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Hands holding bars over "Se Habla Español" sign
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Cuando El Idioma Se Convierte En Blanco, La Democracia Pierde Su Voz
Sep 10, 2025
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision from its “shadow docket” that reversed a lower-court injunction and gave federal immigration agents in Los Angeles the green light to resume stops based on four deeply troubling criteria:
- Apparent race or ethnicity
- Speaking Spanish or accented English
- Presence in a particular location
- Type of work
The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is still working its way through the courts. But the message from this emergency ruling is unmistakable: the constitutional protections that once shielded immigrant communities from racial profiling are now conditional—and increasingly fragile.
Es incorrecto—inmoral y cívicamente ilegal—que ICE apunte a personas simplemente por hablar un idioma distinto al inglés. Sin embargo, eso es exactamente lo que permite la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo en el caso Noem v. Perdomo. Entre los cuatro factores que los agentes pueden usar para justificar detenciones migratorias en Los Ángeles se encuentra hablar español o inglés con acento—un precedente alarmante en un país donde el español es el segundo idioma más hablado, utilizado por más de 43% de los inmigrantes y casi 68 millones de personas en todo el país.
Seamos claros: esto no tiene que ver con la seguridad pública. Se trata de convertir el idioma en una herramienta de perfilamiento racial, origen y estatus migratorio percibido. Solo en el condado de Los Ángeles, más de 3.4 millones de residentes hablan español. No es una población marginada—es parte esencial del tejido cívico y cultural de la región. Tratar el español como sospechoso es criminalizar la identidad, la herencia y el sentido de pertenencia.
Como hijo de inmigrantes peruanos, crecí navegando entre dos mundos—traduciendo para mis padres, adaptándome en las aulas, y aprendiendo que el idioma podía ser tanto un puente como una barrera. Hoy, al criar a mis hijos junto a mi esposa Adriana, ciudadana naturalizada nacida en Colombia, les enseñamos a abrazar ambos idiomas. Pero ¿cómo explicarles que hablar español en público podría convertirlos en blanco de detención?
La ofensiva policial de la administración Trump comenzó en junio de 2025, con agentes del ICE realizando patrullajes itinerantes por el sur de California. Rápidamente surgieron demandas, citando más de 2300 detenciones —incluyendo ciudadanos estadounidenses y residentes legales— en lugares como estacionamientos de Home Depot, paradas de autobús y obras de construcción. La jueza Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong emitió una orden de restricción temporal en julio, prohibiendo al ICE usar la raza, el idioma, el tipo de trabajo o la ubicación como únicos factores para las detenciones. El Noveno Circuito la ratificó. Pero la orden sin firmar de la Corte Suprema ahora ha levantado esas protecciones.
La jueza Sotomayor, acompañada por los jueces Kagan y Jackson, calificó la decisión de "inadmisible irreconciliable con las garantías constitucionales de nuestra nación". Tiene razón. Este fallo no solo erosiona la Cuarta Enmienda, sino que también codifica la sospecha basada en la identidad. Les dice a millones de latinos, inmigrantes y trabajadores: su idioma, su trabajo, su color de piel y su ubicación son suficientes para convertirlos en blanco.
El caso podría regresar al Tribunal Supremo para una revisión completa. Pero el daño ya está hecho. Y si periodistas, defensores y líderes cívicos no se mantienen firmes, este se expandirá—primero por California, luego por todo el país.
Esta decisión no solo debilita las protecciones constitucionales—envía un mensaje de que la diversidad lingüística es una amenaza, no una fortaleza. Socava los ideales de una democracia pluralista. Les dice a millones de estadounidenses que sus voces—literalmente—no son bienvenidas.
Para familias como la mía, esto no es solo un cambio legal—es una ruptura cívica. Socava la confianza en las autoridades, desestabiliza comunidades y envía al país el mensaje de que los derechos constitucionales son negociables. Que el perfilamiento es política pública. Que la justicia es selectiva.
Estamos enseñando a nuestros hijos a sentirse orgullosos de su herencia, a hablar ambos idiomas, a conocer sus derechos. Pero también les estamos enseñando cómo mantenerse seguros en un país que cada vez más percibe su identidad como una amenaza.
Debemos rechazar la idea de que el inglés es el único idioma legítimo. Nuestra democracia es multilingüe. Nuestras comunidades son multilingües. Y nuestras leyes deben reflejar esa realidad—no castigarla.
¿Qué tipo de país somos cuando la sospecha se basa no en acciones, sino en rostros?
To read the article in English, click HERE.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
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Rising debt, stagnant wages, and soaring costs leave families living paycheck to paycheck in 2025.
Getty Images, Grace Cary
Running on Empty: America’s Fragile Middle Class
Sep 10, 2025
The Vanishing Middle Class
In the late 1970s, my mom worked as a nurse and became the family's breadwinner after my dad developed serious heart disease. His doctors told him to avoid stress, even driving, for fear it would be fatal. Yet on her single income, we managed what was then considered a solidly middle-class life. Stability was assumed, even if one parent couldn’t work.
That assumption has vanished. Today, surveys show that roughly half to two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (People’s Policy Project). A stricter Bank of America analysis finds that about one in four households spends nearly all their income on essentials (Axios). Whether the number is one-in-two or one-in-four, millions of Americans are financially on the edge.
Credit card delinquencies are at a 13-year high, and even routine expenses—rent, groceries, childcare—are enough to push families to the brink. The lived reality of millions of households isn’t prosperity—it’s precariousness. Economist Hyman Minsky warned that booms don’t eliminate risk—they breed it. His financial instability hypothesis (Institute for New Economic Thinking) shows how debt piles up until even small shocks can trigger a crisis. By that measure, 2025 looks like a country skating on thin ice. And despite the White House’s boasts of a “booming economy,” the cracks are showing everywhere.
Paycheck-to-Paycheck Nation
What once sustained a family on one income now falls short. In 2025, the math simply doesn’t add up. The Census Bureau reports that the median household income is about $74,500, but the baseline cost of a “normal” middle-class life—mortgage, car, childcare, healthcare—can easily reach $120,000 to $140,000 a year in many metro areas. Families are left plugging the gap with debt or scaling back until stability disappears.
Warning signs are piling up. Credit card delinquencies are at their highest level in 13 years, as households lean on plastic to cover rising rent, insurance, and grocery bills. The share of income consumed by essentials keeps rising, leaving little room for savings or emergencies.
Even in cities once considered affordable, the squeeze is undeniable. In places like Cleveland and St. Louis, median home prices now hover near $300,000—requiring $75,000–$100,000 in income just to avoid being house poor, a threshold already beyond many families. Families aren’t living extravagantly—they’re trapped in an economic system where wages lag behind the costs of essentials, leaving millions running faster just to stay in place.
Debt Across Generations
If households are stuck, much of the reason lies in debt. Mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards eat into paychecks before families can save. Medical bills add to the burden, with insurance premiums up nearly 50% in the past decade and deductibles climbing faster than wages.
The generational squeeze is especially stark. For younger Americans, tuition at public universities has more than tripled since 1980, leaving over 43 million people owing $1.7 trillion in student loans. What was once a ladder into the middle class now delays homeownership, family formation, and savings. Millions of young adults begin life under water.
At the other end of the age spectrum, older Americans face a precarious retirement. Social Security and Medicare remain the pillars of security, but both are under pressure. Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits would blow a $1.6–$1.8 trillion hole in the trust funds, pushing insolvency up to 2032 for Social Security and 2030 for Medicare. That means steep benefit cuts just as Baby Boomers age into retirement.
Meanwhile, long-term care can cost $50,000 to $100,000 a year—far beyond what most retirees have saved.
Across generations, debt has become the silent architecture of American life. Young adults start adulthood burdened, middle-aged families juggle housing and medical bills, and seniors fear outliving their savings. Fragility isn’t confined to Wall Street—it runs through America’s households.
Small Business Paralysis
Households aren’t the only ones squeezed. Small businesses—the backbone of many communities—are freezing in place too. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that confidence has dropped to levels not seen since early 2024. Owners cite inflation and tight credit, but the deeper issue is uncertainty.
Trump’s trade wars, tariff threats, and Congress’s reliance on stopgap budgets make long-term planning nearly impossible. Unlike large corporations, small businesses don’t have legal teams or lobbyists to navigate shifting tax codes and regulatory whiplash.
Instead of hiring or expanding, many are sitting on their hands, waiting for clarity that never comes. Scaled up across the economy, that caution translates into weaker growth, fewer jobs, and less innovation—the very conditions that deepen household insecurity.
When both families and small businesses are stuck in survival mode, the broader economy becomes fragile by design. This is exactly what Minsky meant: what looks like stability is often brittleness in disguise.
Conclusion: A Fragile Foundation
Taken together, the evidence points to an economy far less stable than the White House boasts. Families are buried in debt, young adults begin life under water, retirees face shrinking safety nets, and small businesses are too cautious to invest. The result isn’t resilience—it’s fragility.
When I think back to my childhood, what stands out is how one nurse’s salary was enough to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. That sense of stability—the assumption that middle-class life was secure—was once the foundation of American society. Today, it has crumbled. What my family could manage with one income now takes two, and even then, the math rarely works.
This article is the first in a series exploring how Trump’s economic agenda is destabilizing the country. Here we’ve traced the household and community-level squeeze. In the next piece, we’ll move up the ladder—to financial markets, Wall Street excess, and executive overreach—before concluding with recommendations to restore stability. Those reforms will address issues like affordable housing, the cost of education and healthcare, and policies that could restore predictability for families and businesses alike.
For now, one point is clear: America is living on a fragile foundation. The cracks are already visible. Whether they widen into a full-blown crisis depends not just on markets, but on whether our leaders—and voters—still have the will to fight for a middle class that can thrive again.
Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.Keep ReadingShow less
Protesters participate in a march and rally from City College to Columbia University on April 25, 2025 in New York City.
Getty Images, Spencer Platt
How a Definition of Antisemitism Ruins Academic Freedom
Sep 10, 2025
The new academic year has started at most universities. This fall, however, an icy chill has descended on academic life.
In glaring contradiction to their mission statements, while publicly embracing academic freedom, many institutions severely limit it on one particular issue: the famine and genocide currently being perpetrated in Gaza.
In spite of the appeals of high-profile public figures, in spite of the appeals of leading Israeli human rights organizations to boycott Israel and to pressure it into stopping the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the U.S. administration continues to punish universities. Under the government’s threats, universities are punishing students and scholars for standing up for equal human and political rights of both Israelis and Palestinians and for fighting to end the war crimes supported by the U.S., militarily, financially, and diplomatically.
How has it come to this?
Universities fear the wrath of the Trump administration, which, in a number of high-profile cases, has withheld hundreds of millions of research dollars from public and private institutions. In order to restore funding, some institutions have espoused a particular definition of antisemitism, which the Trump administration imposes as the only valid one, namely the “working definition of antisemitism” proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. The problem, however, is that this definition conflates “criticism of Zionism, Israeli state policies, and violence against Palestinians with antisemitism.”
In response to the IHRA definition and “its implications for academic freedom and freedom of expression,” almost 400 international scholars “working in Antisemitism Studies and related fields, including Jewish, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Middle East Studies,” signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which rejects the above-mentioned conflation and proposes “clear guidance to identify and fight antisemitism while protecting free expression.”
The scholars of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network (GHSCN) also reject the IHRA definition, pointing out that even its co-author, Kenneth Stern, who describes himself as a Zionist, has repudiated its current weaponization as a “blatant distortion of the definition’s purpose.”
As a scholar of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust), I support the GHSCN’s objections and the JDA’s alternative definition.
Columbia University is a case in point of the IHRA definition’s chilling effects. As widely reported, for example by Lexi Lonas Cochran of The Hill, not only was Columbia blackmailed to pay the Trump administration $225 million, presumably to restore $400 million in funding, it also was pressured into espousing the IHRA definition.
As a consequence, one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch, and the eminent historian of Palestine, Rashid Khalidi, have withdrawn their classes from Columbia’s fall curriculum.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” Hirsch was quoted in The Guardian. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”
In an open letter to Columbia’s acting president, Khalidi wrote that under the IHRA definition, “which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.”
It should be underlined, as Cochran does, that in spite of bowing to the demands of the Trump administration, many researchers at Columbia and elsewhere have actually not seen any funding restored.
Another, even more ominous, case in point is UCLA. The world-renowned public research university is battling a $1 billion fine to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in withheld research funding. UCLA’s transgression? Yet again, the Trump administration alleges that UCLA hasn’t done enough to combat antisemitism when it allowed student protests opposing the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that followed the gruesome attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. No consideration was given to the fact that these protests were peaceful (at UCLA, the only violent attack was carried out by pro-Israel activists), and that, just like at Columbia, many of the protesters were Jewish students and faculty.
At American universities, in the name of the IHRA definition, students have been “arrested, suspended, or expelled” for protesting what a growing number of genocide scholars and public figures, including in Israel, have been calling a genocide. Students and scholars are being doxxed, their professional outlooks or careers threatened.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard deplored on August 31, 2025, the “felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction. […] Israel is destroying Gaza. Call it ethnic cleansing, call it erasure, call it genocide, call it whatever you want. I have no doubt that Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish jurist who coined the term ‘genocide,’ would declare with tears of shame that the Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza. It is destroying the place and annihilating the human group living there.”
In the U.S., students and others are being attacked for opposing what the former speaker of the Knesset, Avrum Burg, described on August 8 as “crimes against humanity,” against which he summoned “one million Jews” to rebel, and “file a joint appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.”
By adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the U.S., in the words of the Palestinian philosopher Sami Khatib, casts its role “as the ‘rescuer’ of future victims of an imagined new genocide, while denying the existence of a real genocide as it currently unfolds in Gaza.” Khatib warns that “once a victim group is framed as terrorist or as an exponent of past evil (Palestinians as the new antisemites, as the reincarnation of Nazis), the responsibility to protect and rescue is inverted: protection becomes persecution, rescue becomes annihilation.” The IHRA definition has contributed to this inversion, and genocide and holocaust scholars should oppose it.
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Young people worldwide form new parties to reshape politics—yet America’s two-party system blocks them.
Getty Images, J Studios
No Country for Young Politicians—and How To Fix That
Sep 10, 2025
In democracies around the world, young people have started new political parties whenever the establishment has sidelined their views or excluded them from policymaking. These parties have sometimes reinvigorated political competition, compelled established parties to take previously neglected issues seriously, or encouraged incumbent leaders to find better ways to include and reach out to young voters.
In Europe, a trio in their twenties started Volt in 2017 as a pan-European response to Brexit, and the party has managed to win seats in the European Parliament and in some national legislatures. In Germany, young people concerned about climate change created Klimaliste, a party committed to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as per the Paris Agreement. Although the party hasn’t won seats at the federal level, they have managed to win some municipal elections. In Chile, leaders of the 2011 student protests, who then won seats as independent candidates, created political parties like Revolución Democrática and Convergencia Social to institutionalize their movements. In 2022, one of these former student leaders, Gabriel Boric, became the president of Chile at 36 years old.
But young people in the United States can’t do this. This is not because they are uniquely apathetic or disinterested in politics. Rather, as a new Protect Democracy and New America report argues, it is because the winner-take-all electoral system makes it nearly impossible to create new political parties in the U.S. A more proportional and permissive electoral system would allow young people to realistically start new political parties, and the enhanced electoral competition from having more parties would also jolt the existing parties into doing a better job of appealing to young voters and investing in young candidates.
In a winner-take-all system, only the one candidate with the most votes wins the representation of the entire district, so voters and parties organize around the two candidates that have a shot at winning, resulting in a two-party system. Voters, wary of wasting their votes, vote for the candidate who might win, even if it means not voting for their preferred candidate. Third parties don’t enter races because they know voters won’t waste their vote on them or because they could spoil the election. In proportional systems, even if a party or candidate doesn’t come up at the top, they can still win a seat, so voters are more likely to vote sincerely, and smaller parties are more likely to be created and participate in elections.
Besides making it easier for young people to start a party, proportional systems can also improve the participation of young people in politics through other mechanisms. While in winner-take-all systems, electoral victory depends on swing voters; In proportional systems, parties can win more seats with additional votes, so they have incentives to include young candidates on their candidate lists to appeal to young voting groups. Moreover, because multiple candidates can win in a district under proportional representation, parties can run young candidates without necessarily displacing older politicians. This makes it easier for parties to invest in young political talent while keeping experienced incumbents.
Without a proportional electoral system, young political entrepreneurs in the U.S. don’t have the option of creating partisan alternatives. Instead, they have to work within the parties and dislodge incumbents if they want to win a seat and have real influence. Needless to say, older incumbents are in no rush to step aside for young politicians.
For the rest of young people frustrated with the existing parties, the two-party system forces them to either choose between voting for the party they consider the least worst or not vote at all. For many young people who do not feel represented by the two parties and who feel that politics is not working for them, disengaging from politics becomes a rational response. But this disengagement creates a vicious cycle: if young people don’t participate as much in elections, candidates don’t seek out their votes, which further alienates young people from politics, and so on.
As a result, older people dominate American politics to the point that many now refer to the country as a gerontocracy, ruled by older people. Among OECD countries, the U.S. stands out for having the biggest age divide between elected officials and constituents and for having the highest share of representatives over 60 years of age. While older age comes with experience, the exclusion of young people from politics means the country is missing out on the talent, ideas, and energy of younger generations, and risking that young voters turn their backs on democracy.
Electoral reforms, like the adoption of proportional representation, can bring young people back into politics and improve politics for all. So while organizing around a new party is a fool’s errand right now, organizing around electoral reforms may be a winning strategy for disaffected young people and for the country overall.
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