A jury on Friday found former Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig guilty of obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators.
The two-week trial in Los Angeles federal court concluded with the jury deliberating for nearly two days. Puig, 35, could face up to 20 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for May 26.
Puig faces a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison on the obstruction of justice charge and up to five years in prison for the two false statement charges. He remains free on his own recognizance.
The charges stemmed from a January 2022 videoconference interview with federal investigators during which Puig was alleged to have lied about his sports betting. The investigators — led by Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeff Mitchell — were gathering information at the time about an illegal gambling ring headed by Wayne Nix of Newport Coast.
Investigators alleged that Puig denied he had placed bets with Nix despite evidence establishing that he made 899 wagers with the former minor league pitcher on football and basketball games and tennis matches from July to September 2019.
Puig — who was not accused of betting on baseball — lost more than $1.5 million in sports bets, Internal Revenue Service Special Agent Christen Seymour testified, and owed Nix $282,900.
Nix pleaded guilty in 2022 to one count of conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business and one count of subscribing to a false tax return. He is awaiting sentencing.
Mitchell would soon be best known for overseeing the investigation and conviction of Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who was sentenced a year ago to 57 months in federal prison for bank fraud and filing a false tax return after stealing $17 million from Ohtani to pay off his own illegal gambling debts.
But Mitchell’s interest in Puig centered on what he knew about Nix, the target of the federal probe in 2022. According to a court declaration reviewed by The Times, Mitchell told Puig’s attorney that he didn’t believe it was a federal crime to make payments to an illegal bookmaker. Investigators were after “an unlawful sports gambling organization,” Mitchell said.
Yet when Mitchell concluded Puig lied about placing bets through Nix intermediary Donny Kadokawa, he swiftly charged the outfielder with making false statements and obstruction of justice.
Puig agreed in August 2022 to plead guilty to one count of lying to federal authorities and would have served no jail time while paying a $55,000 fine. Weeks later, however, he backed out of the agreement, and a judge ruled he could do so because he had not yet entered his guilty plea in court.
“I want to clear my name,” Puig said in a statement at the time. “I never should have agreed to plead guilty to a crime I did not commit.”
It took three more years of pretrial legal wrangling, but Puig finally got his day in court in January. Assistant U.S. Attys. Juan Rodriguez and Michael Morse served as prosecutors after Mitchell resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in May.
Puig’s defense centered on issues with the 2022 interview with Mitchell and investigators who represented the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS.
Defense lawyers Keri Curtis Axel and Brian Klein contended in court filings that Puig, who is from Cuba, was confused because of his language barrier and a dual diagnosis of ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder. The investigators misinterpreted his answers, the attorneys said.
Steven Gebelin, who represented Puig in 2021 and 2022, testified at trial that his then-client tried to be helpful during the interview but, because the interpreter’s Spanish dialect differed from Puig’s, his answers were translated poorly. Puig did not testify at trial.
Axel contended during her closing statement that Puig did not lie about his interactions with Nix and his associates, which occurred two years before the interview with investigators.
The investigators assumed Puig was lying when he became confused by the questioning and felt pressured to accurately recollect the details of his gambling activity, Axel argued, telling the jury that “assumptions and speculation are not evidence, and you shouldn’t rely on it.”
Prosecutors also alleged Puig said during the interview that he had lost $200,000 in 2019 betting on a website he couldn’t identify and that a person whose name he couldn’t recall instructed him to purchase $200,000 in cashier’s checks made out to another client of Nix’s to settle his gambling debt. Investigators considered Puig’s inability to remember the name a lie.
Kadokawa testified that he was the person giving Puig instructions. Axel argued that Puig told the investigators later in the interview that he had placed bets through Kadokawa, according to court documents.
Prosecutors said Puig also lied when he went through the naturalization process to become a U.S. citizen in 2019, producing evidence that he said on an application and in an interview that he never gambled illegally.
After growing up in Cuba, Puig came to the United States in 2012 and signed with the Dodgers. His attorneys called an expert who testified that Puig’s arduous journey from his home country caused post-traumatic stress disorder.
UCLA psychology professor Marcel Pontón, a neuropsychology expert witness for the prosecution, disputed that diagnosis. And Morse rebutted the contention that Puig couldn’t understand English by playing audio of Puig reflecting in English about his interview.
The power-hitting outfielder quickly became a Dodgers fan favorite, finishing second in National League Rookie of the Year voting in 2013. Nicknamed the “Wild Horse,” Puig remained a fearsome presence in the lineup for six years and helped the Dodgers to the World Series in 2018 when he hit a three-run homer in Game 7 of the NL Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that California this fall may use its new election map, which is expected to send five more Democrats to Congress.
With no dissents, the justices rejected emergency appeals from California Republicans and President Trump’s lawyers, who claimed the map was a racial gerrymander to benefit Latinos, not a partisan effort to bolster Democrats.
Trump’s lawyers supported the California Republicans and filed a Supreme Court brief asserting that “California’s recent redistricting is tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
They pointed to statements from Paul Mitchell, who led the effort to redraw the districts, that he hoped to “bolster” Latino representatives in the Central Valley.
In response, the state’s attorneys told the court the GOP claims defied the public’s understanding of the mid-decade redistricting and contradicted the facts regarding the racial and ethnic makeup of the districts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed re-drawing the state’s 52 congressional districts to “fight back against Trump’s power grab in Texas.”
He said that if Texas was going to redraw its districts to benefit Republicans so as to keep control of the House of Representatives, California should do the same to benefit Democrats.
The voters approved the change in November.
While the new map has five more Democratic-leaning districts, the state’s attorneys said it did not increase the number with a Latino majority.
“Before Proposition 50, there were 16 Latino-majority districts. After Proposition 50, there is the same number. The average Latino share of the voting-age population also declined in those 16 districts,” they wrote.
It would be “strange for California to undertake a mid-decade restricting effort with the predominant purpose of benefiting Latino voters and then enact a new map that contains an identical number of Latino-majority districts,” they said.
Trump’s lawyers pointed to the 13th Congressional District in Merced County and said its lines were drawn to benefit Latinos.
The state’s attorneys said that too was incorrect. “The Latino voting-age population [in District 13] decreased after Proposition 50’s enactment,” they said.
Three judges in Los Angeles heard evidence from both sides and upheld the new map in a 2-1 decision.
“We find that the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming,” said U.S. District Judges Josephine Staton and Wesley Hsu.
In the past, the Supreme Court has said the Constitution does not bar state lawmakers from drawing election districts for political or partisan reasons, but it does forbid doing so based on the race of the voters.
In December, the court ruled for Texas Republicans and overturned a 2-1 decision that had blocked the use of its new election map. The court’s conservatives agreed with Texas lawmakers who said they acted out of partisan motives, not with the aim of denying representation to Latino and Black voters.
“The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a concurring opinion.
California’s lawyers quoted Alito in supporting their map.
Attorneys for a Los Angeles man shot and killed by an off-duty federal agent on New Year’s Eve are asking the California Attorney General to take over the case, alleging recent comments by LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell show a bias toward the Trump administration.
In a Tuesday afternoon news conference, attorneys Ben Crump and Jamal Tooson called on Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to investigate the fatal shooting of Keith Porter at his San Fernando Valley apartment building.
The request, they said, was based in large part on their lack of confidence in the LAPD and the U.S. Justice Department.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security initially said an off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who lived at same apartment complex was responding to a suspected “active shooter” when he opened fire. Porter’s relatives have said they believe he had been firing a gun into the air to ring in the new year.
Tooson said witnesses have come forward saying that Porter, 43, appeared to be walking back to his apartment when he was shot, and was not a threat to anyone. Tooson also pointed out that witnesses didn’t hear the federal officer identifying himself before firing three shots.
“So, forgive us, if we have skepticism of any claims of self defense,”according to Tooson, who is representing Porter’s mother, Franceola Armstrong.
Crump — who previously represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among other high-profile civil rights cases — said he is supporting Porter’s family but not acting as their legal counsel.
“The family has not been confident that LAPD, with their close relationships with the ICE officials, that there’s going to be a fair and transparent investigation,.” Crump said. “Because them trying to whitewash the investigation into the death of Keith Porter is a nonstarter. We’re not going to allow that to happen.”
A Los Angeles police spokesperson responded to an inquiry about the remarks with a statement Tuesday afternoon that said: “The LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division-Homicide Special Section, continues its investigation into the death of Keith Porter. At this time, there are no additional details available for public release.”
The fatal incident occurred at the Village Pointe Apartments on Roscoe Boulevard around 10:30 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2025. Local police have refrained from using the Department of Homeland Security’s characterization of Porter as an “active shooter.” Nobody else was reported injured at the scene.
Tooson and Porter’s relatives have repeatedly said that even if he was shooting a gun into the air — an activity that can bring felony charges and is discouraged as dangerous by city leaders — he was not threatening anyone and contended the agent who opened fire should have waited for LAPD to respond.
Stacie Halpern, an attorney for the ICE agent, has said there is evidence that Porter shot first. A law enforcement source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, echoed those claims to The Times last month.
Halpern didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment left after Tuesday’s press conference.
In a statement, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said it was confident that the LAPD was “conducting a thorough and independent investigation.”
“Once the case is presented to our office, we will carefully examine the evidence, review the facts, and apply the law to determine whether criminal charges are appropriate,” the statement read. “This is the same rigorous, impartial process we use in every use-of-force case submitted to the District Attorney’s Office.”
Porter’s death has become a rallying point locally for activists, who regularly invoke his name at Police Commission meetings and protests. Hours before the press conference, numerous speakers showed up to the Commission’s meeting to demand that the federal agent responsible be arrested.
Last month, The Times identified the officer as Brian Palacios. Palacios lived in an apartment a short distance away from where Porter was killed, and has previously been accused during a custody dispute of child abuse and making racist remarks about Black and Latino men, according to court records reviewed by The Times. Records provided by Halpern show the child abuse allegations were deemed unfounded by police and the L.A. County Department of Child & Family Servies. Halpern also denied her client ever used racist language.
In a statement issued in late January, a manager for the apartment complex said “the ICE agent is no longer a tenant and has permanently vacated the property.”
In his call for an outside investigation, Tooson argued McDonnell is too cozy with ICE and other federal agencies to oversee an impartial investigation of Palacios’ conduct.
Despite months of federal immigration raids causing chaos in and around Los Angeles, the chief has largely avoided criticizing the Trump administration, at times boasting about the strength of LAPD’s ties to federal law enforcement. He said last week he would not enforce a new California law — which is already being challenged in court — that bars ICE agents from wearing masks while on-duty.
McDonell has stood by LAPD’s policy of not getting involved in civil immigration enforcement. When he served as L.A. County sheriff during President Trump’s first term, McDonnell took criticism for allowing ICE to access the jails when seeking inmates for deportation. His position on immigration was viewed a factor in the 2018 sheriff’s race, which saw McDonnell lose in an upset to Alex Villanueva.
Addressing reporters on Tuesday, Armstrong, Porter’s mother, said she remained heartbroken by the thought of waking up everyday without her son, who was a Compton native and father of two.
“I can’t bring my son back, but I want justice for him. I want justice for my child,” she said.
Times Staff Writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.
TikTok has agreed to settle the first in a series of closely-watched product liability cases, bowing out on the eve of a landmark trial that could upend how social media giants engage their youngest users and leave tech titans on the hook for billions in damages.
The settlement was reached as jury selection was set to begin in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday and comes a week after Snap reached a deal with the same plaintiff, a Chico, Calif., woman who said she became addicted to social media starting in elementary school.
“This settlement should come as no surprise because that damning evidence is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, an industry watchdog. “This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products.”
TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Monday’s settlement.
“The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner,” Snap spokeswoman Monique Bellamy said of the settlement.
The remaining defendants, Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube, still face claims that their products are “defective” and designed to keep children hooked to apps its makers know are harmful.
Those same arguments are at the heart of at least 2,500 cases currently pending together in state and federal courts. The Los Angeles trial is among a handful of bellwethers meant to clarify the uncharted legal terrain.
Social media companies are protected by the 1st Amendment and by Section 230, a decades-old law that shields internet companies from liability for what users produce and share on their platforms.
Attorneys for the Chico plaintiff, referred to in court documents as K.G.M., say the apps were built and refined to snare youngsters and keep them on the platforms without regard for dangers the companies knew lurked there, including sexual predation, bullying and promotion of self-harm and even suicide.
As the claims against Meta and YouTube head to trial, jurors will be asked to weigh whether those dangers are incidental or inherent, and if social media companies can be held responsible for the harm families say flowed from their children’s feeds.
Scores of potential jurors filled the beige terrazzo hallway outside Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s courtroom downtown Tuesday morning, most passing the time on social apps on their phones. Some watched short-form videos while others thumbed through their feeds, pausing every so often to tap a like on a post.
Roughly 450 Angelenos will be vetted this week for spots on the jury. The trial is expected to last through March.
Instagram is 15 years old, YouTube almost 21. Finding Angelenos unfamiliar with either is likely impossible. The trial comes at a moment when public opinion around social media has soured, with a growing sentiment among parents, mental health professionals, lawmakers and even children themselves that the apps do more harm than good.
The judge told prospective jurors that lawyers on the case could not review their online profiles. “We know many of you use defendants’ social media and video-sharing platforms, and you’re not being asked to stop, but until you’re excused, you should not change how you use social media and you should not investigate features you don’t usually use,” Kuhl said in court.
Phones are now banned in California public school classrooms. Many private schools impose strict rules around when and how social media can be used.
In study after study, pluralities of young users — among them the youngest of “Anxious Generation” Zoomers and the oldest Gen Alpha’s iPad kids — now say they spend too much time on the apps. A disputed but growing body of research suggests some portion are addicted.
According to a study last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, roughly half of teens say social media is bad for people their age, that it interferes with their sleep and that it hurts their productivity. Almost a quarter say it has brought down their grades. And 1 in 5 say it has hurt their mental health.
K.G.M., the first bellwether plaintiff, said she started watching YouTube at age 6, and was uploading content to the site by age 8.
Today, about 85% of children under 12 watch YouTube and half of those watch it daily, according to Pew.
At 9, according to K.G.M.’s lawsuit, she got her first iPhone and joined Instagram.
By the time she joined Snapchat at age 13, she was spending almost every waking hour scrolling, posting and agonizing over her engagement, despite bullying from peers, hate comments from strangers and sexually explicit overtures from adult men.
“When I was in middle school, I used to go and hide in the counselor’s office … just to go on my phone,” she said in a deposition last year.
Around that time, she said Instagram began serving her content about self-harm and restrictive eating.
“I believe that social media, her addiction to social media, has changed the way her brain works,” the plaintiff’s mother, Karen, said in a related filing. “She has no long-term memory. She can’t live without a phone. She is willing to go to battle if you were even to touch her phone.”
“There became a point where she was so addicted that I could not get the phone out of her hand,” she said.
K.G.M.’s sister was even more blunt.
“Whenever my mom would take her phone away … she would have a meltdown like someone had died,” the sister said. “She would have so many meltdowns anytime her phone was taken away, and it was because she wouldn’t be able to use Instagram.”
“I wish I never downloaded it,” the plaintiff later told her sister, according to the deposition. “I wish I never got it in the first place.”
Boosters of the litigation compare their quest to the fight against Big Tobacco and the opioid-maker Purdue.
“This is the beginning of the trial of our generation,” said Haworth, the tech industry watchdog.
But the gulf between public opinion and civil culpability is vast, attorneys for the platforms say. Social media addiction is not a formal clinical diagnosis, and proving that it exists, and that the companies bear responsibility for it, will be an uphill battle.
Lawyers for YouTube have sought to further complicate the picture by claiming their video-sharing site is not social media at all and cannot be lumped in with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs say such distinctions are ephemeral, pointing out that YouTube has by far the youngest group of users, many of whom say the platform was an on-ramp to the world of social media.
“I am equally shocked … by the internal documents that I have seen from all four of these defendants regarding their knowing decision to addict kids to a platform knowing it would be bad for them,” said attorney Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “To me they are all outrageous in their decision to elevate their profits over the safety of kids.”
The off-duty federal immigration agent who shot and killed a Los Angeles man on New Year’s Eve allegedly whipped his sons with a belt and made racist and homophobic remarks in the past, according to documents obtained by The Times.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer Brian Palacios shot Keith Porter Jr. late on Dec. 31 at a Northridge apartment complex, according to a sworn declaration submitted by attorney Michelle Diaz in a custody dispute between Palacios’ girlfriend and her ex-husband, which was made public Thursday.
The document alleges that Palacios is the shooter “based on information and belief,” citing records and testimony identifying him as an ICE agent who lives in the complex.
A review of court transcripts, proof of service documents and motions related to the custody battle shows Palacios is an ICE agent and confirms that he lives in a unit at the Village Pointe Apartments. The unit number reflects an apartment that is just a short distance from the location where neighbors say Porter was killed.
Stacie Halpern, an attorney representing Palacios, said her client acted in self-defense the night that Porterwas killed. She denied that he had ever made racist remarks and provided reports from the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services and Los Angeles police that deemed the child abuse allegations to be “unfounded.”
No one answered the door at the apartment listed for Palacios on Friday. An LAPD spokesman declined to comment and a DCFS spokeswoman said she was barred from discussing the case by state law.
Friends and advocates say Porter — a 43-year-old Compton native and father of two — was firing a gun into the air to celebrate the new year on the night of his death.
Tricia McLaughlin, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary of public affairs, initially said a suspected “active shooter” was killed following an exchange of gunfire with an off-duty ICE agent. In her statement, McLaughlin said the agent “bravely responded to an active shooter situation at his apartment complex.”
McLaughlin did not address questions about the agent’s identity on Friday or the past allegations against him. Halpern said her client remained on-duty for ICE as of Friday afternoon.
Los Angeles police said no one else was injured in the incident.
Jamal Tooson, an attorney for Porter’s family, said in a statement: “Should this individual be confirmed as the person responsible for Keith’s death, based on his deeply disturbing past allegations it is unimaginable that any human being with a conscience on this earth could regard him as a hero.”
Later on Friday, Tooson suggested the killing was a racially motivated hate crime and said he was considering asking for California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to launch an independent investigation.
A spokesperson for the L.A. County district attorney’s office said the incident is under investigation by the Justice System Integrity Division, which investigates killings by law enforcement officers.
A meeting of the Los Angeles Police Commission was packed last week with angry activists and residents, many of whom called for authorities to release the ICE agent’s name. Although the names of LAPD officers involved in fatal use-of-force incidents are normally made public within weeks, there is no such rule for federal agencies.
The document filed this week sought to temporarily bar Palacios’ girlfriend from seeing her daughter from her first marriage, based on the potential danger posed by the ICE agent’s alleged involvement in the shooting. According to L.A. County court orders reviewed by The Times, a judge barred Palacios from having any contact with the children from his previous marriage last February. That order was upheld last June, even after DCFS and LAPD dismissed the abuse allegations, the county court filings show.
“Palacios is presently prohibited by Court Order from being in the presence of the parties’ minor children because of his abusive conduct,” read the Thursday filing from Diaz, who represents the ex-husband of Palacios’ girlfriend. “There is a very valid concern that the stress of having shot and killed another man on 12/31/2025, and the ongoing aftermath, will materially and substantially impair Mother’s mental health, and impact her ability to provide a safe and stable parenting schedule for their youngest child.”
The fatal New Year’s Eve incident follows several others in recent weeks in which ICE agents have used deadly force against U.S. citizens.
Last week, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Minneapolis woman Renee Nicole Good. President Trump and other federal officials have accused Good of obstructing immigration efforts and said she tried to hit Ross with her car, but cellphone video from the scene shows Good was trying to drive away and that Ross shot at her through the driver’s side window. The killing has drawn widespread condemnation and protests; Trump administration officials have staunchly defended the agent and accused Good of weaponizing her vehicle in “an act of domestic terrorism.”
Unlike the Minnesota incident, which was captured on multiple videos, no recordings have surfaced from the confrontation that led to Porter’s killing.
It remains unclear exactly what happened in Northridge around 10:40 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Palacios was off duty, so there is no body camera video. None of the building’s security cameras captured the shooting either, according to a message from the property management company.
Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, told The Times that Porter was found in possession of a rifle.
One of those officials said investigators also found evidence of two bullet impacts behind where the agent would have been standing at the time of the shooting, which would support federal authorities claims that he was fired upon by Porter. The official also said the agent identified himself as law enforcement before opening fire. Halpern also said Friday that there is evidence that Porter shot at Palacios during the encounter.
Asked about those issues on Friday, Tooson maintained that no witnesses have come forward to corroborate claims that the agent faced any danger that night.
Porter’s friends and family have argued he was firing a gun in the air to celebrate the new year. Los Angeles police officials have warned people against the practice for years, and doing so is a felony. Still, Porter’s supporters contend that the agent overreacted and should have waited for the LAPD to respond.
Halpern said those outraged over the killing have been far too quick to dismiss the danger that Porter posed by shooting a gun in a dense residential area.
“This person was shooting a firearm in his community. What goes up must come down,” she said, alluding to past incidents where celebratory gunshots have injured bystanders.
Palacios had an “absolute right to self-defense,” she said.
Last year, a Los Angeles County judge barred Palacios from being around his girlfriend’s children from a previous marriage in the wake of allegations that he had whipped his biological sons with a belt, according to a transcript of a 2025 hearing.
Through an attorney, the children also accused Palacios of using homophobic slurs and making racist remarks about Black and Latino people, according to a court transcript. Palacios also referred to the children’s biological father as an “illegal alien,” according to the allegations contained in court records.
Omar Escorcia, the ex-husband of Palacios’ girlfriend, told The Times that Palacios routinely made disparaging remarks about Latinos before and after custody hearings, referring to them as “wetbacks.” Halpern denied her client made any such comments.
Escorcia also described an alleged incident in which Palacios showed up to a youth soccer game carrying a gun, which was visible to other parents and left several people upset and concerned for their kids’ safety.
“What law enforcement officer who is mindful of gun safety, shows up to a children’s sporting event with a gun that is not holstered, but stuck in their waistband, and they’re holding a toddler?” asked Escorcia’s attorney, Diaz, according to a transcript of a 2025 court hearing. “There are all kinds of red flags here.”
Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, is suing his former project manager and his lawyers, alleging they wrongfully put a $1.8-million lien on his former Malibu mansion.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday, alleges that Tony Saxon, Ye’s former project manager on the property, and the law firm West Coast Trial Lawyers, “wrongfully” placed an “invalid” lien on the property “while simultaneously launching an aggressive publicity campaign designed to pressure Ye, chill prospective transactions, and extract payment on disputed claims already being litigated in court.”
Saxon’s lawyers were not immediately available for comment.
Saxon, who was also employed as West’s security guard and caretaker at the Malibu property, sued the controversial rapper in Los Angeles Superior Court in September 2023, claiming a slate of labor violations, nonpayment of services and disability discrimination.
In January 2024, Saxon placed the $1.8-million “mechanics” lien on the property in order to secure compensation for his work as project manager and construction-related services, according to court filings.
A mechanics lien, also referred to as a contractor’s lien, is usually filed by an unpaid contractor, laborer or supplier, as a hold against the property. If the party remains unpaid, it can prompt a foreclosure sale of the property to secure compensation.
Ye has denied Saxon’s allegations. In a November 2023 response to the complaint, Ye disputed that Saxon “has sustained any injury, damage, or loss by reason of any act, omission or breach by Defendant.”
According to Ye’s recent complaint, he listed the property for sale in December 2023. A month later, he alleged, Saxon and his attorneys recorded the lien and “immediately” issued statements to the media.
The suit cites a statement Saxon’s attorney, Ronald Zambrano, made to Business Insider: “If someone wants to buy Kanye’s Malibu home, they will have to deal with us first. That sale cannot happen without Tony getting paid first.”
“These statements were designed to create public pressure and to interfere with the Plaintiffs’ ability to sell and finance the Property by falsely conveying that Defendants held an adjudicated, enforceable right to block a transaction and divert sale proceeds,” the complaint states.
The filing contends that last year the Los Angeles Superior Court granted Ye’s motion to release the lien from the bond and awarded him attorneys fees.
The Malibu property’s short existence has a long history of legal and financial drama.
In 2021, West purchased the beachfront concrete mansion — designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando — for $57.3 million. He then gutted the property on Malibu Road, reportedly saying “This is going to be my bomb shelter. This is going to be my Batcave.”
Three years later, the hip-hop star sold the unfinished mansion (he had removed the windows, doors, electricity and plumbing and broke down walls), at a significant loss to developer Steven Belmont’s Belwood Investments for $21 million.
Belmont, who spent more money to renovate the home, had spent three years in prison after being charged with attempted murder for a pitchfork attack in Napa County. He promised to restore the architectural jewel to its former glory.
However, the property has been mired in various legal and financial entanglements including foreclosure threats.
Last August, the notorious mansion was once again put on the market with a $4.1 million price cut after a previous offer reportedly fell through, according to Realtor.com.
The legal battle surrounding Ye’s former Malibu pad is the latest in a series of public and legal dramas that the music impresario has been involved in recent years.
In 2022, the mercurial superstar lost numerous lucrative partnerships with companies like Adidas and the Gap, following a raft of antisemitic statements, including declaring himself a Nazi on X (which he later recanted).
Two years later, Ye abruptly shut down Donda Academy, the troubled private school he founded in 2020.
Ye, the school and some of his affiliated businesses faced faced multiple lawsuits from former employees and educators, alleging they were victims of wrongful termination, a hostile work environment and other claims.
In court filings, Ye has denied each of the claims made against him by former employees and educators at Donda.
A prominent Imperial Valley farmer charged with killing his estranged wife was extradited to Arizona on Tuesday, where bail has been set at $5.5 million.
Michael Abatti, 63, was arrested on Dec. 23 for allegedly killing Kerri Ann Abatti, 59. He pleaded not guilty to a charge of first-degree murder on Wednesday in Navajo County Superior Court.
An Imperial County Sheriff’s Office booking mugshot of Michael Abatti.
(Imperial County Sheriff’s Office)
Once bail is posted, Abatti will be allowed to return to El Centro — where he lives and where he can receive ongoing medical treatments, according to his attorneys, Owen Roth and Danielle Iredale. He is required to surrender his passport, and will be allowed limited travel to Arizona and Wyoming, where the Abattis own property.
Kerri Abatti was shot in her home in the Arizona town of Pinetop-Lakeside at around 9 p.m. on Nov. 20, authorities say. An autopsy report shows she was shot once in the head. The shot came from outside her house and went through a window.
Her nephew found her after hearing a loud bang, and called 911, according to autopsy reports. She died while being taken to a hospital in Show Low, which is roughly 10 miles from Pinetop-Lakeside.
According to the couple’s divorce filings, the Abattis had been embroiled in a bitter feud about the amount of financial spousal support Kerri Abatti was owed following the separation. Kerri Abatti left her husband and their El Centro home in August 2023 after 31 years of marriage.
While he was on a fishing trip, she left for Pinetop-Lakeside, where the couple owned a 7,000 sq. ft. home on a 14-acre lot.
Kerri Abatti grew up in Pinetop-Lakeside; it is where her parents, siblings and extended family reside.
The couple have three adult children who live in California and Nevada.
Photos of Michael Abatti taken Wednesday in Navajo County show him shirtless and wearing a suicide vest.
His attorneys told The Times on Monday that he had surrendered to authorities in El Centro when he learned of the arrest warrant. He also waived his right to extradition.
At a press conference on Monday, Navajo County Sheriff David Clouse told reporters his detectives “had strong reason to believe that Mr. Abatti had traveled from El Centro, Calif., on Nov. 20 to Pinetop, Ariz., committed the homicide and traveled back to California.”
A pre-trial conference and release hearing is scheduled for March 17 in Navajo County.
Debra Newton was arrested by Marion County sheriff’s deputies after a tip led to a father and daughter reuniting for the first time in more than 40 years. Body camera video captured the moment deputies approached a woman they knew as Sharon Neely.”How are you doing, Ms. Sharon?” said one deputy.She was known in her Marion County community, but according to deputies, her real identity is Debra Newton.Newton was arrested by Marion County deputies for a warrant out of Kentucky after authorities said she abducted her own child.”When the tip came in, it says they recognized this lady from the social media post as being a person who was wanted out of Kentucky,” said Valerie Strong, public information officer for the MCSO.That tip was the last piece that ended a cold case from more than four decades ago.Joe Newton and his wife, Debra, were preparing to move to Georgia in 1983, but when Joe came home, Debra had taken off with their 3-year-old daughter, Michelle.After the pair disappeared, Joe searched for the two. For years, the family didn’t know if Michelle was alive.After Debra’s arrest, Michelle reunited with her father.”She’s always been in our hearts. I cannot explain that moment of that woman walking in and getting to put my arms back around my daughter,” Joe said.The news also meant Michelle had to learn her identity. She said she came home from work to find police at her door.”You are not who you think you are. You are a missing person. You are Michelle Marie Newton,” she was told.Michelle learned she had a family who never stopped searching for her and a father who never stopped loving her.”I wouldn’t trade that moment,” Joe said. “It was just like seeing her when she was first born. It was like an angel.”Despite life turning upside down, Michelle showed no anger toward her mother. She said she wants to heal and move forward.”My intention is to support them both through this and trying to navigate and help them both just wrap it up so that we can all heal and hopefully, you know, there’s just apologies and start healing,” she said.Debra was sent back to Jefferson County in Louisville, Kentucky, where she appeared in court Monday. She has been arraigned on a felony charge of custodial interference, according to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office in Jefferson County. Felony custodial-kidnapping charges carry no statute of limitations in Kentucky. She is due back in court in January.
MARION COUNTY, Fla. —
Debra Newton was arrested by Marion County sheriff’s deputies after a tip led to a father and daughter reuniting for the first time in more than 40 years.
Body camera video captured the moment deputies approached a woman they knew as Sharon Neely.
“How are you doing, Ms. Sharon?” said one deputy.
She was known in her Marion County community, but according to deputies, her real identity is Debra Newton.
Newton was arrested by Marion County deputies for a warrant out of Kentucky after authorities said she abducted her own child.
“When the tip came in, it says they recognized this lady from the social media post as being a person who was wanted out of Kentucky,” said Valerie Strong, public information officer for the MCSO.
That tip was the last piece that ended a cold case from more than four decades ago.
Joe Newton and his wife, Debra, were preparing to move to Georgia in 1983, but when Joe came home, Debra had taken off with their 3-year-old daughter, Michelle.
After the pair disappeared, Joe searched for the two. For years, the family didn’t know if Michelle was alive.
After Debra’s arrest, Michelle reunited with her father.
“She’s always been in our hearts. I cannot explain that moment of that woman walking in and getting to put my arms back around my daughter,” Joe said.
The news also meant Michelle had to learn her identity. She said she came home from work to find police at her door.
“You are not who you think you are. You are a missing person. You are Michelle Marie Newton,” she was told.
Michelle learned she had a family who never stopped searching for her and a father who never stopped loving her.
“I wouldn’t trade that moment,” Joe said. “It was just like seeing her when she was first born. It was like an angel.”
Despite life turning upside down, Michelle showed no anger toward her mother. She said she wants to heal and move forward.
“My intention is to support them both through this and trying to navigate and help them both just wrap it up so that we can all heal and hopefully, you know, there’s just apologies and start healing,” she said.
Debra was sent back to Jefferson County in Louisville, Kentucky, where she appeared in court Monday. She has been arraigned on a felony charge of custodial interference, according to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office in Jefferson County. Felony custodial-kidnapping charges carry no statute of limitations in Kentucky. She is due back in court in January.
Republicans and Democrats squared off in court Monday in a high-stakes battle over the fate of California’s Proposition 50, which reconfigures the state’s congressional districts and could ultimately help determine which party controls the U.S. House in the 2026 midterms.
Dozens of California politicians and Sacramento insiders — including GOP Assembly members and Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell — have given depositions in the case or could be called to testify in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles over the next few days.
The GOP wants the three-judge panel to temporarily block California’s new district map, claiming it is unconstitutional and illegally favors Latino voters.
An overwhelming majority of California voters approved Proposition 50 on Nov. 4 after Gov. Gavin Newsom pitched the redistricting plan as a way to counter partisan gerrymandering in Texas and other GOP-led states. Democrats acknowledged the new map would weaken Republicans’ voting power in California, but argued that it would just be a temporary measure to try to restore the national political balance.
Attorneys for the GOP cannot challenge the new redistricting map on the grounds that it disenfranchises swaths of California Republicans. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court.
But the GOP can bring claims of racial discrimination. They argue that California legislators drew the new congressional maps based on race, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, which prohibits governments from denying citizens the right to vote based on race or color.
Republicans face an uphill struggle in blocking the new map before the 2026 midterms. The hearing comes just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas to temporarily keep its new congressional map — a move that Newsom’s office says bodes poorly for Republicans trying to block California’s map.
“In letting Texas use its gerrymandered maps, the Supreme Court noted that California’s maps, like Texas’s, were drawn for lawful reasons,” Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for Newsom, said in a statement. “That should be the beginning and the end of this Republican effort to silence the voters of California.”
In Texas, GOP leaders drew up new congressional district lines after President Trump openly pressed them to give Republicans five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A federal court blocked the map, finding racial considerations probably made the Texas map unconstitutional. But a few days later, the Supreme Court granted Texas’ request to pause that ruling, signaling that they view the Texas case — and this one in California — as part of a national politically motivated redistricting battle.
“The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California),” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued, “was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
The fact that the Supreme Court order and Alito’s concurrence in the Texas case went out of their way to mention California is not a good sign for California Republicans, said Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.
“It’s hard to prove racial predominance in drawing a map — that race predominated over partisanship or other traditional districting principles,” Hasen said. “Trying to get a preliminary injunction, there’s a higher burden now, because it would be changing things closer to the election, and the Supreme Court signaled in that Texas ruling that courts should be wary of making changes.”
On Nov. 4, California voters approved Proposition 50, a measure to scrap a congressional map drawn up by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replace it with a map drawn up by legislators to favor Democrats through 2030.
On Monday, a key plaintiff, Assemblymember David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno) — who serves on the Assembly Elections Committee — testified that the legislative panel was given only four days to analyze the redistricted maps and was not allowed to vote on them.
“In the language of the bill, it actually states that the Assembly and Senate election committee prepared these maps,” Tangipa said. “This was a lie.”
Tangipa claimed his Democratic colleagues repeatedly brought up increased Black, Latino and Asian representation to further their argument for redistricting.
“They were forcing, through emergency action, maps upon us to dismantle the independent redistricting commission,” Tangipa said. “They were using emotionally charged arguments, racial justifications and polarized arguments to pigeonhole us.”
Defense attorneys, however, referenced multiple instances in depositions and online posts where Tangipa had claimed that there was some “partisan” or “political” purpose for the existence of Proposition 50. Tangipa denied this and maintained that he believed that the redistricting effort was race-conscious since his conversations on the Assembly floor.
The hearing began with attorneys for the GOPhoming in on the new map’s Congressional District 13, which currently encompasses Merced, Stanislaus as well as parts of San Joaquin and Fresno counties, along with parts of Stockton. When Mitchell drew up the map, they argued, he overrepresented Latino voters as a “predominant consideration” over political leanings.
They called to the stand RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende, who said he observed an “appendage” in the new District 13, which extended partially into the San Joaquin Valley and put a crack in the new rendition of District 9.
“From my experience [appendages] are usually indicative of racial gerrymandering,” Trende said. “When the choice came between politics and race, it was race that won out.”
Defense attorneys, however, pressed Trende on whether the shift in Latino voters toward Republican candidates in the last election could have informed the new district boundaries, rather than racial makeup.
The defense referenced a sworn statement by Trende in the Texas redistricting case: the Proposition 50 map, he said then, was “drawn with partisan objectives in mind; in particular, it was drawn to improve Democratic prospects” to neutralize additional Republican seats.
Many legal scholars say that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Texas case means California probably will keep its new map.
“It was really hard before the Texas case to make a racial gerrymandering claim like the plaintiffs were stating, and it’s only gotten harder in the last two weeks,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University.
Hours after Californians voted in favor of Proposition 50, Tangipa and the California Republican Party filed a lawsuit alleging that the map enacted in Proposition 50 for California’s congressional districts is designed to favor Latino voters over others.
The Department of Justice also filed a complaint in the case, contending that the new congressional map uses race as a proxy for politics and manipulated district lines “in the name of bolstering the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race.”
Mitchell, the redistricting expert who drew up the maps, is likely to be a key figure in this week’s battle. In the days leading up to the hearing, attorneys sparred over whether Mitchell would testify and whether he should turn over his email correspondence with legislators. Mitchell’s attorneys argued that he had legislative privilege.
Attorneys for the GOP have seized on public comments made by Mitchell that the “number one thing” he started thinking about was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles” and the “first thing” he and his team did was “reverse” the California Citizens Redistricting Commission’s earlier decision to eliminate a Latino district from L.A.
Some legal experts, however, say that is not, in itself, a problem.
“What [Mitchell] said was, essentially, ‘I paid attention to race,’” Levitt said. “But there’s nothing under existing law that’s wrong with that. The problem comes when you pay too much attention to race at the exclusion of all of the other redistricting factors.”
Other legal experts say that what matters is not the intent of Mitchell or California legislators, but the California voters who passed Proposition 50.
“Regardless of what Paul Mitchell or legislative leaders thought, they were just making a proposal to the voters,” said Hasen, who filed an amicus brief in support of the state. “So it’s really the voters’ intent that matters. And if you look at what was actually presented to the voters in the ballot pamphlet, there was virtually nothing about race there.”
In a fiery rebuttal to allegations he’d criminally misrepresented facts in his mortgage documents, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) sued Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte on Tuesday — accusing him of criminally misusing government databases to baselessly target President Trump’s political opponents.
“Pulte has abused his position by scouring databases at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two government-sponsored enterprises — for the private mortgage records of several prominent Democrats,” attorneys for Swalwell wrote in a federal lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. “He then used those records to concoct fanciful allegations of mortgage fraud, which he referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution.”
Pulte’s attack, Swalwell’s attorneys wrote, “was not only a gross mischaracterization of reality” but “a gross abuse of power that violated the law,” infringing on Swalwell’s free speech rights to criticize the president without fear of reprisal, and violating the Privacy Act of 1974, which they said bars federal officials from “leveraging their access to citizens’ private information as a tool for harming their political opponents.”
Pulte, the FHFA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Pulte has previously defended his work probing mortgage documents of prominent Democrats, saying no one is above the law. His referrals have exclusively targeted Democrats, despite reporting on Republicans taking similar actions on their mortgages.
Swalwell’s lawsuit is the latest counterpunch to Pulte’s campaign, and part of mounting scrutiny over its unprecedented nature and unorthodox methods — not just from targets of his probes but from other investigators, too, according to one witness.
In addition to Swalwell, Pulte has referred mortgage fraud allegations to the Justice Department against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who have all denied wrongdoing and suggested the allegations amount to little more than political retribution.
James was criminally charged by an inexperienced, loyalist federal prosecutor specially appointed by Trump in Virginia, though a judge has since thrown out that case on the grounds that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed. The judge also threw out a case against former FBI Director James Comey, another Trump opponent.
Cook’s attorneys slammed Pulte in a letter to the Justice Department, writing that his “decision to use the FHFA to selectively — and publicly — investigate and target the President’s designated political enemies gives rise to the unmistakable impression that he has been improperly coordinating with the White House to manufacture flimsy predicates to launch these probes.”
Schiff also has lambasted Trump and Pulte for their targeting of him and other Democrats, and cheered the tossing of the cases against James and Comey, calling it “a triumph of the rule of law.”
In recent days, federal prosecutors in Maryland — where Schiff’s case is being investigated — have also started asking questions about the actions of Pulte and other Trump officials, according to Christine Bish, a Sacramento-area real estate agent and Republican congressional candidate who was summoned to Maryland to answer questions in the matter last week.
Pulte has alleged that Schiff broke the law by claiming primary residence for mortgages in both Maryland and California. Schiff has said he never broke any law and was always forthcoming with his mortgage lenders.
Bish has been investigating Schiff’s mortgage records since 2020, and had repeatedly submitted documents about Schiff to the federal government — first to the Office of Congressional Ethics, then earlier this year to an FHFA tip line and to the FBI, she told The Times.
When Trump subsequently posted one of Schiff’s mortgage documents to his Truth Social platform, Bish said she believed it was one she had submitted to the FHFA and FBI, because it was highlighted exactly as she had highlighted it. Then, she saw she had missed a call from Pulte, and was later asked by Pulte’s staff to email Pulte “the full file” she had worked up on Schiff.
“They wanted to make sure that I had sent the whole file,” Bish said.
Bish said she was subsequently interviewed via Google Meet on Oct. 22 by someone from the FHFA inspector general’s office and an FBI agent. She then got a subpoena in the mail that she interpreted as requiring her to be in Maryland last week. There, she was interviewed again, for about an hour, by the same official from the inspector general’s office and another FBI agent, she said — and was surprised their questions seemed more focused on her communications with people in the federal government than on Schiff.
“They wanted to know if I had been talking to anybody else,” she said. “You know, what did I communicate? Who did I communicate with?”
Schiff’s office declined to comment. However, Schiff’s attorney has previously told Justice Department officials that there was “ample basis” for them to launch an investigation into Pulte and his campaign targeting Trump’s opponents, calling it a “highly irregular” and “sordid” effort.
The acting FHFA inspector general at the time Bish was first contacted, Joe Allen, has since been fired, which has also raised questions.
On Nov. 19, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) — the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — wrote a letter to Pulte denouncing his probes as politically motivated, questioning Allen’s dismissal and demanding documentation from Pulte, including any communications he has had with the White House.
Swalwell’s attorneys wrote in Tuesday’s lawsuit that he never claimed primary residence in both California and Washington, D.C., as alleged, and had not broken any laws.
They accused Pulte of orchestrating a coordinated effort to spread the allegations against Swalwell via a vast network of conservative influencers, which they said had “harmed [Swalwell’s] reputation at a critical juncture in his career: the very moment when he had planned to announce his campaign for Governor of California.”
They said the “widespread publication of information about the home where his wife and young children reside” had also “exposed him to heightened security risks and caused him significant anguish and distress.”
Swalwell said in a statement that Pulte has “combed through private records of political opponents” to “silence them,” which shouldn’t be allowed.
“There’s a reason the First Amendment — the freedom of speech — comes before all others,” he said.
WASHINGTON — No one seems to know what happened to Vicente Ventura Aguilar.
A witness told his brother and attorneys that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, who doesn’t have lawful immigration status, was taken into custody by immigration authorities on Oct. 7 in SouthLos Angeles and suffered a medical emergency.
But it’s been more than six weeks since then, and Ventura Aguilar’s family still hasn’t heard from him.
The Department of Homeland Security said 73 people from Mexico were arrested in the Los Angeles area between Oct. 7 and 8.
“None of them were Ventura Aguilar,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant Homeland Security public affairs secretary.
“For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” she added.
McLaughlin did not answer questions about what the agency did to determine whether Ventura Aguilar had ever been in its custody, such as checking for anyone with the same date of birth, variations of his name, or identifying detainees who received medical attention near the California border around Oct. 8.
Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing Ventura Aguilar’s family, said DHS never responded to her inquiries about him.
The family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, 44, says he has been missing since Oct. 7 when a friend saw him arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Homeland Security officials say he was never in their custody.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
“There’s only one agency that has answers,” she said. “Their refusal to provide this family with answers, their refusal to provide his attorneys with answers, says something about the lack of care and the cruelty of the moment right now for DHS.”
His family and lawyers checked with local hospitals and the Mexican consulate without success. They enlisted help from the office of Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), whose staff called the Los Angeles and San Diego county medical examiner’s offices. Neither had someone matching his name or description.
The Los Angeles Police Department also told Kamlager-Dove’s office that he isn’t in their system. His brother, Felipe Aguilar, said the family filed a missing person’s report with LAPD on Nov. 7.
“We’re sad and worried,” Felipe Aguilar said. “He’s my brother and we miss him here at home. He’s a very good person. We only hope to God that he’s alive.”
Felipe Aguilar said his brother, who has lived in the U.S. for around 17 years, left home around 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 7 to catch the bus for an interview for a sanitation job when he ran into friends on the corner near a local liquor store. He had his phone but had left his wallet at home.
One of those friends told Felipe Aguilar and his lawyers that he and Ventura Aguilar were detained by immigration agents and then held at B-18, a temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.
The friend was deported the next day to Tijuana. He spoke to the family in a phone call from Mexico.
According to Felipe Aguilar and Toczylowski, the friend said Ventura Aguilar began to shake, went unconscious and fell to the ground while shackled on Oct. 8 at a facility near the border. The impact caused his face to bleed.
The friend said that facility staff called for an ambulance and moved the other detainees to a different room. Toczylowski said that was the last time anyone saw Ventura Aguilar.
She said the rapid timeline between when Ventura Aguilar was arrested to when he disappeared is emblematic of what she views as a broad lack of due process for people in government custody under the Trump administration and shows that “we don’t know who’s being deported from the United States.”
Felipe Aguilar said he called his brother’s cell phone after hearing about the arrests but it went straight to voicemail.
Felipe Aguilar said that while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.
His family and lawyers said Ventura Aguilar might have given immigration agents a fake name when he was arrested. Some detained people offer up a wrong name or alias, and that would explain why he never showed up in Homeland Security records. Toczylowski said federal agents sometimes misspell the name of the person they are booking into custody.
Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing since Oct. 7, had lived in the United States for 17 years, his family said.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
But she said the agency should make a significant attempt to search for him, such as by using biometric data or his photo.
“To me, that’s another symptom of the chaos of the immigration enforcement system as it’s happening right now,” she said of the issues with accurately identifying detainees. “And it’s what happens when you are indiscriminately, racially profiling people and picking them up off the street and holding them in conditions that are substandard, and then deporting people without due process. Mistakes get made. Right now, what we want to know is what mistakes were made here, and where is Vicente now?”
Surveillance footage from a nearby business reviewed by MS NOW shows Ventura Aguilar on the sidewalk five minutes before masked agents begin making arrests in South Los Angeles. The footage doesn’t show him being arrested, but two witnesses told the outlet that they saw agents handcuff Ventura Aguilar and place him in a van.
In a letter sent to DHS leaders Friday, Kamlager-Dove asked what steps DHS has taken to determine whether anyone matching Ventura Aguilar’s identifiers was detained last month and whether the agency has documented any medical events or hospital transports involving people taken into custody around Oct. 7-8.
“Given the length of time since Mr. Ventura Aguilar’s disappearance and the credible concern that he may have been misidentified, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for during the enforcement action, I urgently request that DHS and ICE conduct an immediate and comprehensive review” by Nov. 29, Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter.
Kamlager-Dove said her most common immigration requests from constituents are for help with visas and passports.
“Never in all the years did I expect to get a call about someone who has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, and also never did I think that I would find myself not just calling ICE and Border Patrol but checking hospitals, checking with LAPD and checking morgues to find a constituent,” she said. “It’s horrifying and it’s completely dystopian.”
She said families across Los Angeles deserve answers and need to know whether something similar could happen to them.
A wrongfully convicted man who spent more than 30 years behind bars will receive $19.1 million as part of a settlement with the city of Baldwin Park, officials said.
Daniel Saldana, 56, was convicted in connection to a 1989 drive-by shooting outside a Baldwin Park high school football game that left two students injured. But for years Saldana maintained he was innocent, insisting he wasn’t at the shooting.
Saldana was was freed from prison in 2023 after a judge declared him factually innocent and, on Friday, the Baldwin Park City Council agreed to pay $19.1 million to settle a wrongful conviction federal lawsuit.
Attorneys for Saldana argued in the lawsuit it was the “egregious misconduct” of a Baldwin Park detective that led to the wrongful conviction in 1990.
Saldana could not be reached for comment, but his attorneys released a statement blaming the wrongful conviction on a Baldwin Park detective.
“Mr. Saldana’s wrongful conviction resulted from the egregious misconduct of a Baldwin Park detective who systematically fabricated evidence and pressured witnesses throughout a fundamentally flawed investigation,” said Amelia Green, one of Saldana’s attorneys.
The case against Saldana began to unravel when one of the codefendants, Raul Vidal, told the state parole board in 2017 that Saldana was not present at the shooting.
A deputy district attorney had been present at Vidal’s parole hearing, but the testimony didn’t spark a review of the case at the time. It was not until 2023 that the state’s parole board turned over transcripts of the hearing to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit.
The district attorney’s office then moved to have Saldana’s conviction overturned, and a judge found him factually innocent in May 2023.
In February 2024, Saldana and his attorneys filed a suit against the city and former Baldwin Park Police Detective Michael Donovan, alleging the former detective coerced witnesses and falsified reports to get Saldana convicted.
Donovan allegedly pressured a teen witness to testify that Saldana was the second shooter in the incident, although the teen originally testified there had been only one shooter, according to the lawsuit.
In a statement, the city of Baldwin Park confirmed the settlement and said the incident did not involve any current city employees.
“The city sincerely hopes Mr. Saldana can now move forward in his new life,” the statement read.
A piano teacher to the stars who fled the country last month just before a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing a student was arrested in Australia, authorities said.
John Kaleel, 69, was taken into custody by Australian Federal Police on Oct. 31, according to Nicole Nishida, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the agency investigating him in the United States.
It was not clear where Kaleel was arrested, and Australian authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kaleel, an Australian national, was facing a retrial on multiple counts of sexually abusing a student last month when he fled the country on Oct. 8, according to the Sheriff’s Department.
Kaleel disappeared while jurors were deliberating at the Airport Courthouse. His attorney, Kate Hardie, said she last saw Kaleel after driving him home from court on Oct. 7. She declined to comment on his arrest.
It is expected that Kaleel will be returned to the U.S., where he faces a lengthy prison sentence after he was convicted of multiple counts of committing lewd acts with a child.
Kaleel taught private piano lessons in the U.S. for more than 25 years, and his clients included the children of the creators of beloved television series such as “Mad Men” and “Orange Is the New Black.” But he became the subject of a Sheriff’s Department investigation in 2015 when a student told detectives Kaleel had been acting inappropriately toward him for years.
The boy said he was 12 when Kaleel asked “to take measurements of [the victim’s] body parts, including his penis,” according to court records. Kaleel later convinced the boy that they should masturbate together while on a FaceTime call because that’s “what friends do,” records show.
When the victim was 15, prosecutors allege, Kaleel invited him over in September 2013 and they smoked marijuana together before having oral sex.
Kaleel initially pleaded no contest to one count of committing lewd acts with a child in 2016, but later appealed the deal on the grounds that he didn’t know how it would affect his immigration status. Kaleel has been a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. since the 1980s, according to Hardie, but found himself in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement following the plea.
Kaleel successfully appealed a deportation order and convinced an L.A. County judge to throw out the plea deal, but the L.A. County district attorney’s office decided to retry him.
“Mr. Kaleel has always maintained his innocence and that he took his initial plea bargain on the advice of counsel to avoid a harsher sentence should he lose at trial,” Hardie previously told The Times.
The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment and has not discussed what, if any, efforts it has taken to return Kaleel to the U.S. since his arrest.
Court records show prosecutors filed an application for an extradition warrant last month.
A hiker clambers across a scorched landscape of ash, his footsteps crunching on charred earth as he peers over a ridge at a burn scar pocked with blackened stumps. Below are thickets of green chaparral and densely packed homes.
Suddenly, he stops. He zooms the camera in to wisps of white smoke rising from the dirt.
“It’s still smoldering,” he whispers — apparently to himself. No firefighters or state park rangers are visible.
The video of smoke on a hillside above Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades was shot by a local resident above Skull Rock Trailhead at 11:30 a.m on Jan. 2 — nearly 36 hours after the Lachman fire ignited and long after the Los Angeles Fire Department deemed the fire “fully contained.”
The footage is one piece of a puzzle that has been the subject of so much anger, attention and investigation since the January firestorms: What happened between the time L.A. firefighters declared the Lachman fire out and when it rekindled into a catastrophic firestorm that burned huge swaths of Pacific Palisades?
The video could also be key evidence for attorneys working on behalf of thousands who lost their homes against a player that has so far not received much attention.
Ever since federal officials arrested Jonathan Rinderknecht Oct. 8 on suspicion of igniting the Lachman fire — and revealed that embers from that blaze rekindled into the Jan. 7 Palisades fire — LAFD has faced the brunt of criticism for failing to fully extinguish the New Year’s Day fire.
But lawyers representing thousands of Palisades fire victims are also focusing on another target.
They argue the state, which owns Topanga State Park, where the Palisades fire began, did not do enough to monitor the small Jan 1. Lachman brush fire and stop it reigniting six days later into the devastating Palisades fire that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,800 structures. Plaintiff attorneys are not alleging the state should have suppressed the fire; instead, they say it failed to make sure the area was secure.
The video, plaintiff attorneys say, corroborates the case they make in a master complaint filed earlier this month: that the state allowed a “dangerous fire condition” to exist on the Lachman burn scar. They allege the state allowed “embers from the Lachman Fire to smolder, rekindle and then re-ignite in dry brush” as the National Weather Service warned of dangerous Santa Ana winds.
California State Parks did not respond to questions on what actions it took to monitor the Lachman burn scar on Topanga State Park in the run-up to the dangerous wind event, or what role it typically plays in monitoring land after fires. It also did not respond to any of the allegations in legal filings or the hiker’s video showing smoke rising.
“California State Parks does not comment on pending litigation,” said a spokesperson for the agency.
Andrew Grinsfelder, 18, waters down the roof of his mother’s home, hoping to prevent the Palisades fire from destroying their house, on Jan. 8.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Government officials typically have limited liability in fires. The legal doctrine of qualified immunity shields public servants from civil litigation, unless their actions violate “clearly established” law, so they can make judgments without constant legal threats and public funds are protected.
California government code specifically prevents public entities and employees from being held “liable for any injury resulting from the failure to provide or maintain sufficient personnel, equipment or other fire protection facilities.”
However, David Levine, a professor of law at UC San Francisco, said allowing a “dangerous condition” on your property offers lawyers a possible path around immunity.
“It’s going to depend on the facts,” Levine said.
It is unclear whether the smoldering depicted in the hiker’s video was on state land. Investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined the Lachman fire ignited on a 160-acre sliver of land owned by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority before spreading to Topanga State Park. The video appears to have been shot near the border of the two properties.
Whether or not the smoke in the video was on the state portion of the burn scar, the plaintiff attorneys claim it was clear the Lachman fire was not fully extinguished.
“The rekindle happened on the State Park land and that’s what matters to our case,” said Alexander “Trey” Robertson, an attorney who represents 3,300 Palisades residents and is co-leading litigation on behalf of all victims in the Palisades fire.
Plaintiff attorneys claim California State Parks did not sufficiently monitor the smoldering earth — even as NWS warned repeatedly in the days before Jan. 7 of “critical fire conditions” and a “life-threatening, dangerous” windstorm across parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Protocol outlined in the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation Operations Manual indicates that staff should monitor burn scars: “Areas of a park unit which have burned will remain closed,” it states, “until appropriate Department staff have inspected the area and rectified any public safety, property or resource protection issues.”
Plaintiff attorneys argue that didn’t happen.
“The State failed to inspect and maintain its property and failed to provide proper fire protection on its property to allow embers from the Lachman Fire on its property,” the complaint states, “particularly in the presence of overgrown and poorly maintained dry chaparral, as well as knowledge of extreme fire weather conditions and predicted Red Flag Warning wind events.”
If a park ranger had inspected the Lachman burn scar and seen the smoke coming out of the ground, Robertson said, they could have urged LAFD to come back out and properly extinguish that fire.
It’s important to note the state has released few details about park rangers’ actions between the Lachman fire and the Palisades fire. It is possible state employees did monitor the burn scar and did not see smoke. California State Parks declined to provide details about ranger movements in the critical days between the two fires.
The area where the Lachman fire burned was not in a remote area, Robertson noted. It is just a couple minutes from a trailhead parking lot in an area popular with hikers.
“A park ranger could have very easily parked his or her truck, and walked a few-minute hike to top of the trail and just done a visual inspection,” Robertson said.
Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who lost his home in the Palisades fire and has since become an advocate for accountability, said park managers have a duty to keep the public safe.
“It’s so obvious that they left it all smoldering — to the point where multiple hikers have videos of it still smoldering,” Pratt said. “We pay our taxes for it to be maintained. It’s in their policy manuals. It’s the law; it’s their government code: that it can’t create a danger to our town, our houses.”
What happened after the Lachman fire?
When flames lit up the hillside near Skull Rock on the Temescal Ridge Trail shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, firefighters moved quickly to suppress the blaze.
Within minutes of getting the first 911 call, fire engines rushed to the nearest trailhead and LAFD firefighters hiked to Skull Rock on foot. County firefighters dug a handline to block the spread of the fire with the assistance of LAFD hose lines.
By 4:46 a.m., LAFD announced that firefighters had “completed the hose line around the perimeter of the fire” and it was “fully contained.” “Some resources will be released as the mop up operation continues,” it added, “to ensure no flare ups.”
The next day, when firefighters returned to collect fire hoses, “it appeared to them that the fire was fully extinguished,” according to an affidavit by a special agent with the ATF.
According to the ATF special agent, a firebrand became lodged within dense chaparral and then smoldered and burned within the roots of the vegetation. The underground burning, he stated, was not visible to firefighters or members of the public who visited the burn scar after the Lachman fire.
But that appears to be contradicted by the video taken Jan 2. A local resident shot footage showing smoke and no firefighters on site.
Five days later, the Palisades fire ignited in Topanga State Park about 20 feet south of the perimeter of the Lachman fire.
The legal case
Los Angeles firefighters have been widely criticized for their lack of preparation before the Palisades fire.
After the ATF announced this month that the Palisades fire was a holdover fire ignited by embers of the Lachman fire, Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva told The Times that LAFD did not use thermal imaging technology to confirm the Lachman fire was out.
But attorneys face steep odds bringing legal claims against LAFD because California governmentcode gives public officials broad immunity against claims of negligent firefighting.
The case against the state, however, is different. Attorneys representing fire victims argue government immunity does not apply to the state’s failure to inspect its land in the days between the Lachman and Palisades fires to ensure that no smoldering embers remained that could reignite as meteorologists warned of dangerous Santa Ana winds.
The complaint cites a 1974 legal decision involving a fire at an airport owned and operated by the city and county of Imperial. The court found governmental immunity should not be used “to allow a public entity to escape responsibility from its failure to provide fire protection on property which it owns and manages itself, particularly where it has permitted a dangerous fire condition to exist on that property.”
After LAFD announced it had extinguished the Lachman fire, the complaint alleges, the state had a “non-delegable duty to inspect its property for dangerous condition given that embers in the root structure are a well-known phenomenon after such a fire, that there was heavy fuel in the form of dry overgrown, chaparral, and a serious known coming wind condition.”
It will be up to courts to determine whether state officials were actually neglectful.
Levine, the law professor not affiliated with the case, said the lawyers who filed the master complaint— a 198-page document that also targets L.A. Department of Water and Power and dozens of public and private entities — had put together an impressively detailed case. But the state could also offer counter evidence and experts might offer different opinions about how often the state would be expected to check the burn scar.
“I think what the plaintiffs are doing is saying, ‘We have a lot of ammunition here,’ and it’s kind of an invitation to consider settling,” Levine said. “It’s a high hurdle, but not an impossible hurdle, and they may have enough evidence to get over that hurdle.”
Even if they prevail, property owners might not actually get that much of a payout, Levine said, because so many of the homes that burned were insured.
“If a fire policy paid out a million dollars, say, on a house up there in Palisades, the insurance company is going to say, ‘We get our money back,’” Levine said. “So how much money would actually end up in the hands of fire victims, I think, would be somewhat open to question.”
The master complaint does not hold the MRCA liable for allowing a dangerous condition on the Lachman burn scar. But even if MRCA isn’t legally liable because the Palisades fire origin point was not on its land, the public agency dedicated to acquiring and preserving open space and parkland also faces questions about its protocol for monitoring burn scars.
The agency has its own fire crew, with 30 full-time, on-call and volunteer wildland firefighters. Its website says it deploys its fire crew on red flag days to prevent and assist in suppressing any fires and coordinates with local fire departments, which are better equipped for larger fire responses.
In a statement to The Times, MRCA said its fire crew “did not play a suppression or monitoring role in the Lachman Fire” and that LAFD “was the lead responding agency and managing authority for the Lachman Fire, working in coordination with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.”
A judge denied bond for Robin Severance Lopez after her second arrest on charges related to bond issue.After spending Thursday night in the Osceola County Jail, Severance Lopez was transferred to the Lake County Jail on Friday morning. The estranged wife of the suspended Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez will no longer appear before an Osceola County judge on Friday afternoon.Her attorney, Michelle Yard, told WESH 2 that statewide prosecutors have filed a motion to revoke Severance-Lopez’s $400,000 bond from her original arrest in June on a conspiracy to commit racketeering charge.Statewide prosecutors say Robin Lopez testified falsely about her financial status at the hearing in August to remove her GPS ankle monitor, according to her attorney Michelle Yard, who got the probable cause affidavit Friday afternoon.The judged ruled to revoke bond after prosecutors says she violated pretrial release conditions by failing to refrain from criminal activity. Yard said she fully intends to defend Robin Lopez at her trial, which is set to begin on Nov. 10 in Lake County before Judge Brian Welke.What is she accused of?Robin Lopez was arrested in connection with the illegal Central Florida gambling enterprise that her estranged husband is accused of protecting, expanding and profiting between $600,000 and $700,000.Statewide prosecutors say Robin Lopez helped facilitate the movement of illicit money from the $21-million illegal gambling operation.Yard said she still has not received the new probable cause affidavit to rearrest Robin Lopez on a third-degree felony charge of providing false or misleading information, or omitting material information, in connection with an application for bail or a bail modification.”They sent me the charge and said that everything else is sealed, but there’s a Florida rule of criminal procedure that says they have to produce it,” Yard said in an exclusive interview with WESH 2 Thursday night.Osceola County sheriff’s deputies took Robin Lopez into custody just after 3 p.m. Thursday.”She was home with her child, and you know, just a normal afternoon, and we had no idea that deputies would be arriving to her house or that statewide was pursuing any additional charge,” Yard said.While Marcos Lopez’s attorneys have filed a motion to continue his case and he has waived his right to a speedy trial, a Lake County judge has set a trial date for Robin Lopez in November.The suspended sheriff’s attorneys are also asking the court to move his case from Lake County to Osceola County.A hearing on this motion this week was canceled, and the state has fired back with a motion on why it wants the criminal proceedings to continue in Lake County.
LAKE COUNTY, Fla. —
A judge denied bond for Robin Severance Lopez after her second arrest on charges related to bond issue.
After spending Thursday night in the Osceola County Jail, Severance Lopez was transferred to the Lake County Jail on Friday morning.
The estranged wife of the suspended Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez will no longer appear before an Osceola County judge on Friday afternoon.
Her attorney, Michelle Yard, told WESH 2 that statewide prosecutors have filed a motion to revoke Severance-Lopez’s $400,000 bond from her original arrest in June on a conspiracy to commit racketeering charge.
Statewide prosecutors say Robin Lopez testified falsely about her financial status at the hearing in August to remove her GPS ankle monitor, according to her attorney Michelle Yard, who got the probable cause affidavit Friday afternoon.
The judged ruled to revoke bond after prosecutors says she violated pretrial release conditions by failing to refrain from criminal activity.
Yard said she fully intends to defend Robin Lopez at her trial, which is set to begin on Nov. 10 in Lake County before Judge Brian Welke.
What is she accused of?
Robin Lopez was arrested in connection with the illegal Central Florida gambling enterprise that her estranged husband is accused of protecting, expanding and profiting between $600,000 and $700,000.
Statewide prosecutors say Robin Lopez helped facilitate the movement of illicit money from the $21-million illegal gambling operation.
Yard said she still has not received the new probable cause affidavit to rearrest Robin Lopez on a third-degree felony charge of providing false or misleading information, or omitting material information, in connection with an application for bail or a bail modification.
“They sent me the charge and said that everything else is sealed, but there’s a Florida rule of criminal procedure that says they have to produce it,” Yard said in an exclusive interview with WESH 2 Thursday night.
Osceola County sheriff’s deputies took Robin Lopez into custody just after 3 p.m. Thursday.
“She was home with her child, and you know, just a normal afternoon, and we had no idea that deputies would be arriving to her house or that statewide was pursuing any additional charge,” Yard said.
While Marcos Lopez’s attorneys have filed a motion to continue his case and he has waived his right to a speedy trial, a Lake County judge has set a trial date for Robin Lopez in November.
The suspended sheriff’s attorneys are also asking the court to move his case from Lake County to Osceola County.
A hearing on this motion this week was canceled, and the state has fired back with a motion on why it wants the criminal proceedings to continue in Lake County.
For more than a month, federal immigration officials surveilled Bayron Rovidio Marin in a hospital bed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he lay recuperating from serious injuries to his leg after an encounter with agents at a Carson car wash they raided. He was never charged and his lawyers say he was shackled to his bed for several days and couldn’t speak privately with doctors or legal counsel.
Over the weekend, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring immigration officials to remove the guards watching over Bayron Rovidio Marin, take off the handcuffs and leave him unrestrained.
“He is presently detained under restrictions that limit his access to counsel, medical providers, and family,” U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela wrote in her Oct. 4 order. “He has been questioned by government officials while in pain and under the influence of medication. He cannot place phone calls and remains handcuffed to a hospital bed despite a broken leg that prevents him from walking. He has received no more than a vague explanation for his detention, and Respondents’ proffered excuses for delaying a formal notice are unsupported by facts.”
Despite Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s insistence on holding the man, Valenzuela said the government failed to provide any proof that he had “violated any law or regulation” or show that he was a “flight risk.”
To date, ICE has not placed Rovidio Marin in removal proceedings, charged him with violating immigration law, set bond, issued a Notice to Appear or otherwise processed him, according to the order. The government told the court that they would determine the immigration status of Rovidio Marin once he was released from the hospital. His attorneys argued being indefinitely held without any charges is a clear constitutional violation.
The Department of Homeland Security and the medical center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under federal law, officers initiating warrantless arrests must provide the person in custody a reason why they were arrested or detained and within 48 hours determine if the person will remain in custody, released on bond or given a notice to appear in court and an arrest warrant issued. Those rules are only waived in extraordinary circumstances. The judge noted that the September 11 attacks previously qualified as an “extraordinary circumstance” in delaying notices to appear to noncitizen detainees, but said that Rovidio Marin has been held “substantially longer.”
It’s unclear exactly how he was injured, but his lawyers say that Rovidio Marin had been at the car wash on Aug. 27, when immigration agents doing a “roving patrol” stormed in and raided it.
In an emailed press statement, Cynthia Santiago, Attorney for CLEAN Carwash Worker Center and Nicolas Thompson-Lleras, Attorney for CHIRLA said he suffered severe injuries and was arrested by Border Patrol agents who transferred him into ICE custody.
“For 37 days, our client was forced to endure medical treatment and recovery with ICE agents in his room, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” the statement read. “ICE agents listened to every conversation between him and his doctors,” they stated. “They interrogated him while he was in pain and under the influence of medication. They did not permit him to see his family and removed his access to phone calls.”
According to the judge’s order, Rovidio Marin has been under the supervision of ICE, which contracted with Spectrum Detention Services to provide guards at the hospital where he was taken.
Once admitted he was placed under what is known as a “blackout” procedure for patients in law-enforcement custody, making it harder for anyone to find him. He was registered under the pseudonym “Har Maine UNK Thirteen.”
Two to four uniformed guards —either Spectrum employees or ICE agents— “have been continuously stationed in Petitioner’s hospital room, monitoring him at all times, including while he sleeps, eats, uses the restroom, or receives medical care,” according to a declaration referenced in the order.
“It’s fundamental that you can’t be detained indefinitely without charges,” said Jean Reisz, co-director of the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, who is representing Rovidio Marin in the habeas case. “Freedom from restraint is the cornerstone of our society and so to arrest someone and withhold their liberty for an extended period of time without any charges, it’s antithetical to our constitutional system and our immigration laws. Our immigration laws do provide for the rights of immigrants as well.”
No, a federal judge ruled, Trump cannot command the California National Guard to invade Portland, Ore. At the request of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and others, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut broadened a temporary restraining order that had blocked Oregon’s National Guard from being used by the federal government. It now includes not just California’s troops but troops from any state. At least for the next two weeks.
It’s the kind of legal loss Trump should be used to it by now, especially when it comes to the Golden State. Since Trump 2.0 hit the White House this year with Project 2025 folded up in his back pocket, the state of California has sued the administration 42 times, literally about once a week.
While many of those cases are still pending, California is racking up a series of wins that restored more than $160 billion in funding and at least slowed down (and in some cases stopped) the steamrolling of civil rights on issues including birthright citizenship and immigration policy.
“We have won in 80% of the cases,” Bonta told me. “Whether it be a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, and more and more now permanent final injunctions after the whole trial court case is done.”
I’ll take it. We all need some positive news. I don’t often write just about the good, but in these strange days, it’s helpful to have a reminder that the fight is always worth having when it comes to protecting our rights. And, despite the partisan Supreme Court, the reason that we are still holding on to democracy is because the system still works, albeit like a ’78 Chevy with the doors rusting off.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom has made himself the face of California’s fights against Trump, taking on a pugnacious and audacious attitude especially on social media, the day-in, day-out slugging in those battles is often done by Bonta and his team in courtrooms across the country.
It’s hard to recall, but months ago, Newsom called a special session of the Legislature to give Bonta a $25-million allowance to defend not just California but democracy. And in a moment when many of us fear that checks and balances promised in the Constitution have turned out to be little more than happy delusions, Bonta has a message: The courts are (mostly) holding and California’s lawyers aren’t just fighting, they’re winning.
“We can do things that governors can’t do,” Bonta said. “No role and no moment has been more important than this one.”
Bonta told me that he often hears that Trump is disregarding the courts, so “what’s the point of litigation at all? What’s the point of a court order at all? He’s just going to ignore them.”
But, he said, the administration has been following judges’ rulings — so far. While there have been instances, especially around deportations, that knock on the door of lawlessness, at least for California, Trump is “following all of our court orders,” Bonta said.
“We’re making a difference,” he said.
A few days ago, the U.S. Department of Education was forced to send out a final chunk of funds it had attempted to withhold from schools. Bonta, in a multistate lawsuit, successfully protected that money, which schools need this year to help migrant children and English learners, train teachers, buy new technology and pay for before- and after-school programs, among other uses.
That’s a permanent, final ruling — no appeals.
Another recent win saw California land a permanent injunction against the feds when it comes to stopping their payments for costs associated with state energy projects. That a win both for the climate and consumers, who benefit when we make energy more efficiently.
Last week, Bonta won another permanent injunction, blocking the Trump administration’s effort to tie grants related to homeland security to compliance with his immigration policies. Safety shouldn’t be tied to deportations, especially in California, where our immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding community members.
Those are just a few of Bonta’s victories. Of course, Trump and his minions aren’t happy about them. Stephen Miller, the shame of Santa Monica, seems to have especially lost his marbles over the National Guard ruling. On social media, Miller seems to be attacking the justice system, and attorneys general such as Bonta.
“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Never mind that the Oregon judge who issued the National Guard ruling is a Trump appointee.
“Their goal, I think, is to chill and pause and worry judges; to chill and pause and worry the press; to chill and pause and worry attorneys general who stand up for the rule of law and for democracy, who go to court and fight for what’s right and fight for the law,” Bonta said.
Bonta expects the administration, far from learning any lessons or harboring self-reflection during this mad dash toward autocracy, to continue full speed ahead.
“We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see it fast, and we’re going to see it escalate,” he said. “None of that is good, including putting military in American cities or, you know, Trump treating them like his royal guard instead of the National Guard.”
Even when the Trump administration loses, “they always have this like second move and maybe a third, where they are always trying to advance their agenda, even when they’ve been blocked by a court, even when they’ve been told that they’re acting unlawfully or unconstitutionally,” he said.
On Monday, Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent the court’s ruling on the National Guard, a massive escalation of his effort to militarize American cities.
But California remains on a winning streak, much to Trump’s dismay.
It’s my bet that as long as our judges continue to honor the rule of law, that streak will hold.
A journalist for the website L.A. Taco filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday, alleging officers have repeatedly interfered with his constitutional right to document sweeps of homeless encampments throughout the city.
Lexis-Olivier Ray said officers and city sanitation employees have wrongfully threatened him with arrest — and in one instance actually placed him in handcuffs — as he tried to report on encampment sweeps in Skid Row and West L.A. between August and November of last year, according to the complaint.
“I tried to resolve the issue outside of a courtroom. But instead of trying to come to an understanding, LAPD officers responded by arresting me and holding me in the back of a patrol car in handcuffs for nearly an hour, before releasing me without any charges,” Ray said in a statement. “At a time when the First Amendment is being threatened by people in power, and journalists are under attack, it’s more important than ever to reaffirm our rights to film police and government officials in public spaces without threats of arrest.”
In some of the incidents, Ray had crossed yellow crime scene tape. But his attorney, Peter Bibring, argued the tape was put up by sanitation workers rather than police and none of the incidents were active crime scenes.
City workers claimed Ray was interfering with their operations and in a “work zone,” but the suit contends other members of the public were able to walk through the area and he created no disruption.
“LAPD consistently fails to get the basic point that the First Amendment forbids them from closing areas to the press unless its required for a specific and overriding concern,” Bibring said.
Jennifer Forkish, the LAPD’s communications director, said that while she could not comment on pending litigation, the department “fully recognizes the rights of the press to cover public spaces and police activity.”
“Our officers are trained to respect those rights while maintaining public safety,” she said.
The city attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit comes at a time when LAPD’s treatment of the press has come under increasing scrutiny in courtrooms.
Last week, a judge barred police and federal law enforcement from using less-lethal weapons on journalists after a spate of incidents in which reporters were hurt during summer protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids. The city also recently settled two lawsuits filed by journalists who claimed they were injured or wrongfully arrested during protests.
Ray’s lawsuit claims city workers singled him out.
During one September incident, an officer approached Ray and told him “I know exactly who you are” before demanding he leave the area, according to the complaint. In another, he was observing a clean up behind the yellow tape when a sanitation worker purposefully obstructed his view and ordered him to move back while on a public sidewalk, the suit alleges.
Last October, an LAPD officer handcuffed Ray on suspicion of interfering with a clean-up. Video from the scene that the reporter posted to X shows the clean-up work continuing uninterrupted even as an officer tells Ray they are going to “put him in cuffs.” Ray was never formally arrested or charged with a crime.
This is not the first time the department has faced accusations of retaliation against Ray. In 2020, he was arrested for failure to disperse while covering chaotic celebrations that followed the Dodgers World Series victory. A 2021 Times investigation showed that Ray was the only person, among the hundreds in the streets that night, that the LAPD later sought to have charged with a crime.
Ten days after a California state lawmaker announced legal action against the city of Sacramento over DUI claims, an attorney representing her released video of the crash and excerpts from bodycam footage of her interaction with officers. State Sen. Sabrina Cervantes got into a crash on May 19 at 14th and S streets while on her way to work at the Capitol. The Sacramento Police Department initially said that Cervantes showed signs of intoxication, which led to her being cited. A toxicology report later came back negative. Since then, Cervantes has filed a government claim, which is the first step toward a civil lawsuit. She claims that police arrested her without probable cause in violation of state and federal protections against unlawful search and seizure.On May 30, the police department said it would release bodycam footage but later said it would not do so because it was part of an investigation. However, an attorney representing Cervantes released a heavily edited and narrated video that went into further details about the crash, police reports and the lawmaker’s arrest. The video is part of a supplemental letter sent to the attorneys by the city of Sacramento.The roughly 15-minute video begins with surveillance footage of the crash, showing a gray vehicle not coming to a complete stop before crossing the intersection and eventually colliding with Cervantes’ state-owned vehicle.Next, the video text narrative states a police affidavit claims Cervantes had an “unsteady gait,” showing a part of the report that has that wording. A clip of Cervantes walking is shown next, and she can be heard telling officers, “My back is starting to really get to me.”In the following clip, an officer is heard asking her what hurts, and she can be heard saying her back and spine. But then video text claims police did not disclose her injuries when they requested a warrant from a judge, citing the “unsteady gait.”Another part of the police report is shown, with X marks under “slurred speech” and “slow speech.”More bodycam footage is shown, with an officer asking Cervantes to perform a “horizontal gaze” field sobriety test.”So I guess the question is, can’t I just do a blood test, though?” Cervantes said in response.”I could,” the officer said.As the officer responded to Cervantes’ request for a blood test, text on the screen reads “Perjury by officer,” with the video later revealing part of the report claiming that Cervantes refused requests to do a blood test.Bodycam from an Officer Foster is shown next, where he appears to be taking a phone call, in which he at some point said Cervantes was acting defensive. The clip ends with an audible click and video text claiming Foster had just turned off his bodycam.The video cuts to black and text that reads, “Missing 5 minutes of footage – body cam appears to be turned off.”Following that statement, bodycam from an Officer Williams is played next. He can be heard saying that Cervantes sounded “a little lethargic” but that he could not smell alcohol on her breath.”If I had to, you know, make a wild guess, there is a possibility — I have a reasonable suspicion that she has something on board that’s causing impairment,” Williams said in the video.The video narrative then alleges that officers treated the other driver, who was not named, better compared to Cervantes when interviewing her, stating that she was asked a minimal number of questions.According to the video, the woman was not asked to exit her vehicle or perform a field sobriety test. She is also heard saying she did not have her driver’s license or insurance when asked.After being asked if she has any complaints of pain, the officer is heard concluding his interview with the woman with the following four questions:If she was on her phoneIf she had her seatbelt onIf the airbags deployedIf she was drinkingShe said no to all of those questions.Bodycam footage from three days after shows an officer calling the other driver back with follow-up questions from the crash.”There’s body camera footage of us and things that are written in the report that are slightly different,” the officer said in the video.He asks the woman about Cervantes’ demeanor after the crash, to which she said that she appeared shaken up.The officer then repeatedly asked if Cervantes appeared to have any injuries or signs of blood. The woman again said no to those questions.Video text afterward reads, “Attempts to suggest Senator Cervantes was somehow suspicious for calling for help from inside her vehicle.”The officer noted multiple times that Cervantes was in her vehicle for a while after the crash.Following that phone call, video text states that four days after the crash, Officer Williams filed a report to the DMV that Cervantes refused to do a blood test after her arrest.An excerpt from the report shows “Chemical Test Refusal” is marked with an X. The entire video highlights much of why Cervantes is seeking legal action, alleging false sworn police statements for her arrest warrant, false sworn statements to the DMV and the leaking of false claims to news outlets that she was driving under the influence.The senator also alleges that police retaliated against her “due to her introduction of legislation to curb abuse by police of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems and due to bias related to her identity as an openly LGBTQ+ Latina elected official.”You can watch the entire video here.Cervantes’ attorneys told KCRA 3 they would not release the raw footage. Asked about how much was edited, they said: “The video has been edited for privacy purposes to protect clients, patients, and others.”KCRA 3 has issued a public records request for the raw footage, which police denied. Police declined again to release the full footage when asked on Thursday.A police representative said that KCRA 3’s public records request did not meet the criteria for mandatory to release to the media, and cited a California code for investigatory records exemption, 7923.600 (a) and related provisions.Police said they would not comment on the case due to pending litigation. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
Ten days after a California state lawmaker announced legal action against the city of Sacramento over DUI claims, an attorney representing her released video of the crash and excerpts from bodycam footage of her interaction with officers.
State Sen. Sabrina Cervantes got into a crash on May 19 at 14th and S streets while on her way to work at the Capitol.
The Sacramento Police Department initially said that Cervantes showed signs of intoxication, which led to her being cited. A toxicology report later came back negative.
Since then, Cervantes has filed a government claim, which is the first step toward a civil lawsuit. She claims that police arrested her without probable cause in violation of state and federal protections against unlawful search and seizure.
On May 30, the police department said it would release bodycam footage but later said it would not do so because it was part of an investigation.
However, an attorney representing Cervantes released a heavily edited and narrated video that went into further details about the crash, police reports and the lawmaker’s arrest. The video is part of a supplemental letter sent to the attorneys by the city of Sacramento.
The roughly 15-minute video begins with surveillance footage of the crash, showing a gray vehicle not coming to a complete stop before crossing the intersection and eventually colliding with Cervantes’ state-owned vehicle.
Next, the video text narrative states a police affidavit claims Cervantes had an “unsteady gait,” showing a part of the report that has that wording. A clip of Cervantes walking is shown next, and she can be heard telling officers, “My back is starting to really get to me.”
In the following clip, an officer is heard asking her what hurts, and she can be heard saying her back and spine. But then video text claims police did not disclose her injuries when they requested a warrant from a judge, citing the “unsteady gait.”
Another part of the police report is shown, with X marks under “slurred speech” and “slow speech.”
More bodycam footage is shown, with an officer asking Cervantes to perform a “horizontal gaze” field sobriety test.
“So I guess the question is, can’t I just do a blood test, though?” Cervantes said in response.
“I could,” the officer said.
As the officer responded to Cervantes’ request for a blood test, text on the screen reads “Perjury by officer,” with the video later revealing part of the report claiming that Cervantes refused requests to do a blood test.
Bodycam from an Officer Foster is shown next, where he appears to be taking a phone call, in which he at some point said Cervantes was acting defensive. The clip ends with an audible click and video text claiming Foster had just turned off his bodycam.
The video cuts to black and text that reads, “Missing 5 minutes of footage – body cam appears to be turned off.”
Following that statement, bodycam from an Officer Williams is played next. He can be heard saying that Cervantes sounded “a little lethargic” but that he could not smell alcohol on her breath.
“If I had to, you know, make a wild guess, there is a possibility — I have a reasonable suspicion that she has something on board that’s causing impairment,” Williams said in the video.
The video narrative then alleges that officers treated the other driver, who was not named, better compared to Cervantes when interviewing her, stating that she was asked a minimal number of questions.
According to the video, the woman was not asked to exit her vehicle or perform a field sobriety test. She is also heard saying she did not have her driver’s license or insurance when asked.
After being asked if she has any complaints of pain, the officer is heard concluding his interview with the woman with the following four questions:
If she was on her phone
If she had her seatbelt on
If the airbags deployed
If she was drinking
She said no to all of those questions.
Bodycam footage from three days after shows an officer calling the other driver back with follow-up questions from the crash.
“There’s body camera footage of us and things that are written in the report that are slightly different,” the officer said in the video.
He asks the woman about Cervantes’ demeanor after the crash, to which she said that she appeared shaken up.
The officer then repeatedly asked if Cervantes appeared to have any injuries or signs of blood. The woman again said no to those questions.
Video text afterward reads, “Attempts to suggest Senator Cervantes was somehow suspicious for calling for help from inside her vehicle.”
The officer noted multiple times that Cervantes was in her vehicle for a while after the crash.
Following that phone call, video text states that four days after the crash, Officer Williams filed a report to the DMV that Cervantes refused to do a blood test after her arrest.
An excerpt from the report shows “Chemical Test Refusal” is marked with an X.
The entire video highlights much of why Cervantes is seeking legal action, alleging false sworn police statements for her arrest warrant, false sworn statements to the DMV and the leaking of false claims to news outlets that she was driving under the influence.
The senator also alleges that police retaliated against her “due to her introduction of legislation to curb abuse by police of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems and due to bias related to her identity as an openly LGBTQ+ Latina elected official.”
Cervantes’ attorneys told KCRA 3 they would not release the raw footage. Asked about how much was edited, they said: “The video has been edited for privacy purposes to protect clients, patients, and others.”
KCRA 3 has issued a public records request for the raw footage, which police denied. Police declined again to release the full footage when asked on Thursday.
A police representative said that KCRA 3’s public records request did not meet the criteria for mandatory to release to the media, and cited a California code for investigatory records exemption, 7923.600 (a) and related provisions.
Police said they would not comment on the case due to pending litigation.
The family of a 13-year-old boy found dead in a roadside ditch earlier this year is suing the city of Los Angeles, claiming parks department officials failed to do a proper background check on the youth soccer coach accused of sexually abusing and murdering the teen.
Oscar Daniel Hernandez and Gladys Bautista Vasquez, the parents of Oscar Omar Rodriguez, filed a notice of claim against the city on Sept. 11, contending the Los Angeles Dept. of Parks & Recreation exposed children to harm by granting Mario Garcia-Aquino a permit to coach youth soccer teams.
“The City of Los Angeles, through its permit application and approval process, knew or should have known that Mario Garcia-Aquino would be using city parks solely to groom and sexually abuse children on a daily or weekly basis under the guise of a boys’ soccer club,” read the notice, typically a precursor to a civil lawsuit.
Gladys Hernandez, mother of Oscar Omar Hernandez, weeps while talking about her son during a news conference outside the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, CA on April 30, 2025.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Oscar played for the Hurricane Valley Boys Soccer Club in the Sylmar area, which Garcia-Aquino coached. The family’s attorney, Michael Carrillo, said the city was negligent by failing to notify parents that he’d twice faced sexual abuse allegations from players in the past.
The boy was found dead in Ventura County in April, days after traveling to Palmdale to Garcia-Aquino’s home where he was supposed to help his coach make soccer jerseys. Prosecutors have since accused Garcia-Aquino of killing the teen after sexually assaulting him. Oscar died of alcohol poisoning, records show.
Garcia-Aquino is now awaiting trial for Oscar’s murder and the prior sex abuse allegations. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
A police booking photo of Mario Edgardo Garcia-Aquino, 43, accused of killing 13-year-old Oscar Omar Hernandez on March, 28 2025.
(Jessica Foster/Courtesy of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Depertment)
The Los Angeles Police Department investigated an allegation of sex abuse against Garcia-Aquino in late 2022, officials previously told The Times, but a criminal case was never filed because the victim would not cooperate with law enforcement. A second player accused Garcia-Aquino of abuse in 2024, prompting a sheriff’s department investigation.
But the L.A. County district attorney’s office took more than 10 months to file charges, a previous Times investigation showed, raising questions about whether prosecutors missed a chance to arrest the coach before the alleged killing.
Undated handout photo of Oscar Omar Hernandez. The 7th grader was killed March 28 and his body was found five days after he left his Sun Valley home to meet with his coach in Lancaster.
(Courtesy of Hernandez family)
“We would expect for the LAPD to inform the city that they work for that ‘Hey maybe this guy should be on the do not permit list,’” said Michael Carrillo, one of the family’s attorneys. “That would be a very rational reasonable approach. Anything to prevent this man from being around kids.”
Garcia-Aquino is undocumented, and news of his arrest also previously drew a furious response from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which called him a “depraved illegal alien who should have never been in this country,” in a post on X earlier this year. Carrillo, however, said it would be “wrong” to blame the murder on immigration policies and that the family’s frustration lies with city and county officials.
A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. Calls and e-mails to the Department of Parks and Recreation were not returned. Carrillo said he did not know when Garcia-Aquino’s coaching permit was last renewed.
