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ORLANDO, Fla. — After Paola Freites was allowed into the U.S. in 2024, she and her husband settled in Florida, drawn by warm temperatures, a large Latino community and the ease of finding employment and housing.

They were among hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the state in recent years as immigration surged under former President Biden.

No state has been more affected by the increase in immigrants than Florida, according to internal government data obtained by the Associated Press. Florida had 1,271 migrants who arrived from May 2023 to January 2025 for every 100,000 residents, followed by New York, California, Texas and Illinois.

Freites and her husband fled violence in Colombia with their three children. After some months in Mexico they moved to Apopka, an agricultural city near Orlando, where immigrants could find cheaper housing than in Miami as they spread throughout a community that already had large populations of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Her sister-in-law owned a mobile home that they could rent.

“She advised us to come to Orlando because Spanish is spoken here and the weather is good,” Freites, 37, said. “We felt good and welcomed.”

The data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which must verify addresses of everyone who is allowed to enter the U.S. and stay to pursue an immigration case, shows Miami was the most affected metropolitan area in the U.S. with 2,191 new migrants for every 100,000 residents. Orlando ranked 10th with 1,499 new migrants for every 100,000 residents.

The CBP data captured the stated U.S. destinations for 2.5 million migrants who crossed the border, including those like Freites who used the now-defunct CBP One app to make an appointment for entry.

Freites and her husband requested asylum and obtained work permits. She is now a housekeeper at a hotel in Orlando, a tourist destination with more than a dozen theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando and SeaWorld. Her husband works at a plant nursery.

“We came here looking for freedom, to work. We don’t like to be given anything for free,” said Freites, who asked that the AP identify her by her middle and second last name for fear of her mother’s safety in Colombia.

Orlando absorbed new immigrants who came

Historically, Central Florida’s immigrant population was mainly from Mexico and Central America, with a handful of Venezuelans coming after socialist Hugo Chávez became president in 1999. In 2022, more Venezuelans began to arrive, encouraged by a program created by the Biden administration that offered them a temporary legal pathway. That same program was extended later to Haitians and Cubans, and their presence became increasingly visible. The state also has a large Colombian population.

Many immigrants came to Florida because they had friends and relatives.

In Orlando, they settled throughout the area. Businesses catering to newer arrivals opened in shopping areas with Mexican and Puerto Rican shops. Venezuelan restaurants selling empanadas and arepas opened in the same plaza as a Mexican supermarket that offers tacos and enchiladas. Churches began offering more Masses in Spanish and in Creole, which Haitians speak.

As the population increased, apartments, shopping centers, offices and warehouses replaced many of the orange groves and forests that once surrounded Orlando.

The economy grew as more people arrived

New immigrants found work in the booming construction industry, as well as in agriculture, transportation, utilities and manufacturing. Many work in restaurants and hotels and as taxi drivers. Some started their own businesses.

“It’s just like a very vibrant community,” said Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet, executive director at Hope CommUnity Center, a group that offers free services to immigrants in Central Florida. “It’s like, ‘I’m going to work hard and I’m going to fight for my American dream,’ that spirit.”

Immigrants’ contributions to Florida’s gross domestic product — all goods and services produced in the state — rose from 24.3% in 2019 to 25.5% in 2023, according to the pro-immigration American Immigration Council’s analysis of the Census Bureau’s annual surveys. The number of immigrants in the workforce increased from 2.8 million to 3.1 million, or 26.5% to 27.4% of the overall population. The figures include immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally.

Immigrants looked for advice

Groups that help immigrants also increased in size.

“We got hundreds of calls a week,” said Gisselle Martinez, legal director at the Orlando Center for Justice. “So many calls of people saying ‘I just arrived, I don’t know anybody, I don’t have money yet, I don’t have a job yet. Can you help me?’”

The center created a program to welcome them. It grew from serving 40 people in 2022 to 269 in 2023 and 524 in 2024, Melissa Marantes, the executive director, said.

In 2021, about 500 immigrants attended a Hispanic Federation fair offering free dental, medical, and legal services. By 2024, there were 2,500 attendees.

Hope, meantime, went from serving 6,000 people in 2019, to more than 20,000 in 2023 and 2024.

Many now fear being detained

After President Trump returned to office in January, anxiety spread through many immigrant communities. Florida, a Republican-led state, has worked to help the Trump administration with its immigration crackdown and has enacted laws targeting illegal immigration.

Blanca, a 38-year-old single mother from Mexico who crossed the border with her three children in July 2024, said she came to Central Florida because four nephews who were living in the area told her it was a peaceful place where people speak Spanish. The math teacher, who has requested asylum, insisted on being identified by her first name only because she fears deportation.

In July 2025, immigration officials placed an electronic bracelet on her ankle to monitor her.

Because a friend of hers was deported after submitting a work permit request, she has not asked for one herself, she said.

“It’s scary,” she said. “Of course it is.”

Salomon writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

Jay Slater’s disappearance sparked a social media storm as the 19-year-old tragically died while on holiday in Tenerife after sending a haunting message to his friend

Jay Slater sent a haunting final message to his friend, which was only delivered following his tragic death. The 19-year-old went missing while on holiday in Tenerife last year after attending a music festival with his pals.

A vast search was carried out in an effort to find Jay after he was reported missing on June 17, 2024. Sadly, Jay’s body was found in a remote area near the village of Masca on 15 July.

The search for Jay revealed he had vanished after being driven about 22 miles into the mountains to an Airbnb with two men he had met on the holiday. He fell around 80ft to his death in a treacherous ravine while trying to walk back to his accommodation in Los Cristianos.

READ MORE: Jay Slater pal Lucy Law’s ‘urgent 999 call’ to cops reveals ‘he’s going to die up there’READ MORE: Last Jay Slater CCTV before he went missing finally released raising more questions

Within hours of Jay’s disappearance, mass online interest set conspiracy theories flying, causing a social media storm led by true-crime keyboard detectives. The case became the focus of global attention, with over 30 million videos online speculating about Jay’s whereabouts.

Now, a new documentary is set to detail his family’s hunt for answers and is the first time they have spoken publicly about the tragic case. During one moment, Jay’s mum Debbie Duncan recalled finding an unsent message when she logged onto her son’s Snapchat account.

After finally receiving Jay’s phone, Debbie found a devastating unsent message to his friend. She said: “When we signed into Jay’s Snapchat there was an unsent message from Jay to Brad [Geohegan].

“So the message was obviously just flying around and then the message sent to Brad, which obviously gave Brad a fright. He messaged me straight away ‘are you on Jay’s phone?’. I said yeah we’ve just signed into his Snapchat.

“He said ‘I’ve just got a message that’s just come through from Jay’. The last message he sent. He said ‘listen, I’m not going to make it’. It’s kind of like he knew he just wasn’t going to make it.”

Jay’s phone is believed to have ran out of charge when his call to friend Lucy Law ended at 8:50am. The documentary plays the desperate ‘999 call’ she made to Spanish police where she tells them: “Jay said he is going to die up there”.

Lucy had known Jay for about six years and was the last person to speak to him on the phone. On the call to Spanish police, Lucy tells them: “My friend he’s met some people, and they’ve drove him up into the mountains. I don’t know why and he’s left the house,

“And I don’t know if something happened, and I was telling him, you need to go back to your friends and tell them to drive you back down.

“And he said ‘No, I can’t. I can’t’. But I don’t know why that was.” The police then asked for the friend’s name and Lucy tells them it is Jay Slater.

The police ask if her friend has asked to be rescued and she added: “Yes, said he feels like he’s going to die up there. And then the phone cut off.” The audio from the call with the police has never been heard before and sheds new light on the events of June 17.

Channel 4 ’s new film The Disappearance of Jay Slater will air next weekend. The Disappearance of Jay Slater also has never-before-seen CCTV footage, previously unheard audio, the discovery of unsent messages, and access to the Slater family as they search for answers about what happened to Jay.

* The Disappearance of Jay Slater airs on Channel 4 on Sunday September 28 at 9pm.

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Taliban rulers say they are not behind the threats and are investigating, according to the United Nations.

Explicit death threats have been made against dozens of Afghan women working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, according to a new UN report, where their rights have been severely curtailed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

The UN mission to the country said female national staff were subjected to direct death threats in May, in the latest update on the human rights situation in Afghanistan published on Sunday.

The report says the Taliban told the UN mission that their cadres were not responsible for the threats, and an Interior Ministry investigation is under way.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Abdul Mateen Qani, however, said no threats had been made. “This is completely incorrect”, Qani told The Associated Press news agency.

“The ministry has an independent department for this, and we have a strategic plan for protection and security so there is no threat to them in any area, nor can anyone threaten them, nor is there any threat to them.” Qani did not answer questions about an investigation, according to AP.

The threats came from unidentified individuals related to their work with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, other agencies, funds, and programmes, “requiring the U.N. to implement interim measures to protect their safety”, according to the report.

The Taliban barred Afghan women from working at domestic and foreign nongovernmental organisations in December 2022, extending this ban to the UN six months later. They then threatened to shut down agencies and groups still employing women. Aid agencies and NGOs say the Taliban have disrupted or interfered with their operations, allegations denied by authorities.

The UN report is the first official confirmation of death threats against Afghan women working in the sector. The report also highlighted other areas affecting women’s personal freedoms and safety, including inspectors from the Vice and Virtue Ministry requiring women to wear a chador, a full-body cloak covering the head. Women have been arrested for only wearing the hijab.

Women have also been denied access to public areas, in line with laws banning them from such spaces.

A UN report from August 2024 found that Afghanistan’s Taliban government has “deliberately deprived” at least 1.4 million girls of their right to an education during its three years in power.

About 300,000 more girls are missing out on school since UNESCO last carried out a count in April 2023, it said on Thursday, warning that “the future of an entire generation is now in jeopardy.”

ICC targets Taliban for persecution of women

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in July for two top Taliban leaders in Afghanistan on charges of abuses against women and girls.

ICC judges said at the time there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhunzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani of committing gender-based persecution.

“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement in July.

The Taliban has “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy, family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.

The Taliban has rejected the ICC warrants as “baseless rhetoric”, saying it does not recognise the ICC’s authority, and underlined the court’s failure to protect the “hundreds of women and children being killed daily” in Gaza.

The Nolans singer spoke of the emotional moment on ITV’s Good Morning Britain

Anne Nolan has opened up about the emotional moment she found out she was cancer free.

The Nolans singer, and sister of Loose Women’s Coleen Nolan, has battled breast cancer twice.

Earlier this year, the family lost Linda to the disease, while Bernie died of the same illness in 2013.

Anne, 74, received the news just days ago that she was cancer-free, having been first diagnosed in 2000 and then 20 years later.

Appearing on Monday’s Good Morning Britain, she shared the emotional journey she’s faced, and the relief at her health update.

“It’s been very traumatic, when I received the letter a few weeks ago, I picked it up, and it said NHS, and I thought, ‘Oh I don’t want to know, I’m not sure if I want to know if it’s bad news.’

“And I put it aside for about ten minutes, and after a while my logical brain kicked in and said, ‘You have to find out, you need to know’.

“I opened it and it was all good news, and I had a bit of a weep at the beginning.

“I feel lucky, blessed, relieved, and then emotional thinking about my sisters having gone through the same thing but not surviving.”

Good Morning Britain airs weekdays from 6am on ITV1 and ITVX.

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Russia and Ukraine are expected to each swap 1,000 prisoners of war as part of deal reached at recent talks in Istanbul.

Russia has received a list of names of prisoners of war (POWs) that Ukraine wants freed as part of an expected exchange between the two countries, a Kremlin spokesperson told the Russian news agency Interfax.

Dmitry Peskov told Interfax on Thursday that the list had been received after Moscow gave Kyiv its own list of prisoners it wants released.

The exchange – which will see each side free 1,000 POWs in what would be the largest swap of the war – was agreed to during talks last week in the Turkish capital, Istanbul.

Those discussions marked the first direct peace negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations since 2022, the year the war began.

In advance of the meeting, Ukraine had called for a 30-day ceasefire, but Moscow rejected the proposal, agreeing only to the prisoner swap.

Ukrainian officials have since accused Russia of deliberately delaying peace talks while consolidating territorial gains on the battlefield.

The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time”, said Peskov, adding that “the work is continuing at a quick pace.”

“Everybody is interested in doing it quickly,” the Kremlin spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that the deal “to release 1,000 of our people from Russian captivity was perhaps the only tangible result of the meeting in Turkiye”.

“We are working to ensure that this result is achieved,” he said in a post on X.

Zelenskyy added that Defence Minister Rustem Umerov is overseeing the exchange process, supported by several Ukrainian government ministries, intelligence agencies and the president’s own office.

“The return of all our people from Russian captivity is one of Ukraine’s key priorities,” Zelenskyy said. “I am grateful to everyone who is contributing to this effort.”

As Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States press Moscow to return to negotiations, Peskov dismissed reports about future peace talks taking place at the Vatican, saying, “There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings.”

US President Donald Trump spoke with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on Monday and urged an end to the “bloodbath”.

Putin thanked Trump for supporting the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, and said his government “will propose and is ready to work with the Ukrainian side on a memorandum on a possible future peace accord”.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 35 over the Moscow region.

The ministry said it downed 485 Ukrainian drones over several regions and the Black Sea between late Tuesday and early Thursday.

In southern Ukraine, Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin also said on Thursday that one person was killed in a Russian artillery attack on the region.

He said 35 areas in the Kherson region, including the city of Kherson, came under artillery shelling and air attacks over the past day, wounding 11 people.

Zelenskyy said the “most intense situation” remains in the Donetsk region, however, while Ukrainian forces continue “active operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions” inside Russia.