(WASHINGTON) — In 2012, the Obama administration introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, protecting all eligible immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation.
“DACA gave me hope,” program recipient Eddie Ramirez told ABC News. “And the biggest thing [DACA] gave me was a Social Security number with employment authorization, which allowed me to work to make money to pay for my schooling.”
Ramirez was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and arrived in the U.S. in 1994 at just 1 and a half years old. Ten years ago, in 2012, he received DACA status, ultimately enabling him to pursue his aspirations of becoming a dentist.
DACA students such as Ramirez are ineligible for federal aid, certain scholarships and internships. Limitations placed on DACA recipients drive various corporations and institutions to deny qualified individuals educational and employment opportunities due to their status.
“Not all institutions are friendly toward DACA,” Ramirez said.
During his last year of dental school, the 2017 rescission of DACA went into effect, threatening Ramirez’s citizenship status.
“It was this anxiety of am I going to be able to be a dentist,” Ramirez said. “Am I going to be able to continue practicing dentistry, everything that I went to school for?”
Ramirez is now a practicing dentist in Hillsboro, Oregon, but the future of his reality, and the life he built for himself, hangs in the balance as legislators delay policy reform that impacts his stability.
As of this year, DACA has promised security to a total of 3,467,749 applicants, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Over the past 10 years, DACA has faced many legislative challenges. Congress’ latest response to the demands of DACA recipients was U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling last July outlawing the DACA program and closing the door on all new applicants. The Department of Justice’s appeal to that decision now makes its way to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, immigration reform is stalled in the Senate.
Hundreds of DACA recipients and supporters plan to rally as the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, calling on Congress to guarantee equal opportunity under DACA and the creation of a substantial pathway to citizenship.
One of those recipients is Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of immigrants’ rights advocacy organization United We Dream.
“What we’re seeking is permanent protection for us to be able to live without fear in our homes,” Rosas told ABC News. “To be able to drive to work without the fear of being separated from our families and be able to make plans for the future.”
Rosas met with Vice President Kamala Harris in January to stress the demands for permanent protection. She says that while “we felt heard and understood,” no action was taken to fortify a certain future for recipients.
Thousands of qualified students are vulnerable to deportation. Caught in the crossfire of the remnants of the previous administration, which Rosas described as “vehemently anti-immigrant,” and the efforts of the current administration, the realities of undocumented people remain in limbo.
Although DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, the last line of defense in the fight for protection is the anticipated American Dream and Promise Act. If signed into law, the bill is set to provide an official pathway to citizenship by granting permanent resident status for 10 years to qualifying undocumented immigrants.
Uncertainty for the future persists for thousands of families as they remain on standby for the outcome of oral arguments in Congress on July 6.
(HONG KONG) — Just 10 days after Shanghai lifted its two-month lockdown and less than a week after Beijing declared its outbreak under control, China’s two largest cities found themselves walking back on loosening up restrictions.
Beijing delayed reopening schools on Monday as a new outbreak centered around a popular bar district pushed cases to a three-week high and Shanghai, once again, suspended dine-in services at restaurants.
Both cities were back to conducting mass testing over the weekend as outbreaks of the Omicron variant stubbornly persist despite the country’s no tolerance zero-COVID measures. Shanghai even briefly placed most of the city back in lockdown Saturday morning to conduct its mass test, which only turned up 66 cases through the weekend.
As much of the world has shifted definitively to living with the virus, China, by all measures, is digging in and even expanding their method of mass testing and suppression authorities call “Dynamic Zero-COVID” where all positive cases, no matter how mild, needed to be isolated and quarantined.
Before Omicron, China’s zero-COVID measures had allowed Chinese citizens to go about their lives as normal for nearly two years as COVID-19 ravaged the rest of the world. China still has one of the lowest official COVID-19 death rates in the world.
The implementation of the Shanghai lockdown, however, came to show the economic and social toll of the country’s stringent measures with Bloomberg Economics predicting that China’s will grow slower than the U.S. economy for the first time since 1976.
Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow for Global Health Yanzhong Huang believes that, despite this, Chinese authorities are drawing a very different lesson from the omicron outbreak and lockdown in Shanghai than when previous zero-COVID stalwarts like New Zealand opened up after omicron broke down their defenses.
“[The Chinese health authorities] believe they didn’t respond speedily enough,” Huang told ABC News. “[They believe] if they took action in the very beginning of the outbreak they would have been able to cut the transmission and bring the situation under control right away.”
In other words, it wasn’t the zero-COVID policy that didn’t work, it was poor implementation that landed Shanghai in lockdown.
So instead of realizing zero-COVID methods were increasingly ineffective against highly transmissible variants like omicron, Huang says authorities came to the opposite conclusion: they needed to double down and that zero-COVID is the only way to go.
Since May, China has rolled out a stringent new PCR testing regime in most major cities across the country — including those where no cases have been detected — and are requiring people to test negative for COVID-19 every 48 to 72 hours in order to work, shop or use public transport.
This has resulted in hundreds of thousands of new semi-permanent testing facilities being set up across the country with the aim of having a testing booth within a 15-minute walk of every resident in all provincial capitals and cities with more than 10 million residents.
Officials argue that constant screening will allow them to catch cases early before they spread exponentially so they would not have to resort to a prolonged lockdown like Shanghai’s.
Shanghai alone has set up 15,000 testing sites in the city but even then social media is teeming with daily clips of long lines of residents waiting to be tested. These booths are usually manned by one or two technicians sealed in an air-conditioned metal and glass cabin with two rubber gloves or openings to take a patient’s sample.
The English-language Chinese outlet Sixth Tone calculated it would cost an estimated $12.55 billion a year to maintain just this testing regime which would have to be paid for by the local governments.
Meanwhile, according to Japanese investment bank Nomura, there are still eight cities across China and an estimated 74 million people currently under full or partial lockdown measures, down from an estimated 355 million people in April.
Last month, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, commented that he did not believe zero-COVID is “sustainable, considering the behavior of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future.”
That prompted Chinese Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian to immediately retort, “we hope that relevant people can view China’s policy of epidemic prevention and control objectively and rationally, get more knowledge about the facts and refrain from making irresponsible remarks.”
“The Chinese government’s policy of epidemic prevention and control can stand the test of history, and our prevention and control measures are scientific and effective,” Zhao said. “China is one of the most successful countries in epidemic prevention and control in the world, which is obvious to all of the international community.”
With the focus on testing and isolation, the conversation around vaccinations has been comparatively muted. Though China was one of the first countries to roll out a vaccination program, an estimated 100 million Chinese citizens remained unvaccinated or under-vaccinated, the majority of which are vulnerable seniors.
China has relied primarily on their own domestic traditional technology vaccines that — although proven to be less effective against infection than the mRNA vaccines now used in much of the world — still protected people from hospitalization and death.
CFR’s Huang believes that even if vaccinations rates improved or an effective domestically-made mRNA vaccine is rolled out, it was unlikely to change the government’s attitude towards zero-COVID.
“This is the problem,” Huang said, “if your intention is zero-COVID and cannot tolerate any infections no matter how mild they are, even if they do achieve a 100% vaccination rate, even if you have the best of vaccines in the world, you cannot prevent infections.”
Huang believes the longer China maintains this policy, the larger the immunity gap grows between China and the rest of world.
“You are basically prolonging the inevitable,” says Huang. “You have to face the reality that with such a large population not exposed to the virus and that has relatively low immunity level to virus, no matter how draconian the measures you undertake, you cannot prevent the virus from infiltrating the borders and affecting the Chinese people.”
China’s borders have remained effectively sealed off since March 2020 and in early May this year the National Immigration Administration announced on Weibo that it would “strictly restrict non-essential departures of Chinese citizens” and ban the approval of new passports.
While many had hoped that China would begin easing restrictions after the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics in February, the outbreaks that emerged soon afterwards dampened that outlook. An important Communist Party meeting coming up in the fall where Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to gain an unprecedented third term was seen as the next milestone but that looks increasingly unlikely as well.
In a sign on how long China’s strict measures may last, look no further than next year’s Asia Football Confederation’s Asian Cup soccer tournament set to begin in mid-June 2023. China had won the bid to host and even purposely built or renovated stadiums in 10 cities but last month completely relinquished its hosting rights “due exceptional circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“The zero-COVID policy is the biggest impediment to right now to China’s economic recovery,” said Huang. “But if they choose to pivot away from zero-COVID it will be difficult because that issue is being politicized. Pivoting away means you have to admit to the failure of zero-COVID in which the top leader himself has invested so much.”
On a visit to the western province of Sichuan Friday, Xi made his position clear.
“Persistence is victory,” Xi said. “We must unswervingly adhere to the general policy of ‘dynamic zero-COVID’, strengthen confidence, eliminate interference, overcome paralyzing thoughts, pay close attention to the key tasks of epidemic prevention and control, and resolutely consolidate the hard-won results of epidemic prevention and control.”
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued warnings Tuesday after at least 14 deaths in recent years related to child rockers.
The warnings covered certain Fisher-Price and Kids2 rockers, and the agency warned consumers to not let their children sleep in the products.
CPSC reported at least 13 deaths between 2009 and 2021 of infants in Fisher-Price Infant-to-Toddler Rockers and Newborn-to-Toddler Rockers. It also reported one death in 2019 of an infant in a Kids2 Bright Starts Rocker.
“Parents and caregivers should never use inclined products, such as rockers, gliders, soothers, and swings, for infant sleep and should not leave infants in these products unsupervised, unrestrained, or with bedding material, due to the risk of suffocation,” CPSC said.
There are about 3,400 sleep-related deaths among babies each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — a number the health agency says includes deaths due to “sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), accidental suffocation in a sleeping environment and other deaths from unknown causes.”
“Fisher-Price recommends consumers visit Fisher-Price’s Safe Start webpage at www.fisherprice.com/SafeStart for safety videos, tips and additional safety information, as well as the latest safety warnings for Rockers and other infant products,” the company said in the CPSC statement Tuesday. The company added that it’s committed to the safety of its products.
Kids2 said in a statement on CPSC’s website that it encourages consumers to report incidents to the company and that its “number one priority is the safety and well-being of the babies and families who love and use our products.”
The CDC advises placing babies on their back for all sleep times; using a firm surface such as a mattress in a safety-approved crib; keeping soft bedding, pillows, bumper pads and soft toys out of the baby’s sleeping area; and having the baby sleep in the same room as a parent, but not in the bed.
A final rule issued by CPSC will go into effect later this month requiring sleep products to have a sleep surface angle of 10 degrees or less, and that all sleep products conform to the existing bassinet, crib, or play yard standards.
“Your infant’s sleep environment should be the safest place in your home,” CPSC Chair Alex Hoen-Saric said Tuesday.
Fisher-Price and Kids2 did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
(WASHINGTON) — As former President Donald Trump’s presidential legacy is tested in Washington this week, with the Jan. 6 hearings dominating Capitol Hill, his political power — and the sway of his election denying — saw a renewed test in the midterm primaries in a handful of states.
Voters took the polls in South Carolina, Nevada, Maine, North Dakota and Texas’ 34 Congressional District Tuesday night, delivering historic turnout numbers and allowing voters to give Republicans who defied the former president a second chance at keeping their jobs, and some Democrats to lose theirs.
Here are some of the key takeaways from Tuesday’s races:
Trump finally lands incumbent ouster
While Trump’s had some success in backing candidates in open races, he’s had major difficulty in knocking off their perch incumbent members of his party who have challenged him in some way, putting aside the score of Trump-scorned Republicans who have decided to not seek re-election.
But finally, on Tuesday, Trump was able to handedly bump one of the most vocal off that list, Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, rendering him out of a job come November.
Rice was one of the ten Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment, a “conservative vote” he told ABC News’ Jon Karl that he would make again in a heartbeat, even if it cost him his job. And lost his job he did, to MAGA-world challenger Russell Fry, who was quick to paint Rice as a traitor to his party. The demographic makeup of Rice’s district, toward the northern border of the state where voters trend far more conservative, may have also contributed to the massive backlash against Rice, pushing folks toward Fry’s direction.
Now, with newly-won swagger, Trump will undoubtedly charge on to defeat another impeachment-vote member of his party, and perhaps his biggest enemy yet, in Wyoming: Rep. Liz Cheney. The question remains: can lightning — and political luck — strike twice?
Nancy Mace’s tightrope walk pays off in Trump proxy war
Totally flipped dynamics greeted South Carolina’s 1st District, where Trump was wholly unsuccessful in booting a challenger in Rep. Nancy Mace, who carried her primary win by at least 10 points. Mace defeated cybersecurity expert Katie Arrington, who beat Rep. Mark Sanford in his primary in 2018 but ultimately lost the race to Rep. Joe Cunningham, who historically flipped the district Democrat during the slate of “blue wave races.”
Arrington bet that voters in the low country would see Mace as something of a flip-flop, first condemning Trump hard after the Capitol insurrection and eventually softening her attacks. But that bet didn’t pay off, partly thanks to a bench of heavy hitter South Carolina endorsements for Mace, including former Gov. Nikki Haley and Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
Another interesting dynamic in Mace’s race is the endorsement cold war of sorts. The proxy battle between potential 2024 candidates — Haley and Trump — falls squarely in Haley’s camp, the beginning of a nice set up for a highly gossiped about bid for the White House. So far, a good record for Haley, who said in the past she’d bow out of consideration if Trump decides to run. But if Haley notches a few other primary wins, who knows? There may be a spot for her against Trump after all.
Trump seems to be trying to save face a little, saying on Truth Social Tuesday night that Arrington was a “long shot” and Mace will “easily” be able to defeat a Democratic opponent come November.
Big Lie gets big win in Nevada senate race
Voters in Nevada seem to not be scared of a little election denial. Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s open-armed embrace of conspiracy surrounding the 2020 presidential election helped him notch a win in the state’s GOP Senate Primary. Laxalt, who hails from a state political dynasty, bested political outsider Sam Brown who tried and failed to paint Laxalt as cozy with party insiders.
Still, a roster of Republican stars, nearly all of whom are rumored to join the crowded contest for president in 2024, backed Laxalt’s bid, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Laxalt’s former roommate, funnily enough), Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Tom Cotton, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
He’ll see if that flock of support will be enough to kick Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto out of office. She sails to the general election contest with no serious challengers and now must answer not just to Laxalt but to voters increasingly frustrated with the concurrent fallout of the pandemic, inflation and other economic woes that hit the tourist-driven state.
(NEW YORK) — Prices for flights this summer have skyrocketed at unprecedented rates, and some travel experts say that travelers looking for deals should start planning for fall trips.
Domestic flight prices have jumped by 47% since January, according to an Adobe Analytics report released Thursday. The cost of domestic airfare also increased 6.2% from April to May, the report said.
“We expected to see elevated demand leading into 2022,” Patrick Brown, vice president of growth marketing insights at Adobe, said. “And consumers have been spending at twice the rate that they have over last year, but prices have grown even faster than the demand has grown.”
Brown also said the price increase “hasn’t dampened the demand for travel.”
“Despite the high increases in prices month over month, we’re seeing consumers still booking their travel while they’re looking for other ways to do it and getting creative about when to travel,” Brown said.
However, travel experts said there are still a few ways travelers can find affordable travel options or more room in their travel budget.
Scott Keyes, the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights, said cheap flights “aren’t gone forever,” but they are for travelers looking to book this summer.
“It’s really too late to get a great deal for your summer travels, but that’s because it’s already June,” Keyes told ABC News.
Keyes said there are still “a ton of deals to be had” for those looking to book fall or winter vacations. For the same seven-day trip from Los Angeles to Maui, waiting a few months could save travelers more than 70%, according to Scott’s Cheap Flights.
“Flights on July 1 through 8 from Los Angeles to Maui are $725 roundtrip,” Keyes said. “But flights from L.A. to Maui on Sept. 1 through 8 are just $161 round trip.”
But Keyes says to get those deals, travelers need to book now.
“My recommendation is book those fall flights now while fares are really cheap and give yourself a trip on the books to look forward to that you get to daydream about,” Keyes said.
For travelers who have already booked flights or are still looking for destinations, the strength of the U.S. dollar could mean more bang for your buck in some foreign destinations, according to Haley Berg, an economist at the booking platform Hopper.
“The dollar has appreciated compared to many local currencies, Mexican pesos is one of them,” Berg said. “So many of those Central American and Caribbean countries might be more attractive to visit this summer than in previous years as well.”
The U.S. dollar’s strength will especially benefit travelers to Europe this summer, where the Euro has depreciated by nearly 15%. Berg said that even though prices for airfare to Europe are up, the dollar parity will help travelers stay in budget.
“When you’re there shopping, staying at hotels, eating out, your dollars will go about 6% further than in 2019,” Berg said.
(NEW YORK) — A new study points to prior COVID-19 infection as a possible culprit for the global wave of severe hepatitis cases among children — though experts caution the true cause is still a medical mystery.
Researchers in Israel added evidence for the theory in a small study published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, suggesting some children might develop liver inflammation in the weeks after recovering from a mild COVID-19 infection.
While the root cause of the pediatric hepatitis outbreak is still unknown, experts say the leading theories include COVID-19 infection, infection with a common cold virus, or an interplay between the two infections, according to Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatric hospitalist at Stanford Health and an ABC News medical contributor.
In a new twist, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis published Tuesday found that there may not be a spike in cases at all — at least not in the United States. CDC scientists said the number of severe hepatitis cases observed in recent weeks is relatively consistent with pre-pandemic levels, but urged public health authorities to continue to monitor the situation.
“I think it is too early as CDC [is] looking at U.S. data and U.S. has not been hit as hard as other countries like U.K.,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.
More than 700 children across the globe have been found to have probable cases of severe hepatitis with an unknown cause, officials from the World Health Organization said in a press conference last Wednesday.
At least 38 children have required a liver transplant, and 10 children have died, the WHO says. Additionally, 112 cases are also under investigation, and a total of 34 countries have reported cases to date.
As the mystery deepens, scientists across the globe are racing to understand whether — and why — children are falling ill with severe hepatitis in higher numbers.
Severe hepatitis, or liver inflammation, is often prompted by an infection, but not always. It is unusual among children, and most often seen in adults who have been living with alcoholism or an undiagnosed infection for decades, slowly causing liver damage.
During a global investigation, the WHO found that about two-thirds of children tested positive for a common cold virus called adenovirus 41 — which quickly became one of the leading theories. Only about 12% of children had COVID-19 at the time they developed severe hepatitis.
Because most of the children were too young to be vaccinated, the COVID-19 vaccine was ruled out as a possible cause.
“The latest Israeli study adds just a little gasoline to the fire to try to understand the causes of the mysterious hepatitis in children,” said Chin-Hong.
However, he said the study was too small to be conclusive.
In the study, researchers described five cases of children ranging from 3 months to 13 years old who recovered from COVID-19 and later developed severe liver inflammation, some requiring liver transplants.
If true, this type of delayed reaction to a COVID-19 infection would mirror the rare multi-organ syndrome MIS-C that affects children weeks and sometimes months after COVID-19 infection.
It’s possible children may be experiencing “an autoimmune reaction from a viral infection causing hepatitis, where the child’s immune system attacks their own liver cells in an attempt to combat the virus,” said Dr. Madhu Vennikandam, a gastroenterology fellow at Sparrow Health System.
However, the CDC cautions the cause remains unknown and a global research effort spearheaded by the WHO is ongoing.
“The silver lining in all of this is that vaccines for children under 5 are on the cusp of approval in the U.S.,” said Chin-Hong.
If COVID-19 indeed “has a central role to play in all of this, we should eventually start seeing cases drop,” he said.
(EL MONTE, Calif.) — Two police officers have died after being shot in El Monte, California, Tuesday while responding to a possible stabbing at a motel, authorities said.
The El Monte Police Department said two officers “immediately took gunfire upon arrival” at the Siesta Inn.
The officers were taken to LAC-USC Medical Center, where they died of their injuries, ABC News Los Angeles station KABC-TV reported.
The suspect was also shot and died at the scene, according to KABC.
Neither the police officers nor the suspect have been identified, and additional details about the incident were not immediately available.
“There are no words to describe our grief and devastation by this senseless act as we learned about the passing of two of our police officers,” the city, police department and El Monte Police Officers Association said in a statement. “It weighs heavy on our hearts and we are sending our support to their families. We would also like to thank the El Monte community and our surrounding government agencies for the outpouring support we have received in the last few hours.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has taken over the investigation, the El Monte Police Department said.
(ATLANTA) — An armed man is in custody after officials say he threatened people inside a HomeGoods store in the Atlanta area.
The HomeGoods in Alpharetta, about 25 miles from Atlanta, was evacuated as were the neighboring businesses, authorities told reporters.
There were no reports of shots fired, the Alpharetta Department of Public Safety said.
“The manager came out of the office and she just told all of us to run,” one HomeGoods employee told ABC Atlanta affiliate WSB-TV.
Authorities said the suspect, who has not been identified, was located in the store and contained at 12:20 p.m. Police said negotiators tried to speak with him.
At 1:28 p.m., authorities announced that the suspect had been taken into custody.
(WASHINGTON) — A series of photos taken on election night 2020 inside the Trump White House captures the tension as Donald Trump’s family and his top aides track election returns and see Trump’s early lead fade away.
The photos, taken by a White House photographer and published exclusively in the book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, are a visual representation of the testimony of senior Trump advisers who told the House Jan. 6 committee that they did not believe Trump should declare victory on election night.
The photos show Trump’s family and campaign team camped out in the Map Room of the White House.
The room, located in the basement of the White House residence, is where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tracked the movement of Allied Forces during World War II.
It’s called the Map Room because some of the maps used by FDR are framed and on the walls.
For election night, however, Trump’s political team transformed the room in to a campaign war room, installing large-screen televisions and placing them over FDR’s maps.
The photos capture the apparently pained expressions on the faces of Trump’s inner circle.
According to a source who is shown in at least one of the photos, they were taken as the campaign’s analysts, who had been more confident early in the evening, became concerned Trump could lose.
The photos feature some of Trump’s most prominent advisers, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Also present are several Trump family members, including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Lara Trump.
In videotaped testimony released Monday by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Stepien said Trump was “increasingly unhappy” on election night as votes were counted and he started to lose.
Stepien, Miller and other key aides urged Trump not to declare victory that night.
“My belief, my recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted, it’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,” Stepien said in a clip of his interview with the committee played during Monday’s hearing.
Trump, he said, “thought I was wrong,” and would instead declare victory at the White House early the next morning on the advice of Rudy Giuliani, who Miller said was “definitely intoxicated” on election night.
Giuliani on Tuesday challenged Miller’s testimony and denied being drunk on election night at the White House.
(WASHINGTON) — Celebrity chef José Andrés on Monday announced plans to open a restaurant in the Old Post Office, the Washington landmark which recently reopened as the Waldorf Astoria Washington D.C. after operating for five years as the Trump International Hotel.
“People of DC big news! Today after a dream of 30 years I’m announcing we will open @bazaarbyjose in the Old Post Office!” Andrés tweeted. “Building longer tables in the heart of our nation’s capital, welcoming people from across the city & the world.”
The new restaurant follows Donald Trump’s company agreeing to sell its hotel lease in May.
It’s not the first time Andrés has planned to have a location in the complex — or the first time his career overlapped with Trump. According to The Washington Post, Andrés was in progress on the $7 million Topo Atrio, at Trump International, when Trump launched his 2016 presidential candidacy.
The chef split with Trump after the latter, then a businessman and reality TV show host, announced his campaign at an event in New York where he notoriously disparaged some immigrants.
Andrés subsequently sought to exit their partnership and a legal battle ensued. (It was settled in 2017.)
The chef went on to repeatedly, publicly criticize Trump-the-politician, tweeting in 2017 that Trump’s continued behavior only reaffirmed his decision to pull out of the hotel partnership.
The forthcoming eatery, The Bazaar by José Andrés, has locations in Chicago, Miami’s South Beach and in Las Vegas. It offers a “vibrant mix of sophisticated cuisine” and “playful lounge spaces,” according to the restaurant’s Twitter.
A hotel spokesperson told ABC News they “look forward to sharing more details about new partnerships in the coming months” but that “with a long history of innovation across the culinary industry, Waldorf Astoria creates iconic, award-winning dining experiences at its landmark locations worldwide. We are continuing that tradition with exciting food and beverage concepts at our newest hotel.”
In a video Andrés — whose humanitarian organization World Central Kitchen is also working to provide meals to Ukrainians during the Russian invasion — tweeted with his announcement on Monday, he took in the historic bells of the Old Post Office ringing in the background.
“For whom the bells toll?” he asked. “Well, for a new restaurant by José Andrés at the Old Post Office.”
