Bagel shop manager Fernando Mejia was arrested by federal agents just over a year ago in the Port Washington store’s parking lot. Since then, including Monday evening, members of the Port Washington community have kept a weekly vigil to honor Mejia, who they consider one of their own, and bring attention to how his abrupt arrest, and ultimate deportation, left a void in his family, at his workplace and among anyone in town who knew him.

For 52 consecutive Mondays, they have flocked to the Main Street side of the Port Washington Long Island Rail Road station as a tribute to Mejia and their other immigrant neighbors who have been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and never returned home. The weekly 7 p.m. effort, dubbed the “Port Shines a Light in a Sea of Darkness” vigil by organizers, began a few weeks after Mejia’s June 12 arrest and has continued, even after he agreed to self deport and return to family in his native El Salvador.

Vigil co-organizer Jeff Seigel, 68, told the crowd of about 75 people — many toting handwritten protest signs — that Mejia was “doing well, although well is a relative term.”

Mejia is unable come back to Port Washington to see his teenage daughter, who stood in the crowd Monday evening and who Seigel said flies to El Salvador for visits.

“He came here when he was about 20 years old, and here in the United States is where he became a man,” Seigel, 68, said. “He worked very hard, always. And it is here in the United States where he became a father. … After five months in detention, he could no longer wait to see if the immigration court would rule in his favor.”

Mejia, the former manager of Schmear Bagel & Cafe on Main Street, one block west of where each vigil is held, was one of about 3,000 Long Islanders arrested by federal immigration agents through March 10 as part of President Donald Trump’s ramped-up deportation push since his return to power, Newsday previously reported.

Mejia had just started his car in the bagel shop’s parking lot about 6:30 a.m. on June 12 to make a delivery when federal agents converged and placed him under arrest. Over the months that followed, Mejia bounced from facility-to-facility — first in Manhattan, then in Newark, Louisiana and Miami. He does not have a criminal record, his attorney, Bryan Richard Pu-Folkes, previously told Newsday. Pu-Folkes said at the time Mejia was likely detained due to a January 2006 deportation order from the Executive Office for Immigration Review for unlawful presence in the country.

Pu-Folkes did not immediately return a phone message Monday seeking comment. Mejia could not be immediately reached for comment.

The weekly efforts help community organizers raise awareness and funds for legal fees and even food for immigrants in the community. Another goal, said Stan Lacy, also a vigil organizer, is distributing whistles throughout the community. As Lacy and other members of Port Washington’s Rapid Response Network drive around Port Washington and encounter ICE agents, they blow whistles to alert immigrants of their presence.

After a trio of arrests “a little over a month ago,” ICE’s presence has been “relatively quiet,” he said.

Fellow organizer Stacey Mellus told Newsday the weekly vigils sometimes draw immigrants thankful for the community support, but not so much “when more ICE activity is in the area, when the climate gets a little more hot.”

“I witnessed one of those abductions here, you’re never going to get over something like that,” Mellus, 50, of Port Washington, said. “I’m never going to get over seeing people separated from their families, people yelling ‘don’t take my husband.’ “

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states should be allowed to count ballots that are mailed on time but arrive after Election Day.

In a 5-4 decision, the high court rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

The decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is a defeat for President Donald Trump who has repeatedly claimed mail-in voting encourages fraud, an assertion not backed up by evidence. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also joined the court’s three liberals in the ruling.

The question before the court was whether Mississippi was acting legally when it permitted ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived within five business days of the election.

“The federal election-day statutes do not preempt Mississippi’s law because the defining element of an ‘election’ has always been the electorate’s choice of candidate,” the decision said.

A voter’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received, it said.

Thirteen other states have grace periods for ballots cast by mail. Another 15 have longer deadlines for military and overseas voters.

Last year, Trump signed an executive order that would require votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day, but it has been blocked by court challenges.

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart noted during arguments before the Supreme Court in March that the Trump administration had failed to produce a single case of fraud due to mail ballots that arrived after Election Day.

Among the state with deadlines after Election Day are California, Texas, New York and Illinois. Rural areas of Alaska also allow post-Election Day ballots.

The Associated Press reported that four states dominated by Republican lawmakers, Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio and Utah, dropped their grace periods last year. That’s according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and Voting Rights Lab.

President Donald Trump said he voted by mail in a Florida election due to scheduling conflicts, explaining he could not be there in person. The remarks come as Palm Beach County records show Trump cast a mail ballot in an upcoming special election, despite his public criticism of the voting method as fraudulent.

During arguments, some of the conservative justices seemed skeptical of late-arriving mail ballots. Justice Samuel Alito for example asked about the appearance of fraud if ballots that arrived after Election Day flipped an election.

The liberal justices on the other hand indicated they would uphold the state laws and noted that federal law allows states to set their own regulations governing elections. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the states and Congress should decide the issue, not the courts. 

Federal law sets Election Day as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.”

Mississippi passed its election law during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was challenged by the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party and others.

An appellate court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, struck down Mississippi’s grace period. Judge Andrew Oldham wrote that the state law allowing the late-arriving ballots to be counted violated federal law.

The three judges who decided Mississippi’s law was unconstitutional were all appointed by Trump during his first term.

by Marcos Cruz, CT Mirror
June 29, 2026

Every week in Bridgeport, I sit with immigrant families as they divide their limited weekly earnings in two different directions. Part will pay the rent here in Connecticut. The remaining amount will be transferred back to a family member overseas.

I started a bilingual financial literacy program for these families, but many of the questions they ask me are not related to my services. Instead, they want to know how to safely transfer money to relatives living in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, or Mexico. Economists call this kind of transfer a remittance. Together, millions of these transfers create a massive flow of capital out of wealthy nations and into lower and middle-income countries.

According to the World Bank, migrant workers transferred over $685 billion into low and middle income countries in 2024, a total that surpassed both foreign direct investment and international development assistance. The Inter-American Development Bank reports that Latin America and the Caribbean received approximately $161 billion in remittances during 2024, and the World Bank puts Mexico’s share at about $68 billion , making it the second largest recipient in the world.

Numbers this large become foreign policy issues. Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute found that in 2023, remittances to developing countries reached approximately $656 billion, three to four times greater than global foreign assistance, which totaled roughly $224 billion. Unlike foreign assistance, which can take months or years to arrive, remittances are paid directly to recipients and spent immediately on basic necessities such as food and medicine. They represent one of the most efficient poverty reduction programs yet developed, and no government designed it.

It should disturb anyone concerned with U.S. foreign policy that Congress has chosen to tax the money sent abroad through remittances.

As part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025 , a new 1 percent excise tax was added on money sent abroad, beginning January 1, 2026. Earlier versions of the bill proposed a 5 percent tax and then a 3.5 percent tax before lawmakers settled on 1 percent. They also extended its scope to cover both citizens and immigrants. Based on data from the Center for Global Development, an estimated 48 million foreign-born individuals could be affected.

Although a 1 percent tax appears minor when expressed as a decimal, its implications are strategic. The same analysis projected that Mexico could lose over $1.5 billion per year, and that El Salvador, a country whose stability Washington treats as an important relationship, could lose the equivalent of roughly 0.6 percent of its national income. These are precisely the economies whose instability contributes to the migration that Washington says it wishes to reduce. By taxing remittances and lowering incomes in these countries, Washington will have worsened the root cause of the immigration problem while claiming to address it.

The tax also fails on its own merits. The law excludes bank transfers and payments made with U.S. issued debit and credit cards, so it falls hardest on cash transactions, the method used by people who do not have or cannot obtain bank accounts. As predicted, taxing the most transparent means of sending money pushes families toward less transparent channels, the reverse of what the tax intends. It also stacks on top of the roughly 6 percent that migrants already pay in transfer fees, about twice the 3 percent rate the United Nations set as a global development goal.

I was drawn to this issue by faith as much as economics. Catholic social teaching upholds the dignity of work and the central importance of the family, and a remittance is exactly that: money earned through one’s labor and sent across a distance out of love. To tax it is to treat an act of devotion as a loophole to be closed.

There is a superior alternative to the policy our federal government is advancing on immigration. Lower the cost of transferring money internationally. Rather than punishing the people locked out of the banking system with higher costs, give them greater access to it. And treat remittances as what they are, a development tool more effective than nearly all of the direct funding we engage in. A nation confident in its own economic strength does not need to take a cut from the money a domestic worker sends home to her mother.

I will continue to spend my days with these families in Bridgeport, helping them find ways to safely send as much of their earnings as they can. But the next time I hear someone claim that Washington is trying to address immigration at its source, I will remember the new line on that $60 transfer, and I will wonder whether anyone in the room understood what they were taxing.

Marcos Cruz lives in Fairfield.

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