law

NEW Laws and new tech – meaning the Club World Cup will look unlike any football tournament we’ve seen before.

Fifa has decided to bring in all the Law tweaks agreed at the International FA Board meeting in Belfast in February for their new flagship.

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That means the “five second countdown”, with referees raising their hand to tell goalkeepers to release the ball or see a corner awarded to the opposing team.

The latest live trials, in South America’s Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana, saw just TWO incidents where the glovemen exceeded the maximum eight seconds with the ball “under control”.

Fifa will also enforce the “captain’s only” rule for talking to referees, with yellow cards for any players who offend.

The so-called “Arteta rule”, meaning no further punishment other than an indirect free-kick if coaches or substitutes accidentally touch the ball before it goes out of play, will also be invoked for the first time.

As will a new penalty rule, where “double touches” – players unintentionally hitting the ball against their own foot or leg – will bring a retake if the spot kick is converted, rather than being disallowed.

But just as eye-opening will be the technology applied for the first time in competitive play, as Fifa pushes new barriers.

The biggest will be using the latest, AI-aided semi-automated offside technology, where a signal will automatically go to the assist referee when a player breaking the defensive line and more than just four INCHES offside plays the ball.

Rugby fans have become used to “ref cams”, attached to the official’s chest and giving an intimate view of scrums.

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BEST ONLINE CASINOS – TOP SITES IN THE UK

But Ifab approved football to go down the same path, with the cameras at eye level, attached to the referee’s VAR communication device.

While “live” shots will not be broadcast during play, they will be available to give fans, both at home and in stadiums, the chance to see goals and other incidents from the ref’s perspective.

Conversations between refs and VARs can still only be broadcast after a match has finished but supporters inside the grounds will be able to view the images for pitchside monitor reviews at the same time as the officials themselves.

And there will be no excuses for messed-up substitutions, with coaching teams handed a tablet to input player changes directly, rather than having to hand written notes to the fourth official.

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While publicly chastising groups protesting immigration raids, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell has offered support to officers in his Latino-majority department who may have mixed feelings about the Trump administration‘s crackdown.

In a department-wide missive sent out earlier this week as protests ramped up, McDonnell acknowledged some officers were “facing criticism from the community or wrestling with the personal impact,” of recent events and needed support.

“When federal immigration enforcement actions take place in communities that may reflect your own heritage, neighborhoods, or even your family’s story, it can create a deep and painful conflict,” he wrote. “You may be wearing the uniform and fulfilling your duty, but inside, you’re asked to hold a complex mix of emotions.”

It was an unusual display of solidarity for a chief who has rarely waded into the contentious immigration debate. McDonnell has bristled over criticism about his relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while serving as Los Angeles County Sheriff during Trump’s first term.

In interviews and public comments since becoming chief McDonnell has sought to distance himself from a policy as sheriff that allowed federal immigration authorities to operate freely, targeting people for deportation in the nation’s largest jail system.

Both McDonnell and current L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna have stressed that their departments do not cooperate with federal authorities solely for immigration purposes — polices adopted long ago to help build trust within the city’s diverse communities.

In his own message to his department this week, Luna thanked deputies for their “professionalism, resolve, and unwavering dedication” — but only briefly alluded to the immigration debate.

“Despite the complexity of this situation — made even more challenging by the heightened political environment — I trust and fully expect that you will continue to demonstrate the same level of excellence, thoughtfulness, and integrity that have brought us this far,” Luna said.

Critics of local law enforcement actions in recent days note that racial bias also remains a contentious issue, with LAPD officers pulling over and shooting Latino Angelenos at a higher rate than their share of the overall population.

Jim McDonnell was introduced by Mayor Karen Bass to serve as the new Chief LAPD during a press conference at City Hall on Oct. 4, 2024.

(Ringo Chiu/For The Times)

When asked about how he is working to keep the city’s immigrant population safe, McDonnell often cites Special Order 40, the landmark policy adopted in 1979 that forbids LAPD officers from stopping people to inquire about their citizenship status.

But Trump’s actions have put the chief and other local leaders in the awkward position of having to defend federal officers and property — while also trying to communicate that they are not on the side of immigration agents.

In his recent message to department employees, McDonnell said he recognized they “may feel loyalty, frustration, fear, or sometimes even shame as the community mistakenly views you as part of something that you are not.” The public may not “see the nuance,” of the LAPD’s postion, he said, because “simply being present can make it seem like you support an action you may not agree with, or that you’re complicit in pain affecting your own community.”

Publicly, though, the chief has struck a different, sometimes defensive tone, often focusing his remarks on destruction caused by some protesters.

At a City Council hearing Tuesday, he sparred with city leaders who challenged the department’s relationship with federal authorities.

In one exchange, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he disagreed with the chief on referring to agencies such as ICE as “law enforcement partners.”

“I don’t care what badge they have on or whose orders they’re under. They’re not our partners,” Harris-Dawson said.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, who sits on the Council’s public safety committee and represents an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district, said in a statement to The Times that he wasn’t surprised that Latino police officers may be feeling conflicted.

“Families are being ripped apart, and I’d bet nearly every one of them has a parent or relative who’s undocumented, or were even undocumented themselves at some point,” said Soto-Martinez.

Art Placencia, a retired LAPD detective, recalled being a young cop on the job in the years when cops would arrest Latinos simply because they believed that they might be in the country illegally and deliver them into federal custody.

The LAPD of today is vastly different than when he was on the job, he said. Prodded by lawsuits and consent decrees, the once-mostly white department has grown to become more than half Latino, which more or less mirrors the city’s demographics. And while Latino officials are under-represented in the LAPD’s upper echelons, they wield more political clout than ever, Placencia said.

Placencia, the former president of an prominent association for Latino officers that once sued the LAPD for discrimination in promotion decisions, said McDonnell is caught in a bind of having to navigate the city’s left-leaning politics while also backing up his rank-and-file officers on the front lines against hostile crowds.

“He’s gotta show that he’s concerned about the officers and their feelings,” said Placencia. “They’re the ones that are out there, they’re the ones that are getting rocks thrown at them.”

In past interviews, McDonnell has spoken proudly about his immigrant upbringing — both of his parents moved to Boston from Ireland a year before he was born — saying that he understands the struggle of trying to make a better life in America. But as sheriff he also came under fire by breaking ranks with many other area politicians by opposing a “sanctuary state” bill that sought to prevent federal immigration agents from taking custody of people being released from California jails.

The selection of McDonnell last November came as a disappointment among some within the department, who had hoped Bass would pick Robert Arcos, a third-generation Mexican American, who had the backing of some powerful Latino civic leaders and would have been the first Latino chief of a city that is more than 50% Latino.

Ruben Lopez, a retired LAPD SWAT lieutenant, said he appreciated that McDonnell decided to address the internal moral dilemma that some officers face.

Lopez remembers wrestling with similar feelings when, as a young cop, he was on the front lines of a massive protest over Proposition 187, a controversial law — later struck down by a federal court — that barred undocumented immigrants from receiving public school educations and a range of other state- and county-funded benefits.

“I remember some of the command staff wanted to be more aggressive, and I felt these were just families and kids wanting to exercise their right to protest,” he said. “Because if we don’t have that trust in the community, including immigrant communities then we’re not going to get that collaborative approach to police a city of this size.”

Times staff writer Connor Sheets contributed reporting.

Lancaster — A California law aimed at reducing the amount of climate-harming greenhouse gases at landfills is exacerbating the problem of illegal dumping in the Antelope Valley, according to local officials and residents.

The law, dubbed California’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Strategy, requires residents and businesses to separate food waste, yard trimmings and other organic waste from their trash to reduce the amount of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being emitted into the atmosphere.

Signed into law in 2016, the bill mandated a gradual increase in the amount of organic waste that must be diverted away from landfills to sites where the waste could be treated and composted, thus reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. The law required the diversion of 50% of all green and food waste from landfills by 2020; by 2025, that number was to hit 75%.

A separate law closed a legal loophole that had previously encouraged waste haulers to cover landfill debris with green waste.

Although experts say the law appears to be working in most regions of the state, the Los Angeles area has been a problem. They say the city of Los Angeles and many of its surrounding municipalities haven’t invested in the infrastructure needed to process increased organic waste, nor is there the agricultural demand for the finished product that there is farther north.

“Illegal dumping has been a problem in the Antelope Valley for decades,” said Chuck Bostwick, a senior field deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents much of the area. “But, since these laws were passed, it’s gotten markedly worse.”

Bostwick said state regulations have made disposal of organic waste “much more expensive and hard to deal with,” and therefore increased the financial incentives for waste haulers to dump illegally, thus circumventing the high processing costs of composting and treating the material.

A truck leaves the Circle Green mulch dump site near El Mirage.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Antelope Valley residents say there are dozens or more rogue dump sites across the region. Although a few are just straight-up garbage and trash, most of the more than 80 identified by residents appear to be some form of unprocessed mulch.

One such site, located in San Bernardino County near the El Mirage Dry Lake bed, gave off a rancid smell on a cool spring afternoon. The material underfoot was dark brown and appeared to be a mix of wood chips and woody debris, dotted with cast-off rubber and plastic — the shred of a Spalding basketball here, a purple plastic squirrel there. The stumps of dead Joshua trees jutted from the fetid ground cover, while a few others, still alive, appeared anemic and were adorned in wispy strands of plastic debris and dust.

A lawsuit filed this year in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by Antelope Valley residents claims that waste-hauling companies including Athens Services and California Waste Services are dumping hazardous substances without authorization, which the companies deny. Athens noted that the law encourages the distribution of compostable material to “farmers and other property owners for beneficial use.”

It’s this interpretation of land-application that has caused consternation among the valley’s desert-dwelling residents: There are no laws preventing landowners from applying compost to their fields or property.

According to Bostwick and others, landowners in the Antelope Valley are granting permission for waste haulers to come and dump on their property in return for payment.

That’s completely legitimate, according to Lance Klug, a spokesman for CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency. Property owners can spread waste on their land, he said as long as the material is compostable and not mixed with non-organic material; contains less than 0.5% of plastic, metal or other contaminants; contains only minimal amounts of metals and pathogens; and is not deposited in piles higher than 6 inches.

At sites such as the one near El Mirage, the legality of the material is questionable. A spreadsheet compiled by CalRecycle officials during a visit in November describes the waste as “illegal.” But at other sites, the waste appears to be in line with state regulations.

But even if it is legal, its presence threatens to cause lasting damage to the desert ecosystem, said Wesley Skelton, assistant land manager at the Portal Ridge Wildlife Preserve, a protected area near the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.

Yard trimmings often contain seeds of invasive plant species and toxic herbicides, he said, and mulching is also problematic, disrupting fragile ecosystems, contributing to poor air quality and potentially the spread of the dust-loving fungus that causes Valley fever.

“We’re concerned that these landowners aren’t having to do any environmental impact report when they do dump on their land,” Skelton said. “The effects of these dumpings are long-lasting habitat destruction, and introduction of invasive plants that’s going to affect the air quality of Lancaster and Palmdale for years to come.”

Trash is dumped at this Lancaster location north of E. Avenue J. on April 18.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“We put in a lot of effort to combat these plants— the Russian thistle and the mustard and all the different grasses and everything,” Skelton said, naming two invasive species that are crowding out the native flora. “It’s a huge problem.”

Nick Lapis, director of Californians Against Waste, doesn’t think the composting laws are the problem in the Antelope Valley. He said dumping has been happening there for more than decade — long before the composting laws were in place.

A sneaker among the trash dumped at Adobe Mountain near Lancaster on April 18.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Irrespective of the cause, it is a big problem, he said, and state and local enforcement agencies need to stop it — both by requiring jurisdictions to track waste, at every step of its journey, and implementing a clear strategy for enforcement.

“It is outrageous that while some companies are investing millions in legitimate composting operations — real facilities with real customers and real climate benefits — others are just dumping raw green waste in the desert and calling it farming,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face to everyone doing the right thing.”

A phalanx of police officers on horseback surround a person who has been knocked to the ground and repeatedly pummeled with batons.

An Australian TV news reporter winces in pain as she’s shot by a rubber bullet while wrapping up a live broadcast.

A crowd milling above the 101 Freeway lobs rocks and chunks of concrete down on California Highway Patrol officers detaining protesters, prompting a volley of flash-bang grenades.

Those incidents and others captured on video have gone viral in recent days as immigration protests reached a boiling point in Los Angeles.

Leaders at the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have long maintained that they have no role in civil immigration enforcement. And yet the region’s two largest police agencies are suddenly on the front lines of the Trump administration’s crackdown, clashing in the street with demonstrators — most peaceful and some seemingly intent on causing mayhem.

Waymo taxis burn on Los Angeles Street as thousands protest ICE immigration raids throughout the city.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell condemned the actions of those carrying out the “disgusting” violence.

“This thing has gotten out of control,” McDonnell said at a news conference Sunday when asked whether he supported President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops. After news broke Monday that the president was sending hundreds of Marines to the city, McDonnell said that without “clear coordination,” adding more soldiers to the mix creates “a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city.”

Sheriff Robert Luna told The Times that deputies are prepared to support federal agents in certain circumstances — even as the department maintains its official policy of not assisting with immigration operations.

“They start getting attacked and they call and ask us for help, we’re going to respond,” Luna said.

Both publicly and behind the scenes, the situation has led to tensions with Los Angeles officials who have questioned whether local law enforcement is crossing the line with aggressive crowd control tactics — or being put in a lose-lose situation by Trump, who has cast blame on the LAPD chief and others for not doing enough.

“The federal government has put everybody in the city, and law enforcement in particular, in a really messed up situation,” said City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson. “They started a riot, and then they said, ‘Well, you can’t handle the riot, so we’re sending in the military.’”

Los Angeles police officers push back protesters near a federal building in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The LAPD said in a statement that officers made a combined 50 arrests on Saturday and Sunday, mostly for failure to obey a dispersal order. They also arrested a man who allegedly rammed a motorcycle into a skirmish line of officers, and another for attempted murder with a Molotov cocktail.

Five officers were injured while policing the protests, the department said, while five police horses also suffered minor injuries. The department said officers fired more than 600 so-called less lethal rounds to quell hostile crowds.

Although the LAPD has changed the way it handles protests in recent years — moving away from some of the heavy-handed tactics that drew widespread criticism in the past — the city still pays out millions for crowd control-related lawsuits every year.

As of Monday, Internal Affairs had opened investigations into seven complaints of officer misconduct, including the shooting of the Australian TV news reporter, said LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Rimkunas, who runs the department’s professional standards bureau.

Additionally, he said, the department’s Force Investigations Division, which reviews all serious uses of force, was investigating two incidents “because of possible significant injury,” including one incident in which a protester was struck in the head with a rubber bullet.

“We’re continuing to review video and monitor the situation,” he said.

The high-profile incidents caught on video — combined with mixed messaging by L.A. officials — have created opportunities for the White House to control the narrative.

On Saturday, Mayor Karen Bass told reporters that the protests were under control, while the LAPD chief publicly lamented that his department was overwhelmed by the outbursts of violence. Trump seized on those comments, writing in a post on Truth Social that the situation in Los Angeles was “looking really bad.”

“Jim McDonnell, the highly respected LAPD Chief, just stated that the protesters are getting very much more aggressive, and that he would ‘have to reassess the situation,’ as it pertains to bringing in the troops,” Trump wrote on the right-wing social media platform shortly after midnight on Monday. “He should, RIGHT NOW!!! Don’t let these thugs get away with this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Protesters clash with police downtown near the VA Outpatient Clinic on Sunday in Los Angeles.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

On the streets over the weekend, local cops often found themselves playing defense while confronting unruly crowds.

Cmdr. Oscar Barragan in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Operations Division described the scene Sunday when his unit responded to a protest near a Home Depot in Panorama. While rumors of a raid targeting migrant workers at the store spread on social media, Barragan said the real issue was a federal immigration office nearby that was being used as a staging area.

“Social media took over and a false narrative started growing and it just grew out of control,” he said.

Barragan said there were “people launching mortars at us and rocks and things” as the scrum moved west toward the 710 Freeway and the Compton border. He said some people put nails and cinder blocks in the street trying to block the police response.

“It got pretty hairy,” Barragan said. “They just kept launching every type of firework you can imagine and it was consistent.”

He said local law enforcement tolerates protests — but has to step up to restore order when things start to get out of hand.

“The sheriff has made it clear that we allow the peaceful protests to occur, but once violence occurs we’re not gonna tolerate it,” he said.

On Sunday outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, a group of roughly 100 protesters spent hours chiding California National Guard members and Department of Homeland Security officers near the entrance to the immigration jail, calling them “Nazis” and urging them to defy orders and defend the public instead of a building.

At one point, a Homeland Security officer approached one of the more vocal demonstrators and said he “didn’t want a repeat” of Saturday’s violence, urging protesters to stay off federal property and clear a path for any vehicles that needed to enter. But around 1 p.m. on Sunday, guardsmen with riot shields moved to the front of the law enforcement phalanx on Alameda and charged into the protest crowd, screaming “push” as they rammed into people. They launched tear gas canisters and smoke grenades into the street, leaving a toxic cloud in the air.

A protester is hurt near the 101 Freeway in clashes with law enforcement in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

It left an enraged crowd of protesters, who had otherwise been peaceful all morning, for the LAPD to contend with.

After National Guard troops and Homeland Security officers retreated to the loading dock, LAPD officers found themselves in an hours-long back and forth with protesters on Alameda. Officers used batons, less lethal launchers and tear gas to slowly force the crowd of hundreds back toward Temple Street, with limited success.

The LAPD repeatedly issued dispersal orders from a helicopter and a patrol car loudspeaker. Some members of the crowd hurled water bottles and glass bottles at officers, and the windshield of a department vehicle shattered after it was struck by a projectile.

One officer grabbed a sign from a protester who was standing near a skirmish line, broke it in half and then swung a baton into the demonstrator’s legs. Another officer was seen by a Times reporter repeatedly raising his launcher and aiming at the heads of demonstrators.

In one particularly wild moment, two people riding motorcycles inched their way to the front of the protest crowd, revving their engines and drawing cheers. At some point, they got close to the LAPD’s skirmish line and skidded out.

Both were handcuffed and led away, their feet dragging across asphalt covered in shattered glass and spent rubber bullets. LAPD later alleged at least one of the motorcyclists rammed officers.

The tensions spilled into Monday.

City workers repair broken windows on Spring Street at Police Headquarters.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

At police headquarters, where city workers were spotted boarding up the ground-level windows, a row of officers in riot gear began assembling outside. With some government offices urging their employees to work from home, the surrounding streets were emptier than usual. Those who came downtown kept their heads down as they hustled past the now-ubiquitous “F— ICE” graffiti.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday afternoon that Trump had ordered another 2,000 National Guard troops to the city, doubling the previous total. In response, the governor said, he had worked with other law enforcement agencies on a “surge” of an additional 800 state and local law enforcement officers “to ensure the safety of our LA communities.”

McDonnell said at a news conference that the department was seeking to strike a balance between “dealing with civil unrest on the streets, [while] at the same time trying to protect peaceful protests.”

Some community leaders were left deeply unsatisfied with the police response.

Eddie Anderson, a pastor at McCarty Memorial Christian Church in Jefferson Park, argued that the LAPD was effectively doing the work of protecting Trump’s immigration agents.

“We asked them to pick a side: Are they going to pick the side of the federal government, which is trying to rip apart families?” Anderson said. “Donald Trump would like nothing more than for Angelenos to resort to violence to try to fight the federal government, because his whole scheme is to try to show L.A. is a lawless place.”

Times staff writers David Zahniser and Matthew Ormseth contributed to this report.

I was driving while listening to the news Sunday when I heard House Speaker Mike Johnson justify President Trump’s move to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles.

“We have to maintain the rule of law,” Johnson said.

I almost swerved off the road.

Maintain the rule of law?

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

Trump pardoned the hooligans who ransacked the Capitol because he lost the 2020 presidential election. They clashed with police, destroyed property and threatened the lives of public officials, and to Trump, they’re heroes.

Maintain the rule of law?

Trump is a 34-count felon who has defied judicial rulings, ignored laws that don’t serve his interests, and turned his current presidency into an unprecedented adventure in self-dealing and graft.

And now he’s sending an invading army to Los Angeles, creating a crisis where there was none. Arresting undocumented immigrants with criminal records is one thing, but is that what this is about? Or is it about putting on a show, occupying commercial and residential neighborhoods and arresting people who are looking for — or on their way to — work.

Protesters and members of the National Guard watched one another in front of the federal building in Los Angeles on Monday.

(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that U.S. Marines were on high alert and ready to roll, and in the latest of who knows how many escalations, hundreds are headed our way.

What next, the Air Force?

I’m not going to defend the vandalism and violence — which plays into Trump’s hands—that followed ICE arrests in Los Angeles. I can see him sitting in front of the tube, letting out a cheer every time another “migrant criminal” flings a rock or a scooter at a patrol car.

But I am going to defend Los Angeles and the way things work here.

For starters, undocumented immigration is not the threat to public safety or the economy that Trump like to bloviate about.

It’s just that he knows he can score points on border bluster and on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), so he’s going full gasbag on both, and now he’s threatening to lock up Gov. Gavin Newsom.

To hear the rhetoric, you’d think every other undocumented immigrant is a gang member and that trans athletes will soon dominate youth sports if someone doesn’t stand up to them.

I can already read the mail that hasn’t yet arrived, so let me say in advance that I do indeed understand that breaking immigration law means breaking the law, and I believe that President Biden didn’t do enough to control the border, although it was Republicans who killed a border security bill early last year.

I also acknowledge the cost of supporting undocumented immigrants is substantial when you factor in public education and, in California, medical care, which is running billions of dollars beyond original estimates.

But the economic contributions of immigrants — regardless of legal status — are undeniably numerous, affecting the price we pay for everything from groceries to healthcare to domestic services to construction to landscaping.

Protesters shut down the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that a surge in immigrants since 2021 — including refugees, asylum seekers and others, legal and illegal — had lifted the U.S. economy “by filling otherwise vacant jobs,” as The Times reported, and “pumping millions of tax dollars into state, local and federal coffers.”

According to a seminal 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, “many illegal immigrants pay Social Security and other taxes but do not collect benefits, and they are not eligible for many government services.”

In addition, the report said: “Political controversies aside, when illegal immigrants come, many U.S. employers are ready to hire them. The vast majority work. Estimates suggest that at least 75 percent of adult illegal immigrants are in the workforce.”

Trump can rail against the lunatic radical left for the scourge of illegal immigration, but the statement that “employers are ready to hire them” couldn’t be more true. And those employers stand on both sides of the political aisle, as do lawmakers who for decades have allowed the steady flow of workers to industries that would suffer without them.

On Sunday, I had to pick up a couple of items at the Home Depot on San Fernando Road in Glendale, where dozens of day laborers often gather in search of work. But there were only a couple of men out there, given recent headlines.

A shopper in the garden section said the report of federal troops marching on L.A. is “kind of ridiculous, right?” He said the characterization by Trump of “all these terrible people” and “gang members” on the loose was hard to square with the reality of day laborers all but begging for work.

I found one of them in a far corner of the Home Depot lot, behind a fence. He told me he was from Honduras and was afraid to risk arrest by looking for work at a time when battalions of masked troops were on the move, but he’s got a hungry family back home, including three kids. He said he was available for any kind of jobs, including painting, hauling and cleanup.

Two men in a pickup truck told me they were undocumented too and available for construction jobs of any type. They said they were from Puebla, Mexico, but there wasn’t enough work for them there.

I’ve been to Puebla, a city known for its roughly 300 churches. I was passing through about 20 years ago on my way to a small nearby town where almost everyone on the street was female.

Where were the men?

Protesters shut down the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

City workers repair broken windows at LAPD headquarters on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

I was told by a city official that the local economy was all about corn, but local growers couldn’t compete with American farmers who had the benefit of federal subsidies. So the men had gone north for work.

Another reason people head north is to escape the violence wrought by cartels armed with American-made weapons, competing to serve the huge American appetite for drugs.

In these ways, and more, the flow of people across borders can be complicated. But generally speaking, it’s simply about survival. People move to escape poverty or danger. They move in search of something better for themselves, or to be more accurate about it, for their children.

The narratives of those journeys are woven into the fabric of Los Angeles. It’s part of what’s messy and splendid and complicated about this blended, imperfect corner of the world, where many of us know students or workers or families with temporary status, or none at all.

That’s why this overheated invasion looks so ugly and feels so personal.

We’re less suspicious of our neighbors and the people we encounter on our daily rounds than the hypocrites who would pardon insurrectionists, sow division and send an occupying army to haul away members of our community.

[email protected]

California sued the U.S. Justice Department on Monday over its demand last week that local school districts ban transgender youth from competing in sports, arguing the federal agency had overstepped its authority in violation of both state and federal law.

The “pre-enforcement” lawsuit was filed “in anticipation of imminent legal retaliation against California’s school systems” for not complying with the agency’s directive by its Monday deadline, said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office, which is handling the litigation.

“The President and his Administration are demanding that California school districts break the law and violate the Constitution — or face legal retaliation. They’re demanding that our schools discriminate against the students in their care and deny their constitutionally protected rights,” Bonta said in a statement. “As we’ve proven time and again in court, just because the President disagrees with a law, that doesn’t make it any less of one.”

The lawsuit comes a week after Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee and head of the federal Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to school districts across California warning them that they faced potential “legal liability” if they did not “certify in writing” by Monday that they will break with California Interscholastic Federation rules and state law to ban transgender athletes from competition in their districts.

Dhillon argued that allowing transgender athletes to compete “would deprive girls of athletic opportunities and benefits based solely on their biological sex,” in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond responded last week by saying in his own letter to schools that Dhillon’s warning carried no legal weight and that school districts were still obligated to follow state law, which requires transgender athletes be allowed to compete on teams based on their gender identity.

The California Department of Education sent a letter to federal authorities Monday, informing them that California’s school districts are under no obligation to provide certifications to the Justice Department.

“There are no changes in law or circumstances that necessitate a new certification,” wrote General Counsel Len Garfinkel. “Moreover, the DOJ letter references no law that would authorize the DOJ to require another ‘certification.’”

“All students — not just transgender students — benefit from inclusive school environments that are free from discrimination and harassment,” Garfinkel added. “When transgender students are treated equally, their mental health outcomes mirror those of their cisgender peers.”

Bonta’s lawsuit asks a federal court in Northern California to uphold the constitutionality of California’s antidiscrimination laws protecting transgender athletes, and to bar the Trump administration from withholding funds or taking other retaliatory actions against school districts that refuse to abide by the Trump directive.

The lawsuit falls along one of the fastest growing legal and political fault lines in America: Does the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment — the Constitution’s oft-cited guarantee against discrimination — protect transgender rights or undermine them?

Dhillon, other members of the Trump administration and anti-transgender activists nationwide have argued that the inclusion of transgender girls in youth sports amounts to illegal discrimination against cisgender girls.

Bonta’s office and other LGBTQ+ advocates argue that the exclusion of transgender girls is what constitutes illegal discrimination — and that courts, including the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs California and much of the American West, have agreed.

While Dhillon “purports that compliance with the Equal Protection Clause requires the categorical exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports, as courts have previously upheld, just the opposite is true: the Equal Protection Clause forbids such policies of total exclusion, as does California law,” Bonta’s office said.

State law that allows transgender students to participate in sports consistent with their identity “is squarely within the State’s authority to ensure all students are afforded the benefits of an inclusive school environment, including participation in school sports, and to prevent the serious harms that transgender students would suffer from a discriminatory, exclusionary policy.”

An attorney who supports keeping transgender athletes out of girls sports said the rights of female athletes are paramount in this situation.

Both the U.S. Constitution and federal statute provide protections for female athletes that California is violating by “allowing males into ‘girls only’ categories,” said Julie A. Hamill, principal attorney with California Justice Center, a law firm that has complaints pending with the federal Office for Civil Rights on behalf of young female athletes.

“By continuing to fan flames of division and play politics, leftist politicians and media outlets are causing further harm to American girls,” Hamill said.

Polls have shown that Americans generally support transgender rights, but also that a majority oppose transgender girls competing in youth sports. Many prominent advocates for excluding transgender girls from sports praised Dhillon’s actions last week as a bold move to protect cisgender girls from unfair competition.

Sonja Shaw, a Trump supporter who is president of the Chino Valley Unified Board of Education, has called on California school systems to adopt resolutions in support of the Trump administration order.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Shaw said last week. “Our daughters deserve safe, fair competition … But radical policies are undermining that right, pushing boys into girls’ sports and threatening their opportunities. We’re not backing down.”

Shaw, a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, said other school systems could model these resolutions on one passed by her school district.

A handful of the state’s 1,000 school districts have passed such resolutions.

The lawsuit’s claim that retaliation from the Trump administration could be imminent for schools that do not comply with the administration’s demands is not entirely speculative. It is based at least in part on repeated threats and actions the administration has already taken against states over its trans-inclusive sports policies.

President Trump has said outright that he wants to cut federal funding to California over its laws allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports. The federal Justice Department has announced investigations into the state and the California Interscholastic Federation over its inclusive policies for transgender athletes.

U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli in Los Angeles, a longtime ally of Dhillon and whose appointment has yet to be confirmed, recently threw his office’s support behind a private lawsuit challenging the inclusion of a transgender athlete on the track and field team at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside.

Dhillon issued her letter to California school districts after another transgender athlete from Jurupa Valley High School, 16-year-old AB Hernandez, won multiple medals at the state high school track and field championships despite President Trump demanding on social media that she not be allowed to compete.

The letter came despite attempts by the state to appease concerns.

After Trump’s online threats, for example, the CIF updated its rules for transgender competitors. As a result, Hernandez was allowed to compete at the state finals in the girls’ long jump, high jump and triple jump, but her qualifying did not result in the exclusion of any cisgender girl.

In addition, while Hernandez was awarded several medals, those medals were also awarded to cisgender girls who otherwise would have claimed them had Hernandez not been competing — with the girls sharing those spots on the medal podiums.

Supporters of the rule change said it eliminated concerns about cisgender girls losing opportunities to compete and win to transgender girls, but critics said the changes did not go far enough, and that transgender athletes needed to be fully banned from competition.

Dhillon’s letter demanding school districts certify that such bans were being implemented made no mention of the CIF’s rule change.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom resisted a fight with President Trump over transgender youth in women’s sports. He forced his way onto a runway tarmac to make peace with the Republican leader after the Los Angeles wildfires.

Just last week, he hesitated before speaking out when rumors swirled about a massive federal funding cut to California.

Newsom’s restraint ended when Trump usurped the governor’s authority over the weekend by deploying the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration raids.

“I’m still willing to do what I can to have the backs of the people I represent and whatever it takes to advance that cause, I’ll do, but I’m not going to do it when we see the trampling of our Constitution and the rule of law,” Newsom said in an interview with The Times. “So we all have our red lines. That’s my red line.”

Newsom said the arrival of troops in the largest city in the Golden State escalated tensions between protesters and law enforcement, which he blamed Trump for intentionally inflaming to sow chaos. Whether Newsom likes it or not, the president’s actions also catapulted the governor to the front lines of a Democratic resistance against Trump that he has been reluctant to embrace after his party lost the presidential election in November.

On Monday, Trump said his border czar Tom Homan should follow through on threats to arrest the governor. The president has cast California as out of control and Newsom incompetent for not stepping in and ending the unrest, or protecting federal immigration agents from protesters.

“I would do it if I were Tom,” Trump said. “I think it’s great. Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing. He’s done a terrible job.”

Newsom also baited Homan: “Come and get me, tough guy.”

Newsom’s position as the leader of a state that has become an immigration target for the federal government offers both risks and rewards for a governor considering a 2028 run for the White House.

Democrats and progressives are thirsty for a leader to challenge Trump and his controversial policies. The National Democratic Party quickly took to social media to publicize the governor’s challenge to Homan to arrest him. Being carted away in handcuffs by officials in Trump’s Justice Department would probably elevate Newsom to Democratic martyr status.

President Trump speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving on Marine One on June 9, 2025. Trump on Monday suggested California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be arrested over his handling of the unrest in Los Angeles.

(Yuri Gripas / Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“In a way, he was channeling Trump, because he knows how much Trump benefited in the Republican Party from his own criminal conviction,” said John Pitney, the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.

Even without an arrest, the political battle is likely to boost Newsom’s standing with Democrats.

But immigration is one of Trump’s best policy issues with voters and it’s not an ideal political fight for any Democrat with presidential aspirations.

“This is the brilliance of Donald Trump,” said Thad Kousser, a professor of political science at UC San Diego. “He’s picking these fights over executive power and over the power of federal government on a political terrain in which he’s most popular: immigration, transgender athletes, DEI, ‘woke’ universities. He’s picking these governance fights where he thinks he can win on the politics.”

For Newsom, the raids provide an opportunity to challenge the president’s narrative that his immigration policy is all about removing criminals and protecting the border, Kousser said.

In interviews, Newsom has repeated that the Trump administration is targeting children in elementary school classrooms and law-abiding citizens who have been in California for a decade or more.

He’s also framing Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles as about more than immigration.

“This is something bigger,” Newsom said. “This is certain power and control over every aspect of our lives. This is about wrecking the constitutional order. This is about tearing down the rule of law. This is about, literally, the cornerstone of our founding fathers, and they’re rolling in their graves.”

Trump’s Los Angeles takeover could derail the work the governor has put in to showcase his more moderate policy positions to America.

While judiciously picking and choosing his battles with Trump, Newsom used his podcast this year to air his belief that it’s unfair for transgender athletes to compete in women and girls’ sports. Through interviews with controversial conservative figures such as Stephen K. Bannon, the governor attempted to demonstrate his ability to be cordial with anyone regardless of their political affiliation.

Newsom has been strategic about the attacks he makes against Trump, such as criticizing the tariffs that are a political vulnerability for the president.

“Anybody who wants to lead the Democratic Party needs the support or at least the acquiescence of the progressive wing of the party, but Democrats need to appeal to the broader general public, and so far, this situation is not helping,” Pitney said of the battle over immigration.

The images streaming out of Los Angeles also create an electoral vulnerability for the governor.

“Perchance Newsom were the Democratic nominee in 2028, you would expect to see pictures of burning Waymos on the streets of Los Angeles with the tagline of ‘what Newsom did for California, he’ll do for America,”’ Pitney said.

Kousser contends that Newsom, in a presidential campaign, will be held responsible for all of California’s shortcomings, regardless of whether he stood up to Trump’s immigration raids.

Although the governor is fighting in the courts with a lawsuit announced Monday, by supporting peaceful protests and using his public podium, there’s little he can do to stop the federal government. The situation highlights the challenge for Newsom and any state leader with interest in the White House.

“This is the blessing and the curse of a governor who wants to run for higher office. When something happens in their state, they get the eyes of the nation upon them even if it’s not the political ground on which they’d rather fight,” Kousser said.

The scenes unfolding in Los Angeles should alarm every American who values constitutional governance. Federal troops have been deployed to a major American city not in response to an insurrection or natural disaster, but to suppress protests against immigration enforcement operations. The whole of downtown Los Angeles has been declared an “unlawful assembly area”.

This represents a dangerous escalation that threatens the very foundations of the US democratic system.

What began as routine raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 6 quickly spiralled into something far more ominous. Federal agents swept through Los Angeles, detaining 121 individuals from restaurants, stores and apartment buildings. The raids were conducted in broad daylight, with a calculated boldness that seemed designed to provoke.

The community’s response was swift. By the afternoon, protesters had gathered downtown, not as rioters but as a grieving community, holding signs and chanting “Set them free!”.

This was grief made public, anger given voice. But in today’s America, even peaceful displays of grief and anger are not allowed when they go against the narrative set by those in power.

The police responded with force. Tear gas canisters flew. Flash-bang grenades exploded. A peaceful demonstration transformed into a battlefield — not because protesters chose violence, but because the government did.

US President Donald Trump decided to escalate further. He signed a memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening to mobilise active-duty Marines if protests continued.

The legality of these actions is questionable at best. Under the Insurrection Act, federal troops can only be deployed after a public proclamation calls for citizens to disperse. Such a proclamation has not been made, and Trump has not invoked the act. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has the power to decide on matters of security in the state of California, was not consulted; he was simply informed.

There is no widespread rebellion threatening the authority of the United States. There are no enemy combatants in Los Angeles, just angry, grieving people demanding dignity for their communities. What we’re witnessing is not the lawful execution of federal authority but improvisation masquerading as application of law, the slow erosion of constitutional order, replaced by declaration, spectacle, and muscle.

If challenged in court, this deployment would likely be deemed illegal. But that may not matter – and that is the most chilling aspect of this crisis. We are fast moving towards a place where illegality no longer matters, where muscle has arrived with or without paperwork, and law is merely a facade.

This moment cannot be understood in isolation. As scholar Aime Cesaire observed in his analysis of colonialism, violence in the periphery inevitably returns to the metropole. The tools of oppression developed abroad always find their way home.

In the US, this has been a decades-long process. In 1996, a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Pentagon to transfer surplus military-grade weaponry to local police departments. In the following three decades, the same weapons that were used for imperialist violence abroad were transferred to police departments to deploy in poor and marginalised communities.

Then with the start of the “war on terror”, tactics to target and subjugate foreign populations were transferred at home to use against vulnerable communities. Congress passed sweeping laws like the USA PATRIOT Act and amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling mass surveillance and intelligence gathering on US soil.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists allowed for indefinite military detention of US citizens, while a Supreme Court ruling in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project expanded the “material support” doctrine to criminalise even peaceful engagement with blacklisted groups.

Programmes like Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) turned schools and mosques into surveillance hubs, targeting Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

While outside the US government was pursuing a campaign of renditions, torture and illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay, at home, it was deploying lawfare against “suspect” communities.

The 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial introduced “secret evidence” in a US criminal court for the first time, with an anonymous Israeli intelligence officer claiming he could “smell Hamas” on defendants. Georgia’s prosecution of Cop City protesters under “terrorism” charges directly borrowed from this playbook, as did Tennessee’s Bill HB 2348, which extends policing powers to suppress peaceful protests.

After October 2023, the US government violated its own laws in order to participate directly in the genocide in Gaza, providing Israel with weapons and intelligence. The mass repression and erasure that Palestinians had suffered at the hands of their US-backed colonisers were transferred on American soil.

The government launched an unprecedented attack on free speech and academic freedom, cracking down on students protesting the genocide and encouraging retribution against pro-Palestinian voices. We’ve seen tenure revoked, protesters surveilled, and dissent criminalised. Palestinians and their allies have endured a fourfold increase in harassment, doxing, and employment loss; they have also faced violent attacks and murder.

All this started not under Trump, but under his “Democratic” predecessor, former US President Joe Biden, who also increased the budget of police departments by $13bn and expanded ICE’s powers.

The pattern is clear: repressive measures developed to target foreign populations have become tools to suppress all dissent at home.

What is happening in Los Angeles and other cities isn’t about law enforcement; it’s about power projection, about demonstrating that defiance will be met with overwhelming force and quashed.

The legal framework matters less than the spectacle. When federal agents fire flash-bang grenades at protesters outside Home Depot stores, when ICE directors accuse mayors of siding with “chaos and lawlessness”, when FBI officials tweet about hunting down rock throwers, we’re watching the construction of a narrative that justifies state violence.

This is how soft coups unfold: not with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, but through executive memos, press briefings, and military logistics disguised as public safety. The Insurrection Act becomes a dead letter not through repeal but through irrelevance.

If this precedent stands, federal troops will become the standard response to resistance. Cities that don’t vote for the president will face occupation. Protest will be redefined as rebellion. The next time people gather in the streets demanding justice, they will not face police officers but soldiers.

When a president can deploy troops without following the law, and no one stops him, law loses its power. It becomes theatre, a facade for a system that has abandoned its own principles.

At this time, we don’t need just legal challenges, we need moral clarity. What’s happening in Los Angeles is not law enforcement: it’s occupation. What’s being called an insurrection is actually resistance to injustice. What’s being framed as public safety is actually political intimidation.

American imperialism has created the infrastructure for exactly this moment. The tools of empire, tested on peoples in the Global South, are now being deployed against American cities. If we don’t recognise this moment for what it is – a fundamental assault on constitutional governance – we will wake up in a country where imperial military force is the primary language of politics.

The US Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it. In Los Angeles, that defence begins now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Several years ago, little was known about the StingRay, a powerful surveillance device that imitates the function of a cell tower and captures the signals of nearby phones, allowing law enforcement officers to sweep through hundreds of messages, conversations and call logs.

The secrecy around the technology, which can ensnare the personal data of criminals and bystanders alike, spurred lawsuits and demands for public records to uncover who was using it and the extent of its capabilities. In California, a 2015 law requires law enforcement agencies to seek permission at public meetings to buy the devices, and post rules for their use online.

But a Los Angeles Times review of records from 20 of the state’s largest police and sheriff’s departments, plus the Alameda County district attorney’s office, found some agencies have been slow to follow or have ignored the law. Several that partner with federal agencies to work on cases are not subject to the law’s reporting requirements. The result is that little information on StingRay use is available to the public, making it hard to determine how wide a net the surveillance tools cast and what kind of data they gather.

Out of 21 law enforcement agencies surveyed, 12 were found to own or have access to a StingRay or similar device. Nine of those agencies had developed and released online public polices.

**Officers don’t operate the stingray but work with other agencies that may

Source: L.A. Times review of public records

The Times reviewed more than 400 documents it received from public information requests, including grant proposals, purchase orders and memos on the use of StingRays and similar devices generically called “stingrays” or “dirtboxes.”

The devices, which cost between $242,000 and $500,000, are primarily marketed for preventing and responding to terrorist threats, but the documents suggest they are used most frequently in felony criminal cases, such as burglaries, murders and kidnappings.

Out of 21 law enforcement entities The Times surveyed, 12 either owned stingrays or used or had access to them through partner agencies. Nine owned the surveillance devices, and each of them posted public policies online as required by law. Three of the nine went a step further to conduct annual reporting audits that showed when and in what cases the devices were used.

But some stingray policies posted by the law enforcement agencies revealed little about the devices besides noting they were in use. Other agencies took months to post their stingray guidelines online. The Los Angeles Police Department, which owns a stingray, updated its public safety policies to include its stingray guidelines only after questions from The Times.

Data on stingray purchases and use have long been difficult to come by, a problem the 2015 law requiring more public accountability was meant to correct — and has yet to fix.

California police would have to disclose the use of more surveillance devices under this proposed law>>

The Times found that the nine agencies that own stingrays bought them between 2006 and 2013, mostly with federal grant money or under programs or agreements that prohibited any public disclosure, following a national trend. Local tax dollars weren’t used on the purchases, and city and county officials didn’t ask about them in a public forum.

Just two of the 21 law enforcement agencies polled by The Times have ever publicly discussed buying new devices before city or county officials: Santa Clara (which did not buy a device) and Alameda counties.

And only one agency, the Oakland Police Department, has gathered input from the public to develop guidelines for stingray use, which isn’t required under the 2015 law.

“Any tool can be used for good or bad,” said Brian Hofer, chairman of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, which helped establish the surveillance policies. “This is the most controversial piece of equipment that we know about, and they should not be used in the dark.”

The StingRay II gives off the strongest wireless signal in an area, tricking nearby phones, tablets and laptops to connect. (Associated Press)

(Associated Press)

A device cloaked in secrecy

Stingrays tend to be the size of small briefcases and mimic the function of cell towers. They give off the strongest wireless signal in an area, tricking nearby phones, tablets and laptops to connect.

Investigators can target the location data of specific phones, allowing them to track suspects and their associates. They can also sweep up communications over a wide area. How much and what types of data they collect — location information, audio or images — depends on how the devices are designed and how law enforcement agencies use them.

The technology has been used for about 20 years by federal, state and local law enforcement, often secretly, under manufacturer agreements that typically prohibit agencies from disclosing the purchases.

The public did not learn about the existence of the equipment until 2011, after an inmate in federal prison, Daniel Rigmaiden, spent three years scouring government records and meeting transcripts on a hunch that investigators used some kind of secret device to catch him.

Rigmaiden, a native of Seaside, Calif., who hadn’t had a stable living situation, was arrested in Phoenix for filing fake tax returns. Police were able to find him through tracking an old Verizon wireless card he seldom used to connect online.

“It wasn’t just that [investigators] were able to get historical call data from Verizon,” said Linda Lye, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief in support of his case. “They were able to pinpoint him to a particular apartment in a particular apartment building, which was far more precise.”

State bill requiring California police to disclose surveillance equipment clears its first hurdle>>

In 2015, California lawmakers passed the sweeping Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prohibited any investigative body in the state from forcing businesses to turn over digital communications without a warrant. That same year, state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) introduced legislation to compel local law enforcement agencies to disclose more information about the use of stingrays in California.

“Our country has a rich history of democracy and civilian oversight,” Hill told a Senate judiciary committee that May. “The stealthy use of these devices undercuts the very nature of our government.”

The law, which took effect in January 2016, requires cities and counties that operate a stingray to create guidelines for how and when officers use the equipment. Any agency that wants to buy a device must first receive approval at a public hearing.

Investigators can target the data of specific phones. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Opening access to information

The state law helped open up some public access to information about how and where the devices are used. Privacy advocates and lawyers have kept up the public pressure in some cities and counties, particularly in the Bay Area, calling on officials to put ordinances and guidelines in place to bar police from collecting data from those not under investigation.

Under most of those policies, officers can use the technology only when it is critical to a case and is approved by higher-ranking officers, or in emergency situations such as natural disasters. Investigators are also required to obtain search warrants. Any data not considered official evidence can’t be sought, recorded or stored. Officers must delete or destroy all information gathered by the equipment related to an investigation at the end of the period in which they’re authorized to use the technology.

Three agencies keep track of when officers use a stingray — the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the San Jose Police Department and the Alameda County district attorney’s office. But their data offer few details about the cases.

In Los Angeles County, a report from the sheriff’s office showed deputies followed state law and obtained a search warrant in nearly all 138 investigations that required a cell site simulator in 2015, and 38 investigations in 2016, the majority of which were murder cases.

In that time, the device helped officers arrest 70 suspects and find one crime victim. Sheriff’s Department officials declined to disclose further information or records on those cases.

Source: L.A. County Sheriff’s Office Ally Levine / @latimesgraphics Stingray use in Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles County asked to use the surveillance equipment for investigations 138 times in 2015 and 38 times in 2016. In 2015 17 Narcotics 16 Assault 9 Robbery 6 Grand theft In 2016 Most common investigations using stingrays Murder 63 Murder 21 Weapons 3 Attempted murder 2 2 Rape 2 Assault* *with a deadly weapon

The Alameda County district attorney’s office, which purchased a device to be operated by the Sheriff’s Department and other area police agencies, said the stingray had not been used as of January.

The San Jose Police Department bought a $500,000 stingray in June 2013, and used it about 20 times between early September 2016 and June 2017.

Law enforcement officers in Oakland and San Jose, as well as several other California cities, say the law requiring them to disclose use of the devices has allowed them to ease community fears over what the technology can and can’t do.

“You watch TV and you’d think that we are sucking their phones dry of all the images, of all the texts, of all the pictures and emails,” said San Jose Police Lt. Steve Lagorio, who crafted guidelines for stingray use with the city attorney’s office. “But we are not. We don’t have that capability.”

The cellphone interceptor at his department is strictly used to target the phones of individual suspects, and Lagorio said he doubted any local law enforcement agencies used the equipment to do much more than that.

A traditional cellphone tower. Cell tower interceptors, often called “stingrays” or “dirtboxes,” tend to be the size of small briefcases and mimic traditional cell towers. (Jeff Roberson / Associated Press)

(Jeff Roberson / AP)

Calls for oversight

Privacy advocates and lawyers say a state agency is needed for oversight to ensure law enforcement agencies are following the law and post their own guidelines.

Most of the records on purchases and grant proposals reviewed by The Times were highly redacted, providing little insight into how their equipment is designed and what it can collect.

The LAPD provided purchase orders and invoices that show the department first obtained price quotes for stingray equipment in 2004, but it is unclear when it acquired the technology. LAPD officials said only that the stingray was not deployed due to technical malfunction issues, but declined to elaborate.

Other records from the Police Department show it obtained another stingray in June 2012, but the department declined to release additional information on the purchase, including its cost.

It was used more than 21 times in routine criminal investigations over four months in 2012, according to LAPD records that were first obtained by the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit that works to advance free speech and open-records laws.

In response to an information request regarding its purchases of stingray devices, the San Francisco Police Department provided heavily redacted records, including a 2012 grant proposal and shipping receipt showing the purchase of “specialized surveillance equipment” in 2007.

The department also gave The Times a document indicating a stingray was bought with 2009 federal grant funds. But a spokesman said the department did not have any public policies on the technology because the equipment was not in use.

Seventeen of the 21 agencies polled by The Times said they did not keep or declined to provide data on how often and in what types of cases they used stingrays.

Privacy advocates point to a loophole in the law that allows some law enforcement agencies to avoid reporting their use of the devices. Police departments that partner with another agency that owns and uses a stingray in an investigation are not required to publish their own guidelines for using the equipment.

The Santa Ana and Fresno police departments, for example, said they did not have any records on the use and policies of surveillance devices. But both departments acknowledge they work with agencies that do have them, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, and might have indirect access to the data they produce.

“Our officers don’t use the equipment, but we often look for fugitive hunters,” Santa Ana Police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said. “Anaheim [police] may have one, the U.S. Marshals may have one.… They do help us catch fugitives, but whether they have one — you’d have to ask them.”

A new proposal by state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), left, would expand the state’s transparency laws on StingRays and extend it to all surveillance devices. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

(Rich Pedroncelli / AP)

Increasing transparency

This legislative session, a new proposal by Sen. Hill would expand the state’s disclosure law on stingrays to all surveillance devices, including facial recognition software, drones and social media monitors.

Senate Bill 21 would require law enforcement agencies to disclose not only the use of the surveillance equipment, but the use of any information obtained from the devices.

Civil rights lawyers and advocates have supported the measure, saying transparency is necessary at a time when concerns over surveillance of immigrant and Muslim communities have risen under the Trump administration.

The legislation was narrowly approved by the state Senate, with heavy opposition from law enforcement officials who argued it would give criminals a road map to police agencies’ crime-fighting technology.

Its prospects of passage in the Legislature are unclear. Hill says he understands the technology has many benefits for law enforcement.

“[But] we need people — we need agencies — to be accountable, and we need civilian bodies to create that accountability standard,” he said.

—————————

FOR THE RECORD

6:31 a.m.: This article reported incorrectly that Daniel Rigmaiden was arrested in Phoenix. He was arrested in Santa Clara.

[email protected]

Twitter: @jazmineulloa

The Trump administration announced Saturday that National Guard troops were being sent to Los Angeles — an action Gov. Gavin Newsom said he opposed. President Trump is activating the Guard by using powers that have been invoked only rarely.

Trump said in a memo to the Defense and Homeland Security departments that he was calling the National Guard into federal service under a provision called Title 10 to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions.”

What is Title 10?

Title 10 provides for activating National Guard troops for federal service. Such Title 10 orders can be used for deploying National Guard members in the United States or abroad.

Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s leading constitutional law scholars, said “for the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling.”

“It is using the military domestically to stop dissent,” said Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “It certainly sends a message as to how this administration is going to respond to protests. It is very frightening to see this done.”

Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border czar,” announced the plan to send the National Guard in an interview Saturday on Fox News as protesters continued confronting immigration agents during raids.

“This is about enforcing the law,” Homan said. “We’re not going to apologize for doing it. We’re stepping up.”

“We’re already ahead of the game. We were already mobilizing,” he added. “We’re gonna bring the National Guard in tonight. We’re gonna continue doing our job. We’re gonna push back on these people.”

Newsom criticized the federal action, saying that local law enforcement was already mobilized and that sending in troops was a move that was “purposefully inflammatory” and would “only escalate tensions.”

The governor called the president and they spoke for about 40 minutes, according to the governor’s office.

Other rarely used powers

Critics have raised concerns that Trump also might try to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to activate troops as part of his campaign to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

The president has the authority under the Insurrection Act to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so hinders the execution of the laws” that any portion of the state’s inhabitants are deprived of a constitutional right and state authorities are unable or unwilling to protect that right.

The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that Trump’s use of the military domestically would be misguided and dangerous.

According to the ACLU, Title 10 activation of National Guard troops has historically been rare and Congress has prohibited troops deployed under the law from providing “direct assistance” to civilian law enforcement — under both a separate provision of Title 10 as well as the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Insurrection Act, however, is viewed as an exception to the prohibitions under the Posse Comitatus Act.

In 1958, President Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision ending racial segregation in schools, and to defend Black students against a violent mob.

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, wrote in a recent article that if Trump were to invoke the Insurrection Act “to activate federalized troops for mass deportation — whether at the border or somewhere else in the country — it would be unprecedented, unnecessary, and wrong.”

Chemerinsky said invoking the Insurrection Act and nationalizing a state’s National Guard has been reserved for extreme circumstances in which there are no other alternatives to maintain the peace.

Chemerinsky said he feared that in this case the Trump administration was seeking “to send a message to protesters of the willingness of the federal government to use federal troops to quell protests.”

In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson requested that President George H.W. Bush use the National Guard to quell the unrest in Los Angeles after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. That was under a different provision of federal law that allows the president to use military force in the United States. That provision applies if a state governor or legislature requests it.

California politics editor Phil Willon contributed to this report.

Budget airline Ryanair is known for its cheap flights across Europe, but some holidaymakers may not be aware of its ban on a certain item that could be in your hand luggage

Ever jetted off on holiday with Ryanair? As bargain-hunting globetrotters will be aware, the airline is a go-to for snagging smashing flight deals throughout Europe. Yet, there’s a lesser-known fact about the low-cost carrier that could catch you off-guard when packing your carry-on.

We’ve all experienced that worrying moment at airport security, mentally checking if every lotion and potion is snug in their transparent bag or recalling if we ditched that water bottle from our backpack. But it turns out there’s a particular item that Ryanair frowns upon, and naturally, we’re all obliged to abide by the established baggage rules, reports the Express.

READ MORE: Vet tells dog owner ‘prepare for the worst’ but 89p-a-day ‘improved condition 100%’

So, what’s this contraband piece? While some UK airports are working towards axing the 100ml liquid restriction, you might need to think twice before slipping a lighter into your travel essentials.

Travel advise from the Government has highlighted the advisories on carrying lighters aboard. The guidance from GOV.UK states: “You should put it inside a resealable plastic bag (like the ones used for liquids), which you must keep on you throughout the flight.”

Yet, despite such counsel, placing the lighter in your carry-on post-security is a no-go. Turning to Ryanair’s own digital domain for further clarity, one finds the item clearly listed under forbidden articles.

Their directive specifies: “You must not carry any of the following items in checked-in luggage or carry-on baggage, or go through security with them on you (for example in your pockets).”

SAN ANSELMO, Calif. — It’s hard to miss Brian Colbert. It’s not just his burly 6-foot-4 frame, his clean-shaven head or the boldly patterned, brightly colored Hawaiian shirts he’s adopted as an unofficial uniform.

Colbert is one of just a small number of Black people who live in wealthy, woodsy and very white Marin County — and the first Black supervisor elected since the county’s founding more than 175 years ago.

He didn’t lean into race, or history, as he campaigned in the fall. He didn’t have to. “As a large Black man,” he said, his physicality and the barrier-breaking nature of his candidacy were self-evident.

Rather, Colbert won after knocking, by his count, on 20,000 doors, wearing out several pairs of size 15 shoes and putting parochial concerns, such as wildfire prevention, disaster preparedness and flood control, at the center of his campaign. He continues, during these early months in office, to focus on a garden variety of municipal issues: housing, traffic, making local government more accessible and responsive.

That’s not to say, however, that Colbert doesn’t have deeply felt thoughts on the precedent his election set, or the significance of the lived experience he brings to office — different from most in this privileged slice of the San Francisco Bay Area — at a time President Trump is turning his back on civil rights and his administration treats diversity, equity and inclusion as though they were four-letter words.

“I think of the challenges, the indignities that my grandparents suffered on a daily basis” living under Jim Crow, Colbert said over lunch recently in his hometown of San Anselmo. He carefully chose his words, at one point resting an index finger on his temple to signal a pause as he gathered his thoughts.

Colbert recalled visits to Savannah, Ga., where he attended Baptist church services with his mother’s parents.

“I remember looking at the faces,” Colbert said, “and to me they were the faces of African Americans waiting for death, because they were aware and knew of the opportunities that had been denied to them simply because of the color of their skin. But what gave them hope was the belief their kids and grandkids would have a better life. I am a product of that hope, in so many ways.”

Colbert, 57, grew up in Bethel, Conn., about 60 miles northeast of New York City. Residents tried to prevent his parents — an accountant and a stay-at-home mom — from moving into the overwhelmingly white community. Neighbors circulated a petition urging the owners to not sell their home to the Black couple. They did so anyway.

Colbert went on to earn degrees in political science and acting, public policy and law. He traveled the world with his wife, a Syrian American, practiced law on Wall Street, ran a chocolate company and a small tech firm. He lived for 3½ years in Turkey, where he taught international law and political science at a private university.

In 2007, when the couple returned to the U.S., they set their sights on the Bay Area, drawn by the weather, the natural beauty and the entrepreneurial spirit that drew countless opportunity seekers before them. (Colbert started wearing Hawaiian shirts on the Silicon Valley conference circuit, after being mistaken one too many times for a security guard.)

In 2013, Colbert, his wife and their daughter settled in San Anselmo, a charmy tree-lined community about 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The relatively short commute to San Francisco, where he manages a medical concierge service, the quality schools and the vast open space were big attractions — though Colbert knew he and his family would stand out, just as he had in Bethel.

San Anselmo, with its rugged hillsides and red-brick downtown, has about 13,000 residents. The Black population is less than 2%. But Colbert’s extensive travels and life overseas convinced him that people “on a certain level [are] the same” everywhere — “warm, welcoming, kind, generous, helpful.”

He had an abiding interest in policy and public service, so in 2013 Colbert joined the city’s Economic Development Council. Four years later, he was elected to the Town Council. He served seven years, one in the rotating position of mayor, before running for the nonpartisan Board of Supervisors.

Inevitably, he encountered racism along the way. There were threatening phone calls and emails. He got the occasional side-eye as he canvassed door-to-door in all-white neighborhoods. For the most part, however, “people were incredibly pleasant” and campaigning “was no more challenging … than it would be [for] any candidate.”

On a recent sunny afternoon, Colbert was greeted heartily — “Hey, Brian!” “Hey, supervisor!” — as he strode past Town Hall to Imagination Park, a gift the city’s most famous resident, filmmaker George Lucas, bequeathed along with life-sized statues of Yoda and Indiana Jones.

These are fraught times. The reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd has given way to a backlash and a president who disdains efforts at equality, complains of anti-white prejudice and purges powerful Black men and women in the name of a mythical colorblind society.

Given a chance to speak directly to Trump, what would Colbert — a Democrat — say?

“Mr. President, thank you for your service,” he began. “Being in public offices is hard and difficult.”

He paused. Several beats passed. A waiter cleared away dishes.

“I would encourage you to change your tone, certainly publicly, and broaden your perspective and embrace those who might have a different perspective than you,” Colbert went on. “Many people have come to this country and they’ve added value. They’ve made this country for the better.

“Remember those who don’t necessarily have easy access to power. Remember those who are struggling. Focus on those who are most vulnerable and are highly dependent on the government to help them through a short amount of time. I mean, the American experiment is incredible. Keep that in mind. A little empathy. Simple acts of kindness. Place yourself into someone else’s shoes.

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

SACRAMENTO — Nearly six months after a firestorm ravaged communities across Los Angeles, California lawmakers are crafting legislation to try to protect the state insurance program for high-risk homes from financial collapse.

A bill, AB 226, sponsored by Assemblymembers Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier) and David A. Alvarez (D-San Diego), would make the state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, eligible for loans and bonds from the state-backed California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank to avoid running out of money after a disaster.

Alvarez proposed the measure last year but it failed to pass. Despite receiving unanimous support in the Assembly, the bill never reached the Senate floor for a vote before the end of the 2024 legislative session.

If the measure had passed last year and been signed into law by the governor, the FAIR Plan would have had more flexibility to weather the massive number of claims filed after the January firestorms, Alvarez said.

Instead, the FAIR plan was forced to imposed an extra $1 billion in total assessments on insurers that provide homeowners policies in California. To recoup those expenses, insurance companies are expected to hike rates on homeowners through monthly surcharges.

“Had they had this option available to them … they would not be having to hit consumers with price increases on the private market now,” Alvarez said.

AB 226 is one of many wildfire-related bills still winding their way through the slow legislative process. If passed into law, the measures would protect homeowners from price gouging after disasters, streamline the process for filing claims for lost property and offer financial protections for disaster victims.

Lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom in January approved $2.5 billion in wildfire aid after the Palisades and Eaton fires killed more than two dozen people and became the second and third most destructive fires in state history. Legislative leaders at the time signaled for a swift, bipartisan approach to the disaster.

“Tens of thousands of our neighbors, our families and friends, they need help. This means that we need to be able to move with urgency, put aside our differences, and be laser-focused on delivering the financial resources, delivering the boots on the ground that are needed and the policy relief that is needed to get neighborhoods cleaned up and communities rebuilt,” Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) said after it passed.

California’s last-ditch home insurer, the FAIR Plan, is meant as a backup for properties deemed high-risk and uninsurable by private companies. A Times analysis found that within the Eaton and Palisades fire zones, the number of homes on the plan nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024 and the plan has become one of the state’s largest insurers.

Amid lawsuits alleging collusion between private insurers and the FAIR Plan and policyholders raising concerns about delays in payments and smoke damage investigations, lawmakers and insurance advocates have repeatedly called for better safety nets — like the one proposed in AB 226 — to keep the insurer solvent in emergencies and viable as a long-term solution to the state’s home insurance problem.

This year, Alvarez was joined on the bill by Calderon, chair of the Assembly’s insurance committee. It passed through the Assembly at the beginning of March but has not yet seen its first Senate committee.

Alvarez celebrated the bill’s swift passage through the Assembly and hopes the Senate will work to do the same, “God forbid, if it has to be used because of a devastating fire this summer,” he said.

Other major wildfire bills being considered by lawmakers include:

• AB 493, which would require lenders to pay policyholders interest on disaster insurance payouts that are held in escrow. The measure, authored by Assemblymember John Harabedian (D-Pasadena) would close a loophole in existing law, which already requires interest payments on other escrowed funds.
• AB 597, also introduced by Harabedian, which would keep public insurance adjusters from gouging homeowners, especially after a natural disaster or state of emergency.
• SB 495, which would prevent insurers from requiring an itemized list of personal property losses from policyholders during a state of emergency, and would require insurers to provide extensions where reconstruction is delayed. The bill, introduced by state Sen. Benjamin Allen — who represents the Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica areas — passed a Senate floor vote on Tuesday and is headed to the Assembly.

Most of the pending legislation won’t directly support survivors of the Palisades and Eaton fires but are still important to the rebuilding process, said Maryam Zar, president emeritus of the Pacific Palisades Community Council and founder of the Palisades Recovery Coalition.

The new laws would help prevent and prepare for future fires, she said, and are a show of goodwill to the communities that are suffering still.

Some other fire relief measures focus on easing the permit process for rebuilding, while others extend provisions set by Newsom during the state of emergency — easing tenancy rights for people staying in temporary housing for longer than 30 days, shortening the permit approval timeline and securing mortgage forbearance for destroyed properties for up to a year after the disaster. Others look to address staffing issues for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection as fire season turns into a year-round threat.

“Wildfire survivors continue to face housing insecurity, financial strain, and emotional trauma long after the immediate danger has passed,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said in a statement. “These State bills represent a commitment to meeting people where they are — actively in recovery, rebuilding their lives, and in need of our long-term support.”

The California Public Utilities Commission failed to abide by state law when it slashed financial incentives for residential rooftop solar panels in 2022, environmental groups argued before the California Supreme Court Wednesday.

The commission’s policy, which took effect in April 2023, cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending power they don’t need to the electric grid by as much as 80%.

In arguments before the court, the environmental groups said the decision has stymied efforts to get homeowners and businesses to install the climate-friendly panels.

The commission violated state law, the groups argued, by not considering all the benefits of the solar panels in its decision and by not ensuring that rooftop solar systems could continue to expand in disadvantaged communities.

More than two million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal set by a 2018 law of using only carbon-free energy by 2045.

On the other side of the courtroom battle were lawyers from Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, arguing that the commission’s five members, all pointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, had followed the law in making their decision.

In briefs filed before Wednesday’s oral arguments, the government lawyers sided with those from the state’s three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Mica Moore, deputy solicitor general, said at the hearing in downtown Los Angles that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in “a cost shift” of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This was raising electric bills, she said, especially hurting low-income electric customers.

The credits for the energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid are valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commissioners have voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested.

The environmental groups and other critics of the commission’s decision have argued that there is no “cost shift.” They say that the commission failed to consider in its calculations the many benefits of the rooftop solar panels, including how they lower the amount of transmission lines and other infrastructure the utilities need to build.

“The cost shift narrative is a red herring,” argued plaintiff’s attorney Malinda Dickenson, representing the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group and the Protect Our Communities Foundation.

Moore countered by saying the commission doesn’t have to consider all the possible societal or private benefits of the rooftop panels.

For example, even though the rooftop panels could result in conserving land that was otherwise needed for industrial scale solar farms, the government lawyers argued in their brief, the commission was not obligated to consider that value in its calculation of the amount of costs the rooftop panels shift to other customers.

The government lawyers also said the commission had created other programs beyond the electric bill credits to help disadvantaged communities afford the solar systems.

The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid.

During the oral arguments, the seven justices focused on a legal question of whether a state appeals court erred when it ruled in January 2024 against the environmental groups and said that the court must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters.

“This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission’s work,” the appeals court concluded in its opinion.

The environmental groups argue the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission’s decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies.

Moore told the seven justices that the appeals court had made the correct decision to defer to the commission.

Not all justices seemed to agree with that.

“But we’re pretty good about figuring out what the law says,” Associate Justice Carol Corrigan said to Moore during the proceeding. “Why should we defer on that to the commission?”

The justices will weigh the arguments made by both sides and issue a decision in the next 90 days.

The big utilities have for decades tried to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities’ sale of electricity.

On another front, the state’s three big utilities are now lobbying in Sacramento to reduce credits for Californians who installed their panels before April 15, 2023. The commission’s decision in 2022 left the incentives in place for those panel owners for 20 years after their purchase.

Early this year, Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier), a former Southern California Edison executive, introduced a bill that would have ended the program for all solar owners who installed their systems by April 2023 after 10 years. In face of opposition and protests by solar owners, Calderon amended the bill so it would end the program — where credits are valued at the retail electric rate — only for those selling their homes.

Calderon said the bill would save the state’s electric customers $2.5 billion over the next 18 years.

On Monday, Roderick Brewer, an Edison lobbyist, sent an email to Assemblymembers, urging them to vote for the bill known as AB 942. “Save Electricity Customers Billions, Promote Equity,” he urged in the email.

The Assembly voted 46 to 14 to approve the bill on Tuesday night, sending it to the state Senate for consideration.

The timing of the vote surprised opponents of the bill. They expected a vote late this week because of rules that allow more time for bills to be reviewed after they are amended. Calderon amended the bill late Monday.

Nick Miller, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, said Calderon had asked for a waiver of the rules so that it could be voted on Tuesday night.

Such waivers, Miller said, are “not uncommon.”

WASHINGTON — A Texas hospital that repeatedly sent a woman who was bleeding and in pain home without ending her nonviable, life-threatening pregnancy violated the law, according to a newly released federal investigation.

The government’s findings, which have not been previously reported, were a small victory for 36-year-old Kyleigh Thurman, who ultimately lost part of her reproductive system after being discharged without any help from her hometown emergency room for her dangerous ectopic pregnancy.

But a new policy the Trump administration announced on Tuesday has thrown into doubt the federal government’s oversight of hospitals that deny women emergency abortions, even when they are at risk for serious infection, organ loss or severe hemorrhaging.

Thurman had hoped the federal government’s investigation, which issued a report in April after concluding its inquiry last year, would send a clear message that ectopic pregnancies must be treated by hospitals in Texas, which has one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.

“I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through this,” Thurman said in an interview with the Associated Press from her Texas home this week. “I put a lot of the responsibility on the state of Texas and policy makers and the legislators that set this chain of events off.”

Uncertainty regarding emergency abortion access

Women around the country have been denied emergency abortions for their life-threatening pregnancies after states swiftly enacted abortion restrictions in response to a 2022 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three appointees of President Trump.

The guidance issued by the Biden administration in 2022 was an effort to preserve access to emergency abortions for extreme cases in which women were experiencing medical emergencies. It directed hospitals — even ones in states with severe restrictions — to provide abortions in those emergency cases. If hospitals did not comply, they would be in violation of a federal law and risk losing some federal funds.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the law and inspecting hospitals, announced it would revoke the Biden-era guidance around emergency abortions.

The law, which requires doctors to provide stabilizing treatment, was one of the few ways that Thurman was able to hold the emergency room accountable after she didn’t receive any help from staff at Ascension Seton Williamson in Round Rock, Texas, in February 2023, a few months after Texas enacted its strict abortion ban.

An ectopic pregnancy left untreated

Emergency room staff observed that Thurman’s hormone levels had dropped, a pregnancy was not visible in her uterus and a structure was blocking her fallopian tube — all telltale signs of an ectopic pregnancy, when a fetus implants outside of the uterus and has no room to grow. If left untreated, ectopic pregnancies can rupture, causing organ damage, hemorrhage or even death.

Thurman, however, was sent home and given a pamphlet on miscarriage for her first pregnancy. She returned three days later, still bleeding, and was given an injected drug intended to end the pregnancy, but it was too late. Days later, she showed up again at the emergency room, bleeding out because the fertilized egg growing on Thurman’s fallopian tube ruptured it. She underwent an emergency surgery that removed part of her reproductive system.

CMS launched its investigation of how Ascension Seton Williamson handled Thurman’s case late last year, shortly after she filed a complaint. Investigators concluded the hospital failed to give her a proper medical screening exam, including an evaluation with an OB-GYN. The hospital violated the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment to all patients. Thurman was “at risk for deterioration of her health and wellbeing as a result of an untreated medical condition,” the investigation said in its report, which was publicly released last month.

Ascension, a vast hospital system that has facilities across multiple states, did not respond to questions about Thurman’s case, saying only that it “is committed to providing high-quality care to all who seek our services.”

Penalties for doctors, hospital staff

Doctors and legal experts have warned abortion restrictions like the one Texas enacted have discouraged emergency room staff from aborting dangerous and nonviable pregnancies, even when a woman’s life is imperiled. The stakes are especially high in Texas, where doctors face up to 99 years in prison if convicted of performing an illegal abortion. Lawmakers in the state are weighing a law that would remove criminal penalties for doctors who provide abortions in certain medical emergencies.

“We see patients with miscarriages being denied care, bleeding out in parking lots. We see patients with nonviable pregnancies being told to continue those to term,” said Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights that represented Thurman. “This is not, maybe, what some people thought abortion bans would look like, but this is the reality.”

The Biden administration routinely warned hospitals that they need to provide abortions when a woman’s health was in jeopardy, even suing Idaho over its state law that initially prohibited nearly all abortions, unless a woman’s life was on the line.

Questions remain about hospital investigations

But CMS’ announcement on Tuesday raises questions about whether such investigations will continue if hospitals do not provide abortions for women in medical emergencies.

The agency said it will still enforce the law, “including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy.”

While states like Texas have clarified that ectopic pregnancies can legally be treated with abortions, the laws do not provide for every complication that might arise during a pregnancy. Several women in Texas have sued the state for its law, which has prevented women from terminating pregnancies in cases where their fetuses had deadly fetal anomalies or they went into labor too early for the fetus to survive.

Thurman worries pregnant patients with serious complications still won’t be able to get the help they may need in Texas emergency rooms.

“You cannot predict the ways a pregnancy can go,” Thurman said. “It can happen to anyone, still. There’s still so many ways in which pregnancies that aren’t ectopic can be deadly.”

Seitz writes for the Associated Press.

Several Vietnamese American-owned nail salons in Orange County have sued California, alleging the state’s labor code is discriminating against their businesses.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on Friday, alleges that the state’s labor code violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by forcing nail technicians to be classified as employees.

The suit argues that professionals in the beauty industry for years have operated as independent contractors, renting space in a salon and bringing in their own clients. That changed at the beginning of 2025, when nail technicians under the labor code became required to be classified as employees, the lawsuit said.

State Assemblyman Tri Ta (R-Westminster), who represents Little Saigon and surrounding communities, said his office has fielded much concern from Vietnamese American nail salon owners.

“Their lives have turned upside down overnight,” Ta said at a news conference Monday morning. “It is not just unfair, it is discrimination.”

The switch in labor law came in 2019 when Assembly Bill 5, a sweeping law governing worker classification rules across various industries, was approved. It codified a California Supreme Court decision creating a stricter test to judge whether a worker should be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor.

AB 5 sought to crack down on industries in which many workers are misclassified as independent contractors, who are not afforded protections including minimum wage, overtime pay and workers’ compensation that employees have access to. But various industries have said AB 5 targets them unfairly, creating an uneven playing field for businesses.

Some professions received carve-outs, including doctors, accountants, real estate agents and hairdressers. Others such as truckers, commercial janitors and physical therapists must abide by the tighter classification rules.

Some implementation of the law was staggered to give industries, including nail technicians, time to adapt.

But Ân Tran, who owns two franchisee locations of Happy Nails & Spa that are among the businesses suing the state, said the law remains burdensome. Hiring employees is more costly, and it’s unfair that businesses hiring hairdressers, aestheticians and other beauty workers aren’t subject to the requirement, he said.

“We don’t have customers all the time. That’s going to cost us a lot more to pay them for the downtime when they don’t have any customers,” Tran said in an interview.

The requirement also defies the flexible work culture and control over their clients that many manicurists prefer, Tran said.

Emily Micelle was among several manicurists who spoke in support of the salon owners’ lawsuit at the Monday news conference.

“No one forced me to be here today. I chose to be here because I want to express my side of the story,” Micelle said. “Being [an independent contractor] means I can work for myself, I can be my own boss, I can create my own branding within the business, I choose my own hours, I choose my own clients. … The law means to protect us workers, but [being an employee] doesn’t work for everyone.”

The lawsuit describes how the nail salon industry in California became dominated by Vietnamese workers in recent decades, when Vietnamese refugees began fleeing to the U.S. in large numbers in 1975 after the fall of Saigon in America’s failed military intervention in Southeast Asia.

The industry “has become synonymous with the Vietnamese community,” the lawsuit said, with more than 82% of nail technicians in California being Vietnamese American and some 85% women.

The legal action highlights the tension between how small businesses can serve as a pathway for immigrants and others to build wealth, and how workers at times might have little formal recourse for low wages or unsafe work conditions, experts have said.

Researchers with the UCLA Labor Center last year analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data and released a report estimating that the hourly median wage for nail salon workers in 2021 was $10.94, below the then-$13 minimum wage for small businesses.

In 2017, four women sued a salon in Tustin, alleging that the owners had created bogus time records and paychecks to create an illusion that manicurists were paid lawfully by the hour, but instead workers were compensated based on a 60% commission system where their pay was further deducted for using business supplies, such as spa chairs.

Businesses that filed suit include multiple locations of Blue Nail Bar, Happy Nails & Spa and Holly & Hudson Nail Lounge.

WASHINGTON — A closely divided Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a 2nd Amendment challenge to the bans on semiautomatic rifles in Maryland, California and eight other blue states.

Gun rights advocates say these AR-15s are owned by millions of Americans, and they argue the 2nd Amendment protects weapons that are “in common use by law-abiding citizens.”

But they fell one vote short of winning a hearing on the question before the Supreme Court.

Three conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — voted to hear the 2nd Amendment challenge.

But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh refused for now to cast the key fourth vote. He called the lower-court ruling upholding Maryland’s ban “questionable,” but agreed with the majority in turning down the appeal for now.

“In my view, this court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two,” Kavanaugh said.

The closely watched appeal had been pending since December, and the outcome suggests that the majority, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., is not ready to strike down state laws that restrict semiautomatic guns.

Monday’s no-comment order lets stand laws in Maryland and Rhode Island that forbid the sale or possession of “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines.

California adopted the nation’s first ban on assault weapons in 1989. Since then, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Washington have enacted similar laws, all of which would have been struck down if Maryland’s law were ruled unconstitutional.

Lawmakers in California and nine other Democratic-led states say these rapid-fire weapons are especially dangerous and not needed for self-defense.

Maryland said its ban applies to “certain highly dangerous, military-style assault weapons of the sort used in a series of highly publicized mass shootings.”

The case tested the reach of the 2nd Amendment and its “right to keep and bear arms.”

For more than a decade, the justices have turned away gun-rights appeals that challenged local or state bans on assault weapons.

In 2008, the court ruled for the first time that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to self-defense, but its constitutional rulings since then have been modest in their impact.

The justices struck down city ordinances in Washington and Chicago that prohibited private possession of handguns, and they ruled states may not deny law-abiding citizens a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

In opinion polls, most Americans are opposed to a ban on handgun possession but they support a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles.

Maryland passed its ban on “assault weapons” after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, where 20 children and six school employees were killed.

The law was upheld last year in an opinion written by a prominent conservative judge.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee who was a finalist for a Supreme Court nomination in 2005, said the AR-15, AK-47 and similar rapid-fire rifles are not protected by the 2nd Amendment.

“They are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense,” he wrote in a 9-5 decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. “We decline to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes.”

The dissenters said the 2nd Amendment protects the right to the “arms” that are in common use.

“Today, the AR-15 and its variants are one of the most popular and widely owned firearms in the Nation,” wrote Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee.

“As of 2021, there are at least 28 million AR-style semiautomatic rifles in circulation. For context, this means that there are more AR-style rifles in the civilian market than there are Ford F-Series pickup trucks on the road — the most popular truck in America.”

Three years ago, the court said in an opinion by Thomas that the 2nd Amendment should be interpreted based on the nation’s history and tradition of gun regulations.

However, the two sides in the Maryland case differed on what to glean from that history.

Gun-rights advocates said there was no early history of laws banning common firearms.

But some judges and state lawyers said the history shows that when new dangers arose — including stored gunpowder, dynamite and machine guns — new restrictions were written into law. If so, that would support new laws adopted in response to the danger posed by rapid-fire weapons.

The justices denied review in the case of Snope vs. Brown.

When a landmark state environmental law threatened to halt enrollment at UC Berkeley, legislators stepped in and wrote an exemption. When the Sacramento Kings were about to leave town, lawmakers brushed the environmental rules aside for the team’s new arena. When the law stymied the renovation of the state Capitol, they acted once again.

Lawmakers’ willingness to poke holes in the California Environmental Quality Act for specific projects without overhauling the law in general has led commentators to describe the changes as “Swiss cheese CEQA.”

Now, after years of nibbling at it, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature are going in with the knives.

Two proposals have advanced rapidly through the Legislature: one to wipe away the law for most urban housing developments, the other to weaken the rules for most everything else. Legal experts say the efforts would be the most profound changes to CEQA in generations. Newsom not only endorsed the bills last month, but also put them on a fast track to approval by proposing their passage as part of the state budget, which bypasses normal committee hearings and means they could become law within weeks.

“This is the biggest opportunity to do something big and bold, and the only impediment is us,” Newsom said when announcing his support for the legislation.

Nearly the entire 55-year history of the California Environmental Quality Act has featured dueling narratives about its effects. On its face the law is simple: It requires proponents to disclose and, if possible, lessen the environmental effects of a project. In practice, this has led to tomes of environmental impact reports, including volumes of soil testing and traffic modeling studies, and sometimes years of disputes in court. Many credit CEQA for helping preserve the state’s scenic vistas and waterways while others decry its ability to thwart housing and infrastructure projects, including the long-delayed and budget-busting high-speed rail.

On the latter point, evidence supports both sides of the argument. One study by UC Berkeley law professors found that fewer than 3% of housing projects in many big cities across the state over a three-year period faced any litigation. But some contend that the threat of a lawsuit is enough to chill development, and examples continue to pile up of CEQA stalling construction of homeless shelters, a food bank and child-care center.

What’s clear is that CEQA has become embedded as a key point of leverage in California’s development process. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass once recalled that when she worked as a community organizer in the 1990s, Westside land-use attorneys who were successful in stopping development in their communities taught her how to use CEQA to block liquor stores in South L.A.

Organized labor learned to use the law to its advantage and became one of its most ardent supporters, alongside environmentalists — major constituencies within Democratic politics in the state. Besides carve-outs for individual projects in recent years, lawmakers have passed CEQA streamlining for certain kinds of housing and other developments. These fast-track measures can be used only if proponents agree to pay higher wages to construction workers or set aside a portion of the project for low-income housing on land considered the least environmentally sensitive.

Labor groups’ argument is simple, said Pete Rodriguez, vice president-Western District of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners: CEQA exemptions save time and money for developers, so some benefit should go to workers.

“When you expedite the process and you let a developer get the TSA pass, for example, to get quicker through the line at the airport, there should be labor standards attached to that as well,” Rodriguez said at a Los Angeles Business Council panel in April.

The two bills now under debate — Assembly Bill 609 by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) and Senate Bill 607 by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) — break with that tradition. They propose broad CEQA changes without any labor or other requirements.

Wicks’ bill would exempt most urban housing developments from CEQA. Wiener’s legislation, among other provisions, would in effect lessen the number of projects, housing and otherwise, that would need to complete a full environmental review, narrowing the law’s scope.

“Both are much, much more far-reaching than anything that has been proposed in living memory to deal with CEQA,” said Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor who tracks state environmental and housing legislation.

The legislation wouldn’t have much of an effect on rebuilding after L.A.’s wildfires, as single-family home construction is exempt and Newsom already waived other parts of the law by executive order.

The environment inside and outside the Legislature has become friendlier to more aggressive proposals. “Abundance,” a recent book co-written by New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein, makes the case that CEQA and other laws supported by Democrats have hamstrung the ability to build housing and critical infrastructure projects, citing specifically California’s affordability crisis and challenges with high-speed rail, in ways that have stifled the American Dream and the party’s political fortunes.

The idea has become a cause celebre in certain circles. Newsom invited Klein onto his podcast. This spring, Klein met with Wicks and Wiener and other lawmakers, including Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, respectively.

Wicks and Wiener are veteran legislators and former chairs of legislative housing committees who have written much of the prior CEQA streamlining legislation. Even though it took bruising battles to pass previous bills, the resulting production hasn’t come close to resolving the state’s shortage, Wicks said.

“We need housing on a massive scale,” Wicks said.

To opponents of the bills, including dozens of environmental and labor groups, the effort misplaces the source of building woes and instead would restrict one of the few ways community groups can shape development.

Asha Sharma, state policy manager for Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, said her organization uses CEQA to reduce the polluting effects of projects in neighborhoods already overburdened by environmental problems.

The proposed changes would empower public agencies and developers at the expense of those who would be affected by their decisions, she said.

“What folks aren’t realizing is that along with the environmental regulations comes a lot of public transparency and public engagement,” said Sharma, whose group advocates for low-income Californians in rural areas. “When you’re rolling back CEQA, you’re rolling back that too.”

Because of the hefty push behind the legislation, Sharma expects the bills will be approved in some form. But it remains uncertain how they might change. Newsom, the two lawmakers and legislative leaders are negotiating amendments.

Wicks said her bill will not require developers to reserve part of their projects for low-income housing to receive a CEQA exemption; cities can mandate that on their own, she said. Wicks indicated, however, that labor standards could be part of a final deal, saying she’s “had some conversations in that regard.”

Wiener’s bill was gutted in a legislative fiscal committee last month, with lawmakers saying they wanted to meet infrastructure and affordability needs “without compromising environmental protections.” Afterward, Wiener and McGuire, the Senate leader, released a joint statement declaring their intent to pass a version of the legislation as part of the budget, as the governor had proposed.

Wiener remained committed to the principles in his initial bill.

“What I can say is that I’m highly optimistic that we will pass strong changes to CEQA that will make it easier and faster to deliver all of the good things that make Californians’ lives better and more affordable,” Wiener said.

Should the language in the final deal be anything like what’s been discussed, the changes to CEQA would be substantial, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. Still, he said the law’s effects on housing development were overblown. Many other issues, such as local zoning restrictions, lack of funding and misaligned tax incentives, play a much larger role in limiting construction long before projects can even get to the point where CEQA becomes a concern, he said.

“CEQA is the last resort of a NIMBY,” said Elkind, referring to residents who try to block housing near them. “It’s almost like we’re working backwards here.”

Wicks agreed that the Legislature would have to do more to strip away regulations that make it harder to build housing. But she argued that the CEQA changes would take away a major barrier: the uncertainty developers face from legal threats.

Passing major CEQA reforms would demonstrate lawmakers’ willingness to tackle some of the state’s toughest challenges, she said.

“It sends a signal to the world that we’re ready to build,” Wicks said.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office sent a letter on Friday requesting that the Trump administration remove California from its list of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.

The Department of Homeland Security issued the list this week in accordance with an executive order President Trump signed in April that directs federal agencies to identify funding to sanctuary cities, counties and states that could be suspended or terminated.

In the letter, Newsom’s office contended that federal court rulings have rejected the argument that California law limiting law enforcement coordination with immigration authorities “unlawfully obstructs the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

“This list is another gimmick — even the Trump Administration has admitted California law doesn’t block the federal government from doing its job,” Newsom said in a statement. “Most immigrants are hardworking taxpayers and part of American families. When they feel safe reporting crimes, we’re all safer.”

California is among more than a half-dozen states that were included on the list for self-identifying as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants. Forty-eight California counties and dozens of cities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco, were also on the Trump administration’s list of more than 500 total jurisdictions nationwide.

The state strengthened its sanctuary policies under a law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown that took effect 2018 after Trump won office the first time. Then, state officials tried to strike a balance between preventing local law enforcement resources from being used to round up otherwise law-abiding immigrants without obstructing the ability of the federal government to enforce its laws within the state.

Local police, for example, cannot arrest someone on a deportation order alone or hold someone for extra time to transfer to immigration authorities. But state law does permit local governments to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer people to federal custody if they have been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors within a given time frame. The limitations do not apply to state prison officials, who can coordinate with federal authorities.

The law has been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration’s campaign to ramp up deportations, which the president has cast as an effort to rid the country of criminals despite also targeting immigrants with no prior convictions.

In a release announcing the list, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said politicians in sanctuary communities are “endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens.”

“We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law,” Noem said. “President Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first. Sanctuary politicians are on notice: comply with federal law.”

The Trump administration’s assertion that California’s sanctuary policies protect criminals from deportation appears to irk Newsom, who has repeatedly denied the allegation. Trump’s threat to withhold federal dollars could also pose a challenge for a governor proposing billions in cuts to state programs to offset a state budget deficit for the year ahead.

Homeland Security said jurisdictions will receive a formal notice of non-compliance with federal law and demand that cities, counties and states immediately revise their policies.

A coalition of airlines, hotels and concession companies at Los Angeles International Airport filed paperwork Thursday to force a citywide vote on a new ordinance hiking the minimum wage of hotel and airport workers to $30 per hour by 2028.

The group, known as the L.A. Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress, is hoping to persuade voters to repeal the ordinance. But first, the alliance would need to gather about 93,000 signatures within 30 days to qualify the measure for the ballot in an upcoming election.

Phil Singer, a spokesperson for the alliance, said the wage increase “threatens revenue Los Angeles urgently needs” — and its standing as the host of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

“Small businesses will be forced to shut down, workers will lose their jobs, and the economic fallout will stretch across the city,” Singer said in an email. “We’re fighting for all of it: the city’s future, the jobs that sustain our communities, and the millions of guests the tourism industry proudly serves year after year.”

The new ballot measure campaign comes just two days after Mayor Karen Bass signed the minimum wage legislation into law.

The wage ordinance has been hotly opposed by an array of L.A. business organizations, which argue that it increases wages in the tourism industry too much and too quickly. However, it was welcomed by unions representing hotel and airport employees, which have supported many of the politicians who backed the measure.

The alliance’s campaign committee has received major funding from Delta Airlines, United Airlines and the American Hotel & Lodging Assn., Singer said. The group’s petition, submitted to the city clerk’s office, was signed by five businesspeople, including Greg Plummer, operator of an LAX concession company; Mark Beccaria, a partner with the Hotel Angeleno on L.A.’s Westside; and Alec Mesropian, advocacy manager with the organization known as BizFed.

The alliance is targeting a law that’s slated to push the hourly minimum wage to $22.50 on July 1 for housekeepers, parking attendants and hotel restaurant workers, as well as LAX skycaps, baggage handlers and concession employees. The wage would jump to $25 in 2026 and $27.50 in 2027.

The wage increase was spearheaded by Unite Here Local 11, the hotel and restaurant worker union, and by Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West, which represents private-sector airport workers.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, called the business group’s proposal “shameful” and promised his union’s members would go “toe to toe out on the streets” with the alliance’s signature gatherers.

“The hotel industry’s greed is limitless,” Petersen said. “They would rather spend millions getting them to sign this petition than pay their workers enough to live in Los Angeles. It’s shameful, but we’re confident that Angelenos will see through their deceptions and stand with workers.”

Under the city’s laws, hotel and airport workers have minimum wages that are higher than those who are employed by other industries.

The hotel minimum wage, approved by the council in 2014, is currently $20.32 per hour. The minimum wage for private-sector employees at LAX is $25.23 per hour, which includes a $5.95 hourly healthcare payment.

For nearly everyone else in L.A., the hourly minimum wage is $17.28, 78 cents higher than the state’s. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Backers of the airport and hotel minimum wage hikes say they will help some of the region’s lowest paid workers cover the rising cost of rent and food, while also giving them more disposable income to spend locally, delivering a boost to the region’s economy.

Detractors say it will undermine efforts by L.A.’s tourism industry to recover from the decline in business that was sparked by the outbreak of COVID-19 five years ago. They contend the ordinance will lead to layoffs, while also chilling development of new hotels.

The ordinance also requires airport and hotel businesses to provide an hourly healthcare payment — on top of the minimum wage — that starts at $7.65 in July and is expected to go up each year. (Hotels will be exempted from that requirement until 2026.)

Once the healthcare requirement is included, some businesses will be required to pay their workers an additional 60% over a three-year period, opponents of the wage increase say.