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Tag: immigration raid

  • Man sentenced for throwing Molotov cocktail at deputies during protest against immigration raids

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    A man was sentenced four years in federal prison Friday after he admitted to lighting a Molotov cocktail and throwing it at Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies during a protest last year against immigration raids.

    Emiliano Garduño Gálvez, 23, pleaded guilty in October to one count each of possessing an unregistered destructive device and obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder. Federal authorities said Gálvez is an immigrant from Mexico in the U.S. illegally, having entered more than a decade ago and staying beyond the time permitted in his visa.

    “This defendant’s reckless behavior threatened the lives and safety of law enforcement officers and that of a lawful protester,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. “My office remains steadfast in its efforts to prosecute and punish those who commit acts of violence against others.”

    The events occurred in June, when Border Patrol agents convened near Home Depot in Paramount, drawing protesters.

    According to the U.S. attorney’s office, the group threw objects like rocks and cinder block chunks at federal and local law enforcement officers, and set off fireworks. Authorities declared the protest an unlawful assembly.

    The U.S. attorney’s office said Gálvez was hiding behind a stone wall when he lit and threw a Molotov cocktail toward sheriff’s deputies, who were engaging in crowd control. The incendiary device landed in a grassy area near a protester’s foot, about 15 feet from sheriff’s deputies. Gálvez then fled the area.

    Federal prosecutors had argued in a sentencing memorandum for Gálvez to serve a longer sentence — more than seven years — because of the seriousness of his offenses. Video recordings appear to show that the flaming wick separated from the bottle after he threw it.

    “Defendant endangered everyone — law enforcement and civilians in the area — and is lucky that, despite his actions, no one was injured,” the prosecutors’ sentencing memo said.

    Gálvez’s federal public defenders asked for a more lenient sentence of three years, saying in a sentencing memo that he was “caught up in a historic social movement and under the influence of Brandy and nitrous oxide,” and now “readily admits and acknowledges how serious his actions were and the harm that could have ensued.”

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    Alene Tchekmedyian

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  • Californians sharply divided along partisan lines about immigration raids, poll finds

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    California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.

    Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

    But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.

    Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.

    “The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

    While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

    One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.

    “That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.

    The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.

    A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.

    “So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.

    Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.

    The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.

    In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.

    More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

    On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.

    While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.

    Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.

    “If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.

    Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

    Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.

    Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.

    Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.

    “I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”

    The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

    He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.

    “They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.

    Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.

    After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

    “At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”

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    Seema Mehta, Brittny Mejia

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  • Justice Department sues to block laws restricting masked, unidentified law enforcement officers in California

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    SACRAMENTO — The U.S. Department of Justice sued California on Monday to block newly passed laws that prohibit law enforcement officials, including federal immigration agents, from wearing masks and that require them to identify themselves.

    The laws, passed by the California Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, came in the wake of the Trump administration’s immigration raids in California, when masked, unidentified federal officers jumped out of vehicles this summer as part of the president’s mass deportation program.

    Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi said the laws were unconsitutional and endanger federal officers.

    “California’s anti-law enforcement policies discriminate against the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents,” Bondi said in a statement. “These laws cannot stand.”

    The governor recently signed Senate Bill 627, which bans federal officers from wearing masks during enforcement duties, and Senate Bill 805, which requires federal officers without a uniform to visibly display their name or badge number during operations. Both measures were introduced as a response to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids that are often conducted by masked agents in plainclothes and unmarked cars.

    The lawsuit, which names the state of California, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta as defendants, asserts the laws are unconstitutional as only the federal government has the authority to control its agents and any requirements about their uniforms. It further argued that federal agents need to conceal their identities at times due to the nature of their work.

    “Given the personal threats and violence that agents face, federal law enforcement agencies allow their officers to choose whether to wear masks to protect their identities and provide an extra layer of security,” the lawsuit states. “Denying federal agencies and officers that choice would chill federal law enforcement and deter applicants for law enforcement positions.”

    Federal agents will not comply with either law, the lawsuit states.

    “The Federal Government would be harmed if forced to comply with either Act, and also faces harm from the real threat of criminal liability for noncompliance,” the lawsuit states. “Accordingly, the challenged laws are invalid under the Supremacy Clause and their application to the Federal Government should be preliminarily and permanently enjoined.”

    Newsom previously said it was unacceptable for “secret police” to grab people off the streets, and that the new laws were needed to help the public differentiate between imposters and legitimate federal law officers.

    The governor, however, acknowledged the legislation could use more clarifications about safety gear and other exemptions. He directed lawmakers to work on a follow-up bill next year.

    In a Monday statement, Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who introduced SB 627, said the FBI recently warned that “secret police tactics” are undermining public safety.

    “Despite what these would-be authoritarians claim, no one is above the law,” said Wiener. “We’ll see you in court.”

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    Katie King

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  • ‘They smashed into me’: Activist says video shows ICE rammed his truck. Agents claim the opposite

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    Video footage that appears to show federal immigration agents using their vehicle to ram into the truck of an immigrant rights activist has sparked controversy and public outrage in the city of Oxnard, an agricultural town that has been the frequent target of immigration raids.

    At the center of the controversy is a claim by federal agents that the activist was the aggressor, ramming into the agents’ vehicle.

    The incident began shortly before 8 a.m. Thursday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents notified the Oxnard Police Department that their vehicle had been rammed by a civilian’s vehicle near the intersection of 8th and A streets, according to Sgt. Martin Cook.

    “We responded, and ICE agents detained an individual, and a crowd started to gather,” Cook said. “We were there to keep the peace and prevent any type of altercation with ICE or any other federal agency.”

    Cook said that federal agencies took control of the investigation. He did not know if the person arrested by agents requested a police report and referred all questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees several agencies including ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

    VC Defensa, an immigrant rights group that has been documenting immigration raids in the region, said on Instagram that one of its volunteers, whom the group identified as Leo Martinez, had been arrested.

    The group also released video footage taken by eyewitnesses that they said showed that the allegation by federal agents against Martinez was false.

    “ICE intentionally struck Leo’s truck and blocked his exit while Leo was exercising his right to observe ICE activity,” the group stated in one of its Instagram posts.

    The video starts with a Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows tailing a dark gray truck before ramming into the passenger door on the driver’s side. The driver of the truck then pulls into a dirt lot, where the group says Martinez was arrested.

    “This shameful escalation by ICE is nothing more than an attempt to intimidate those of conscience who are standing up against Trump’s assault on immigrants,” the group said on Instagram. “We will not be deterred, and we will continue to keep our communities safe.”

    The incident is the latest controversy involving federal immigration agents that has not only sparked outrage among activists and residents but also raised questions about some of the claims agents previously have made.

    Two months ago, federal immigration officers stopped Francisco Longoria in San Bernardino. During the encounter, Longoria, who was in his truck with his 18-year-old son and 23-year-old son-in-law, said he feared for their safety after masked officers shattered his car window, then he drove off and an officer fired several rounds at the truck.

    Department of Homeland Security officials have said officers were injured during the encounter when Longoria tried to “run them down,” prompting one officer to “discharge his firearm in self-defense.”

    Attorneys for Longoria dispute that their client injured the officers or attempted to hit them and have called for an investigation of the shooting.

    In June, Arturo Hermosillo was accused of ramming his van against a federal agent’s vehicle when he was instructed by the agents to move his van back to make room for an ambulance for a woman who had been injured during an immigration sweep.

    Hermosillo was reversing when he said a federal agent standing near the vehicle pushed in his side view mirror, blocking his view; Hermosillo subsequently bumped into a vehicle behind him. Shortly after, agents pulled him out of the van.

    Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin told The Times in an email at the time that a person “rammed his vehicle into a law enforcement vehicle” during the June 19 operation

    “CBP Agents were also assaulted during the operation and verbally harassed,” she said.

    Videos of that day did not capture any assaults; they showed residents yelling at agents.

    The incident in Oxnard mirrors a level of aggression by federal agents seen on the streets of Chicago.

    A Chicago-area mayor said ICE agents used excessive force when making arrests at a cemetery. A pastor who was protesting at a detention center was shot in the head with a pepper ball. Troubled by the clashes between agents and the public, one federal judge is considering ordering agents to wear body cameras.

    The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment from The Times. In a statement to CNN, however, DHS said that claims that agency is using “harsher approaches” are “smearing” federal agents who “put their lives on the line every day to enforce the law.”

    In downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, just outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center where a crowd had gathered with “Free Leo Now!” and “ICE out of L.A.” signs, they listened to Martinez as he thanked them for their support and their work.

    “I knew I didn’ t do anything f— wrong; that’s why they released me with pending charges,” he told the crowd. “That’s what they do with pretty much a lot of our volunteers cause we didn’t do s— wrong.

    “They smashed into me,” he continued as people clapped. “And then they tried to accuse me of assaulting them, what kind of bulls— is that?”

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    Ruben Vives

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  • ‘We’re not North Korea.’ Newsom signs bills to limit immigration raids at schools and unmask federal agents

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    In response to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids that have roiled Southern California, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed a package of bills aimed at protecting immigrants in schools, hospitals and other areas targeted by federal agents.

    He also signed a bill that bans federal agents from wearing masks. Speaking at Miguel Contreras Learning Complex in Los Angeles, Newsom said President Trump had turned the country into a “dystopian sci-fi movie” with scenes of masked agents hustling immigrants without legal status into unmarked cars.

    “We’re not North Korea,” Newsom said.

    Newsom framed the pieces of legislation as pushback against what he called the “secret police” of Trump and Stephen Miller, the White House advisor who has driven the second Trump administration’s surge of immigration enforcement in Democrat-led cities.

    SB 98, authored by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra), will require school administrators to notify families and students if federal agents conduct immigration operations on a K-12 or college campus.

    Assembly Bill 49, drafted by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Rolling Hills Estates), will bar immigration agents from nonpublic areas of a school without a judicial warrant or court order. It will also prohibit school districts from providing information about pupils, their families, teachers and school employees to immigration authorities without a warrant.

    Sen. Jesse Arreguín’s (D-Berkeley) Senate Bill 81 will prohibit healthcare officials from disclosing a patient’s immigration status or birthplace — or giving access to nonpublic spaces in hospitals and clinics — to immigration authorities without a search warrant or court order.

    Senate Bill 627 by Sens. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Jesse Arreguín (D-Berkeley) targets masked federal immigration officers who began detaining migrants at Home Depots and car washes in California earlier this year.

    Wiener has said the presence of anonymous, masked officers marks a turn toward authoritarianism and erodes trust between law enforcement and citizens. The law would apply to local and federal officers, but for reasons that Weiner hasn’t publicly explained, it would exempt state police such as California Highway Patrol officers.

    Trump’s immigration leaders argue that masks are necessary to protect the identities and safety of immigration officers. The Department of Homeland Security on Monday called on Newsom to veto Wiener’s legislation, which will almost certainly be challenged by the federal government.

    “Sen. Scott Wiener’s legislation banning our federal law enforcement from wearing masks and his rhetoric comparing them to ‘secret police’ — likening them to the gestapo — is despicable,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.

    The package of bills has already caused friction between state and federal officials. Hours before signing the bills, Newsom’s office wrote on X that “Kristi Noem is going to have a bad day today. You’re welcome, America.”

    Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, fired back on X accusing the governor of threatening Noem.

    “We have zero tolerance for direct or implicit threats against government officials,” Essayli wrote in response, adding he’d requested a “full threat assessment” by the U.S. Secret Service.

    The supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, leading some legal experts to question whether California could enforce legislation aimed at federal immigration officials.

    Essayli noted in another statement on X that California has no jurisdiction over the federal government and he’s directed federal agencies not to change their operations.

    “If Newsom wants to regulate our agents, he must go through Congress,” he wrote.

    California has failed to block federal officers from arresting immigrants based on their appearance, language and location. An appellate court paused the raids, which California officials alleged were clear examples of racial profiling, but the U.S. Supreme Court overrode the decision and allowed the detentions to resume.

    During the news conference on Saturday, Newsom pointed to an arrest made last month when immigration officers appeared in Little Tokyo while the governor was announcing a campaign for new congressional districts. Masked agents showed up to intimidate people who attended the event, Newsom said, but they also arrested an undocumented man who happened to be delivering strawberries nearby.

    “That’s Trump’s America,” Newsom said.

    Other states are also looking at similar measures to unmask federal agents. Connecticut on Tuesday banned law enforcement officers from wearing masks inside state courthouses unless medically necessary, according to news reports.

    Newsom on Saturday also signed Senate Bill 805, a measure by Pérez that targets immigration officers who are in plainclothes but don’t identify themselves.

    The law requires law enforcement officers in plainclothes to display their agency, as well as either a badge number or name, with some exemptions.

    “Ensuring that officers are clearly identified, while providing sensible exceptions, helps protect both the public and law enforcement personnel,” said Jason P. Houser, a former DHS official who supported the bills signed by Newsom.

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    Matthew Ormseth, Dakota Smith, Laura J. Nelson

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  • Trump administration moves to make U.S. citizenship harder with revised civics test

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    The Trump administration moved again Wednesday to make it harder to gain U.S. citizenship, announcing a slate of changes to the core civics test that immigrants must pass to be naturalized.

    The changes would expand the number of questions immigrants need to be prepared to answer, and increase the number of questions they must answer correctly in order to pass.

    The changes, announced as pending in the Federal Register, would largely revert the test to a similarly longer and harder version that was introduced in 2020 during President Trump’s first term, but was swiftly rolled back under President Biden in 2021.

    The shift follows other Trump administration changes to the process by which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials determine whether prospective citizens are qualified, including enhanced assessments of their “moral character” and whether they ascribe to any “anti-American” beliefs, and intense checks into their community ties and social media networks.

    It also comes amid a broader crackdown on undocumented immigration, and what Trump has said will be the largest “mass deportation” in U.S. history. That effort has been heavily centered in the Los Angeles region, to the consternation of many Democratic leaders and immigration advocacy organizations.

    The new naturalization test, like the short-lived 2020 version, would draw from 128 possible questions and require prospective citizens to answer 12 out of 20 questions correctly in order to pass. Under the current test, which dates to 2008, there are 100 possible questions, and prospective citizens must answer six out of 10 correctly.

    Trump administration officials said the new test “will better assess an alien’s understanding of U.S. history, government, and English language,” and is part of a “multi-step overhaul” of the citizenship process that will ensure traditional American culture and values are protected.

    “We are doing everything in our power to make sure that anyone who is offered the privilege of becoming an American citizen fulfills their obligation to their new country,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

    Immigration advocates cast the change as an attempt by the administration to further impede the legal pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants already deeply rooted in the U.S. They say it is part of a broader, authoritarian campaign by Trump and his administration to vet potential new citizens and other legal immigrants for conservative ideology and loyalty to him — all while the administration aggressively targets people for deportation based on little more than the color of their skin and the work that they do.

    “The Trump administration lauding the privileges of becoming a U.S. citizen — while making it harder to obtain it — rings hollow when you consider that it is also arguing before the Supreme Court that law enforcement can racially profile Latines,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “All this does is make it harder for longtime residents who contribute to this country every day to finally achieve the permanent protections that only U.S. citizenship can offer.”

    Earlier this month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in a case challenging immigration raids in California that immigration agents may stop and detain people they suspect are in the U.S. illegally based on little more than the color of their skin, their speaking Spanish and their working in fields or locations with large immigrant workforces.

    Last month, USCIS announced that it was ramping up its vetting of immigrants’ social media activity and looking for “anti-American ideologies or activities,” including “antisemitic ideologies.” That announcement followed months of enforcement against pro-Palestinian student activists and other U.S. visa and green card holders that raised alarms among constitutional scholars and free speech advocates.

    Trump administration officials have rejected such concerns, and others about raids sweeping up people without criminal records and racial profiling being used to target them, as part of a misguided effort by liberals and progressives to protect even dangerous, undocumented immigrants for political reasons.

    In announcing the latest change to the naturalization test, Homeland Security said it would make the test more difficult, and in the process ensure that “only those who are truly committed to the American way of life are admitted as citizens.”

    The department also lauded its recent moves to more deeply vet prospective citizens, saying the new process “includes reinstating neighborhood interviews of potential new citizens, considering whether aliens have made positive contributions to their communities, determining good moral character, and verifying they have never unlawfully registered to vote or unlawfully attempted to vote in an American election.”

    In rolling back the first Trump administration’s test — which is very similar to the newly proposed one — USCIS officials under the Biden administration said that it “may inadvertently create potential barriers to the naturalization process.”

    By contrast, the agency under Biden said the 2008 test — the one Trump is now replacing again — was “thoroughly developed over a multi-year period with the input of more than 150 organizations, which included English as a second language experts, educators, and historians, and was piloted before its implementation.”

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    Kevin Rector

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  • Long Beach cancels annual Día de los Muertos parade over fears of immigration raids

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    The city of Long Beach has canceled its annual Día de los Muertos parade, citing concerns raised by community members about federal immigration operations.

    The city-sponsored parade is usually held in early November and draws large crowds to Long Beach.

    Even though the city is not aware of federal enforcement activity targeting the parade, the decision was made “out of an abundance of caution” because it’s “a large and very public outdoor event,” said Long Beach spokesperson Kevin Lee.

    Long Beach City Councilmember Mary Zendejas had requested the cancellation, Lee said.

    “This decision did not come lightly,” both Zendejas and the city said in statements. The decision addresses “genuine fears raised by community members, especially those who may face the possibility of sudden and indiscriminate federal enforcement actions that undermine the sense of security necessary to participate fully in public life.”

    The Arte y Ofrendas Festival, a separate ticketed event organized by an outside vendor and held at Rainbow Lagoon Park, also has been canceled this year. The festival typically coincides with the city-sponsored parade and is held where the parade ends its route, thus drawing parade attendees.

    Roberto Carlos Lemus, a marketer who brought food trucks and other vendors to the festival last year, called the cancellation “very sad.”

    “Everyone’s very sad about the situation. Día de los Muertos has been one of the largest celebrations for a very long time, and the city has done a great job putting it on,” Lemus told The Times on Sunday. “Unfortunately with Latinos being kidnapped and attacked by ICE and the current administration, I do understand why they made the decision that they made.”

    Lemus said some local businesses were worried about economic fallout of the festival and parade cancellation as well as the potential effects of raids on Latino Restaurant Week in Long Beach, an event he co-founded that is set to begin Sept. 22.

    “They are afraid,” he said. “Overall, it affects everybody.”

    Immigration raids have swept Southern California in recent months, with thousands of people detained by federal agents. A new Supreme Court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. immigration agents to stop and detain people in Southern California whom they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally, even if their suspicion is solely based on the type of job they hold, the language they speak or their appearance.

    The ruling has bolstered fears that people with brown skin and Spanish speakers will be targeted — especially going into national Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins Monday — and was met with outrage by immigration rights attorneys and local leaders.

    At its meeting Tuesday, the Long Beach City Council approved a motion to push unspent funds allocated for this year’s parade to next year’s budget, ensuring $100,000 will be available for the 2026 parade.

    The council also added $600,000 to the Long Beach Justice Fund, which provides legal representation to residents who face immigration actions, bringing the budget available for the fund to $1.85 million. The fund ensures residents have access to “resources necessary to safeguard their constitutional rights, uphold due process protections, and preserve family unity,” according to the motion.

    Some Southern California events have proceeded as scheduled despite similar fears.

    East L.A.’s 79th annual Mexican Independence Day parade held on Sunday seemed to draw smaller crowds than usual, but many said they felt a sense of pride and duty to attend in spite of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

    “We’re here and we’re going to continue fighting for our rights and for others who cannot fight for themselves,” Samantha Robles, 21, told The Times as she watched the parade roll by.

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    Suhauna Hussain

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  • Commentary: The immigration raids are crushing L.A.’s fire recovery and California’s economy

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    The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.

    I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.

    “Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody’s worried.”

    The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.

    “We’re still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”

    Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.

    There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.

    And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywall, Nickelsburg told me, it “means you finish homes much more slowly, and that means fewer people are employed.”

    Now look, I’m no economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country we were headed for a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been in his best interest to stifle the state with the largest economy in the nation.

    Especially when many national economic indicators aren’t exactly rosy, when we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of groceries and consumer goods, and when the labor statistics were so embarrassing he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with another one, only to see more grim jobs numbers a month later.

    I had just one economics class in college, but I don’t recall a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washers, elder-care workers, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other people whose only crime — unlike the violent offenders we were allegedly going to round up — is a desire to show up for work.

    Now here, let me give you my email address. It’s steve.lopez@latimes.com.

    And why am I telling you that?

    Because I know from experience that some of you are frothing, foaming and itching to reach out and tell me that illegal means illegal.

    So go ahead and email me if you must, but here’s my response:

    We’ve been living a lie for decades.

    People come across the border because we want them to. We all but beg them to. And by we, I mean any number of industries — many of them led by conservatives and by Trump supporters — including agribusiness, and hospitality, and construction, and healthcare.

    Why do you think so many employers avoid using the federal E-Verify system to weed out undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.

    In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and they can’t stop introducing bills by the dozens to mandate wider use of E-Verify. But the most recent one, like all the ones before it, just died.

    Why?

    Because the tough talk is a lie and there’s no longer any shame in hypocrisy. It’s a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity to admit what’s clear — that the Texas economy is propped up in part by an undocumented workforce.

    At least in California, six Republican lawmakers all but begged Trump in June to ease up on the raids, which were affecting business on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Please do some honest work on immigration reform instead, they pleaded, so we can fill our labor needs in a more practical and humane way.

    Makes sense, but politically, it doesn’t play as well as TV ads recruiting ICE commandos to storm the streets and arrest tamale vendors, even as the barbarians who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops enjoy their time as presidentially pardoned patriots.

    Small businesses, restaurants and mom and pops are being particularly hard hit, says Maria Salinas, chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those who survived the pandemic were then kneecapped again by the raids.

    With the Supreme Court ruling, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this is going to come back harder than before.”

    From a broader economic perspective, the mass deportations make no sense, especially when it’s clear that the vast majority of people targeted are not the violent criminals Trump keeps talking about.

    Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, noted that we’re in the midst of a demographic transformation, much like that of Japan, which is dealing with the challenges of an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.

    “We’ll lose almost a million working-age Americans every year in the next decade just because of aging,” Peri told me. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will demand a lot of services in … home healthcare [and other industries], but there will be fewer and fewer workers to do these types of jobs.”

    Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, has been studying these trends for years.

    “The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Each year, the worker-to-retiree ratio decreases, and it will continue to do so. This means we’re headed for a critical shortage of working people who pay into Social Security and Medicare even as the number of retirees balloons.

    If we truly wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, we should “send all ICE workers to the border. But if you take people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there’s an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”

    At the Pasadena Home Depot, where day laborers still gather despite the risk of raids, three men held out hope for work. Two of them told me they have legal status. “But there’s very little work,” said Gavino Dominguez.

    The third one, who said he’s undocumented, left to circle the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.

    Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was loading concrete and other supplies into his truck. He told me he lost one fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They came back because they’re desperate and need to pay their bills.

    “The housing shortage in California was already terrible before the fires, and now it’s 10 times worse,” said real estate agent Brock Harris, who represents a developer whose Altadena rebuilding project was temporarily slowed after a visit from ICE agents in June.

    With building permits beginning to flow, Harris said, “for these guys to slow down or shut down job sites is more than infuriating. You’re going to see fewer people willing to start a project.”

    Most people on a job site have legal status, Harris said, “but if shovels never hit the ground, the costs are being borne by everybody, and it’s slowing the rebuilding of L.A.”

    Lots of bumps on the road to the golden age of prosperity.

    steve.lopez@latimes.com

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    Steve Lopez

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  • Hyundai ICE raid in Georgia leaves Asian executives shaken by Trump’s mixed signals

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    SEOUL — The immigration raid that snatched up hundreds of South Koreans last week sent a disconcerting message to companies in South Korea and elsewhere: America wants your investment, but don’t expect special treatment.

    Images of employees being shackled and detained like criminals have outraged many South Koreans. The fallout is already being felt in delays to some big investment projects, auto industry executives and analysts said. Some predicted that it could also make some companies think twice about investing in the U.S. at all.

    “Companies cannot afford to not be more cautious about investing in the U.S. in the future,” said Lee Ho-guen, an auto industry expert at Daeduk University, “In the long run, especially if things get worse, this could make car companies turn away from the U.S. market and more toward other places like Latin America, Europe or the Middle East.”

    The raid last week, in which more than 300 South Korean nationals were detained, targeted a factory site in Ellabell, Ga., owned by HL-GA Battery Co., a joint venture between Hyundai and South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solutions to supply batteries for electric vehicles. The Georgia factory also is expected to supply batteries for Kia, which is part of the Hyundai Motor Group. Kia has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its factory in West Point, Ga.

    “This situation highlights the competing policy priorities of the Trump administration and has many in Asia scratching their heads, asking, ‘Which is more important to America? Immigration raids or attracting high-quality foreign investment?’” said Tami Overby, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea. “Images of hundreds of Korean workers being treated like criminals are playing all over Asia and don’t match President Trump’s vision to bring high-quality, advanced manufacturing back to America.”

    A protester wears a mask of President Trump at a rally Tuesday in Seoul against the detention of South Korean workers in Georgia. The signs call for “immediate releases and Trump apology.”

    (Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)

    South Korea is one of the U.S.’ biggest trading partners, with the two countries exchanging $242.5 billion in goods and services last year. The U.S. is the leading destination for South Korea’s overseas investments, receiving $26 billion last year, according to South Korea’s Finance Ministry.

    Trump is banking on ambitious projects like the one raided in Georgia to revive American manufacturing.

    Hyundai is one of the South Korean companies with the largest commitments to the U.S. It has invested about $20 billion since entering the market in the 1980s. It sold 836,802 vehicles in the U.S. last year.

    California is one of its largest markets, with more than 70 dealerships.

    Earlier this year, the company announced an additional $26 billion to build a new steel mill in Louisiana and upgrade its existing auto plants.

    Hyundai’s expansion plans were part of the $150-billion pledge that South Korea made last month to help persuade Trump to set tariffs on Korean products at 15% instead of the 25% he had earlier announced.

    Samsung Electronics announced that it would invest $37 billion to construct a semiconductor factory in Texas. Similarly large sums are expected from South Korean shipbuilders.

    Analysts and executives say the recent raid is making companies feel exposed, all the more so because U.S. officials have indicated that more crackdowns are coming.

    “We’re going to do more worksite enforcement operations,” White House border advisor Tom Homan said Sunday. “No one hires an illegal alien out of the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, undercut the competition that hires U.S. citizen employees.”

    Many South Korean companies have banned all work-related travel to the U.S. or are recalling personnel already there, according to local media reports. Construction work on at least 22 U.S. factory sites has reportedly been halted.

    The newspaper Korea Economic Daily reported Monday that 10 out of the 14 companies it contacted said they were considering adjusting their projects in the U.S. due to the Georgia raid.

    It is a significant problem for the big planned projects, analysts say. South Korean companies involved in U.S. manufacturing projects say they need to bring their own engineering teams to get the factories up and running, but obtaining proper work visas for them is difficult and time-consuming. The option often used to get around this problem is an illegal shortcut like using the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, a nonwork permit that allows tourists to stay in the country for up to 90 days.

    Unlike countries such as Singapore or Mexico, South Korea doesn’t have a deal with Washington that guarantees work visas for specialized workers.

    “The U.S. keeps calling for more investments into the country. But no matter how many people we end up hiring locally later, there is no way around bringing in South Korean experts to get things off the ground,” said a manager at a subcontractor for LG Energy Solution who asked not to be named. “But now we can no longer use ESTAs like we did in the past.”

    Trump pointed to the problem on his social media platform, posting that he will try to make it easier for South Korean companies to bring in the people they need, but reminding them to “please respect our Nation’s Immigration Laws.”

    “Your Investments are welcome, and we encourage you to LEGALLY bring your very smart people … and we will make it quickly and legally possible for you to do so,” the post said.

    Sydney Seiler, senior advisor and Korea chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the timing of the raids was an “irritant” but that South Korean companies eventually would adjust.

    “Rectifying that is a challenge for all involved, the companies, the embassies who issue visas, etc.,” Seiler said, adding that the raids will make other companies be more careful in the future.

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  • ICE confirms 4 Chicago-area arrests as Trump administration’s ‘Midway Blitz’ operation gets underway

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    CHICAGO (WLS) — Immigrant advocates say they have already received a large volume of calls to their hotline about Immigration and Customs Enforcement encounters in the Chicago area in recent days.

    Some elected leaders worry that this just the start of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the area.

    ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch

    “It’s obvious that operations have begun in Chicago, and it’s even more obvious they’re going to be targeting our communities here in the Southwest Side again. We’re afraid. Our neighbors are afraid,” said Any Huamani, who is on the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and is a Southwest Side Rapid Response team member.

    The Department of Homeland Security says their operation “Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area is underway. They say they are targeting violent offenders who are here illegally.

    On social media, ICE posted a picture of one of their SUVs with the Chicago skyline behind it, saying they are here to remove the dangerous public safety threats.

    Late Monday, ICE said agents arrested at least four men from Mexico in the Chicago area on Sunday. They are accused of crimes like DUI, vehicular burglary, armed robbery, domestic battery, assault and sexual assault of a child, ICE said.

    “So far, it’s been successful. We have successfully arrested some criminal aliens over the last few days. We just began our surge. We’re going to be bringing in our our partners, our other DHS partners, DOJ partners, CBP partners coming in. So, they’ll be coming in and participating in this ICE-led operation,” said ICE official Marcos Charles.

    SEE ALSO | Katie Abraham’s father speaks out on DHS’ operation ‘Midway Blitz’ in Chicago area

    ICE said one arrest was made at 47th and Archer and another was made at 49th and Archer. ICE did not provide locations for the other two arrests.

    Video provided to ABC7 shows federal agents wearing badges that say “ICE” handcuffing a man near Archer and Pulaski. Neighbors say that man is a flower vendor.

    “We have confirmed in my ward… detained in my ward… there have been three people. One in 50th and Pulaski; he a was a street vendor selling flowers. The other, a couple of blocks down in Archer, was just standing on the sidewalk. The third one was waiting on the bus on 47th and Archer,” said Ald. Jeylu Gutierrez, who represents the 14th Ward. “This was never about arresting the worst of the worst. It’s been about terrorizing our community.”

    Gutierrez says the wife of the flower vendor has been notified, and the family is figuring out their next steps.

    On Monday morning, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights says their teams were deployed to 61st and Kildare on Chicago’s Southwest Side after reports of immigration agents in the area.

    LIVE UPDATES | Chicago federal intervention: Tracking surge in immigration enforcement operations

    “What we do know is they attempted arrests, and there has been at least one arrest for today,” said ICIRR Senior Director of Deportation Defense Rey Wences.

    While announcing the immigration blitz on Monday, DHS also listed 11 specific people agents are looking for in Chicago.

    Many of those people were detained in the Cook County Jail for criminal cases, but later released.

    DHS accuses the jail of not cooperating. But in a statement on Monday night, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office says state law prohibits them from releasing any detainees into the custody of federal immigration authorities without a signed arrest warrant from a judge.

    Meanwhile, Evanston is also preparing for possible ICE raids in the coming days. The mayor there was tipped off by the governor’s office and sent out an email blast, letting residents know.

    “We’re also working with community partners. So for example, this morning, the high school sent an email blast as well to all of their families, knowing that some people might get ours and not theirs, some people might get theirs and not ours,” said Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.

    The Evanston City Council will vote on a resolution calling for the state to address ICE agents wearing masks on Monday night.

    “We believe that it is just fundamentally wrong in a democracy for an agent of the state to use the power of the state without identifying themselves clearly with transparency and accountability,” Biss said.

    Many people in the Chicago area are wondering if this past weekend was the calm before the ICE storm.

    “Operation ‘Midway Blitz’ is not public safety. It’s a declaration of war on Mexicans and Latinos in Chicago,” said state Rep. Aaron Ortiz, who represents the 1st District.

    Immigrant advocates reminded the public to not provoke federal agents and to take video of any encounters from a safe distance.

    Religious leaders rally against immigration crackdown in Chicago: ‘Faith over fear’

    Religious leaders from a diverse group of faith backgrounds stood with one voice on Daley Plaza to decry the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

    Meanwhile, more than one dozen faith leaders came together on Monday, taking a stand against ICE raids and rallying in support of immigrants in a campaign they are calling Faith Over Fear.

    “ICE cannot survive the fire of a forge,” said Reverend David Black with the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago.

    “But what he’s done is rallying us together. I’ve not seen this in a long time. He’s fighting with all his weapons of his mouth and weapons of the army. We’re fighting for something. It’s our DNA, our faith, our faith is essential of who we are. He’s not ready for this and he’s not more powerful,” said Fr. Michael Pfleger with St. Sabina Church.

    Religious leaders from a diverse group of faith backgrounds stood with one voice on Daley Plaza to decry the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the possibility of a National Guard deployment in Chicago, as the White House border czar says the use of National Guard troops to protect and support immigration enforcement operations is “on the table.”

    “This morning, as I dropped my kids off at school. Like so many of us in Chicago did this morning, we took our kids to school, but today felt different,” said Rev Sandra Van-Opstal with Lawndale Christian Community Church.

    “I’ve got to tell you, there’s a lot of fear. I live in the Pilsen/Little Village area, and it’s been quieter these past few days, and so, we suspect that people will be navigating the conditions in our city cautiously,” said Ray Wences with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

    Little Village is all decked out in Mexican colors in advance of this weekend’s Independence Day celebration. Many street vendors are selling flags and other items for those gearing up for the festivities.

    “God stood on the side of the vulnerable and the oppressed,” said Mishkan Chicago founder Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann. “God split the sea for them and said to the world, the way that you treat the least among you, the strangers, the slaves, the servants, the way that you treat them is a test of your society.”

    The faith leaders are preparing to support those families who may be impacted by ICE detentions.

    “As a way to be able to walk with the families after something has happened, we’re going to reactivate a lot of the resource network that we had during the new arrivals mission and be able to partner with churches and other groups to be able to get emergency items out to all of them,” said New Life Centers CEO Matt DeMateo.

    SEE ALSO | ‘We’re not going to war’ with Chicago, Trump says, after sharing ominous meme

    A protest and a march against the operation are set to get underway in the Loop late Tuesday afternoon.

    Trump, meanwhile, continues to focus on Chicago crime as operation “Midway Blitz” ramps up.

    “And I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us saying, ‘Please give us help,’ when you have, over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot, and then, you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s really crazy,” Trump said.

    In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson addressed a possible National Guard deployment to address crime, saying in part, “lowering crime rates here does not require an occupation of our city by armed members of the National Guard, as the White House continues to threaten us with…. Sending in the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem.”

    Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker responded to the ICE post about coming after dangerous criminals, saying it is not about fighting crime, and that if it were, his administration would have heard from the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate efforts. The governor says this is about scaring Illinoisans.

    The ICIRR Family Support Network was founded to connect immigrant communities with support. They can be reached at 855-435-7693.

    A spokesperson for Pritzker, issued a statement, saying, “The Governor’s Office has received no formal communication or information from the Trump Administration. Like the public and press, we are learning of their operations through their social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show. As Trump has said himself, this is not about seriously fighting crime or reforming immigration – it’s about Trump’s plan to go to war with America’s third-largest city. If he cared about delivering real solutions for Illinois, then we would have heard from him. Unlike Trump’s reality show, we don’t like keeping people in the dark. Since we have learned of the Trump Administration’s plans to deploy federal agents and active-duty military to Illinois, Gov. Pritzker has shared information with the public and the Governor’s Office has remained in regular contact with leaders and partners at the City of Chicago, Cook County, the Illinois congressional delegation, state legislature, and mayors and representatives from the collar counties.”

    Johnson also issued a statement, saying, “We have received no notice of any enhanced immigration action by the Trump administration. We are concerned about potential militarized immigration enforcement without due process because of ICE’s track record of detaining and deporting American citizens and violating the human rights of hundreds of detainees. ICE sent a 4-year-old boy with stage 4 kidney cancer to Honduras, even though the child was an American citizen. There are more than 500 documented incidents of human rights abuses at detention facilities since Trump took office, including deaths of detainees and alleged cases of sexual abuse of minors by federal immigration agents. Because of these incidents and more, we remain opposed to militarized immigration enforcement that runs afoul of the Constitution in our city. We encourage residents to visit www.Chicago.gov/KYR to stay informed on their rights.”

    Copyright © 2025 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.

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    Jasmine Minor

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  • South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in massive Hyundai plant raid in Georgia

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    SEOUL, South Korea — More than 300 South Korean workers detained following a massive immigration raid at a Hyundai plant in Georgia will be released and brought home, the South Korean government announced Sunday.

    Kang Hoon-sik, chief of staff for President Lee Jae Myung, said that South Korea and the U.S. had finalized negotiations on the workers’ release. He said South Korea plans to send a charter plane to bring the workers home as soon as remaining administrative steps are completed.

    Foreign Minister Cho Hyun is to leave for the U.S. on Monday for talks related to the workers’ releases, South Korean media reported.

    U.S. immigration authorities said Friday they detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided Hyundai’s sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia where the Korean automaker makes electric vehicles. Agents focused on a plant that is still under construction at which Hyundai has partnered with LG Energy Solution to produce batteries that power EVs.

    Cho said that more than 300 South Koreans were among the detained.

    The operation was the latest in a long line of workplace raids conducted as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. But the one on Thursday is especially distinct because of its large size and the fact that state officials have long called the targeted site Georgia’s largest economic development project.

    The raid stunned many in South Korea because the country is a key U.S. ally. It agreed in July to purchase $100 billion in U.S. energy and make a $350 billion investment in the U.S. in return for the U.S lowering tariff rates. About two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump and Lee held their first meeting in Washington.

    Lee said the rights of South Korean nationals and economic activities of South Korean companies must not be unfairly infringed upon during U.S. law enforcement procedures. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry separately issued a statement to express “concern and regret” over the case and sent diplomats to the site.

    Video released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday showed a caravan of vehicles driving up to the site and then federal agents directing workers to line up outside. Some detainees were ordered to put their hands up against a bus as they were frisked and then shackled around their hands, ankles and waist.

    Most of the people detained were taken to an immigration detention center in Folkston, Georgia, near the Florida state line. None has been charged with any crimes yet, Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations, said during a news conference Friday, adding that the investigation was ongoing.

    He said that some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working.

    Kang, the South Korean presidential chief of staff, said that South Korea will push to review and improve visa systems for those traveling to the U.S. on business trips for investment projects.

    The video in the player above is from a previous report.

    Copyright © 2025 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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  • District of Columbia sues over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard

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    The District of Columbia on Thursday sued to stop President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard during his law enforcement intervention in Washington.The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, said the surge of troops essentially amounts to an “involuntary military occupation.” He argued in the federal lawsuit that the deployment, coinciding with an executive order Aug. 11, that now involves more than 1,000 troops is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.A federal judge in California recently ruled that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June was illegal.The Republican administration is appealing that decision and Trump has said he is ready to order federal intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite staunch opposition in those Democrat-led cities. That court ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the Guard than in states.The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment to the new lawsuit.Members of the D.C. National Guard have had their orders extended through December, according to a Guard official. While that does not necessarily mean all those troops will serve that long, it is a strong indication that their role will not wind down soon.Several GOP-led states have added National Guard troops to the ranks of those patrolling the streets and neighborhoods of the nation’s capital.Schwalb’s filing contends the deployment also violates the Home Rule Act, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973, because Trump acted without the mayor’s consent and is wrongly asserting federal control over units from other states.The city’s attorney general, an elected official, is its top legal officer and is separate from Washington’s federal U.S. attorney, who is appointed by the president.The lawsuit is the second from Schwalb against the Trump administration since the president asserted control over the city’s police department and sent in the Guard, actions that have been with protests from some residents.Trump has said the operation is necessary to combat crime in the district, and Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has pointed to a steep drop in offenses such as carjackings since it began.Violent crime has been an issue in the capital for years, though data showed it was on the decline at the start of Trump’s intervention.

    WASHINGTON —

    The District of Columbia on Thursday sued to stop President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard during his law enforcement intervention in Washington.

    The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, said the surge of troops essentially amounts to an “involuntary military occupation.” He argued in the federal lawsuit that the deployment, coinciding with an executive order Aug. 11, that now involves more than 1,000 troops is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

    A federal judge in California recently ruled that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June was illegal.

    The Republican administration is appealing that decision and Trump has said he is ready to order federal intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite staunch opposition in those Democrat-led cities. That court ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the Guard than in states.

    The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment to the new lawsuit.

    Members of the D.C. National Guard have had their orders extended through December, according to a Guard official. While that does not necessarily mean all those troops will serve that long, it is a strong indication that their role will not wind down soon.

    Several GOP-led states have added National Guard troops to the ranks of those patrolling the streets and neighborhoods of the nation’s capital.

    Schwalb’s filing contends the deployment also violates the Home Rule Act, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973, because Trump acted without the mayor’s consent and is wrongly asserting federal control over units from other states.

    The city’s attorney general, an elected official, is its top legal officer and is separate from Washington’s federal U.S. attorney, who is appointed by the president.

    The lawsuit is the second from Schwalb against the Trump administration since the president asserted control over the city’s police department and sent in the Guard, actions that have been with protests from some residents.

    Trump has said the operation is necessary to combat crime in the district, and Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has pointed to a steep drop in offenses such as carjackings since it began.

    Violent crime has been an issue in the capital for years, though data showed it was on the decline at the start of Trump’s intervention.

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  • At Labor Day rallies, speakers decry Trump

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    Thousands of union members and others participated in marches, rallies and picnics on Labor Day throughout the Los Angeles region and across the country on Monday, decrying actions by the Trump administration that they say weaken unions and harm workers while strengthening and emboldening major corporations and the wealthy.

    A White House proclamation Monday said President Trump’s actions are “reversing decades of neglect and finally putting American Workers first” by rewriting tax laws and creating a better economic climate for businesses.

    His critics say he is undermining, in historic ways, the government and labor-union infrastructure established to protect workers — and therefore hurting individual workers.

    Participants at a massive Wilmington rally and parade — organized by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor — united over a common foe: Trump.

    “Donald Trump has gone too far,” said state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), as she and others linked typical Labor Day rhetoric directly to immigration raids. “On this Labor Day, we have an American president who takes parents from their children and workers from their jobs.”

    The raids are no longer about border security, Durazo said, but “about breaking the backbone of our economy and terrorizing families.”

    ”Fighting for workers’ rights means fighting for immigrant rights,” said Angelica Salas, the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group CHIRLA.

    The Trump administration, meanwhile, marked Labor Day by extolling the American worker and calling attention to new trade policies — including widespread tariffs — intended to spur a return of manufacturing to the United States.

    “Every day, my Administration is restoring the dignity of labor and putting the American worker first,” Trump said in a Labor Day proclamation. “We are making it easier to buy American and hire American, breathing new life into our manufacturing cities, and securing fair trade deals that protect our jobs and reward our productivity. … Under my leadership, we are bringing jobs back to America — and those jobs are going to American-born workers.”

    Tariff chaos at port

    The effect of tariffs and their uneven rollout is widely debated, including within Trump’s Republican Party, although a Congress controlled by Republicans has not acted to stop them.

    Trump’s tariffs — and the threat of them — have triggered unpredictable boom-and-bust cycles at L.A.’s ports, Mickey Chavez, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Southern California District Council, said Monday.

    Standing with his French bulldog Gucci under an ILWU tent after the Wilmington parade, the union foreman described how the mood has fluctuated dramatically at the nearby union hall where ILWU members wait for work.

    “It’s been chaotic, more than anything, with the tariffs,” Chavez said as smoke from a barbecue a few tents over curled past his ILWU beret. “Either the workers really get a lot of work because they’re trying to beat the tariffs, or then [Trump] sets out more tariffs and the work slows down.”

    The uncertainty has made it difficult for workers to plan, particularly those at the lowest level, who are most affected by slowdowns.

    “If he sends out a tweet or makes a decision, we never know if there’s going to be work or not, so it’s been in flux,” the fourth-generation ILWU member said.

    Chavez’s great-grandfather first joined the union in the 1940s and his family has worked at the ports ever since. But he has never experienced anything like this before, where work is so dependent on the whims of a single man, he said.

    Trump bans most federal bargaining

    On the same day as his Labor Day proclamation, Trump issued an order banning collective bargaining at the International Trade Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Commerce Department; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, and the National Weather Service; as well as at NASA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

    Trump cited national security concerns as providing legal grounds for the unilateral edict. The latest action follows a March order outlawing collective bargaining for a majority of the federal workforce, citing the same justification.

    Unions immediately filed suit, putting Trump’s action on hold.

    A study from the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimated that Trump’s orders have stripped 82% of civilian federal workers of their right to bargain. The total number of workers whose contracts Trump has abrogated exceeds 1 million, an estimated one-fifteenth of American workers covered by a union contract.

    In addition, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, although the National Labor Relations Act stipulates that board members serve for five years and her term was not to end until August 2028. Her dismissal has paralyzed the labor board by leaving it without a quorum. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop her dismissal as part of ongoing litigation.

    At least one speaker at the Wilmington rally spoke of the need for organized labor to support California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to redraw state congressional districts to flip as many as five seats from Republican to Democrat — a strategy to offset actions taken in Texas — urged on by Trump — to do exactly the opposite.

    Labor groups have already put millions of dollars behind it and have committed to help lead voter-mobilization efforts.

    Unlike in Texas, Newsom’s plan must be approved by voters, who will have the opportunity to support it by voting for Proposition 50.

    Passage of the measure at the ballot box is essential, state Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles) said at the Wilmington event, because Trump is already “destroying the fabric of the labor movement” months into his second term.

    California Republicans point out that the measure unravels reforms meant to make California districts more representative and competitive. Opponents of the retaliatory gerrymander include former California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Festive vibes

    In Wilmington, although the thousands of union members and allies were fired up, the rally and parade retained a festive vibe.

    On a truck at the front of the procession, leaders of local and state labor groups danced with elected officials as Bob Marley and the Wailers sang about standing up for rights over a loudspeaker.

    Hammerhead cranes at the nearby port facilities dotted the horizon as classic cars turned down E Street, and posters and T-shirts in the crowd advertised membership in an alphabet soup of union locals.

    Children sharing space with political fliers in oversized wagons blew bubbles, and teenage girls from a local high school twirled pom-poms.

    At the helm of a massive shiny black truck bearing the Teamsters insignia, a driver clenched a cigar between his teeth as he steered with one hand and pulled an overhead horn with the other. Representatives from the local branch of the sheet metal workers union carried a carefully crafted, welded brown California bear in the back of their truck.

    Alongside carpenters and nurses and dockworkers, there were also representatives from a cadre of entertainment industry unions representing actors, writers and production workers.

    Rallies across the Southland and the country were united under the banner of May Day Strong, a partnership of labor, political and environmental organizations. The targets of the rallies included federal agencies carrying out immigration raids, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    “The billionaires continue to wage a war on working people, with their cronies in the administration, ICE and law enforcement backing up their attacks,” according to the organizers’ toolkit. “This Labor Day we will continue to stand strong, fighting for public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, shared prosperity over billionaire-bought politics.”

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    Julia Wick, Howard Blume

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  • ‘Take your orange aprons somewhere else’: Citing raids, L.A. official opposes Home Depot in Eagle Rock

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    A Los Angeles city councilmember has openly opposed Home Depot’s plans to open a new location at Eagle Rock Plaza, claiming the home improvement retailer has been complicit with immigration enforcement operations.

    In an Instagram post, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado wrote, “Take your orange aprons somewhere else,” citing a raid that occurred Thursday morning at Westlake Home Depot, one of several at that location since June. Jurado’s district spans from downtown to El Sereno and Eagle Rock.

    Home Depot plans to demolish the former Macy’s department store in Eagle Rock Plaza to make space for its new location, The Eastsider reported.

    On Thursday, surveillance video obtained by The Times shows federal agents arriving in several vehicles across from the Home Depot and CARECEN Day Labor Center, and immediately running after people, including vendors and day laborers.

    As people scattered, federal agents can be seen deploying tear gas.

    A man who was apprehended and pinned to the ground by federal officials was punched in the face, according to a statement by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

    “We are disturbed by what can only be described as an act of terror and indiscriminate roundup of Latino street vendors, day laborers, and people who were going about their daily lives,” the organization stated.

    At least eight to 15 people were arrested during the operation, according to CHIRLA.

    This specific home improvement store on Wilshire Boulevard and South Union Avenue has been the site of four immigration operations since June 6, including “Operation Trojan Horse,” in which half a dozen border patrol agents jumped out of a Penske truck and arrested 16 people.

    These raids, Jurado said, “are part of a disturbing pattern across Los Angeles, with ICE repeatedly targeting Home Depot parking lots — common gathering spots for day laborers — without judicial warrants, in clear violation of people’s rights.”

    In her post, the councilmember accused Home Depot of “remaining silent.”

    “When your name becomes associated with terror and you refuse to speak, you are complicit,” the post read. “Home Depot has chosen power and profit over the working people who sustain it.”

    In a statement to The Times, Home Depot spokesperson Sarah McDonald said the company isn’t notified of planned ICE operations and “we’re not requesting them.” In many cases the company doesn’t know arrests happen until after they’re over, she said.

    “We’re required to follow all federal and local rules and regulations in every market where we operate,” McDonald said.

    The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to the Times’ request for comment before publication.

    Earlier this month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s block on “roving patrols” across much of Southern California. The ruling maintains a temporary restraining order barring masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. without documentation.

    The excessive use of force that occurred during Thursday’s raid “and apparent disregard of community safety standards by federal agents is deeply disturbing, may be a violation of the TRO currently in place, and must be investigated,” CHIRLA stated.

    On Friday, the East Area Progressive Democrats announced on Facebook that the group launched a #NoHomeDepot campaign to stop the retailer from opening a brick-and-mortar in the Eagle Rock Plaza.

    Staff writer Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.

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    Karen Garcia

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  • ICE will ‘ramp up’ immigration raids in Los Angeles, other ‘sanctuary cities,’ border advisor says

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    President Donald Trump’s border czar told reporters Thursday that federal authorities planned to increase immigration raids in Los Angeles and other so-called “sanctuary cities,” with Chicago likely the next target.

    “You’re going to see a ramp up of operations in New York; you’re going to see a ramp up of operations continue in L.A., Portland, Seattle, all these sanctuary cities that refuse to work with ICE,” Tom Homan said.

    Since June, Southern California has been ground zero of thousands of immigration arrests as well as legal battles over whether the raids violate the U.S. Constitution.

    There is no agreed-upon definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities, but the terms generally describe limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    Homan did not elaborate on specifics about new raids in L.A.

    But talking to reporters Thursday morning, he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering using a naval base north of Chicago as its hub when potential enforcement raids take place in that city.

    Tom Homan said, “there’s discussions about that, yes,” when asked by reporters outside the White House.

    He didn’t provide an exact timeline for the use.

    “The planning is still being discussed,” he said. “So, maybe by the end of today.”

    Earlier this week, Trump said Chicago would likely be the next city in which he’ll direct a crack down on crime and, in particular, illegal immigration.

    He recently sent 2,000 National Guard troops to Washington D.C. after having dispatched soldiers, ICE and border patrol agents to Los Angeles since early June. The Department of Homeland Security said that as of Aug. 8 ICE and Border Patrol agents had arrested 2,792 illegal aliens in the Los Angeles area.

    “I think Chicago will be… next,” Trump told reporters at the White House last Friday.

    He also called the City of Broad Shoulders a “mess” and that its residents were “screaming for us to come.” Three days after Trump railed about crime in Chicago, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson released a statement, saying overall crime in the city had dropped by 21.6%, year to date, with homicides falling by 32.3%.

    Homan would not commit to how many soldiers and agents would be used in any immigration enforcement.

    “We’re not going to tell you how many resources we’re going to send to the city,” he said. “We don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re sending.”

    He added, “It will be a large contingent.”

    Since a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from targeting people solely based on their race, language, vocation or location, the number of arrests in Southern California declined in July.

    But raids are continuing, with Home Depot stores becoming a common target in recent weeks.

    On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Trump administration request to lift the restraining order prohibiting roving raids.

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    Andrew J. Campa

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  • Trump expands L.A. military tactics by sending National Guard to Washington, D.C.

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    WASHINGTON — In an expansion of tactics started in June during immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Trump on Monday announced he would take federal control of Washington’s police department and activate 800 National Guard troops in the nation’s capital to help “reestablish law and order.”

    “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at the White House.

    “This is liberation day in D.C.,” he declared.

    Trump, who sent roughly 5,000 Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. in June in a move that was opposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, issued an executive order declaring a public safety emergency in D.C. The order invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act that places the Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.

    The California governor decried Trump’s move in D.C., warning that what happened in L.A. was now taking place across the country.

    “He was just getting warmed up in Los Angeles,” Newsom said on X. “He will gaslight his way into militarizing any city he wants in America. This is what dictators do.”

    In his briefing, Trump painted D.C. in dark, apocalyptic terms as a grimy hellhole “of crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor and worse.” He said he planned to get tough, citing his administration’s stringent enforcement on the nation’s southern border.

    Already, Trump said, his administration has begun to remove homeless people from encampments across the city, and he said he planned to target undocumented immigrants, too. He vowed to “restore the city back to the gleaming capital that everybody wants it to be.”

    As the White House noted in a fact sheet Monday, D.C. had a 2024 homicide rate of 27 per 100,000 residents, the nation’s fourth-highest homicide rate. By comparison, Los Angeles’ homicide rate is 7.1 per 100,000 residents.

    But data also show violent crime has declined significantly in D.C. in recent years.

    Just a few weeks before Trump took office, the Justice Department announced that violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low. Homicides were down 32%, robberies down 39% and armed carjackings down 53% when compared with 2023 levels, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department.

    In a press conference Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s deployment of troops “unsettling and unprecedented.” But she also tried to strike a conciliatory tone with the president, acknowledging he was operating within the letter of the law in her district.

    “We’re not a state. We don’t control the D.C. National Guard,” she told reporters. “… Limited home rule gives the federal government the ability to intrude on our autonomy in many ways.”

    Bowser suggested the president was misinformed about crime in the district, advancing the idea that his views of D.C. were largely shaped by his COVID-era experience.

    “It is true that those were more challenging times,” Bowser told reporters. “It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-COVID. But we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we have seen a huge decrease in crime.”

    Accountability for gun-related crimes in the district remains an issue of concern, Bowser said, again offering an olive branch to Trump. But she noted that crime in the capital is down to pre-pandemic levels and that violent crime statistics are at 30-year lows.

    Brian Schwalb, the elected attorney general of the District of Columbia, said in a statement that “there is no crime emergency” in D.C. and the administration’s deployment of troops was “unprecedented, unnecessary and unlawful.”

    His office refuted the claims of Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who said juveniles, or as she put it, “young punks,” were too often granted probation or other lenient sentences

    In D.C., the U.S. attorney’s office handles all adult felonies and the majority of adult misdemeanors, while Schwalb’s office exercises jurisdiction over crimes committed by juveniles and some adult misdemeanors.

    Since Schwalb took office in January 2023, the office has prosecuted so many juveniles at higher rates that the mayor has had to issue an emergency order creating more space at juvenile detention facilities, according to his office. Last year, the office prosecuted over 90% of homicide and attempted homicide cases, 88% of violent assault cases and 87% of carjacking cases, according to the statement.

    Ken Lang, a veteran of the Baltimore Police Department and an expert on law enforcement, said that Trump’s actions in D.C. could be an effort “to model a new national law enforcement strategy by having federal, state and local agencies better partner together.”

    But because it is a federal district and not a state, he said, D.C. occupies a “unique legal position” under the Home Rule Act.

    Oklahoma Mayor David Holt, who is also president of the United States Conference of Mayors, condemned Trump’s move as a “takeover,” and said “local control is always best.”

    Holt noted that the Trump administration’s data — specifically, the FBI’s national crime rate report released last week — shows crime rates dropping in cities across the nation.

    Trump said the deployment of troops in D.C. should serve as a warning to cities across the nation — including Los Angeles.

    “Hopefully L.A.’s watching,” Trump said as he berated Bass and Newsom for their handling of the firestorm that swept through the region in January, destroying thousands of homes.

    “The mayor’s incompetent and so is Gov. Newscum,” Trump said. “He’s got a good line of bull—, but that’s about it.”

    Trump’s announcement that he was deploying troops to D.C. comes more than two months after he sparked a major legal battle with California when he sent thousands of troops to Los Angeles. He argued they were necessary to combat what he described as “violent, insurrectionist mobs” as protests broke out in the city against federal immigration raids.

    But the protests calmed relatively quickly and local officials said they were primarily kept in check by police. The National Guard troops and Marines wound up sparsely deployed in Los Angeles, with some protecting federal buildings and some assisting federal agents as they conducted immigration enforcement operations. Military officials said the troops were restricted to security and crowd control and had no law enforcement authority.

    Trump’s deployment of troops to D.C. immediately found its way into the pitched court battle in California over whether his administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars federalized military from civilian law enforcement.

    As top U.S. military officials testified before Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, California lawyers quickly maneuvered to get Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement into evidence, hoping to bolster their argument that the government had not only knowingly violated the law, but was likely to do so again.

    “That’s one of the tests for injunctive relief, right?” Breyer said. “Present conduct may be relevant on that issue.”

    In June, Breyer ruled that Trump broke the law when he mobilized thousands of California National Guard members against the state’s wishes.

    In a 36-page decision, Breyer wrote that Trump’s actions “were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

    But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused that court order, allowing the troops to remain in Los Angeles while the case plays out in federal court. The appellate court found the president had broad, though not “unreviewable,” authority to deploy the military in American cities.

    That decision is set to be reviewed by a larger “en banc” panel of the appellate court. Meanwhile, California continues to fight what it says are illegal uses of the military for civilian law enforcement in Judge Breyer’s court in San Francisco.

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    Jenny Jarvie, Michael Wilner, Sonja Sharp

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