By Scott Brinton

The re-election of Hempstead Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr. over challenger Kevin Boone leaves open a question of whether the village will cooperate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as they seek to carry out President Trump’s executive orders calling for mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. 

Boone, who lost his trustee seat in running for the mayoralty, had pledged during a meeting with Hempstead-area immigrant activists in the week leading to the March 18 election that he would, if elected, sign an ordinance prohibiting village cooperation with ICE.

Boone’s statement came in response to a question by Nadia Marin-Molina, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. She asked whether Boone would allow the Hempstead Village Police Department to collaborate with ICE in detaining undocumented immigrants. She noted the village had no written policy prohibiting such cooperation.

Under current policy, Marin-Molina said, “any individual police officer can call immigration.” 

Boone ran on the People Over Party United ticket with incumbent Trustee Clariona Griffith and newcomer Kevin Ramirez. They joined him at the meeting with the activists, held at a bar/restaurant in downtown Hempstead. The Long Island Advocate sat in on the session.

“Everybody should be treated fairly,” Boone said. “We don’t feel anyone should be targeted, especially by the police. The police are there to serve and protect in ways that are not harassing.”

Three votes would be needed on the five-member Hempstead Village Board to pass an ordinance prohibiting ICE cooperation. Election of Boone’s three-member ticket would have ensured that the measure would have received a hearing at village hall and likely would have passed, as Griffith and Ramirez had also pledged to vote for such an ordinance. 

Like Boone, Griffith and Ramirez were defeated in Tuesday’s election, losing to challengers Tanya Carter and William Whitaker. 

Two phone calls to Hobbs’s office seeking comment on the question of potential ICE cooperation, one before the election and one after, were not returned.

To continue reading, click here.

By Scott Brinton

One early casualty of President Donald Trump’s war of words over the Gulf of Mexico is freedom of the press.

The president barred The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news agency took a principled stand by refusing to refer to the water body as the Gulf of America in its reporting. This came after the president issued an executive order changing the name that had been in place for 400 years.

The AP is based in New York City and provides stories to news outlets throughout the United States. But it also is a global news service, with client media around the world. The AP explained that calling the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name would confuse its international readers and viewers. The AP noted that the agency “must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” Indeed, no other country acknowledges the renaming, which has no official bearing on international boundaries.

To continue reading, click here.

• LI Advocate

• Community News, Hempstead, Politics, Uniondale
• February 16, 2025

County Executive Blakeman emphasizes only known criminals would be detained

By Gabriel Prevots

More than a hundred protesters gathered on the steps of the Nassau County’s Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building Friday to denounce County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s announcement that 10 county police detectives will be deputized to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Between chants in English and Spanish supporting immigrants, prominent representatives from immigrant rights advocacy groups, elected leaders and union members called on Blakeman to rescind his Feb. 5 decision and urged their communities to show solidarity with immigrants. 

Immigrants “are the bedrock of every community in this state and in this country, and under no circumstances should the state law enforcement or city law enforcement or municipal law enforcement be colluding with ICE,” said Robert Agyemang, of Hempstead, vice president of the New York Immigration Coalition. Agyemang was born in the U.S., and his parents emigrated from Ghana. 

“We’re here today, we’re sending the message: Blakeman, you need to do the right thing. You still have time to make it up,” said Angel Reyes, of Glen Cove, Long Island coordinator with the immigrant rights organization Make the Road in Brentwood, who served as emcee for the hour-long protest. 

In response to opposition to his announcement, Blakeman reaffirmed that the purpose of the deputized detectives would be “picking up criminals, people who are engaged in crimes … These aren’t going to be raids. These are going to be targeted enforcement of known criminals who are here illegally.”

It is unclear when Blakeman’s deputization of the county detectives will take place, as the details have not yet been made public. ICE collaborations with police departments under its 287(g) program are published on the agency’s website, and as of Feb. 16, Nassau County remained absent from the list.

Still, speakers emphasized that ICE’s current enforcement policies, laid out by President Trump, have had a chilling effect on immigrant communities throughout Long Island, instilling anxiety and fear and leading many to forgo help when they need it most. 

Marcia Estrada, a chapter coordinator with local women’s and immigrants’ rights organizations, shared her personal story of escaping “abuse, poverty and threats to my life” in Honduras and then domestic abuse in the United States.

Referring to the abuse, Estrada said, “If this had happened today with the police collaborating with ICE, I would have never sought help. I would have never called the police because I would have feared facing deportation, being separated from my children or even facing death.”

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Feb. 14 protest was held on Valentine’s Day to “demonstrate love and support for Long Island immigrants, many of whom are living in fear due to an escalation in ICE activity in their communities.”

To read more, click here.

By Scott Brinton

I was honored to cover the 2025 Hempstead-Hofstra MLK Day Parade and Celebration. Here’s my Long Island Advocate report:

Dressed in a dark purple suit, her hands flowing excitedly and her voice booming through the Hofstra University Student Center on Saturday, Dr. LaQuetta Solomon, clinical psychotherapist and emotional intelligence assessor, declared, “Our existence today is the dream realized. It’s the dream realized that I’m standing here speaking to you.”

The dream that Solomon was referring to was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for America, the hope and belief that people of all races and creeds would one day live as one, with equal opportunity for all.

Solomon served as the keynote speaker for “Moving Forward: The Dream Realized,” a celebration of Dr. King’s life and work held Saturday in remembrance of his upcoming birthday, Jan. 15. The four-hour event, a collaboration between the Village of Hempstead and Hofstra University, included a parade from Hempstead Village Hall to Hofstra’s North Campus and a cultural program that included song and dance performed by students from the Academy Charter School and Hempstead High School, as well as the Youth and Teens Dance Company in Hempstead.

MLK Day, a federal holiday, is marked annually on the third Monday of January. This year, it falls on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. 

Other participants in the celebration included Aviation High School in Long Island City, the United People’s Organization, Uniondale-Hempstead Girl Scout Troop 1570 and the Hofstra wrestling team, among others. 

This was the 32nd year that a MLK Day parade has been held in Hempstead, and the third year that Hempstead Village and Hofstra University have teamed up to celebrate Dr. King. Born in Atlanta in 1929, the reverend would have been 96 this year. 

Dr. Laurie Hamilton, an educational leader in the Hempstead School District, served as the host and emcee for Saturday’s cultural celebration. The day was intended, she said, to honor Dr. King’s legacy. 

Solomon’s 28-minute talk was one part informational, one part inspirational. “It’s the dream realized that we have so many generations here coming together, learning how to work with one another, building community,” she said.

To continue reading, click here.

My Hofstra University colleagues Mario A. Murillo, Aashish Kumar, and I last night revealed the interactive website that we’ve been working on the past year or so to graphically represent our academic study on suburban news deserts. Special thanks to Hofstra University President Susan Poser, whose office funded our research, and to our amazing coder Ali Tan Ucer!! Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!!

You can check out the new site here.

You can check out the full study here.

This past summer, I returned to Bulgaria, where I served in the U.S. Peace Corps, for the first time in 10 years. I produced this travelogue after my trip:

I immediately noticed the interlocking pattern of shadows that fell from the canopy of deciduous and evergreen trees onto the tombstones covered in brambles and wildflowers on this 85-degree Thursday. Birds hovered overhead, cackling. Otherwise, it was peaceful in this secluded corner of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. 

My wife, sister-in-law and I were at the Central Sofia Cemetery on July 6 to pay our respects to loved ones. Many Bulgarians visit the graves of their closest relatives at least once yearly to lay flowers and whisper prayers. 

The Orlandovtsi Cemetery, as the graveyard is also known, is the final resting place of a number of Bulgaria’s glitterati, literati and top politicos, including its first democratically elected president after the fall of communism in 1989, Zhelyu Zhelev. The graveyard is egalitarian, though — the once popular and powerful lie near average Bulgarians.

The cemetery is also a beautifully wild place where nature lives and breathes. Many, if not most, graves are covered by underbrush. To visit a gravesite, one cuts a path with clippers or tiptoes carefully through the overflowing vegetation. 

This expansive graveyard, I thought, is a perfect reflection of Bulgarian philosophy on nature. With a population of nearly 6.9 million, Bulgaria is a rugged, mountainous nation that, through the centuries since its founding in 681, has remained a largely rural, agrarian state. Its bustling cities are rapidly progressing into the so-called “modern world,” with high-tech innovation leading the way. 

In a deep sense, though, the heart of Bulgaria remains its countryside, to which most Bulgarians can trace their roots. Many own apartments in cities and small cottages in provincial villages, living part of the time in each. Preserving the bucolic side of Bulgaria, even in a cemetery, is a way of life. “Let nature be nature” is a common refrain among Bulgarians. 

For the full story, click here.

The Long Island Advocate, Hofstra University’s online multimedia platform for off-campus reporting, took home 13 awards in the Press Club of Long Island’s 2023 Media Awards, presented last Thursday at Fox Hollow in Woodbury.

The honors included six first places for Investigative Series Narrative, Feature Story Radio, News Story Radio, Feature Package Video, News Package Video and Sports Package Video.

Additionally, the Spring 2022 edition of Pulse Magazine, Pass the Plate, earned a first place for Feature Story Narrative and a second place in the professional division for Best Magazine. All articles in Pass the Plate were published on The Advocate last summer.

For the full story, click here.

I have a bit of catching up to do with my blog, so this post is coming a tad late, but I am still excited to say the former of Nick’s Pizza in Rockville Centre reached a $375,000 settlement with eight former workers. Here’s my Long Island Advocate story:

Julio Contreras, of Freeport, arrived in the U.S. in 2001 as an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, 17 years old, without family and friends here, and hungry to work. Soon, he was employed as a dishwasher at Nick’s Pizza on Sunrise Highway in Rockville Centre, working 12-hour days, six days a week, for less than the state-required minimum wage, court and state filings show.

Now Contreras, 39, is one of eight former Nick’s Pizza workers who will share in a $375,000 settlement that the New York State Department of Labor reached recently with the eatery’s one-time owner, Nicholas J. Angelis, 62, of Rockville Centre.

The settlement represents a little more than half of the roughly $733,000 that Angelis had owed in back wages to the workers, interest payments and state penalties. Under terms of the agreement, the penalties and part of the interest payments have been waived, with all monies from the settlement going to the workers, according to a DOL release. It was unclear when Angelis relinquished ownership of Nick’s Pizza.

 Contreras, who appeared at a news conference on Monday in front of Nick’s Pizza to announce the settlement, is owed $41,319.59 in back wages, according to a DOL order first issued to Angelis in August 2011 and obtained by The Long Island Advocate. In total, Angelis owed the workers a little more than $400,000 in wages and interest charges.

Smiling, Contreras said he plans to celebrate with a good meal surrounded by his friends and supporters when he receives his first payment. “I’m celebrating. I’m feeling great,” Contreras said in Spanish. “I thought that money was lost.”

The DOL announced the settlement on its website on Monday. “In New York State, we believe that every worker deserves fair pay for a fair day’s work,” DOL Commissioner Roberta Reardon said in the state’s release. “Wage theft remains a top priority to Governor Hochul, and we will do anything in our power to help victims. We will not rest until justice is served.”

For more, click here.

Here’s part 2 of the investigation I’ve been working on w/@ABC7NY‘s @KristinThorne since September. In this installment, a ‘megalithic’ collection of eateries goes under, leaving the future of a #NYC historic landmark in question.

Since the early to mid-2000s, restaurant developer Peter Poulakakos has steadily built a portfolio of fashionable eateries across Lower Manhattan. The collapse of one of his more recent projects — Pier A Harbor House at the southern tip of Manhattan — leaves the future of a New York City historic landmark in question.

By Scott Brinton

Part two of two. For the first installment of this story, click here. 

Pier A Harbor House, a three-story, 28,000-square-foot collection of high- and medium-end dining venues overlooking New York Harbor, lies vacant these days, its many stools resting upside down atop bars and tables, its wine glasses collecting dust and its stainless-steel beer kegs stacked on shelves. 

A handful of notes taped to the inside of its glass doors read, “Pier A will be closed until further notice. We apologize for the inconvenience. Be safe.”

Pier A, a national historic landmark that was built in 1886 as the headquarters of the New York Docks Department and is owned by New York City, has remained unoccupied since the Harbor House shuttered in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

Restaurant developer Peter Poulakakos, whose portfolio of roughly 20 Manhattan eateries has been described as an “empire,” was the force behind Harbor House, along with his father, Harry, who founded the iconic Harry’s at Hanover Square, only blocks from Wall Street, in 1972. 

In 2011, the Poulakakoses joined with the Dermot Company and others to develop the Harbor House. That March, Pier A Battery Park Associates LLC, of which the Poulakakoses are listed as owners in court documents, signed a 25-year lease to Pier A with the Battery Park City Authority, a New York State public benefit corporation. The BPCA is responsible for the site and is charged with management of several other venues within the 92-acre Battery Park City neighborhood on Manhattan’s southwest side.    

The lease was worth $39.1 million in rent over its life, in addition to a percentage of annual gross sales above $18 million. Though New York City owns the pier, the BPCA acts as the landlord, as it leases the site from the city, so the agreement that it signed with Pier A Battery Park Associates was a sublease.

Now, it is unclear how the BPCA will recoup the millions of dollars in lost rent that it was to receive from Pier A Harbor House.

The BPCA referred The Advocate to a public affairs consultancy firm, Risa Heller Communications of Manhattan, which had no comment.

To continue reading, click here.

Here’s my latest on the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication’s Long Island Advocate:

By Scott Brinton

Part one of two. 

Diana Sanchez, regional organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, stood feet from the glass-door entrance to Nick’s Pizza, on Sunrise Highway in Rockville Centre, and shouted into a microphone, “Shame on you!”

The dozen protesters assembled in a tight semi-circle around her responded in kind four times.

The demonstrators were there Feb. 8 “to demand” one-time owner Nicholas J. Angelis, of Rockville Centre, pay eight of his former workers the hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages that the New York State Department of Labor contends they are owed.

They are “workers who have families, who have children, who have to survive,” Sanchez said.

Roughly a decade ago, Angelis, now 62, was ordered by the DOL to pay a combined $421,0000 in back wages, interest charges and liquidated damages to eight of his kitchen workers at Nick’s Pizza, in addition to $311,500 in state penalties, for a total of more than $730,000. In a two-year probe that began in 2009, the DOL found that Angelis had paid the workers a rate below minimum wage from 2003 through July 2011, court documents show.

They are “workers who have families, who have children, who have to survive.”Diana Sanchez, National Day Laborer Organizing Network

The workers are yet to receive any of the funds that they are owed, despite two New York State Supreme Court judgments in their favor in July 2021 and May 2022 — hence the protest in front of Nick’s on Wednesday. All eight came to the U.S. as undocumented workers, from El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico, though one is now a permanent resident. 

The Advocate first reported on the state orders and court judgments against Angelis last September. In further investigating the case in recent months, The Advocate uncovered four class-action civil lawsuits alleging wage violations against Pizza on Stone LLC, which does business as Adrienne’s Pizzabar, in between Pearl Street and the cobblestone-covered Stone Street, only blocks from Wall Street. 

Angelis, who plays a key leadership role in Adrienne’s Pizzabar, according to its website, is named in the suits, along with Peter Poulakakos, one of the eatery’s owners and a restaurant developer who has steadily built an “empire” of roughly 20 high-end dining establishments across Lower Manhattan over the past two decades. 

The wage-violation cases against Adrienne’s Pizzabar are four of a dozen such class-action civil suits filed against LLCs/restaurants owned by Poulakakos and others dating back to 2011. The suits were found on PACER, the online database of federal electronic court records, in a joint, four-month investigation by The Long Island Advocate and WABC “Eyewitness News.” 

To date, 10 of the suits have been settled, with ventures owned by Poulakakos and his partners agreeing to pay more than $1.9 million combined to dozens of employees and their lawyers, though Poulakakos and others admitted no wrongdoing and their attorneys “sharply” and “vigorously” contested the allegations against their clients’ businesses in court filings.

Outside of the Adrienne’s Pizzabar cases, Angelis was not named in the other suits.

To continue reading, click here.

By Scott Brinton

Perhaps it was the slant of the sun on this July 4 afternoon, or maybe it was the statue’s shimmering metallic sheen, or both, but one piece in the Seward Johnson exhibit now on display at Old Westbury Gardens — of a guitarist strumming away by a lake in the forest, titled “My Dog Has Fleas” — took on an ethereal quality, as if it were an apparition.

One could be forgiven for imagining you were seeing ghosts in this outdoor sculpture show. Johnson’s bronze statues of seemingly ordinary people engaging in everyday activities, such as reading a chemistry textbook or flying a kite, are so full of life-like detail that they at once appear alive, yet frozen in place, as if cryogenically preserved. 

The show, “Revisiting the Familiar: Seward Johnson at the Gardens,” opened June 18 and will run through Sept. 5. It reprises Johnson’s 2017 exhibit at Old Westbury.

To continue reading, click here.

I had such great fun covering this story for Hofstra University’s Long Island Advocate:

By Scott Brinton

The soccer players, all 10- and 11-year-old members of the Panteras, or Panthers, started to assemble in a semi-straight line in front of the net before 5 p.m. for their 5:30 practice on a recent Thursday, firing furious shots on goal, conversing at breakneck pace in Spanish and occasionally screaming in delight when a ball, booted from afar, landed squarely at the back of the net.

It was a seemingly chaotic, yet perfectly organized scene on a back field at NuHealth’s A. Holly Patterson Extended Care Facility in Uniondale on this partly cloudy, 75-degree day.

All the while, parents and guardians pulled up in mini-vans and SUVs to drop off their kids. Some parked and sat cross-legged on the sidewalk at the edge of the unlined field full of clover, watching intently from beneath the shade of soaring oaks while chatting in Spanish on their cell phones. 

Within an hour, all four soccer fields there were full of children, many first-generation immigrants from Latin America, laughing and huffing their way through their practices, all led by volunteer coaches. 

This is where, week after week, the New York Soccer Latin Academy prepares for competition in the Long Island Junior Soccer League and any number of summer tournaments. The academy was founded in 2002 to give Hispanic boys and girls, ages 5 to 19, a safe place to learn the fundamentals of the game that, for decades, has captivated the peoples of Mexico and countries throughout Central and South America.  

South of the U.S.-Mexican border, soccer, or fútbol, is more than a game; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of Latin America, said Francisco Guerrero, a NSYLA coach who founded the club and owner of the Sanzivar Auto Repair and Body Shop in Hempstead. 

“We want to give our kids the best we can give them,” Guerrero, 54, said during an interview at his dimly lit office, whose walls are covered by NYSLA team photos. “Everybody who wants to learn, we’re going to give our time to teach them soccer.”

Registration is $400 for the year, divided in two payments, to cover the cost of LIJSL registration and uniforms. For players in need, their families pay what they can. No child is cut. In these respects, NYSLA is very different than many Long Island youth soccer clubs, where travel fees and expenses can run into the thousands per year, many trainers are paid, and players, particularly in the older divisions, can be cut.

To continue reading, click here.

With all that is happening in the United States and around the world at this moment, it is too easy to forget the war that Russia is waging at this very moment on the democratic nation of Ukraine. Below are links to some of my coverage of the war from the Long Island perspective. I post this to remind myself that the story continues, and I must continue this work. — Scott A. Brinton