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Tag: los angeles times

  • The Supreme Court could give immigration agents broad power to stop and question Latinos

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    WASHINGTON — This year’s most far-reaching immigration case is likely to decide if immigration agents in Los Angeles are free to stop, question and arrest Latinos they suspect are here illegally.

    President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation” in American history, and he chose to begin aggressive street sweeps in Los Angeles in early June.

    The Greater Los Angeles area is “ground zero for the effects of the border crisis,” his lawyers told the Supreme Court this month. “Nearly 2 million illegal aliens — out of an area population of 20 million — are there unlawfully, encouraged by sanctuary-city policies and local officials’ avowed aim to thwart federal enforcement efforts.”

    The “vast majority of illegal aliens in the [Central] District [of California] come from Mexico or Central America and many only speak Spanish,” they added.

    Their fast-track appeal urged the justices to confirm that immigration agents have “reasonable suspicion” to stop and question Latinos who work in businesses or occupations that draw many undocumented workers.

    No one questions that U.S. immigration agents may arrest migrants with criminal records or a final order of removal. But Trump administration lawyers say agents also have the authority to stop and question — and sometimes handcuff and arrest — otherwise law-abiding Latinos who have lived and worked here for years.

    They could do so based not on evidence that the particular person lacks legal status but on the assumption that they look and work like others who are here illegally.

    “Reasonable suspicion is a low bar — well below probable cause,” administration lawyers said. “Apparent ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion,” they added, noting that this standard assumes “lawful stops of innocent people may occur.”

    If the court rules for Trump, it “could be enormously consequential” in Los Angeles and nationwide, said UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law & Policy. “The government would read this as giving immigration enforcement agents a license to interrogate and detain people without individualized suspicion. It would likely set a pattern that could be used in other parts of the country.”

    In their response to the appeal, immigrant rights advocates said the court should not “bless a regime that could ensnare in an immigration dragnet the millions of people … who are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally entitled to be in this country and are Latino, speak Spanish” and work in construction, food services or agriculture and can be seen at bus stops, car washes or retail parking lots.

    The case now before the high court began June 18 when Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and two other Pasadena residents were arrested at a bus stop where they were waiting to be picked up for a job. They said heavily armed men wearing masks grabbed them, handcuffed them and put them in a car and drove to a detention center.

    If “felt like a kidnapping,” Vasquez Perdomo said.

    The plaintiffs include people who were handcuffed, arrested and taken to holding facilities even though they were U.S. citizens.

    They joined a lawsuit with unions and immigrants rights groups as well as others who said they were confronted with masked agents who shouted commands and, in some instances, pushed them to the ground.

    However, the suit quickly focused not on the aggressive and sometimes violent manner of the detentions, but on the legality of the stops.

    U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said the detentions appeared to violate the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

    It is “illegal to conduct roving patrols which identify people based on race alone, aggressively question them, and then detain them without a warrant, without their consent, and without reasonable suspicion that they are without status,” she said on July 11.

    The crucial phrase is “reasonable suspicion.”

    For decades, the Supreme Court has said police officers and federal agents may stop and briefly question persons if they see something that gives them reason to suspect a violation of the law. This is why, for example, an officer may pull over a motorist whose car has swerved on the highway.

    But it was not clear that U.S. immigration agents can claim they have reasonable suspicion to stop and question persons based on their appearance if they are sitting at a bus stop in Pasadena, working at a car wash or standing with others outside a Home Depot.

    Frimpong did not forbid agents from stopping and questioning persons who may be here illegally, but she put limits on their authority.

    She said agents may not stop persons based “solely” on four factors: their race or apparent ethnicity, the fact they speak Spanish, the type of work they do, or their location such as a day labor pickup site or a car wash.

    On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift the judge’s temporary restraining order. The four factors “describe only a broad profile that does not supply the reasonable suspicion to justify a detentive stop,” the judges said by a 3-0 vote.

    The district judge’s order applies in the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and Orange counties as well as Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

    The 9th Circuit said those seven counties have an estimated population of 19,233,598, of whom 47% or 9,096,334 identify as “Hispanic or Latino.”

    Like Frimpong, the three appellate judges were Democratic appointees.

    A week later, Trump administration lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in Noem vs. Perdomo. They said the judge’s order was impeding the president’s effort to enforce the immigration laws.

    They urged the court to set aside the judge’s order and to clear the way for agents to make stops if they suspect the person may be in the country illegally.

    Agents do not need evidence of a legal violation, they said. Moreover, the demographics of Los Angeles alone supplies them with reasonable suspicion.

    “All of this reflects common sense: the reasonable-suspicion threshold is low, and the number of people who are illegally present and subject to detention and removal under the immigration laws in the (the seven-county area of Southern California) is extraordinarily high,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer. “The high prevalence of illegal aliens should enable agents to stop a relatively broad range of individuals.”

    He said the government is not “extolling racial profiling,” but “apparent ethnicity can be relevant to reasonable suspicion, especially in immigration enforcement.”

    In the past, the court has said police can make stops based on the “totality of the circumstances” or the full picture. That should help the administration because agents can point to the large number of undocumented workers at certain businesses.

    But past decisions have also said officers need some reason to suspect a specific individual may be violating the law.

    The Supreme Court could act at any time, but it may also be several weeks before an order is issued. The decision may come with little or no explanation.

    In recent weeks, the court’s conservatives have regularly sided with Trump and against federal district judges who have stood in his way. The terse decisions have been often followed by an angry and lengthy dissent from the three liberals.

    Immigration rights advocates said the court should not uphold “an extraordinarily expansive dragnet, placing millions of law-abiding people at imminent risk of detention by federal agents.”

    They said the daily patrols “have cast a pall over the district, where millions meet the government’s broad demographic profile and therefore reasonably fear that they may be caught up in the government’s dragnet, and perhaps spirited away from their families on a long-term basis, any time they venture outside their own homes.”

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    David G. Savage

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  • Photos: An epic day in the ocean

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    Surfing with a disability

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    Allen J. Schaben

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  • Trump can’t deny funds to L.A. and 30 other ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions, judge rules

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    The Trump administration cannot deny funding to Los Angeles and 30 other cities and counties because of “sanctuary” policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration agencies, a judge ruled late Friday.

    The judge issued a preliminary injunction that expands restrictions the court handed down in April that blocked funding cuts to 16 cities and counties, including San Francisco and Santa Clara, after federal officials classified them as “sanctuary jurisdictions.”

    U.S. District Judge William Orrick of the federal court in San Francisco ruled then that Trump’s executive order cutting funding was probably unconstitutional and violated the separation of powers doctrine.

    Friday’s order added more than a dozen more jurisdictions to the preliminary injunction, including Los Angeles, Alameda County, Berkeley, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago.

    Mayor Karen Bass’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House said the Trump administration expected to ultimately win in its effort on appeal.

    “The government — at all levels — has the duty to protect American citizens from harm,” Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement. “Sanctuary cities interfere with federal immigration enforcement at the expense and safety and security of American citizens. We look forward to ultimate vindication on the issue.”

    The preliminary injunction is the latest chapter in an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to force “sanctuary cities” to assist and commit local resources to federal immigration enforcement efforts.

    Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice published a list of what it determined to be sanctuary jurisdictions, or local entities that have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

    “Sanctuary policies impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk by design,” Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi said in a statement accompanying the published list.

    Several cities and counties across the country have adopted sanctuary city policies, but specifics as to what extent they’re willing — or unwilling — to do for federal immigration officials have varied.

    The policies typically do not impede federal officials from conducting immigration enforcement activities, but largely keep local jurisdictions from committing resources to the efforts.

    The policies also don’t prevent local agencies from enforcing judicial warrants, which are signed by a judge. Cooperation on “detainers” or holds on jailed suspects issued by federal agencies, along with enforcement of civil immigration matters, is typically limited by sanctuary policies.

    Federal officials in the suit have so far referred to “sanctuary” jurisdictions as local governments that don’t honor immigration detainer requests, don’t assist with administrative warrants, don’t share immigration status information, or don’t allow local police to assist in immigration enforcement operations.

    Orrick noted that the executive orders threatened to withhold all federal funding if the cities and counties in question did not adhere to the Trump administration’s requests.

    In the order, the judge referred to the executive order as a “coercive threat” and said it was unconstitutional.

    Orrick, who sits on the bench in the Northern District of California, was appointed by former President Obama.

    The Trump administration has been ratcheting up efforts to force local jurisdictions to assist in immigration enforcement. The administration has filed lawsuits against cities and counties, vastly increased street operations and immigration detentions, and deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles as it increased immigration operations.

    The U.S. Department of Justice in June sued Los Angeles, and local officials, alleging its sanctuary city law is “illegal.”

    The suit alleged that the city was looking to “thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations” by enacting sanctuary city policies.

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    Salvador Hernandez

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  • Records fall as worst of dangerous heat wave bears down on Southern California

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    After one day of widespread, dangerously hot temperatures — including a few that broke daily records— National Weather Service officials are warning Southern Californians that this prolonged heat wave is just getting started.

    Friday is forecast to bring more sizzling heat, with temperatures and conditions similar to Thursday when highs hit over 105 degrees in many Los Angeles County valleys and over 110 in some deserts. A widespread extreme heat warning remains in place for much of Southern California through Saturday, warning of “dangerously hot conditions” causing a high risk for heat illnesses.

    Many areas Thursday night into early Friday experienced little cooling, with temperatures across the L.A. Basin remaining above 70 degrees. Experts warn that lack of nighttime relief can be the most dangerous situation, as it doesn’t give the body a chance to recover from daytime highs — and can help fuel a wildfire, if one ignites.

    “Extreme heat is dangerous even at night,” the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center wrote in a heat wave update. The extreme heat poses “a threat to anyone without effective cooling and adequate hydration.”

    The National Weather Service continues to warn of a trio of threats through this weekend: the extreme heat, elevated fire conditions, and a chance for monsoonal thunderstorms. A red flag warning remains in effect for the Los Angeles and Ventura County mountains and foothills through Saturday night.

    Thunderstorms, mostly in the mountains and deserts, could remain a threat through Monday. Forecasters say the storms could bring localized winds, flooding, debris flows and the chance for dry lightning, which could spark fires.

    Temperatures are expected to fall a few degrees by Saturday, and will continue to do so into early next week — though highs will remain above average for this time of year.

    Record-breaking high temperatures Thursday:

    These are a few of the daily high temperatures records around Southern California that were tied or broken on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service:

    • Camarillo Airport: 89 degrees (tied with prior record)
    • Campo: 106 degrees (prior record was 103)
    • Lake Cuyamaca: 96 degrees (prior record was 94)
    • Palomar Mountain: 93 degrees (tied with prior record)

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    Grace Toohey

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  • A mother’s choice: Jail in L.A. or deportation to Mexico with her children

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    YOJUELA, Mexico — Modesta Matías Aquino was working her regular morning shift — 3 a.m. till noon — at the Glass House Farms in Camarillo, caring for rows of marijuana plants.

    Among her co-workers on the morning of July 10 were two of her daughters, aged 16 and 19.

    “With everything going on, with the raids, there had been rumors that something bad might happen,” Matías recalled.

    About 9 a.m., she said, phalanxes of masked agents in tactical vests sealed off the sprawling compound. Matías and her daughters were among more than 300 undocumented immigrants — including at least 10 minors — who, according to U.S. authorities, were detained at a pair of Glass House sites.

    The raids, like other such operations across the United States, split many so-called “mixed-status” families, those with both U.S.-born citizens — often children — and undocumented relatives, typically one or both parents.

    Matías’ family life is, by any definition, complicated, including seven daughters in all. Her two youngest daughters, aged 2 and 5, are U.S. citizens, born in California. Her 2-year-old grandson —the child of Matías’ 16-year-old daughter — is also a native Californian. So when Matías was held in a federal lockup in downtown Los Angeles, she faced a momentous choice — one that would mark her family for life.

    Matías, 43, could accept removal to Mexico. But that might effectively banish her from returning to the United States, where she had toiled as a field worker for most of the past quarter-century — and where she had deep family ties.

    Alternately, she could fight expulsion in court. But that would leave her in custody, possibly indefinitely.

    “They told me I could be locked up for months, maybe a year, and never see my children,” Matías said, recalling what U.S. agents informed her in Los Angeles. “I just couldn’t endure that.”

    Instead, Matías said, she agreed to return voluntarily to Mexico, but with a caveat: She had to be accompanied by her two youngest daughters and her grandson. After some haggling — federal authorities initially balked at sending U.S. citizen minors to Mexico, Matías said — an agreement was reached. (The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to inquiries from The Times.)

    She and four daughters — the two undocumented teenagers who worked at Glass House and the two U.S. citizen youngsters — were soon in a van en route to Tijuana. The U.S.-born grandson was also with them.

    “Go ahead,” an agent told Matías upon letting the family out at the border. “You’re back in your country now.”

    Ailed Lorenzo Matías and her son, Liam Yair, in the family home in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, have a video chat with the boy’s father, who is in California.

    (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

    Back to Yojuela

    The hamlet of Yojuela is home to some 500 people — all of Indigenous Zapotec origins — who reside deep in the Sierra Madre Oriental, in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state. The area is known for its clay pottery, fired from distinctive reddish earth, and for something else — dispatching its offspring to work in the fields of California, supporting loved ones left behind in a time-tested rite of passage.

    The scripted sequel is the triumphant homecoming of those who moved on but never forsook their roots. These days, however, many return to places like Yojuela broke and embittered, casualties of President Trump’s deportation onslaught.

    Matías and her family showed up last month, just 20 days after she was detained. She had last set foot here seven years earlier.

    “This is is where I was born and reared,” Matías said with both resignation and pride, ushering visitors onto a verdant patch shimmering in the aftermath of recent rains.

    Reaching the ancestral hearth involves a two-hour, uphill drive on a washboard road from the nearest city, and then a short hike — across a stream and up a steep hill, past fields of corn and beans and stands of pine, all to a soundtrack of clucking turkeys and braying donkeys.

    Accompanying Matías were two U.S.-born daughters, Arisbeth, 2, and Keilani, a onetime Oxnard preschooler who turned 5 in Tijuana. Also present were Matías’ 16-year-old daughter, Ailed, and Ailed’s U.S.-born son, Liam Yair, 2.

    I’d like like to go back to California

    — Ailed Lorenzo Matías

    It marked the first time that the native Californians met their extended family, including a platoon of curious cousins.

    Seasoned to the periodic reunion ritual was Cecilia Aquino, mother of Matías and her five siblings— all of whom had made the trek to California. For decades, her adobe dwelling hosted waves of grandchildren and great-grandchildren as sons and daughters went back and forth, entrusting expanding broods to the matriarch.

    Matías and her mother, now 72, embraced, no words needed. Each examined the other closely. Time had taken its melancholic toll.

    “All of my children had to go away and leave their kids with me — there’s no work here,” said Aquino, worn down by years of toil, as she prepared coffee on a kindling-fired stove. “Then they come back. Then they leave again. It’s sad. The children never really get to know their parents. I wish the officials on the other side [of the border] would let them be together.”

    Leaving home

    Matías joined the migrant trail as a teenager, following the harvests — strawberries, celery, broccoli and more — from California to the Pacific Northwest. Through the years, she gave birth to her seven daughters — four in the United States, three in Mexico — as she crisscrossed the border a dozen times.

    “I was always a single mother, always battling on my own for my children,” Matías said. “I earned everything through my own sweat and toil. The fathers of my kids never gave me anything.”

    Her last journey north, in 2018, was the most difficult, as the once-porous international boundary had become a militarized bulwark. She vowed it would be her last crossing. Four years ago, she said, she secured work at Glass House Farms, a major player in the legalized cannabis boom.

    “It was the best job I ever had,” she said.

    There was no back-breaking stooping: Trimmers sat on benches. The pounding sun wasn’t an issue in the temperature-controlled facilities.

    Matías said she rose to become a crew chief, overseeing 240 workers. She said she earned more than $20 an hour, and, with overtime, regularly grossed in excess of $1,000 a week — a unfathomable haul in Oaxaca, where field hands pocket the equivalent of about $10 a day.

    Her plan, she said, was to remain in California until she turned 65, then retire to Yojuela, using savings to open a shop.

    “I never wanted to stay forever in Oxnard,” she said.

    Then came July 10.

    ‘Total chaos’

    “People were running all over the place,” Matías recalled of the raid. “Some tried to hide inside the greenhouses. Others crawled inside the ventilation shafts. It was total chaos.”

    One worker, Jaime Alanis García, 56, died from injuries suffered when he fell from a greenhouse roof, apparently while trying to evade arrest.

    Blocking any escape for herself and her two daughters, Matías said, were los militares — heavily armed U.S. agents in martial getup.

    That evening, Matías said, she spent a sleepless night in detention in downtown Los Angeles. The next day, she accepted a “voluntary return” to Mexico.

    For almost a week, the family stayed in a shelter in Tijuana, awaiting the arrival of her male partner and the boyfriend of her 19-year-old-daughter. Both were also among the of Glass House detainees. The three-day bus ride south included a frenzied, crosstown change of terminals in Mexico City at midnight to catch the last coach for Oaxaca.

    With her remaining savings, Matías purchased an unfinished, cinder-block house on the outskirts of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, a historic but drab city that hosts a federal prison. It’s about a two-hour drive on a rough track from Yojuela, but offers baseline schooling and job prospects.

    The expulsion to Mexico shattered a family that had attained a modicum — perhaps an illusion — of stability in California.

    Keilani Lorenzo Matías, 5, at the family home in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz.

    Keilani Lorenzo Matías, 5, a U.S.-born daughter of Modesta Matías Aquino, at the family’s new home in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz.

    (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

    Like her mother, Ailed Lorenzo Matías, 16, succumbed to the siren call of the border. She was 14 when she and her boyfriend crossed into California. She struggled to climb the fence and descend on the U.S. side, worrying about her baby. She was five months pregnant.

    The other day, Ailed sat in a stairwell of the new home in Miahuatlán, cuddling her son. They were sharing a video call to Oxnard with the boy’s father, who also worked at Glass House. But, in a twist of fate, he was off duty on July 10.

    “I’d like like to go back to California,” the soft-spoken Ailed said. “My son was born there. And that’s where his papá is.”

    Unlike Ailed, her sister, Natalia Lorenzo Matías, 19, has no intention of returning.

    “No, I don’t want to go back,” Natalia said. “You don’t have a real life there. You spend your time working and locked in your house, always afraid that you will be arrested.”

    Her mother is deeply tormented but endeavors to conceal her despair. “I have to be strong for the kids,” Matías said. “When I’m alone, I begin to cry.”

    She says she understands Trump’s point: He wants to deport criminals. But, she asks, why target hardworking immigrants?

    “In all my years in the north,” she said, “I never saw an American working in the fields.”

    Her plan, she says, is to stabilize the family, enroll her 5-year-old in school, find some work — and, then, perhaps in a year or two, set off once more.

    For now, though, Matías says she is concentrated on helping her family adjust to a new way of life — albeit, she hopes, a transitory one, until they get back on the road to California.

    Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • House committee launches investigation into California’s high-speed rail project

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    A bipartisan congressional committee is investigating whether California’s High-Speed Rail Authority knowingly misrepresented ridership projections and financial outlooks, as alleged by the Trump administration, to secure federal funding.

    In a letter sent to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Tuesday, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chair James Comer (R-KY) requested a staff briefing and all communications and records about federal funding for the high-speed rail project and any analysis over the train’s viability.

    “The Authority’s apparent repeated use of misleading ridership projections, despite longstanding warnings from experts, raises serious questions about whether funds were allocated under false pretenses,” Comer wrote.

    Comer’s letter copied Congressman Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee who has also voiced skepticism about the project. Garcia, whose districts represent communities in Southern California, was not immediately available for comment.

    An authority spokesperson called the House committee’s investigation “another baseless attempt to manufacture controversy around America’s largest and most complex infrastructure project,” and added that the project’s chief executive Ian Choudri previously addressed the claims and called them “cherrypicked and out-of-date, and therefore misleading.”

    Last month, the Trump administration pulled $4 billion in federal funding from the project meant for construction in the Central Valley. After a months-long review, prompted by calls from Republican lawmakers, the administration found “no viable path” forward for the fast train, which is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. The administration also questioned whether the authority’s projected ridership counts were intentionally misrepresented.

    California leaders called the move “illegal” and sued the Trump administration for declaratory and injunctive relief. Gov. Gavin Newsom said it was “a political stunt” and a “heartless attack on the Central Valley.”

    The bullet train was proposed decades ago as a way to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours by 2020. While the entire line has cleared environmental reviews, no stretch of the route has been completed. Construction has been limited to the Central Valley, where authority leaders have said a segment between Merced and Bakersfield will open by 2033. The project is also about $100 billion over its original budget of $33 billion.

    Even before the White House pulled federal funding, authority leaders and advisers repeatedly raised concerns over the project’s long-term financial sustainability.

    Roughly $13 billion has been spent so far — the bulk of which was supplied by the state, which has proposed $1 billion per year towards the project. But Choudri, who started at the authority last year, has said the project needs to find new sources of funding and has turned focus toward establishing public-private partnerships to supplement costs.

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    Colleen Shalby

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  • Boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. deported to Mexico

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    MEXICO CITY — Julio César Chávez Jr., whose high-profile boxing career was marred by substance abuse and other struggles and never approached the heights of his legendary father, was in Mexican custody Tuesday after being deported from the United States.

    His expulsion had been expected since July, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him outside his Studio City home and accused him of making “fraudulent statements” on his application to become a U.S. permanent resident.

    In Mexico, Chávez, 39, faces charges of organized crime affiliation and arms trafficking, Mexican authorities say.

    He is the son of Julio César Chávez — widely regarded as Mexico’s greatest boxer — and spent his career in the shadow of his fabled father.

    Boxers Julio César Chávez, right, and his son Julio César Chávez Jr., during a news conference in Los Angeles in May.

    (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

    His father both supported his troubled son and chastised his namesake, whose struggles included substance abuse, legal troubles and challenges in making weight for his bouts.

    Despite his highly publicized problems, Chávez won the World Boxing Council middleweight title in 2011 before losing the belt the following year.

    Chávez was turned over to Mexican law enforcement authorities at the Arizona border and was being held Tuesday in a federal lockup in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, authorities here said.

    During her regular morning news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed that the boxer was in Mexican custody.

    Days before his July arrest in Studio City, Chávez faced off in Anaheim for his last bout — against Jake Paul, the influencer-turned-pugilist. Chávez lost the fight.

    When he was arrested in July, U.S. authorities labeled Chávez an “affiliate” of the Sinaloa cartel, which is one of Mexico’s largest — and most lethal — drug-trafficking syndicates.

    Jake Paul, right, and Julio César Chávez Jr., left, exchange punches during their cruiserweight bout in Anaheim on June 28.

    Jake Paul, right, and Julio César Chávez Jr., left, exchange punches during their cruiserweight bout in Anaheim on June 28.

    (Anadolu / Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Chávez has faced criticism over alleged associations with cartel figures, including Ovidio Guzmán, a son of infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, now serving a life sentence in a U.S prison for his leadership role in the Sinaloa cartel. Ovidio Guzmán recently pleaded guilty to drug-trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago and is reported to be cooperating with U.S. prosecutors.

    Controversies have long overshadowed the career of Chávez.

    Chávez served 13 days in jail for a 2012 drunk-driving conviction in Los Angeles County and was arrested by Los Angeles police in January 2024 on gun charges. According to his attorney, Michael Goldstein, a court adjudicating the gun case granted Chávez a “mental health diversion,” which, in some cases, can lead to dismissal of criminal charges.

    “I’m confident that the issues in Mexico will be cleared up, and he’ll be able to continue with his mental health diversion” in California, Goldstein said.

    A lingering question in the case is why Chávez was apparently allowed to travel freely between the United States and Mexico on several occasions despite a Mexican arrest warrant issued against him in March 2023.

    On Jan. 4, 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Chávez reentered the United States from Tijuana into San Diego via the San Ysidro port of entry. He was permitted in despite the pending Mexican arrest warrant and a U.S. determination just a few weeks earlier that Chávez represented “an egregious public safety threat,” the DHS stated in a July 3 news release revealing the boxer’s detention.

    Homeland Security said that the Biden administration — which was still in charge at the time of Chávez’s January entry — had determined that the boxer “was not an immigration enforcement priority.”

    While in training for the Paul match, Chávez spoke out publicly against President Trump’s ramped-up deportation agenda, which has sparked protests and denunciations across California. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he accused the administration of “attacking” Latinos.

    Chávez told The Times: “I wouldn’t want to be deported.”

    McDonnell reported from Mexico City and El Reda from Los Angeles. Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Jad El Reda

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  • Commentary: Newsom’s redistricting move isn’t pretty. California GOP leaders are uglier

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    King Gavin is at it again!

    That’s the cry coming from Republicans across California as Newsom pushes the state Legislature to approve a November special election like none this state has ever seen. Voters would have the chance to approve a congressional map drawn by Democrats hoping to wipe out GOP-held seats and counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Trump-driven redistricting.

    The president “doesn’t play by a different set of rules — he doesn’t believe in the rules,” the governor told a roaring crowd packed with Democratic heavyweights last week at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. “And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. … We have got to meet fire with fire.”

    California Republicans are responding to this the way a kid reacts if you take away their Pikachu.

    “An absolutely ridiculous gerrymander!” whined Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents the state’s rural northeast corner, on social media. Under the Democratic plan, his district would swing all the way down to ultra-liberal Marin County.

    The California Republican Party deemed the new maps a “MASTERCLASS IN CORRUPTION” (Trumpian caps in the original). National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said “Newscum” was giving “a giant middle finger to every Californian.”

    Intelligent minds can disagree on whether countering an extreme political move with an extreme political move is the right thing. The new maps would supersede the ones devised just four years ago by an independent redistricting commission established to keep politics out of the process, which typically occurs once a decade after the latest census.

    Good government types, from the League of Women Voters to Charles Munger Jr. — the billionaire who bankrolled the 2010 proposition that created independent redistricting for California congressional races — have criticized Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Response Act. So has former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fierce Trump critic who posted a photo of himself on social media working out in a T-shirt that read, “F*** the Politicians / Terminate Gerrymandering.”

    I’m not fully convinced that Newsom’s plan is the MAGA killer he thinks it is. If the economy somehow rebounds next year, Republicans would most likely keep Congress anyway, and Newsom would have upended California politics for nothing.

    I also don’t discount the moderate streak in California voters that pops up from time to time to quash what seem like liberal gimmes, like the failed attempt via ballot measure to repeal affirmative action in 2020 and the passage last year of Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of California voters want to keep redistricting away from the Legislature, according to a POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll released last week.

    If Californians reject Newsom’s plan, that would torpedo his presidential ambitions and leave egg on the face of state Democratic leaders for years, if not a generation.

    For now, though, I’m going to enjoy all the tears that California Republicans are shedding. As they face the prospect of even fewer congressional seats than the paltry nine they now hold, they suddenly care about rescuing American democracy?

    In this image from video, Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa speaks at the U.S. Capitol in 2020.

    (House Television via Associated Press)

    Where were they during Trump’s fusillade of lawsuits and threats against California? When he sent the National Guard and Marines to occupy parts of Los Angeles this summer after protests against his deportation deluge? When his underlings spew hate about the Golden State on Fox News and social media?

    Now they care about political decency? What about when LaMalfa and fellow California GOP House members Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa — whose seats the Newsom maps would also eliminate — voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory? When the state Republican Party backed a ridiculous recall against Newsom that cost taxpayers $200 million? Or when the Republican congressional delegation unanimously voted to pass Trump’s Big Bloated Bill, even though it’s expected to gut healthcare and food programs for millions of Californians in red counties? Or even when Trump first pushed Abbott to pursue the very gerrymandering Newsom is now emulating?

    We’re supposed to believe them when they proclaim Newsom is a pompadoured potentate who threatens all Californians, just because he wants to redo congressional maps?

    Pot, meet black hole.

    If these GOPers had even an iota of decency or genuine care for the Golden State, they would back a bill by one of their own that I actually support. Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose seat is also targeted for elimination by the Newsom maps, wants to ban all mid-decade congressional redistricting. He stated via a press release that this would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”

    That’s an effort that any believer in liberty can and should back. But Kiley’s bill has no co-sponsors so far. And Kevin: Why can’t you say that your man Trump created this fiasco in the first place?

    We live in scary times for our democracy. If you don’t believe it, consider that a bunch of masked Border Patrol agents just happened to show up outside the Japanese American National Museum — situated on a historic site where citizens of Japanese ancestry boarded buses to incarceration camps during World War II — at the same time Newsom was delivering his redistricting remarks. Sector Chief Gregory Bovino was there, migra cameramen documenting his every smirk, including when he told a reporter that his agents were there to make “Los Angeles a safer place, since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves.”

    The show of force was so obviously an authoritarian flex that Newsom filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who authorized what and why. Meanwhile, referring to Trump, he described the action on X as “an attempt to advance a playbook from the despots he admires in Russia and North Korea.”

    Newsom is not everyone’s cup of horchata, myself included. Whether you support it or not, watching him rip up the California Constitution’s redistricting section and assuring us it’s OK, because he’s the one doing it, is discomfiting.

    But you know what’s worse? Trump anything. And even worse? The California GOP leaders who have loudly cheered him on, damn the consequences to the state they supposedly love.

    History will castigate their cultish devotion to Trump far worse than any of Newsom’s attempts to counter that scourge.

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    Gustavo Arellano

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  • COVID surges nationwide with highest rates in Southwest as students return to school

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    COVID-19 rates in the Southwestern United States reached 12.5% — the highest in the nation — according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this week. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County recorded the highest COVID levels in its wastewater since February.

    The spike, thanks to the new highly contagious “Stratus” variant, comes as students across California return to the classroom, now without a CDC recommendation that they receive updated COVID shots. That change in policy, pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been criticized by many public health experts.

    The COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, mutates often, learning to better transmit itself from person to person and evade immunity created by vaccinations and previous infections.

    The Stratus variant, first detected in Asia in January, reached the U.S. in March and became the predominant strain by the end of June. It now accounts for two-thirds of virus variants detected in wastewater in the U.S., according to the CDC.

    The nationwide COVID positivity rate hit 9% in early August, surpassing the January post-holiday surge, but still below last August’s spike to 18%. Weekly deaths, a metric that lags behind positivity rates, has so far remained low.

    In May, RFK Jr. announced the CDC had removed the COVID vaccine from its recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.

    The secretary argued it was the right move to reverse the Biden administration’s policy, which in 2024, “urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children.”

    That statement promptly spurred a lawsuit from a group of leading medical organizations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Assn. — which argued the “baseless and uninformed” decision violated federal law by failing to ground the policy on the recommendation of the scientific committee that looks at immunization practices in the U.S.

    The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has been routinely recommending updated COVID vaccinations alongside the typical yearly flu vaccination schedule. In its update for the fall 2024-spring 2025 season, it noted that in the previous year, a COVID booster decreased the risk of hospitalization by 44% and death by 23%.

    The panel argued the benefit outweighed isolated cases of heart conditions and allergic reactions associated with the vaccine.

    The panel also acknowledged that booster effectiveness decreases as new COVID strains — for which the boosters were not designed — emerge. Nevertheless, it still felt that most Americans should get booster shots.

    The CDC estimates that only about 23% of adults and 13% of children received the 2024-25 COVID booster — even with the vaccine recommendation still in place. That’s compared to roughly half of adults and children who received the updated flu shot in the same time frame.

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    Noah Haggerty

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  • Trump’s unprecedented show of force in L.A., Washington is pushing norms, sparking fears

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    In downtown Los Angeles, Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a news conference with Democratic leaders when the Border Patrol showed up nearby to conduct a showy immigration raid.

    In Washington D.C., hundreds of National Guard troops patrolled the streets, some in armored vehicles, as city officials battled with the White House over whether the federal government can take control of the local police department.

    President Trump has long demonized “blue” cities like Los Angeles, Washington and New York, frequently claiming — often contrary to the evidence — that their Democratic leaders have allowed crime and blight to worsen. Trump, for example, cited out-of-control crime as the reason for his Washington D.C. guard deployment, even though data shows crime in the city is down.

    But over the last few months, Trump’s rhetoric has given way to searing images of federal power on urban streets that are generating both headlines and increasing alarm in some circles.

    While past presidents have occasionally used the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in response to clear, acute crises, the way Trump has deployed troops in Democratic-run cities is unprecedented in American politics. Trump has claimed broader inherent powers and an authority to deploy troops to cities when and where he decides there is an emergency, said Matthew Beckmann, a political science professor at UC Irvine.

    “President Trump is testing how far he can push his authority, in no small part to find out who or what can challenge him,” he said.

    State and local officials reacted with shock when they learned Border Patrol agents had massed outside Newsom’s news conference Thursday. The governor was preparing to announce the launch of a campaign for a ballot measure, which if approved by voters, would redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats before the 2026 midterms.

    Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told a Fox 11 reporter: “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves.” When the reporter noted that Newsom was nearby, Bovino responded, “I don’t know where he’s at.”

    However, local law enforcement sources told The Times that the raid was not random and that they had received word from the federal authorities that Little Tokyo was targeted due to its proximity to the governor’s event. The raid, the sources told The Times, was less about making arrests and more of a show of force intended to disrupt Democrats.

    Whatever the reason, the raid generated news coverage and at least in the conservative media, overshadowed the announcement of the redistricting plan.

    Trump’s second term has been marked by increased use of troops in cities. He authorized the deployment of thousands of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. in June after immigration raids sparked scattered protests. The troops saw little action, and local leaders said the deployment was unnecessary and only served to inflame tensions.

    The operation reached a controversial zenith in July when scores of troops on horseback wearing tactical gear and driving armored vehicles, rolled through MacArthur Park. The incident generated much attention, but local police were surprised that the raid was brief and resulted in few arrests.

    After the MacArthur Park raid, Mayor Karen Bass complained “there’s no plan other than fear, chaos and politics.”

    Beckmann said the situation is a “particularly perilous historical moment because we have a president willing to flout constitutional limits while Congress and the court have been willing to accept pretext as principle.”

    UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Eric Schickler, co-director of the university’s Institute of Governmental Studies, said the recent military displays are part of a larger mission to increase the power of the president and weaken other countervailing forces, such as the dismantling of federal agencies and the weakening of universities.

    “It all adds up to a picture of really trying to turn the president into the one dominant force in American politics — he is the boss of everything, he controls everything,” Schickler said. “And that’s just not how the American political system has worked for 240 years.”

    In some way, Trump’s tactics are an extension of long-held rhetoric. In the 1980s, he regularly railed against crime in New York City, including the rape of a woman in Central Park that captured national headlines. The suspects, known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated after spending years in prison and have filed a defamation suit against Trump.

    Trump and his backers say he is simply keeping campaign promises to reduce crime and deport people in the country illegally.

    “Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law — not about Gavin Newsom,” said Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

    Federal agents “patrol all areas of Los Angeles every day with over 40 teams on the ground to make L.A. safe,” she said.

    In Washington D.C., where the federal government has began assuming law enforcement responsibilities, the business of policing the streets of the nation’s capital had radically transformed by Friday. Federal agencies typically tasked with investigating drug kingpins, gunrunners and cybercriminals were conducting traffic stops and helping with other routine policing.

    Twenty federal law enforcement teams fanned out across the city Thursday night with more than 1,750 people joining the operation, a White House official told the Associated Press. They made 33 arrests, including 15 people who did not have permanent legal status. Others were arrested on warrants for murder, rape and driving under the influence, the official said.

    Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice, said the administration’s actions not only threaten democracy, but they also have real consequences for local leaders and residents. Citizens often can’t distinguish between federal or local officers and don’t know when the two groups are or aren’t working together.

    “That breeds a lot of confusion and also breeds a lot of fear,” Johnson said.

    Thomas Abt, founding director of University of Maryland’s Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, emphasized that pulling federal agents from their jobs can hurt overall public safety.

    “There’s a real threat to politicizing federal law enforcement, and sending them wherever elected officials think there’s a photo opportunity instead of doing the hard work of federal law enforcement,” Abt said.

    Already, D.C. residents and public officials have pushed back on federal law enforcement’s presence. When federal officers set up a vehicle checkpoint along the 14th Street Northwest corridor this week, hecklers shouted, “Go home, fascists” and “Get off our streets.”

    On Friday, the District of Columbia filed an emergency motion seeking to block the Trump administration’s takeover of the city’s police department.

    “This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a statement on Friday. “The Administration’s actions are brazenly unlawful. They go well beyond the bounds of the President’s limited authority and instead seek a hostile takeover of MPD.”

    The show of force in L.A. has also left local officials outraged at what they see as deliberate efforts to sow fear and exert power. Hours before agents arrived in Little Tokyo, Bass and other officials held a news conference calling for an end to the continued immigration raids.

    Bass said she believes the recent actions violated the temporary restraining order upheld this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals prohibiting agents from targeting people solely based on their race, vocation, language or location.

    The number of arrests in Southern California declined in July after a judge issued the order. But in the past two weeks, some higher profile raids have begun to ramp up again.

    In one instance, an 18-year-old Los Angeles high school senior was picked up by federal immigration officers while walking his dog in Van Nuys. On Thursday, a man apparently running from agents who showed up at a Home Depot parking lot in Monrovia was hit by a car and killed on the 210 Freeway.

    Bass appeared to be seething as she spoke to reporters after Newsom’s press conference on Thursday, calling the raid in Little Tokyo a “provocative act” and “unbelievably disrespectful.”

    “They’re talking about disorder in Los Angeles, and they are the source of the disorder in Los Angeles right now,” she said.

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    Hannah Fry, Grace Toohey, Richard Winton

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  • Home Depots across L.A. become tense battleground in new phase of ICE raids

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    While the number of immigration raids in Southern California have slowed in recent weeks, the focus on Home Depots appears to have intensified.

    Parking lots at those stores have become a key new battleground in the federal government’s evolving strategy of immigration enforcement.

    “Home Depot, whether they like it or not, they are the epicenter of raids,” said Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a group that represents the tens of thousands of day laborers working in L.A.

    On Thursday, agents moved on a Home Depot parking lot in Monrovia, sending laborers running, including a man who jumped a wall and onto the 210 Freeway, where he was fatally struck. A day prior, fear of a possible raid at a Ladera Ranch location sparked warnings across social media.

    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 over the last two weeks, some higher-profile raids have returned, often taking place at Home Depot locations, where immigrant laborers congregate looking for work.

    The renewed burst of raids outside neighborhood Home Depots began Aug. 6, when a man drove a Penske moving truck to a Home Depot in Westlake and began soliciting day laborers when, all of a sudden, Border Patrol agents jumped out of the back of the vehicle and began to chase people down. Sixteen people were arrested.

    The raid — branded “Operation Trojan House” by the Trump administration — was showcased by government officials with footage from an embedded Fox News TV crew. “For those who thought Immigration enforcement had stopped in Southern California, think again,” acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli posted on X.

    The next day, federal agents raided a Home Depot in San Bernardino. Then, on Aug. 8, they conducted two raids outside a Home Depot in Van Nuys in what DHS described as a “targeted immigration raid” that resulted in the arrest of seven undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

    Over the weekend, activists say, a Home Depot was targeted in Cypress Park and word spread that federal agents were at a Home Depot in Marina del Rey. On Monday, day laborers were nabbed outside a Home Depot in North Hollywood, and on Tuesday more were arrested at a Home Depot in Inglewood.

    “And it’s not just day laborers they are taking,” Alvarado added, noting that when federal agents descend on the hardware store’s parking lots, they question anyone who looks Latino or appears to be an immigrant and ask them about their papers. “They also get customers of Home Depot who look like day laborers, who speak Spanish.”

    The national hardware chain — whose parking lots have for decades been an unofficial gathering point for undocumented laborers hoping to get hired for a day of home repair or construction work — was one of the first sites of the L.A. raids in June that kicked off the Trump administration’s intense immigration enforcement across Southern California.

    Nearly 3,000 people across seven counties in L.A. were arrested in June as masked federal agents conducted roving patrols, carrying out a chaotic series of sweeps of street corners, bus stops, warehouses, farms, car washes and Home Depots. But the number of raids and arrests plummeted dramatically across L.A. in mid-July after the court order blocked federal agents across the region from targeting people unless they had reasonable suspicion they entered the country illegally.

    On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Trump administration request to lift the restraining order prohibiting roving raids. But within just a few days, federal agents were back, raiding the Westlake Home Depot.

    “Even though we’ve had two successful court decisions, the administration continues with their unconstitutional behavior coming and going to Home Depot stores,” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference Thursday. “They are violating” the temporary restraining order, she added.

    Advocates for undocumented immigrants question the legality of federal agents’ practices. In many cases, they say, agents are failing to show judicial warrants. They argue that the way agents are targeting day laborers and other brown-skinned people is illegal.

    “It’s clear racial profiling,” said Alvarado.

    The Department of Homeland Security did not answer questions from The Times about how many people have been arrested over the last week at Home Depots across L.A. or explain what why the agency has resumed raids outside hardware stores.

    After last Friday’s raids on Van Nuys, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said four of the seven individuals arrested had criminal records, including driving under the influence of alcohol, disorderly conduct and failing to adhere to previous removal orders. She dismissed activists’ claims that the Trump administration was violating the temporary restraining order.

    “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race, or ethnicity,” McLaughlin said. “America’s brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, rapists — truly the worst of the worst from Golden State communities.”

    Activists say that federal agents are targeting Home Depots because they are hubs for a constant flow of day laborers — mostly Latino and many of whom are undocumented.

    “They know that at the Home Depot there will always be people who are day laborers, many of them undocumented,” said Ron Gochez, a member of the Unión del Barrio, a group that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents of immigration sweeps. “And so they figured it would be a much easier, faster and more effective way for them to kidnap people — just to go to the Home Depot.”

    Another reason the hardware store parking lots had become a focal point, Gochez said, is that they present a wide, open space to hunt people down.

    “There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” Gochez said. “And when some of the day laborers started running inside of the Home Depot stores, the agents literally have chased them down the aisles of the store.”

    In Los Angeles, pressure is mounting on Home Depot to speak out against the targeting of people outside their stores.

    “They haven’t spoken out; their customers are being taken away and they are not saying anything,” Alvarado said. “They haven’t issued a public condemnation of the fact that their customers have been abducted in their premises.”

    This is not the first time Home Depot has found itself in the center of a political firestorm.

    In 2019, the Atlanta-based company faced boycott campaigns after its co-founder Bernie Marcus, a Republican megadonor, announced his support for Trump’s reelection campaign. Back then, the chain tried to distance itself from its founder, noting that Marcus retired from the company in 2002 and did not speak on its behalf.

    But in a global city like L.A., where civic and political leaders are rallying against the raids and public schools have developed policies blocking federal agents from entering their premises, there are growing calls for the national hardware chain to develop consistent policies on raids, such as demanding federal agents have judicial warrants before descending on their lots.

    On Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy groups led a protest in MacArthur Park and urged Angelenos to support a 24-hour boycott of Home Depot and other businesses that they say have not stopped federal immigration agents from conducting raids in their parking lots or chasing people down in their stores.

    “We call them an accomplice to these raids, because there is no other location that’s been hit as much as they have,” Gochez said. “We think that Home Depot is being complicit. They’re actually, we think, in some way collaborating, whether directly or not.”

    Home Depot denies that it is working with federal agents or has advance notice of federal immigration enforcement activities.

    “That’s not true,” George Lane, manager of corporate communications for Home Depot, said in an email to The Times. “We aren’t notified that these activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in the operations. We’re required to follow all federal and local rules and regulations in every market where we operate.”

    Lane said Home Depot asked associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement operations immediately and not to engage for their own safety.

    “If associates feel uncomfortable after witnessing ICE activity,” he added, “we offer them the flexibility they need to take care of themselves and their families.”

    The targeting of day laborers outside L.A. Home Depots is particularly contentious because day laborers, primarily Latino men, have for decades represented an integral part of the Los Angeles labor force.

    Since the 1960s, day laborers have formed an informal labor market that has boosted this sprawling city, helping it expand, and in recent months they have played a pivotal role in rebuilding L.A. after the January firestorms tore through Pacific Palisades and Altadena destroying thousands of homes.

    “It appears they’re targeting and taking the very people rebuilding our cities,” Alvarado said. “Without migrant labor, both documented and undocumented, it’s impossible to try to rebuild Los Angeles.”

    In many L.A. neighborhoods, day laborers are such a constant, ingrained presence at Home Depots that the city’s Economic and Workforce Development Department sets up its resource centers for day laborers next to the stores.

    Day laborers are also a reason many customers come to Home Depot.

    “Day laborers are a part of their business model,” Alvarado said. “You come in, you get your materials, and then you get your helper.”

    Alvaro M. Huerta, the Director of Litigation and Advocacy of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, part of a coalition of groups suing Homeland Security over immigration raids in L.A., said the growing number of raids at Home Depot parking lots was “deeply troubling” and raised serious concerns that the federal government was continuing to violate the July temporary restraining order.

    “This looks a lot like it did before a temporary restraining order was in place,” Huerta said. “My sense is they feel they can justify raids at Home Depots more than roving raids.”

    Lawyers, Huerta said, were investigating the raids and asking some of the people taken into custody a series of questions: Did agents ever present a warrant? What kinds of questions did they ask? Did you feel like you were able to leave?

    “One of the things we’ve been arguing is that some of these situations are coercive,” Huerta said. “The government is saying, ‘No, we’re allowed to ask questions, and people can volunteer answers.’ But we’ve argued that in many of these cases, people don’t feel like they cannot speak.”

    Attorneys will likely present information about the arrests to court at a preliminary injunction hearing in September, Huerta said, as they press Trump administration attorneys for evidence that the arrests are targeted.

    Huerta said some of the people caught up in recent Home Depot raids were not even looking for work at the parking lot.

    One man, a 22-year-old who was getting gas across the street from a Home Depot last week, Huerta said, was detained even though he had special immigrant juvenile status as he was brought to the U.S. as a teen. The man had an asylum application pending, work authorization and no criminal history — and yet a week after he was arrested he was confined in Adelanto Detention Center.

    Times staff writer Julia Wick contributed to this report.

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    Jenny Jarvie

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  • From the L.A. Olympics to Oakland, California braces for Trump National Guard deployments

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    President Trump’s decision to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington has California officials on high alert, with some worrying that he intends to activate federal forces in the Bay Area and Southern California, especially during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

    Trump said that his use of the National Guard to fight crime could expand to other cities, and suggested that local police have been unable to do the job.

    Legal experts say it is highly unusual and troubling for forces to be deployed without a major crisis, such as civil unrest or a natural disaster. The Washington deployment is another example of Trump seeking to use the military for domestic endeavors, similar to his decision to send the National Guard to Los Angeles in June, amid an immigration crackdown that sparked protests, experts said.

    Washington has long struggled with crime but has seen major reductions in recent years.

    Officials in Oakland and Los Angeles — two cities the president mentioned by name — slammed Trump’s comments about crime in their cities. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said in a statement that the president’s characterization wasn’t rooted in fact, but “based in fear-mongering in an attempt to score cheap political points.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it “performative” and a “stunt.”

    Trump has said he would consider deploying the military to Los Angeles once again to protect the 2028 Olympic Games. This month, he signed an executive order that named him chair of a White House task force on the Los Angeles Games.

    The White House has not said specifically what role Trump would play in security arrangements.

    Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who sits on the city panel overseeing the Games, acknowledged last week that the city is a “little nervous” about the federal government’s plans for securing the event.

    Congress recently approved $1 billion for security and planning for the Games. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security declined to explain to The Times how the funds will be used.

    Padilla said her concern was based on the unpredictable nature of the administration, as well as recent immigration raids that have used masked, heavily armed agents to round up people at Home Depot parking lots and car washes.

    “Everything that we’re seeing with the raids was a real curveball to our city,” Padilla said during a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum event. It dealt “a real curveball to [efforts] to focus on the things that folks care about, like homelessness, like transportation … economic development,” she said.

    Bass, appearing on CNN this week, said that using the National Guard during the Olympics is “completely appropriate.” She said that the city expects a “federal response when we have over 200 countries here, meaning heads of state of over 200 countries. Of course you have the military involved. That is routine.”

    But Bass made a distinction between L.A. Olympics security and the “political stunt” she said Trump pulled by bringing in the National Guard and the U.S. Marines after protests over the federal government’s immigration crackdown. That deployment faces ongoing legal challenges, with an appeals court ruling that Trump had the legal authority to send the National Guard.

    “I believed then, and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case, and I think D.C. is a test case as well,” Bass said. “To say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want, and I’m the commander in chief, and I can use the troops whenever we want.”

    On Monday, Trump tied his action to what has been a familiar theme to him: perceived urban decay.

    “You look at Chicago, how bad it is, you look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore —they’re so far gone,” he said. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.”

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said officers and agents deployed across the District of Columbia have so far made 23 arrests for offenses including homicide, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, lewd acts, reckless driving, fare evasion and not having permits. Six illegal handguns were seized, she said.

    Citing crime as a reason to deploy National Guard troops without the support of a state governor is highly unprecedented, experts said. The National Guard has been deployed to Southern California before, notably during the 1992 L.A. riots and the civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.

    “It would be awful because he would be clearly violating his legal authorities and he’d be sued again by the governor and undoubtedly, by the mayors of L.A. and Oakland,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University. “The citizens in those cities would be up in arms. They would be aghast that there are soldiers patrolling their streets.”

    The District of Columbia does not have control over its National Guard, which gives the president wide latitude to deploy those troops. In California and other states, the head of the National Guard is the governor and there are legal limits on how federal troops can be used.

    The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, largely bars federal troops from being used in civilian law enforcement. The law reflects a tradition dating to the Revolutionary War era that sees military interference in American life as a threat to liberty and democracy.

    “We have such a strong tradition that we don’t use the military for domestic law enforcement, and it’s a characteristic of authoritarian countries to see the military be used in that way,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and a constitutional law expert. “That’s never been so in the United States, and many are concerned about the way in which President Trump is acting the way authoritarian rulers do.”

    Whether the troops deployed to Los Angeles in June amid the federal immigration raids were used for domestic law enforcement in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is central in the trial underway this week in federal court in San Francisco.

    If Trump were to send troops to California, Banks said, the only legal lever he could pull would be to declare an insurrection and invoke the Insurrection Act.

    Unlike in D.C., Trump wouldn’t be able to federalize police departments in other parts of the country. There are circumstances where the federal government has put departments under consent decrees — a reform tool for agencies that have engaged in unlawful practices — but in those cases the government alleged specific civil rights violations, said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California sheriff’s deputy and legal counsel on policing.

    “You are not going to be able to come in and take over because you say crime is rising in a particular place,” he said.

    Oakland Councilman Ken Houston, a third-generation resident who was elected in 2024, said his city doesn’t need the federal government’s help with public safety.

    Oakland has struggled with crime for years, but Houston cited progress. Violent crimes, including homicide, aggravated assault, rape and robbery are down 29% so far this year from the same period in 2024. Property crimes including burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny also are trending down, according to city data.

    “He’s going by old numbers and he’s making a point,” Houston said of Trump. “Oakland does not need the National Guard.”

    Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.

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    Hannah Fry, Dakota Smith, Richard Winton, Andrea Castillo

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  • Before and after: They replaced their midcentury home with a modern pool-inspired refuge

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    The first thing you notice about the Monterey Park home of artist Yi Kai and his wife, Jian Zheng, is the swimming pool. Like David Hockney’s pool paintings, which celebrate the sun-filled landscapes of Los Angeles, the glistening ripples of the pool water reverberate throughout the first floor, much like the skyline of Los Angeles in the distance.

    “This house has always been treated not simply as a construction project, but as a continuously evolving piece of art,” says Kai. “Over time, we’ve been refining, altering and reimagining it — a process that reflects the values of both experimentation and transformation.”

    The blue swimming pool, a quintessentially Californian feature, is not just a recreational space but a central element of the new house, which was built from the ground up after the 1956 home was torn down. According to architect De Peter Yi, who designed the newly completed home for his aunt and uncle in collaboration with architect Laura Marie Peterson, the home’s original kidney-shaped pool was intended as a delightful surprise upon entering the house.

    The house’s movement as it curves around the pool “breaks out of the rigid house construct,” Yi says, and it’s a deliberate design choice that symbolizes the blending of Chinese and American cultural elements.

    “We wanted to make the outdoor spaces useful and delightful,” says artist Yi Kai, 70, who built a new home with his wife, Jian Zheng, 65. “The balcony provides vantage points that you wouldn’t normally get.”

    A white Midcentury home with bars on the windows and a pool in foreground.

    Kai and Zheng’s 1956 home in Monterey Park before it was demolished.

    (De Peter Yi)

    The magical quality of the pool extends well beyond the first floor. Upstairs, an 80-foot-long, curving teak deck, permitted within 50% of the rear setback, rotates around the pool, making the outdoor spaces feel much larger than they are. Partial-height walls frame the city, creating a series of outdoor spots that feel like rooms.

    “For me, the house was really about opening up specific views and moments to create a series of indoor-outdoor rooms,” Peterson says.

    An 80-foot-long walkway creates memorable moments outdoors, Yi says, by “taking something mundane and making it special” by framing the light as it shifts throughout the day.

    “We are framing that view,” says Yi, comparing it to James Turrell’s outdoor “Skyspaces” (including the “Dividing the Light” open-air pavilion at Pomona College) where Turrell frames a portion of the sky with a built environment.

    Two people inside their home.

    Kai and Zheng inside their new home.

    Kai, who is Chinese American, says his artworks blend aspects of his heritage but are “centered around a single theme: understanding and reflecting on the human condition.”

    Look closely, and you’ll see Kai’s artistic touches throughout the house. For instance, an outdoor spiral staircase, a connection between the deck and the ground-floor garage studio, is a striking feature. It’s screened in nine 18-foot wooden strips from the couple’s original home and painted in red and blue with a seven-tier white base — a design that echoes the colors of the American flag.

    The outdoor spiral staircase painted red and blue.

    The outdoor spiral staircase is composed of repurposed wood from the couple’s demolished home.

    Another unique feature in the home is a long slot, reminiscent of a trap door, that allows Kai to move his paintings from his studio on the first floor to an attic-like space on the second floor where he stores them.

    A couple move a large oil painting through a hole in the ceiling

    Kai and Zheng pass one of his oil paintings through the ceiling of his studio to his office on the second floor of their home. Kai says he got the idea after visiting Cézanne’s studio in France.

    The second story office of artist Yi Kai and his wife Zheng Jian's home.

    Kai’s paintings are stored in the home’s office on the second floor.

    Yi says his uncle’s deep interest in Chinese and American culture is vividly reflected in the house’s design. The slope of the roof, for instance, reflects the mid-century butterfly roofs scattered throughout the predominantly Chinese neighborhood, while the arc of the terrace references historic courtyard houses and gardens in China.

    A new, modern house with a slanted roof in Monterey Park.

    The house was designed to have a low profile in front.

    A second story balcony that curves around a swimming pool.

    Kai, 70, was born and raised in China and drafted into the People’s Liberation Army as a railway soldier at age 15. After the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Kai fled China and relocated to the United States, where he lived for 13 years in Minneapolis and briefly in Boston, before meeting Jiang and settling in Los Angeles.

    In 1998, the couple purchased a three-bedroom home near Jian’s office in Monterey Park, which is often referred to as “Little Taipei,” because of the large number of immigrants from China residing there. “It was easy for us to integrate into the community,” Kai says.

    Eight years later, when Kai got a job teaching art at Claremont Graduate University, they rented the house and moved to Rancho Cucamonga to be closer to Kai’s job.

    When the couple began thinking about retiring in 2014, they turned to their nephew for help in reimagining their house so that they could return to Monterey Park.

    A dining room with colorful furniture and art.
    A dining room with colorful furniture and art.

    Colorful furnishings by China-based Pablo, in collaboration with artist Lu Biaobiao, in the living room and dining room play off the colors, symbols and textures of Kai’s paintings.

    Los Angeles painter Yi Kai in his art studio at home.

    Kai in his art studio at home.

    After years of working as an artist, Kai had modest dreams for retirement: He wanted a place where he and his wife would be comfortable. “Peter wanted to design a special house related to art,” Kai says.

    Because of logistical and financial reasons, they decided to demolish the original home, which tenants had rented for 16 years, but retain the pool. Today, they are glad they did. “The pool inspired everything that is special about the house,” Yi says of the project, which included requests for maximum living space, a first-floor bedroom with an in-suite bathroom for aging-in-place purposes and an art studio for Kai.

    “I told him to use his imagination,” says Kai. “I am a first-generation from China. He is a second-generation immigrant. I thought, ‘Let’s take his American ideas and my Chinese ideas and combine them.’”

    Halle Doenitz, left, De Peter Yi, Yi Kai, Zheng Jian and Larry Tan shown in a home.

    Structural engineer Halle Doenitz, left, architect De Peter Yi, homeowners Yi Kai and Jian Zheng, and general contractor Larry Ton inside the home.

    Portrait of architect De Peter Yi.

    Architect De Peter Yi in the shade of the balcony.

    As an immigrant, Kai says he takes great pride in the multicultural group that worked on the home project over 30 months. “Our lead designer, Peter Yi, came to the U.S. at age 5 [and] is a second-generation Chinese American,” Kai says. “Gabriel Armendariz, another designer, comes from Mexico and brings a Latino cultural background. Halle Doenitz, our structural engineer, is a Caucasian American woman. MZ Construction has two partners, one from Hong Kong and one from mainland China, and Larry Ton, our contractor, has an arts background.”

    Their efforts have paid off. The interiors of the 2,200-square-foot home are expansive and airy, with easy access to the outdoors. Notably, the outdoor kitchen, located on the other side of the indoor kitchen, is a feature the couple uses daily for their stir-fry recipes.

    Palm trees peek out of an asymmetrical window.

    Palm trees appear in the second-story bathroom window.

    A swimming pool, left, as viewed from a second floor deck.

    Ripples of water from the swimming pool reverberate throughout the rooms of the first floor.

    Asymmetrical windows throughout both floors of the home provide indirect lighting for Kai’s artworks, responding to the house’s geometry and mimicking its playfulness.

    Like the views from the terrace, the sight lines are constantly changing — palm trees appear in one window, a neighbor’s tree in another — depending on where you look. “The windows respond to the different views and interesting topography of Los Angeles,” Yi says. “There is beauty in the sidewall and the neighbor’s trees. The views extend the house outwards.”

    Similarly, colorful furnishings by China-based Pablo, in collaboration with artist Lu Biaobiao, in the living room and dining room play off the colors, symbols and textures of Kai’s paintings.

    Upstairs, where a tea room connects to the main bedroom and bathroom, the entire living area, which includes the office where Kai stores his paintings, connects to the wraparound terrace. In addition to 450 square feet of balcony space on the second floor, the terrace adds an additional 650 square feet of shaded outdoor space on the ground floor.

    Two chairs rest in front of a partial height wall with a window.

    Partial-height walls give one corner of the outdoor deck the feeling of a room. “It’s beautiful to watch how the light changes throughout the day,” says Kai.

    Though he lives in Cincinnati, the couple’s architect nephew says it was rewarding for him to visit his family in their new home, which ultimately cost $1.5 million to build. “It has been amazing to see how they use the house,” he says.

    Ultimately, Kai hopes to open the home to the public for salons, exhibitions and cross-cultural exchanges.

    “America is my home,” he says, “a place where I’ve realized many dreams and achieved both personal and professional success. It is also the place where I wish to give back, by contributing all I can — my art, my knowledge, and my energy — to help enrich American culture in return.”

    Adds Zheng: “Everyone can appreciate art, and everyone can love it. But not everyone truly brings art into their daily lives or integrates it with how they live. Our goal is to inspire a shift in mindset, to show that art is something everyone can enjoy and that it can be a meaningful part of everyday life.”

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    Lisa Boone

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  • Trial in National Guard lawsuit tests whether Trump will let courts limit authority

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    Minutes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trumpeted plans to “flood” Washington with National Guard members, a senior U.S. military official took the stand in federal court in California to defend the controversial deployment of troops to Los Angeles.

    The move during protests this summer has since become the model for President Trump’s increasing use of the military to police American streets.

    But the trial, which opened Monday in San Francisco, turns on the argument by California that troops called up by Trump have been illegally engaged in civilian law enforcement.

    “The military in Southern California are so tied in with ICE and other law enforcement agencies that they are practically indistinguishable,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Meghan Strong told the court Tuesday.

    “Los Angeles is just the beginning,” the deputy attorney general said. “President Trump has hinted at sending troops even farther, naming Baltimore and even Oakland here in the Bay Area as his next potential targets.”

    Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer said in court that Hegseth’s statements Monday could tip the scales in favor of the state, which must show the law is likely to be violated again so long as troops remain.

    But the White House hasn’t let the pending case stall its agenda. Nor have Trump officials been fazed by a judge’s order restricting so-called roving patrols used by federal agents to indiscriminately sweep up suspected immigrants.

    After Border Patrol agents last week sprang from a Penske moving truck and snatched up workers at a Westlake Home Depot — appearing to openly defy the court’s order — some attorneys warned the rule of law is crumbling in plain sight.

    “It is just breathtaking,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition challenging the use of racial profiling by immigration enforcement. “Somewhere there are founding fathers who are turning over in their graves.”

    The chaotic immigration arrests that swept through Los Angeles this summer had all but ceased after the original July 11 order, which bars agents from snatching people off the streets without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

    An Aug. 1 ruling in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to assure they could not resume again for weeks, if ever.

    For the Department of Justice, the 9th Circuit loss was the latest blow in a protracted judicial beatdown, as many of the administration’s most aggressive moves have been held back by federal judges and tied up in appellate courts.

    Trump “is losing consistently in the lower courts, almost nine times out of 10,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

    In the last two weeks alone, the 9th Circuit also found Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship unconstitutional and signaled it would probably rule in favor of a group of University of California researchers hoping to claw back funding from Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

    Elsewhere in the U.S., the D.C. Circuit Court appeared poised to block Trump’s tariffs, while a federal judge in Miami temporarily stopped construction at the migrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

    California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has noted that his Department of Justice had sued the administration nearly 40 times.

    But even the breakneck pace of current litigation is glacial compared with the actions of immigration agents and federalized troops.

    Federal officials have publicly relished big-footing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have repeatedly warned the city is being used as a “petri dish” for executive force.

    On Monday, the White House seemed to vindicate them by sending the National Guard to Washington.

    Speaking for more than half an hour, Trump rattled off a list of American cities he characterized as under siege.

    Asked whether he would deploy troops to those cities as well, the president said, “We’re just gonna see what happens.”

    “We’re going to look at New York. And if we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago,” he said. “Hopefully, L.A. is watching.”

    This image taken from video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents jumping out of a Penske box truck during an immigration raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles on Aug. 6, 2025.

    (Matt Finn / Fox News via Associated Press)

    The U.S. Department of Justice argues that the same power that allows the president to federalize troops and deploy them on American streets also creates a “Constitutional exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that bars troops from civilian police action.

    California lawyers say no such exception exists.

    “I’m looking at this case and trying to figure out, is there any limitation to the use of federal forces?” Judge Breyer said.

    Even if they keep taking losses, Trump administration officials “don’t have much to lose” by picking fights, said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.

    “The base likes it,” Somin said of the Trump’s most controversial moves. “If they lose, they can consider whether they defy the court.”

    Other experts agreed.

    “The bigger question is whether the courts can actually do anything to enforce the orders that they’re making,” said David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. “There’s no indication to me that [Department of Homeland Security agents] are changing their behavior.”

    Some scholars speculated the losses in lower courts might actually be a strategic sacrifice in the war to extend presidential power in the Supreme Court.

    “It’s not a strategy whose primary ambition is to win,” said professor Mark Graber of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “They are losing cases right and left in the district court, but consistently having district court orders stayed in the Supreme Court.”

    Win or lose in the lower courts, the political allure of targeting California is potent, argued Segall, the law professor who studies the Supreme Court.

    “There is an emotional hostility to California that people on the West Coast don’t understand,” Segall said. “California … is deemed a separate country almost.”

    A favorable ruling in the Supreme Court could pave the way for deployments across the country, he and others warned.

    “We don’t want the military on America’s streets, period, full stop,” Segall said. “I don’t think martial law is off the table.”

    Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a day laborer who is one of the plaintiffs in the Southern California case challenging racial profiling by immigration enforcement, has said the case is bigger than him.

    He took to the podium outside the American Civil Liberties Union’s downtown offices Aug. 4, his voice trembling as he spoke about the temporary restraining order — upheld days earlier by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — that stood between his fellow Angelenos and unchecked federal authority.

    “I don’t want silence to be my story,” he said. “I want justice for me and for every other person whose humanity has been denied.”

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    Sonja Sharp

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  • New 51-story apartment tower in downtown L.A. gets city nod

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    A residential skyscraper has been approved in the South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, though it’s unclear how soon construction will begin.

    The City Council last week signed off on a proposed 51-story apartment tower at 11th and Olive streets, a few blocks east of Crypto.com Arena and the L.A. Live entertainment district.

    New York developer Mack Real Estate Development declined to talk about the planned tower, but documents filed with the city show a tall tower with 536 rental units and ground floor spaces for bars, restaurants and other retail uses. It would have parking for 581 vehicles both underground and above ground.

    The site at 1105 S. Olive St. is now a surface parking lot.

    When asked when construction of the project might begin, a representative for Mack Real Estate said the company had no comment.

    Even though demand for housing is high in Los Angeles, it’s challenging to construct ground-up multi-unit housing in the current financial climate, urban development consultant Hamid Behdad said.

    Costs have risen and grown more unpredictable on multiple fronts, Behdad said, raising uncertainty for developers about whether they will be able to rent or sell new units profitably after completing them.

    Top hurdles include high interest rates for borrowing money to finance construction. New tariffs are driving up the cost of imported construction materials while raising uncertainty about how long the tariffs may last or what new ones may arise.

    Labor costs have also been increasing in recent years, Behdad said, and the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have added a destabilizing effect on the construction labor pool.

    Some developers who have downtown projects approved but not built are trying to sell them to other developers or investors, he said.

    “Nothing is easy,” Behdad said.

    South Park, though, is one of downtown’s most vibrant neighborhoods where thousands of new residences have been built in recent years, said Nick Griffin, executive director of the privately funded Downtown Center Business Improvement District, a nonprofit coalition of more than 2,000 property owners.

    There is “a demonstrable underlying demand for housing more across the city and region, but specifically in downtown with the occupancy rate at a pretty steady 90% or so,” he said.

    The location of Mack Real Estate’s planned project has already proved desirable to developers, Griffin said.

    “There have already been several significant projects built along that stretch and there are another four large-scale projects within a couple of blocks, so you’re you’re talking about a significant residential hub” that stands to attract new residents and more development, he said.

    Griffin said he hopes developers like Mack Real Estate are getting their projects ready for market conditions to change in the next six months to two years.

    “Financial conditions are going to align themselves at some point in the not too distant future,” he said, “and they want to have their projects teed up and ready to go.”

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Commentary: Trump wants troops in D.C. But don’t expect him to stop there

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    Well, at least they’re not eating the cats and dogs.

    To hear President Trump tell it, Washington, D.C., has become a barbarous hellhole — worse even than Springfield, Ohio, it would seem, where he accused Black immigrants, many from Somalia, of barbecuing pets last year during the campaign.

    Back then, Trump was just a candidate. Now, he’s the commander in chief of the U.S. military with a clear desire to use troops of war on American streets, whether it’s for a fancy birthday parade, to enforce his immigration agenda in Los Angeles or to stop car thefts in the nation’s capital.

    “It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” Trump said during a Monday news conference, announcing that he was calling up National Guard troops to help with domestic policing in D.C.

    “We’ll get rid of the slums, too. We have slums here. We’ll get rid of them,” he said. “I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”

    Where “they” live.

    While the use of the military on American streets is alarming, it should be just as scary how blatantly this president is tying race not just to crime, but to violence so uncontrollable it requires military troops to stop it. Tying race to criminality is nothing new, of course. It’s a big part of American history and our justice system has unfortunately been steeped in it, from the Jim Crow era to the 1990s war on drugs, which targeted inner cities with the same rhetoric that Trump is recycling now.

    The difference between that last attack on minorities — started by President Nixon and lasting through Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, also under the guise of law and order — and our current circumstances is that in this instance, the notion of war isn’t just hyperbole. We are literally talking about soldiers in the streets, targeting Black and brown people. Whether they are car wash employees in California or teenagers on school break in D.C., actual crimes don’t seem to matter. Skin color is enough for law enforcement scrutiny, a sad and dangerous return to an era before civil rights.

    “Certainly the language that President Trump is using with regard to D.C. has a message that’s racially based,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

    Chemerinsky pointed out that just a few days ago, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals called out the Trump administration for immigration raids that were unconstitutional because they were basically racial sweeps. But he is unabashed. His calls for violence against people of color are escalating. It increasingly appears that bringing troops to Los Angeles was a test case for a larger use of the military in civilian settings.

    President Trump holds up a chart in front of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during Monday’s news conference announcing the deployment of troops in Washington, D.C.

    (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

    “This will go further,” Trump ominously said, making it clear he’d like to see soldiers policing across America.

    “We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is,” he went on. “We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so, they’re so far gone.”

    In reality, crime is dropping across the United States, including in Washington. As the Washington Post pointed out, violent crime rates, including murders, have for the most part been on a downward trend since 2023. But all it takes is a few explosive examples to banish truth from conscientiousness. Trump pointed out some tragic and horrific examples — including the beating of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former employee of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency who was attacked after attempting to defend a woman during a carjacking recently, not far from the White House.

    These are crimes that should be punished, and certainly not tolerated. But the exploitation we are seeing from Trump is a dangerous precedent to justify military force for domestic law enforcement, which until now has been forbidden — or at least assumed forbidden — by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

    This week, just how strong that prohibition is will be debated in a San Francisco courtroom, during the three-day trial over the deployment of troops in Los Angeles. While it’s uncertain how that case will resolve, “Los Angeles could provide a bit of a road map for any jurisdiction seeking to push back against the Trump administration when there’s a potential threat of sending in federal troops,” Jessica Levinson, a constitutional legal scholar at Loyola Law School, told me.

    Again, California coming out as the biggest foil to a Trump autocracy.

    But while we wait in the hopes that the courts will catch up to Trump, we can’t be blind to what is happening on our streets. Race and crime are not linked by anything other than racism.

    Allowing our military to terrorize Black and brown people under the guise of law and order is nothing more than a power grab based on the exploitation of our darkest natures.

    It’s a tactic Trump has perfected, but one which will fundamentally change, and weaken, American justice if we do not stop it.

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    Anita Chabria

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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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  • L.A. is under the gun to add housing units. The hard part? Where and how many

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    Los Angeles needs more affordable housing.

    When presented with the problem in the past, builders and developers were able to turn lima bean fields and orange groves into row after row of homes. But the vast swaths of open land on the city’s fringes vanished decades ago.

    The California Department of Housing and Community Development has said that Los Angeles should add 456,643 new units by 2029 — a number that has generated controversy. To meet those demands, the city will have to create new ways of growing its inventory — strategies that will allow the city’s established communities to welcome many more residents than they are able to accommodate now.

    The big questions are, as always: where, how and how much new housing should be built.

    Imagining a Future L.A.

    Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

    The Times reached out to two sources with scenarios that challenge conventional thinking — two plans for the San Fernando Valley, which, half a century ago, provided the space for much of the city’s growth.

    The first scenario proposes awakening a sleepy commercial corridor with low- and mid-rise apartments. The other focuses on 20 miles of vacant land — below electrical transmission lines that snake through the Valley.

    Reseda reimagined

    Like many L.A. suburbs, Reseda began as a small town center surrounded by fields.

    As the West San Fernando Valley developed after World War II, those fields filled with an expansive grid of single-family homes.

    Vestiges of Reseda’s small-town beginning still survive in block after block of single-story businesses like the Traders pawnbroker and jewelry store at the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way.

    But snapshots of the future have begun to appear. A few blocks to the north, a five-story apartment building rises between a Thai restaurant and a used car lot.

    How many more of those would be needed for Reseda, or any similar community, to contribute its fair share of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation for the city of Los Angeles?

    The Times posed that question to Los Angeles-based policy think tank Center for Pacific Urbanism, which has spent years examining the causes of and solutions for L.A.’s housing shortage.

    Its recent research created an equity scale to calculate targets for individual communities based on five factors: affordability, environmental quality, transit availability, past down-zoning and socioeconomics.

    In the modern era, housing construction across Los Angeles peaked twice, once before the Great Depression and then in a postwar boom.

    Reseda was a part of the postwar boom. Initially dominated by single-family homes, growth then shifted to medium-size apartment buildings. Construction of both types fell off precipitously by 1990, as anti-development sentiments gained ascendance. A tiny sliver representing accessory dwelling units has appeared in the last decade, part of a shift in housing topology that is just beginning.

    The Reseda-West Van Nuys community falls near the middle of the city’s 34 community planning areas and will need 13,885 new housing units to meet its target. At one extreme, 14,000 single-family homes would meet the need. At the other it would take 1,400 10-unit buildings. The first is unfeasible — there isn’t that much land — and the other, a new high-rise canyon, would be unpalatable.

    The Pacific Urbanism staff imagined a hybrid model that, they believe, would allow Reseda to achieve its goal with the least amount of community angst.

    The plan looks a lot like a return to the building patterns of the 1970s but with a few significant differences. Like then, more than half of the new units would be provided in large and medium-size apartment buildings. But in place of single-family home construction that was already dwindling, almost a quarter of the new units would come from new housing types that did not exist then — accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and the conversion of existing commercial space into housing.

    Above all, the pace of development would have to increase precipitously to reach the state’s 2029 goal.

    The reimagined Reseda includes 37 buildings of 100 or more units, 73 medium-size buildings of 25 to 99 units and 484 duplex and small apartment buildings of up to 24 units. There would be 1,854 ADUs, including more than 1,000 that have already been built or permitted since 2020 and more than a thousand units in commercial conversions.

    A similar result could be achieved with a different mix of housing types. But Dario Alvarez, Pacific Urbanism president, says that his organization’s hybrid scenario, based on building trends across the city, is the most feasible, if those trends persist.

    Some progress has been made. Since 2019, city law has given single-family homeowners a right to build second units on their property. A raft of recent state laws provides incentives to builders and homeowners such as increased density for affordable housing and up to four units on single-family lots. And Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Order 1 streamlined the approval of affordable projects.

    Those changes have helped, but don’t “get us anywhere close to what’s needed to meet the target, much less in an equitable way where all communities contribute a fair share,” Alvarez said. According to his calculations, the current rate of construction in Reseda would have to increase 16-fold to meet the target by 2029.

    Pacific Urbanism proposes upgrading the zoning from medium- to high-density near the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way and creating medium-density zones to replace much of what is now single-family residences and small businesses.

    A review of the Reseda-West Van Nuys community plan, including the zoning, is underway and is in the consulting phase. It’s expected to be complete in a year or two.

    Considering the fight that single-family communities generally put up to preserve the character of what has come to represent the “American Dream” — and the single family home and yard —there’s no guarantee those changes will be made. The state housing mandate requires the city only to create a pathway to the housing targets by adjusting zoning that is currently too restrictive.

    Bury the transmission lines; build on top

    If you’ve spent time in the San Fernando Valley, it would be easy to view the overhead electrical transmission lines that stretch for more than 20 miles simply as essential wallpaper of modern living. The lines help ensure that 1.6 million households and businesses across the city can turn on the lights through a mostly uninterrupted band of 100- to 200-foot tall towers on a 150-foot wide strip of land.

    But what if that land, which travels through the heart of Northridge, Granada Hills, Mission Hills, Arleta and North Hollywood, could continue to power Los Angeles while also meeting the housing needs of tens of thousands of people? The idea is almost too simple: Put the transmission lines underground and homes on top.

    We wish such an innovative concept was ours. But it comes from Jingyi “Jessy” Qiu, a Boston-based landscape designer who conceived of the idea while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design a few years ago. In Qiu’s vision, the project reclaims dead space in the middle of bustling neighborhoods for the public good.

    Qiu calls the right of way beneath the power lines “a land of opportunity to solve the housing problem in L.A.”

    The project ticks many of the boxes for what large, sustainable development in Los Angeles can be.

    It’s climate-friendly. As the region becomes hotter and drier, taking down overhead power lines lowers the risk of sparking wildfires. And by building in established communities, new residents will be able to reduce their commutes for work and shopping, while existing residents will have new offices and stores nearby.

    There’s a way to pay for it. At one point, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns the lines and the land underneath, told us it would cost roughly $100 million to put the lines underground. More recently, the public utility said it couldn’t provide a price tag, and that, although possible, undergrounding transmission lines is rare, complex and expensive. An optimist would respond that revenue from the new development could cover much of, if not all, the cost, especially since the land itself would be free.

    It’s a lot of housing. By Qiu’s calculations, 23,000 homes could be built along the 20 miles.

    Qiu modeled the project through designing superblocks that could be repeated end to end throughout each community.

    Neighborhoods and topography along the route differ and so does the planned development. In North Hollywood, a denser mix of small apartments, mixed-use complexes and single-family homes with casitas fills the flatlands. In Granada Hills, lower densities fit in the highlands. In Northridge, student housing is prioritized near the state university.

    Today, people who live near the power lines complain of dust, litter and loitering, and worry about wires falling in high winds and storms.

    It’s not that the right of way under the power lines now is unkempt. Many nursery businesses fill the land underneath. Landscaping is maintained. It’s just that, as one neighbor put it, barren land attracts negative activity. Of all things, the right of way is dark at night.

    Besides housing, the development opens up space to the broader community. There’s room for continued nursery operations while adding parks, courtyards and shared gardens. Qiu even proposes repurposing some existing transmission towers, especially in the hills, into platforms for bird-watching.

    One fear, of course, is adding this many new homes to an existing area could cause congestion. But the 20-mile stretch of homes ensures that traffic would be spread out. Superblocks could tie into the current road network and add parking while also providing long and unified bike and pedestrian infrastructure — not to mention the centralized open and community space — to neighborhoods lacking it now.

    A future Los Angeles that takes its housing and climate challenges seriously will have to look for opportunities to make better use of space. Fitting 23,000 new homes into the Valley by redeveloping a land now used for a relic hits that mark.

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    Liam Dillon, Doug Smith, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee

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  • Trump seeks $1-billion fine against UCLA. Newsom says ‘we’ll sue,’ calling it extortion

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    Hours after the Trump administration demanded that the University of California pay a $1-billion fine to settle federal accusations of antisemitism in exchange for restoring frozen grant funding to UCLA, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the proposal “extortion” and said the state will go to court to protect the nation’s premier university system.

    “We’ll sue,” Newsom said during a news conference with Texas legislators over California’s effort to counter a contentious Republican redistricting plan in that state.

    President Trump is “trying to silence academic freedom” by “attacking one of the most important public institutions in the United States of America,” Newsom said, adding that he would “stand tall and push back against that, and I believe every member of California Legislature feels the same way.”

    The federal government on Friday said UC should pay the billion-dollar fine in installments and contribute $172 million to a fund for Jewish students and other individuals affected by alleged violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The statute covers illegal discrimination related to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, including Jewish and Israeli identity.

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    In addition, the Trump administration demanded sweeping campus changes encompassing protests, admissions, gender identity in sports and housing, the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups, and submission to an outside monitor over the agreement, according to four UC senior officials who have reviewed the proposal.

    “He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine, unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said.

    “We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions,” he said.

    The governor appeared to be referring to controversial and costly deals the Trump administration secured from Columbia and Brown universities over charges similar to those facing UCLA, deals Newsom criticized a day earlier in public remarks.

    In a statement Friday that UC was “reviewing” the terms, UC President James B. Milliken, who oversees the 10-campus system that includes UCLA, also seemed to rebuff the demand.

    “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” Milliken said. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

    UC Regents Chair Janet Reilly told The Times the university was still willing to negotiate with the Trump administration but not on “unacceptable” terms.

    “Demand for a $1 billion payment from UCLA, coupled with conditions that contradict the university’s values, is unacceptable,” Reilly said, describing it as a “financial burden” that would be “catastrophic for our students, research, our patients and the people of California.

    “The university remains willing to engage in a constructive and good faith dialogue with the federal government but the University of California will always stand firm in protecting the integrity and values of our institution,” Reilly said.

    A spokesperson for UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk referred The Times to Milliken’s statement. Federal negotiations are being handled on a UC-wide level.

    UC is grappling with how to restore $584 million in frozen medical and science grant funds to UCLA. If the deal was accepted, it would be the largest settlement between a university and the Trump administration, far surpassing a $221-million agreement that Columbia University announced last month. Harvard is also reportedly considering a settlement involving a hefty fine.

    “We would never agree to this,” said one of the UC officials who is involved in the deliberations with the Trump administration. “It is more money than was frozen at UCLA. So how does that make sense?”

    But another senior UC official said the figure was understandable if it resolved all federal investigations across the system, even if UC may not ultimately agree to it. The federal proposal focuses on UCLA only, not all campuses.

    Any payment would be a political liability for the university and state leaders in deep-blue California, where Trump’s policies are highly unpopular. A billion dollars would be a financial burden for a university system that is already facing a hiring freeze, budget squeezes, deferred state funding and scattered layoffs.

    UC and individual campuses are under multiple federal investigations into alleged use of race in admissions, employment discrimination against Jews, civil rights complaints from Jewish students and improper reporting of foreign donations.

    UCLA has faced the most charges from the government of any UC or public university, many of them tied to a 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.

    The encampment, which unsuccessfully demanded the university divest from weapons companies tied to Israel’s war in Gaza, was targeted in a violent overnight attack last spring and was later the subject of federal lawsuit by pro-Israel Jewish students. The students, along with a professor, accused UCLA of enabling antisemitism by not shutting down the encampment, which plaintiffs said blocked pro-Israel Jews from campus pathways. UCLA settled the suit for $6.45 million, including more than $2 million in donations to Jewish nonprofits.

    The Trump administration’s Friday offer follows a similar playbook to agreements it reached with Columbia and Brown universities to restore federal funding and resolve allegations of civil rights violations against Jewish and Israeli students.

    Trump wants to remake universities, which he has called “Marxist” hotbeds of liberalism and anti-Israel sentiment. During his second term, federal agencies have suspended or canceled billions in federal medical and science grants related to gender, LGBTQ+ issues or in response to campuses it accuses of being antisemitic. The White House has also attacked campus diversity programs and admissions practices as being illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.

    University leaders have challenged the notion that cutting medical research helps protect Jewish people. “This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk, the UCLA chancellor, said in a campus letter this week.

    At UCLA, Trump’s demands include an end to scholarships that focus on race or ethnicity, the sharing of admissions data with the government and changes to campus protest rules. The Trump administration is also proposing that UCLA Health and the medical school cease gender-affirming care for transgender people.

    UC has already overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring.

    The Trump administration is also saying it wants an outside monitor to oversee the agreement.

    The proposal came one day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to Trump. Newsom, a Democrat, has fashioned himself as a national anti-Trump figure and is considering a presidential run in 2028.

    The university system, run by Milliken — who assumed his role only last week — and the Board of Regents, is independent under the state Constitution. But the governor can exercise political sway over the regents, whose members he appoints. Newsom also holds an ex-officio seat on the board.

    Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Wilner from Washington. Times staff Writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento and Seema Mehta in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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    Jaweed Kaleem, Michael Wilner

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  • Trump administration asks Supreme Court to lift limits on ICE’s ‘roving patrols’

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    The Trump administration on Thursday petitioned the Supreme Court to free up its mass deportation efforts across Southern California, seeking to lift a ban on “roving patrols” implemented after a lower court found such tactics likely violate the 4th Amendment.

    The restrictions, initially handed down in a July 11 order, bar masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets of Los Angeles and cities in seven other counties without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

    Under the 4th Amendment, reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on race, ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of Los Angeles found in her original decision.

    The Trump administration said in its appeal to the high court that Frimpong’s ruling, upheld last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”

    Lawyers behind the lawsuits challenging the immigration tactics immediately questioned the Trump administration’s arguments.

    “This is unprecedented,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition of civil rights groups and individual attorneys challenging cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests. “The brief is asking the Supreme Court to bless open season on anybody on Los Angeles who happens to be Latino.”

    The move comes barely 24 hours after heavily armed Border Patrol agents snared workers outside a Westlake Home Depot after popping out of the back of a Penske moving truck — actions some experts said appeared to violate the court’s order.

    If the Supreme Court takes up the case, many now think similar aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate enforcement actions could once again become the norm.

    “Anything having to do with law enforcement and immigration, the Supreme Court seems to be giving the president free rein,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law and a prominent scholar of the country’s highest court. “I think the court is going to side with the Trump administration.”

    The Department of Justice has repeatedly argued that the temporary restraining order causes “manifest irreparable harm” to the government. Officials are especially eager to see it overturned because California’s Central District is the single most populous in the country, and home to a plurality of undocumented immigrants.

    In its Supreme Court petition, the Justice Department alleged that roughly 10% of the region’s residents are in the U.S. illegally.

    “According to estimates from Department of Homeland Security data, nearly 4 million illegal aliens are in California, and nearly 2 million are in the Central District of California. Los Angeles County alone had an estimated 951,000 illegal aliens as of 2019 — by far the most of any county in the United States,” the petition said.

    President Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, and has poured billions in federal funding and untold political capital into the arrest, incarceration and removal of immigrants. Though Justice Department lawyers told the appellate court there was no policy or quota, administration officials and those involved in planning its deportation operations have repeatedly cited 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year as objectives.

    District and appellate courts have stalled, blocked and sometimes reversed many of those efforts in recent weeks, forcing the return of a Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison, compelling the release of student protesters from ICE detention, preserving birthright citizenship for children of immigrant parents and stopping construction of “Alligator Alcatraz.”

    But little of the president’s immigration agenda has so far been tested in the Supreme Court.

    If the outcome is unfavorable for Trump, some observers wonder whether he will let the justices limit his agenda.

    “Even if they were to lose in the Supreme Court, I have serious doubts they will stop,” Segall said.

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    Sonja Sharp

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