Noelle E. C. Evans

Ibero-American Action League and others in Rochester’s Latino community say cuts to bilingual education in the Rochester City School District budget targets an already marginalized population. 

Part of the budget proposal for the 2020-21 school year includes closing the Bilingual Language and Literacy Academy, which serves students displaced from Puerto Rico. 

The Islamic celebration of Ramadan began at sundown on Thursday. As New York state remains in lockdown over the coronavirus, the holy month will look different this year -- but the religious lessons remain the same.

Muslims around the world will be participating in a monthlong fast broken only at sundown at each day for iftar, the evening meal, as it has been since the seventh century. 

For the second week in a row, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases among detainees at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia has more than tripled in a week. 

Forty-five detainees have tested positive for the coronavirus as of Monday. That’s more than any other detention facility in the country. 

One of those who tested positive for the coronavirus is a man in his 30s from the Dominican Republic. His attorney, Siana McLean, said he also has asthma and high blood pressure. 

Victor Cortez has worked on dairy farms in New York state for almost 15 years. He currently works on a farm in Wyoming County.

Right now, with the coronavirus, he says everyone’s worried.

“We’re isolated from the population, and we continue working. We haven’t stopped and we keep working,” Cortez says in Spanish. “Our worry is, if we get infected, what would happen to us? What plan is there for us?”

The U.S. census, that constitutionally mandated once-a-decade count of every resident, is still being conducted this year -- though it’s not going according to plan.

Jim Malatras with the New York State Complete Count Commission said the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected what was already a difficult year for the 2020 census. 

He said he doesn’t believe that the federal government had done enough before the pandemic to ensure an accurate count, particularly in states with large immigrant populations and communities of color, like New York.