Four refugees and migrants have died and about 20 were missing after their boat capsized off the coast of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, authorities said, as Haitians and Dominicans continue to take life-threatening risks to make the crossing to what they hope is a better life.
The Dominican civil defence authority was quoted by AFP news agency as saying on Friday that 17 other people were rescued from the boat, which was carrying about 40 people and headed for Puerto Rico, a United States territory.
The Caribbean nation’s navy said it had rescued 10 Dominicans and seven Haitians. A child was among the survivors.
So-called “yola” migrant boats, such as the one that ran into trouble, are constructed from wood or fibreglass and do not comply with safety regulations, according to authorities.
Refugees and migrants pay as much as $7,000 for a one-way trip to Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with crisis-torn Haiti.
Illegal migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico has been a growing phenomenon in the last decade.
In 2022, at least five people drowned and another 66 were rescued in an incident involving a suspected human smuggling boat near the uninhabited island of Mona, west of Puerto Rico.
Mona Island, a nature reserve, is located between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and has, over the years, been used by smugglers carrying people between the two. Those on that route are typically Dominican or Haitian.
Five men have been lynched after rural community members accused them of robbing damaged homes following an earthquake that struck Guatemala and caused widespread damage.
Police spokesperson Cesar Mateo told the AFP news agency on Friday night that the men were accused of using the dark of the night to break into homes following the tremors, which led people to sleep in shelters or with relatives.
“While it’s true that robbery is illegal, lynching is also a crime,” Mateo said.
Guatemala’s Ministry of the Interior said residents of Santa Maria de Jesus municipality searched for the men late on Thursday and then blocked authorities who tried to detain and take them away.
Residents beat the men with sticks and stones and then burned them in the community, which lies in the Sacatepequez department southwest of the capital.
Santa Maria de Jesus was the worst-affected area by the earthquake that created tremors of up to 5.7 magnitude. At least seven people were killed across Guatemala after Tuesday’s earthquake.
Vigilante violence is a recurrent response to criminals who are not prosecuted in Guatemala.
According to a local civil society organisation, between 2008 and 2020, vigilante justice left 361 people dead and 1,396 injured in the country.
The earthquake left Santa Maria de Jesus, home to an Indigenous Mayan community, without power, while access to roads was cut off by landslides.
The government flew in humanitarian aid to Santa Maria de Jesus to help residents.
The disaster coordination agency, Conred, which has been evaluating the level of damage in affected areas, said a delivery of solar lamps, buckets, mats, mosquito nets, blankets and kitchen kits has been received from the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
Colombian authorities have captured an alleged leader of the Italian ‘Ndrangheta mafia in Latin America who is accused of overseeing cocaine shipments and running illegal trafficking routes to Europe.
Police on Friday identified the suspect as Giuseppe Palermo, also known as “Peppe”, an Italian national who was wanted under an Interpol red notice, which called for his arrest in 196 countries.
He was nabbed on the street in Colombia’s capital Bogota during a coordinated operation between Colombian, Italian and British authorities, as well as Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, according to an official report.
Palermo is believed to be part of “one of the most tightly knit cells” of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, said Carlos Fernando Triana, head of the Colombian police.
The ‘Ndrangheta, one of Italy’s most powerful, ruthless and clandestine criminal organisations, has increasingly wielded its influence overseas and is widely accused of importing cocaine into Europe.
The suspect “not only led the purchase of large shipments of cocaine in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, but also controlled the maritime and land routes used to transport the drugs to European markets”, Triana added.
Illegal cocaine production reached 3,708 tonnes in 2023, an increase of nearly 34% from the previous year, driven mainly by the expansion of coca leaf cultivation in Colombia, according to the United Nations.
The global illicit drug trade, including cocaine, is estimated to be worth more than $500bn annually.
Ecuador’s most infamous drug lord has agreed to be extradited to the United States to face cocaine and weapons smuggling charges, a court in the capital Quito has said.
The announcement on Friday is the latest chapter in the dramatic underworld tale of Adolfo Macias, alias “Fito”, who was recaptured in June after escaping from a maximum security prison 18 months ago in a jailbreak that triggered a bloody wave of gang violence.
Macias, head of the “Los Choneros” gang, is wanted in the US on charges of cocaine distribution, conspiracy and firearms-related crimes, including weapons smuggling.
After Macias vanished from his prison cell in the southwestern port of Guayaquil in January 2024, authorities had been scouring the world for him, offering a $1m reward for information leading to his capture. But it emerged that the country’s most wanted man was hiding out at a family member’s mansion in his hometown.
Ecuadorian security forces recaptured the drug kingpin last month at an underground bunker beneath a marble-walled house in the port city of Manta, some 260km (160 miles) southwest of the capital, Quito.
The former taxi-driver-turned-crime-boss had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for involvement in organised crime, drug trafficking and murder.
In a country plagued by drug-related crime, Los Choneros members responded with violence as the manhunt began after their leader’s escape – using car bombs, holding prison guards hostage and storming a television station during a live broadcast.
President Daniel Noboa’s right-wing government had recently declared, “We will gladly send him and let him answer to the North American law.”
Macias, dressed in an orange prison uniform, took part in a court hearing Friday via videolink from a high-security prison in Guayaquil.
In response to a judge’s question, he replied, “Yes, I accept (extradition).”
This would make Macias the first Ecuadorian extradited by his country since the measure was written into law last year, after a referendum in which Noboa sought the approval of measures to boost his war on criminal gangs.
Ecuador, once a peaceful haven wedged between the world’s two top cocaine exporters, Colombia and Peru, has seen violence erupt in recent years as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.
These gang wars have largely played out inside the country’s prisons, where Macias wielded immense control. He was the unofficial boss of his Guayaquil prison, where authorities found images glorifying him, weapons and US dollars.
Videos of parties he held in the prison captured fireworks and a mariachi band. In one sequence, he appeared waving, laughing and petting a fighting rooster.
Macias earned a law degree behind bars. By the time he escaped, he was considered a suspect in the assassination of presidential candidate and anticorruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio in 2023.
Soon after Macias’s prison break, Noboa declared Ecuador to be in a state of “internal armed conflict” and ordered the military and tanks into the streets to “neutralize” the gangs.
Los Choneros has ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Colombia’s Gulf Clan – the world’s largest cocaine exporter – and Balkan mafias, according to the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory.
A farmworker has died from injuries he sustained in immigration raids on two California cannabis farms, as United States authorities confirmed they arrested 200 workers after a tense standoff with protesters.
The United Farm Workers advocacy group confirmed the death of Jaime Alanis, who was injured after a 30-foot (nine-metre) fall during one of the raids, in a post on X on Friday.
“We tragically can confirm that a farm worker has died of injuries they sustained as a result of yesterday’s immigration enforcement action,” it said.
Federal immigration authorities confirmed on Friday that they had arrested about 200 immigrants suspected of being in the US illegally in raids on Thursday at two cannabis farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo, Southern California.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that they also found at least 10 immigrant children during the raids who were rescued from “potential exploitation, forced labour, and human trafficking”.
The statement said four US citizens had been arrested for their role in violent confrontations between agents and protesters. Authorities are also offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of another person suspected of firing a gun at the federal agents.
“During the operation, more than 500 rioters attempted to disrupt operations. Four US citizens are being criminally processed for assaulting or resisting officers. The rioters damaged vehicles, and one violent agitator fired a gun at law enforcement officers,” the statement said.
One of the raids saw immigration agents clad in military-style helmets and uniforms storm Glass House Farms – a licensed cannabis grower which also grows tomatoes and cucumbers – in Camarillo on Thursday.
Agents faced off with the demonstrators outside the farm, as crowds of people gathered to seek information about their relatives and to oppose the raids.
Andrew Dowd, a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department, said at least 12 people were injured as a result of the raid and protest.
Jaime Alanis inside Ventura County Medical Center after he was injured during an immigration raid on July 10, 2025, in Camarillo, California [AP Photo]
During the raid, Alanis, who had reportedly worked at Glass House Farms picking tomatoes for 10 years, called his family in Mexico to say he was hiding from authorities.
“The next thing we heard was that he was in the hospital with broken hands, ribs and a broken neck,” said Juan Duran, Alanis’s brother-in-law, according to The Associated Press news agency.
In a statement, Glass House said immigration agents held valid warrants, and it is helping provide detained workers with legal representation.
“Glass House has never knowingly violated applicable hiring practices and does not and has never employed minors,” the statement said.
United Farm Workers said in a statement that some US citizens who worked at the firm are not yet accounted for.
The raid is the latest to take place as part of the Trump administration’s controversial all-out campaign cracking down on immigration in the US.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has unleashed groups of immigration agents to round up undocumented migrants and sent accused gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without due process.
But in the wake of Thursday’s raids, Federal Judge Maame E Frimpong ordered a temporary halt to the Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in seven California counties, including Los Angeles.
The Friday ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by immigrant advocacy groups in the US District Court last week, accusing the Trump administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people during immigration raids in Southern California.
The filing asked the judge to block the administration from using what they called unconstitutional tactics.
In her ruling, which remains in place for 10 days, Judge Frimpong agreed that “roving patrols” of immigration agents without reasonable suspicion violated the Fourth Amendment, protecting individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment, ensuring due process of law.
Frimpong directed agents to stop racially profiling people and ordered the federal government to ensure detainees have access to legal counsel.
Al Jazeera correspondent in Washington, DC, Shihab Rattansi, said the case gets to the “heart of whether we can have these marauding sort of gangs of ICE agents without any identification” sweeping people up.
The US State Department has imposed sanctions on senior Cuban officials, including President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced as he marked the fourth anniversary of a brutal crackdown on historic antigovernment protests.
In a post on X, Rubio said the State Department would be “restricting visas for Cuban regime figureheads”, including President Diaz-Canel, Defence Minister Alvaro Lopez Miera, Interior Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas, and their “cronies” for their “role in the Cuban regime’s brutality toward the Cuban people”.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also announced that the State Department has added the Torre K hotel to its restricted list of entities in order to “prevent US dollars from funding the Cuban regime’s repression”.
The Cuban government has promoted the luxury high-rise Torre K in central Havana as a symbol of modernisation. But the government has faced criticism for its large investment in luxury hotels amid a severe economic crisis in the nominally socialist one-party state.
“While the Cuban people suffer shortages of food, water, medicine, and electricity, the regime lavishes money on its insiders,” Rubio said.
Ten other “regime-linked properties” were also added to the State Department’s List of Prohibited Accommodations, it said in a statement.
The statement said the sanctions were being enacted in “solidarity with the Cuban people and the island’s political prisoners”, citing the Cuban government’s brutal crackdown on the July 2021 demonstrations – the largest since the Cuban revolution in the 1950s.
The police crackdown resulted in one death and dozens of wounded protesters.
“Four years ago, thousands of Cubans peacefully took to the streets to demand a future free from tyranny. The Cuban regime responded with violence and repression, unjustly detaining thousands, including over 700 who are still imprisoned and subjected to torture or abuse,” the State Department said.
Rubio also accused Cuba of torturing pro-democracy activist Jose Daniel Ferrer, whose bail was revoked as he was taken into custody alongside fellow dissident Felix Navarro in April.
“The United States demands immediate proof of life and the release of all political prisoners,” Rubio said.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez slammed the latest measures as part of a “ruthless economic war” being waged by the administration of US President Donald Trump.
“The USA is capable of imposing migratory sanctions against revolutionary leaders and maintaining a prolonged and ruthless economic war against Cuba, but it lacks the ability to break the will of these people or their leaders,” he said on X.
In January, then-US President Joe Biden had removed Cuba from the blacklist of countries sponsoring terrorism.
