When Barnard junior – and former Teen Vogue cover star – Isra Hirsi, 21, tweeted on April 18 she was suspended for her involvement in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, I immediately headed uptown so we could talk about the suspension. While I was on the subway, she stopped responding. Columbia students launched the encampment in the center of campus at 4 a.m. on Wednesday April 17, timed to a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism featuring Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik. Though her mother, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), would go on to make noteworthy contributions at the hearing, Hirsi was otherwise occupied with the occupation.
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Social media posts showed that during that same 1 p.m. block on Thursday, Shafik emailed the Columbia University community, informing them that she had officially told the New York Police Department to enter campus and dismantle the encampment. Isra, fellow Barnard junior Soph Askanase, and Barnard freshman Maryam Iqbal were the first to receive suspensions at the encampment; the three were arrested alongside over 100 students in the 20 minutes it took me to get into Columbia’s campus — past the police officers, campus security, additional hired Allied Universal private security, media, and protesters swarming the locked gates. (Despite the heavy security presence, NYPD Chief John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that the students “offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.")
That Thursday, Columbia became one of the nation’s trending topics, and Hirsi in particular caught intense heat, though not for the first time, as a longtime advocate on social justice issues. After her release, Hirsi faced being evicted from her dorm and inflamed social media backlash — much of which, she says, is based on “misunderstanding” and “misrepresentation.” Simultaneously, pro-Palestine campus encampments in solidarity with Columbia’s were popping up across the country, from Miami University in Ohio to the University of North Carolina to Yale. We met on Saturday at Morningside Park, 48 hours after her arrest.
This conversation was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: Should we start at the beginning of the encampment Wednesday, or with the suspensions and arrests Thursday?
Isra Hirsi: I think there's some misunderstanding of what the camp was and what was happening in the camp. There's been a lot of assumptions about whether it was peaceful or not. Wednesday we set up at the crack of dawn. By the time the student body was awake, we had people watching, people supporting. We had faculty come and talk to us, we had a teach-in from a professor who was at Columbia during 1968.
It was a really beautiful community space; so many people providing donations, food, blankets. We had such an amazing crowd come and join us Wednesday night, which was so powerful and also made the camp feel stronger. We had had a very core group of folks who understood the risks, and then having that number grow alleviated a lot of our stress. We felt like we weren't alone.
TV: Who do you think is misrepresenting the encampment?
IH: In my suspension email that I received on Thursday morning, which has to do with what happened on Wednesday, it says that the school has to “ensure the students’ own physical or emotional safety and well-being, or if the student poses an ongoing threat of disruption of, or interference with, the normal operation of the College” — and to clarify, what happened was not at [Barnard] College, it’s at the university, and also was outside, so I don't really know how we were disrupting campus life. I think that those are misrepresentations. The university's president has been trying to state that this is a massive disruption, rather than what I would say is a community building space. (Teen Vogue reached out to Columbia University and Barnard College for comment.)
TV: All this was happening on Wednesday, while your mother was speaking at the Congressional hearing regarding your school, which people acted like was a big shock after news broke of your suspension.
IH: It was public information. It's pretty obvious. She tweeted congratulating me. On the internet you can easily find what university I go to, so I'm a little bit confused, especially because she is a free speech advocate and has always been, has always fought for the rights of students. But I mean, of course she was upset; I was sprayed with the [alleged] chemical weapons [in January], I was directly impacted, a lot of my own friends were hospitalized, and she was aware of that. It is personal for her.
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TV: Were you following along with the hearing, or was that not possible, given the encampment?
IH: Yeah, I was. It is a Republican-controlled committee, so I was waiting to find out when she was gonna go on. We all were hearing about the students that were not being let into the Congressional hearing, so that was mostly the only thing we were paying attention to. Our biggest concern while this was happening was the thought of an imminent sweep. At that moment of time, we were really focused on survival and maintaining the crowd.
TV: At this point the cops haven’t come in, right?
IH: The police did not enter until literally the moment we were arrested. They had been outside of campus for a very long period of time, especially because of the solidarity actions happening outside, and they had been prepping; we had seen riot cops multiple times. But yeah, they did not enter until 1:30 on Thursday.
TV: So Thursday morning, you wake up in the camp.
IH: I woke up at 9 am. I was helping with security, standing by the door to see who enters and exits. If folks wanted to join us, we would have to give them the spiel of like, “do you know the risks?” as informed consent. I was walking around doing that, trying to get a meal, then me, Soph, and Maryam received the email at 10:23 am. At that moment, we made an announcement to the camp – because there were an overwhelming amount of Barnard students at camp – and let them know that we had been basically evicted and not allowed into our space, but also officially suspended.
From there, we ended up talking to school newspapers, then there was a support rally we spoke at, and then right after that rally had formally ended, we got notice that they were about to come in. We got into our formation, which was two concentric circles, linked arms, and prepared for arrest. That's when the police came onto the lawns and issued the LRAD and gave us our warnings. They kicked off all the press, they arrested our legal observers, and then they then arrested us. (Teen Vogue reached out to the NYPD for comment.)
From there I went to the correctional bus. It took about an hour for us to even get off the bus, and then I didn't enter One [Police Plaza] for another two hours, I was in the back of the line. Then when you got in it was an even longer process, because we had so many people who were born [assigned] female in our group that they didn't have enough space for us. It was a very slow process in getting everybody into the cells. I was zip-tied for about seven hours and wasn't released for about eight. So that was Thursday, and then we left and everybody was waiting for us at jail support. I got out, I think, between 9 and 9:30 pm.
TV: And you were charged with trespassing?
IH: Yes. The legal [National Lawyers Guild] observers got harder misdemeanor charges, “obstruction of governmental administration.”
TV: But you got out and couldn’t go back to your dorm.
IH: Honestly that was my biggest concern. Me and Maryam are the only ones that live in the dorms, and we were suspended pretty early, so we knew that we were not allowed to get back. When I got to 1 Police Plaza, my roommates had brought me a bag of clothes because they knew that I was likely evicted. We were reading our email and it said we had 15 minutes to go get our shit if we wanted it, and we'd have to go with a public safety escort. I was like, I'm not going to do that. But I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my shit is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible.
Have you seen the photo they showed to the desk attendants? The “no entry” photo? Maryam posted hers on Twitter, SJP posted mine. I live in a building where professors also live, and a lot of the professors that live in our buildings are in [Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine], so I reached out to them before I got out of jail like, can you guys please talk to desk attendants in my building? They were like, can we bring her in as our guest, anything? And they were like no, essentially. They also showed that [no entry] photo to every single public safety officer at Barnard and sent it to all my professors, so I kind of have no option.
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TV: Are you formally banned from campus?
IH: The language isn't “banned,” the language is I don't “have swipe access.” For the Columbia students that were suspended, their language says that if you are found on campus you will receive more disciplinary action, but ours doesn't say that. And also, in my email, it doesn't explicitly say what else I have violated. [...]
I don't know when I can go home, and I don't know if I ever will be able to. I haven't formally been evicted. I haven't been sent a “move out” email, but they've just said that I can't get in, whatever that means. I have like four shirts, two pairs of pants. Only Barnard students are evicted, and I think it's pretty crazy.
I cannot go to the dining hall. I sent them an email like, “Hey, I rely on campus for my meals, I rely on my dining plan,” and they were like, Oh, you can come pick up a prepackaged bag of food, a full 48 hours after I was suspended. There was no food support, no nothing. The Columbia students still have access to a dining hall and to their homes; they can't go anywhere else, but they can go home and to one dining hall.
TV: Why do you think it’s going differently for Barnard students?
IH: I think it's really on a school-by-school basis, and Barnard has decided to take a very egregious stand against us. I think that they feel like there isn't a big limelight on them right now and that they have the ability to do this, because Shafik was on the congressional stage and is actively being harassed about what she's doing, versus [Barnard president] Laura Rosenbury has the ability to skirt what's going on. She's not the one sending the correspondence, it's all College Dean [Leslie] Grinage.
It is really confusing and concerning, especially because the majority of the Barnard students are femme-identifying.... A lot of them are staking out in their dorms right now because they haven't been kicked out. We've told them the best option is not to leave, the minute they leave, they can't get back in.
TV: So what next?
IH: Genuinely we have no clue. Our interim suspension is contingent on what happens at our hearings, which has not been set. They told us that we would receive a date by Monday at noon, so I'm basically at least houseless until then. …
They are literally starting a 15 minute timer if you go and try to get your stuff. I know Maryam did it; I refused, I'm not going to subject myself to that. One of my professors went and tried to retrieve a student's belongings and public safety treated her like complete shit as well, like the student was a criminal. It's not the fault of public safety, but it's egregious to make them enforce such cop-like procedures, this is not in their purview. [...]
TV: How has the last week’s focus on Columbia felt?
IH: A lot of us are grateful that people are paying attention and noticing how severe our campus repression has been, but it has been a little bit frustrating to focus on Columbia over the focus of what is even happening in Gaza. The whole point of the encampment was to shed light on Columbia's complicity in genocide and to focus back on the folks in Gaza, so a big thing for all of us is trying to redirect the language.
We will [also] be donating as much as we can, after all the suspended students have been supported, to Gaza. We know that we don't need this much money. Things for the camp are being purchased, but our big thing is so many Barnard undergrads have no food, so it's our first thing.
It is very difficult being evicted and not having access to our homes; so many of the PhD students are [being threatened with] losing their jobs. These are all detrimental and horrible things, but alhamdulillah we are all still here and alive and have roofs over our heads, despite it all. People have supported us. Shifting the focus, I think that's what the encampment is trying to do right now. We're holding it down, but we're holding it down for Gaza, not just because of the folks that have been suspended; and the repression is explicitly because of the fact that we were fighting for ending the war in Gaza. That also is really important to remember.
TV: Leading up to the Congressional hearing and continuing now, people have made accusations calling you all “terrorists.”
IH: Columbia is the one supporting the purchasing of weapons [through their investments]; that's what we do not want.
It's really frustrating, because when we were arrested, we were literally sitting in a circle singing songs, sharing a meal together. I think it is really egregious of them to completely misrepresent what was happening and have the audacity to call us things like terrorists. We are students at this university and many of us pay thousands of dollars to go here. There's a reason why we felt the need to take this escalation: It's because we do not feel heard, despite the numerous actions that we've been holding all year long. What else did they expect us to do? Stay silent?
TV: People are now tweeting about your public politics, as if you haven’t been public about them for a long time.
IH: This is why I get off Twitter; every three months when I was in high school, I would get crazy dogpiled. What's the point? You guys can be mad about the hammer and sickle [emoji in my bio]; then what? I've had that in my bio for what feels like four years, so I'm confused why everybody cares so much. This is not news.
When I got into Barnard, [people] tried to get me kicked out of Barnard because of my politics. Multiple donors called. What's crazy is despite all of this shit I was getting online, Barnard College told me that they were here for me, and they were willing to support me despite it all. Public Safety met with me on my first day, at move-in, and were like, we're here for you, we care about you. It feels like it's been all thrown out the window, the minute you do something that makes them look bad.
The commie thing is really, I think, a little bit silly. They're really honing in on it. But it makes it easier for them to call me a terrorist, so I kind of get it for that reason.
TV: How does it feel re-entering the public conversation like this?
IH: I was not a target at this university. Everybody knew that my mother had a child here, but not everybody was tuned into who I was, so I had the ability to lay low in my organizing; but this has really blown that up. Now I feel a little bit too hypervisible. I have been really re-thinking my own safety and what it looks like to be a student that just has so many eyes on them right now. I knew this was going to happen, I just had no idea the scale. When I got out of 1 [Police Plaza] it felt like paparazzi, the amount of flashes in my face. It's such a surreal experience.
It was really intentional for me to take that step back. It's really difficult being hypervisible, but I've taken that time for myself, to focus on my local organizing, my campus organizing. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for this moment, and I'm pretty okay with it, I'm pretty ready. It's just a really big reality check about my own positionality.
TV: In terms of your vulnerability?
IH: Yes. And also realizing I've been able to be a little bit delusional in thinking nobody knows who I am, and that's just not true. I've been able to have a wake up call and be like, oh, like, right, I can't just disappear, people are intrigued by my mother and what I have to do.
One of the weird things about bodies is that so very many people seem to have them, and yet not all of them are the same! This is something relatively recently discovered by such luminaries as NASA rocket scientists:
525,600 tampons. How do you measure a trip into space?
The details and implications of this knowledge are still being debated. But one interesting thing that happened along the way is that, according to The Atlantic, doctors started to realize that the questions that they asked FtM folk when they began therapy that artificially changed their hormone levels were not at all the same questions that they asked cis women going through spontaneous hormone changes at menopause.
Marci Bowers thought she understood menopause. Whenever she saw a patient in her 40s or 50s, she knew to ask about things such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and memory problems. And no matter what a patient’s concern was, Bowers almost always ended up prescribing the same thing. “Our answer was always estrogen,” she told me.
Then in the mid-2000s, Bowers took over a gender-affirmation surgical practice in Colorado. In her new role, she began consultations by asking each patient what they wanted from their body—a question she’d never been trained to ask menopausal women. Over time, she grew comfortable bringing up tricky topics such as pleasure, desire, and sexuality, and prescribing testosterone as well as estrogen. That’s when she realized: Women in menopause were getting short shrift.
Menopause, for the uninitiated, is not merely relief from monthly bleeding. It’s a whole damn thing affecting more organs than you knew you had. And the transition from a stable adult menstrual cycle to a stable post-menopausal body state can be long and chaotic and affect far more than anyone has bothered to research. Kind of like menstruation itself! And while it’s caused to some significant degree by changes in estrogen, neither is that the only cause nor is replacing estrogen the only cure.
Bodies are highly individual things, almost like each person has their own version and it’s not the same as any other. Mind you, this has caused some distress for the medical profession, which has a history of very much wanting to square humans’ pegs and holes, regardless of the harm this might do. Recently, it seems, doctors have even become aware that hacking at the bodies of others in order to maintain binary illusions of an oppressive society may, in fact, be somewhat less than the ethical best practice.
As a result of all this exposure to radical trans antifa, BLM-HRT, police-defunding, highway- and puberty-blocking activists, a few doctors have been questioning a binary or two their own selves.
Although clinicians lack high-quality research on the role of testosterone in women over age 65, they know that in premenopausal women, it plays a role in bone density, heart health, metabolism, cognition, and the function of the ovaries and bladder. A 2022 review concluded, “Testosterone is a vital hormone in women in maintaining sexual health and function” after menopause.
Yet for decades, standard menopause care mostly would mostly pass over androgens. Interest in testosterone therapy has only begun rising—and rapidly—within the last 10 to 15 years. (Nota bene: the lack of research on testosterone use by perimenopausal women was not cited by the NHS as a reason to shut down such “experimental” prescriptions. This is our shocked face.)
There are more barriers than lack of research, however. It turns out that getting cis women comfortable with taking testosterone is not always easy even when it would be medically helpful, for they sometimes think the doctors are calling them trans for the temerity of ceasing menstruation:
[Cis women] have to get used to the idea of taking a hormone they’ve been told all their lives is for men, at just the time when their femininity can feel most tenuous […but…] taking testosterone wouldn’t change a menopause patient’s gender identity.
And patients are not the only ones struggling with holistic care for bodies that produce lots of hormones to varying degrees. Pharmacists, too, have a hard time believing leavening estrogen therapies with a bit of testosterone is kosher:
Some of [Dr. Kelly] Casperson’s female patients have had their testosterone prescription withheld by pharmacists; one was asked if she was undergoing gender transition.
While rapid-onset vaginal dryness has been observed as a side effect of even small doses of Ben Shapiro, the Cooties Hypothesis asserting social transmission of perimenopausal sexual symptoms seems unlikely to go viral, and there is as yet no movement to withhold testosterone from 52-year-old cis women for Baby Jesus and Western Civilization.
What does this all mean?
It means that trans people fighting for the medical establishment to take their care seriously has knock-up effects for cis health, and thus the more doctors get comfortable with trans lives, the better cis women’s care. Queer cis women, too, have benefited straight cis women’s care by challenging assumptions that what women want is too obvious to bother actually asking women. After centuries ignoring women’s desire, The Atlantic reports doctors are beginning conversations with
“Tell me about your sexuality. Tell me, are you happy with that? How long does it take you to orgasm? Do you masturbate? What do you use?”
And the benefits go both ways: trans men who experience menopause as a result of hormone therapy can now benefit from topical vaginal estrogen cremes originally developed to relieve dryness and vaginal pain during straight, menopausal women’s penetrative sex. (Though given the historical lack of conversation about cis women’s desire, it’s likely that these cremes were developed more with an eye towards the benefits to cis het men who didn’t like being turned down.)
This isn’t the only benefit either. Doctors have recently been studying menstruation and fertility in FtM folks taking testosterone, and to the surprise of many a third still ovulated. This should not have been news as testosterone isn’t birth control. Indeed it was tried decades ago to poor effect. And yet this was news in trans communities.
Why don’t we already know these things, study these things, talk about these things?
Part of the problem is that society insists on treating different communities as entirely separate, even when that’s radically inappropriate. And society does this in ways more hypocritic than hippocratic. For decades drug manufacturers would only include cis men in clinical trials of medicines because female bodies were considered a confound and male-bodied trans people were considered to have a confounding illness, even though there was no reason to think that a medicine would know your gender identity and function differently because of that. Yet after trials, manufacturers wanted their drugs prescribed to everyone as if they had been found safe and effective for every body. Even today the safety of many drugs for fetuses or pregnancies or female fertility has gone unstudied, yet the drugs are still prescribed for people who are or may become pregnant, with barely (and not always) an “ask your doctor if” warning.
But they’ve taken the opposite approach when the benefits might flow to patients instead of investors: anti-trans fuckfaces continually insist that puberty blockers have not been proven safe for trans children going through puberty. Yet these are old and well-tested drugs. And yet, the Cass Review is right there, insisting that bone density development during the years of postponed puberty must be studied before puberty blockers can be considered safe for adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Scotland has even decided to ban the use of puberty blockers until the age of 18, which Yr Wonkette thinks we can all agree misses the point of “puberty blocker” by rather a large margin.
We have said before that trans rights are reproductive rights, and that we are all in this together, and we are not the only ones to notice. Sad Brown Girl writes, “Despite the ongoing rhetorical battles over how trans people should be included in discussions of abortion, the link is unambiguous for those seeking the end of both: as goes abortion, so too transition, and vice versa.”
The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that it said reject God’s plan for human life. […]
[Pope Francis] has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today.
Yr Wonkette does not pretend to know whether asking someone what name they prefer is worse than climate change burning Canada to death and choking New York City on the ash, but we do know that the Pope is unlikely to be factoring in the benefits to straight cis women’s sex lives that accrue when all of us, regardless of gender, are treated as whole, complex people who deserve healthy bodies and happy lives.
Yr Wonkette does not pretend to know whether asking someone what name they prefer is worse than climate change burning Canada to death and choking New York City on the ash, but we do know that the Pope is unlikely to be factoring in the benefits to straight cis women’s sex lives that accrue when all of us, regardless of gender, are treated as whole, complex people who deserve healthy bodies and happy lives.
It’s 4 p.m., and the corner of 14th and Irving streets NW in D.C. brims with activity. Vendors fervently tout their offerings — “mango, mango, mango fresco” and “tenemos tacos” — against a din of hip-hop, the occasional siren and a preacher’s voice booming through a loudspeaker.
Nearby, some 20 moped drivers sit parked in a line, wedged behind a bike lane and stalls selling coconuts and Ethiopian barbecue. Some sip Chick-fil-A milkshakes or listen to music as they wait for their phones to ping: the welcome sound of a hungry customer ordering delivery.
The drivers have become a fixture on this corner in Columbia Heights, part of a new wave of Venezuelan immigrants who have entered the capital’s food delivery industry and filled the city’s streets with mopeds. Many are among the nearly 8 million people who have fled Venezuela since 2014, as the country faces a political, economic and humanitarian crisis. While most have set down roots across Latin America, the number of migrants trekking north to the United States has soared in recent years. They’ve also brought a food delivery system that’s helped them survive in other countries.
The Washington Post spoke with more than 15 Venezuelan moped drivers abouttheir growing, not-so-underground economy. Delivering food for companies like DoorDash and Uber has become a lifeline for many of D.C.’s Venezuelans, some of whom were among the more than 13,000 migrants Republican governors have bused to the city since 2022. As they pursue the months-long process of claiming asylum and applying for work permits, many immigrants have leaned on food delivery to stay afloat financially.
For most, food delivery offers far more autonomy over their schedules and pay than other industries. But they acknowledged numerous hurdles — for instance, the lack of access to health insurance, which heightens the financial risks of any accident. Expenses such as “renting” food-delivery accounts and financing mopeds add to their burdens. And while some drivers say that their ability to deliver food quickly has been praised by customers and restaurants, some D.C. residents have publicly expressed frustration at what they say is erratic and unsafe behavior on the mopeds.
Yonatan Colmenarez, a 31-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, has made a living as a moped delivery driver since February. Today, he’s been up since sunrise, but the day has been slow. Around 4:10 p.m., he gets a notification from his Uber Eats account.
It takes Colmenarez a little over three minutes to hop on his moped and grab the order at Lou’s City Bar about a block away. By 4:21 p.m., he’s carefully placed the food in front of a resident’s door. Colmenarez has made $3 on the trip, adding to the $90 he has gathered by riding all over Washington. But he’ll be out on the street until midnight — or, at least, until he makes his daily goal of $200.
“I’m working really hard to contribute to this country that opened its doors to us,” Colmenarez said in Spanish. “At the end of the day, it’s a job many Americans don’t want to do, but I do it gladly because I want to show that I appreciate being here and that most of us are good people. After all it took to arrive, being in the United States is truly a blessing from God.”
Though their paths in the United States differ, many of the Venezuelans’ stories begin the same way: Desperation and a hope for a brighter future that propels them to embark on a perilous journey north — one often marked by death.
Colmenarez was once a member of the Venezuelan army. Over time, he became disenchanted by the country’s authoritarian government and how years of mismanagement had resulted in families barely scraping by and struggling to feed their children. In 2016, he defected to Colombia. For seven years, he dabbled in taxi driving, food delivery and document processing — a skill he acquired while working at Venezuela’s civil registry agency. In 2023, Colombia’s low salaries, inflation and lack of jobs pushed him to venture to the United States.
He left last Aprilwith $228 in his pocket, a small backpack and one big prayer: “I said, ‘Lord, if it’s your will, someday you’ll let me arrive. And if I do, I just ask that you help me save enough to buy a house in my country — whatever else you give me ahead will be blessings.’”
Colmenarez said he nearly died after crossing a treacherous swath of jungle between Colombia and Panama, known as the Darién Gap. He ran out of money and resorted to drinking from puddles and rivers, which gave him a severe infection.
By May 1, Colmenarez had crossed — mostly by foot — through Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, where he turned himself in to U.S. officials in Ciudad Juárez. After he was processed and released on parole some 13 days later, a friend helped him pay for a flight to D.C. He spent his first night on the street, perched on a park bench and shivering from the cold.
The moped deliveries in D.C. began about two years ago, according to the drivers, with three Venezuelan immigrants and one Colombian. Since then, the trade has evolvedinto a cottage industry fostered by word-of-mouth recommendations and mutual trust. The drivers share advice, from navigating the labyrinth of popular eateries to establishing online bank accounts with minimal verification. Many buy their mopeds from Facebook Marketplace, local stores or from one man who sells them out of a white van near a Panda Express in Columbia Heights.
After arriving in D.C., Colmenarez found himself a home in one of the city’s shelters and eventually gained work authorization. He decided to take up moped deliveries after hearing about them from a friend, figuring that would be a better option than juggling work at a construction company in Virginia during the day and a midnight shift atMcDonald’s.
In February, he gathered $300 to pay the first weekly installment for a $1,500 moped from a Colombian man who had imported the vehicles from New York City, where immigrants are similarly working as delivery drivers. He openedan Uber Eats account and set up a schedule: delivering from 7 a.m. to about 3 p.m., resting at 4 p.m., a slow period the drivers call “la hora muerta,” and heading back out from 5 p.m. to midnight, six days a week.
Now, Colmenarez makes about $4,000 each month — $700 of which he sends to his wife and three children, who live in a home he bought for them in Venezuela with his earnings, “just like I asked God for.”
Others in the business said they earn about the same amount as Colmenarez, though much depends on the time they put in and the tips they receive. The earnings have allowed many to afford rent in neighborhoods across the region, especially in Maryland, where most of the drivers said they live. Some have also bought cars or higher-quality mopeds. Others help their families and take English lessons at night.
The job comes with challenges: The migrants work rain or shine and in snow, ice and wind. Their mopeds have occasionally been stolen — but some said that, instead of reporting it to police, they try to gather enough money to buy another bike. And car drivers who aren’t used to mopeds on the streets seemingly “just throw themselves at us,” said Raibi González, 32.
Many migrants without work permits “rent” Uber Eats or DoorDash accounts from relatives or friends, often for a weekly fee of $100 to $150. Spokespeople for Uber and DoorDash said they have safeguards in place to try to ensure that everyone using their platforms is who they say they are. Both said anyone using an account fraudulently will be removed from the app.
Several drivers said D.C. police have mostly left them alone, but they fear that any misstep could cause police to crack down on unregistered mopeds, like they’ve done in New York City.
City officials from the Office of Migrant Services and the Highway Safety Office have been meeting with the drivers and their vendors to educate them about local traffic rules.
“Fortunately, we have seen no uptick in crashes involving these devices and we want it to stay that way,” Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure Keith Anderson said in a statement.
To avoid confrontations with other residents or police, some drivers are seeking to formalize their work with the city. They’ve proposed having a delimited area where they can park without disturbing traffic; organizing more courses on traffic rules; wearing uniforms that highlight them as delivery drivers; and getting help registering their mopeds — a process that requires identification documents, such as a passport, that are hard to come by in Venezuela and that many migrants don’t have.
D.C. law requires drivers to register mopeds with more than 55 cubic centimeters of motor power. That means many of the delivery workers’ vehicles should be registered, said council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), who represents Columbia Heights and chairs the committee overseeing regulation of for-hire vehicles. Registrations of motor-driven cycles, a category that includes mopeds, more than doubled last year, from 54 in 2022 to 143 in 2023, according to the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles.
Nadaeu said she supports clarifying the registration rules and educating recent immigrants about the requirements. She added that she arranged for a traffic-control officer at 14th and Irving streets NW to designate an area where the mopeds can park without blocking traffic.
“As we continue to redesign our streets, we need to be thinking about how to incorporate these vehicles and their uses,” Nadeau said.
The more the city supports the drivers, the better, said Abel Nuñez, executive director of the local immigration advocacy group CARECEN. More organization, he said, could help new immigrants safely make a living without relying on government subsidies.
“It’s a little messy right now, but it has incredible potential to be a win-win for everyone,” Nuñez said.
Andy Brown, owner of popular local chain Andy’s Pizza, mostly sees the messiness. He said he has asked delivery apps not to send moped drivers to his restaurants and directs his staff to turn drivers away if they arrive on the bikes anyway.
Many customers have complained about pizzas being cold after arriving via moped, with air rushing into the box during transit, he said. While Brown appreciates that food delivery enables recent immigrants to work, he’s concerned about the impact on his business.
“There’s pros and cons,” he said. “There just are.”
Every morning, Colmenarez repeats the same mantra: “Be an eagle.” It’s a phrase he borrowed from an interview with a taxi driver he saw online, which, in essence, means going the extra mile for the job.
For Colmenarez, that means meticulously choosing his outfit, spraying cologne before leaving and constantly communicating with his customers — something that, he said, has enabled him to achieve Uber’s highest status tier for drivers, Diamond. But it’s not always easy: There’s usually a language barrier. And he grieves the distance from his family.
“I’ve had to cry alone because there are moments when one gets depressed,” he said. “But then, you say, ‘Let’s go, you can find a way’ — that is, instead of doing bad things, always trying to find a way to make a difference.”
Colmenarez returns to the silver linings: The city he gets to explore. The beauty of the sun as it sets over historic monuments. His children’s smiles when they FaceTime. The people he feeds every time his phone pings — whether they’re in the Russell Senate Office Building, the White House, a police station or a random apartment building.
“I’ve made it this far in the American Dream,” Colmenarez said.
For some, that dream means grinding as delivery drivers for as long as there’s appetite in the city. Others hope to land better jobs or make enough money to have their families join them in the United States.
“Or you know what? Maybe starting a podcast or becoming the owner of the same food franchises we come to every day to pick up orders,” said Julio Bello, 28. “The sky is the limit.”
József Szájer’s departure from Parliament involved an orgy, an attempted escape along a gutter and a backpack containing narcotics.
According to the Parliament’s records, 162 lawmakers left the chamber ahead of the end of their mandates, including 73 Brits who crossed back over the Channel on January 31, 2020. When it comes to sheer memorability, none of their exits come anywhere close to the that of Hungarian conservative’s.
Szájer was a close confidant of Viktor Orbán and a cofounder of his nationalist Fidesz party. He fell from the Hungarian leader’s grace in December 2020 after police caught him fleeing a party they said was in breach of coronavirus lockdown rules after they found 25 naked men in attendance.
“A passer-by reported to the police that he had seen a man fleeing along the gutter; he was able to identify the man,” reads the press release from the public prosecutor’s office. “The man’s hands were bloody. It is possible that he may have been injured while fleeing. Narcotics were found in his backpack. The man was unable to produce any identity documents. He was escorted to his place of residence, where he identified himself as S. J. (1961) by means of a diplomatic passport.”
Orbán called the deed “unacceptable and indefensible.” Suffice to say, Szájer quit the party and his post in Brussels. A political comeback is — we believe — unlikely.
Honorable mention: Helmut Geuking, a German lawmaker from a fringe party in the EPP, quit as EU lawmaker in February. He was officially replaced by his son Niels Geuking. The name of their small political movement is the Family Party. Of course it is.
The Israeli military struck Iran early on Friday, according to two Israeli and three Iranian officials, in what appeared to be Israel’s first military response to Iran’s attack last weekend but one whose scope, at least initially, appeared to be limited.
The Iranian officials said that a strike had hit a military air base near the city of Isfahan, in central Iran. Initial reaction in both Israel and Iran was muted, with news media in both countries appearing to play down the attack, in what analysts said was a sign that the rivals were seeking to de-escalate tensions. For nearly a week, world leaders have urged Israel and Iran to avoid sparking a broader war in the region.
The Israeli military declined to comment. All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
This is about as “let’s chill this shit out” as you can get with missiles, but it is nevertheless a direct attack on Iran. While the senior levels of government in both Tehran and Jerusalem clearly want this to end, they’ll need to take great care with their own security services in order to ensure that the conflict doesn’t take on a life of its own.
…by the way, this shit will get you immediately, permanently banned.
This is about as “let’s chill this shit out” as you can get with missiles, but it is nevertheless a direct attack on Iran. While the senior levels of government in both Tehran and Jerusalem clearly want this to end, they’ll need to take great care with their own security services in order to ensure that the conflict doesn’t take on a life of its own.
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