Mort Rosenblum: La Abuela is free and the press is alive and well

Back in the early 1900s, an Andy Borowitz-type guy named Finley Peter Dunne, who used humor to make crucial point, defined a newspaper's essential role: To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Today, thanks to Emily Bregel and the Star's top editor, David McCumber, the much-beloved 79-year-old Cuban grandma known mostly just as La Abuela, is free from ICE clutches in that shameful lockup near Eloy, now living her life with her family.

Bregel is a colleague; McCumber calls the shots. This may smack of cheerleading for the home team. But opinion writers stick to what they think. This is a cockle-warming example of why newspapers everywhere matter so much in the time of Trump.

Bregel's piece focused on Julia Benitez to show how government goons are meeting their quotas any way they can, even if it means jailing a woman with advancing dementia and no criminal history while awaiting a stalled asylum process.

She spent nine months behind bars, reduced to a wheelchair, and would likely have been there indefinitely had Emily not shed harsh light on her case in Lee Enterprise papers across the country. La Abuela is smiling again, regaining faculties fast.

Bregel is one of those young hard-charging pros who make an old reporter proud. Her beat is the border in its larger sense. No advocate, she simply lays out substantiated facts and asks comment from authorities or other key people who see things differently.

Here is the background — and how Abuela's case shakes out.

Trump, pushed by Secretary of State (for starters) Marco Rubio, whose family fled Cuba just before Castro's revolution in 1959, is bringing suffering Cuba to its knees by slow starvation and a cruel total embargo.

After losing Venezuelan oil, Cuba is so short of fuel that motorists can wait more than a month for permission to fill a single tank of gas. Then they go back on a lengthening list.

Illegally crossing into the United States is a misdemeanor. But asylum seekers facing "credible fear" are admitted under Geneva Conventions championed by the U.S. government after World War II. Trump sees things differently.

For this fiscal year, the asylum cap is set at 7,500, mostly white South Africans, who Trump preposterously claims face "genocide."

In her younger years, La Abuela irked Cuban authorities for advocating human rights, a clear sign that she is no dangerous commie. If forced to return, she would likely be subject to retribution on a benighted island where everyone now struggles to survive.

McCumber wrote in an editorial:

" ...To detain people like Benitez is a perversion of the government’s power. It calls into question every arrest ICE has made under Trump. How can the ICE supervisor responsible for her continued detention sleep at night? How can her jailers, the private firm CoreCivic, live with themselves?

"If ICE released Julia Benitez on humanitarian parole, it would be just for the duration of her immigration proceedings. It wouldn't affect whether or not she would be deported once her case is decided.

"Let her go."

After Bregel's story, Rep. Adelita Grijalva visited the grandmother in the Eloy lockup and shed tears. When nothing changed, it was La Abuela who cried. But 11 days after the Star reported on her plight, she was released.

That was on a humanitarian parole. ICE declined comment. It seldom makes apologies, and she still awaits a final decision. But the real reason is evident. Under harsh scrutiny, even this administration exhibits a shred of decency.

La Abuela survived her ordeal because of the kindness of strangers, other detainees who helped her feed herself, get dressed, use the bathroom and move around among 1,330 others at Eloy.

Stepping back, Bregel quoted legal advocates who said ICE has largely stopped using its discretion to release detainees on humanitarian parole since Trump took office. Over 11 months in 2025, discretionary releases — and humanitarian parole — fell by 87%, her sources said.

Her story said ICE’s "blanket denials" in response to release requests are leaving vulnerable people in inhumane detention conditions for no good reason, according to Liz Casey, with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.

Casey told her: "ICE is not releasing anybody ... despite the increase in the number of deaths (in custody), despite mental health issues, despite medical issues, disabilities."

I zeroed in on La Abuela because her case reflects so much else that I have seen across America, a shocking contrast to European countries. They strictly control immigration but also treat asylum seekers far more humanely according to international norms.

More, I am proud of the Star, where I began as a reporter in the early 1960s. In size and scope, it is a shadow of itself. But it is a victim of an increasingly apathic society, which criticizes the sad shape of newspapers while letting them wither away.

Nearly every mid-size and small daily operates on a shoestring, these days, yet a few manage near miracles with the dwindling resources they still have.

When people snicker at some glaring mistake, I always ask if they are subscribers. We all know the answer I normally get.

An awful lot of the afflicted need comfort for everyone's greater good. Human kindness aside, when people have nothing to lose, they get desperate. TV coverage and a "social media" tower of babble depends heavily on the Emily Bregels still on the job.

More by the day, plenty of people get comfortable by ignoring others in deep trouble. They might be a little more generous with some hard-facts affliction.