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The city of Los Angeles has racked up nearly $20 million in police costs and other expenses in response to protests that have erupted over federal immigration raids, the city’s top budget analyst said Monday.
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo said in a memo to the City Council that the city has incurred at least $19.7 million in costs through June 16. The Los Angeles Police Department has spent $16.9 million, including $11.7 million for overtime.
Other costs include $780,601 to repair damage at City Hall, the LAPD’s headquarters on 1st Street, and other city buildings.
Some estimates, excluding the police, run only through June 13 and the tally is expected to increase.
Protesters have held near-daily demonstrations in downtown L.A. since immigration agents raided a fast-fashion warehouse on June 6. Some protests have become violent and police have deployed tear gas canisters and shot less-lethal munitions. The LAPD said Monday that 575 people have been arrested since the demonstrations started.
President Trump has vowed to carry out the biggest mass deportation operation in U.S. history and called on federal agents to detain and deport undocumented people in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
The additional costs from the protests will strain L.A.’s already-shaky finances. The city is spending more on legal payouts and labor costs, but bringing in less tax revenues due to a variety of reasons, including a drop in tourism.
During protests in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, the LAPD spent $40 million on overtime. Also, police actions related to those protests cost the city at least $11.9 million in settlements and jury awards, according to The Times’ analysis in May.
On Monday, a group representing reporters sued the LAPD in federal court over the department’s treatment of media, arguing constitutional and state rights are being violated.
The suit cites multiple instances of officers firing foam projectiles at members of the media and otherwise flouting state laws that restrict the use of so-called less-lethal weapons in crowd control situations and protect journalists covering the unrest.
Times staff writer Libor Jany contributed reporting.
SACRAMENTO — In response to immigration raids by masked federal officers in Los Angeles and across the nation, two California lawmakers on Monday proposed a new state law to ban members of law enforcement from concealing their faces while on the job.
The bill would make it a misdemeanor for local, state and federal law enforcement officers to cover their faces with some exceptions, and also encourage them to wear a form of identification on their uniform.
“We’re really at risk of having, effectively, secret police in this country,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), co-author of the bill.
During a news conference in San Francisco announcing the legislation, Wiener criticized the Trump administration for targeting illegal immigrants without criminal records and alleged that current tactics allow ICE agents to make themselves appear to be local police in some cases. Under the proposal, law enforcement officials would be exempted from the mask ban if they serve on a SWAT team or if a mask is necessary for medical or health reasons, including to prevent smoke inhalation.
Recent immigration enforcement sweeps have left communities throughout California and the country frightened and unsure if federal officials are legitimate because of their shrouded faces and lack of identification, said Sen. Jesse Arreguín (D-Berkeley), co-author and chair of the Senate Public Safety Committee. He said the bill would provide transparency and discourage impersonators.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agencies, called the proposal “despicable,” saying it posed a threat to law enforcement officers by identifying them and subjecting them to retaliation.
“We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law. The men and women of ICE put their lives on the line every day to arrest violent criminal illegal aliens to protect and defend the lives of American citizens,” the department said in a post on the social media site X. “Make no mistake, this type of rhetoric is contributing to the surge in assaults of ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE.”
Wiener, however, said members of law enforcement are public servants and people need to see their faces so they can be held accountable for their actions.
He likened ICE officials to Stormtroopers, fictional helmeted soldiers from the movie “Star Wars,” and said masking the faces and concealing the names of law enforcement officials shields them from public scrutiny and from the communities they are meant to serve.
“We don’t want to move towards that kind of model where law enforcement becomes almost like an occupying army, disconnected from the community, and that’s what it is when you start hiding their face, hiding the identity,” he said.
California law already bans wearing a mask or other disguise, including a fake mustache, wig or beard to hide your identity and evade law enforcement while committing a crime, but there are no current laws about what police can or cannot wear. It was unclear whether the proposal would affect undercover or plainclothes police officers, or if a state law could apply to federal police forces.
The proposal is being offered as an amendment to Senate Bill 627, a housing measure that would essentially be eviscerated.
The bill also includes an intent clause, which is not legally binding, that says the legislature would work to require all law enforcement within the state to display their name on their uniforms.
“Finding a balance between public transparency and trust, along with officer safety, is critical when we’re talking about creating state laws that change the rules for officers that are being placed into conflict situations,” Jason Salazar, president of the California Police Chief Assn., said in a statement. “We have been in touch with Senator Wiener, who reached out ahead of the introduction of this bill, and we will engage in discussions with him and his office to share our concerns so that we ensure the safety of law enforcement first responders is a top priority.”
Wiener said the new measure would make it clearer who is a police officer and who is not, which would be essential in the wake of the politically motivated killing of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted killing of another politician and his wife. The suspect, Vance Boelter, is accused of knocking on the doors of the lawmakers in the middle of the night and announcing himself as a police officer to get them to open up, authorities said.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), wrote in an X post that the bill would endanger ICE agents.
“Do not forget — targeted attacks on ICE agents are up 413%. This is yet another shameless attempt to put them in harm’s way,” she said.
A coalition of press rights organizations is seeking a court order to stop the “continuing abuse” of journalists by the Los Angeles Police Department during protests over President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The federal lawsuit, filed Monday by the Los Angeles Press Club and investigative reporting network Status Coup, seeks to “force the LAPD to respect the constitutional and statutory rights of journalists engaged in reporting on these protests and inevitable protests to come.”
The suit cites multiple instances of officers firing foam projectiles at members of the media and otherwise flouting state laws that restrict the use of so-called less-lethal weapons in crowd control situations and protect journalists covering the unrest. Those measures were passed in the wake of the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis when journalists were detained and injured by the LAPD while covering the unrest.
The recent suit filed in the Central District of California describes journalists being shot with less-lethal police rounds, tear-gassed and detained without cause.
Carol Sobel, a longtime civil rights attorney who represents the plaintiffs, said LAPD officers have also been blocking journalists from areas where they had a right to be, in violation of the department’s own rules and Senate Bill 98, a state law that prohibits law enforcement from interfering with or obstructing journalists from covering such events.
“You have people holding up their press credentials saying, ‘I’m press,’ and they still got shot,” she said. “The Legislature spent all this time limiting how use of force can occur in a crowd control situation, and they just all ignored it.
Apart from journalists, scores of protesters allege LAPD projectiles left them with severe bruises, lacerations and serious injuries.
The Police Department said Monday that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation. A message for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which represents the LAPD in most civil suits, went unreturned.
Sobel filed a similar action in the wake of the LAPD’s response to the 2020 protests on behalf of Black Lives Matter-L.A. and others who contended that LAPD caused scores of injuries by firing hard-foam projectiles. A federal judge later issued an injunction restricting the department’s use of 40-millimeter and 37-millimeter hard-foam projectile launchers to officers who are properly trained to use them.
Under the restrictions, which remain in place with the court case pending, police can target individuals with 40-millimeter rounds “only when the officer reasonably believes that a suspect is violently resisting arrest or poses an immediate threat of violence or physical harm.” Officers are also barred from targeting people in the head, torso and groin areas.
The city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements and jury awards related to lawsuits brought by reporters and demonstrators in 2020 who were injured.
On Monday, the LAPD announced an internal review of a June 10 incident in which a 30-year-old man suffered a broken finger during a confrontation with officers of the vaunted Metropolitan Division.
According to the department’s account, the Metro officers had been deployed to contend with an “unruly” crowd on Alameda Street and Temple Street and said that Daniel Robert Bill and several other demonstrators refused to leave the area and instead challenged officers. During a confrontation, several officers swung their batons and fired less-lethal munitions at Bill “to no effect” and then “used a team takedown” before arresting him.
After his arrest, Bill was taken to an area hospital, where he underwent surgery to repair a broken finger on his left hand.
The department’s Force Investigation Division will review the case, as it does all incidents in which someone is seriously injured or killed while in policy custody.
Department leaders have in the past argued that officers need less-lethal weapons to restore order, particularly when faced with large crowds with individuals throwing bottles and rocks.
The department’s handling of the recent protests is expected to be addressed at Tuesday’s meeting of the LAPD Police Commission, the department’s civilian policy-making body. The body reviewed complaints of excessive force against the department stemming from the 2020 protests but has not staked a public position about the continued use of the 40-millimeter projectiles and other crowd control measures.
NEW YORK — All 17 experts recently dismissed from a government vaccine advisory panel published an essay Monday decrying “destabilizing decisions” made by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that could lead to more preventable disease spread.
Kennedy last week announced he would “retire” the entire panel that guides U.S. vaccine policy. He also quietly removed Dr. Melinda Wharton — the veteran Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who coordinated the committee’s meetings.
Two days later, he named eight new people to the influential panel. The list included a scientist who criticized COVID-19 vaccines, a leading critic of pandemic-era lockdowns and someone who worked with a group widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation.
“We are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of U.S. immunization policy, impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put U.S. families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses,” the 17 panelists wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
The new committee is scheduled to meet next week. The agenda for that meeting has not yet been posted, but a recent federal notice said votes are expected on vaccinations against flu, COVID-19, HPV, RSV and meningococcal bacteria.
In addition to Wharton’s removal, CDC immunization staff have been cut and agency experts who gather or present data to committee members have resigned.
One, Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, resigned after 12 years at CDC, disclosing her decision early this month in a note to members of a COVID-19 vaccines work group. Her decision came after Kennedy decided — without consulting the vaccine advisers — to pull back COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women.
“My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role,” she wrote in a message viewed by the Associated Press.
Those CDC personnel losses will make it hard for a group of new outside advisers to quickly come up to speed and make fact-based decisions about which vaccines to recommend to the public, the former committee members said.
“The termination of all members and its leadership in a single action undermines the committee’s capacity to operate effectively and efficiently, aside from raising questions about competence,” they wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to the JAMA commentary, but instead pointed to Kennedy’s previous comments on the committee.
Kennedy, a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official, has accused the committee of being too closely aligned with vaccine manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the CDC director on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used. CDC directors almost always approve those recommendations, which are widely heeded by doctors and guide vaccination programs.
ACIP policies require members to state past collaborations with vaccine companies and to recuse themselves from votes in which they had a conflict of interest, but Kennedy has dismissed those safeguards as weak.
As a community and cultural center of Boyle Heights, Mariachi Plaza would be an obvious place for families to gather on Father’s Day.
But the normally bustling plaza was all but deserted when Mayor Karen Bass visited Sunday morning.
More than a week after President Trump’s immigration raids first instilled terror in Los Angeles communities, the federal sweeps have had a profound chilling effect in the overwhelmingly Latino, working-class neighborhood just east of downtown.
“Mariachi Plaza was completely empty. There was not a soul there,” Bass recalled a few hours later. “One restaurant, there were a handful of people. The other restaurant, there was literally nobody there.”
Bass visited a number of small businesses in Boyle Heights with Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles), including Casa Fina, Distrito Catorce, Yeya’s and Birrieria De Don Boni, as well as the Estrada Courts public housing project, where Bass and Gonzalez both said residents were reluctant to come outside of their homes for a Father’s Day celebration.
“It’s the uncertainty that continues that has an absolute economic impact. But it is pretty profound to walk up and down the streets and to see the empty streets, it reminded me of COVID,” Bass told The Times on Sunday afternoon.
Bass said restaurant operators in Boyle Heights told her current circumstances were actually worse than what they had faced during COVID-19, because unlike during the pandemic, there had been no ensuing bump in to-go orders. She hypothesized that the issue was compounded by the fact that many people were not going in to work, meaning they didn’t have disposable income to eat out.
“They said people aren’t ordering, and people probably aren’t ordering because they’re not working,” Bass said.
Gonzalez said the proprietor of one of the restaurants they visited was crying.
“He said, ‘It’s so empty. I’ve never seen it like this, and I don’t know how we can survive this,’ ” Gonzalez recalled.
Asked about his message to Trump, Gonzalez spoke about the centrality of immigrants to California’s economy.
“For somebody who’s supposed to be business oriented, he sure is allowing local businesses to sink and have the effect that these raids are having,” Gonzalez said.
Entire sectors of the city’s economy cannot function without immigrant labor, Bass said, citing the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles, where raids have instilled acute fears and muffled business.
Bass also said she worried about how the disquiet would affect rebuilding in the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades, if a significant quotient of the immigrant-heavy construction workforce is scared to show up to job sites.
In a post on X, she urged Angelenos to visit small businesses like those in Boyle Heights, writing, “Let’s show up, support them and send a message: LA stands with you.”
The aftereffects of the ensuing mass protests have also pummeled restaurants and bars in the downtown area, with widespread vandalism in the Civic Center and Little Tokyo areas.
WASHINGTON — President Trump has fired a Democratic commissioner for the federal agency that oversees nuclear safety as he continues to assert more control over independent regulatory agencies.
Christopher Hanson, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a statement Monday that Trump terminated his position as NRC commissioner without cause, “contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees.”
The firing of Hanson comes as Trump seeks to take authority away from the independent safety agency, which has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades. Trump signed executive orders in May intended to quadruple domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years, a goal experts say the United States is highly unlikely to reach. To speed up the development of nuclear power, the orders grant the U.S. Energy secretary authority to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement that “all organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction” and that the Republican president reserves the right to “remove employees within his own executive branch.”
Trump fired two of the three Democratic commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal agency responsible for enforcing federal laws that prohibit discrimination in the workplace. In a similar move, two National Labor Relations Board members were fired. Willie Phillips, a Democratic member and former chairman of the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stepped down in April, telling reporters that the White House asked him to do so.
Trump also signed an executive order to give the White House direct control of independent federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.
New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, called Hanson’s firing illegal and another attempt by Trump to undermine independent agencies and consolidate power in the White House.
“Congress explicitly created the NRC as an independent agency, insulated from the whims of any president, knowing that was the only way to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the American people,” Pallone said in a statement.
Senate Democrats also said Trump overstepped his authority. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Patty Murray and Martin Heinrich said in a joint statement that “Trump’s lawlessness” threatens the commission’s ability to ensure that nuclear power plants and nuclear materials are safe and free from political interference.
Hanson was nominated to the commission by Trump in 2020. He was appointed chair by former President Biden in January 2021 and served in that role until Trump’s inauguration to a second term as president. Trump selected David Wright, a Republican member of the commission, to serve as chair. Hanson continued to serve on the NRC as a commissioner. His term was due to end in 2029.
Wright’s term expires on June 30. The White House has not said if he will be reappointed.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Hanson a dedicated public servant and a strong supporter of the NRC’s public health and safety mission. Firing Hanson is Trump’s “latest outrageous move to undermine the independence and integrity” of the agency that protects the U.S. homeland from nuclear power plant disasters, Lyman said in a statement.
The NRC confirmed Hanson’s service ended on Friday, bringing the panel to two Democrats and two Republicans. The commission has functioned in the past with fewer than the required five commissioners and will continue to do so, the statement said.
McDermott and Daly write for the Associated Press. McDermott reported from Providence, R.I.
AUSTIN, Texas — Juneteenth celebrations have been scaled back this year due to funding shortfalls as companies and municipalities across the country reconsider their support for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Canceled federal grants and businesses moving away from so-called brand activism have hit the bottom line of parades and other events heading into Thursday’s federal holiday, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. The shrinking financial support coincides with many companies severing ties with LGBTQ+ celebrations for Pride this year and President Trump’s efforts to squash DEI programs throughout the federal government.
In Denver, for example, more than a dozen companies backed out of supporting the Juneteenth Music Festival, which is one of the city’s biggest celebrations of the holiday, according to Norman Harris, executive director of JMF Corporation, which puts on the event.
“There were quite a few sponsors who pulled back their investments or let us know they couldn’t or wouldn’t be in a position to support this year,” said Harris, who has overseen the event for more than a decade.
The festival, which takes place in the historically Black Five Points neighborhood, has been scaled back to one day instead of two because of the budget shortfall. It has only been able to stay afloat thanks to donations from individuals and foundations.
“Thankfully, there was a wide range of support that came when we made the announcement that the celebration is in jeopardy,” Harris said.
Juneteenth celebrates the day the last enslaved people in Texas were told they were free on June 19, 1865, two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The day has been celebrated by Black Americans for generations, including in Harris’ family, but became more widely celebrated after becoming a federal holiday in 2021.
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, many companies pursued efforts to make their branding more inclusive, but it has slowed down over the last few years after some received blowback from conservatives and because many companies didn’t see it as an important part of their revenue stream, said Dionne Nickerson, a marketing professor at Emory University.
Some companies can no longer afford to support Juneteenth celebrations because they just don’t have the money given the economic uncertainty, according to Sonya Grier, a marketing professor at American University.
“It’s a whole confluence of issues,” Grier said.
Rollback of local support
Many state and local governments hold or help fund celebrations, but some decided not to this year.
The governor’s office in West Virginia stated that the state won’t be hosting any Juneteenth events this year for the first time since 2017 due to a budget deficit. Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey last month signed a bill to end all diversity programs.
“Due to the continued fiscal challenges facing West Virginia, state government will not be sponsoring any formal activities,” Deputy Press Secretary Drew Galang said in an email.
City Council members in Scottsdale, Ariz., dissolved their DEI office in February, leading to the cancellation of the city’s annual Juneteenth festival.
Event organizers in Colorado Springs, Colo., had to move locations due to fewer sponsors and cuts in city funding, said Jennifer Smith, a planner for the Southern Colorado Juneteenth Festival.
Around five companies sponsored the event this year, compared to dozens in years prior, Smith said.
“They have said their budgets have been cut because of DEI,” and that they can no longer afford it, she said.
Some groups have also mentioned safety concerns. Planners in Bend, Ore., cited “an increasingly volatile political climate” in a statement about why they canceled this year’s celebration.
Slashes in federal funding
Many local organizations have also had their budgets slashed after the National Endowment for the Arts pulled funding for numerous grants in May.
The Cooper Family Foundation throws one of the largest Juneteenth celebrations in San Diego each year. It was one of dozens of groups told by the NEA in May that its $25,000 grant was being rescinded.
The email said the event no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities, said Maliya Jones, who works for the foundation.
The grant money went toward paying for arts and dance performers. The event will still take place this year, but members of the Cooper family will have to divide up covering the costs, said Marla Cooper, who leads the foundation.
“That’s $25,000 we have to figure out how we’re going to pay for,” Cooper said.
“We will always have Juneteenth,” she said. “And we will work it out.”
KANANASKIS, Canada — The Group of 7 summit began in Canada on Monday with world leaders scrambling to contain the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program, with President Trump reiterating his call for the two nations to start negotiating.
“They should talk, and they should talk immediately,” he told reporters.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said all G-7 leaders agree they “have to find a way to de-escalate the situation” in the Middle East because the Israel-Iran conflict risks inflaming the “tinderbox” of Gaza and hurting the global economy.
Starmer said he’d spoken to Trump about the issue, adding “the risk of the conflict escalating is obvious, I think, and the implications, not just for the region but globally, are really immense, so the focus has to be on de-escalation.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told reporters Monday ahead of the summit beginning in the Canadian Rocky Mountains that Germany is planning to draw up a final communique proposal on the Israel-Iran conflict that will stress that “Iran must under no circumstances be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons-capable material.”
But as Trump met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he also stressed it was a mistake to remove Russia from the organization in 2014 and doing so had destabilized the world. He also suggested it would be a good idea to add China to the G-7.
The U.S. president also seemed to put a greater priority on his planned emphasis on addressing his grievances with other nations’ trade policies.
“Our primary focus will be trade,” Trump said of his talks with Carney.
This year’s G-7 summit is full of combustible tensions, and it’s unclear how the gathered world leaders can work together to resolve them. Trump already has hit several dozen nations with severe tariffs that risk a global economic slowdown. There is little progress on settling the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and now a new conflict between Israel and Iran has arisen.
Add to all of that the problems of climate change, immigration, drug trafficking, new technologies such as artificial intelligence and China’s continued manufacturing superiority and chokehold on key supply chains.
“We’re gathering at one of those turning points in history,” Carney said. “The world’s more divided and dangerous.”
But as the news media were escorted from the opening session, Carney could be heard as he turned to Trump and referenced how his remarks about the Middle East, Russia and China had already drawn attention to the summit.
“Mr. President, I think you’ve answered a lot of questions already,” Carney said.
Trump wants to focus on trade, though he may have to balance those issues with the broader need by the G-7 countries — which also include France, Italy and Japan — to project a united front to calm down a world increasingly engulfed in chaos.
Asked if he planned to announce any trade agreements at the G-7 as he left the White House on Sunday, Trump said: “We have our trade deals. All we have to do is send a letter, ‘This is what you’re going to have to pay.’ But I think we’ll have a few, few new trade deals.”
Also at stake might be the survival of the G-7 itself when the Trump administration has sent mixed signals about whether the president will attend the November Group of 20 summit in South Africa.
The German, U.K., Japanese and Italian governments have each signaled a belief that a friendly relationship with Trump this year can help to keep any public drama at a minimum, after the U.S. president in 2018 opposed a joint communique when the G-7 summit was last held in Canada.
Going into the summit, there was no plan for a joint statement this year, a sign that the Trump administration sees no need to build a shared consensus with fellow democracies if it views such a statement as contrary to its goals of new tariffs, more fossil fuel production and a Europe that is less dependent on the U.S. military.
“The Trump administration almost certainly believes that no deal is better than a bad deal,” said Caitlin Welsh, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank who was part of Trump’s team for the G-7 in Trump’s first term.
The White House has stayed decidedly mum about its goals for the G-7, which originated as a 1973 finance ministers’ meeting to address the oil crisis and evolved into a yearly summit meant to foster personal relationships among world leaders and address global problems.
The G-7 briefly expanded to the G-8 with Russia as a member, only for Russia to be expelled in 2014 after annexing Crimea and taking a foothold in Ukraine that preceded its aggressive 2022 invasion of that nation.
Trump will have a series of bilateral meetings during the summit with other world leaders while in Canada. Beyond Carney, he’s also expected to have bilateral meetings or pull-aside conversations with Starmer, Merz, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ahead of his meeting with Trump, Zelensky said one of the topics for discussion will be a “defense package” that Ukraine is ready to purchase from the U.S. as part of the ongoing war with Russia.
The U.S. president has imposed 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, all of which have disproportionately hit Japan. Trump is also charging a 10% tax on imports from most countries, though he could raise rates on July 9, after the 90-day negotiating period set by him would expire.
The United Kingdom reached a trade framework with the U.S. that included quotas to protect against some tariffs, but the 10% baseline would remain as the Trump administration is banking on tariff revenues to help cover the cost of its income tax cuts.
Canada and Mexico face separate tariffs of as much as 25% that Trump put into place under the auspices of stopping fentanyl smuggling, through some products are still protected under the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement signed during Trump’s first term.
Merz said of trade talks that “there will be no solution at this summit, but we could perhaps come closer to a solution in small steps.”
The Trump administration has insisted that its broad tariffs will produce trade agreements that box out China, though it’s unclear how antagonizing trade partners would make them want to strengthen their reliance on the U.S. Carney has been outspoken in saying Canada can no longer look to the U.S. as an enduring friend.
That might leave Trump with the awkward task of wanting to keep his tariffs in place while also trying to convince other countries that they’re better off siding with the U.S. than China.
Boak, Gillies and Lawless write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Calgary, Canada. AP writer Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report.
It took Crystal Strickland years to qualify for Medicaid, which she needs for a heart condition.
Strickland, who’s unable to work due to her condition, chafed when she learned that the U.S. House has passed a bill that would impose a work requirement for many able-bodied people to get health insurance coverage through the low-cost, government-run plan for lower-income people.
“What sense does that make?” she asked. “What about the people who can’t work but can’t afford a doctor?”
The measure is part of the version of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful” bill that cleared the House last month and is now up for consideration in the Senate. Trump is seeking to have it passed by July 4.
The bill as it stands would cut taxes and government spending — and also upend portions of the nation’s social safety net.
For proponents, the ideas behind the work requirement are simple: Crack down on fraud and stand on the principle that taxpayer-provided health coverage isn’t for those who can work but aren’t. The measure includes exceptions for those who are under 19 or over 64, those with disabilities, pregnant women, main caregivers for young children, people recently released from prisons or jails — or during certain emergencies. It would apply only to adults who receive Medicaid through expansions that 40 states chose to undertake as part of the 2010 health insurance overhaul.
Many details of how the changes would work would be developed later, leaving several unknowns and causing anxiety among recipients who worry that their illnesses might not be enough to exempt them.
Advocates and sick and disabled enrollees worry — based largely on their past experience — that even those who might be exempted from work requirements under the law could still lose benefits because of increased or hard-to-meet paperwork mandates.
Benefits can be difficult to navigate even without a work requirement
Strickland, a 44-year-old former server, cook and construction worker who lives in Fairmont, North Carolina, said she could not afford to go to a doctor for years because she wasn’t able to work. She finally received a letter this month saying she would receive Medicaid coverage, she said.
“It’s already kind of tough to get on Medicaid,” said Strickland, who has lived in a tent and times and subsisted on nonperishable food thrown out by stores. “If they make it harder to get on, they’re not going to be helping.”
Steve Furman is concerned that his 43-year-old son, who has autism, could lose coverage.
The bill the House adopted would require Medicaid enrollees to show that they work, volunteer or go to school at least 80 hours a month to continue to qualify.
A disability exception would likely apply to Furman’s son, who previously worked in an eyeglasses plant in Illinois for 15 years despite behavioral issues that may have gotten him fired elsewhere.
Furman said government bureaucracies are already impossible for his son to navigate, even with help.
It took him a year to help get his son onto Arizona’s Medicaid system when they moved to Scottsdale in 2022, and it took time to set up food benefits. But he and his wife, who are retired, say they don’t have the means to support his son fully.
“Should I expect the government to take care of him?” he asked. “I don’t know, but I do expect them to have humanity.”
There’s broad reliance on Medicaid for health coverage
About 71 million adults are enrolled in Medicaid now. And most of them — around 92% — are working, caregiving, attending school or disabled. Earlier estimates of the budget bill from the Congressional Budget Office found that about 5 million people stand to lose coverage.
A KFF tracking poll conducted in May found that the enrollees come from across the political spectrum. About one-fourth are Republicans; roughly one-third are Democrats.
The poll found that about 7 in 10 adults are worried that federal spending reductions on Medicaid will lead to more uninsured people and would strain health care providers in their area. About half said they were worried reductions would hurt the ability of them or their family to get and pay for health care.
Amaya Diana, an analyst at KFF, points to work requirements launched in Arkansas and Georgia as keeping people off Medicaid without increasing employment.
Amber Bellazaire, a policy analyst at the Michigan League for Public Policy, said the process to verify that Medicaid enrollees meet the work requirements could be a key reason people would be denied or lose eligibility.
“Massive coverage losses just due to an administrative burden rather than ineligibility is a significant concern,” she said.
One KFF poll respondent, Virginia Bell, a retiree in Starkville, Mississippi, said she’s seen sick family members struggle to get onto Medicaid, including one who died recently without coverage.
She said she doesn’t mind a work requirement for those who are able — but worries about how that would be sorted out. “It’s kind of hard to determine who needs it and who doesn’t need it,” she said.
Some people don’t if they might lose coverage with a work requirement
Lexy Mealing, 54 of Westbury, New York, who was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 and underwent a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgeries, said she fears she may lose the medical benefits she has come to rely on, though people with “serious or complex” medical conditions could be granted exceptions.
She now works about 15 hours a week in “gig” jobs but isn’t sure she can work more as she deals with the physical and mental toll of the cancer.
Mealing, who used to work as a medical receptionist in a pediatric neurosurgeon’s office before her diagnosis and now volunteers for the American Cancer Society, went on Medicaid after going on short-term disability.
“I can’t even imagine going through treatments right now and surgeries and the uncertainty of just not being able to work and not have health insurance,” she said.
Felix White, who has Type I diabetes, first qualified for Medicaid after losing his job as a computer programmer several years ago.
The Oreland, Pennsylvania, man has been looking for a job, but finds that at 61, it’s hard to land one.
Medicaid, meanwhile, pays for a continuous glucose monitor and insulin and funded foot surgeries last year, including one that kept him in the hospital for 12 days.
“There’s no way I could have afforded that,” he said. “I would have lost my foot and probably died.”
Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
MADISON, Wis. — A Wisconsin dairy farmer alleged in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that the Trump administration is illegally denying financial assistance to white farmers by continuing programs that favor minorities.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal court in Wisconsin on behalf of a white dairy farmer, Adam Faust.
Faust was among several farmers who successfully sued the Biden administration in 2021 for race discrimination in the USDA’s Farmer Loan Forgiveness Plan.
The new lawsuit alleges the government has continued to implement diversity, equity and inclusion programs that were instituted under former President Biden. The Wisconsin Institute wrote to the USDA in April warning of legal action, and six Republican Wisconsin congressmen called on the USDA to investigate and end the programs.
“The USDA should honor the President’s promise to the American people to end racial discrimination in the federal government,” Faust said in a written statement. “After being ignored by a federal agency that’s meant to support agriculture, I hope my lawsuit brings answers, accountability, and results from USDA.”
Trump administration spokesperson Anna Kelly did not immediately respond to an email Monday seeking comment.
The lawsuit contends that Faust is one of 2 million white male American farmers who are subject to discriminatory race-based policies at the USDA.
The lawsuit names three USDA programs and policies it says put white men at a disadvantage and violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment by discriminating based on race and sex.
Faust participates in one program designed to offset the gap between milk prices and the cost of feed, but the lawsuit alleges he is charged a $100 administrative fee that minority and female farmers do not have to pay.
Faust also participates in a USDA program that guarantees 90% of the value of loans to white farmers, but 95% to women and racial minorities. That puts Faust at a disadvantage, the lawsuit alleges.
Faust has also begun work on a new manure storage system that could qualify for reimbursement under a USDA environmental conservation program, but 75% of his costs are eligible while 90% of the costs of minority farmers qualify, the lawsuit contends.
A federal court judge ruled in a similar 2021 case that granting loan forgiveness only to “socially disadvantaged farmers” amounts to unconstitutional race discrimination. The Biden administration suspended the program and Congress repealed it in 2022.
The Wisconsin Institute has filed dozens of such lawsuits in 25 states attacking DEI programs in government. In its April letter to the USDA, the law firm that has a long history of representing Republicans said it didn’t want to sue “but there is no excuse for this continued discrimination.”
Trump has been aggressive in trying to end the government’s DEI efforts to fulfill a campaign promise and bring about a profound cultural shift across the U.S. from promoting diversity to an exclusive focus on merit.
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Leavenworth, Kan., occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a shorthand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”
Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally.
The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.
ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville area and another giant firm, the Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.
That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as a “hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.
To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for “immigration enforcement support teams” to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints or telling ICE if someone is a risk to community safety.
Just last week, Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants — and earn $66 million in annual revenue.
“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders.
A tax-cutting and budget reconciliation measure approved last month by the House includes $45 billion over four years for immigrant detention, a threefold spending increase. The Senate is now considering that legislation.
Declaring an emergency to expedite contracts
When Trump started his second term in January, CoreCivic and Geo had around 20 idle facilities, partly because of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the Trump administration wants to more than double the existing 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and — if private prison executives’ predictions are accurate — possibly to more than 150,000.
ICE declared a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without “Full and Open Competition.”
Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE’s document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Mich.
The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn’t been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical.
Charles Tiefer, a contract expert and professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, said letter contracts normally are reserved for minor matters, not the big changes he sees ICE making to previous agreements.
“I think that a letter contract is a pathetic way to make big important contracts,” he said.
A Kansas prison town becomes a priority
CoreCivic’s Leavenworth facility quickly became a priority for ICE and the company because of its central location. Leavenworth, with 37,000 residents, is only 10 miles to the west of the Kansas City International Airport. The facility would hold men and women and is within ICE’s area of operations for Chicago, 420 miles to the northeast.
“That would mean that people targeted in the Chicago area and in Illinois would end up going to this facility down in Kansas,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Prisons have long been an important part of Leavenworth’s economy, employing hundreds of workers to guard prisoners held in two military facilities, the nation’s first federal penitentiary, a Kansas correctional facility and a county jail within six miles of city hall.
Resistance from Trump country
The Leavenworth area’s politics might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president.
But skeptical city officials argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn’t because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge issued an order requiring it earlier this month.
An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service.
In late 2021, CoreCivic stopped housing pretrial detainees in its Leavenworth facility after then-President Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. In the months before the closure, the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were “false and defamatory.”
Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report from 2017.
“It was just mayhem,” recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016-20. He said repeated assaults sent him to the emergency room three times, including once after a blow to the head that required 14 staples.
The critics have included a federal judge
When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: “The only way I could describe it frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole.”
The city’s lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force’s ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes.
The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. One unit for inmates had a painting on one wall featuring a covered wagon.
During the tour, when asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees’ experiences and said the company officials “do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.”
ICE moves quickly across the U.S.
Besides CoreCivic’s Leavenworth prison, other once-shuttered facilities could come online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, to help Trump fulfill his deportation plans.
ICE wants to reopen existing facilities because it’s faster than building new ones, said Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director for the Detention Watch Network, which has organized nationwide protests against ICE detention.
Counties often lease out jail space for immigrant detention, but ICE said some jurisdictions have passed ordinances barring that.
ICE has used contract modifications to reopen shuttered lockups like the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, N.J., and a 2,500-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, offering no explanations why new, competitively bid contracts weren’t sought.
The Newark facility, with its own history of problems, resumed intakes May 1, and disorder broke out at the facility Thursday night. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who previously was arrested there and accused of trespassing, cited reports of a possible uprising, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed four escapes.
The contract modification for Dilley, which was built to hold families and resumed operations in March, calls its units “neighborhoods” and gives them names like Brown Bear and Blue Butterfly.
The financial details for the Newark and Dilley contract modifications are blacked out in online copies, as they for more than 50 other agreements ICE has signed since Trump took office. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.
From idle prisons to a ‘gold rush’
Private prison executives are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in new ICE profits. Since Trump’s reelection in November, CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56% and Geo’s by 73%.
“It’s the gold rush,” Michael A. Hallett, a professor of criminal justice at the University of North Florida who studies private prisons. “All of a sudden, demand is spiraling. And when you’re the only provider that can meet demand, you can pretty much set your terms.”
Geo’s former lobbyist Pam Bondi is now the U.S. attorney general. It anticipates that all of its idle prisons will be activated this year, its executive chairman, George Zoley, told shareholders.
CoreCivic, which along with Geo donated millions of dollars to largely GOP candidates at all levels of government and national political groups, is equally optimistic. It began daily talks with the Trump administration immediately after the election in November, said Hininger.
CoreCivic officials said ICE’s letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing.
Tiefer, who served on an independent commission established to study government contracting for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said ICE is “placing a very dicey long-term bet” because of its past problems and said ICE is giving CoreCivic “the keys to the treasury” without competition.
But financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, “Great news.”
“Are you hiding any more of them on us?” he asked.
Hollingsworth and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. AP writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Morgan Lee, in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed to this report.
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SACRAMENTO — Sen. Alex Padilla had heard all he could stand from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. For good reason. She was sounding like a military dictator and brushing off California voters.
This is how the Trump administration intends to “Make America Great Again”?
The unprecedented act of disrespecting and roughing up a U.S. senator occurred at the Westwood federal building during a Noem news conference Thursday. Padilla, a Democrat, was standing behind reporters when the secretary said federal agents would continue to conduct immigration raids in Los Angeles indefinitely.
“[We’ll] continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city,” Noem said.
“We are not going away,” she emphasized. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.”
Definitely fighting words.
“Liberate” the city? That’s the sort of language used by dictators — fascist, Communist or any Third World despot.
“Socialist” leadership? A pejorative straight out of the right-wing playbook of political talking points.
Was Noem saying the Trump administration’s real goal is to overthrow Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass because of their “burdensome” regimes?
Perhaps the secretary has forgotten what she presumably was taught in civics class.
Noem talks without thinking
But Noem, 53, was governor of South Dakota. And before that she was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a state legislator. So she knows about the election process. And we can only conclude that, at her news conference, she was talking without thinking.
Because in America, the “liberators” are the voters. Not immigration agents, Cabinet secretaries or even the president.
California citizens reelected Newsom by a 59% landslide vote in 2022. The Democrat will be termed out of office next year — a policy set by voters, not by some federal administration.
Bass also was elected in 2022 by a margin of nearly 10 percentage points. If Angelenos want to liberate themselves from her, they’ll have the opportunity when she’s up for reelection next year.
Socialist is such a tired characterization of practically any policy the political right doesn’t like. You could tag lots of government spending with socialism — including Social Security and Medicare.
Anyway, Padilla listened to Noem’s dumb comments about liberating citizens from the governor and mayor, and, he said later in TV interviews, “it was just too much.”
He broke in with a shouted question.
OK, he shouldn’t have done that. There’s a protocol at formal news conferences. Only reporters ask questions. Certainly not visiting politicians. And questioners really shouldn’t interrupt the person at the lectern, although it happens.
This wasn’t a Senate committee hearing in which Padilla could ask anything he wanted — when it was his turn. He wasn’t “doing his job” at Noem’s event, as his Democratic colleagues later asserted. He was there as an observer. If he wanted to ask the secretary a question, this wasn’t the time or place.
Wrong but understandable
But his emotional reaction to Noem’s comments was totally understandable.
But he is passionate about the cause of immigrant rights and comprehensive reform that would offer a path to citizenship for undocumented people. It’s what inspired him to enter politics.
He was motivated by Latino activists’ losing fight in 1994 against Proposition 187, which would have denied most public services to immigrants living here illegally if it wasn’t tossed out by a judge.
Padilla, 52, is a proud L.A. native, the son of Mexican immigrants. His dad was a short-order cook, and his mom cleaned affluent people’s houses. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a mechanical engineering degree. But he caught the political bug and was elected to the L.A. City Council at age 26.
Later he was elected to the state Senate and as secretary of state. He ultimately became California’s first Latino U.S. senator.
On Thursday, the lawmaker was at the federal building to meet a general. He heard Noem was holding a news conference, asked to attend and was escorted in.
After he was forced to the ground by federal agents who considered him a security threat, Padilla declared repeatedly: “If that’s what they do to a United States senator with a question, imagine what they do to farmworkers, day laborers, cooks and the other nonviolent immigrants they are targeting in California and across the country.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung claimed Padilla acted like “a complete lunatic … by rushing toward Secretary Noem.” Noem said he “lunged” at her.
Wrong. A video recording disproved that.
Federal bodyguards contended Padilla didn’t identify himself. More bull. They just didn’t listen.
“Hands off! I am Sen. Alex Padilla,” he’s heard saying and repeating several times on the recording.
A federal agent turned to a Padilla staffer recording the sorry incident and said: “There’s no recording allowed out here, per FBI rights.”
Sorry. If it’s a right not to be recorded piling on a senator trying to exercise his rights, then it should be repealed.
The Trump administration did another stupid thing. Padilla came out a hero.
More than 30 million Californians across the state could see their electric bills go up to pay for the devastating Eaton fire, as officials scramble to shore up a state wildfire fund that could be wiped out by damage claims.
One early estimate places fire losses from the Eaton fire at $24 billion to $45 billion. If Southern California Edison equipment is found to have sparked the blaze on Jan. 7, as dozens of lawsuits allege, the damage claims could quickly exhaust the state’s $21-billion wildfire fund.
“Everyone is concerned about this,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford’s climate and energy policy program, who was involved in the fund’s creation. “If we need to put more money into the fund, where will it come from?”
The wildfire fund was created to shield the state’s three big utilities from bankruptcy in the event one was found liable for massive fire damages.
At a meeting last month, members of the state Catastrophe Response Council, which oversees the fund, were told that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders were being urged to extend a monthly surcharge on electric bills beyond its planned expiration in 2035. The fee, called the non-bypassable charge, adds roughly $3 a month to the average residential bill.
“They are asking the people of California to put more money into the fund,” said council member Paul Rosenstiel, a former investment banker and Newsom advisor, according to a transcript of the meeting. “Some of them are asking for an extension of the non-bypassable charge.”
The fee is paid by customers of the state’s three big for-profit utilities — Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.
Rosenstiel didn’t respond to a request for comment. At the meeting, he didn’t say who was lobbying the governor and lawmakers to extend the surcharge to ratepayers.
California utility executives have told their investors they have been talking to Newsom and legislative leaders about shoring up the fund. PG&E executives have said that they have asked that no new money come from utilities or their shareholders, which would likely leave electric customers to pay more.
“We continue to advocate that we don’t think there is a good case that investors should contribute to the fund,” Patti Poppe, PG&E’s chief executive, told Wall Street analysts in an April conference call.
A Siller Skycrane removes Southern California Edison’s tower 208 from a hillside in Altadena in May. The idle transmission tower, suspected of sparking the Eaton fire, will be examined at a lab.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of SoCal Edison’s parent company Edison International, was asked in a recent call with Wall Street analysts about the prospects for legislation that would bolster the wildfire fund.
“Clearly the governor’s office is engaged, as are our legislative leaders,” he said, adding that he was “certainly very encouraged by the level of diligence and engagement that I’m seeing.”
Asked to elaborate, Kathleen Dunleavy, a SoCal Edison spokeswoman, said the utility was not seeking a specific solution to questions of the fund’s durability.
“Our focus is to convey the importance of a strong wildfire fund,” she said. “We are not being prescriptive in how to achieve that.”
This year, the electric bill surcharge is expected to add $923 million to the fund, according to California Public Utility Commission records. If the fee was extended an additional 10 years, it would require customers of the three utilities to pay an additional $9 billion into the fund.
That doesn’t sit well with consumer advocates, who point out customers are already on the hook to contribute half of the $21-billion fund, while also paying higher bills to cover costs such as undergrounding and insulated electric wires.
Those measures are intended to make the electric system safer. Yet despite spending billions of dollars last year on wildfire mitigation, the number of fires sparked by its equipment jumped from 90 in 2023 to 178 last year.
Altadena homes lie in ruins after the Eaton fire.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“We think ratepayers have more than done enough,” said Mark Toney, the executive director of The Utility Reform Network, also known as TURN, a consumer group in San Francisco. “My position is that ratepayers should not pay another penny.”
Rosenstiel said at the May meeting that Newsom and legislative leaders were also being asked for the state’s general fund, which pays for schools, healthcare, prisons and other government operations, to contribute to the fund that protects utilities from wildfire claims.
The governor’s office declined to answer questions and said Newsom’s schedule didn’t allow time for an interview.
Newsom has a seat on the Catastrophe Response Council. He was a no-show at the group’s most recent meeting, sending a designee in his place.
Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), the chair of the Assembly’s Utilities and Energy Committee, acknowledged that lawmakers are concerned about the fund but said that they are still considering remedies.
“All options are on the table and are being considered and evaluated,” she said. “I have certainly not arrived at a solution yet.”
The cause of the Eaton fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes, businesses and other structures in Altadena, remains under investigation.
Edison CEO Pizarro has said a leading theory is that an unused, decades-old transmission line in Eaton Canyon was reenergized and sparked the blaze. Video captured flames erupting under an Edison transmission tower on the night of the fire.
If Edison’s equipment is found to have started the inferno, the state’s wildfire fund is expected to cover most of the cost of damages over $1 billion, under a 2019 law that was passed after PG&E went bankrupt from its liability for the deadly 2018 Camp fire.
The first $1 billion in damages from the Eaton fire would be covered by insurance that electric customers paid for.
The total cost of the fire in Altadena won’t be known until dozens of lawsuits make their way through the courts, which could take years.
A February study by UCLA economists Zhiyun Li and William Yu estimated that the fire caused $24 billion to $45 billion in property damages and capital losses, or the cost to replace what was destroyed.
Officials at the California Earthquake Authority, which manages the wildfire fund, told members of the Catastrophe Response Council in a May memorandum that the authority had “undertaken a significant project to evaluate alternatives for extending the durability of the Wildfire Fund in the face of potential large losses.”
To determine how to strengthen the fund, authority officials said they had rehired consultants who worked with Newsom’s office in 2019 to create the fund. The four firms will be paid $4.5 million, which the fund will cover, they said.
Among the consultants is Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking arm of Guggenheim Partners. Another subsidiary of Guggenheim Partners owns stock in the state’s three big utilities.
A recommendation to tap utility customers to replenish the fund, instead of the utility companies themselves, would likely have a big impact on company share prices.
“They [Guggenheim] certainly have a vested interest in the financial success of the utilities,” Toney said.
A spokesman for Guggenheim Securities said the stocks owned by the sister company didn’t pose a conflict, saying it “maintains a robust conflict management program, including strict information barriers between its investment banking department and the rest of Guggenheim Partners.”
Wara at Stanford said if Edison is found responsible for the Eaton fire, the wildfire fund would cover what insurers paid to victims and also pay for property damage not covered by insurance.
For example, families who lost their homes but received insurance payouts lower than the value of their property could seek the balance from Edison, he said. The utility would then seek to recover those sums from the wildfire fund.
The other deadly Los Angeles County inferno that ignited on Jan. 7, the Palisades fire, is not covered by the wildfire fund because Pacific Palisades is served by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, a municipal utility. The fund only covers blazes ignited by equipment owned by the state’s three biggest investor-owned utilities.
“They have their insurance and that’s it,” Wara said of Palisades fire victims.
At its meeting last month, the state Catastrophe Response Council was informed that insurance claims from the Eaton fire have totaled roughly $15 billion so far.
Adding to the damage bill is the potential cost of lawsuits. The possibility that the fund will pay out large amounts for Eaton fire damages has led to dozens of lawsuits being filed against Edison, even before the official cause has been determined.
Families of Altadena residents who died have filed wrongful-death suits. Edison is also facing lawsuits from L.A. County and other local governments for damages, including to public infrastructure such as water systems. Residents living outside the fire’s borders have filed suit, saying they were harmed by lead and other toxins in the smoke.
If a court found Edison negligent in maintaining its equipment, Wara said, victims could ask for compensation for pain and suffering, which would escalate the cost.
“Then the wildfire fund is out of money,” Wara said.
Pizarro has said that Edison is “committed to a thorough and transparent investigation.”
“Our hearts go out to everyone who has suffered losses,” he said.
The 2019 law that created the wildfire fund, known as AB 1054, greatly limited what Edison would have to pay for any of the claims. The company has told its investors that its maximum liability would be $3.9 billion.
The three utilities are asking legislators to ensure that state law continues to protect them and their shareholders, even if the $21-billion fund runs out of money.
Since the January fires, Edison, PG&E and Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, have each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby in Sacramento, according to required regulatory reports they filed for the first three months of the year.
A PG&E lobbyist reported taking Assemblywoman Petrie-Norris to a $267 dinner at Paragary’s, a bistro in Sacramento, on Feb. 3.
Petrie-Norris said the dinner was with Carla Peterman, a former state public utilities commissioner who is now a top PG&E executive. Petrie-Norris said they talked about a planned March hearing on electricity affordability and didn’t discuss the wildfire fund.
The next month, a PG&E lobbyist took Dee Dee Myers and Rohimah Moly, two of Newsom’s top staff members, to the upscale Prelude Kitchen & Bar, which is a short walk from the state Capitol.
Willie Rudman, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said the wildfire fund wasn’t discussed at the meal. Instead it “was a general meet and greet,” Rudman said, where the governor’s staff and PG&E executives “discussed opportunities for future collaboration.”
PG&E declined to answer questions. Lynsey Paulo, a PG&E spokesperson, said in a statement that the utility’s lobbying expenses were paid with shareholder funds and not money from customers.
“Like many individuals and businesses, PG&E participates in the political process on behalf of our customers and company,” Paulo said.
HOPLAND, Calif. — On a sun-kissed hillside in remote Northern California, I watched in awe as a crackling fire I’d helped ignite engulfed a hillside covered in tall, golden grass. Then the wind shifted slightly, and the dense gray smoke that had been billowing harmlessly up the slope turned and engulfed me.
Within seconds, I was blind and coughing. The most intense heat I’d ever felt seemed like it would sear the only exposed skin on my body: my face. As the flames inched closer, to within a few feet, I backed up until I was trapped against a tall fence with nowhere left to go.
Alone in that situation, I would have panicked. But I was with Len Nielson, chief of prescribed burns for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who stayed as cool as the other side of the pillow.
Like a pilot calmly instructing passengers to fasten their seat belts, Nielson suggested I wrap the fire-resistant “shroud” hanging from my bright yellow helmet around my face. Then he told me to take a few steps to the left.
And, just like that, we were out of the choking smoke and into the gentle morning sunlight. The temperature seemed to have dropped a few hundred degrees.
“It became uncomfortable, but it was tolerable, right?” Nielson asked with a reassuring grin. “Prescribed fires are a lot about trust.”
Dripping gasoline onto dry grass and deliberately setting it ablaze in the California countryside felt wildly reckless, especially for someone whose job involves interviewing survivors of the state’s all too frequent, catastrophic wildfires. But “good fire,” as Nielson called it, is essential for reducing the fuel available for bad fire, the kind that makes the headlines. The principle is as ancient as it is simple.
Before European settlers arrived in California and insisted on suppressing fire at every turn, the landscape burned regularly. Sometimes lightning ignited the flames; sometimes it was Indigenous people using fire as an obvious, and remarkably effective, tool to clear unwanted vegetation from their fields. Whatever the cause, it was common for much of the land in California to burn about once a decade.
“So it was relatively calm,” Nielson said, as the flames we’d set danced and swirled just a few feet behind him. “There wasn’t this big fuel load, so there wasn’t a chance of it becoming really intense.”
With that in mind, the state set an ambitious goal in the early 2020s to deliberately burn at least 400,000 acres of wilderness each year. The majority of that would have to be managed by the federal government, since agencies including the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service own nearly half of the state’s total land. And they own more than half of the state’s forests.
Cal Fire crew members set a prescribed burn near Hopland in Mendocino County.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
But California officials worry their ambitious goals are likely to be thwarted by deep cuts to those federal agencies by Elon Musk’s budget-whacking White House advisory team, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In recent months, the Forest Service has lost about 10% of its workforce to mass layoffs and firings. While firefighters were exempt from the DOGE-ordered staffing cuts, employees who handle the logistics and clear the myriad regulatory hurdles to secure permission for prescribed burns were not.
“To me, it’s an objective fact that these cuts mean California will be less safe from wildfire,” said Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources. He recalled how President Trump, in his first term, erroneously blamed the state’s wildfires on state officials who, Trump said, had failed to adequately “rake” the forests.
“Fifty-seven percent of our forests are owned and managed by the federal government,” Crowfoot said. If anybody failed, it was the president, he argued.
Larry Moore, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said the job cuts won’t affect the agency’s fire prevention efforts.
The Forest Service “continues to ensure it has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world,” Moore wrote in an email. The agency’s leaders are “committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”
Cal Fire crew members plot out the direction and scope of a prescribed burn in Mendocino County.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
Nevertheless, last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom added $72 million to the state’s forest management budget to bridge some of the gap expected to be left by federal agencies. But wildfire experts say that’s just a drop in the bucket. Doing prescribed burns safely takes a lot of boots on the ground and behind-the-scenes cajoling to make sure local residents, and regulators, are on board.
Because people get pretty testy when you accidentally smoke out an elementary school or old folks home, burn plans have to clear substantial hurdles presented by the California Environmental Quality Act and air quality regulators.
It took three years to get all the required permissions for the 50-acre Hopland burn in Mendocino County, where vineyard owners worried their world-class grapes might get a little too “smoky” for most wine lovers. When the big day finally arrived in early June, more than 60 firefighters showed up with multiple fire engines, at least one bulldozer and a firefighting helicopter on standby in case anything went wrong.
But this was no school project. A fire that began in the surrounding hills a couple of years ago threatened to trap people in the center, so the area being burned was along the only two roads that could be used to escape.
“We’re trying to create a buffer to get out, if we need to,” said John Bailey, the center’s director. “But we’re also trying to create a buffer to prevent wildfire from coming into the center.”
Smoke emanates from a prescribed burn in Mendocino County.(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
As the firefighters pulled on their protective yellow jackets and pants, and filled their drip torches with a mixture of diesel and gasoline, Nielson bent down and grabbed a fistful of the yellow grass. Running it through his fingers, he showed it to his deputies and they all shook their heads in disappointment — too moist.
Thick marine-layer clouds filled the sky at 7 a.m, keeping the relative humidity too high for a good scorching. In many years of covering wildfires, it was the first time I had seen firefighters looking bored and disappointed because nothing would burn.
By 8:45 a.m., the clouds cleared, the sun came out, and the grass in Nielson’s fist began to crinkle and snap. It was time to go to work.
The fire that would fill the sky and drift north that afternoon, blanketing the town of Ukiah with the familiar orange haze of fire season, began with a single firefighter walking along the edge of a cleared dirt path. As he moved, he made little dots of flame with his drip torch, drawing a line like a kid working the edges of a picture in a coloring book.
Additional firefighters worked the other edges of the field until it was encircled by strips of burned black grass. That way, no matter which direction the fire went when they set the center of the field alight, the flames would not — in most circumstances — escape the relatively small test patch.
On the uphill edge of the patch, along the top of a ridge, firefighters in full protective gear leaned against a wooden fence with their backs to the smoke and flames climbing the hill behind them. They’d all done this before, and they trusted those black strips of pre-burned grass to stop the fire before it got to them.
Their job was to keep their eyes on the downward slope on the other side of the ridge, which wasn’t supposed to burn. If they saw any embers drift past them into the “green” zone, they would immediately move to extinguish those flames.
Nielson and I were standing along the fence, too. In addition to the circle of pre-burned grass protecting us, we were on a dirt path about four feet wide. For someone with experience, that was an enormous buffer. I was the only one who even flinched when the smoke and flames came our way.
Afterward, when I confessed how panicked I had felt, Nielson said it happens to a lot of people the first time they are engulfed in smoke. It’s particularly dangerous in grass fires, because they move so fast. People can get completely disoriented, run the wrong way and “get cooked,” he said.
Grass fires are particularly dangerous, because they move so fast, says Cal Fire Staff Chief Len Nielson. People can get disoriented in the smoke, run the wrong way and “get cooked.”
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
But that test patch was just the warmup act. Nielson and his crew were checking to make sure the fire would behave the way they expected — pushed in the right direction by the gentle breeze and following the slope uphill.
“If you’re wondering where fire will go and how fast it will move, think of water,” he said. Water barely moves on flat ground, but it picks up speed when it goes downhill. If it gets into a steep section, where the walls close in like a funnel, it becomes a waterfall.
“Fire does the same thing, but it’s a gas, so it goes the opposite direction,” Nielson said.
With that and a few other pointers — we watched as three guys drew a line of fire around the base of a big, beautiful oak tree in the middle of the hillside to shield it from what was about to happen — Nielson led me to the bottom of the hill and handed me a drip torch.
Once everybody was in position, and all of the safety measures had been put in place, he wanted me to help set the “head fire,” a 6-foot wall of flame that would roar up the hill and consume dozens of acres in a matter of minutes.
“It’s gonna get a little warm right here,” Nielson said, “but it’s gonna get warm for only a second.”
As I leaned in with the torch and set the grass ablaze, the heat was overwhelming. While everyone else working the fire seemed nonchalant, I was tentative and terrified. My right hand stretched forward to make the dots and dashes where Nielson instructed, but my butt was sticking as far back into the road as it could get.
I asked Nielson how hot he thought the flames in front of us were. “I used to know that,” he said with a shrug. “I want to say it’s probably between 800 and 1,200 degrees.”
With the hillside still burning, I peeled off all of the protective gear, hopped in a car and followed the smoke north along the 101 Freeway. By lunchtime, Ukiah, a town of 16,000 that bills itself as the gateway to the redwoods, was shrouded in haze.
Everybody smelled the smoke, but prescribed burns are becoming so common in the region, nobody seemed alarmed.
“Do it!” said Judy Hyler, as she and two friends walked out of Stan’s Maple Cafe. A veteran of the rampant destruction of wildfires from years past, she didn’t hesitate when asked how she felt about the effort. “I would rather it be prescribed, controlled and managed than what we’ve seen before.”
A demonstrator was shot and killed at Salt Lake City’s “No Kings” protest when a man believed to be part of the event’s peacekeeping team fired at another man allegedly aiming a rifle at protesters, authorities said Sunday.
Police took the alleged rifleman, Arturo Gamboa, 24, into custody Saturday evening on a murder charge, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said at a Sunday news conference. The demonstrator, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, died at the hospital.
Detectives don’t yet know why Gamboa pulled out a rifle or ran from the peacekeepers, but they accused him of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death. The Associated Press did not immediately find an attorney listed for Gamboa or contact information for his family in public records.
Redd said a man dressed in a brightly colored vest fired three shots from a handgun at Gamboa, inflicting a relatively minor injury but fatally shooting Ah Loo.
The gunshots sent hundreds of protesters running, some hiding behind barriers and fleeing into parking garages and nearby businesses, police said in a statement. “That’s a gun. Come on, come on, get out,” someone can be heard saying in a video posted to social media that appears to show the events.
“No Kings” protests swept across the country Saturday, as millions rallied in cities nationwide against what demonstrators view as President Trump’s monarch-like, authoritarian excesses. Confrontations were largely isolated.
The Utah chapter of the 50501 Movement, which helped organize the protests, said in a statement on Instagram that they condemned the violence.
The Utah chapter did not immediately respond to AP questions about the peacekeeping team. It was unclear who hired the peacekeepers, whether they were volunteers or what their training was prior to the event. Redd said that the peacekeepers’ actions are also part of the investigation.
The shooter and another person in a vest allegedly saw Gamboa separate from the crowd of marchers in downtown Salt Lake City, move behind a wall and withdraw a rifle around 8 p.m., Redd said.
When the two men in vests confronted Gamboa with their handguns drawn, witnesses said Gamboa raised his rifle into a firing position and ran toward the crowd, said Redd.
That’s when one of the men dressed in the bright vests shot three rounds, hitting Gamboa and Ah Loo, said Redd. Gamboa, who police said didn’t have a criminal history, was wounded and treated before being booked into jail.
Police said they recovered an AR-15 style rifle, a gas mask and a backpack at the scene.
NEW YORK — A judge blocked New York Mayor Eric Adams from letting federal immigration authorities reopen an office at the city’s main jail, in part because of concerns Adams had invited them back in as part of a deal with the Trump administration to end his corruption case.
New York Judge Mary Rosado’s decision Friday is a setback for the Democratic mayor, who issued an executive order permitting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies to maintain office space at the Rikers Island jail complex. City lawmakers filed a lawsuit in April accusing Adams of entering into a “corrupt quid pro quo bargain” with the Trump administration in exchange for the U.S. Justice Department dropping criminal charges against him.
Rosado temporarily blocked the executive order in April. In granting a preliminary injunction, she said City Council members have “shown a likelihood of success in demonstrating, at minimum, the appearance of a quid pro quo whereby Mayor Adams publicly agreed to bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement … back to Rikers Island in exchange for dismissal of his criminal charges.”
Rosado cited a number of factors, including White House border advisor Tom Homan’s televised comments in February that if Adams did not come through, “I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
Adams has repeatedly denied making a deal with the administration over his criminal case. He has said he deputized his first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, to handle decision-making on the return of ICE to Rikers Island to make sure there was no appearance of any conflict of interest.
Rosado noted that Mastro reports to Adams and “cannot be considered impartial and free from Mayor Adams’ conflicts.”
Mastro said in a statement Friday that the administration was confident it would prevail in the case.
“Let’s be crystal clear: This executive order is about the criminal prosecution of violent transnational gangs committing crimes in our city. Our administration has never, and will never, do anything to jeopardize the safety of law-abiding immigrants, and this executive order ensures their safety as well,” Mastro said.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running in the Democratic primary for mayor, called the decision a victory for public safety.
“New Yorkers are counting on our city to protect their civil rights, and yet, Mayor Adams has attempted to betray this obligation by handing power over our city to Trump’s ICE because he is compromised,” she said in a statement.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels after the president expressed alarm about the impact of his aggressive enforcement, an official said Saturday.
The move marks a remarkable turnabout in Trump’s immigration crackdown since he took office in January. It follows weeks of increased enforcement since Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
Tatum King, an official with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, wrote regional leaders on Thursday to halt investigations of the agricultural industry, including meatpackers, restaurants and hotels, according to the New York Times.
A U.S. official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed to the Associated Press the contents of the directive. The Homeland Security Department did not dispute it.
“We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokesperson, said when asked to confirm the directive.
The shift suggests Trump’s promise of mass deportations has limits if it threatens industries that rely on workers in the country illegally. Trump posted on his Truth Social site Thursday that he disapproved of how farmers and hotels were being affected.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
While ICE’s presence in Los Angeles has captured public attention and prompted Trump to deploy the California National Guard and Marines, immigration authorities have also been a growing presence at farms and factories across the country.
Farm bureaus in California say raids at packinghouses and fields are threatening businesses that supply much of the country’s food. Dozens of farmworkers were arrested after uniformed agents fanned out on farms northwest of Los Angeles in Ventura County, which is known for growing strawberries, lemons and avocados. Others are skipping work as fear spreads.
ICE made more than 70 arrests Tuesday at a food packaging company in Omaha. The owner of Glenn Valley Foods said the company was enrolled in a voluntary program to verify workers’ immigration status and that it was operating at 30% capacity as it scrambled to find replacements.
Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, has repeatedly said ICE will send officers into communities and workplaces, particularly in “sanctuary” jurisdictions that limit the agency’s access to local jails.
Sanctuary cities “will get exactly what they don’t want, more officers in the communities and more officers at the work sites,” Homan said Monday on Fox News Channel. “We can’t arrest them in the jail, we’ll arrest them in the community. If we can’t arrest them in the community, we’re going to increase work-site enforcement operation. We’re going to flood the zone.”
Madhani and Spagat write for the Associated Press.
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Individual shootings and massacres
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
“You’re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. “It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
“We’re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,” Ware said.
One of Trump’s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you’re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.”
Ideologies not always aligned — or coherent
Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilistic ideations.”
But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day’s anti-Trump “No Kings” parades.
Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. “The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker’s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: “Where is Nancy?!”
No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath.
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. “All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,” she wrote.
After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls “sick” and “evil,” and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration’s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to “HIT” disrespectful protesters and warned of a “migrant invasion” of the city.
Dallek said Trump has been “both a victim and an accelerant” of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
“It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday issued a stark warning to Iran against retaliating on U.S. targets in the Middle East while also predicting Israel and Iran would “soon” make a deal to end their escalating conflict.
Trump in an early morning social media post said the United States “had nothing to do with the attack on Iran” as Israel and Iran traded missile attacks for the third straight day. Iran, however, has said that it would hold the U.S. — which has provided Israel with much of its deep arsenal of weaponry — responsible for its backing of Israel’s military actions.
Israel targeted Iran’s Defense Ministry headquarters in Tehran and sites it alleged were associated with Iran’s nuclear program, while Iranian missiles evaded Israeli air defenses and slammed into buildings deep inside Israel.
“If we are attacked in any way, shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the U.S. Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before,” Trump said.
Hours later, Trump took to social media again, saying, “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal.”
The U.S. president claimed he has a track record for de-escalating conflicts, and that he would get Israel and Iran to cease hostilities, “just like I got India and Pakistan to make” after the two countries’ recent cross-border confrontation. The U.S. was among a multinational diplomatic effort that defused that crisis.
India struck targets inside Pakistan after militants in April massacred 26 tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan has denied any links to the attackers. Following India’s strikes in Pakistan, the two sides exchanged heavy fire along their de facto borders, followed by missile and drone strikes into each other’s territories, mainly targeting military installations and airbases.
It was the most serious confrontation in decades between the countries. Trump on Sunday repeated his claim, disputed by India, that the two sides agreed to a ceasefire after he had offered to help both nations with trade if they agreed to de-escalate.
Trump also pointed to efforts by his administration during his first term to mediate disputes between Serbia and Kosovo and Egypt and Ethiopia.
“Likewise, we will have PEACE, soon, between Israel and Iran!” Trump said. “Many calls and meetings now taking place. I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST GREAT AGAIN!”
The growing conflict between Israel and Iran is testing Trump, who ran on a promise to quickly end the wars in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine and build a foreign policy that more broadly favors steering clear of foreign conflicts.
Trump has struggled to find an endgame to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which show no signs of abating.
And after criticizing President Biden during last year’s presidential campaign for persuading Israel against carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump himself made the case to the Israelis to give diplomacy a chance.
His administration’s push on Tehran to give up its nuclear program came after the U.S. and other world powers in 2015 reached a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday about the growing Israel-Iran conflict. And Trump is set to travel later Sunday to Canada for the Group of 7 summit, where the Mideast crisis will loom large.
Some influential backers of Trump are him urging to keep the U.S. out of Israel’s escalating conflict with Iran.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson are among the prominent hard-right backers of Trump who have argued that voters supported his election because he would not involve the nation in foreign conflicts.
Kirk said last week that before Israel launched the strikes on Iran he was concerned the situation could lead to “a massive schism in MAGA and potentially disrupt our momentum and our insanely successful presidency.”
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul praised Trump, saying he showed restraint and that he hoped the president’s “instincts will prevail.”
“So, I think it’s going to be very hard to come out of this and have a negotiated settlement,” Paul said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” ”I see more war and more carnage. And it’s not the U.S.’s job to be involved in this war.”
Madhani writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Gary Fields contributed to this report.
BROOKLYN PARK, Minn. — A massive search stretched into its second day Sunday for a man who authorities say wore a mask and posed as a police officer while fatally shooting a Democratic state lawmaker in her suburban Minneapolis home, an act Gov. Tim Walz called “a politically motivated assassination.” Authorities said the suspect also shot and wounded a second lawmaker and was trying to flee the area.
Former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed in their Brooklyn Park home early Saturday. Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were injured at their Champlin address, about nine miles away.
Authorities identified the suspect as 57-year-old Vance Boelter, and the FBI issued a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction. They shared a photo taken Saturday of Boelter wearing a tan cowboy hat and asked the public to report sightings. Hundreds of law enforcement officers fanned out in the search.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Sunday that authorities believe the shooter hasn’t gone far.
“We believe he’s somewhere in the vicinity and that they are going to find him,” the Democrat said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But right now, everyone’s on edge here, because we know that this man will kill at a second.”
Authorities had not yet given any details on a possible motive.
Boelter is a former political appointee who served on the same state workforce development board as Hoffman, records show, though it was not clear whether or how well they knew each other.
The attacks prompted warnings to other state elected officials and the cancellation of planned “No Kings” demonstrations against President Trump in Minnesota, though some went ahead anyway, including one that drew tens of thousands to the state Capitol in St. Paul. Authorities said the suspect had “No Kings” fliers in his car and writings mentioning the names of the victims as well as other lawmakers and officials, though they could not say whether he had any other specific targets.
A Minnesota official told AP the suspect’s writings also contained information targeting prominent lawmakers who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
Law enforcement agents recovered several AK-style firearms from the suspect’s vehicle, and he was believed to still be armed with a pistol, a person familiar with the matter told AP. The person could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The shootings happened at a time when political leaders nationwide have been attacked, harassed and intimidated amid deep ideological divisions.
“We must all, in Minnesota and across the country, stand against all forms of political violence,” said Walz, a Democrat. He also ordered flags to fly at half-staff in Hortman’s honor.
“Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!” President Trump said in a statement hours after the attack.
Exchange of gunfire
Police responded to reports of gunfire at the Hoffmans’ home shortly after 2 a.m., Champlin police said, and found the couple with multiple gunshot wounds.
After seeing who the victims were, police sent officers to proactively check on Hortman’s home. There they encountered what appeared to be a police vehicle and a man dressed as an officer at the door, leaving the house, authorities said.
“When officers confronted him, the individual immediately fired upon the officers, who exchanged gunfire, and the suspect retreated back into the home” and escaped on foot, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said.
Authorities believe the shooter was wearing a mask when carrying out the attacks, according to a law enforcement official. The FBI released photos of the suspect including an image that appears to show him wearing a mask that covered his face and head, a police uniform, and holding a flashlight.
Bullet holes could be seen in the front door of the Hoffmans’ home.
John and Yvette Hoffman each underwent surgery, according to Walz.
Two Democrats targeted
Hortman, 55, had been the top Democratic leader in the state House since 2017. She led Democrats in a three-week walkout at the beginning of this year’s session in a power struggle with Republicans. Under a power-sharing agreement, she turned the gavel over to Republican Rep. Lisa Demuth and assumed the title speaker emerita.
Hortman used her position as speaker in 2023 to champion expanded protections for abortion rights, including legislation to solidify Minnesota’s status as a refuge for patients from restrictive states who travel there to seek abortions — and to protect providers who serve them.
Walz called her a “formidable public servant, a fixture and a giant in Minnesota.”
Hortman and her husband had two adult children.
The initial autopsy reports from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office gave their cause of death as “multiple gunshot wounds.”
The reports said Melissa Hortman died at the scene, while her husband was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Hoffman, 60, was first elected in 2012 and is chair of the Senate Human Services Committee, which oversees one of the biggest parts of the state budget. He and his wife have one daughter.
The suspect
Boelter was appointed to the workforce development board in 2016 and reappointed in 2019 to a four-year term that expired in 2023, state records show.
Corporate records show Boelter’s wife filed to create a company called Praetorian Guard Security Services with the same Green Isle mailing address listed for the couple. Boelter’s wife is listed as president and CEO and he is listed as director of security patrols on the company’s website.
The website says the company provides armed security for property and events and features a photo of an SUV painted in a two-tone black-and-silver pattern similar to a police vehicle. Another photo shows a man in black tactical gear with a military-style helmet and a ballistic vest.
An online resume says Boelter is a security contractor who has worked in the Middle East and Africa, in addition to past managerial roles at companies in Minnesota.
In the messages, read to reporters by David Carlson, Boelter did not specify what he had done but said: “I’m going to be gone for a while. May be dead shortly, so I just want to let you know I love you guys both and I wish it hadn’t gone this way. … I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused.”
Political violence
Klobuchar condemned online threats and urged people Sunday to think twice before posting accusations or motives on the internet.
Speaking of Hortman on CNN, Klobuchar said: “This is a person that did everything for the right reasons.
“Regardless of political parties, look at her face before you send out your next post,” Klobuchar said.
Demuth, the Republican House speaker, called the attack “evil” and said she was “heartbroken beyond words” by the killings.
The shootings are the latest in a series of attacks against lawmakers across parties.
In April an assailant set fire to the home of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, forcing him and his family to flee during the Jewish holiday of Passover. The suspect said he planned to beat Shapiro with a small sledgehammer if he found him, according to court documents.
In July 2024, Trump was grazed on the ear by one of a hail of bullets that killed a Trump supporter. Two months later a man with a rifle was discovered near the president’s Florida golf course and arrested.
Other incidents include a 2022 hammer attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, in their San Francisco home and a 2020 plot by anti-government extremists to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and start a civil war.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said he asked Capitol Police to “immediately increase security” for Klobuchar and the other U.S. senator from Minnesota, Tina Smith. He also asked Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, to hold a briefing on member security.
Speaking Sunday on CNN’s “Inside Politics Sunday,” Smith said she personally felt safe and the thought of security details becoming the norm was unbearable.
“But I think we are at a tipping point right now when we see these kinds of personal threats. It gets worse, not better,” she said. “I don’t want to think that I need to have a personal security detail wherever I go.“
Sullivan, Karnowski and Richer write for the Associated Press. Sullivan reported from Brooklyn Park, Karnowski from Minneapolis and Durkin Richer from Washington. AP writers Giovanna Dell’Orto in Champlin, Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., Michael Biesecker in Washington and Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.
