Florida,” said Charles Gibson, grandson of one of the first Black members of the Miami City Commission, Theodore Gibson.

Sports was its heartbeat. It nurtured the early careers of Olympic gold medalists and football stars like Cooper, national champions and future football Hall of Famers like Gore, all of whom trace their first sports memories to this close-knit community.

Today, few remnants of that proud Black heritage exist. Years of economic neglect followed by recent gentrification have wiped out much of the neighborhood’s cultural backbone. Robust youth leagues and sports programs have dwindled. Now, the community that once created an environment for young athletes to succeed — a trusted neighbor watching out for a young football player on his walk to practice, a respected coach instilling discipline and persistence in a future track star — is at risk of extinction.

“I think in two or three years, if something’s not done, Black Grove is going to be totally eradicated,” said Anthony Witherspoon, a West Grove native and founder of the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame.

Witherspoon, known as “Spoon” by everyone in town, is a former college basketball player and coach who returned to West Grove in 2015 after nearly 30 years in Atlanta and found a neighborhood far different from the one that raised him.

Witherspoon recalled the late 1970s, when he would walk down the aptly named Grand Avenue — once the economic epicenter of West Grove — after a Friday night high school football game, grab dinner at a local mom-and-pop place and hang out at the popular Tikki Club.

The neighborhood’s earlier generations died, many of their families moved elsewhere and disinvestment led to poverty and neglect. Then redevelopment moved in, replacing longtime locals with non-Black newcomers. The mom-and-pops are largely gone. So is the Tikki Club, now an empty building, its last bit of vibrancy the Bahamian-inspired colors lingering on its walls.

“I was here. I lived in the community. I felt the impact of sports,” Witherspoon said. “I came back from Atlanta, Georgia, and I ran into the gentrification. And this was in the back of my mind: We still need to preserve this history.”

Witherspoon founded the Hall of Fame as a way to keep that legacy alive. A time capsule of about 90 athletes and coaches from the area, it starts with figures like Colzie, a World War II veteran who played baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues, and continues with the former pro running back Gore and Cooper, a receiver with the Cleveland Browns.

“Coconut Grove is the nesting place for all of us athletes from this neighborhood,” said Gerald Tinker, a West Grove native who won a gold medal at the 1972 Olympics as a member of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team. “They would always expect us to be just as good (as earlier generations), and just as humble as well. And it’s always been that way.”

The community’s reputation for athletics was birthed at George Washington Carver High School, a segregated Black school. Carver was a football powerhouse in the 1950s and 1960s, winning five state championships under Powell, who helped shape the landscape of Miami’s high school sports scene.

Harold Cole, a former coach and athletic director at nearby Coral Gables High School who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2019, said Powell’s influence has lasted generations.

“He was a coach; he was a mentor,” Cole said. “He was responsible for so many of the athletes that have come out of Coconut Grove.”

Cole said West Grove still has youth sports programs, but since many families have moved out and kids have dispersed to other school districts, “it isn’t quite the same.”

Integration in the 1970s forced Carver to close. It’s a middle school now, located in the wealthy nearby town of Coral Gables.

“That division broke the fabric of the community to a degree in the ‘80s,” Witherspoon said.

Nichelle Haymore’s family hopes to preserve some of the old neighborhood by reopening the Ace Theater, a popular spot for Black residents during the Jim Crow era. Haymore’s great-grandfather, businessman Harvey Wallace Sr., bought the theater on Grand Avenue in the 1970s. Born in West Grove, Haymore spent years in Texas before moving back in 2007 to help maintain the theater.

“The feel of the neighborhood is different,” Haymore said. “Neighbors who may have looked out for your house in the beginning, they don’t say hello, they don’t speak. People walk their dogs in your yard. That neighborly respect is different because the neighborhood is different.”

Shotgun-style homes belonging to Black residents have been torn down for sleek, boxy estates — called ice cubes by some — and condominiums far too expensive for the middle-class people that built the community. Abandoned, boarded-up buildings sit where landmarks used to draw crowds. Giant real estate advertisements are plastered on the fences of vacant lots.

“They’re knocking down homes that’s been in people’s families for years and they’re building townhomes,” said Denzel Perryman, a Coconut Grove native and former University of Miami star who is a linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers. “So, it does affect the community because some kids who are from there, they end up going to different places, different parks because they don’t live in the Coconut Grove area.”

Perryman, who lived in Miami’s historic Black neighborhood of Overtown as a kid, spent most of his time in West Grove playing football at Armbrister Park or participating in the many after-school activities the community had to offer.

Some still exist today. Perryman watched his childhood football team, the Coconut Grove Cowboys, win a Pop Warner championship in December. Youth teams still hold practices at Armbrister Park, though some of them look different from teams of years past.

“It’s unfortunate because you lose so much, the character,” said Gibson, a football and lacrosse coach. “There’s certain things in a community that has family ties to it. When you lose that, I think that it’s a sadness.”

Gibson is determined, like many other residents, to foster the same family environment that nurtured him.

“You can’t put a dollar sign on saying, ‘Go to grandma’s house. She (lives) next door,’” Gibson said. “You don’t even have to look outside because you know that it’s just 10 steps away and they’re inside the house. How can you put a value on that?”

In The Grove, that is the question people are struggling to answer — before it’s too late.

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Reaching the United States was a harrowing ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then-7-year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama’s Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and then turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received a work permit last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“My plan is to help my family that much need the money and to grow economically here,” Silva said.

Her story amounts to far more than one family’s arduous quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year:

How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether living in the United States legally or not. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.

More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. The availability of immigrant workers eased the pressure on companies to sharply raise wages and to then pass on their higher labor costs to their customers via higher prices that feed inflation. Though U.S. inflation remains elevated, it has plummeted from its levels of two years ago.

“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?’’ said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.’’

While helping fuel economic growth, immigrants also lie at the heart of an incendiary election-year debate over the control of the nation’s Southern border. In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has attacked migrants in often-degrading terms, characterizing them as dangerous criminals who are “poisoning the blood” of America and frequently invoking falsehoods about migration. Trump has vowed to finish building a border wall and to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their key role in propelling the economy, will endure.

The boom in immigration caught almost everyone by surprise. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that net immigration — arrivals minus departures — would equal about 1 million in 2023. The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, was more than triple that estimate: 3.3 million.

Thousands of employers desperately needed the new arrivals. The economy — and consumer spending — had roared back from the pandemic recession. Companies were struggling to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.

The problem was compounded by demographic changes: The number of native-born Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — was dropping because so many of them had aged out of that category and were nearing or entering retirement. This group’s numbers have shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed the economy.

Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million. And nearly all those new labor force entrants — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States. Immigrants last year accounted for a record 18.6% of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of government data.

And employers welcomed the help.

Consider Jan Gautam, CEO of the lodging company Interessant Hotels & Resort Management in Orlando, Florida, who said he can’t find American-born workers to take jobs cleaning rooms and doing laundry in his 44 hotels. Of Interessant’s 3,500 workers, he said, 85% are immigrants.

“Without employees, you are broken,” said Gautam, himself an immigrant from India who started working in restaurants as a dishwasher and now owns his own company.

“If you want boost the economy,” he said, “it definitely needs to have more immigrants coming out to this country.”

Or consider the workforce of the Flood Brothers farm in Maine’s “dairy capital’’ of Clinton. Foreign-born workers make up fully half the farm’s staff of nearly 50, feeding the cows, tending crops and helping collect the milk — 18,000 gallons each day.

“We cannot do it without them,” said Jenni Tilton-Flood, a partner in the operation.

For every unemployed person in Maine, after all, there are two job openings, on average.

“We would not have an economy, in Maine or in the U.S. if we did not have highly skilled labor that comes from outside of this country,” Tilton-Flood said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from her farm.

“Without immigrants — both new asylum-seekers as well as our long-term immigrant contributors — we would not be able to do the work that we do,” she said. “Every single thing that affects the American economy is driven by and will only be saved by accepting immigrant labor.”

A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, economists at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, has concluded that over the past two years, new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.

In the past, economists typically estimated that America’s employers could add no more than 60,000 to 100,000 jobs a month without overheating the economy and igniting inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson included the immigration surge in their calculations, they found that monthly job growth could be roughly twice as high this year — 160,000 to 200,000 — without exerting upward pressure on inflation.

“There are significantly more people working in the country,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week in a speech at Stanford University. Largely because of the immigrant influx, Powell said, “it’s a bigger economy but not a tighter one. Really an unexpected and an unusual thing.’’

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s immigration policy over the surge in migrants at the Southern border. Only about 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so through as “lawful permanent residents’’ or on temporary visas, according to Edelberg and Watson’s analysis. The rest — 2.4 million — either came illegally, overstayed their visas, are awaiting immigration court proceedings or are on a parole program that lets them stay temporarily and sometimes work in the country.

“So there you have it,’’ Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who is president of the conservative American Action Forum, wrote in February. “The way to solve an inflation crisis is to endure an immigration crisis.”

Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy in several ways. They take generally undesirable, low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t, like caring for children, the sick and the elderly. And they can boost the country’s innovation and productivity because they are more likely to start their own businesses and obtain patents.

Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center and a former Biden economic adviser, calculates that the burst of immigration has accounted for about a fifth of the economy’s growth over the past four years.

Critics counter that a surge in immigration can force down pay, particularly for low-income workers, a category that often includes immigrants who have lived in the United States longer. Last month, in the most recent economic report of the president, Biden’s advisers acknowledged that “immigration may place downward pressure on the wages of some low-paid workers” but added that most studies show that the impact on the wages of the U.S.-born is “small.”

Even Edelberg notes that an unexpected wave of immigrants, like the recent one, can overwhelm state and local governments and saddle them with burdensome costs. A more orderly immigration system, she said, would help.

The recent surge “is a somewhat disruptive way of increasing immigration in the United States,” Edelberg said. “I don’t think anybody would have sat down and said: ‘Let’s create optimal immigration policy,’ and this is what they would come up with.”

Holtz-Eakin argued that an immigration cutoff of the kind Trump has vowed to impose, if elected, would result in “much, much slower labor force growth and a return to the sharp tradeoff’’ between containing inflation and maintaining economic growth that the United States has so far managed to avoid.

For now, millions of job vacancies are being filled by immigrants like Mariel Marrero. A political opponent of Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, Marrero, 32, fled her homeland in 2016 after receiving death threats. She lived in Panama and El Salvador before crossing the U.S. border and applying for asylum.

Her case pending, she received authorization to work in the United States last July. Marrero, who used to work in the archives of the Venezuelan Congress in Caracas, found work selling telephones and then as a sales clerk at a convenience store owned by Venezuelan immigrants.

At first, she lived for free at the house of an uncle. But now she earns enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom house she shares with three other Venezuelans in Doral, Florida, a Miami suburb with a large Venezuelan community. After rent, food, electricity and gasoline, she has enough left over to send $200 a month to her family in Venezuela.

“One hundred percent — this country gives you opportunities,’’ she said.

Marrero has her own American dream:

“I imagine having my own company, my house, helping my family in a more comfortable way.”

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National Institute of Standards and Technology investigators told an advisory panel that tests show that some of the steel-reinforced concrete columns at Champlain Towers South were half the strength they should have been and were not up to construction standards in 1980 when the 12-story tower was built. The steel in some had become moderately to extremely corroded, weakening them further.

Investigators have also confirmed eyewitness reports that the pool deck fell into the garage four to seven minutes before the beachside tower collapsed early on June 24, 2021, in the Miami suburb of Surfside. Thursday’s meeting was in Maryland and streamed online.

Glenn Bell, one of the lead investigators, stressed that the results are preliminary and will not be official until all tests are completed and the final report issued next year.

“The implications of our recommendations are very large, and we feel pressure to get this right,” Bell said. “Bringing about the changes that may be required based on the lessons that we learned may not be easy.”

The federal agency cannot change state and local building codes, but it can make recommendations.

The concrete pool deck was attached to the building, and investigators believe its failure likely damaged and destabilized the base of a support beam that ran through the tower section that first fell. When that beam failed, that caused that tower section to pancake down and a neighboring section to then fall onto it, they said.

The question remains, however, whether the pool deck collapsed on its own or something happening within the building triggered it, they said.

Evidence supporting the theory that the deck failed on its own includes photographs taken weeks before the collapse showing large cracks in concrete planters that lined the pool area. That shows the deck was already under stress, investigators said.

Evidence supporting the idea that something happening within the tower triggered the deck collapse includes surviving tenants telling investigators they heard loud banging from inside the walls before the deck failed.

Pablo Langesfeld, whose 26-year-old daughter Nicole died in the collapse with her husband, Luis Sadovnic, criticized the investigation for taking too long. He pointed out that Miami-Dade County prosecutors have said they cannot determine whether any criminal charges are warranted until the federal investigation is completed.

“I understand the complexities of such an investigation, but almost three years later, 40 employees and around $30 million spent and still not solid answers — it is not acceptable,” Langesfeld said. “It is frustrating that justice, and accountability seems nowhere in sight.”

Lawsuits filed after the collapse by victims’ families and survivors settled in less than a year, with more than $1 billion divided. The money came from several sources, including insurance companies, engineering companies and a luxury condominium that had recently been built next door. None of the parties admitted wrongdoing.

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After three consecutive years of spring break violence, Miami Beach officials are implementing monthlong security measures aimed at curbing the chaos, including parking restrictions for non-residents and closing sidewalk cafes on busy weekends. The city has warned visitors to expect curfews, bag searches at the beach, early beach closures, DUI checkpoints, and arrests for drug possession and violence. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that 45 state law enforcement officers are also being deployed to the city to bolster the police.

But business owners in the city’s world-famous South Beach neighborhood are now concerned that they’ll lose money during one of the busiest times of the year, and civil rights advocates say the restrictions are an overreaction to large Black crowds.

Many of the city’s restrictions aren’t new, but in past years, they were instituted as emergency measures during the unofficial holiday — not measures put in place ahead of time.

“The status quo and what we’ve seen in the last few years is just not acceptable, not tolerable,” Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner said.

Meiner said crowds have become unmanageable despite a robust police presence. He said the city, which is situated on a barrier island across the bay from Miami, can only hold so many people, and that capacity has often exceeded what’s safe for both visitors and residents during the break.

DeSantis said at a Miami Beach press conference that Florida is going to crack down on anyone who violates the law during spring break.

“Florida is a very welcoming state. We welcome people to come and have a good time. What we don’t welcome is criminal activity. What we don’t welcome is mayhem and people who want to wreak havoc on our communities,” he said.

Most spring break activity centers around a 10-block stretch of Ocean Drive known for its art deco hotels, restaurants and nightclubs.

David Wallack, owner of Mango’s Tropical Cafe, said Miami Beach has always thrived on celebration, and choking visitor access will turn the vibrant, eclectic city into a retirement community.

“I believe we need to create something big, another big event in March because March has fallen off the edge of the cliff,” Wallack said.

Wallack and others have proposed a large music festival during the third week of spring break — when aimless and unruly crowds tend to reach their climax — with the hope that attendees will disperse the loitering mobs.

Meiner said the city has spent millions of dollars on concerts and other events in the past with little effect in mitigating the violence. He said businesses suffer when violent mobs gathering along Ocean Drive force them to close, adding that the people who are primarily causing the problems aren’t spending money in the city anyway.

“They’re not staying in the hotels,” Meiner said. “They’re not visiting our businesses.”

Some civil rights advocates, however, believe the restrictions are racially motivated.

South Beach became popular among Black tourists about two decades ago as promoters organized Urban Beach Week during the Memorial Day weekend. Many locals have complained about violence and other crime associated with the event, which led to an increased police presence. But the event’s continued popularity correlates to a bump in Black tourism throughout the year.

Stephen Hunter Johnson, an attorney and member of Miami-Dade’s Black Affairs Advisory Board, said city officials are only cracking down so hard because many of the visitors are Black.

“Everybody loves this idea that they are free from their government intruding on them,” Johnson said. “But amazingly, if the government intrudes on Black people, everyone’s fine with it.”

Miami Beach’s mayor rejects the notion that the city’s actions have anything to do with race.

“I have a moral obligation to keep people safe, and right now, it is not safe,” Meiner said.

In the Florida Panhandle, the longtime spring break destination of Panama City Beach has experienced a similar escalation in violent crime, but Police Chief Eusebio Talamantez attributes that to people taking advantage of the environment, not actual college students on spring break.

“When you think of spring break, you might think of vacation, a collegiate break, maybe some fistfights and some keg stands,” Talamantez said. “It has evolved into shootings, mass riots, rape and homicide.”

Panama City Beach’s violence came to a head in 2015 when a house party shooting left seven people wounded. The city subsequently banned alcohol on the beach and cracked down on unpermitted events, among other things. Local businesses sued the city later that year, claiming the new rules unfairly targeted events popular with Black visitors, but the lawsuit was dropped several months later.

Talamantez said the measures were somewhat successful, but a massive hurricane in late 2018 and COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 disrupted the city’s ability to manage crowds once pandemic restrictions were lifted, leading to a resurgence in the violence.

A renewed crackdown in 2023, however, led to a 44% reduction in crime, and the city is imposing similar rules this year. Talamantez said he doubts anything Miami Beach is doing will be more strict than the enforcement measures in Panama City Beach.

“We’re just trying to create an environment that says loud and clear in big bold letters that we are a municipality of law and order,” Talamantez said. “And law and order does not go away just because you’re on spring break.”

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Against the backdrop of favorable decisions by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, Florida was among nine states that expanded school voucher programs last year. So many families have signed up for the taxpayer-funded tuition reimbursements, some states are already exceeding their budgets.

Some long-running religious schools are now planning for a fuller future after the wave of policy wins for the so-called school choice movement. Others hope voucher expansion comes to their state.

“We are moving into growth mode,” said Jim Rigg, superintendent of the Miami Archdiocese’s 64 schools. Accelerated by the state’s private school scholarship program, enrollment has risen for the last four years, reaching its highest peak in over a decade, he said.

We are actively discussing new schools, either opened or reopened, over the next several years.”

But using public funds to pay for religious school tuition — especially with generous income limits or none at all — remains controversial as proponents gain ground in Republican-majority states. The movement gained momentum amid fallout from pandemic-era school restrictions, debates on how transgender students should participate in school life, and wars over books and curriculum related to race and LGBTQ+ issues.

More expansion may be ahead as legislatures in a majority of states consider dozens of bills and related court cases carry on. In Tennessee, for example, a Catholic school principal is hoping her students will soon be eligible for the state’s limited program. In California, families are suing because they can’t use available public funds to send their children with disabilities to Jewish schools.

FUNDING DEBATE: MORE OPTIONS VS. CHURCH-STATE ISSUES
Thirty-two states have voucher programs, and some have been in place for decades. Supporters tout funding the student instead of the school, better academic options and more choices for parents who can benefit from taxes they pay. Opponents worry paying for private school tuition leaves less money for programs and teachers for the kids left behind in public school. They say vouchers exacerbate segregation in schools, and they worry about blurring the line between church and state, saying religious schools could discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and others.

“When taxpayer dollars fund religious education, you are forcing taxpayers to support religion and oftentimes a religion that’s not their own,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Her organization is part of a lawsuit trying to stop the nation’s first religious charter school — St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School under the Oklahoma City Archdiocese. She called the rising pro-voucher push just one prong of the Christian nationalist attack on public education.

“That’s antithetical to religious freedom and un-American,” Laser said.

Ed Choice President Robert Enlow disagrees: “These are funds given to parents that are neutrally and privately making choices to spend them at nonpublic or religious schools.”

Nearly 80% of private school families choose religious ones, according to P. George Tryfiates, public policy and legal affairs vice president for the Association of Christian Schools International. The association represents about 2,200 U.S. schools.

In a statement, he said Christian schools are, among other things, “a refuge from the cultural wars over sexuality.”

MORE STUDENTS FOR SOME RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS
In central Florida, Mount Dora Christian Academy now has waitlists for nearly every grade, and plans to add more classes, said James Carr, interim president for the 80-year-old Church of Christ-rooted school. State scholarships now make up about half of the $10 million the school receives for tuition and fees, he said, noting it’s increasing the school’s diversity and affordability.

“The demand now for private education is growing because there is some assistance,” he said.

Due in part to Florida’s expanded voucher program, Jewish school enrollment in the state has grown nearly as much in the past two years as in the previous decade, according to a data analysis by Gabe Aaronson, director of Teach Coalition’s Office for Jewish Education Research.

In the Miami Archdiocese, more than half the schools have waitlists and one in southern Miami-Dade County has doubled its student body, said Rigg, who credited the scholarship program in part for the growth. Last year, the archdiocese added two high schools; this year, a shuttered elementary school reopened, he said.

Illinois is an outlier. The Democratic-controlled legislature let the state’s income-restricted, tax credit scholarship program expire. The Catholic Chicago Archdiocese cited its demise as part of why two of its suburban schools would close in June.

“Enrollment growth in religious schools is a chief outcome of this expansion of vouchers,” said Samuel E. Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, in an email. “This should be no surprise.”

Religious education advocates were involved in three key Supreme Court rulings that reinforced ways for public funds to flow into private schools, Abrams said, including parochial ones that have otherwise seen declining enrollment and rising tuition. U.S. Catholic school enrollment saw its first increase in 20 years when it rose 3.8% in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

“Vouchers are a godsend, pardon the pun, for Catholic schools and similar religious schools, even if such vouchers don’t cover all of tuition,” Abrams said.

Teach Coalition, an education advocacy project of the Orthodox Union, believes in strong public school systems alongside strong private schools, said Dan Mitzner, government affairs director for the organization, which advocates for about 90% of Yeshiva and Jewish day school students in the U.S.

“We still believe that public funds in general should not be used for religious purposes,” Mitzner said. “But there’s a way to thread that needle and that’s the space that we operate in.”

JEWISH FAMILIES TURN TO THE COURTS FOR FUNDING HELP
Teach Coalition is backing a school funding-related religious discrimination lawsuit in California. Chaya Loffman and her husband, and two other Orthodox Jewish families, are suing the state for allowing public student disability funding to be used at secular private schools but not religious ones. They have a religious obligation to send their son, who has autism, to a Jewish school, but doing so has meant forgoing or paying out of pocket for the additional services he needs, she said.

“Religious families and schools should have the same treatment under the law,” said Loffman, represented by religious freedom legal experts at The Becket Fund.

“Ultimately these children with disabilities are losing out and it’s not fair,” she said.

Even with four big fundraisers a year, some families at St. Patrick Catholic School in McEwen, Tennessee, could still use financial help, said Sister Veronica Marie Buckmaster, principal of the rural preK-8 institution that is the oldest Catholic school in the Nashville Diocese.

Expanding the state’s public savings account program, she said, “would greatly relieve the stress on family finances and give parents the freedom to use their tax dollars toward their choice of education for their child.”

Last month, Republican Gov. Bill Lee used his State of the State address to renew his expansion push, which requires legislative action. Bills are being considered this session, but the current program barely passed even with a Republican supermajority.

“The key thing for voters and policymakers to keep in mind regarding this funding of religious education is the absence of much regulation,” said Abrams. He questioned why the U.S. isn’t following the lead of some European countries by requiring universal academic standards and discrimination protections at publicly funded private schools.

“More fundamentally, this funding of religious education erodes the common ground that public schools, however imperfectly, have long afforded this country.”

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Manuel Rocha, 73, told a federal judge he would admit to federal counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, charges that could land him behind bars for several years. His defense lawyer indicated that prosecutors have agreed upon a sentence, but the length of that term was not disclosed in court Thursday.

He is due back in court April 12.

“I am in agreement,” Rocha said when asked by U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom if he wished to change his plea to guilty.

Prosecutors alleged that Rocha engaged in “clandestine activity” on Cuba’s behalf since at least 1981 — the year he joined the U.S. foreign service — including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to U.S. government officials about his contacts.

Federal authorities have said little about exactly what Rocha did to assist Cuba while working for the State Department and in a lucrative post-government career that included a stint as a special adviser to the commander of U.S. Southern Command.

Rocha, whose two-decade career as a U.S. diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, was arrested by the FBI at his Miami home in December.

Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rocha’s own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative named “Miguel.”

Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as “Comandante,” branded the U.S. the “enemy” and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of U.S. foreign policy circles, the complaint says.

“What we have done … it’s enormous … more than a Grand Slam,” he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations.

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A person familiar with the matter said that results on the substance were inconclusive, but officials do not believe it was deadly. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm details of the letter, which were first reported by The Daily Beast.

Trump Jr. opened the letter, which also contained a death threat, in his home office, and emergency responders wearing hazmat suits responded.

Jupiter police said the investigation is being handled by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, which said it was working with the U.S. Secret Service but didn’t have any further details. The Secret Service declined to comment.

Trump Jr. is one of his father’s top campaign surrogates, frequently headlining events and appearing in interviews on his behalf.

It’s the second time white powder has been sent to the former president’s oldest son. In 2018, his then-wife, Vanessa, was taken to a New York City hospital after she opened an envelope addressed to her husband that contained an unidentified white powder. Police later said the substance wasn’t dangerous.

In March 2016, police detectives and FBI agents investigated a threatening letter sent to the Manhattan apartment of Donald Trump Jr.’s brother Eric that also contained a white powder that turned out to be harmless.

Envelopes containing white powder were also sent twice in 2016 to Trump Tower, which served as Trump’s campaign headquarters.

Hoax attacks using white powder play on fears that date to 2001, when letters containing deadly anthrax were mailed to news organizations and the offices of two U.S. senators. Those letters killed five people.

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So former CIA operative Félix Rodríguez was dubious in 2006 when a defected Cuban Army lieutenant colonel showed up at his Miami home with a startling tip: “Rocha,” he quoted the man as saying, “is spying for Cuba.”

Rodriguez, who participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the execution of revolutionary “Che” Guevara, believed at the time that the Rocha tip was an attempt to discredit a fellow anti-communist crusader. He said he nonetheless passed the defector’s message along to the CIA, which was similarly skeptical.

“No one believed him,” Rodriguez said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We all thought it was a smear.”

That long-ago tip came rushing back in devastating clarity in December when the now-73-year-old Rocha was arrested and charged with serving as a secret agent of Cuba stretching back to the 1970s — what prosecutors called one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the U.S. State Department.

Rocha was secretly recorded by an undercover FBI agent praising Fidel Castro as “El Comandante” and bragging about his work for Cuba’s communist government, calling it “more than a grand slam” against the U.S. “enemy.” And to hide his true allegiances, prosecutors and friends say, Rocha in recent years adopted the fake persona of an avid Donald Trump supporter who talked tough against the island nation.

“I really admired this son of a bitch,” an angry Rodríguez said. “I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything.”

As Rocha pleaded not guilty from jail this week to 15 federal counts, FBI and State Department investigators have been working to decipher the case’s biggest missing piece: exactly what the longtime diplomat may have given up to Cuba. It’s a confidential damage assessment, complicated by the often-murky intelligence world, that’s expected to take years.

The AP spoke with two dozen former senior U.S. counterintelligence officials, Cuban intelligence defectors, and friends and colleagues of Rocha to piece together what is known so far of his alleged betrayal, and the missed clues and red flags that could have helped him avoid scrutiny for decades.

It wasn’t just Rodríguez’s tipster — whom he refused to identify to the AP but says was recently interviewed by the FBI. Officials told the AP that as early 1987, the CIA was aware Castro had a “super mole” burrowed deep inside the U.S. government. Some now suspect it could have been Rocha and that since at least 2010 he may have been on a short list given to the FBI of possible Cuban spies high up in foreign policy circles.

Rocha’s attorney did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment. The FBI and CIA declined to comment, and the State Department didn’t respond to requests.

“This is a monumental screw-up,” said Peter Romero, a former assistant secretary of state for Latin America who worked with Rocha. “All of us are doing a lot of soul searching and nobody can come up with anything. He did an amazing job covering his tracks.”

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Before he was charged with being a Cuban agent, Rocha’s life embodied the American dream.

He was born in Colombia and at age 10 moved with his widowed mother and two siblings to New York City. They lived for a while in Harlem while his mother worked in a sweatshop and got by with the help of food stamps.

A talented soccer player with a sharp intellect, he won a scholarship for minorities in 1965 to attend The Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Overnight he was catapulted from what he called a “ghetto” engulfed in race riots to a refined world of American wealth.

“Taft was the best thing that happened to my life,” he told the school’s alumni magazine in 2004.

But as one of only a few minorities at the school, Rocha says he suffered discrimination — including a classmate who refused to room with him — something that fueled a grudge that friends suspect may have led him to admire Castro’s revolution.

“I was devastated and considered suicide,” he told the alumni magazine.

From Taft, he went to Yale, where he graduated with honors with a degree in Latin American studies, and then on to graduate work at Harvard and Georgetown.

It’s not clear exactly how Rocha may have been recruited by Cuba but prosecutors say it happened sometime in the 1970s when he was still racking up degrees and American college campuses were teeming with students sympathetic to leftist causes.

In 1973, the year he graduated from Yale, Rocha traveled to Chile, where prosecutors say he became a “great friend” of Cuba’s intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence, or DGI. That same year, the CIA helped topple the Castro-backed socialist government of Salvador Allende, replacing it with a brutal military dictatorship.

Around the same time, Rocha entered the first of his three marriages, to an older Colombian woman he barely spoke about to friends, and who is now under scrutiny for possible ties to Cuba, according to those who have been questioned by the FBI. The AP was unable to reach the woman or locate any record of their marriage.

‘ALL PART OF A PLAN’
After joining the foreign service in 1981, one of Rocha’s first overseas postings was as a political-military affairs officer in Honduras, where he advised the Contras in their fight against Cuba-backed leftist rebels in neighboring Nicaragua.

In 1994, he went to the White House to work as director of Inter-American Affairs on the National Security Council, with responsibility for Cuba. That same year, he wrote a memo, “A Calibrated Response to Cuban Reforms,” urging the Clinton administration to begin dismantling U.S. trade restrictions, according to Peter Kornbluh, a national security expert who interviewed Rocha for a 2014 book.

The secretary of state planned to announce the policy overhaul following the U.S. midterm elections, according to Kornbluh. But that speech was never delivered. Republican hardliners who took control of Congress enacted legislation in 1996 hardening the embargo and blocking any effort to improve relations with Havana.

From Washington, Rocha was dispatched to Havana, where he served for two years as the principal deputy of the U.S. Interests Section. It was a perilous time — in the wake of the 1996 aerial shootdown of a “Brothers to the Rescue” propaganda plane over Cuba that killed four Castro opponents — and the DGI would have had almost unfettered access to the diplomat.

Rocha’s biggest known favor to Cuba, intentional or not, came during his final and most important diplomatic post, as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, when he intervened in the country’s presidential election to help a Castro protégé.

At an embassy event in 2002, Rocha inserted into his carefully scripted remarks a warning to Bolivians that voting for a narcotrafficker — a not-so veiled reference to coca grower-turned-presidential candidate Evo Morales — would lead the U.S. to cut off all foreign assistance.

“I remember it vividly. I was so uncomfortable,” said Liliana Ayalde, a fellow foreign service officer who later served as U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and Brazil. “I told him it wasn’t appropriate for the ambassador to say these remarks with elections just around the corner.”

The backlash was immediate. Bolivians deeply resented the idea of the U.S. interfering in their elections, and Morales, until then a long shot, surged in the polls and almost won. Three years later when he did prevail, he credited Rocha with being his “best campaign chief.”

Today, Ayalde wonders whether Rocha’s last hurrah as a foreign service officer was an act of self-sabotage, done at the direction of a foreign power to further damage the U.S.’ standing in Latin America, traditionally referred to as “Washington’s backyard.”

“Now that I look back,” she said, “it was all part of a plan.”

SUPER MOLE?
As early as 1987, when Rocha was a few years into his ascendant career, the U.S. was made aware of a Cuban “super mole” burrowed into the Washington establishment, according to Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst.

The information was provided by Florentino Aspillaga, who defected while heading the DGI’s office in Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia.

Before Aspillaga died in 2018, he told the CIA that four dozen Cubans it recruited were actually double agents — or “dangles” in spy parlance— carefully selected by the DGI to penetrate the U.S. government. Latell said Aspillaga also spoke of two highly productive spies inside the State Department.

While Aspillaga didn’t know any of their names, the revelation sent shockwaves through the CIA.

“One of Aspillaga’s major revelations was that Fidel Castro himself was serving to a large degree as Cuba’s spymaster,” Latell said.

Enrique Garcia, who defected to the U.S. in the 1990s, also caught wind of the clandestine spy ring while running Cuban agents in Latin America. He said the documents he saw, which carried “Top Secret” and State Department markings, were so valuable that they were sent directly to Castro’s residence, bypassing the interior minister who oversaw the DGI.

“I have no doubt Rocha was part of that ring,” said Garcia, who told the FBI about the spy ring years ago.

Jim Popkin, author of “Code Name Blue Wren,” a book about Ana Montes, the highest-level U.S. official ever convicted of spying for Cuba, said his intelligence sources recently told him that Rocha’s name was on a short list of at least four possible Cuban spies that had been in the FBI’s hands since at least 2010. AP was not able to independently confirm that.

“The FBI has been aware of Rocha for a dozen years,” Popkin said. “That’s likely what stirred interest that led to his arrest years later.”

Peter Lapp, who oversaw FBI counterintelligence against Cuba between 1998 and 2005, and wrote a book on Montes, “Queen of Cuba,” said he was unaware whether Rocha had been on the bureau’s radar. But he acknowledged that in the national security hierarchy, Cuba is often an afterthought to Russia, China and more dangerous threats.

At the time of Rodríguez’s 2006 tip about Rocha spying for Cuba, for instance, U.S. counterintelligence investigators were occupied with the U.S. war in Iraq, the airstrike that killed al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and controversial detention and interrogation programs overseas.

“You don’t get promoted to the senior ranks of the FBI counterintelligence division by focusing on Cuba,” Lapp said. “But it’s a country we ignore at our peril. Not only are the Cubans really good at human intelligence but they are experts at brokering information to some of our biggest adversaries.”

‘I HAVE ACCESS’
Following his retirement from the foreign service in 2002, Rocha embarked on a lucrative career in business, racking up a number of senior positions and consulting jobs at private equity firms, a public relations agency, a Chinese automaker and even a company in the cannabis industry.

“I have access to just about every country in the region or know how to get it,” he bragged to the Miami Herald in 2006.

From 2012 to 2018, he served as president of Barrick Gold’s subsidiary in the Dominican Republic, overseeing production at the world’s sixth-largest gold mine. Rodríguez’s mementos of his one-time friendship with Rocha include a photo of the former diplomat in a hard hat lugging around a freshly extracted chunk of gold.

John Feeley, who worked under Rocha when he joined the State Department and eventually became ambassador to Panama, remembers his former mentor urging him to reject pro bono work in retirement and instead chase a paycheck.

“He was openly and vocally motivated by making money in his post-foreign service career,” Feeley said, “which wasn’t typical among former diplomats.”

One business that has received new scrutiny in the wake of Rocha’s arrest was a venture he headed with a group of offshore investors to buy up at a steep discount billions of dollars in claims against Cuba’s government for farmland, factories and other properties confiscated during the communist revolution.

Rocha and his partner said that there was no way the Cuban government would ever pay up and that the U.S. government was unlikely to help, recalled claim holder Carolyn Chester, whose father was a former AP journalist and later close to deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Chester remembered how the pair rolled up to meet her in Omaha, Nebraska, in a limousine and delivered a polished presentation in which they played off one another “like a tag team.”

While his partner presented the facts of their offer for a claim to a farm and other seized property, “Rocha would tug on our heartstrings,” recounting a supposed meeting they had with Chester’s parents years before in Washington.

Chester, who ultimately decided not to sell, said the meeting left her with doubts about Rocha, in part because she was all but certain her father’s poor health would have kept her parents from making such a trip to Washington. And she found it strange that Rocha and his partner spoke as if “they knew for sure” of the intentions of Cuban officials.

The idea, according to Rocha’s former business partner, Tim Ashby, was to “kill communism with capitalism” by swapping the claims for land concessions, leases and joint ventures in Cuba at a time when the communist island was desperate for foreign investment.

“For Cuba, there was a lot more at play,” said Ashby, a lawyer and former senior official in the U.S. Commerce Department. “This was crucial to normalizing relations with the U.S.”

The investment group would eventually spend around $5 million buying up nine claims valued at over $55 million, Ashby said. But the venture collapsed after some claim holders complained to the George W. Bush administration that they thought they were being bamboozled. In 2009, the Treasury Department moved to bar the transfer of any certified claims against Cuba.

That didn’t stop Rocha from continuing to make money. Records show that since 2016 alone, Rocha and his current wife spent more than $5.2 million to buy a half-dozen apartments in high-rise buildings in Miami’s financial district. This month, four of those properties were transferred entirely into his wife’s name, a move former law enforcement officials said could potentially shield them from government seizure.

In hindsight, Ashby acknowledged he was taken in by the image his former partner wanted the world to see.

“He was fiercely anti-communist and a staunch, early, Trump supporter,” he said. “Rocha was the last person I would have suspected of being a Cuban spy.”

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Around 90% of the roses and fresh cut flowers being sold for Valentine’s Day in the United States come through Miami, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. They arrive on hundreds of flights into Miami on their journey to florists and supermarkets across the U.S. and Canada. That equates to some 18,000 tons of flowers passing through Miami.

“This season we transported around 460 million flowers from Ecuador and Colombia,” Diogo Elias, senior vice president of Avianca Cargo, said Monday during a news conference in Miami.

Among the most exported flowers this season by the airline were roses and carnations from Bogota; pompons, hydrangeas and chrysanthemums from Medellin; and roses, carnations and gypsophila from Quito, Avianca said in a statement.

The Valentine season actually started in mid-January and ends Wednesday. During that three-week period, flowers arrived in Miami on some 300 flights, Elias said.

And that’s where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists come into play. At the airport, they check the bundles of flowers to prevent the introduction of potentially harmful plant, pest and foreign animal disease from entering the country.

Their job is to make sure the floral imports don’t contain the kinds of exotic pests and foreign animal diseases which have caused $120 billion annually in economic and environmental losses in the United States, said Danny Alonso, the airport’s port director.

It is a massive undertaking.

Through Feb. 8, agriculture specialists had processed about 832 million stems of cut flowers, inspected 75,000 cut flower sample boxes, and intercepted 1,100 plant pests, he said. During the same time last year, specialists processed more than 861 million stems of flowers, resulting in 932 plant pest interceptions

“It’s one of the most demanding times of the year for our staff here,” Alonso said.

And once the Valentine’s rush is over, everyone involved can take a quick breath before planning begins for the next big flower day in the United States — Mother’s Day in May.

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It was a typical jab from Biden, but it came with extra punch on Trump’s home turf. The first fundraiser of the day was held at the Pelican Club in Jupiter, a wealthy enclave less than an hour from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

“You’re the reason Donald Trump’s the defeated president,” Biden told donors. “And you’re the reason we’re going to make him a loser again.”

Biden said Republicans were determined to undo his administration’s progress, such as limiting the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs, and he accused Trump of “threatening our very democracy.”

The Democratic president has been buoyed by positive economic news as fears of a recession have faded. Now he’s eager to stockpile campaign cash to help him promote his record and target Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, in what is expected to be a grueling and expensive election year.

A second fundraiser was held in the Miami area in the evening, and it was hosted by Chris Korge, the national finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee. He said the event raised $6.2 million.

Biden warned the audience to “imagine the nightmare if Trump returned to office.”

Although Florida’s wealthy donors make the state an important stop for Biden, it’s unlikely to swing his way in November. President Barack Obama won Florida in 2008 and 2012, but Trump carried the state in 2016 and 2020.

In addition, Republicans routed Democrats in Florida in the 2022 midterm elections, when they won campaigns for governor, U.S. Senate and other statewide positions by about 20 percentage points across the board. Voter registration, which favored Democrats by 600,000 a little more than a decade ago, now shows Republicans with an 800,000-voter margin.

Biden nevertheless expressed optimism, tell donors in Jupiter, “I think we can win Florida.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, dismissed Biden’s chances in the state, saying, “he’s just as delusional as Nikki Haley thinking she has a shot to be the nominee,” a reference to Trump’s last remaining opponent in the Republican primary.

“Americans know that they were better off with President Trump,” Cheung said.

Florida’s rightward lean reflects the arrival of retirees from the Midwest and Northeast who generally favor Republicans, but also the political preferences of the state’s Latino population. AP VoteCast found that Biden won just 54% of the state’s Latino voters in 2020, down substantially from his national average of 63%.

Inflation is also much more of a challenge in Florida, where residents tend to drive more and the economy depends on tourism. Although consumer sentiment has improved and inflation has eased, higher prices have been a persistent weight on Biden’s approval numbers. The consumer price index for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area jumped 5.7% in December from a year ago, compared with 3.4% nationally, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still, White House spokeswoman Olivia Dalton told reporters aboard Air Force One that Florida’s economy had benefited from Biden’s policies, saying they have led to infrastructure projects and spurred $9 billion in private sector investment. She noted that Florida’s unemployment rate is below the national average at 3% but was 5.9% when Biden took office.

Kevin Wagner, a Florida Atlantic University political science professor who runs the Palm Beach County school’s polling operation, said Biden has a chance in Florida given the high number of independents, who make up about a quarter of the electorate.

Wagner also said the inability of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s former rival for the Republican nomination, and the state legislature to rein in Florida’s skyrocketing housing prices and insurance rates could cost the party votes.

“The assumption that Florida will necessarily be an easy victory for Republicans is questionable,” Wagner said.

Both Florida parties have been hit by infighting. The Republicans recently ousted their state party chair, Christian Ziegler, after he got caught up in a sex scandal.

“President Biden can keep visiting Florida all he wants, but I hope while he is here he learns from the policies here that are working. We look forward to retiring him and his failed administration in November,” the party’s new chair, Evan Power, said in a statement.

The state Democratic Party has long been plagued by disorganization. After the 2020 election, party employees learned that their medical insurance had not been paid, leaving them uncovered and some with significant doctor bills.

Former state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried was elected party chair last year in response to the 2022 trouncing. Fried is the only Democrat to win a statewide race in the last decade — she won in 2018 — but so far hasn’t been able to stem the party’s voter registration slide.

Fried said proposals that would restrict abortion and legalize marijuana could be on the ballot, driving up turnout among Democrats and left-leaning independents.

“Florida is in play and is worth fighting for,” she said.

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