WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Rosenberg is still trying to understand why President Trump would free the man who defrauded him out of a quarter of a million dollars.
Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president’s decision in November to commute the sentence of former private equity executive David Gentile has left him angry and confused.
“I just feel I’ve been betrayed,” Rosenberg, 68, said. “I don’t know why he would do this, unless there was some sort of gain somewhere, or some favor being called in. I am very disappointed. I kind of put him above this kind of thing.”
Trump’s decision to release Gentile from prison less than two weeks into his seven-year sentence has drawn scrutiny from securities attorneys and a U.S. senator — all of whom say the White House’s explanation for the act of clemency is not adding up. It’s also drawn the ire of his victims.
“I think it is disgusting,” said CarolAnn Tutera, 70, who invested more than $400,000 with Gentile’s company, GPB Capital. Gentile, she added, “basically pulled a Bernie Madoff and swindled people out of their money, and then he gets to go home to his wife and kids.”
Gentile and his business partner, Jeffry Schneider, were convicted of securities and wire fraud in August 2024 for carrying out what federal prosecutors described as a $1.6-billion Ponzi scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors. After an eight-week trial, it took a jury five hours to return a guilty verdict.
More than 1,000 people attested to their losses after investing with GPB, according to federal prosecutors who described the victims as “hardworking, everyday people.”
When Gentile and Schneider were sentenced in May, Joseph Nocella Jr., the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, and Christopher Raia, a senior official in the Justice Department, called their punishment “well deserved” and a warning to would-be fraudsters.
“May today’s sentencing deter anyone who seeks to greedily profit off their clients through deceitful practices,” Raia said in a statement.
Then, on Nov. 26 — just 12 days after Gentile reported to prison — Trump commuted his sentence with “no further fines, restitution, probation, or other conditions,” according to a grant of clemency signed by Trump. Under those terms, Gentile may not have to pay $15 million that federal prosecutors are seeking in forfeiture.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters this month that prosecutors had failed to tie “supposedly fraudulent” representations to Gentile and that his conviction was a “weaponization of justice” led by the Biden administration — even though the sentences and convictions were lauded by Trump’s own appointees.
The White House declined to say who advised Trump in the decision or whether Trump was considering granting clemency to Schneider, Gentile’s co-defendant. Attorneys for Gentile and Schneider did not respond to a request seeking comment.
Adam Gana, a securities attorney whose firm has represented more than 250 GPB investors, called the White House’s explanation “a word salad of nonsense,” and questioned why Trump granted Gentile a commutation, which lessens a sentence, rather than a pardon, which forgives the offense itself.
“If the government wasn’t able to prove their case, why not pardon David Gentile? And why is his partner still in prison?” Gana said. “It’s left us with more questions than answers.”
‘It hurts a lot’
To Rosenberg, Tutera and two other investors interviewed by The Times, the president’s decision stripped away any sense of closure they felt after Gentile and Schneider were convicted.
Rosenberg has tried not to dwell on the $250,000 he lost in 2016, after a broker “painted a beautiful picture” of steady returns and long-term profits. The investments were supposed to generate income for him during retirement.
“A quarter of a million dollars, it hurts a lot,” Rosenberg said. “It changed a lot of things I do. Little trips that I wanted to take with my grandkids — well, they’re not quite as nice as they were planned on being.”
Jeffrey Rosenberg, a longtime Trump supporter, said he felt “betrayed” after the president granted clemency to convicted fraudster David Gentile.
(Scott Sady / For The Times)
Tutera, who runs a hormone replacement therapy office in Arizona, invested more than $400,000 with GPB at the recommendation of a financial advisor. She hoped the returns would help support her retirement after her husband had died.
“I was on grief brain at the time and just feel I was taken advantage of and really sold a bill of goods,” said Tutera, 70. Now, she says: “I have to keep working to make up for what I was owed.” She has been able to recover only about $40,000.
Tutera said her sister, Julie Ullman, and their 97-year-old mother also fell victim to the scheme. Their mother lost more than $100,000 and now finds herself spending down savings she had planned to leave to her children and not trusting people, she said.
“That’s really sad,” Tutera said. “People, unfortunately, have turned into thieves, liars and cheaters, and I don’t know what’s happened to the world, but we’ve lost our way to be kind.”
Ullman, 58, who manages a medical practice in Arizona, said the financial loss was life-changing.
“I’m going to have to work longer than I thought I would because that was my retirement fund,” Ullman said.
Mei, a 71-year-old licensed acupuncturist who asked to not use her full name out of embarrassment, said a broker introduced her to the GPB investment funds at a lunch meeting targeting divorced women. She eventually invested $500,000 and lost all of it. It was only through lawsuits that she was able to recover roughly $214,000 of her money, she said.
Mei had planned to retire in New York to be close to her children. But the loss of income has forced her to live in China, where the cost of living is much lower, six months out of the year, she said.
Mei fears Trump’s decision to commute Gentile’s sentence will allow these schemes to continue.
“Donald Trump is promoting more white-collar financial criminals, for sure,” Mei said. “How unfair.”
Bob Van De Veire, a securities attorney who has represented more than 100 GPB investors, said he has mostly handled negligence cases against the brokers who touted GPB investments.
“Based on all the red flags that were present, they should have never sold these investments at all,” Van De Veire said.
Gana, the securities attorney, added that he will continue to fight for victims in civil court, noting the clemency only addressed the criminal conviction.
The commutation caught the eye of Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who sent a letter to the White House last week asking several questions: Why, for example, did Gentile receive clemency while Schneider did not? And what were the trial errors cited as a reason for the commutation? He said victims deserve answers.
“They will not forget that when they needed their government to stand with them against the man who stole their futures, their President chose to stand with the criminal instead,” Gallego wrote.
Rosenberg, the retiree from Nevada, said he still supports the president but can’t help but think Trump’s decision makes him “look like another of the swamp” that Trump says he wants to drain.
“I think Trump does a lot of good things,” he said, “but this is a bad one.”
Still, Rosenberg is hopeful Trump may do right by the victims — even if it’s just by admitting he made a mistake.
“I would like to think that he was fed some bad information somewhere along the way,” he said. “If that is the case … at least come forward and say, ‘I regret it.’ ”
Dozens of California National Guard troops under President Trump’s command apparently slipped out of Los Angeles under cover of darkness early Sunday morning, ahead of an appellate court’s order to be gone by noon Monday.
Administration officials would not immediately confirm whether the troops had decamped. But video taken outside the Roybal Federal Building downtown just after midnight on Sunday and reviewed by The Times shows a large tactical truck and four white passenger vans leaving the facility, which has been patrolled by armed soldiers since June.
About 300 California troops remain under federal control, some 100 of whom were still active in Los Angeles as of last week, court records show.
“There were more than usual, and all of them left — there was not a single one that stayed,” said protester Rosa Martinez, who has demonstrated outside the federal building for months and was there Sunday.
Troops were spotted briefly later that day, but had not been seen again as of Monday afternoon, Martinez said.
The development that forced the troops to leave was part of a sprawling legal fight for control of federalized soldiers nationwide that remains ongoing.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued the order late Friday but softened an even more stringent edict from a lower court judge last week that would have forced the president to relinquish command of the state’s forces. Trump federalized thousands of California National Guard troops in June to quell unrest over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
“For the first time in six months, there will be no military deployed on the streets of Los Angeles,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a statement. “While this decision is not final, it is a gratifying and hard-fought step in the right direction.”
The ruling Friday came from the same three-judge panel that handed the president one of his most sweeping second-term victories this summer, after it found that the California deployment could go forward under an obscure and virtually untested subsection of the law.
That precedent set a “great level of deference” as the standard of review for deployments that have since mushroomed across the country, circumscribing debate even in courts where it is not legally binding.
But the so-called Newsom standard — California Gov. Gavin Newsom was the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit — has drawn intense scrutiny and increasingly public rebuke in recent weeks, even as the Trump administration argues it affords the administration new and greater powers.
In October, the 7th Circuit — the appellate court that covers Illinois — found the president’s claims had “insufficient evidence,” upholding a block on a troop deployment in and around Chicago.
“Even applying great deference to the administration’s view of the facts … there is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws,” the panel wrote.
That ruling is now under review at the Supreme Court.
In November, the 9th Circuit vacated its earlier decision allowing Trump’s Oregon federalization to go forward amid claims the Justice Department misrepresented important facts in its filings. That case is under review by a larger panel of the appellate division, with a decision expected early next year.
Despite mounting pressure, Justice Department lawyers have doubled down on their claims of near-total power, arguing that federalized troops remain under the president’s command in perpetuity, and that courts have no role in reviewing their deployment.
When Judge Mark J. Bennett asked the Department of Justice whether federalized troops could “stay called up forever” under the government’s reading of the statute at a hearing in October, the answer was an unequivocal yes.
“There’s not a word in the statute that talks about how long they can remain in federal service,” Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Eric McArthur said.
For now, the fate of 300 federalized California soldiers remains in limbo, though troops are currently barred by court orders from deployment in California and Oregon.
Times staff writers David Zahniser and Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservatives sounded ready on Monday to overrule Congress and give President Trump more power to fire officials at independent agencies and commissions.
The justices heard arguments on whether Trump could fire Rebecca Slaughter, one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member Federal Trade Commission.
The case poses a clash between Congress’ power to structure the government versus the president’s “executive power.”
A ruling for Trump portends a historic shift in the federal government — away from bipartisan experts and toward more partisan control by the president.
Trump’s Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the court should overturn a 1935 decision that upheld independent agencies. The decision “was grievously wrong when decided. It must be overruled,” he told the court.
The court’s three liberals strongly argued against what they called a “radical change” in American government.
If the president is free to fire the leaders of independent agencies, they said, the longstanding civil service laws could be struck down as well.
It would put “massive, uncontrolled and unchecked power in the hands of the president,” Justice Elena Kagan said.
But the six conservatives said they were concerned that these agencies were exercising “executive power” that is reserved to the president.
It was not clear, however, whether the court will rule broadly to cover all independent agencies or focus narrowly on the FTC and other similar commissions.
For most of American history, Congress has created independent boards and commissions to carry out specific missions, each led by a board of experts who were appointed with a fixed term.
But the court’s current conservative majority has contended these commissions and boards are unconstitutional if their officials cannot be fired at will by a new president.
In creating such bodies, Congress often was responding to the problems of a new era.
The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to regulate railroad rates. The FTC, the focus of the court case, was created in 1914 to investigate corporate monopolies. The year before, the Federal Reserve Board was established to supervise banks, prevent panics and regulate the money supply.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market and the National Labor Relations Board to resolve labor disputes.
Decades later, Congress focused on safety. The National Transportation Safety Board was created to investigate aviation accidents, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission investigates products that may pose a danger. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission protects the public from nuclear hazards.
Typically, Congress gave the appointees, a mix of Republicans and Democrats, a fixed term and said they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Slaughter was first appointed by Trump to a Democratic seat and was reappointed by President Biden in 2023 for a seven-year term.
But conservatives often long derided these agencies and commissions as an out-of-control “administrative state,” and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said he believes their independence from direct presidential control is unconstitutional.
“The President’s power to remove — and thus supervise — those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text” of the Constitution, he wrote last year in his opinion, which declared for the first time that a president has immunity from being prosecuted later for crimes while in office.
Roberts spoke for a 6-3 majority in setting out an extremely broad view of presidential power while limiting the authority of Congress.
The Constitution in Article I says Congress “shall have the power…to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution…all other powers vested” in the U.S. government. Article II says, “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
The current court majority believes that the president’s executive power prevails over the power of Congress to set limits by law.
“Congress lacks authority to control the President’s ‘unrestricted power of removal’ with respect to executive officers of the United States,” Roberts wrote last year in Trump vs. United States.
Four months later, Trump won reelection and moved quickly to fire a series of Democratic appointees who had fixed terms set by Congress. Slaughter, along with several other fired appointees, sued, citing the law and her fixed term. They won before federal district judges and the U.S. Court of Appeals.
But Trump’s lawyers filed emergency appeals at the Supreme Court, and the justices, by 6-3 votes, sided with the president and against the fired officials.
In September, the court said it would hear arguments in the case of Trump vs. Slaughter to decide on whether to overturn the Humphrey’s Executor decision.
At the time, conservatives applauded the move. “For far too long, Humphrey’s Executor has allowed unaccountable agencies like the FTC to wield executive power without meaningful oversight,” said Cory Andrews, general counsel for the Washington Legal Foundation.
In defense of the 1935 decision, law professors noted the court said that these independent boards were not purely executive agencies, but also had legislative and judicial duties, like adopting regulations or resolving labor disputes.
During Monday’s argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the principle of “democratic accountability” called for deferring to Congress, not the president.
“Congress decided that some matters should be handled by nonpartisan experts. They said expertise matters with respect to the economy and transportation. So having the president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs and replacing them with loyalists is actually is not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
But that argument gained no traction with Roberts and the conservatives. They said the president is elected and has the executive authority to control federal agencies.
The only apparent doubt involved the Federal Reserve Board, whose independence is prized by business. The Chamber of Commerce said the court should overrule the 1935 decision, but carve out an exception for the Federal Reserve.
Trump’s lawyer grudgingly agreed. If “an exception to the removal power exists,” he wrote in his brief in the Slaughter case, it should be “an agency-specific anomaly” limited to the Federal Reserve.
WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?
The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”
The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.
They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.
Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.
“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.
That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.
In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.
All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.
For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”
The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.
If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.
The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.
In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.
At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”
This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.
She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.
The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.
Voting rights advocates saw a violation.
“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.
Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.
He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.
The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”
The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”
Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court. Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.
Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.
The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.
“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.
They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.
Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.
On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.
“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.
“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.
In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.
Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.
The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.
President Donald Trump speaks with Attorney General Pam Bondi as he delivers an announcement on his Homeland Security Task Force in the State Dining Room of the White House on October 23, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong
Getty Images
President Donald Trump said Friday night he has already decided on his next steps toward Venezuela, offering his clearest indication yet that Washington is preparing new military actions against Nicolás Maduro’s government as the United States dramatically expands its presence in the Caribbean.
“I sort of made up my mind,” Trump told reporters when pressed about recent high-level meetings on Venezuela within his administration and the deployment of U.S. forces near the country’s shores. Speaking briefly as he walked toward Air Force One before departing Washington for a weekend trip to Florida, the president declined to elaborate. “I can’t say what it will be,” he added.
Trump’s comments—captured in an audio recording by a reporter traveling with the press pool—came less than an hour after The Washington Post reported that he had met with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and senior Pentagon officials on Friday. According to the paper, the discussions focused on “a series of options” to advance the administration’s strategy against Venezuela, whose leadership U.S. officials increasingly accuse of turning the country into a narco-state.
Those accusations escalated in August, when U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi doubled the reward for Maduro’s capture to $50 million, calling him “one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers” and alleging he leads the regime-led Soles drug cartel. Bondi cited alleged collaboration between Maduro and criminal groups, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and other transnational networks.
President Trump ordered the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers to the southern Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela Sipa USA U.S. Navy/Sipa USA
A senior U.S. official, speaking anonymously to The Post, said the American forces already positioned in the Caribbean are awaiting orders to “strike and respond” to new operations. The official said Trump prefers to maintain “strategic ambiguity,” withholding clear signals about timing or targets to keep adversaries off balance.
Concerns about a looming escalation intensified Friday after Doral-based U.S. Southern Command posted a video on X showing the destruction of another vessel in the Caribbean, saying four alleged drug traffickers on board had been killed. Since Thursday, the administration has begun referring to the mission as Operation Southern Spear—a campaign Hegseth says is designed to block narcotics shipments bound for the United States.
Even ahead of the announcement, the U.S. Navy had already surged unprecedented firepower into the region. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, entered SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility this week, expanding what officials describe as the largest U.S. military presence in the Caribbean in decades.
Under Operation Southern Spear, an estimated 15,000 to 16,000 personnel are now operating near Venezuela. Washington describes the mobilization as part of a counter-narcotics effort, while Caracas denounces it as a prelude to regime change and has triggered a nationwide military mobilization in response.
At the center of the buildup is the Ford Carrier Strike Group, which arrived Tuesday. The nuclear-powered carrier—capable of launching more than 75 aircraft—is usually escorted by seven Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, including the USS Bainbridge, USS Mahan, USS Winston S. Churchill, and USS Gravely. The deployment also includes two guided-missile cruisers.
A U.S. military video released by the Department of Defense shows a precision strike destroying a high-speed narcotics vessel in international waters on Sept. 2, 2025. The footage, later shared by Trump on Truth Social, was described as targeting the Tren de Aragua criminal organization amid a U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean. Department of Defense
A major amphibious force is also in place. The USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio and USS Fort Lauderdale are carrying roughly 4,500 Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with helicopters, Osprey tilt-rotors and landing craft. Live-fire drills near the Venezuelan coast and the presence of the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News further underscore U.S. readiness. Additional assets include Coast Guard cutters, F-35Bs, MQ-9 Reapers, CH-53 helicopters, and P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft operating from Puerto Rico. A special-operations support vessel, the MV Ocean Trader, is providing logistics and covert-insertion capabilities.
The escalation follows more than 20 U.S. strikes on suspected drug-running boats since September, which have reportedly caused about 80 deaths, including alleged civilian casualties. Although Trump has not authorized land strikes, options under review reportedly include attacks on ports and airstrips tied to trafficking networks.
Venezuela has activated more than 200,000 troops and militia members under “Plan Independencia 200,” reinforcing coastal air defenses—possibly including Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile systems—and hardening strategic sites. With U.S. naval forces operating ever closer to Venezuelan waters, analysts warn the risk of miscalculation is rising.
The USS Gerald R. Ford is the world’s largest aircraft carrier. U.S. Navy
While the deployments are officially framed as part of an anti-narcotics mission, they coincide with growing tensions with Caracas, which is scrambling to reinforce its Russian- and Iranian-backed air defense network amid speculation that U.S. forces may strike targets inside the country.
In recent days, multiple news outlets, including the Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal, have reported that the administration has identified several Venezuelan military facilities allegedly linked to drug trafficking as potential targets. Regional diplomats quoted in those stories have described the expanding U.S. flotilla as an “armada,” warning that the buildup has raised alarm across Latin America.
Inside Venezuela, the arrival of the Ford has heightened public anxiety. Many residents view the deployment of the carrier—rarely used in counter-drug missions—as a symbolic threshold that could signal the next phase of Trump’s pressure campaign. With U.S. officials suggesting orders could come at any moment, uncertainty is deepening in Caracas and among Venezuela’s neighbors, who are watching closely to see whether Washington’s posture shifts from deterrence to action.
Galardonado periodista con más de 30 años de experiencia, especializado en la cobertura de temas sobre Venezuela. Amante de la historia y la literatura.
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from imposing a $1.2-billion fine on UCLA along with stipulations for deep campus changes in exchange for being eligible for federal grants.
The decision is a major win for universities that have struggled to resist President Trump’s attempt to discipline “very bad” universities that he claims have mistreated Jewish students, forcing them to pay exorbitant fines and agree to adhere to conservative standards.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The preliminary injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California, rendered moot — for now — nearly every aspect of a more than 7,000-word settlement offer the federal government sent to the University of California in August after suspending $584 million in medical, science and energy research grants to the Los Angeles campus.
The government said it froze the funds after finding UCLA broke the law by using race as a factor in admissions, recognizing transgender people’s gender identities, and not taking antisemitism complaints seriously during pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 — claims that UC has denied.
The settlement proposal outlined extensive changes to push UCLA — and by extension all of UC — ideologically rightward by calling for an end to diversity-related scholarships, restrictions on foreign student enrollment, a declaration that transgender people do not exist, an end to gender-affirming healthcare for minors, the imposition of free speech limits and more.
“The administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities,” Lin wrote in her opinion. “Agency officials, as well as the president and vice president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune. Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this.”
“It is undisputed,” Lin added, “that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California.”
Universities including Columbia, Brown and Cornell agreed to pay the government hundreds of millions to atone for alleged violations similar to the ones facing UCLA. The University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia also reached agreements with the Trump administration that were focused, respectively, on ending recognition of transgender people and halting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Friday’s decision, for the time being, spares the UC system from proceeding with negotiations that it reluctantly entered with the federal government to avoid further grant cuts and restrictions across the system, which receives $17.5 billion in federal funding each year. UC President James B. Milliken has said that the $1.2-billion fine would “completely devastate” UC and that the system, under fire from the Trump administration, faces “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.”
This is not the first time a judge rebuked the Trump administration for its higher education campaign. Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in September ordered the government to reverse billions in cuts to Harvard. But that case did not wade directly into settlement negotiations.
Those talks with UC have proceeded slowly. In a court hearing last week, a Department of Justice lawyer said “there’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future.” The lawyer argued that the settlement offer was only an idea that had not received UC approval.
Because of that, he said, a lawsuit was inappropriate. Lin disagreed.
“Plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratcheting up defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system.”
The case was brought by more a dozen faculty and staff unions and associations from across UC’s 10 campuses, who said the federal government was violating their 1st Amendment rights and constitutional right to due process. UC, which has avoided directly challenging the government in court, was not party to the suit.
“This is not only a historic lawsuit — brought by every labor union and faculty union in the UC — but also an incredible win,” said Veena Dubal, a UC Irvine law professor and general counsel for one of the plaintiffs, the American Assn. of University Professors, which has members across UC campuses.
Dubal called the decision “a turning point in the fight to save free speech and research in the finest public school system in the world.”
Asked about Friday’s outcome, a spokesperson said UC “remains focused on our vital work to drive innovation, advance medical breakthroughs and strengthen the nation’s long-term competitiveness. UC remains committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the university.”
Zoé Hamstead, chair of external relations and legal affairs for the Council of UC Faculty Assns., said she was “thrilled that the court has affirmed our First Amendment rights.”
The organization is an umbrella group of faculty associations across UC campuses that sued.
Hamstead, an associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, said she was “deeply proud to be part of a coalition that represents the teachers, researchers, and workers of the University of California who are challenging rising authoritarianism in federal court.”
Anna Markowitz, an associate professor in UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and president of the Los Angeles campus faculty association, said her chapter was “extremely pleased with this decision, which will put a pause on the current federal overreach at UC.”
“UCLA faculty are honored to stand with this coalition, which continues to show that when faced with an administration targeting the very heart of higher education, fighting back is the only option,” Markowitz said.
Lin’s injunction is not the final say on the case, which will proceed through the legal process as she determines whether a permanent injunction is warranted. The government also could appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as it has done for other cases, including one filed by UC researchers that restored funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation among other agencies.
An appeals court hearing in that case was held Friday; a decision is pending.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
The justices turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.
Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling.
Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.
Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion.
But Barrett has suggested recently that same-sex marriage might be in a different category than abortion because people have relied on the decision when they married and had children.
Davis drew national attention to eastern Kentucky’s Rowan County when she turned away same-sex couples, saying her faith prevented her from complying with the high court ruling. She defied court orders to issue the licenses until a federal judge jailed her for contempt of court in September 2015.
She was released after her staff issued the licenses on her behalf but removed her name from the form. The Kentucky legislature later enacted a law removing the names of all county clerks from state marriage licenses.
On an overcast morning in September, Hector Alessandro Negrete left his beloved Los Angeles — the city he was brought to at 3 months old — and headed down Interstate 5 to Mexico, the only country where he held a passport.
It was a place that, to him, had “always felt like both a wound and a possibility.”
Negrete, 43, sat in the passenger seat as a friend steered the car south and two more friends in another car followed. He had condensed his life to three full suitcases and his dachshund mix, Lorca.
They pulled over at the beach in San Clemente. Angel Martinez, his soon-to-be former roommate, is deeply spiritual, and his favorite prayer spot is the ocean, so he prayed that Negrete would be blessed and protected — and Lorca too — as they began a new stage in their lives.
On the near-empty beach, the friends embraced and wiped away tears. Martinez handed Negrete a small watermelon.
As instructed, Negrete walked to the edge of the water, said his own prayer and, as a gift of thanks to the cosmos, plopped it into a crashing wave.
Negrete, holding a drink, embraces his friend Angel Martinez as they visit a drag club in Tijuana after leaving Los Angeles a day earlier.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Negrete doesn’t call it self-deportation.
“Self-repatriation,” he said. “I refuse to use this administration’s language.”
President Trump had been in office just over a month when Negrete decided he would return to Mexico. Methodical by nature, he approached the decision like any other — by researching, organizing and planning.
He registered Lorca as an emotional support animal, paid for a vaccine card and a certificate of good health, and crate-trained her in a TSA-approved carrier.
He announced his decision to leave in June on his Substack newsletter: “If you’re thinking, ‘Alessandro’s giving up,’ look deeper. I am choosing freedom. For the first time, I feel unshackled from the expectations of waiting.”
Negrete walks the streets of Boyle Heights while shopping for moving supplies after deciding he would leave the U.S. on his own terms.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Negrete had grown tired of wishing for immigration reform. He had built his career advocating for immigrants such as himself, including stints as statewide coordinator for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, and as executive director for the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance.
He said his work had helped legalize street vending in Los Angeles and he assisted the office of then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris in securing the release of a young woman from immigration detention. He was the first openly undocumented and LGBTQ+ person on the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council.
Under previous administrations, Negrete’s political work had felt like a shield against deportation. Even during Trump’s first term, Negrete had marched at rallies denouncing his immigration policies.
But that was before the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols that tore into Southern California during Trump’s second term. On June 6, as anti-ICE protesters took to the streets, Negrete rushed to downtown Los Angeles when fellow activists told him street medics were needed.
“One of my homies said, ‘Hey fool, what are you doing here?’” he recalled. Seeing Los Angeles police officers advancing on the crowd, he realized that no amount of public support could protect him.
He fled. “Thank God I left.”
Negrete, in red, with his friends and colleagues at a farewell party and yard sale in August.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
In mid-August, Negrete hosted a yard sale and going away party. The flier was tongue-in-cheek: “Everything must go! Including me!”
His red T-shirt stated plainly, “I AM UNDOCUMENTED,” and his aviator sunglasses hid the occasional tears. Tattoos dotted his extremities, including an anchor on his right leg with the words “I refuse to sink.”
“I think it hit me when I started packing my stuff today,” he told a former colleague, Shruti Garg, who had arrived early.
“But the way you’ve invited everyone to join you is so beautiful,” she replied.
One table held American pop-culture knickknacks — sippy cups with Ghostface from the movie “Scream,” collectible Mickey Mouse ears, a Detective Batman purse shaped like a comic book, another purse shaped like the locker from the ‘90s cartoon “Daria.”
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Negrete said the items reminded him of his youth and represented the gothic, quirky aspects of his personality.
“I was born in Mexico, but I don’t know Mexico,” he said. “So I’m leaving the American parts of me that are no longer going to serve me.”
The back yard slowly filled with loved ones from Negrete’s various social circles. There was his mostly queer softball team — the Peacocks — his running group, his chosen family and his blood family.
Negrete’s close friend Joel Menjivar looked solemn.
“I’m scared it’s going to start a movement,” he said. “Undocumented or DACA friends who are talented and integral to the fabric of L.A. might get ideas to leave.”
Another friend, Mario Mariscal, said he took Negrete’s decision the hardest, though at first he didn’t believe Negrete was serious. More than once he asked, “You really want to give up everything you’ve built here for a new start in Mexico?”
Eventually, Negrete had to tell Mariscal that his questions weren’t helpful. During a deeper conversation about his decision, Negrete shared that he was tired of living with the constant fear of getting picked up, herded into an unmarked van and taken away.
“I just kept telling him, ‘That’s not going to happen to you,’” Mariscal said. “But the more this administration keeps doing it, the more it’s in our face, the more we’re seeing every horror story about that, it became clear that, you know what, you do have a point. You do have to do what’s right for you.”
Negrete continues packing for his move to Mexico as roommate Martinez works at their Boyle Heights home.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Negrete is cognizant of the privilege that makes his departure different from that of many other immigrants. He is white-passing, fluent in Spanish and English, and moved with $10,000 in savings.
In June, he was hired as executive director of a U.S.-based nonprofit, Old School Hub, that works to combat ageism around the world. The role allowed him to live wherever he wanted.
He decided to settle in Guadalajara, a growing technology hub, with historic buildings featuring Gothic architecture that he found beautiful. It also helped that Guadalajara has one of the country’s most vibrant LGBTQ+ scenes and is a four-hour drive from Puerto Vallarta, a renowned queer resort destination.
As Negrete began his new job while still in L.A., he picked a moving date — Sept. 4 — and booked a two-week Airbnb near the baseball stadium.
That Guadalajara’s team, the Charros de Jalisco, wore Dodger blue felt like a good omen.
On the day he left the United States, Negrete and Martinez hold a prayer at the beach in San Clemente in which Negrete offers thanks to the universe with an offering of a watermelon.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
On the drive toward the border, messages poured into Negrete’s phone.
“I’m sending you all my love Alessandro,” one read. “Cuídate. [Take care.] Know that even though you’re far away from home, you carry us with you.”
“Todo te va a salir bien,” read another. Everything will go well for you, it said. “Spread your wings and flyyyyy.”
Afraid of being stopped and detained at the airport, as has happened to other immigrants attempting to leave the country, Negrete preferred to drive to Tijuana and then fly to Guadalajara.
Negrete’s driver, his friend Jorge Leonardo, turned into a parking lot at the sign reading “LAST USA EXIT.”
Negrete put on his black felt tejana hat and called Iris Rodriguez, who was in the companion car. He asked her to cross on foot with him.
Negrete walks his last few steps on American soil as he enters Mexico en route to Guadalajara, his new home.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“I don’t want to go alone,” he said.
“We’re still on American soil,” Leonardo said. “You can still change your mind.”
Negrete ignored him.
“See y’all on the other side,” he said as he hopped out of the car.
He and Rodriguez stopped for photos in front of a sign with an arrow pointing “To Mexico.” Around a corner, the border came into full view — a metal turnstile with layers of concertina wire above it.
The line for Mexicanos was unceremoniously quick. The immigration agent barely glanced at Negrete’s passport before waving him through.
On the other side, a busker sang “Piano Man” by Billy Joel in perfect English.
“Welcome to the motherland,” Rodriguez told him. Negrete let out a deep breath.
Negrete tours downtown Guadalajara, where he now lives.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Negrete’s immediate family members, and almost all of his extended family, live in the U.S.
He was born in Manzanillo, Colima, in 1982. Three months later, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where his parents had two more children.
At 17, Negrete was one of two students in his graduating class at Roosevelt High School to get into UC Berkeley. That’s when he found out he didn’t have papers.
His parents had divorced and his father married a U.S. citizen, obtaining a green card when Negrete was at Roosevelt. They began the legalization process for Negrete in 1999, he said, but two years later he came out to his family as gay.
His father was unsupportive and refused to continue seeking to adjust his immigration status. By the time they mended their relationship, it was too late. Negrete had aged out of the pathway at 21.
In 2008, Negrete said, he was arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. Four years later, President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to protect immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Negrete failed to qualify because of the DUI.
He said he got his record expunged in 2016, but — again — it was too late.
Negrete waited until his last night in the U.S. to tell his mother, who now lives in Colorado, that he was leaving. He had grown tired of friends and other family members begging him to change his mind.
He had partially hinged his decision on the fact that his mom was in remission from her third bout with cancer and had just obtained legal residency. With life more stable for her, he could finally seek stability for himself.
“You taught me to dream,” Negrete recalled telling her. “This is me dreaming. I want to see the world.”
She cried and scolded him, promising to visit and repeating what she had said when he came out to her all those years before: “I wish you told me sooner.”
At a hotel in Tijuana, Negrete’s emotions finally caught up with him.
The day after Negrete and his three friends left L.A., three more friends surprised him by arriving in Tijuana for a final Friday night out together. One of them presented a gift he had put together with help from Negrete’s entire social circle — a video with loved ones sharing messages of encouragement.
In Negrete’s hotel room, as he and his friends watched, the mood grew sentimental.
“You’re basically the one that formed the family friend tree,” one friend said in her clip. “Friendships do not die out in distance.”
Negrete sobbed. “Yes! Friendships don’t have borders,” he said.
“Every single one of you has said this hasn’t hit y’all, like it’s a mini vacation,” he said. “I want to think of it as an extended vacation.”
“This isn’t goodbye, this is we’ll see each other soon,” he continued.
Off his soapbox, Negrete then chided his friends for making him cry before heading to a drag show.
Negrete had a habit of leaving social gatherings abruptly. His friends joked that they would refer to him as “catch me on the 101” because every time he disappeared during a night out, they would open Apple’s Find My app and see him on the freeway heading home.
“We’re not gonna catch him on the 101 no more,” Martinez said.
The last few flights of stairs lead Iris Rodriguez and Negrete to his Airbnb apartment in Guadalajara.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
On the flight to Guadalajara, Negrete’s heart raced and he began to hyperventilate. The anxiety attack caught him off guard.
Negrete had worked hard to show his friends and family that he was happy, because he didn’t want them to think he had doubts — and he had none. But he began to worry about the unknown and to mourn his former dreams of gaining legal status and running for public office.
“It hit me all at once,” he recounted. “I am three hours away from a whole new life that I don’t know. I left everything and I don’t know what’s next.”
Many deep breaths by Negrete later, the plane descended through the clouds, revealing vibrant green fields and a cantaloupe-hued sunset.
Negrete tests the bed at his temporary home in Guadalajara.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Inside the Airbnb, he was surprised to find a clothesline instead of a dryer. Noticing the blue 5-gallon jug of water in the kitchen, he remarked that he would have to remember tap water wasn’t safe to cook with. But alongside the new was something familiar: The view from his 11–story apartment showed off a sprawling metropolis dotted with trees, some of them palms.
The next day started off like any Sunday, with a trip to Walmart and drag brunch.
Negrete marveled at the cost of a large carton of egg whites ($1) and was shocked to see eggs stored at room temperature, liquid laundry detergent in bags and only single-ply toilet paper. He treated himself to a Darth Vader coffee mug and a teapot featuring characters from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
After brunch, it was time to play tourist. Negrete was accompanied by Rodriguez, who stayed with him for the first two weeks, and a new friend, Alejandro Preciado, whom he had met at Coachella in April and happened to be a Guadajalara local.
Negrete tours downtown Guadalajara. He was drawn to the city, in part, by its Gothic architecture.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Their first stop was the city’s Spanish Renaissance cathedral, where Negrete said a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary at his mother’s request. Negrete treated his friends to an electric carriage ride around the historic buildings, where he excitedly pointed out the Gothic architecture, then they bought aguas frescas and walked through an open-air market, chatting in an English-heavy Spanglish.
“I’m trying to look at how people dress,” Negrete said, suddenly self-conscious about his short shorts. “I’m pretty sure I stand out.”
After dinner, Negrete was booking an Uber back to his Airbnb when a message popped up: “We’ve detected unusual activity.”
The app didn’t know he had moved.
Before he arrived in Guadalajara, Negrete had already joined an intramural baseball team and a running club. Practices began days after his arrival.
Negrete enjoys a view of the sprawling hills of Guadalajara.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Within a month, he moved into an apartment, visited Mexico City and reconnected with aunts in Mexico City and Guadalajara he hadn’t seen in decades.
He reflected on the small joys of greeting neighborhood señoras on morning dog walks, discovering the depths of Mexican cuisine and the peace of mind that came with no longer feeling like a target — though he’ll still freeze at the sight of police lights.
Still, Negrete remained glued to U.S. politics. In late September, the federal government detailed plans to begin processing initial DACA applications for the first time in four years. Had Negrete stayed in the U.S., he would have finally qualified for a reprieve.
He isn’t regretful.
Lorca greets Negrete as he arrives home after touring Guadalajara.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
His new dreams are wide-ranging. He wants to buy a house in Rosarito, where friends and family from L.A. could visit him. He wants to travel the world, starting with a trip to Spain. And he wants to help U.S. organizations build resources for other immigrants who are considering repatriating.
The goal isn’t to encourage people to leave, he said, but to show them they have agency.
“I actually did it,” he said. “I did it, and I’m OK.”
Now, he said, Mexico feels like an estranged relative that he’s getting to know again.
At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.
But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.
For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels and brass scales of justice.
The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.
Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.
That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black’s 13th Edition.
But, despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” was never far from his mind.
Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”
He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.
“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.
Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.
That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”
The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise sparred over the word.
In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.
This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.
States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”
“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onstage to deliver remarks as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”
Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.
Still, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to interpretive excesses of the past.
“The words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.
Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.
“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ or ‘no, there isn’t,’ so they say ‘the dictionary made me do it.’” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it didn’t.”
Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.
The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike past presidents, who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump deployed an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and surge military forces into American cities.
Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.
Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.
As of this week, appellate courts also remain sharply divided on the evidence.
On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”
The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.
The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.
“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.
A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.
For Garner, that decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.
As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”
Three of the country’s most powerful judges met in Pasadena on Wednesday for a rare conclave that could rewrite the legal framework for President Trump’s expansive deployment of troops to cities across the United States.
The move to flood Los Angeles with thousands of federalized soldiers over the objection of state and local leaders shocked the country back in June. Five months later, such military interventions have become almost routine.
But whether the deployments can expand — and how long they can continue — relies on a novel reading of an obscure subsection of the U.S. code that determines the president’s ability to dispatch the National Guard and federal service members. That code has been under heated debate in courts across the country.
Virtually all of those cases have turned on the 9th Circuit’s decision in June. The judges found that the law in question requires “a great level of deference” to the president to decide when protest flashes into rebellion, and whether boots on the ground are warranted in response.
On Wednesday, the same three judge panel — Jennifer Sung of Portland, Eric D. Miller of Seattle and Mark J. Bennett of Honolulu — took the rare move of reviewing it, signaling a willingness to dramatically rewrite the terms of engagement that have underpinned Trump’s deployments.
“I guess the question is, why is a couple of hundred people engaging in disorderly conduct and throwing things at a building over the course of two days of comparable severity of a rebellion?” said Miller, who was appointed to the bench in Trump’s first term. “Violence is used to thwart the enforcement of federal law all the time. This happens every day.”
The question he posed has riven the judicial system, splitting district judges from appellate panels and the Pacific Coast from the Midwest. Some of Trump’s judicial appointees have broken sharply with their colleagues on the matter, including on the 9th Circuit. Miller and Bennett appear at odds with Ryan D. Nelson and Bridget S. Bade, who expanded on the court’s June ruling in a decision Monday that allowed federalized troops to deploy in Oregon.
Most agreethat the statute itself is esoteric, vague and untested. Unlike the Insurrection Act, which generations of presidents have used to quell spasms of violent domestic unrest, the law Trump invoked has almost no historical footprint, and little precedent to define it.
“It’s only been used once in the history of our country since it was enacted 122 years ago,” California Solicitor General Samuel Harbourt told the court Wednesday.
Attorneys from both sides have turned to legal dictionaries to define the word “rebellion” in their favor, because the statute itself offers no clues.
“Defendants have not put forward a credible understanding of the term ‘rebellion’ in this litigation,” Harbourt told the panel Wednesday. “We’re continuing to see defendants rely on this interpretation across the country and we’re concerned that the breadth of the definition the government has relied on … includes any form of resistance.”
The wiggle room has left courts to lock horns over the most basic facts before them — including whether what the president claims must be provably true.
In the Oregon case, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland, another Trump appointee, called the president’s assertions about a rebellion there “untethered to the facts.”
But a separate 9th Circuit panel overruled her, finding the law “does not limit the facts and circumstances that the President may consider” when deciding whether to use soldiers domestically.
“The President has the authority to identify and weigh the relevant facts,” the court wrote in its Monday decision.
Nelson went further, calling the president’s decision “absolute.”
Upon further review, Sung signaled a shift to the opposite interpretation.
“The court says when the statute gives a discretionary power, that is based on certain facts,” she said. “I don’t see the court saying that the underlying decision of whether the factual basis exists is inherently discretionary.”
That sounded much more like the Midwest’s 7th Circuit decision in the Chicago case, which found that nothing in the statute “makes the President the sole judge of whether these preconditions exist.”
“Political opposition is not rebellion,” the 7th Circuit judges wrote. “A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows.”
The Trump administration’s appeal of that decision is currently before the Supreme Court on the emergency docket.
But experts said even a high court ruling in that case may not dictate what can happen in California — or in New York, for that matter. Even if the justices ruled against the administration, Trump could choose to invoke the Insurrection Act or another law to justify his next moves, an option that he and other officials have repeatedly floated in recent weeks.
The administration has signaled its desire to expand on the power it already enjoys, telling the court Wednesday there was no limit to where troops could be deployed or how long they could remain in the president’s service once he had taken control of them.
“Would it be your view that no matter how much conditions on the ground changed, there would be no ability of the district court or review — in a month, six months, a year, five years — to review whether the conditions still support [deployment]?”
“Yes,” McArthur said.
Bennett pressed the point, asking whether under the current law the militia George Washington federalized to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 could “stay called up forever” — a position the government again affirmed.
“There’s not a word in the statute that talks about how long they can remain in federal service,” McArthur said. “The president’s determination of whether the exigency has arisen, that decision is vested in his sole and exclusive discretion.”
A San José-based tech company that sells roof shingles with built-in solar panels is the latest to announce plans to leave the Golden State for Texas.
GAF Energy will relocate its headquarters to Georgetown, Texas, on Dec. 13, the company announced in a notification document filed with state officials. The company said its decision was motivated by better market opportunities in Texas, rather than an unfavorable business environment in California.
The company will lay off 138 California-based employees, including technicians, engineers and managers.
The San José headquarters, which is currently used for research, development and solar panel manufacturing, was opened in 2021. Both in-person and remote employees will be affected by its closure, the notice said.
Required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, the notice must be issued by a company 60 days before a mass layoff.
GAF Energy, which is owned by Standard Industries, opened a manufacturing facility in Texas last year. The company plans to consolidate its operations at a new headquarters in the state, President Martin DeBono said.
“In light of ongoing changes in the solar industry, we are aligning our business and our team to focus on key markets where solar is most compelling for builders and homeowners,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “This decision was not taken lightly. We are grateful to our employees in San Jose for their contributions to the business and are committed to assisting those impacted through this transition.”
GAF Energy advertises a more practical approach to rooftop solar energy by embedding solar panels directly into shingles, rather than installing them on top of a roof.
The consolidation to a Texas headquarters will help the company “drive efficiencies, foster stronger collaboration and partnership amongst teams, and better serve customers,” the spokesperson said.
Though Silicon Valley is known as a premier tech hub and incubator for young companies, many firms have left the state in recent years, complaining of strict regulations, high taxes and costly labor.
Bed Bath & Beyond’s chief executive, Marcus Lemonis, recently took aim at California and announced that the company would not reopen stores in the state, writing on X that “California has created one of the most overregulated, expensive, and risky environments for businesses.”
Economists said the state remains the fourth-largest economy in the world, boasts a diverse pool of talent and is a hub of technological innovation.
GAF Energy did not point to faults in California’s business environment as a reason for moving operations to Texas. However, the company will suspend all operations in the Golden State.
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices like to talk about the Constitution’s separation of powers and how it limits the exercise of official authority.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his conservative colleagues have given no sign so far they will check President Trump’s one-man governance by executive order.
To the contrary, the conservative justices have repeatedly ruled for Trump on fast-track appeals and overturned federal judges who said the president had exceeded his authority.
The court’s new term opens on Monday, and the justices will begin hearing arguments.
But those regularly scheduled cases have been overshadowed by Trump’s relentless drive to remake the government, to punish his political enemies, including universities, law firms, TV networks and prominent Democrats, and to send troops to patrol U.S. cities.
The overriding question has become: Are there any legal limits on the president’s power? The Supreme Court itself has raised the doubts.
A year ago, as Trump ran to reclaim the White House, the justices blocked a felony criminal indictment against him related to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, for which Trump was impeached.
Led by Roberts, the court ruled for Trump and declared for the first time that presidents were immune from being prosecuted for their official actions in the White House.
Not surprisingly, Trump saw this as a “BIG WIN” and proof there is no legal check on his power.
This year, Trump’s lawyers have confidently gone to Supreme Court with emergency appeals when lower-court judges have stood in their way. With few exceptions, they have won, often over dissents from the court’s three liberal Democrats.
Many court scholars say they are disappointed but not surprised by the court’s response so far to Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.
The Supreme Court “has been a rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions,” said UC Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “I hope very much that the court will be a check on Trump. There isn’t any other. But so far, it has not played that role.”
Roberts “had been seen as a Republican but not a Trump Republican. But he doesn’t seem interested or willing to put any limits on him,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “Maybe they think they’re saving their credibility for when it really counts.”
Acting on his own, Trump moved quickly to reshape the federal government. He ordered cuts in spending and staffing at federal agencies and fired inspectors general and officials of independent agencies who had fixed terms set by Congress. He stepped up arrests and deportations of immigrants who are here illegally.
But the court’s decisions on those fronts are in keeping with the long-standing views of the conservatives on the bench.
Long before Trump ran for office, Roberts had argued that the Constitution gives the president broad executive authority to control federal agencies, including the power to fire officials who disagree with him.
The court’s conservatives also think the president has the authority to enforce — or not enforce — immigration laws.
That’s also why many legal experts think the year ahead will provide a better test of the Supreme Court and Trump’s challenge to the constitutional order.
“Overall, my reaction is that it’s too soon to tell,” said William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and a former clerk for Roberts. “In the next year, we will likely see decisions about tariffs, birthright citizenship, alien enemies and perhaps more, and we’ll know a lot more.”
In early September, Trump administration lawyers rushed the tariffs case to the Supreme Court because they believed it was better to lose sooner rather than later.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government could face up to a $1-trillion problem if the court delayed a decision until next summer and then ruled the tariffs were illegal.
“Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” he told the court.
The Constitution says tariffs, taxes and raising revenue are matters for Congress to decide. Through most of American history, tariffs funded much of the federal government. That began to change after 1913 when the 16th Amendment was adopted to authorize “taxes on incomes.”
Trump has said he would like to return to an earlier era when import taxes funded the government.
“I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at a rally after his inauguration in January. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”
While he could have gone to the Republican-controlled Congress to get approval, he imposed several rounds of large and worldwide tariffs acting on his own.
Several small businesses sued and described the tariffs as “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”
As for legal justification, the president’s lawyers pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It authorizes the president to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.”
The law did not mention tariffs, taxes or duties but said the president could “regulate” the “importation” of products.
Trump administration lawyers argue that the “power to ‘regulate importation’ plainly encompasses the power to impose tariffs.” They also say the court should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security.
They said the president invoked the tariffs not to raise revenue but to “rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders.”
In response to lawsuits from small businesses and several states, judges who handle international trade cases ruled the tariffs were illegal. However, they agreed to keep them in place to allow for appeals.
Their opinion relied in part on recent Supreme Court’s decisions which struck down potentially far-reaching regulations from Democratic presidents on climate change, student loan debt and COVID-19 vaccine requirements. In each of the decisions, Roberts said Congress had not clearly authorized the disputed regulations.
Citing that principle, the federal circuit court said it “seems unlikely that Congress intended to … grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”
Trump said that decision, if allowed to stand, “could literally destroy the United States of America.” The court agreed to hear arguments in the tariffs case on Nov. 5.
A victory for Trump would be “viewed as a dramatic expansion of presidential power,” said Washington attorney Stephanie Connor, who works on tariff cases. Trump and future presidents could sidestep Congress to impose tariffs simply by citing an emergency, she said.
But the decision itself may have a limited impact because the administration has announced new tariffs last week that were based on other national security laws.
They did not seek a fast-track ruling, however. Instead, they said the court should grant review and hear arguments on the regular schedule early next year. If so, a decision would be handed down by late June.
The amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”
And in the past, both Congress and the Supreme Court have agreed that rule applies broadly to all children who are born here, except if their parents are foreign ambassadors or diplomats who are not subject to U.S. laws.
But Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said that interpretation is mistaken. He said the post-Civil War amendment was “adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists and temporary visitors.”
Judges in three regions of the country have rejected Trump’s limits on the citizenship rule and blocked it from taking effect nationwide while the litigation continues.
SAN DIEGO — Six Democrats running for governor next year focused on housing affordability, the cost of living and healthcare cuts as the most daunting issues facing Californians at a labor forum on Saturday in San Diego.
Largely in lockstep about these matters, the candidates highlighted their political resumes and life stories to try to create contrasts and curry favor with attendees.
Former state Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, in his first gubernatorial forum since entering the race in late September, leaned into his experience as the first millennial elected to the state Legislature.
“I feel like my experience and my passion uniquely positioned me in this race to ride a lane that nobody else can ride, being a millennial and being young and having a different perspective,” said Calderon, 39.
Concerns about his four children’s future as well as the state’s reliance on Washington, D.C., drove his decision to run for governor after choosing not to seek reelection to the Legislature in 2020.
“I want [my children] to have opportunity. I want them to have a future. I want life to be better. I want it to be easier,” said Calderon, whose family has deep roots in politics. State leaders must focus “on D.C.-proofing California. We cannot continue to depend on D.C. and expect that they’re going to give a s— about us and what our needs are, because they don’t.”
Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who also served as the state’s attorney general after a 24-year stint in Congress, argued that it is critical to elect a governor who has experience.
“Would you let someone who’s never flown a plane tell you, ‘I can fly that plane back to land’ if they’ve never done it before?” Becerra asked. “Do you give the keys to the governor’s office to someone who hasn’t done this before?”
He contrasted himself with other candidates in the race by invoking a barking chihuahua behind a chain-link fence.
“Where’s the bite?” he said, after citing his history, such as suing President Trump 122 times, and leading the sprawling federal health bureaucracy during the pandemic. “You don’t just grow teeth overnight.”
Calderon and Becerra were among six Democratic candidates who spoke at length to about 150 California leaders of multiple chapters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The union has more than 200,000 members in California and is being battered by the federal government shutdown, the state’s budget deficit and impending healthcare strikes. AFSCME is a powerful force in California politics, providing troops to knock on voters’ doors and man phone banks.
The forum came as the gubernatorial field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is in flux.
Rumors continue to swirl about whether billionaire businessman Rick Caruso or Sen. Alex Padilla will join the field.
“I am weighing it. But my focus is first and foremost on encouraging people to vote for Proposition 50,” the congressional redistricting matter on the November ballot, Padilla told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday. “The other decision? That race is not until next year. So that decision will come.”
Wealthy Democratic businessman Stephen J. Cloobeck and Republican Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco declined an invitation to participate in the forum, citing prior commitments.
The union will consider an endorsement at a future conference, said Matthew Maldonado, executive director for District Council 36, which represents 25,000 workers in Southern California.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaned into his longtime roots in labor before he ran for office. But he also alluded to tensions with unions after being elected mayor in 2005.
Labeled a “scab” when he crossed picket lines the following year during a major city workers’ strike, Villaraigosa also clashed with unions over furloughs and layoffs during the recession. His relationship with labor hit a low in 2010 when Villaraigosa called the city’s teachers union, where he once worked, “the largest obstacle to creating quality schools.”
“I want you to know something about me. I’m not going to say yes to every darn thing that everybody comes up to me with, including sometimes the unions,” Villaraigosa said. “When I was mayor, they’ll tell you sometimes I had to say no. Why? I wasn’t going to go bankrupt, and I knew I had to protect pensions and the rest of it.”
He pledged to work with labor if elected governor.
Labor leaders asked most of the questions at the forum, with all of the candidates being asked about the same topics, such as if they supported and would campaign for a proposed state constitutional amendment to help UC workers with down-payment loans for houses.
“Hell yes,” said former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who teaches at UC Irvine’s law school and benefited from a program created by state university leaders to allow faculty to buy houses priced below the market rate in costly Orange County because the high cost of housing in the region was an obstacle in recruiting professors.
“I get to benefit from UC Irvine’s investment in their professionals and professors and professional staff housing, but they are not doing it for everyone,” she said, noting workers such as clerks, janitors and patient-care staff don’t have access to similar benefits.
State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who entered the gathering dancing to Dr. Dre and Tupac’s “California Love,” agreed to support the housing loans as well as to walk picket lines with tens of thousands of Kaiser health employees expected to go on strike later this month.
AFSCME local leaders listening to former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra speak at a gubernatorial forum Saturday in San Diego.
(Seema Mehta / Los Angeles Times)
“I will be there,” Thurmond responded, adding that he had just spoken on the phone with Kaiser’s chief executive, and urged him to meet labor demands about staffing, pay, retirement and benefits, especially in the aftermath of their work during the pandemic. “Just get it done, damn it, and give them what they’re asking for.”
Former state Controller Betty Yee agreed to both requests as well, arguing that the healthcare employers are focused on profit at the expense of patient care.
“Yes, absolutely,” she said when asked about joining the Kaiser picket line. “Shame on them. You cannot be expected to take care of others if you cannot take care of yourselves.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has ruled for a second time that the Trump administration may cancel the “temporary protected status” given to about 600,000 Venezuelans under the Biden administration.
The move, advocates for the Venezuelans said, means thousands of lawfully present individuals could lose their jobs, be detained in immigration facilities and deported to a country that the U.S. government considers unsafe to visit.
The high court granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside decisions of U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court said in an unsigned order.
Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the appeal.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. “I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” she wrote. “Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent.”
Last month, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had overstepped her legal authority by canceling the legal protection.
Her decision “threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray and exposed them to substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families and loss of employment,” the panel wrote.
But Trump’s lawyers said the law bars judges from reviewing these decisions by U.S. immigration officials.
Congress authorized this protected status for people who are already in the United States but cannot return home because their native countries are not safe.
The Biden administration offered the protections to Venezuelans because of the political and economic collapse brought about by the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary under Biden, granted the protected status to groups of Venezuelans in 2021 and 2023, totaling about 607,000 people.
Mayorkas extended it again in January, three days before Trump was sworn in. That same month, Noem decided to reverse the extension, which was set to expire for both groups of Venezuelans in October 2026.
Shortly after, Noem announced the termination of protections for the 2023 group by April.
In March, Chen issued an order temporarily pausing Noem’s repeal, which the Supreme Court set aside in May with only Jackson in dissent.
The San Francisco judge then held a hearing on the issue and concluded Noem’s repeal violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it was arbitrary and and not justified.
He said his earlier order imposing a temporary pause did not prevent him from ruling on the legality of the repeal, and the 9th Circuit agreed.
The approximately 350,000 Venezuelans who had TPS through the 2023 designation saw their legal status restored. Many reapplied for work authorization, said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, and a counsel for the plaintiffs.
In the meantime, Noem announced the cancellation of the 2021 designation, effective Nov. 7.
Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, went back to the Supreme Court in September and urged the justices to set aside the second order from Chen.
“This case is familiar to the Court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” he said.
The Supreme Court’s decision once again reverses the legal status of the 2023 group and cements the end of legal protections for the 2021 group next month.
In a further complication, the Supreme Court’s previous decision said that anyone who had already received documents verifying their TPS status or employment authorization through next year is entitled to keep it.
That, Arulanantham said, “creates another totally bizarre situation, where there are some people who will have TPS through October 2026 as they’re supposed to because the Supreme Court says if you already got a document it can’t be canceled. Which to me just underscores how arbitrary and irrational the whole situation is.”
Advocates for the Venezuelans said the Trump administration has failed to show that their presence in the U.S. is an emergency requiring immediate court relief.
In a brief filed Monday, attorneys for the National TPS Alliance argued the Supreme Court should deny the Trump administration’s request because Homeland Security officials acted outside the scope of their authority by revoking the TPS protections early.
“Stripping the lawful immigration status of 600,000 people on 60 days’ notice is unprecedented,” Jessica Bansal, an attorney representing the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, wrote in a statement. “Doing it after promising an additional 18 months protection is illegal.”
TODAY– WALMART ANNOUNCED IT PLANS TO REMOVE SYNTHETIC FOOD DYES AND 30 OTHER INGREDIENTS FROM ITS STORE BRANDS BY JANUARY 20-27. IT INCLUDES SOME PRESERVATIVES, ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS AND FAT SUBSTITUTES. WALMART SAYS THIS WILL AFFECT ABOUT A THOUSAND OF ITS PRODUCTS. THIS INVOLVES ITS BRANDS INCLUDING GREAT VALUE, MARKETSIDE, AND BETTER GOODS. EARLIER THIS Y
Walmart will remove dyes and other additives from its US house-brand products by 2027
Walmart will remove artificial dyes and 30 other additives — such as artificial sweeteners, fat substitutes and various preservatives — from its U.S. private-brand food and beverage products, the company announced Wednesday. The decision marks the latest corporate move in response to evolving consumer tastes and the yearslong crackdown on food additives that began with state lawmakers, particularly those in California. The momentum has picked up steam this year amid Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.The change in Walmart brands, including Great Value, Marketside, Freshness Guaranteed and bettergoods, will be in full effect by 2027.”Our customers have told us that they want products made with simpler, more familiar ingredients — and we’ve listened,” Walmart US President and CEO John Furner said in a news release. “By eliminating synthetic dyes and other ingredients, we’re reinforcing our promise to deliver affordable food that families can feel good about.”The 11 dyes being removed are blue dyes No. 1 and No. 2; green dye No. 3; red dyes No. 3, No. 4 and No. 40; yellow dyes No. 5 and No. 6; citrus red dye; orange B dye; and canthaxanthin, an orange-red pigment naturally found in some bacteria, algae, fungi, crustaceans, and tissues and egg yolk from wild birds. Except for canthaxanthin and orange B dye, the other colorants are made from petroleum. All of these dyes are commonly used to make food and beverage products brightly colored and more appealing to consumers.The push to rid the food system of artificial dyes stems from concerns about negative impacts on animal and human health, including a potentially increased risk of cancer and neurobehavioral issues. California banned red dye No. 3 statewide in October 2023, followed by a ban of six other common dyes in school foods in September.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned red dye No. 3 in January, effective for food on Jan. 15, 2027, and for drugs on Jan. 18, 2028 — but the agency has since asked food companies to eliminate the dye sooner. In March, West Virginia passed the most sweeping law thus far, prohibiting seven dyes and two preservatives.The other additives Walmart plans to remove include preservatives such as butylparaben and propylparaben; fat substitutes such as synthetic trans fatty acid and sucrose polyester; and artificial sweeteners advantame and neotame.”This commitment is a bold declaration and response to consumer sentiment that has become increasingly wary of the long list of chemicals found in so many processed foods,” Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “Walmart’s decision shows that food companies don’t have to wait for the FDA’s regulatory process to catch up with the science.”Several of the ingredients Walmart is nixing, including red dye No. 3, are already banned or not commonly used. About 90% of Walmart’s house-brand products are already free of synthetic dyes, according to the news release.”Walmart accounts for 25% to 30% of all grocery sales in the United States and anything it does reverberates throughout the entire industry,” Dr. Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, said via email. “If it is removing the artificial colors from its house brands, other retailers … will have to follow suit.”Major food companies including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, WK Kellogg Co, The Campbell’s Company, PepsiCo and Utz have pledged to remove artificial dyes by 2027, Nestle added — all following the Trump administration’s April request that companies voluntarily alter their product formulations.”This is a big MAHA win, and one that food advocates have urged for decades,” Nestle said. “I’m hoping MAHA will build on this and now take on more important issues.”State actions also likely influenced the Walmart decision, Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at the New York University School of Global Public Health, said via email.”The food companies are not going to create ‘better’ products for one state — especially California which has one of the biggest economies in the world — or for several states, so they are forced to change the ingredients in their food nationally,” she added.If you want to avoid food dyes and other additives until various restrictions, bans and reformulations take place, reading ingredient lists when you shop is always your best bet, experts said.On ingredient lists, these artificial dyes are sometimes referred to using the following terms:Red dye No. 3: red 3, FD&C Red No. 3 or erythrosineRed dye No. 40: red 40, FD&C Red No. 40 or Allura Red ACBlue dye No. 1: blue 1, FD&C Blue No. 1 or Brilliant Blue FCFBlue dye No. 2: FD&C Blue No. 2 or indigotineGreen dye No. 3: FD&C Green No. 3 or Fast Green FCFYellow dye No. 5: yellow 5, FD&C Yellow No. 5 or tartrazineYellow dye No. 6: yellow 6, FD&C Yellow No. 6 or sunset yellowDyes listed with the word “lake” in any ingredient list indicate the dye is a water-insoluble version, meaning it can dissolve in oily foods or low-moisture foods.Since these ingredients are typically found in ultraprocessed foods, not eating those is a shortcut to eliminating the additives from your diet. Ultraprocessed foods are made with industrial techniques and ingredients “never or rarely used in kitchens,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. These foods are typically low in fiber and high in calories, added sugar, refined grains and fats, sodium, and additives, all of which are designed to help make food more appealing.Accordingly, shifting away from these products may result in more significant health benefits, as numerous studies have linked consumption of ultraprocessed foods with health issues including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, premature death, cancer, depression, cognitive decline, stroke and sleep disorders.
Walmart will remove artificial dyes and 30 other additives — such as artificial sweeteners, fat substitutes and various preservatives — from its U.S. private-brand food and beverage products, the company announced Wednesday. The decision marks the latest corporate move in response to evolving consumer tastes and the yearslong crackdown on food additives that began with state lawmakers, particularly those in California. The momentum has picked up steam this year amid Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
The change in Walmart brands, including Great Value, Marketside, Freshness Guaranteed and bettergoods, will be in full effect by 2027.
“Our customers have told us that they want products made with simpler, more familiar ingredients — and we’ve listened,” Walmart US President and CEO John Furner said in a news release. “By eliminating synthetic dyes and other ingredients, we’re reinforcing our promise to deliver affordable food that families can feel good about.”
The 11 dyes being removed are blue dyes No. 1 and No. 2; green dye No. 3; red dyes No. 3, No. 4 and No. 40; yellow dyes No. 5 and No. 6; citrus red dye; orange B dye; and canthaxanthin, an orange-red pigment naturally found in some bacteria, algae, fungi, crustaceans, and tissues and egg yolk from wild birds. Except for canthaxanthin and orange B dye, the other colorants are made from petroleum. All of these dyes are commonly used to make food and beverage products brightly colored and more appealing to consumers.
The push to rid the food system of artificial dyes stems from concerns about negative impacts on animal and human health, including a potentially increased risk of cancer and neurobehavioral issues. California banned red dye No. 3 statewide in October 2023, followed by a ban of six other common dyes in school foods in September.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned red dye No. 3 in January, effective for food on Jan. 15, 2027, and for drugs on Jan. 18, 2028 — but the agency has since asked food companies to eliminate the dye sooner. In March, West Virginia passed the most sweeping law thus far, prohibiting seven dyes and two preservatives.
The other additives Walmart plans to remove include preservatives such as butylparaben and propylparaben; fat substitutes such as synthetic trans fatty acid and sucrose polyester; and artificial sweeteners advantame and neotame.
“This commitment is a bold declaration and response to consumer sentiment that has become increasingly wary of the long list of chemicals found in so many processed foods,” Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “Walmart’s decision shows that food companies don’t have to wait for the FDA’s regulatory process to catch up with the science.”
Several of the ingredients Walmart is nixing, including red dye No. 3, are already banned or not commonly used. About 90% of Walmart’s house-brand products are already free of synthetic dyes, according to the news release.
“Walmart accounts for 25% to 30% of all grocery sales in the United States and anything it does reverberates throughout the entire industry,” Dr. Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, said via email. “If it is removing the artificial colors from its house brands, other retailers … will have to follow suit.”
Major food companies including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, WK Kellogg Co, The Campbell’s Company, PepsiCo and Utz have pledged to remove artificial dyes by 2027, Nestle added — all following the Trump administration’s April request that companies voluntarily alter their product formulations.
“This is a big MAHA win, and one that food advocates have urged for decades,” Nestle said. “I’m hoping MAHA will build on this and now take on more important issues.”
State actions also likely influenced the Walmart decision, Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at the New York University School of Global Public Health, said via email.
“The food companies are not going to create ‘better’ products for one state — especially California which has one of the biggest economies in the world — or for several states, so they are forced to change the ingredients in their food nationally,” she added.
If you want to avoid food dyes and other additives until various restrictions, bans and reformulations take place, reading ingredient lists when you shop is always your best bet, experts said.
On ingredient lists, these artificial dyes are sometimes referred to using the following terms:
Red dye No. 3: red 3, FD&C Red No. 3 or erythrosine
Red dye No. 40: red 40, FD&C Red No. 40 or Allura Red AC
Blue dye No. 1: blue 1, FD&C Blue No. 1 or Brilliant Blue FCF
Blue dye No. 2: FD&C Blue No. 2 or indigotine
Green dye No. 3: FD&C Green No. 3 or Fast Green FCF
Dyes listed with the word “lake” in any ingredient list indicate the dye is a water-insoluble version, meaning it can dissolve in oily foods or low-moisture foods.
Since these ingredients are typically found in ultraprocessed foods, not eating those is a shortcut to eliminating the additives from your diet. Ultraprocessed foods are made with industrial techniques and ingredients “never or rarely used in kitchens,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. These foods are typically low in fiber and high in calories, added sugar, refined grains and fats, sodium, and additives, all of which are designed to help make food more appealing.
Accordingly,shifting away from these products may result in more significant health benefits, as numerous studies have linked consumption of ultraprocessed foods with health issues including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, premature death, cancer, depression, cognitive decline, stroke and sleep disorders.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday put off a decision on whether President Trump can fire Federal Reserve Govenor Lisa Cook and said it would hear arguments on the case in January.
The court’s action allows Cook to remain in her position, and it prevents Trump from taking majority control of the historically independent central bank board.
Last month, the president said he fired Cook “for cause,” citing mortgage documents she signed in 2021 confirming that two different properties were her primary residence.
But the flap over her mortgages arose as Trump complained that the Federal Reserve Board, including Cook, had not lowered interest rates to his satisfaction.
“We will have a majority very shortly,” Trump said after he fired Cook.
In September, Trump appointed Stephen Miran, the chair of of his White House Council of Economic Advisers, to serve a temporary term on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board. He joined two other Trump appointees.
Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 intending to give the central bank board some independence from politics and the current president.
Its seven members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and they serve staggered terms of 14 years, unless “removed for cause by the president.”
The law does not define what amounts to cause.
President Biden appointed Cook to a temporary term in 2022 and to a full term a year later.
In August, however, Bill Pulte, Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that Cook committed mortgage fraud when she took out two housing loans in 2021. One was for $203,000 for a house in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the second was for $540,000 for a condo in Atlanta. In both instances, he said she signed a loan document saying the property would be her primary residence.
Mortgage lenders usually offer a lower interest rate for a borrower’s primary residence.
Cook has not directly refuted the allegation about her mortgage documents, but her attorneys said she told the lender she was seeking the Atlanta condo as a vacation home.
Trump, however, sent Cook a letter on Aug. 25. “You may be removed, at my discretion, for cause,” citing the law and Pulte’s referral. “I have determined that there is sufficient cause to remove you from your position,” he wrote.
Cook refused to step down and filed a suit to challenge the decision. She argued the allegation did not amount to cause under the law, and she had not been given a hearing to contest it.
A federal judge in Washington agreed and blocked her firing, noting that unproven allegation of mortgage fraud occurred before she was appointed to the Federal Reserve.
By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court also refused to uphold her firing.
Trump’s lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Sept. 18 arguing Congress gave the president the authority to fire a Fed governor he concludes she is not trustworthy.
“Put simply, the President may reasonably determine that interest rates paid by the American people should not be set by a Governor who appears to have lied about facts material to the interest rates she secured for herself — and refuses to explain the apparent misrepresentations,” wrote Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.
But the justices refused to act on an emergency appeal and decided they will give the case a full hearing and a written decision.
Thomas Joseph Wasman, 68, a former Bishop Moore Catholic High School coach, was arrested on Thursday for human trafficking for commercial sex with someone under the age of 18, according to the Altamonte Springs Police Department. Investigators told the diocese that no Bishop Moore students or any other diocesan schools were involved.Wasman was not a faculty member but did work as a seasonal coach, according to a statement from Bishop Moore High School.Wasman was arrested in 2015 for a misdemeanor charge of soliciting a prostitute in Orange County, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.He was found not guilty by a jury in the 2015 case. Statement from Bishop Moore Catholic High SchoolBishop Moore High School was recently notified, as a courtesy of the Altamonte Springs Police Department, that Mr. Tom Wasman was arrested for human trafficking for commercial sex with someone under the age of 18.Investigators have confirmed no students from Bishop Moore or any diocesan schools were involved. Mr. Wasman was not a faculty member but did work as a seasonal coach. In 2015, Mr. Wasman had been placed on administrative leave after being charged with Solicitation to Commit Prostitution.After being found not guilty by a jury and the judge’s decision to expunge his record, the Diocese conducted an additional background check and determined that Mr. Wasman could be reinstated.With this recent arrest, Mr. Wasman has been terminated effective immediately.
ORLANDO, Fla. —
Thomas Joseph Wasman, 68, a former Bishop Moore Catholic High School coach, was arrested on Thursday for human trafficking for commercial sex with someone under the age of 18, according to the Altamonte Springs Police Department.
Investigators told the diocese that no Bishop Moore students or any other diocesan schools were involved.
Wasman was not a faculty member but did work as a seasonal coach, according to a statement from Bishop Moore High School.
Wasman was arrested in 2015 for a misdemeanor charge of soliciting a prostitute in Orange County, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.
He was found not guilty by a jury in the 2015 case.
Statement from Bishop Moore Catholic High School
Bishop Moore High School was recently notified, as a courtesy of the Altamonte Springs Police Department, that Mr. Tom Wasman was arrested for human trafficking for commercial sex with someone under the age of 18.
Investigators have confirmed no students from Bishop Moore or any diocesan schools were involved. Mr. Wasman was not a faculty member but did work as a seasonal coach. In 2015,
Mr. Wasman had been placed on administrative leave after being charged with Solicitation to Commit Prostitution.
After being found not guilty by a jury and the judge’s decision to expunge his record, the Diocese conducted an additional background check and determined that Mr. Wasman could be reinstated.
With this recent arrest, Mr. Wasman has been terminated effective immediately.
President Donald Trump’s administration is asking the Supreme Court to uphold his birthright citizenship order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.Previous reporting: A legal win for birthright citizenship after Supreme Court setbackThe appeal, shared with The Associated Press on Saturday, sets in motion a process at the high court that could lead to a definitive ruling from the justices by early summer on whether the citizenship restrictions are constitutional.Lower-court judges have so far blocked them from taking effect anywhere. The Republican administration is not asking the court to let the restrictions take effect before it rules.The Justice Department’s petition has been shared with lawyers for parties challenging the order, but is not yet docketed at the Supreme Court.Any decision on whether to take up the case is probably months away, and arguments probably would not take place until the late winter or early spring.“The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. “Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”Cody Wofsy, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents children who would be affected by Trump’s restrictions, said the administration’s plan is plainly unconstitutional.“This executive order is illegal, full stop, and no amount of maneuvering from the administration is going to change that. We will continue to ensure that no baby’s citizenship is ever stripped away by this cruel and senseless order,” Wofsy said in an email.Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term in the White House that would upend more than 125 years of understanding that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as unconstitutional, or likely so, even after a Supreme Court ruling in late June that limited judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.While the Supreme Court curbed the use of nationwide injunctions, it did not rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The justices did not decide at that time whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.But every lower court that has looked at the issue has concluded that Trump’s order violates or likely violates the 14th Amendment, which was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.The administration is appealing two cases.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled in July that a group of states that sued over the order needed a nationwide injunction to prevent the problems that would be caused by birthright citizenship being in effect in some states and not others.Also in July, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked the citizenship order in a class-action lawsuit including all children who would be affected.Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers who are in the country illegally, under long-standing rules. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment.The administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship.
WASHINGTON —
President Donald Trump’s administration is asking the Supreme Court to uphold his birthright citizenship order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
Previous reporting: A legal win for birthright citizenship after Supreme Court setback
The appeal, shared with The Associated Press on Saturday, sets in motion a process at the high court that could lead to a definitive ruling from the justices by early summer on whether the citizenship restrictions are constitutional.
Lower-court judges have so far blocked them from taking effect anywhere. The Republican administration is not asking the court to let the restrictions take effect before it rules.
The Justice Department’s petition has been shared with lawyers for parties challenging the order, but is not yet docketed at the Supreme Court.
Any decision on whether to take up the case is probably months away, and arguments probably would not take place until the late winter or early spring.
“The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. “Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”
Cody Wofsy, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents children who would be affected by Trump’s restrictions, said the administration’s plan is plainly unconstitutional.
“This executive order is illegal, full stop, and no amount of maneuvering from the administration is going to change that. We will continue to ensure that no baby’s citizenship is ever stripped away by this cruel and senseless order,” Wofsy said in an email.
Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term in the White House that would upend more than 125 years of understanding that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.
In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as unconstitutional, or likely so, even after a Supreme Court ruling in late June that limited judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.
While the Supreme Court curbed the use of nationwide injunctions, it did not rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The justices did not decide at that time whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.
But every lower court that has looked at the issue has concluded that Trump’s order violates or likely violates the 14th Amendment, which was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
The administration is appealing two cases.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled in July that a group of states that sued over the order needed a nationwide injunction to prevent the problems that would be caused by birthright citizenship being in effect in some states and not others.
Also in July, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked the citizenship order in a class-action lawsuit including all children who would be affected.
Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers who are in the country illegally, under long-standing rules. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment.
The administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship.
Kamala Harris picked her way through several sticky subjects in a Tuesday night TV interview, including her account of being ghosted by Gov. Gavin Newsom when she called for his support during her brief, unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign.
On the eve of the public release of her book detailing that campaign, Harris spoke with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on her relationship with Newsom as well as the redistricting ballot measure Californians will vote on in November — and she also hailed “the power of the people” in getting Jimmy Kimmel back on ABC.
Kimmel was indefinitely suspended last week by the Walt Disney Co. over remarks he made about the suspect in the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. After fierce protests, consumers announcing subscription cancellations, and hundreds of celebrities speaking out against government censorship, Disney announced Monday that Kimmel would return on ABC the following day.
“Talk about the power being with the people and the people making that clear with their checkbooks,” Harris said of Kimmel’s return. “It spoke volumes, and it moved a decision in the right direction.”
Harris was speaking with Maddow about her new book, “107 Days,” which details her short sprint of a presidential campaign in 2024 after then-President Biden decided not to seek reelection.
The book discloses which Democrats immediately supported her to become the Democratic nominee, and which didn’t, notably Newsom. She wrote that, when she called, he texted her that he was hiking and would call her back but never did.
After Maddow raised the anecdote in the opening of the show, Harris said she had known Newsom “forever.”
“Gavin has a great sense of humor so, you know, he’s gonna be fine,” Harris said.
Newsom was icier when asked by a reporter about the interaction — or lack thereof — on Friday.
“You want to waste your time with this, we’ll do it,” Newsom said, adding that he was hiking when he received a call from an unknown number, even as he was trying to learn more about Biden’s decision not to run for reelection while also asking his team to craft a statement supporting Harris to be the Democratic nominee. “I assume that’s in the book as well — that, hours later, the endorsement came out.”
Harris brought up Newsom when asked about Proposition 50, the redistricting ballot measure championed by the governor and other California Democrats that voters will decide in November. If approved, the state’s congressional districts will be redrawn in an effort to boost Democratic seats in the house to counter efforts by President Trump to increase the number of Republicans elected in GOP-led states.
“Let me say about what [Newsom] is doing, redistricting, it is absolutely the right way to go. Part of what we’ve got to, I think, challenge ourselves to accept, is that we tend to play by the rules,” Harris said. “But I think this is a moment where you gotta fight fire with fire. And so what Gavin is doing, what the California Legislature is doing, what those who are supporting it are doing is to say, ‘You know what, you want to play, then let’s get in the field. Let’s get in the arena, and let’s do this.’ And I support that.”
But Harris was more cautious when asked about other electoral contests, notably the New York City mayoral race. Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic nominee and has large leads in the polls over other candidates in the race, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.
Asked whether she backed Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, Harris was measured.
“Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee, and he should be supported,” Harris said, prompting Maddow to ask whether she endorsed him.
“I support the Democrat in the race, sure,” she replied. “But let me just say this, he’s not the only star. … I hope that we don’t so over-index on New York City that we lose sight of the stars throughout our country.”
Harris, who announced this summer that she would not run for California governor next year, demurred when asked about whether she would run for president for a third time in 2028.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday it will decide on reversing a 90-year precedent that has protected independent agencies from direct control by the president.
The court’s conservative majority has already upheld President Trump’s firing of Democratic appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board. And in a separate order on Monday, it upheld Trump’s removal of a Democratic appointee at the Federal Trade Commission.
Those orders signal the court is likely to rule for the president and that he has the full authority to fire officials at independent agencies, even if Congress said they had fixed terms.
The only hint of doubt has focused on the Federal Reserve Board. In May, when the court upheld the firing of an NLRB official, it said its decision does not threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve.
The court described it as “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” Trump did not share that view. He threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell during the summer because he had not lowered interest rates.
Trump’s lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court last week seeking to have Cook removed now.
Long before Trump’s presidency, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had argued that the president has the constitutional power to control federal agencies and to hire or fire all officials who exercise significant executive authority.
But that view stands in conflict with what the court has said for more than a century. Since 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, lawmakers on Capitol Hill believed they had the authority to create independent boards and commissions.
Typically, the president would be authorized appoint officials who would serve a fixed term set by law. At times, Congress also required the boards have a mix of both Republican and Democratic appointees.
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld that understanding in a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor. The justices said then these officials made judicial-type decisions, and they should be shielded from direct control by the president.
That decision was a defeat for President Franklin Roosevelt who tried to fire a Republican appointee on the Federal Trade Commission.
In recent years, the chief justice and his conservative colleagues have questioned the idea that Congress can shield officials from direct control by the president.
In Monday’s order, the court said it will hear arguments in December on “whether the statutory removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers and, if so, whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U. S. 602 (1935), should be overruled.”
Justice Elena Kagan has repeatedly dissented in these cases and argued that Congress has the power to make the law and structure the government, not the president.
Joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, she objected on Monday that the court has continued to fire independent officials at Trump’s request.
“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” she wrote. “Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
