Hundreds of people rallied Saturday outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City to protest the Trump administration’s decision to end a program protecting young immigrants from deportation.

The protesters on Saturday waved signs that read “No one is illegal” and “Immigrants welcome” and chanted “Deport Donald Trump” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday announced the end of an administrative order initiated by former President Barack Obama that allows some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay.

Many of those attending the rally said they have benefited from the program, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Sandra Silva, 28, an interior designer who lives in Queens, said she came to the United States from Mexico when she was 12 and has lived in New York since. She cleaned houses and worked in a restaurant 40 hours a week to pay for a degree in architecture at City College.

“When DACA happened, it opened up opportunities for me,” Silva said. “I was able to work in something I went to school for.”

She said she was angered by the decision to end the program because she went through a lot to get a good job. She added, “We’re not here to steal anyone’s job, we’re here to create jobs.”

Susan Puma, 26, wore a white baseball hat with the seal of the president of the United States on it and waved an American flag.

“I’m very American but I’m very proud of my roots,” Puma said. “If I’m deported, my identity is taken away from me.”

Puma emigrated illegally with her family from Ecuador when she was 5 years old. She now works as a finance associate for a tech company. She said she’s determined to stay in the U.S. and hopes Congress will act to protect people like her.
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On the surface, Savannah, Georgia, and Syracuse, New York, don’t have much in common beyond their size. Both are smaller cities, with populations hovering around 145,000 people. Yet their streets share a grim reality: Teenagers are being killed or wounded by firearms at rates far higher than in most U.S. cities, according to an Associated Press and USA Today Network analysis of shootings compiled by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

From 2014 through this past June, 57 youths aged 12 to 17 in Savannah and 48 in Syracuse were killed or injured in gun violence. The cities’ rates of teen shootings per capita are more than double those seen in the vast majority of U.S. cities with populations of 50,000 or more.

“It’s getting worse,” said Barbara O’Neal, who started the group Mothers of Murdered Sons in Savannah. “They’re still shooting. And they still don’t care.”

Her son, Alan O’Neal Jr., survived his teenage years, only to be shot dead during a robbery attempt six years ago at age 20.

The unrelenting gun violence in both cities is tearing at the adults who struggle to find answers and the kids who try, often in vain, to avoid mayhem.

Sheryl Sams speaks with a mix of weariness and disbelief about teen shootings in Savannah. She directs a program called Youth Intercept, which dispatches volunteers to the hospital emergency room to offer assistance to young people being treated for gunshot wounds.

Some successes

Sams says Youth Intercept has its share of successes; roughly 75 young people have graduated from the program since 2010. But she estimates only about 1 in 3 victims accepts the program’s help.

“We have a kid who’s been shot three times and his mom finally tried to enroll him, but she hasn’t done all the follow-through,” Sams said, adding the mother and son stopped answering phone calls and knocks at their door. “He’s 14 now and he’s been shot three times. To them it’s a way of life.”

Founded in 1733, Savannah is Georgia’s oldest city, and its downtown area forms the largest National Historic Landmark district in the U.S. An estimated 13 million visitors pumped $2.8 billion into the local economy last year. But beyond the Greek Revival mansions and manicured public squares, nearby neighborhoods struggle with poverty and violence.

In a case that typifies Savannah’s shootings, 17-year-old Wayne Edwards was on his way to a party in August 2014 when he got into an argument with another teen standing outside his car. That teen raised a gun and fired five shots, with one bullet killing Edwards. He wasn’t shot over money or drugs; the evidence pointed to violence sparked by tough talk and bluster.

The 18-year-old shooter was sentenced to life in prison, but the crime still makes no sense to Edwards’ father.

“It’s still hard after three years,” Wayne Blige said of his son’s slaying. “You know what happened, but you still don’t know why.”

Worse in smaller, midsize cities

The Gun Violence Archive compiles information on shootings nationwide from media and police reports. The AP-USA Today Network analysis of those cases found that smaller and midsize cities have higher rates of teenage gun violence than major American cities. Chicago, plagued for years by teen violence, is the exception.

Wilmington, Delaware, a city of 72,000, had by far the highest rate of teenage gun violence, nearly twice that of Chicago.

Syracuse sits just beyond the vineyard-rich hillsides of the Finger Lakes region of central New York, a tourist destination of spectacular waterfalls, deep gorges and rolling hills. The city has a grittier past, built not by pressing Riesling grapes but by stamping out parts for automobiles and air conditioners.

Most of those factories have closed. The city is now known mostly for Syracuse University and its basketball team.

The university’s stately halls sit atop a hill that looms over the city’s South Side, a sprawling mix of neighborhoods that are often blemished by boarded-up clapboard homes sitting in overgrown lots. Many of the shootings cataloged by the Gun Violence Archive occurred here.

On one South Side street corner, mourners piled teddy bears where 15-year-old Akil Williams was shot and killed this summer during an argument. The corner is blocks away from where another 15-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2015. A year ago, 18-year-old Tyshawn Lemon was killed as he talked to a girl on her porch nearby.

‘It can happen to anyone’

“When I was growing up … if you were a regular kid and going to school and working, it didn’t happen to you,” said Lateefah Rhines, Tyshawn’s mother. “But now it’s touching everybody’s lives. And I feel like if it can happen to Tyshawn, it can happen to anyone.”

Researchers have linked high poverty rates to gun violence, and some South Side neighborhoods are plagued by both. They are among the poorest areas in a city with a poverty rate of 35 percent, well above the national average.

Despite the reasons for despair, some residents are not ready to give in to the violence.

Over the slap of boxing gloves at the Faith Hope Community Center, Arthur “Bobby” Harrison said some teens who get mixed up with guns are good kids, but confused. His gym offers a place where neighborhood youths can shoot hoops, lift weights or spar in a ring next to a wall plastered with pictures of local boxers and role models such as Muhammad Ali and former President Barack Obama.

Harrison, who was serving a sentence in Attica state prison during the infamously deadly uprising in 1971, provides a firm hand for the teens who train here. But the gym also is a sanctuary for teens such as Quishawn Richardson.

“It doesn’t remind you of all the violence that’s going on outside,” said Quishawn, a lanky 15-year-old who dreams of playing basketball up the hill at the university. “It shows you that Syracuse has got some places you can go to without getting hurt.”
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The White House’s decision this week to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), carries enormous repercussions for the nearly 800,000 beneficiaries: The undocumented young people who were brought to the United States as children.

But the cost, which is difficult to quantify for a workforce faced with the real possibility of losing their job and forced to leave the country, is evident to employers, who largely view both the moral and economic implications of ending the program as intertwined.

“Losing [the economic contributions of DACA recipients] is a direct cost,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City, which represents the city’s business leadership. She said the state’s DACA workforce contributes several billion dollars a year to the local economy.

WATCH: DACA Repeal to Cost U.S. Businesses, Economy Billions

“It’s also a signal to the rest of the world that somehow America is no longer a place that is embracing talent and hard work and the energy of immigrants,” Wylde told VOA. “That message has a ripple effect in terms of hurting recruitment efforts by our major companies, because they need talent — multilingual talent — from all over the world.”

Employers bear the brunt

To date, more than 400 U.S. entrepreneur and business leaders have signed an open letter that calls on U.S. President Donald Trump and Congress to preserve DACA and provide a permanent solution that ensures recipients’ ability to continue working legally in the country without risk of deportation.

“Our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions,” the letter reads, referencing research conducted by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, over a 10-year period.

The conservative-leaning CATO Institute places that figure at $280 billion.

​Lose-lose

Following the announcement of DACA’s repeal, the White House suggested unemployed American workers might somehow benefit, based solely on the age of the workforce.

“There are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.

“Over 950,000 of those are African-Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group. Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs,” Sanders said.

But economists and immigration analysts find fault with Sanders’ argument: The native-born unemployed population is not a perfect substitute for the DACA workforce, and the displacement of one worker for another does not increase productivity.

Under the repeal of DACA, CATO estimated employers would incur $6.3 billion in turnover costs, a figure that includes the recruiting, hiring and training of 720,000 new employees in often highly skilled positions. Thirty-six percent of DACA recipients 25 and older hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree.

Many DACA recipients “are highly educated and working in positions such as health care and education, where they are more highly paid and therefore more productive,” said David Bier, immigration policy analyst at CATO Institute. “[Those are] the industries where you’re going to see a greater impact as a result of this forced turnover caused by the DACA repeal.”

“Contracting the labor force, kicking people out of the country, will not create jobs. It will just shrink the overall size of the economy,” Bier said.

Over the long term, Wylde said, failing to find a permanent solution for DACA workers would inhibit U.S. businesses’ ability to compete.

“We want to be at the forefront of the attraction and support of our talent,” she said. “We don’t want to be deporting them.”
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Public statues and tributes to early Spanish conquerors are facing mounting criticism tied to the brutal treatment of American Indians centuries ago by Spanish soldiers and missionaries, with activists drawing ethical parallels to the national controversy over Confederate monuments.

From California to Florida, historical markers and commonplace names trace the path of the 16th century Spanish conquistadors and missionaries who explored and settled land inhabited by American Indians in what is now the U.S. Few, if any, of the monuments honoring them have come down.

The Spanish presence is particularly noticeable in parts of the Southwest, which Spaniards controlled for about 300 years. In northern New Mexico, statues and annual re-enactments recognize two colonizers who quelled armed uprisings by American Indians and meted out reprisals that included slavery and executions.

On Friday, police arrested at least 12 people in Santa Fe as protesters chanted slogans opposing an annual pageant that marks the return of Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas to New Mexico following a 17th century Indian revolt.

Pageantry supporters say they are honoring their Spanish heritage, paying homage to the Roman Catholic faith and highlighting reconciliation. For Native American tribes, the monuments and events often are reminders of forced religious conversions and violence against resisters of Spanish rule.

Here’s a look at Spanish historical figures whose legacies are stirring protest and debate:

​Don Diego de Vargas

Police thronged downtown Santa Fe streets Friday to contain protests of an annual costumed pageant that re-enacts de Vargas’ 1692 arrival in Santa Fe, 12 years after Pueblo Indians from small, scattered tribes rebelled against Spain.

There were no signs of violence among the roughly 100 protesters. But police Sgt. Gardner Finney said a dozen people were arrested on charges including trespassing and disorderly conduct.

They included protest organizer Jennifer Marley, a tribal member of San Ildefonso Pueblo and leader of the activist group Red Nation. Led away in hand restraints, she said she hoped images of her arrest would stoke opposition to the re-enactment.

Organizers of the “entrada,” or arrival, of de Vargas say the event on Santa Fe’s downtown plaza portrays a peaceful reconciliation between the conquistador and American Indians in shared reverence for a wood-carved Virgin Mary known as “La Conquistadora.”

New Mexico Deputy State Historian Rob Martinez says the dramatization wrongfully gives the impression that Native Americans welcomed back the Spanish, and activists say it obscures the cruelty de Vargas inflicted as he stamped out resistance to Spanish rule.

Santa Fe schoolchildren have been visited by a dancing troupe portraying Spanish royalty for at least 50 years, led annually by an actor playing de Vargas who wears a shiny, feather-plumed helmet.

School district officials let children skip the presentations this year for the first time in deference to hundreds of students who might feel uncomfortable.

Conchita Lucero of Albuquerque says the Fiesta entrada recognizes perseverance of hardscrabble Spanish settlers.

“It’s a way to honor our ancestors,” she says. “The idea of the entrada is that we came back and we dedicated our lives to the city. … The gates of hell did not open when we came.”

Juan de Onate

Juan de Onate’s arrival in present-day New Mexico in 1598 is re-enacted at an annual fiesta in Espanola, a small city set amid several Indian Pueblos in northern New Mexico.

To American Indians, Onate is known for having ordered the right feet cut off 24 captive tribal warriors after his soldiers stormed Acoma Pueblo’s mesa-top “sky city,” an attack precipitated by the killing of Onate’s nephew.

Four hundred years later, in 1998, someone sawed off the foot of an Onate statue at a visitor center near Espanola named for him.

The former Onate Monument and Visitor Center reopened in August as the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Center. Board member Patricia Trujillo said some people avoided the building for its focus on Onate, although a statue of him still stands on the path to the front entrance.

Organizers posed questions on public bulletin boards about Onate at the reopening and asked people to respond in writing, but someone crossed out messages that asked to remove the Onate statue and stop the glorification, Trujillo said.

Onate has staying power as a cultural icon, she said.

“When you ask people, it’s kind of a blind patriotism to this pristine moment, the fact he was the first colonizer to come into New Mexico and start this settlement that persisted,” she said. “People find a lot of pride in that.”

Maurus Chino, of Acoma Pueblo, says Onate should no longer be honored.

“These monuments really mean something obscene and evil to the indigenous people here and all decent people,” he said.

​Junipero Serra

A Franciscan friar who founded the Spanish mission system in California, Junipero Serra believed that American Indians needed to be baptized and taught to farm. Once converted, they were prohibited from leaving the missions and became largely dependent on the Spanish, said Robert Senkewicz, a history professor at Santa Clara University.

In August, a statue of Serra in Southern California was splashed with red paint and defaced with the word “murderer” in white. Other Serra statues were vandalized — one beheaded — surrounding his elevation to sainthood two years ago.

The popular picture in colonial California was one of heroic Spanish missionaries and content American Indians, Senkewicz said. Recently, the California school system said children no longer would have to build replica missions in their classrooms.

The problem isn’t Serra himself, Senkewicz said.

“The problem is he’s been allowed to symbolize everything.”

​Juan Ponce de Leon

Juan Ponce de Leon is credited for naming Florida in 1513. Though he did not establish a permanent settlement, statues of him are found throughout the state.

He was among Spanish explorers who forged alliances with American Indians and fought against them. Known for his search for the mythical fountain of youth, Ponce de Leon died from an arrow wound in 1521, said J. Michael Francis, who heads the Department of History and Politics at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

Ponce de Leon and Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who founded St. Augustine in 1565, are less controversial than explorers in the Southwest and the Spanish never gained a stronghold over the peninsula, Francis said.

Protesters say the period of ethnic genocide and environmental degradation is nothing to celebrate.

Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney and activist from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, recognized an extinct Florida tribe on the 500th anniversary of Ponce de Leon’s landing.

“If people want to do re-enactments, people want to be proud of their heritage, they want to celebrate these people who are heroes, that’s their right,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “But it’s also a right that the truth be told.”
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Emergency officials in the U.S. are dealing with one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricane seasons in recorded history. As Hurricane Irma moves toward Florida, VOA’s Bill Gallo got an inside look at the operations center at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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