POLITICS

The Trump administration has lifted a freeze on federal funds for HIV prevention and surveillance programs, officials said, following an outcry from HIV prevention organizations, health experts and Democrats in Congress.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health received notice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday that it had been awarded nearly $20 million for HIV prevention for the 12-month period that began June 1 — an increase of $338,019 from the previous year.

“Let’s be clear — the Trump administration’s move to freeze HIV prevention funding was reckless, illegal and put lives at risk,” said Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) in a statement. “I’m relieved the CDC finally did the right thing — but this never should have happened.”

The CDC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Friedman and other advocates for HIV prevention funding sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month, warning that proposed cuts to these programs would reverse years of progress combating the disease and cause spikes in new cases — especially in California and among the LGBTQ+ community.

The letter cited estimates from the Foundation for AIDS Research, known as amfAR, suggesting the cuts could lead to 143,000 additional HIV infections nationwide and 127,000 additional deaths from AIDS-related causes within five years.

Los Angeles County, which stood to lose nearly $20 million in annual federal HIV prevention funding, was looking at terminating contracts with 39 providers. Experts said the dissolution of that network could result in as many as 650 new cases per year — pushing the total number of new infections per year in the county to roughly 2,000.

“Public Health is grateful for the support and advocacy from the Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles County Congressional delegation, and all of our community based providers in pushing CDC to restore this Congressionally approved funding,” a spokeswoman for the county’s health department said.

“Looking forward, it is important to note that the President’s FY26 budget proposes to eliminate this funding entirely, and we urge our federal partners to support this critical lifesaving funding,” she said.

WASHINGTON — Americans’ per capita income–after adjustment for inflation–declined in 1991, the first drop in nine years, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

The fall in real personal income was even greater in California, reflecting the impact of the recession in the state.

Nationwide, personal income averaged $19,082 last year, a scant 2.1% improvement over the prior year. That compares to a 4.1% rise in consumer prices, meaning real per capita income fell last year.

In California, personal income averaged $20,952 in 1991, a 1.3% increase over 1990. Nevada lagged even more with personal income of $19,175, only 0.7% higher than the prior year.

It was the first time since 1982 that growth in per capita income failed to keep pace with inflation, and it was the slowest growth since per capita incomes rose just 1% in 1958, a recession year.

The Commerce Department calculates personal income using wages and salaries, rents, dividends and government payments such as Social Security. This total measure of income–$4.81 trillion nationally in 1991–divided by a population of 252.2 million yields the per capita income for America.

California last year was among a group of 14 slow-growing states, according to the Commerce Department. This represents a major change from the 1980s, when these states were enjoying rapid growth, significantly above the national expansion of per capita incomes. They led the boom, with the central part of the nation lagging behind.

Now the situation is reversed, with the Midwest enjoying growth while both coasts suffer from sluggish economic performance.

The eastern states, notably New England and New York, suffered “declines in earnings in construction, durables, manufacturing and retail trade,” the Commerce Department said. Incomes grew in the West, but population and inflation grew even faster.

The fast-growing states, in which per capita income outstripped the national average, had strong gains in construction, manufacturing and service industries, the Commerce Department said. This group included Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Hawaii and Utah.

Nationally, the growth rate in per capita income has been slowing since the end of the Reagan Administration. The increase in 1988 was 7.1%, and then slipped to 6.9% in 1989, and 5.4% in 1990 before reaching 1.3% last year.

The Commerce Department indicated that the recession, now in its second year, has had widespread and pervasive impact throughout the country. The growth of income slowed in all 50 states compared to the previous year’s performance.

“The defense cutbacks are having a big impact,” said Rudolph E. DePass, a Commerce Department analyst. “The high-income states (in the 1980s) . . . were generally all pretty heavily involved in the defense industry.”

Only seven states enjoyed per capita incomes in 1991 matching or exceeding the national inflation rate. They were: Wyoming, 5.1%; Montana, 4.8%; North Dakota, 4.8%; Hawaii, 4.6%; Louisiana, 4.2%; New Mexico, 4.1%, and Arkansas, 4.1%. Mississippi at 4% virtually matched the national average.

Economists predicted that income growth would improve modestly this year as the economy recovers.

“1992 will be slightly better. You could see a 3% to 4% increase,” said economist Lawrence Chimerine of DRI-McGraw Hill, a Lexington, Mass., forecasting firm. “But we still will be lucky to match or exceed inflation, and we won’t make up for the weakness of the last several years.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — The news clips say Bob Hertzberg was sworn in as Assembly speaker April 13. But ask Hertzberg and he’ll tell you he really didn’t become speaker until May 9. That’s the day he pulled together the biggest deal of the year in the Capitol.

It’s the day the Sherman Oaks Democrat first felt the power of the office–and passed a leadership test he easily could have avoided without anybody noticing.

It may have been indicative of a speakership style Sacramento has not seen for a long while–a political natural who moves comfortably among the powerful and relishes the action, somebody raised in public policy activism and schooled in precinct combat. An old pro at 45, after only 3 1/2 years in elective office.

He’s somebody who can relate to the Capitol’s indigenous, No. 1 old pro, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), an acerbic veteran of nearly 30 years in the Legislature and Congress.

What Hertzberg achieved on May 9–with Burton’s indispensable help at the end–was to sign up Gov. Gray Davis, the California Teachers Assn. and the legislative leadership on a $1.84-billion boost for schools.

This is not just an ordinary spending bump. This is extra money now that will become part of the schools’ permanent, yearly entitlement. It’s also a done deal, unlike all the other ballyhooed budget proposals that have yet to be negotiated.

But the larger significance for Capitol insiders–and Hertzberg’s motivation–was political. In exchange for the new school money, the CTA agreed to dump its November ballot initiative that would have played havoc with Democratic legislative candidates. The CTA measure would have required California to raise per-pupil spending to the national average and forced a tax increase.

Democratic lawmakers would have felt obliged to endorse the initiative because the CTA is a financial angel. Republican campaign opponents then could have accused them of endorsing a tax hike.

“We had this train wreck coming down the line,” Hertzberg says. “It could have cost Democrats seats. I couldn’t let that happen.”

*

*

The new speaker started calling Friday night, May 5. First to staffers, then to Burton, Davis and the CTA on Saturday. And everybody again on Sunday. Davis gave Hertzberg the license to broker a deal.

On Monday–one day before the CTA was to turn in enough signatures to qualify its initiative–8,000 teachers rallied for more money at the Capitol. Afterward, Hertzberg and CTA officials met with the governor.

Davis started at $1.25 billion; the CTA $3 billion. Their relations had been strained by past feuding. But both had an incentive to settle. The CTA measure would hinder the union’s all-out fight against a voucher initiative–and also the governor’s sponsorship of a ballot proposal to lower the vote requirement for local school bond issues.

“It would have looked to the voters like too much in one fell swoop,” says Garry South, Davis’ political advisor.

Still, the sides couldn’t agree. Talks broke down. Hertzberg wouldn’t let it go, however. He called Burton. Burton called CTA officials and asked them to meet in his office Tuesday morning, May 9.

There, Hertzberg offered the $1.84 billion he knew Davis would accept. And Burton closed the deal.

How? “He guaranteed it,” recalls CTA President Wayne Johnson. “He said, ‘If people don’t live up to this, they’ll rue the day’–in a little more colorful language.”

Quips Burton: “Bob pitched 8 2/3 innings. Then with the bases loaded, a 3-0 count, they called me in and I struck out the batter on three pitches.

“But there wouldn’t have been anything for me to do if not for Hertzberg.”

*

Unlike Hertzberg’s predecessor, Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa, the new speaker says he enjoys and relates to Burton, 67. Villaraigosa often talked about having “to pop [Burton] in the nose a couple of times.”

“My old man was sort of an old school guy and all his buds were old school, and that’s why I relate so well to Burton. I totally get him,” says Hertzberg. His late father, Harrison Hertzberg, was a prominent West L.A. constitutional lawyer who used the courtroom to change public policy. “They’re the same kind of guys. Speak the same language–the same four-letter words.”

Just as Hertzberg was telling me this on May 9, Burton walked in to report that the CTA negotiators were headed to his Senate office. Final strategy was discussed.

Later, the speaker remarked: “They changed the sign on the office door April 13, but I’ll always think of May 9 as the day I earned my stripes.”

A fast start for a new leader.

WASHINGTON — Anybody remember “Abolish ICE?”

That was progressives’ impassioned cry last year after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents imprisoned undocumented immigrant children in cages. It was a litmus test of compassion for Democrats running for president.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said yes, “abolish ICE.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said she’d “replace” the agency. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he’d “restructure” it.

But Joe Biden, the leading moderate in the race, refused to get near the idea. Eventually, “Abolish ICE” disappeared — and Biden won the nomination.

Now, after George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, progressive groups have raised a new banner: “Defund the police.”

It may be the worst political slogan ever coined.

For one thing, its proponents say it doesn’t mean what it sounds like — the abolition of police departments, a proposal that would be an election year gift to President Trump.

The defunders say they want to trim police budgets and redirect the money to social services, and let cops go back to solving crimes and other core functions. Even then, the idea is massively unpopular.

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll last week found only 16% of Democrats favor cuts in police funding. Republicans are even less enthusiastic.

“Abolish ICE” was more popular than that.

Biden’s response was crisp. “I don‘t support defunding the police,” he said Monday. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency.”

That’s no surprise. Biden is a man of the center — the center of the Democratic Party, that is. He built his Senate career as a “law and order” candidate during the high-crime era, with strong support from police unions.

He’s moved left since then, but “Defund the police?” His 77-year-old political antennae are too well-tuned for that.

More striking were the similar reactions of most other Democrats, including leading progressives. Sanders said he wants to pay well-trained police officers more, not less. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the slogan was “a distraction.”

Instead of defunding police, House Democrats plan to pass a sweeping police reform bill with a long list of sensible proposals: a ban on federal aid for police departments that use chokeholds, mandated use of body cameras for police, a change in qualified immunity laws to let people seek civil damages against abusive police, and a national misconduct registry to track bad cops.

Biden has endorsed the bill, which is similar to criminal justice proposals he has outlined.

“Let us vow to make this, at last, an era of action to reverse systemic racism,” he said in a passionate speech in Philadelphia last week. “Bad cops should be dealt with severely and swiftly. We all need to take a hard look at the culture that allows for these senseless tragedies to keep happening.”

And here’s what may be the most important development: Most of the public agrees.

A series of public opinion polls found that the wave of overwhelmingly peaceful protests that followed Floyd’s death crystallized a remarkable shift in public opinion — in favor of reform.

The Yahoo/YouGov poll, for example, found that fully two-thirds of Americans want to ban police from using chokeholds, including 48% of Republicans.

A Monmouth poll found that 57% of Americans believe police officers are more likely to use excessive force in a confrontation if the target is Black; four years ago, only 34% gave that answer.

What provoked the huge change in public sentiment? I’ll nominate an obvious cause: ubiquitous cellphone cameras, which enable protesters and bystanders to record police misconduct and upload it to social media.

In an earlier era, the Minneapolis police could claim — as they tried to do this time — that Floyd died in a violent struggle with officers. But we know otherwise, because we watched him die after nearly nine agonizing minutes with an armed officer pressing his full weight on his neck and others holding his legs.

As the protests swelled, Trump resorted to the age-old playbook of “law and order,” charging that the problem was violent agitators running amok. But anyone with a smartphone could see that wasn’t true.

He tweeted that a 75-year-old protester who suffered serious head injuries after being shoved by police in Buffalo, N.Y., had faked his fall and might have been “an Antifa provocateur.” That one didn’t fly, either.

Trump normally displays a canny sense of the public mood. But he has put himself squarely on the wrong side of this issue — not only morally, but as a matter of practical politics.

He doesn’t seem to have noticed that most voters think he’s dead wrong.

Suddenly, thanks to the tragedy of Minneapolis, Democrats have an opportunity to build a majority — perhaps even a bipartisan majority — in favor of criminal justice reform.

It’s too late for George Floyd, but just in time for the November election.

When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.

But that wasn’t the only response.

Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.

“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.

In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.

Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.

The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.

“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”

The shifting debate

Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.

One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.

In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.

People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.

(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)

LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.

However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.

One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.

Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.

“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.

Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.

Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.

He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.

President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”

“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.

From offense to defense

Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.

Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.

“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”

Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.

Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.

One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.

Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.

“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”

Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.

Leaders look ahead

Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.

It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.

“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.

The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.

They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.

The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”

The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.

(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)

“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”

Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.

The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.

A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”

A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.

“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.

Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.

Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.

Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.

Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.

“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”

As federal immigration raids continue to upend life in Los Angeles, Asian American leaders are rallying their communities to raise their voices in support of Latinos, who have been the primary targets of the enforcement sweeps, warning that neighborhoods frequented by Asian immigrants could be next.

Organizers say many Asian immigrants have already been affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants working in the country without documentation. Dozens of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders had been on indefinite hold have been detained after showing up for routine check-ins at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigration attorneys and advocacy groups.

In recent months, a number of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants whose deportation orders had been stayed — in some cases for decades — have been told that those orders will now be enforced.

The Asian immigrants being targeted are generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the U.S., making them subject to deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through because the immigrants had lived in the U.S. long enough that their home countries no longer recognized them as citizens.

“Our community is much more silent, but we are being detained in really high numbers,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “There’s such a stigma and fear that, unlike the Latinx community that wants to fight and speak out about the injustices, our community’s first reaction is to go down and get more and more hidden.”

On Thursday, more than a half-dozen leaders representing Thai, Japanese and South Asian communities held a news conference in Little Tokyo urging community members to stand together and denounce the federal action as an overreach.

President Trump came into office in January vowing to target violent criminals for deportation. But amid pressure to raise deportation numbers, administration officials in recent months have shifted their focus to farmworkers, landscapers, street vendors and other day laborers, many of whom have been working in the country for decades.

While an estimated 79% of undocumented residents in L.A. County are natives of Mexico and Central America, Asian immigrants make up the second-largest group, constituting 16% of people in the county without legal authorization, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Across the U.S., Indians make up the third-largest group of undocumented residents, behind Mexicans and Salvadorans.

According to the Pew Research Center, the L.A. metropolitan area is home to the largest populations of Cambodian, Korean, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese people in the U.S.

So far, the highest-profile raids in Southern California have centered on Latino neighborhoods, targeting car washes, restaurants, home improvement stores, churches and other locales where undocumented residents gather and work.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado and Peter Gee of the Little Tokyo Service Center were among the speakers who denounced ICE raids during a news conference Thursday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

But Asian businesses have not been immune. A raid outside a Home Depot in Hollywood happened near Thai Town, where organizers have seen ICE agents patrolling the streets. In late May, Department of Homeland Security agents raided a Los Angeles-area nightclub, arresting 36 people they said were Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in the country without authorization.

In Little Bangladesh, immigration agents recently detained 16 people outside a grocery store, said Manjusha P. Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 community-based organizations.

“They will come for us even more in the coming days and weeks,” Kulkarni said. “So we are only protected when we’re in solidarity with our fellow Angelenos.”

From June 1 to 10, at the start of the federal sweeps, ICE data show that 722 people were arrested in the Los Angeles region. The figures were obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of enforcement data at UC Berkeley Law.

A Times analysis found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal convictions. Nearly 48% were Mexican, 16% were from Guatemala and 8% from El Salvador.

Forty-seven of the 722 individuals detained — or about 6% — were from Asian countries.

“We know the fear is widespread and it is deep,” said Assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat whose district takes in Monterey Park and west San Gabriel Valley, areas with large Asian immigrant populations.

Los Angeles City Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Ysabel Jurado spoke of the repercussions the raids were having on immigrant communities. Raman is Indian American, and Jurado is Filipino American.

Jurado said undocumented Filipinos make up a sizable portion of the region’s caregivers, tending to elderly people and young children.

“Their work reflects the deepest values of our communities: compassion, service and interdependence,” Jurado said. “Their labor is essential, and their humanity must be honored.”

Jurado and Raman called on the federal government to end the raids.

“This is such an important moment to speak out and to ensure that the Latino community does not feel alone,” Raman said. “I also want to make it clear to every single person who is Asian American, these aren’t just raids on others. They’re raids on us.”

Staff writer Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

A Central American asylum applicant arrested outside an L.A. immigration court is suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security and the Trump administration for her immediate release and that of her two children, including her 6-year-old son stricken with cancer.

The Honduran woman, not named in court documents, filed a petition for writs of habeas corpus, challenging the legality of her and her family’s detention at a Texas facility. She is also asking for a preliminary injunction that would prevent her family’s immediate deportation to Honduras, as her children cry and pray nightly to be released from a Texas holding facility, according to court documents.

She and her two children, including a 9-year-old daughter, are facing two removal proceedings concurrently: a previous removal proceeding involving their asylum request and this recent expedited removal process.

The woman claims the government violated many of their rights, including the due process clause of the 5th Amendment.

Her attorneys noted that DHS determined she was not a flight risk when she was paroled into the country and that her detention was unjustified.

The woman’s lawyers also argued that she was not given an opportunity to contest her family’s detention in front of a neutral adjudicator.

They also argue that the family’s 4th Amendment right to not be unlawfully arrested were violated.

The Honduran mother is being represented by several groups, including attorney Kate Gibson Kumar of the Texas Civil Rights Project, the San Antonio-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Service and the immigrant advocacy group Raices Texas.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Antonio on Tuesday.

An after-hours email to the Department of Homeland Security was not immediately answered.

One of the focal points of the lawsuit is the fate of the woman’s son.

The youth was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of 3 and has undergone chemotherapy treatments, including injecting chemotherapeutic agents into his cerebrospinal fluid, according to court documents.

He began treatment in Honduras and completed two years of chemotherapy, at which point the mother believes he no longer has leukemia cells in his blood, according to court documents.

The son, however, needs regular monitoring and medical care for his condition, according to court documents.

Last year, the family fled to the United States to “seek safety” after they were subject to “imminent, menacing death threats” in Honduras, according to court documents.

They applied for entrance while waiting in Mexico and received a CBP One app appointment in October to apply for asylum. They presented themselves at an undisclosed border entry, were processed and were paroled in the U.S., according to court documents.

They were scheduled to appear before a Los Angeles immigration court and moved to the area to live with family.

Both children enrolled in local public schools, attended Sunday church and were learning English, according to court documents.

The trio arrived at court May 29 for a hearing for their asylum request and were caught off guard when a Homeland Security lawyer asked for their case to be dismissed, according to court documents.

The woman told an immigration judge “we wish to continue [with our cases],” according to court documents.

The judge granted the dismissal and the Honduran mother and two children were immediately arrested by plainclothes ICE agents upon leaving the courtroom in the hallway, according to court documents. The woman had a June 5 medical appointment scheduled for her son’s cancer diagnosis, which he couldn’t attend because of the arrest.

The family was detained for hours on the first floor before being taken to an undisclosed immigration center in the city, according to court documents.

All three “cried in fear” and the young boy urinated on himself and remained in wet clothing “for hours,” according to court documents.

The trio were placed on a flight to San Antonio along with several other families. The date of the flight was not available.

After landing, the family was transported to a detention center in Dilley, Texas, where they have since resided.

The children have cried each night and prayed “for God to take them out of the detention center,” according to court documents.

The mother claims that the federal government did nothing to monitor her son’s leukemia for days.

Her lawyers have also sought the boy’s release for medical treatment, a request that was not fulfilled.

Bill Moyers, a soft-spoken former White House aide turned journalist who became a standard bearer of quality in TV news, died Thursday in New York. He was 91.

Moyers’ son William told the Associated Press his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital after a long illness.

Moyers began his TV career in 1971 during the early years of PBS after serving as a leading advisor and press secretary to President Johnson. He spent 10 years in two stints at CBS News in the 1970s and ‘80s. He was editor and chief correspondent for “CBS Reports,” the network’s prestigious documentary series, and an analyst for the “CBS Evening News.”

He also did a turn as a commentator on “NBC Nightly News” and was a host of the MSNBC program “Insight” in 1996.

But Moyers was often frustrated with the restraints of corporate-owned media and returned to non-commercial PBS each time.

At PBS, “Bill Moyers Journal” was the first news program on the service, launched in 1972 just as the Watergate scandal was heating up. His documentaries and series, which included “Now With Bill Moyers” and the weekly interview show “Moyers & Company, ” often examined complex issues and offered serious discussion. He earned top prizes in television journalism, including more than 30 Emmy Awards. His final program for PBS aired in 2013.

Moyers made a posthumous star out of a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College with the landmark 1988 PBS series “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” an exploration of religious and mythological archetypes. The series was watched by 30 million viewers.

His 2006 series “Faith and Reason,” where Moyers interviewed authors about the role of religion in their lives, was the kind of programming that distinguished public television, even as audiences had more viewing options on cable.

Moyers also fronted tough investigative programs such as “The Secret Government,” a deep dive into the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. He often focused on the influence of money in the nation’s politics.

A believer in liberal causes, Moyers aggravated Republican administrations who often cited his programs when they accused PBS of bias and attempted to cut its federal funding.

PBS President Paula Kerger, who worked closely with Moyers for decades, said he always embodied the aspirations of public television.

“Bill was always of service: as a journalist, a mentor, and a fierce champion for PBS,” Kerger said in a statement. “He fought for excellence and honesty in our public discourse, and was always willing to take on the most important issues of the day with curiosity and compassion.”

Moyers was born June 5, 1934 in Hugo, Okla., the son of a dirt farmer and day laborer. He attended high school in Marshall, Texas, where he covered sports for the local newspaper.

After graduating from the University of Texas, he earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister. He preached at small rural churches.

While in college, he established a relationship with Johnson, who hired him to work on his 1954 reelection campaign for U.S. Senate. He worked as a news editor for KTBC radio and television, the Austin, Texas, outlets owned by Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird.

Moyers stuck with Johnson when the senator was elected as John F. Kennedy’s vice president, becoming his personal assistant and later serving as a deputy director of the Peace Corps.

After Johnson was sworn in as president on Nov. 22, 1963, following the assassination of Kennedy, Moyers ascended as well. He was a top Johnson aide with a wide range of duties including press secretary.

According to a 1965 profile in Time magazine, Moyers was a key figure in assembling Johnson’s ambitious domestic policy initiatives known as the Great Society. He shaped legislation and edited and polished the work of Johnson’s speechwriters.

When Johnson underwent anesthesia for a gall bladder operation, Moyers was given responsibility to decide whether then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey should take over the president’s powers in the event of a crisis.

Moyers had a major impact on political communication when in 1964 he signed off on the creation of the “Daisy” ad for Johnson’s presidential election campaign.

The ad showing a girl counting petals she pulls from a daisy blends into a countdown for the launch of nuclear missile. Moyers expressed regret for the spot — an attack on Johnson’s Republican opponent Barry Goldwater’s views on the use of nuclear weapons. He believed the use of visceral imagery harmed the country’s politics in the long term.

Moyers left the Johnson White House in 1967 as he was disenchanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War. He went on to become publisher of the Long Island, N.Y., daily newspaper Newsday, raising its stature in the journalism industry, before his first tenure at PBS.

When he rejoined PBS in 1986, he formed his own production company called Public Affairs Television.

Moyers’ preacher-like delivery and emphasis on high moral standards in his commentaries led some people to criticize him as being a pious scold. But as cable news brought a more raucous style of current affairs discussions to TV, Moyers’ gentler approach was an oasis for many.

“His mission has always been to make things better, not louder,” Neil Gabler wrote in an appreciation of Moyers for The Times in 2009. “In a world of ego and bombast, he has always been modest and self-effacing.”

Moyers is survived by his wife Judith; three children, Suzanne Moyers, John D. Moyers and William Cope Moyers; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

The parent organization of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s labor union has doubled down on allegations that the union’s top official failed to properly document hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card transactions.

The International Assn. of Fire Fighters, which oversees the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, suspended President Freddy Escobar and two other union officials last month over “serious problems” with missing receipts identified in a wide-ranging audit going back to 2018.

Auditors reexamined their findings after Escobar showed up to UFLAC headquarters last month — news cameras in tow — with a thumb drive and stacks of photocopied receipts that he claimed would clear him.

In a letter last week reviewed by The Times, the IAFF’s auditors concluded that even with the new materials, Escobar failed to properly document more than $212,000 worth of credit card expenses. They said they were not provided full access to UFLAC’s internal expense system for their first report and said Escobar engaged in a “flurry of activity” to reconcile the transactions in recent months. In the months after auditors left UFLAC’s offices in December 2024, Escobar directed his staff by email to look for missing receipts, according to the letter.

“Escobar — with the assistance of UFLAC staff — worked feverishly to reconcile some of his past credit card expenditures,” IAFF General President Edward Kelly and General Secretary Treasurer Frank Líma said in a note this week to the local union’s members.

Of the 1,974 Escobar credit card transactions auditors recently reviewed, totaling $312,985, only 889, or $100,824 worth, were fully documented with receipts and a business purpose, the auditors’ letter said.

The initial audit reviewed 1,957 of those transactions, which amounted to $311,498, and found that only 428, or $45,635, were properly documented.

“Our conclusions set forth in our May 1, 2025 audit report remain the same,” the auditors wrote in the letter. “It appears that Escobar repeatedly failed to comply with his fiduciary duties and obligations, and proper controls were not in place for compliance with state and federal laws and regulations and UFLAC policies on expense reimbursements and expenditure of UFLAC funds due to lack of receipts and documentation of business purpose.”

Neither Escobar nor his attorney immediately provided comment.

The initial audit had also found that two other UFLAC officials — former Secretary Adam Walker and former Treasurer Domingo Albarran Jr. — together made more than $530,000 in credit card transactions with no receipts or partial documentation.

Auditors did not reexamine those findings in the new report.

Under UFLAC policy, receipts are required for all credit card expenditures, along with an explanation of the expense, including the names of those present and the business reason.

Vice Presidents Chuong Ho and Doug Coates also were suspended and accused of breaching their fiduciary duties in “failing to enforce UFLAC policy.”

After the audit, the IAFF appointed a conservator, John Bagala, to take over the union and “restore responsible financial stewardship and guarantee the fulfillment of UFLAC’s legitimate objectives.”

Bagala is a state representative for the IAFF and president of Marin Professional Firefighters, IAFF Local 1775, which represents firefighters in Marin County.

In a statement Thursday, IAFF spokesperson Ryan Heffernan said the conservatorship is focused on implementing safeguards to prevent future financial mismanagement.

“During this temporary conservatorship, the IAFF remains focused on meeting members’ critical needs and protecting their hard-earned dues money,” he said.

NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction to stop the U.S. Department of Labor from shutting down Job Corps, a residential program for low-income youths, until a lawsuit against the move is resolved.

The injunction bolsters a temporary restraining order U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter issued this month when he directed the Labor Department to cease removing Job Corps students from housing, terminating jobs or otherwise suspending the nationwide program without congressional approval.

Founded in 1964, Job Corps aims to help teenagers and young adults who struggled to finish traditional high school and find jobs. The program provides tuition-free housing at residential centers, training, meals and healthcare.

“Once Congress has passed legislation stating that a program like the Job Corps must exist, and set aside funding for that program, the DOL is not free to do as it pleases; it is required to enforce the law as intended by Congress,” Carter wrote in the ruling.

Labor Department spokesperson Aaron Britt said the department was working closely with the Department of Justice to evaluate the injunction.

“We remain confident that our actions are consistent with the law,” Britt wrote in an email.

The Labor Department, led by Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, said in late May that it would pause operations at all contractor-operated Job Corps centers by the end of June. It said the publicly funded program yielded poor results for its participants at a high cost to taxpayers, citing low student graduation rates and growing budget deficits.

“Secretary DeRemer rightfully paused funding to reassess underperforming programs, operating in a $140 million deficit, with massive safety concerns at Job Corps centers,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in an email. “The district court lacked jurisdiction to enter its order, and the Trump Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”

The judge rejected the department’s claims that it did not need to follow a congressionally mandated protocol for closing down Job Corps centers because it wasn’t closing the centers, only pausing their activities.

“The way that the DOL is shuttering operations and the context in which the shuttering is taking place make it clear that the DOL is actually attempting to close the centers,” Carter wrote.

The harm faced by some of the students served by the privately run Job Corps centers is compelling, the judge said. Carter noted that one of the students named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit lives at a center in New York.

If the Job Corps program is eliminated, she would lose all the progress she’s made toward earning a culinary arts certificate and “will immediately be plunged into homelessness,” the judge wrote. That’s far from the “minor upheaval” described by government lawyers, he said.

The AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department said the decision prevents any Job Corps center closures, job terminations or student removals, pending legislative action. “The law is clear: a federal agency cannot unilaterally dismantle a congressionally-mandated program like Job Corps,” the group said in a statement. “The students who enter the Job Corps program are the embodiment of the American dream: that if you work hard, no matter your beginnings, you can achieve success. We are proud of these students and of the Job Corps program.”

As the centers prepared to close, many students were left floundering. Some moved out of the centers and into shelters for homeless people.

“Many of these young people live in uncertainty, so it takes time to get housing and restore a lot of those supports you need when you’ve been away from your community for so long,” said Edward DeJesus, chief executive of Social Capital Builders, a Maryland-based educational consulting firm that provides training on relationship building at several Job Corps sites. “So the abrupt closure of these sites is really harmful for the welfare of young adults who are trying to make a change in their lives.”

The National Job Corps Assn., a nonprofit trade organization made up of business, labor, volunteer and academic organizations, sued to block the suspension of services, alleging it would displace tens of thousands of vulnerable young people and force mass layoffs.

The attorneys general of 20 states filed an amicus brief supporting the group’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the case.

Monet Campbell learned about the Job Corps’ center in New Haven, Conn., while living in a homeless shelter a year ago. The 21-year-old has since earned her certified nursing assistant license and phlebotomy and electrocardiogram certifications through Job Corps, and works at a nursing home.

“I always got told all my life, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ But Job Corps really opened my eyes to, ‘I can do this,’” said Campbell, who plans to start studying nursing at Central Connecticut State University in August.

The program has been life-changing in other ways, she said. Along with shelter and job training, Campbell received food, mental health counseling, medical treatment and clothing to wear to job interviews.

“I hadn’t been to the doctor’s in a while,” she said. “I was able to do that, going to checkups for my teeth, dental, all that. So they really just helped me with that.”

Campbell said she and other Job Corps participants in New Haven feel like they’re in limbo, given the program’s possible closure. They recently had to move out for a week when the federal cuts were initially imposed, and Campbell stayed with a friend.

There are 123 Job Corps centers in the U.S., the majority of them operated by private organizations under agreements with the Department of Labor. The private centers serve more than 20,000 students across the U.S., according to the lawsuit.

Bussewitz writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Susan Haigh in Hartford and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration is racing ahead with construction of a makeshift immigration detention facility at an airstrip in the Everglades over the opposition of Native American leaders who consider the area their sacred ancestral homelands.

A string of portable generators and dump trucks loaded with fill dirt streamed into the site Thursday, according to activist Jessica Namath, who witnessed the activity. The state is plowing ahead with building a compound of heavy-duty tents, trailers and other temporary buildings at the county-owned airfield in the Big Cypress National Preserve, about 45 miles west of downtown Miami.

A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which is helping lead the project, did not respond to requests for comment.

State officials have characterized the site as an ideal place to hold migrants, saying there’s “not much” there other than pythons and alligators.

Indigenous leaders who can trace their roots to the area back thousands of years dispute that — and they’re condemning the state’s plans to build what’s been dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” on their homelands.

For generations, the sweeping wetlands of what is now South Florida have been home to Native peoples who today make up the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, as well as the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

“Rather than Miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited wasteland for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the Big Cypress is the Tribe’s traditional homelands. The landscape has protected the Miccosukee and Seminole people for generations,” Miccosukee Chairman Talbert Cypress wrote in a statement on social media.

There are 15 remaining traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages in Big Cypress, as well as ceremonial and burial grounds and other gathering sites, Cypress testified before Congress in 2024.

“We live here. Our ancestors fought and died here. They are buried here,” he said. “The Big Cypress is part of us, and we are a part of it.”

Critics have condemned the facility and what they call the state’s apparent reliance on alligators as a security measure as a cruel spectacle, while DeSantis and other state officials have defended it as part of Florida’s muscular efforts to carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Tribal leaders and environmentalists are urging the state to change course, noting that billions of dollars in state and federal funds have been poured into Everglades restoration in recent years, an investment they say is jeopardized by plans to house some 1,000 migrants at the site for an undetermined amount of time.

Indigenous leaders and activists are planning to gather at the site again Saturday to stage a demonstration highlighting why the area is “sacred” and should be “protected, not destroyed.”

“This place became our refuge in time of war. It provides us a place to continue our culture and traditions,” Miccosukee leader Betty Osceola wrote in a social media post announcing the demonstration.

“And we need to protect it for our future generations,” she added.

Payne writes for the Associated Press.

President Trump’s administration plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a country that’s not his native El Salvador after he’s released from jail in Tennessee, a federal prosecutor told a federal judge in Maryland on Thursday.

Justice Department attorney Jonathan Guynn said the removal proceedings would be to a “third country.” But the prosecutor also said there are “no imminent plans” to deport Abrego Garcia and the U.S. government would comply with all court orders.

Guynn acknowledged the government’s plans during a hastily planned conference call with Abrego Garcia’s attorneys and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Md. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers had filed an emergency request for Xinis to order the government to take Abrego Garcia to Maryland when he is released in Tennessee, an arrangement that would prevent his deportation before he stands trial.

“We have concerns that the government may try to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia quickly over the weekend, something like that,” one of his attorneys, Jonathan Cooper, told Xinis on the call.

Prosecutor says ‘there’s no timeline’

Xinis, however, said she could not move as quickly as Abrego Garcia’s attorneys would like. She said she had to consider the Trump administration’s pending motions to dismiss the case before she could rule on the emergency request. The judge scheduled a July 7 court hearing in Maryland to discuss the emergency request and other matters.

It was unclear whether the government would seek to deport Abrego Garcia before he stands trial in the U.S. on criminal charges unsealed earlier this month.

Guynn told the judge during Thursday’s call that “there’s no timeline.”

“We do plan to comply with the orders we’ve received from this court and other courts,” he said. “But there’s no timeline for these specific proceedings.”

Deporting Abrego Garcia before his trial would be a reversal for an administration that brought him back from El Salvador just weeks ago to face human smuggling charges, with Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi saying: “This is what American justice looks like.”

Abrego Garcia, a Maryland construction worker, became a flash point over Trump’s immigration policies after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March. He’s been in jail in Tennessee since he was returned to the U.S. on June 7 to face human smuggling charges.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes in Nashville has ruled that Abrego Garcia has a right to be released while awaiting trial. But she decided Wednesday to keep him in custody for at least a few more days over concerns that U.S. immigration officials would swiftly try to deport him again.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in Maryland, where his wife is suing the Trump administration over his March deportation, offered up a solution when they asked Xinis to direct the government to take him to Maryland while he awaits trial. Xinis has been overseeing the lawsuit in her Greenbelt court.

“If this Court does not act swiftly, then the Government is likely to whisk Abrego Garcia away to some place far from Maryland,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys wrote in their request to Xinis.

Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland, just outside Washington, with his American wife and children for more than a decade. His deportation violated a U.S. immigration judge’s order in 2019 that barred his expulsion to his native country. The judge had found that Abrego Garcia faced a credible threat from gangs who had terrorized him and his family.

The Trump administration described its violation of the immigration judge’s 2019 order as an administrative error. Trump and other officials doubled down on claims Abrego Garcia was in the MS-13 gang, an accusation that Abrego Garcia denies.

Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty on June 13 to smuggling charges that his attorneys have characterized as an attempt to justify his mistaken expulsion to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Those charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop for speeding in Tennessee, during which Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers without luggage.

Holmes, the magistrate judge in Tennessee, wrote in a ruling on Sunday that federal prosecutors failed to show that Abrego Garcia was a flight risk or a danger to the community.

During a court hearing on Wednesday, Holmes set specific conditions for Abrego Garcia’s release that included him living with his brother, a U.S. citizen, in Maryland. But she held off on releasing him over concerns that prosecutors can’t prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting him.

Holmes ordered Abrego Garcia’s lawyers and prosecutors to file briefs on the matter on Thursday and Friday respectively.

U.S. has to pull diplomatic levers

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor, said the Trump administration would be “fully within its legal power to attempt to remove him to some other country.”

“The Trump administration would have to pull its diplomatic levers,” the professor added. “It’s unusual. But it’s not unheard of.”

Abrego Garcia also could contest the criminal allegations and attempts to remove him in immigration court while demonstrating his ties to the U.S., García Hernández said.

Whatever decision an immigration judge would make, it can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, García Hernández said. And the board’s ruling can then be contested in a federal appeals court.

Finley writes for the Associated Press.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday that his country had delivered a “slap to America’s face” by striking a U.S. air base in Qatar and warned against further attacks in his first public comments since a ceasefire agreement with Israel.

Khamenei’s prerecorded speech that aired on Iranian state television, his first appearance since June 19, was filled with warnings and threats directed toward the United States and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s longtime adversaries.

The 86-year-old, a skilled orator known for his forceful addresses to the country’s more than 90 million people, appeared more tired than he had just a week ago, speaking in a hoarse voice and occasionally stumbling over his words.

The supreme leader downplayed U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites Sunday using bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles, saying that President Trump — who said the attack “completely and fully obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program — had exaggerated its impact.

“They could not achieve anything significant,” Khamenei said. Missing from his more than 10-minute video message was any mention of Iran’s nuclear program and the status of their facilities and centrifuges after extensive U.S. and Israeli strikes.

His characterization of Monday’s strike on the U.S. air base in Qatar contrasted with U.S. accounts of it as a limited attack with no casualties.

The White House responded to Khamenei’s video, accusing him of trying to “save face.”

“Any commonsense, open-minded person knows the truth about the precision strikes on Saturday night,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “They were wildly successful.”

U.N. nuclear watchdog confirms damage to Iran sites

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Grossi, reiterated Thursday that the damage done by Israeli and U.S. strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities “is very, very, very considerable” and that he can only assume the centrifuges are not operational.

“I think annihilated is too much, but it suffered enormous damage,” Grossi told French broadcaster RFI. The IAEA has not been allowed to visit any of the Iranian facilities to do an independent assessment of the damage.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, also conceded Wednesday that “our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.”

Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking shelter in a secret location after the outbreak of the war on June 13, when Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and targeted top military commanders and scientists.

After Sunday’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump was able to help negotiate a ceasefire that came into effect Tuesday.

Iranian leader warns U.S. against further attacks

Khamenei claimed the U.S. had only intervened in the war because “it felt that if it did not intervene, the Zionist regime would be utterly destroyed.”

“It entered the war to save them, yet it gained nothing,” he said.

He said his country’s attack Monday on the U.S. base in Qatar was significant, since it shows Iran “has access to important U.S. centers in the region and can act against them whenever it deems necessary.”

“The Islamic Republic was victorious and, in retaliation, delivered a hand slap to America’s face,” he said, adding, “This action can be repeated in the future.”

“Should any aggression occur, the enemy will definitely pay a heavy price,” he said.

Trump has dismissed the retaliatory attack as a “very weak response,” saying that the U.S. had been warned by Iran in advance and emphasizing that there had been no casualties.

With the ceasefire, life slowly returns to normal in Iran

On Thursday, Iran partially reopened its airspace, which had been closed since the war began, and shops in Tehran’s capital began to reopen, with traffic returning to the streets.

Majid Akhavan, spokesperson for the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development, said Iran had reopened its airspace for the eastern half of the country to domestic and international flights, including those transiting Iranian airspace.

Earlier this week, Tehran said 606 people had been killed in the conflict in Iran, with 5,332 people wounded. The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group released figures Wednesday suggesting Israeli strikes on Iran had killed at least 1,054 and wounded 4,476.

The group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, said 417 of those killed were civilians and 318 were security forces.

At least 28 people were killed in Israel and more than 1,000 wounded, according to officials there. During the 12-day war, Iran fired more than 550 missiles at Israel with a 90% interception rate, according to new statistics released by Israeli authorities Thursday. Israel, meantime, hit more than 720 Iranian military infrastructure targets and eight nuclear-related sites, Israel said.

Trump has also asserted that American and Iranian officials will talk next week, giving rise to cautious hope for longer-term peace.

Iran has not acknowledged that any such talks would take place, though U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff has said there has been direct and indirect communication between the countries. A sixth round of U.S.-Iran negotiations was scheduled for earlier this month in Oman but was canceled after Israel attacked Iran.

Iran has insisted that it will not give up its nuclear program. In a vote underscoring the tough path ahead, its parliament agreed Wednesday to fast-track a proposal that would effectively stop the country’s cooperation with the IAEA, which has monitored the program for years.

Amiri and Rising write for the Associated Press. The AP’s John Leicester in Paris and Natalie Melzer in Nahariya, Israel, and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.

LONDON — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the country is pulling its support from the vaccines alliance Gavi, saying the organization has “ignored the science” and “lost the public trust.”

A video of Kennedy’s short speech was shown to a Gavi meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, where the organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated through routine immunization programs was hoping to raise at least $9 billion for the next five years.

Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, mentioned Gavi’s partnership with the World Health Organization during COVID-19, accusing them of silencing “dissenting views” and “legitimate questions” about vaccine safety. His speech also cast doubt on the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine — which WHO and other health agencies have long deemed to be safe and effective.

Gavi said in a statement Thursday that its “utmost concern is the health and safety of children,” adding that any decision it makes on vaccines to buy is done in accordance with recommendations issued by WHO’s expert vaccine group.

Some doctors in the United States criticized the decision. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said it was “incredibly dangerous” and warned that defunding immunization would put millions of children at risk.

Gavi is a public-private partnership including WHO, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, and it is estimated that the vaccination programs have saved 18 million lives. The United States has long been one of its biggest supporters; before President Donald Trump’s reelection, the country had pledged $1 billion through 2030.

In just under four minutes, Kennedy called on Gavi “to justify the $8 billion America has provided in funding since 2001,” saying officials must “consider the best science available, even when that science contradicts established paradigms.” Kennedy said until that happens, the U.S. won’t contribute further to Gavi.

The health secretary zeroed in on the COVID-19 vaccine, which WHO, Gavi and other health authorities have recommended for pregnant women, saying they are at higher risk of severe disease. Kennedy called that a “questionable” recommendation; his U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently stopped recommending it.

He also criticized Gavi for funding a rollout of a vaccine to prevent diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis in poorer countries, saying he’d seen research that concluded that young girls who got the vaccine were more likely to die from all other causes than children who weren’t immunized.

Gavi said scientists had reviewed all available data, including any studies that raised concerns, and that the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine has “played a key role in helping halve childhood mortality.”

Some observational studies have shown that vaccinated girls do have a higher death rate compared to unvaccinated children, but there is no evidence the deaths are caused by the vaccine. But Offit said the studies cited by Kennedy were not convincing and that research examining links between vaccinations and deaths did not prove a causal connection.

“There’s no mechanism here which makes biological sense for why the [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine] might result in more children dying,” Offit said.

Doctors Without Borders on Thursday predicted “countless children will die from vaccine-preventable diseases” as a result of the U.S. withdrawing support for Gavi.

“To invoke misleading and inaccurate claims about vaccine safety as the pretext for cutting all global vaccine funding is cruel and reckless,” said Mihir Mankad, the charity’s global health advocacy and policy director in the U.S. “When we vaccinate in the community, parents line up for hours to give their children a chance to be protected from these deadly diseases.

“For these children, vaccination programs … are a matter of life and death.”

Kennedy’s recorded speech to Gavi came on the same day that his reconstituted U.S. vaccine advisory panel met for the first time. He fired the previous 17-member panel this month and replaced it with a seven-member group that includes several vaccine skeptics.

Cheng writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

JERUSALEM — President Trump’s call for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial to be thrown out has plunged the American leader into one of Israel’s most heated debates, unnerving some in its political class just days after they unanimously praised his strikes on Iran.

Trump’s social media post condemning the trial as a “WITCH HUNT,” and his vow that the United States will be the one who “saves” Netanyahu from serious corruption charges, came just two days after he called off an Israeli bombing raid in Iran to preserve a ceasefire.

Both were dramatic interventions in the affairs of an ally that previous U.S. administrations had always insisted was a sovereign nation that made its own decisions. Now the one leader nearly all Israelis seem to support has fully embraced the one who most divides them.

“With all due respect for Trump, he is not supposed to interfere in a legal process in an independent country,” opposition leader Yair Lapid told Israeli media.

Trump says trial should be canceled

In an extended post on his Truth Social site, Trump condemned Netanyahu’s trial in the same language that both he and Netanyahu have long used to describe their legal woes. Both contend they are the victims of witch hunts by hostile media, crooked law enforcement and political opponents.

“I was shocked to hear that the State of Israel, which has just had one of its Greatest Moments in History, and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister!” Trump wrote, using a common nickname for Netanyahu.

“Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State. … It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu,” Trump wrote.

Netanyahu’s allies took to social media Thursday to praise Trump and a spokesperson from Netanyahu’s Likud party translated the post into Hebrew.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, a former rival who once challenged Netanyahu over the corruption charges, only to join his Cabinet last year, said the trial was harming the state: “When the president of the United States calls for an annulment of the trial or for a pardon — can anyone say that he is wrong?”

Netanyahu himself said in a post addressed to Trump that he was “deeply moved by your heartfelt support for me and your incredible support for Israel and the Jewish people.”

Netanyahu is a polarizing figure in Israel

Netanyahu became the only sitting prime minister in Israeli history to be indicted when he was charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases after yearslong investigations accusing him of exchanging favors with wealthy political supporters.

He took the witness stand for the first time late last year and his cross-examination began earlier this month. Several hearings have been postponed as he has dealt with the wars and unrest stemming from Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack out of the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu portrays himself as a towering statesman fighting for Israel’s very survival and accuses his political opponents of trying to achieve in the courtroom what they failed to do at the ballot box during his nearly unbroken 16 years in power — the longest of any Israeli leader.

His critics accuse him of prolonging the war in Gaza and of leaving dozens of hostages languishing in Hamas captivity to cling to power and more effectively battle the allegations. Massive weekly protests against Netanyahu have been held for years.

Trump seen as Israel’s greatest U.S. friend

Trump is seen by Netanyahu — and many Israelis — as the greatest friend they have ever had in the White House. He has lent unprecedented support to Israel’s claims to territories seized in war, he brokered the Abraham Accords with four Arab nations in his first term and over the weekend he ordered direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel views as an existential threat.

Still, even some staunch supporters of Netanyahu and Trump seemed a bit unnerved.

Simcha Rotman, a lawmaker from the far-right Religious Zionist party and one of the architects of Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul, wrote on X that Netanyahu’s trial “may be an example of an accumulation of many faults” of the justice system.

“Still, it is not the place of the president of the United States to interfere in legal proceedings in Israel.”

Melzer and Hazboun write for the Associated Press. Melzer reported from Nahariya, Israel.

BALTIMORE — A federal lawsuit could open a new chapter in an escalating legal battle in Maryland, where officials are struggling to address an unexpected onslaught of claims alleging child sexual abuse in state-run juvenile detention facilities.

With thousands of similar claims already pending in state court, the litigation has raised questions about how Maryland will handle the potential financial liability.

The new federal suit, filed Wednesday on behalf of three plaintiffs, seeks $300 million in damages — an amount that far exceeds caps imposed on claims filed in state court. It alleges Maryland juvenile justice leaders knew about a culture of abuse inside youth detention facilities and failed to address it, violating the plaintiffs’ civil rights.

A message seeking comment was left Thursday with the state’s Department of Juvenile Services. The department generally doesn’t comment on pending litigation. The Maryland Office of the Attorney General declined to comment.

An estimated 11,000 plaintiffs have sued in state court, according to the attorneys involved. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson said Wednesday that he believes negotiations for a potential settlement are ongoing between attorneys for the plaintiffs and the attorney general’s office. Officials have said the state is facing a potential liability between $3 billion and $4 billion.

Lawsuits started pouring in after a state law passed in 2023 eliminated the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse claims in Maryland. The change came in the immediate aftermath of a scathing investigative report that revealed widespread abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It prompted the archdiocese to file for bankruptcy to protect its assets.

But Maryland leaders didn’t anticipate they’d be facing similar budgetary concerns because of claims against the state’s juvenile justice system.

Facing a potentially enormous payout, lawmakers recently passed an amendment to limit future liabilities. The new law reduces caps on settlements from $890,000 to $400,000 for cases filed after May 31 against state institutions, and from $1.5 million to $700,000 for private institutions. It allows each claimant to receive only one payment, instead of being able to collect for each act of abuse.

Suing in federal court allows plaintiffs to sidestep those limits.

“Despite Maryland’s recent unconstitutional legislative efforts to insulate itself from liability for the horrific sexual brutalization of children in its custody, Maryland cannot run from liability under Federal law,” plaintiffs’ attorney Corey Stern said in a statement. “The United States Constitution was created for all of us, knowing that some would need protection from the tyranny of their political leaders.”

The three plaintiffs in the federal case allege they were sexually abused by staff at two juvenile detention centers. While other lawsuits have mainly presented allegations of abuse occurring decades ago, the federal complaint focuses on events alleged to have happened in 2019 and 2020. The plaintiffs were 14 and 15 years old.

The victims feared their sentences would be extended if they spoke out, according to the complaint. They accuse state officials of turning a blind eye to a “culture of sexual brutalization and abuse.”

Stern said he anticipates more federal claims will be forthcoming.

Skene writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — An undocumented man from Guatemala who has leukemia postponed chemotherapy because he was afraid to go to the hospital.

A Mexican grandmother packed most of her belongings into boxes, in case she is deported.

A Pentecostal church in East Los Angeles has lost nearly half of its in-person membership.

Across California and the U.S., immigrants are responding to the Trump administration’s unrelenting enforcement raids by going into lockdown. Activities that were once a regular or even mundane part of life — taking kids to school, buying groceries, driving — have become daunting as immigrants who lack legal authorization grapple with how to avoid arrest and deportation.

To stay safe, some immigrants have swapped in-person activities with digital approximations. Others are simply shutting themselves away from society.

“It’s a harmful form of racial profiling combined with the suspension of constitutional rights and due process. That’s why many families are staying at home,” said Victor Narro, a professor and project director for the UCLA Labor Center.

Pastor Carlos Rincon said that about 400 people used to attend his church every week. Now, half as many attend and viewership of live-streamed services on Facebook and YouTube has increased.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Pastor Carlos Rincon, who leads a Pentecostal church in East Los Angeles, said that about 400 people used to attend his church every week, people with roots in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras. Now, half as many attend and viewership of live-streamed services on Facebook and YouTube has increased. Some prayer groups meet on Zoom.

In January, the Trump administration said immigration agents were free to make arrests in sensitive locations once considered off limits, such as hospitals, schools and churches.

At Rincon’s church — which he asked not be named for concern about retaliation — fear has colored life in ways large and small.

A congregant in his late 20s who has leukemia postponed his chemotherapy, afraid he could be caught and deported to Guatemala. After he decided to reschedule the upcoming treatment, church leaders agreed they will take turns staying with him at the hospital.

Pastor Carlos Rincon says he has had to cancel a music class for children due to the raids. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The Trump administration has said immigration agents are free to make arrests in locations once considered off limits such as hospitals, schools and churches. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

A half-day program to provide resources for landscapers and a music class for children were canceled this month after many said they were too afraid to attend. Rincon restarted the music class last week for those who could attend.

On Wednesday, after neighbors told him that immigration agents had been lurking around the area, he warned families against attending a regularly scheduled in-person church service.

Five miles away at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Father Ricardo Gonzalez said church attendance is down at least 30%. The church doesn’t live-stream Mass, though he’s considering it.

Gonzalez said parishioners expect him to have answers, but as an immigrant green card holder himself, he too doesn’t know how to react if immigration agents show up at the church.

“If I get arrested, am I going to be thrown from the country?” he said. “Who is going to help me out?”

Pastor Carlos Rincon and his wife, Amparo, sing and pray during a livestream service at their church.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

For weeks, agents have been arresting those who show up at courthouses for their immigration proceedings.

Volunteers at USC, UCLA, UC Irvine and UC Law San Francisco responded by establishing a free hotline to help people file motions to move their appointments online. The service was the idea of Olu Orange, a lawyer and USC political science and international relations professor who runs the Agents of Change Civil Rights Advocacy Initiative.

Since the hotline (888-462-5211) went live June 15, volunteers have responded to nearly 4,000 calls and helped more than 300 people fill out the form to move their hearings online.

On Friday, Orange answered a call from a girl who sounded about 12 years old, whose parent had been picked up by immigration agents.

“She saw this number on social media and she called and she said, ‘What can I do?’” Orange said. He gave her the number for CHIRLA, a local immigrant rights nonprofit.

Luz Gallegos, executive director of TODEC Legal Center in the Inland Empire, said the pandemic prepared some rural and elderly residents for the current reality because it taught people to use technology — “to go virtual.” Now they have WiFi access and know how to use Zoom.

Some, though, also fear staying digitally connected.

Gallegos said many people who call TODEC’s hotline say they are changing phone companies because they are afraid of being tracked by immigration agents. Others say they’re swapping cellphones for pagers.

A woman identified only as Doña Chela at her home Tuesday. She has packed up her possessions planning to return to her hometown in Michoacan, Mexico, for the first time in more than 25 years. But her brother said it wasn’t safe.

(Julie Leopo / For The Times)

Many of the immigrants served by TODEC now leave their homes only for work, Gallegos said. They have groceries delivered or run to the store when they think border agents are least likely to be on patrol. Before schools let out for the summer, some parents switched their children to online classes.

Some Inland Empire farmworkers now won’t grab their own mail from community mailboxes, Gallegos said, so TODEC has mobilized volunteers to drop off mail, give people rides and help with interpretation needs.

One person helped by the nonprofit is Doña Chela, an undocumented 66-year-old woman who asked to be identified by her nickname.

Many months ago, Doña Chela packed up her possessions after making plans to return to her hometown in Michoacan, Mexico, for the first time since she arrived in the U.S. in 1999. But in April, her brother called to say it wasn’t safe there, that cartel groups had taken over the neighborhood and were extorting residents.

Her husband, a U.S. citizen, has dementia. She thought of moving instead to a border town such as Mexicali, where she and her husband could still be near their three adult U.S.-born daughters.

Doña Chela stands by the packed luggage in her home. (Julie Leopo / For The Times)

Doña Chela waters her home garden. “If it wasn’t for this garden I would not know what to do with myself,” she said in Spanish. (Julie Leopo / For The Times)

But then her husband’s condition began to decline, and now starting over feels too difficult. Even so, she has chosen to keep her clothes, pots and pans, and jewelry packed away — just in case.

Doña Chela doesn’t leave her home except for emergencies. Her daughters bring her groceries because she has stopped driving. She no longer goes to church or makes big batches of tamales for community reunions. She barely sleeps, thinking that agents could burst through her door any time.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said, crying. “I will wait here until they kick me out.”

Her only distraction from constant anxiety is the lush garden she tends to daily, with mangoes, nopales, limes and a variety of herbs.

Gallegos, of TODEC, said the situation faced by Doña Chela and so many others bring to mind a song by Los Tigres del Norte — “La Jaula de Oro.” The golden cage.

“Our community is in a golden cage,” she said. “I hope it’s not too late when this country realizes they need our immigrant workforce to sustain our economy.”

St. John’s Community Health, one of the largest nonprofit community healthcare providers in Los Angeles County that caters to low-income and working-class residents, launched a home visitation program after it surveyed patients and found many canceling appointments “solely due to fear of being apprehended by ICE.”

The clinic, which serves L.A., the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley, said that since the immigration raids began, more than a third of all patients didn’t show up or canceled their appointments.

Some of those who canceled signed up for telehealth or home visits performed by a small team of medical staff, according to Jim Mangia, the clinic’s chief executive. The clinic is adding another home visitation team to double the amount of visits they perform.

Community coalitions are stepping in to help immigrants who can’t afford to hide. OC Rapid Response Network, for instance, raised enough funds through payment app Venmo to send 14 street vendors home.

Robb Smith stands by the food he delivered after he unloaded his truck at a food drop site on Monday in Paramount.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

Robb Smith, who runs Alley Cat Deliveries, said he has seen requests for grocery deliveries grow by about 25%.

He doesn’t ask his customers if they’re immigrants in hiding, but there are signs that people are afraid to leave their house. One woman, who said she was making an inquiry for a friend, asked him if he saw any ICE officers when he was picking up items at Costco.

1

2

3

1. Tito Rodriguez helps unload Robb Smith’s truck of drieg goods and groceries at a drop site on Monday in Paramount. 2. Robb Smith, left, unloads his truck with the help of Tito Rodriguez at the drop site on Monday in Paramount. 3. Robb Smith carries a box of groceries down a driveway Monday in Long Beach. He founded and runs Alley Cat Deliveries. (Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)

Glen Curado, the founder and chief executive of World Harvest Food Bank in Los Angeles, said there has been a significant drop in people coming in to pick up groceries in person. Up to 100 families visit the food bank on a weekday, down from the usual high of 150, he said.

The food bank has a program, called Cart With A Heart, in which people can donate $50 toward fresh produce, protein and other staples to feed two families for a week. The donors can then take those groceries to people sheltering in place.

“It’s almost like a war scene,” Curado said. “You hide here. I’ll go out and I’ll get it for you, and I’ll bring it back — that mentality.”

Castillo reported from Washington and Wong from San Francisco. Times staff writer Melissa Gomez in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that states may exclude Planned Parenthood clinics from providing medical screenings and other healthcare for women on Medicaid.

The court’s conservative majority reversed the longstanding rule that said Medicaid patients may obtain medical care from any qualified provider.

In a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled the Medicaid Act does not give patients an “individual right” to the provider of their choice.

The dispute has turned on abortion. Medicaid is funded by the federal government and the states. For decades, conservative states have argued their funds should not be used in Planned Parenthood clinics because some of those clinics perform abortions.

But until now, the federal government and the courts had said that Medicaid patients can go to any qualified provider for healthcare.

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the decision “will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them. And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed.

Planned Parenthood clinics provide cancer screenings, birth control medical screenings, pregnancy testing, contraception and other healthcare services.

Congress pays most of the state’s costs for Medicaid, and it says “any individual eligible for medical assistance” may receive care from any provider who is “qualified to perform the service.”

Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, called the decision “an attack on our healthcare and our freedom to make our own decisions about our bodies and lives. By allowing states to block Medicaid patients from getting care at Planned Parenthood health centers, the Court has chosen politics over people and cruelty over compassion.”

Three years ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and ruled states may prohibit nearly all abortions.

Nonetheless, South Carolina continued its legal fight to prevent Medicaid patients from receiving care at Planned Parenthood’s clinics in Charleston and Columbia.

Former Gov. Henry McMaster, who issued the ban on Planned Parenthood in 2018, said he did so to protect “his state’s sovereign interests.”

Critics of the move said the state has a severe shortage of doctors and medical personnel who treat low-income patients on Medicaid.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s top leaders doubled down Thursday on how destructive the U.S. attacks had been on Iran’s nuclear facilities and described in detail the study and planning behind the bombing mission.

In a rare Pentagon news briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, worked to shift the debate from whether the nuclear targets were “obliterated,” as President Donald Trump has said, to what they portrayed as the heroism of the strikes as well as the extensive research and preparation that went into carrying them out.

“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was an historically successful attack,” Hegseth said in an often combative session with the media.

He said once more an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, a part of the Defense Department, was preliminary and that the report acknowledged there was low confidence and gaps in information. Hegseth scolded reporters for “breathlessly” focusing on that intelligence assessment and said such stories were just attempts to undermine the Republican president.

That intelligence report said that while the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities did significant damage, the sites were not totally destroyed and that Tehran’s program was only set back by a few months.

U.S. stealth bombers dropped 12 deep penetrator bombs on Iran’s Fordo uranium enrichment site and two on Natanz, a U.S. official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

Despite the sheer tonnage of weaponry used on Fordo, the DIA report said the sites were not totally destroyed.

At the briefing, Caine described the 15 years of study by two Defense Threat Reduction Agency officers to create a bomb that could penetrate the Fordo nuclear facility being built deep underground by Iran.

Over time, he said, the department had many people with Ph.D.s working on the program, “doing modeling and simulation that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America.”

The pilots of the bombers involved in the weekend strikes described the flash after the bomb drop as “the brightest explosion they had ever seen,” Caine said.

At the briefing, Hegseth responded to some questions by personally attacking the reporter or the press as a whole.

Asked repeatedly whether any of the nuclear material was moved out of the Iranian facilities, Hegseth acknowledged that the Pentagon was “looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was where.

“I’m not aware of any intelligence that says things were not where they were supposed to be” or that they were moved, Hegseth said.

Copp and Baldor write for the Associated Press. AP writers Eric Tucker and Chris Megerian contributed to this report.

The nation’s federal judges — including appointees of presidents of both parties, Donald Trump’s among them — have been the bulwark against Trump’s reign of lawlessness on deportations, spending, federal appointments and more. Repeatedly, lower courts have been standing up for the Constitution and federal law, trying to constrain a president contemptuous of both, at demonstrable danger to themselves. But too often, the administration disregards their orders.

You’d think the Supreme Court — in particular Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the overseer of the judicial branch — would have the lower courts’ backs. But no, as the high court’s conservative majority shamefully showed in a ruling on Monday.

That decision in one of many deportation challenges wasn’t the court’s first such display of deference to a president who doesn’t reciprocate. And, safe bet, it won’t be the last.

The court allowed the Trump administration to at least temporarily continue deporting migrants to countries not their own, unsafe ones at that, with little or no notice and no chance to legally argue that they could face torture or worse. No matter that lives are at stake — the justices blithely lifted an injunction by Judge Brian E. Murphy, of the U.S. District Court in Boston, that had blocked the administration’s slapdash deportations while legal challenges wend through the courts.

In a blistering 19-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, marshaled legal arguments, damning examples of Trump administration dissembling and defiance of lower courts, and warnings of more defiance of federal courts from an emboldened president.

In contrast, the ruling from the Supreme Court majority was just one paragraph — unsigned legal mumbo-jumbo, its decision wholly unexplained, as is typical in the cases that the court takes all too frequently on an emergency basis, the aptly named “shadow docket.” (In two other shadow docket rulings in May, Trump was allowed to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians, many of whom were here under programs created to protect refugees from violent, impoverished and repressive countries. Why? Who knows?)

What’s all the more maddening about the Supreme Court’s opacity in overriding both Judge Murphy and an appeals court that backed him is that its preliminary support for Trump in this case contradicts the plain language of the justices’ unanimous ruling in April that people subject to deportation “are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

“Fire up the deportation planes,” crowed a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department.

Such callous gloating surely didn’t surprise Sotomayor. Her dissent began, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.” And so did her conservative colleagues.

As Sotomayor wrote, historically the Supreme Court stays a lower court order only “under extraordinary circumstances.” Typically it doesn’t grant relief when, as in this case, both district and appeals courts opposed it. And certainly it doesn’t give the government a W when the record in the case, like this one, is replete with evidence of its misconduct, including openly flouting court orders.

Examples: A judge agreed a Guatemalan gay man would face torture in his home country, yet the man was deported there anyway. The administration violated Judge Murphy’s order when it put six men on a plane to civil-war-torn South Sudan, which the U.S. considers so unsafe that only its most critical personnel remain there. And in a third case, a group was unlawfully bound to Libya before a federal judge was able to halt the flight.

Thus, Sotomayor said, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration “relief from an order it has repeatedly defied” — an order that didn’t prohibit deportations but only required due process in advance.

As she put it, the decision to stay the order was a “gross” abuse of the justices’ discretion. It undermines the rule of law as fully as the Trump administration’s lawlessness, especially given that Americans look to the nation’s highest court as the last word on the law.

“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last,” Sotomayor said. As if on cue, the Supreme Court’s decision was followed on Tuesday by news that underscored just how dangerously misplaced the conservative justices’ deference toward Trump is.

A former Justice Department official, who was fired for truthfully testifying in court that Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been wrongly deported to El Salvador, blew the whistle on his former colleagues — all Trump appointees — confirming in a 27-page document that they’d connived to defy court orders. Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer and now his nominee for a federal appeals court seat, allegedly advised a group of DOJ lawyers in March to tell the courts “f— you” if — when — they tried to stop Trump’s deportations. Bove on Wednesday told the Senate he had “no recollection” of saying that; he might have denied it, as a DOJ associate did to the media, but Bove was under oath.

And the alleged phrase captures the administration’s attitude toward the judiciary, a coequal branch of government, though you’d hardly know it by the justices’ kowtowing to the executive branch. The message, while more profane, matches Trump’s own take on lower-court judges. “The Judges are absolutely out of control,” he posted in May. “Hopefully, the Supreme Court of the United States will put an END to the quagmire.”

For the sake of courageous judges who follow the law, and the rest of us, we can hope otherwise — even if the justices’ early record is mixed at best.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes