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The Puerto Rico Status Act brings together two competing bills in the House: the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act and the Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s in it.

Following a press conference on Thursday, members of the House negotiating team behind a potential consensus bill on Puerto Rico’s status released what is likely a messaging bill meant to act as a framework for further negotiations and their outcome.

Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Jenniffer González Colón, tell Latino Rebels that, despite their opposing perspectives on Puerto Rico’s status question, there are at least two areas of common ground driving the negotiations on a consensus bill.

The United States government is moving to ease a few economic sanctions on Venezuela in a gesture meant to encourage resumed negotiations between the U.S.-backed opposition and the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

A consensus bill to determine the future of Puerto Rico’s status is imminent, Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL) said, but sources close to the matter tell Latino Rebels that no draft has been circulated to the key stakeholders in the process and that the tense negotiations over the bill’s language have hit a series of dead ends.

El Faro obtained audio files of conversations between a senior Bukele official and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), revealing that the covert negotiations with the gangs fell apart after MS-13 considered the surprise arrest of a group of its leaders a violation of the agreement they brokered in 2019 for a reduction in homicides.

Almost all Latinos believe investments in schools, jobs, and housing make their communities safer rather than simply funding police departments, according to a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Mijente and other groups.

The Biden administration says it will expand flights to Cuba, take steps to loosen restrictions on U.S. travelers to the island, and lift Trump-era restrictions on remittances that immigrants can send to people on the island.

For many Black Americans, the Buffalo shooting has stirred up the same feelings they faced after Charleston and other attacks: the fear, the vulnerability, the worry that nothing will be done politically or otherwise to prevent the next act of targeted racial violence.

The U.S. Coast Guard announced Monday that it suspended the search for potential survivors of a capsized boat near Puerto Rico after finding 11 bodies and rescuing 38 migrants from a vessel that had carried an estimated 60 to 75 passengers.

The falling price of bitcoin underscores El Salvador’s precarious debt crisis, financial experts say. President Nayib Bukele, nevertheless, perseveres: On Monday, May 9, he announced a new $15 million state bitcoin purchase and boasted about his mockup of the megaproject Bitcoin City.

Colombia’s constitutional court legalized medically-assisted suicide in a ruling Wednesday, making it the first country in Latin America to do so. Euthanasia has been legal in Colombia since 1997.

Less than a year after receiving formal approval, the Congressional Progressive Staff Association, a group looking to increase the number of progressive staffers working in Congress, is seeing its membership swell.

Puerto Rico’s governor announced Thursday that he was rejecting a proposed $12.4 billion budget filed by a federal control board overseeing the island’s finances and would submit his own version as the U.S. territory emerges from bankruptcy.

Several Latin American leaders have signaled they will not attend this year’s 9th Summit of the Americas if Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are not invited. “Nobody should exclude anyone,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said during a recent visit to Cuba.

Colombians were stopped at the border more than 15,000 times in March, up nearly 60 percent from February and nearly 100-fold over last year, according to CBP figures. Many fly to Mexico City or Cancún and take a bus or another plane to border towns before crossing into the U.S.

After a resolution to protect Hill staffers from retaliation for organizing a union in their offices had been adopted by the House on Tuesday night, a number of Congress members tell Latino Rebels they expect their offices to unionize.

On May 24, immigrant rights attorney and Laredo native Jessica Cisneros faces nine-term Congressman Henry Cuellar, the only anti-abortion Democrat in the House of Representatives, in a run-off election.

Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and feminist media outlet Todas launched the Gender Investigative Unit, a collaborative project that seeks to conduct in-depth investigations aimed at addressing systemic gender violence in Puerto Rico and train journalists from the island to better cover these issues.

A Salvadoran man who claims he was jailed, beaten, and tortured after being wrongfully deported from the United States filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the federal government, seeking damages for his treatment. José Daniel Guerra-Castañeda, 25, has since been returned to the United States and lives in Massachusetts.

As a national labor shortage is contributing to higher prices on consumer goods and increased inflation, some senators tell Latino Rebels that increasing legal immigration can help undermine these economic pressures on the American economy, while others are not so convinced.