Politics Desk

California Democrats, poised to play a prominent role in the next Congress, plan to use their newly won power to investigate President Trump over allegations that corruption, cronyism and self-dealing enriched the president, his family and his allies while housing, fuel and food costs skyrocketed for everyday Americans.

The potential targets are wide-ranging, from immigration raids and the fatal shootings of protesters by federal agents to Trump’s ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein and billions of dollars in investment made by Middle Eastern countries allegedly seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy.

The war with Iran, which increased oil prices, the military operation in Venezuela and dizzying tariff policies are also expected to come under intense scrutiny.

However, Democrats are notably focused on investigations, not the other “I-word” — impeachment.

“That’s not on my bingo card,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), who is expected to become House Democratic whip. “We’re focused on accountability, and we’re focused on holding people accountable, and that should be to follow the evidence wherever it leads … but that’s not anything that House Democrats are discussing at this point.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who played a leading role in the impeachment proceedings against Trump in 2020, said the priority is to alleviate the affordability crisis, but that the administration’s actions must be scrutinized for causing it.

“Our oversight agenda should be focused on corruption that has led to higher costs,” said Schiff, who has been making calls to colleagues about his desire to serve in leadership next year given his fundraising prowess, his visibility communicating the party’s priorities and his oversight experience, according to a source close to the senator. “Corruption involving the oil industry, allowing the oil industry to gouge consumers, corruption that is costing taxpayers by raising the cost of federal contracts because of kickbacks or sweetheart deals or contributions to ballrooms.”

Judicial appointments are also a priority for California’s two senators, who could review appointments to the federal courts across the nation as well as Supreme Court nominees if any of the nine justices retire in the next two years. Schiff, who lives in Burbank, serves alongside Sen. Alex Padilla of Porter Ranch on the Judiciary Committee.

Committee Democrats, Schiff said, would be able to block federal judicial appointments of “incompetent partisans … who have no business being on the bench, and in any other administration would have never been nominated.”

Schiff also hopes to pursue an enforceable code of ethics and term limits on the high court. (The Supreme Court has a code of conduct but has resisted the idea of adopting one written by Congress.)

Democrats’ sweeping victories in the Nov. 3 election may prompt a significant upheaval in the already-fraught power dynamic between Trump and Schiff.

Trump, who was acquitted by the Senate in two first-term impeachments, has relentlessly attacked Schiff, from mocking him as “Shifty Schiff” to ordering investigations into unfounded allegations that he committed mortgage fraud.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) speaks at a Texas Democratic Party news conference in Texas in September.

(Gabriela Passos / Associated Press)

Trump’s response to this new round of Democratic-led investigations is expected to be just as aggressive. On Monday, White House counsel Will Scharf sent Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), who is expected to chair the House’s chief investigative committee, a letter warning that he and his Democratic colleagues could face criminal scrutiny over their planned investigations.

Shortly after the election, Garcia made it clear that the incoming Democratic-led Congress will hold the Trump administration to account. “LAWYER UP,” he posted on social media.

“Taking on the Trumps and their grift is taking on corruption, but it’s also going to lower your costs,” Garcia said. “Prices are up at the gas pump because of Trump’s corruption in Iran, because Trump is paying off oil companies in Venezuela while they’re making record profits.

“While the Trumps get richer on their crypto schemes, the American public is struggling with gas and groceries. It’s all connected.”

The White House dismissed Democrats’ plans as counterproductive to the nation’s economy.

“As the President has said, he’s willing to work with anyone to continue delivering victories for hardworking Americans,” spokesperson Lauren Bis said in an email. “If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”

After Trump threatened Democrats who pursue investigations, Garcia sought to turn it to his advantage.

“Because I promised that our incoming House Oversight majority will hold him accountable, investigate his administration’s abuses, and pull back the curtain on his corruption, he is trying to use the legal system as a weapon to stop us,” Garcia wrote in a fundraising email to supporters.

While some ballots are still being counted, Democrats had won 256 House seats to the Republicans’ 169, as of Friday, according to the Associated Press. In the Senate, Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them had secured 55 seats to the GOP’s 44.

The Democratic gains in traditionally Republican states and congressional districts could be short-lived, however, if the incoming Congress is consumed by political revenge and fails to address voters’ economic concerns.

“Managing a very large caucus that represents America is going to be thrilling and important as we change America’s direction to focus on affordability and accountability,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), who is expected to lead the House Democratic caucus.

The former prosecutor said he views an impeachment as akin to an indictment, which shouldn’t be pursued based on news reports but on witnesses’ testimony, documents and tangible evidence.

“After we do those investigations, then we can make a decision,” Lieu said. “I absolutely support investigating the corruption in the Trump administration, and then we can see where that leads.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) faced the challenges of balancing the various wings of her party during Trump’s first term. She rebuffed liberal members’ initial calls for impeachment over allegations of administration obstruction into the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Pelosi eventually supported impeachment after allegations surfaced that Trump threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless the nation launched an investigation into the Biden family, and in the aftermath of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot and insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Pelosi, who is retiring, did not respond to a request for comment.

Barbara Boxer, who represented California in the U.S. Senate for 24 years, noted a similar phenomenon when Republicans impeached President Clinton while she was in office.

“To say that it sucked all the air out of the room is not even describing it,” Boxer said, adding that the attention over the proceedings sidelined policy actions that could have benefited the American people.

This time, Boxer said, incoming Democrats will need to focus on common goals, even when they disagree. While she believes some members will place ideology ahead of pragmatism, the expected House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a moderate, has enough support to neutralize challenges from either wing of the party.

“Everyone under this big umbrella has to understand that they have to come to the center to stay out of those storms,” she said. “Because if they stay on their right and they stay on their left, they’re gonna lose in the next election.”

WASHINGTON — Progressive Senate candidates in at least two states are accusing a key Democratic Party campaign arm of actively working against them in primaries to help more moderate rivals favored by leadership as having a better shot of ousting GOP incumbents.

The efforts by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee come as the party seeks to retake the Senate majority from Republicans in 2020. But while early intervention may help prevent ugly primary battles, it is already heightening internal tensions between the party’s centrists and progressives, and rekindling allegations of unfair meddling by party leadership.

Progressive candidates in Colorado and Maine — two of the most competitive 2020 Senate races — say political consultants and vendors have refused to work on their campaigns after being warned that doing so would risk a future boycott by the DSCC, which endorsed other Democrats for those primaries.

“They want to blackball us,” said Andrew Romanoff, a Democrat who is hoping to take on GOP Sen. Cory Gardner in Colorado in next year’s election. “We heard the same from enough firms. It’s not an accident.”

The DSCC threw its support behind former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a pro-fracking moderate, almost immediately after he announced his bid for the Senate seat late last month.

Romanoff, who backs “Medicare for all” and aggressively combating climate change, said at least five political vendors that had expressed interest in working with him later told his campaign that officials at the DSCC, which helps recruit and finance Democratic candidates, said the vendors would get no other business from the committee if they worked for Romanoff’s campaign.

A political consultant at one of those firms confirmed the account but refused to be named for fear of retribution, saying that the firm was told by an intermediary for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that “under no circumstances were we to work with Andrew Romanoff.” If it did, the firm would get no more DSCC-related business, including lucrative referrals to work on other campaigns or to put together outside political advertisements. Romanoff’s account was first published Thursday by the Intercept, a left-leaning online publication. Since then, Romanoff said he’s received offers from several firms offering to help his campaign, including one that he said wants to “get banned by Schumer.”

Schumer’s office referred questions to the DSCC.

DSCC spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua said the committee has no policy that forbids vendors from working with Democratic candidates that it does not support.

But she added: “In our role as a campaign committee focused on winning Senate seats, we have ongoing conversations with strategists and advisors about battleground races.”

Maine Senate hopeful Betsy Sweet said she’s had similar trouble hiring finance staffers for her primary campaign. And Iowa Senate primary candidate Eddie Mauro said one vendor indicated that Washington Democrats “put pressure on them not to work with people like me” although he did not name the DSCC.

As in Colorado, the DSCC has endorsed more moderate Democrats in Maine and Iowa who they hope will beat sitting Republican senators in November 2020.

Vendors initially “are saying they’re excited [to work with the campaign,] and then they say they can’t do it,” Sweet said. “If you’re part of the political industrial complex and you’re making a career out of it, whether it is implicit or explicit, you don’t want to go up against that machine.”

The DSCC has endorsed Sara Gideon to take on GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine.

The intervention does not appear to be nationwide. Senate candidates in other races around the country said in interviews that they have seen no such interference in their campaign hiring.

But Sweet likened the DSCC’s meddling in her campaign to efforts made behind the scenes by the Democratic National Committee to bolster Hillary Clinton for president over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, moves that bitterly split the party.

“We in Maine have done a lot of work to reunify [since then]. This has just made it really hard,” she said. “It adds to the cynicism of people getting involved in politics.”

The DSCC’s counterpart for the House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, adopted a new written policy on vendors this year. The committee forbids vendors from getting DCCC business if they work on a primary challenge to a sitting Democratic House member. In that situation, the DCCC is trying to avoid Democrats trying to kick a sitting Democrat out of office.

For Democrats, the stakes in the Senate couldn’t be higher. Both Democrats and Republicans admit there is a window for Democrats to take control of the chamber by flipping Republican-held seats in Colorado, Arizona and Maine. They’re hoping additional challengers in Iowa and North Carolina take off. And their chances became a little more positive last week when a Georgia seat came into play upon the sudden retirement of Sen. Johnny Isakson.

Democrats need to win three or four seats to take control of the Senate in the 2020 election. (The figure depends on which party controls the White House and with it, the ability to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate.)

So far this year, the DSCC has endorsed candidates in Democratic primaries in nearly all of the marquee Senate races. Dan Sena, a Democratic operative who ran the House’s DCCC in the last cycle, said early endorsements can help donors and political supporters prioritize which candidates to back and which races look promising.

“If we’re going to stop Mitch McConnell from gutting access to affordable health care, confirming partisan judges to lifetime appointments on the federal bench and Supreme Court, and attacking reproductive rights, then we need to win Senate seats,” Passalacqua said. “We’re working with candidates who will do exactly that and help Democrats take back the Senate.”

Many of the Democratic candidates, even those who said the DSCC is not interfering with their hiring process, said they resented the committee’s endorsement in their race instead of letting a primary play out among voters.

That anger is most acute in Colorado, where a competitive Democratic primary between a dozen candidates was well underway when Hickenlooper dropped out of the presidential primary contest and announced he would run for the Senate.

The DSCC’s quick endorsement incensed candidates who were already in the race, an anger undoubtedly fueled by Hickenlooper’s prior comments that he didn’t want the Senate seat and wouldn’t be good at the job. Several of the self-identified liberal Democrats in the race say Hickenlooper — who opposes progressive standard-bearers such as Medicare for all and the Green New Deal — is too centrist for Colorado. They argue that Gardner is so vulnerable that almost any Democratic candidate can beat him.

“It’s hard for me to get in their head on this because a blue rock beats Cory Gardner by 10%,” said Alice Madden, one of the Democratic hopefuls.

Madden and the five other Democratic women in the race signed a letter last week asking the DSCC to reconsider the endorsement, arguing that it implies “that we should defer to a male candidate because you seem to believe he is ‘more electable.’”

Schumer had long made no secret that he wanted Hickenlooper, who has tremendous name recognition in the state, to take on Gardner next year. Democratic strategists say polling shows that Hickenlooper’s popularity would survive intense negative messaging, making him the strongest candidate in both the primary and general election.

On Tuesday, 314 Action, a group that promotes electing Democrats with scientific backgrounds, touted a poll that showed 72% of Democratic primary voters have a favorable opinion of Hickenlooper — a former geologist — besting all other Democrats by more than 30 percentage points.

For his part, Hickenlooper “believes anyone should be able to work for anyone they want to,” according to his spokesperson, Jacque Montgomery. “And anyone who wants to throw their hat in the ring should step up and run for office.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Richard Hudson wanted a triumphant return to Capitol Hill this week after steering Republicans to another majority. Instead, the North Carolina Republican is facing the reality that he and dozens of colleagues will soon clear out their offices.

“It was really people coming out to send a message,” Hudson, the chair of the House GOP’s campaign arm, said in a brief interview. “They, rightly so, felt gas was too high, things were too expensive.”

“The mistake Republicans made,” he said, “is we didn’t convey to them that we cared about that and cared about them.”

Back in Washington this week for the first time since the GOP’s sweeping midterm losses, Republicans were in something of a daze. Even as they acknowledged the depth of their defeat, there was little appetite for a wholesale break from President Trump.

Instead, they met behind closed doors to talk about what went wrong. And they scrutinized the calendar to figure out how to push through as much of their agenda as possible before Democrats assume control of the House and the Senate in January.

There’s little appetite for a full break with Trump

There was widespread frustration that Republicans who were awarded full control of the White House and Congress just two years earlier had lost touch with voters.

“You cut rural healthcare spending, when you abandon pro-lifers, when you abandon the poor, when you abandon the needy, when you abandon working people, you’re gonna get your butt kicked,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who unsuccessfully sought to delay his party’s leadership elections in the Senate. “And you’re gonna deserve it.”

“We collectively failed,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who is trailing her Democratic challenger in a district that Republicans carried by more than 18 percentage points in 2024.

“It’s very clear,” she said. “The American people let us know we have failed in this governing experience for this Congress.”

The anger is sharp in part because of the rosy predictions from top Republicans ahead of the election. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who is also trailing a Democratic rival, said people kept telling her she couldn’t lose. But she knew otherwise.

“I couldn’t get anybody to listen to me,” she said. “People just didn’t think it could happen, but we knew it could.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) spent the final stretch of the campaign rejecting the historic headwinds that often befall a president’s party during a midterm. He toured the country, insisting the polls were wrong and Republicans would retain their majority even as some incumbents were skeptical.

Back on Capitol Hill this week, Johnson said voters made the “wrong choice” as Democrats flipped more than 40 Republican-held seats. That puts the Democrats on track to hold the most robust majority since the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The House and the Senate take different approaches

Republicans, meanwhile, are weighing how to proceed, balancing calls for moderation against an impulse for hard-line positions that might reenergize the party’s base. Each chamber took different tracks, previewing divisions that may lie ahead.

In the House, the Republicans who will remain in Washington next year largely represent staunchly conservative districts where Trump remains popular. Their decision to elect Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as their next leader reflected a fighting stance.

Jordan is a cofounder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, currently chairs the Judiciary Committee and has previously chaired the Oversight Committee. From those positions, he’s waged heated fights against Democrats and become a top Trump ally.

“The way that Jim fights says a lot about where this conference is,” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.).

In the Senate, the desire for combat was less intense.

The question for Republicans there was less about whether they would stick with John Thune of South Dakota as their leader than when they would make that decision. Hawley and a small group of conservatives spent hours huddled with Republicans in the Old Senate Chamber arguing for a delay in leadership elections to allow the party to consider alternative candidates.

But the problem was that no one would come forward to offer themselves as an alternative to Thune, who has faced criticism from Trump at times for his refusal to abandon Senate rules to make it easier to pass conservative legislation.

“It’s a bad job,” Hawley said.

After hours of deliberation, Republicans ultimately backed Thune without so much as a voice vote.

“We’re going to let our leader be the leader,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who was also elected to lead the party’s effort to regain seats in the 2028 election.

GOP unites to protect Hegseth

Perhaps the biggest question for Republicans going forward is how to manage their relationship with Trump, whose policies on trade and the war in Iran helped contribute to their losses. He’s in the last two years of his second term, and the election defeats have raised stark questions about the durability of his Make America Great Again movement.

But there was no rush to distance themselves from the president as House Republicans, even those who have been critical of his administration, overwhelmingly blocked an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Only Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who led the push alongside Democrats, broke ranks.

“What I found out tonight is they still haven’t broken from the spell of Donald Trump,” Massie said after the vote. “He still controls this conference.”

When asked whether the election was a referendum on Trump, Thune said the results stemmed from “a combination of things,” refusing to directly blame the president for contributing to the party’s challenges.

Signs of Trump’s influence

But there were signs that Trump’s influence had limits.

Few echoed his argument in a social media post this week that there were problems with the election. In conceding a closely fought Senate contest in Mississippi, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said she would “respect the decision” of voters.

Several Republicans, including Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Tim Scott of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas and Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, posted pictures of Democrats who will either succeed them or soon represent their states, harkening to an earlier era of postelection unity.

Rep. James Comer of Kentucky pushed back against White House warnings to congressional Democrats that planned probes of the Trump administration could amount to “blatant criminality.” Comer, who oversaw extensive investigations of Democratic President Biden and his family as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said lawmakers have a role in holding any White House accountable.

“Regardless of who is in the White House, there’s always going to be a strong desire for the Oversight Committee to be a check and balance on the executive branch, regardless of the political scenario,” Comer said.

Sloan, Cappelletti and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — For more than four hours, a ground stop of virtually all aircraft in the United States brought unprecedented chaos and delays that are expected to last days.

Here is what we know about what went wrong.

What caused the stop?

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said switches and routers on the Federal Aviation Administration’s analog air traffic control system became overloaded with data, causing inconsistencies in communication with airlines. As a result, the decision was made to shut the system down shortly after 12:30 p.m.

“We have old, old switches, old routers, we use 1980s little copper lines,” he said. “It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere.”

The ground stop ended around 5:15 p.m. Duffy said the FAA was able to deploy fixes to reduce the overloading and bring its towers and air traffic control facilities known as TRACONs back online.

Duffy said the problem was with the TDM — time-division multiplexing — a dated, still mostly copper-wire technology used to transmit air traffic control voice and radar data. He said there was no evidence to suggest a cyberattack or the involvement of foreign adversaries.

What problems did this cause?

The technological breakdown led to intermittent communication and radar, but not a complete blackout, Duffy said.

“We were able to keep some of those communications going, but when you have issues and you can’t immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at — that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate,” he said.

What do we know about the technology?

Duffy lambasted the aging infrastructure that the FAA relies on and said that President Trump is pushing for the funding needed to update the equipment.

“None of your networks run on 1980 technology,” he said to the gaggle of reporters at a Friday evening news conference. “You have all got fiber, state-of-the-art, high-speed networks that cover all of your stations, but not the FAA.”

He said the FAA was in the process of upgrading its air traffic control system thanks to $12.5 billion in funding secured through Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, but called on Congress to approve an additional $50 billion to complete the modernization of the system.

“I believe that should be a priority,” he said. “America, Congress, let’s make this system more safe.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin noted that the communications failure was caused as the FAA was performing upgrades.

“That new equipment, new technology — It was overwhelming the older system,” he said. “The patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system.”

What is the impact?

There were more than 3,500 airplanes flying across America when the decision to close the airspace was made, Duffy said.

Tens of thousands of travelers were left stranded and FEMA was mobilized to ensure lifesaving medication was not being missed by passengers, said Mullin. Some college football teams were left scrambling to find alternative transportation to this weekend’s games.

Duffy said that air traffic control would try to move as many planes as possible Friday night, but noted that this will depend on the availability of flight crews and pilots.

Nov. 13, 2026 7:23 PM PT

DENVER — Democrat Eileen Laubacher defeated Rep. Lauren Boebert for a Colorado U.S. House seat Friday, ousting a three-term Republican and staple of conservative media.

Laubacher is a former Navy rear admiral. Her win in the 4th Congressional District race brought about just one of several surprising Republican losses in what’s shaping up to be the most lopsided election in half a century.

Boebert has embodied the Republican politics of the last decade. The telegenic owner of a gun-themed restaurant named Shooters Grill in the western Colorado town of Rifle, she catapulted to notoriety alongside President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Once elected to Congress in 2020, she refused to pass through metal detectors at the U.S. Capitol and taunted Rep. Ilhan Omar, sometimes in Islamophobic terms, as when she referred to the Minnesota Democrat as part of the “jihad squad.” After barely surviving her first reelection campaign four years ago, Boebert moved across Colorado to a more Republican district.

Republicans carried the 4th District by more than 11 percentage points in 2024. But even that wasn’t safe for her in this year’s midterm election.

Boebert acknowledged the widespread losses as she returned to the Capitol this week, saying, “We collectively failed.”

“It’s very clear,” she said. “The American people let us know we have failed in this governing experience for this Congress.”

In a video posted on her social media account Friday, Boebert said she called Laubacher to congratulate her on her victory and thanked the district’s residents.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.

SEOUL — President Trump will get his wish for a historic meeting among the three most powerful men in the world — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and himself — at a summit Thursday in southern China.

But Moscow, Beijing and Washington already know their leaders are arriving at the Shenzhen conference with disparate aims.

Trump hopes to focus the meeting on nuclear nonproliferation, urging the Russian and Chinese presidents to work with him to scale back the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles. Putin pressed for the meeting to discuss his ongoing war in Ukraine. And Xi wants to discuss neither, only embracing the idea of the summit to show the world China can help broker peace on the international stage, Chinese officials told The Times.

“That’ll be interesting,” Trump said earlier this week, teasing the trilateral summit before the White House formally confirmed the meeting Friday.

“We’re talking a lot of things, including denuclearization,” he added, “but we’ll be talking a lot of things.”

U.S. officials have acknowledged they do not expect the meeting to result in a breakthrough on arms control. China is openly racing to build up its nuclear capacity — a nonnegotiable policy in Beijing, which sees its arsenal dwarfed by an American stockpile nearly 10 times the size.

“We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement. I would characterize this as the entry point,” one senior Trump administration official said. “This is the beginning of hopefully a conversation that can be productive going forward.”

The Chinese, too, threw cold water on the chances of a breakthrough, with one Chinese official telling The Times the central government saw no benefit to a pause.

“It is a matter of survival,” the official said.

The United States and Russia still command the world’s two dominant nuclear arsenals, with over 5,000 warheads each. China has an estimated 620 — but in catching up, it is developing new warheads with more sophisticated delivery systems.

Moscow, too, is modernizing its weapons, after the Trump administration allowed the last major U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty to expire earlier this year.

Though expectations are low for a nuclear breakthrough, Trump doesn’t want to discuss Putin’s priorities, either, the U.S. official added.

“He does not intend to talk about Ukraine in that meeting,” the official said. “China is not really part of that track, so it doesn’t really seem appropriate.”

Ukraine has grown increasingly concerned by Trump’s pressure campaign to force it into concessions to Moscow as he pushes to end the war.

The Trump administration has brought Russian and Ukrainian officials together at a working level to explore the viability of peace talks. But a long-standing U.S. policy on the war — not to negotiate about Ukraine without Ukraine — could be further compromised at a trilateral with Putin and Xi.

The only American business leader confirmed to join Trump in Asia is Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief who was seen as instrumental in the decision last month to restrict Ukraine’s access on the battlefield to Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Musk.

Beijing has struck a careful balance on Ukraine, publicly issuing its respect for sovereign borders — a position popular among Chinese voices who support Kyiv — while giving Moscow diplomatic cover, an economic lifeline and technological support throughout the war.

Their competing agendas could make the summit little more than a spectacle, yet still produce images that hark back to the famous Yalta Conference — held in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula currently occupied by Russia, in 1945 — where Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill carved up a postwar order.

World War II allies Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin meet on Feb. 4, 1945, at the Yalta Conference.

(Associated Press)

The summit on Chinese soil offers Xi a powerful image to broadcast worldwide, demonstrating an emergent superpower can bring together the leaders of two historic rivals in the name of peace.

Putin gets to present himself as a global player, despite the devastation wrought on Russia’s economy and military standing after four bruising years of war.

And it allows Trump to reassert his global relevance after this month’s midterms delivered the worst electoral rebuke to a president in half a century, rivaling the backlash against President Nixon during Watergate.

Self-funded political newcomer Eric Jones has edged out longtime Rep. Mike Thompson in the Democrat-on-Democrat race for Northern California’s 4th District.

Ten days after the Nov. 3 election, the Associated Press called the race for Jones, who spent millions on his race and led Thompson 52.5% to 47.5% as of Friday evening.

Jones, a venture capitalist and nonprofit executive who grew up in a working-class household, will now lead a district that was redrawn under Proposition 50 to stretch from the vast wineries of Napa County to the rice fields of Sutter County.

He ran against Thompson (D-St. Helena), who was first elected in 1998, while calling for a new generation of leadership. He campaigned on keeping corporate money out of politics, lowering the cost of living and protecting “our future” by facilitating a government that lives within its means.

Jones poured $14.8 million of his own funds into the race and ran an active campaign. He said that he held more than 200 town halls and that his campaign knocked on half a million doors.

“I answered every email myself personally. We offered a coffee chat with every single voter we met, and that’s the message that people heard,” he said in an interview Friday after his race was called. “I do think we need to make a lot of progress on campaign reform. It’s something we’re already working on with the freshman class right now in D.C.”

The 36-year-old father of two also backed progressive measures to expand Medicare and cut taxes for low- and middle-income Americans.

“It’s been really fantastic to see just how impactful our message was because we knew from Day One that we were speaking to voters and Americans who were pretty left behind in the political system,” he said.

Thompson acknowledged the election results in a statement Friday evening.

“I’m proud of my service,” he said before listing his work on water issues, wildfires, gun violence and conservation. “My team and I have always lived by one principle: We’re here to do the people’s work serving our district, and that job is never too big nor too small.”

Supporters of Jones’ campaign included Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.); Duolingo Chief Executive and co-founder Luis von Ahn; and Our Revolution, an independent grassroots organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Thompson spent 14 terms in Congress, initially elected to California’s 1st District. Prior to that, he was a two-term state senator.

He sits on the influential Ways and Means Committee and is the top Democrat on its tax policy subcommittee. He had been endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and the California Democratic Party.

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Thursday that he will run for Senate Majority Leader in the next Congress, setting up a challenge to Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer after the party swept to power in the midterm elections.

Van Hollen said in a statement that “the American people called for change” and that is why he is running.

“It’s now on us to meet this moment, and to do that we need new leadership,” Van Hollen said. “This is not about any one person — it’s about answering the call of the American people. That is why I’m running for Senate Majority Leader.”

Schumer has said he has the necessary support to win the race, which will be the first contested election for Senate Democratic leader in decades. The closed-door, secret-ballot election will be held in early December.

The question of whether to reelect Schumer has already divided the caucus and many senators have declined to say publicly how they will vote, even before Van Hollen entered the race. They have privately deliberated about what message to take from the election and many are torn — Schumer recruited many of the party’s winning candidates and raised money for them, but progressive groups are pushing for his removal.

Making the pitch for his reelection, Schumer has been working with Democratic senators one-on-one to form an agenda for 2027. In private caucus meetings this week, Schumer opened discussion on a broad plan for their first 100 days in power that included healthcare and tariff legislation and efforts to stop the Iran war.

“I’m going to win it,” Schumer told the Associated Press in an interview last week.

In a statement after Van Hollen’s announcement, Schumer said he welcomes any discussion about the future of the caucus.

“I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together — 55 seats and counting is an amazing result — and I have the votes to continue serving as Democratic Leader,” Schumer said. “I look forward to leading our new Democratic majority and delivering for the American people.”

Divisions over Schumer have simmered over the last two years

While Schumer is the favorite to win, Van Hollen’s run exposes a rift in the party that opened in the spring of 2025, when Schumer was put on the defensive after he sided with Republicans on a spending vote.

Even as Schumer has redeemed himself within his caucus since then — leading them through a government shutdown last year and orchestrating huge wins in the election — many in the Democratic base are agitating for generational change.

Van Hollen, 67, is not that much younger than Schumer, 75. But he has positioned himself as a new face in the party. He has also said he is considering a run for president.

While most Democratic senators have either said they are supporting Schumer or are undecided, Van Hollen has at least two backers: Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, who won a competitive election in his state last week, and progressive standard-bearer Bernie Sanders.

El-Sayed posted on X on Thursday night that their majority will need “bold leadership.”

“I called on Sen. @ChrisVanHollen to lead our caucus as a candidate back in April because he leads with courage and experience,” El-Sayed wrote. “We need both right now. Which is why I’m proud to stand with him in his bid to lead our Senate majority.”

Sen. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, held a news conference Tuesday announcing he would not support Schumer. He posted Thursday night that the American people “want a Democratic Party that will stand up to powerful special interests, take on the billionaire class and fight for working families. That is why I am supporting Senator Chris Van Hollen to lead Senate Democrats.”

Van Hollen has not yet laid out his own agenda, but he has criticized Schumer for his ties to Israel and other special interests.

While Schumer has a long history of support for Israel, he has strongly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of the war in Gaza.

Schumer says he has broad support

Several senators have said they are backing Schumer, including incoming Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who beat Republican Sen. Jon Husted last week. Beyond the election wins, those who support him say being the leader is a difficult job, experience is necessary and Schumer has proved himself with legislative successes when they held the Senate under President Biden.

“Why would you fire the manager when you just won the World Series?” posted Maine Sen. Angus King, another independent who caucuses with Democrats and votes in the leadership election.

“Chuck Schumer is one of the principal architects of the most successful election in modern history, and I see no reason to change the leadership that helped make that success possible,” King wrote.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) also posted her support Thursday evening:

Cortez Masto said Schumer was key in “securing a historic majority. I will be supporting him as our Democratic leader.”

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Democrats are demanding answers about Friday’s temporary ground stoppage on all flights in the United States and the apparent communications issue that affected air traffic control centers.

The ground stop crippled air travel and raised a variety of questions about the nation’s aging air traffic control systems.

In an interview on Friday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) said the FAA telecommunications outage was completely unacceptable and that the agency needs to create systems that do not have a single point of failure.

“I urge the FAA and the Trump administration to make sure this never happens again,” he said.

The California congressman said there need to be congressional hearings on the cause of the technical issue and what improvements should be enacted to avoid similar future outages.

“What just happened is enormously damaging to trust in our air system,” he said, “and our air system is a vital component of our national economy.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the Aviation, Space and Innovation Subcommittee, said she will be demanding answers from the FAA about the ground stop.

“The safety of our skies is built on redundancies,” she said in a statement. “Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont)—who was stranded at Denver International Airport because of the outage—told CNN that lawmakers were waiting to be briefed by the Trump administration Friday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that it was a telecommunications outage and that the ground stop did not constitute a national security threat.

“There is no indication that we’ve had, no reason to believe, that as of right now this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin told reporters at the White House, later repeating there was “no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us.”

While the outage has not been linked to a specific cause yet, federal officials are not yet ruling out the possibility that it could be tied to the use of an AI tool that advises air traffic controllers to assist in managing air traffic across the nation’s airspace.

The FAA expanded the use of the tool to all of its 22 control centers on Tuesday, according to the agency. The tool—called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART—combines about 200 data streams, including flight paths, schedules and weather, on one cloud-based system, according to a fact sheet posted on the FAA’s website.

Congressional Democrats raised concerns after the platform’s initial roll-out in the Washington area, calling for a 90-day pause until they better understand how it is being used. In a letter to Secretary Duffy, lawmakers said there was an “egregious lack of transparency” about the tool.”

“The air traffic control systems and processes currently in place are complex, and we don’t know what impact AI-enabled tools might have on these systems and resulting safety,” they wrote in October.

But in a post on social media Friday afternoon, the AI company that created SMART, Air Space Intelligence, said that “current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.”

Last week voters across the country rejected Republican politicians and the Trump administration’s agenda. Democrats gained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate — nabbing historic pickups in Republican strongholds such as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

Notably, Latino voters turned their back on Republicans after giving Donald Trump 48% of the vote in 2024. A New York Times voter analysis found that Latino voters shifted 29 points toward Democrats between 2024 and 2026, compared with a 15-point shift among voters overall.

After the monumental about-face, President Trump processed the defeat by blaming everyone around him for the blue tsunami.

After Trump-endorsed candidates lost pivotal Senate seats, the president posted on social media, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

The resignation of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles last week was perhaps the most telling move about how Trump plans to deal with Republican losses nationwide. Wiles was promptly replaced with far-right advisor Stephen Miller, who previously served as the deputy chief of staff.

“I wanted to make a change,” Trump told reporters Nov. 6. “I think Susie’s done a very good job. … Stephen’s been great and we’ve got to make moves.”

Political observers now fear the appointment signals Trump will double down on an agenda that has alienated broad swaths of voters, including Latinos, who were among the most targeted demographic in the administration’s campaign of aggressive immigration enforcement spearheaded by Miller.

To better understand what Miller’s promotion will mean for the president’s future plans, The Times spoke with New York Times contributing writer and USC associate professor of journalism Jean Guerrero, who literally wrote the book on Miller.

Her 2020 book, “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” examined Miller’s upbringing, the political forces that shaped his ideologies and the origins of his anti-immigrant policies.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

With the big news of this election cycle being that Latinos turned their back on Trump, do you see the appointment of Stephen Miller as an act of revenge by Trump? What do you think he’s trying to signal for his agenda over the next two years with this promotion?

I think he’s trying to signal that he plans to double down on talking down on Latino and immigrant communities because [Trump and his allies] need the war on immigrants to continue their war on the working classes, which is what this is all about.

The general public is fed up with this administration because of how de-prioritized working families have been, and that’s across the board: white, Latino, Black, Asian. The war on immigrants is central to that de-prioritization because by criminalizing a sector of the population and keeping [them] in the shadows and in fear, they are able to suppress wages for the entire working class and they’re able to keep immigrants from being able to organize with their citizen co-workers in the workplace.

What do you think we can expect to happen to immigrant Latino communities specifically under this era of Stephen Miller?

I think what we’re going to see is an extreme expansion of the war on immigrant communities and their allies specifically. That is going to disproportionately target U.S. citizen Latinos — using what power and privilege they’ve been able to accumulate through the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents — who are at the front lines of defending their community members.

Your book discussed how Miller’s high school years helped shape his anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiment and how that seems to have stemmed a bit from going to a public school in Santa Monica. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A lot of people get surprised when they learn that Stephen Miller was from Santa Monica, because it’s a liberal enclave, but he is very much a product of the liberal hypocrisy that he witnessed growing up in California. What he witnessed remains true of establishment and corporate Democrats today, which is a professed concern for marginalized communities and performative support for social justice, while completely neglecting to pursue any concrete policies that would make the lives of marginalized communities any better.

One of the ways he exploited that fact to rise in power was by aligning himself with the conservative movement that was growing rapidly in California during the 1990s, led by David Horowitz — a conservative activist in Studio City — who became one of Stephen Miller’s main mentors and who groomed a generation of young conservatives to use the tools and terms of the civil rights movement against the gains of the civil rights movement. Miller learned to perceive multiculturalism and people of color as an existential threat to the U.S.

Do you think that putting Miller in the position of chief of staff is a way for Trump to reposition this war on immigrants as his main thing and to move away from the more economic and cost-of-living concerns that people also seem aggravated by?

They’re going to continue to try to frame immigrants as the enemies of the working classes, which is masterful gaslighting. By doing that, they are ensuring that citizen workers don’t organize alongside immigrants for higher wages, for economic equality. I think the immigration issue is actually at the heart of the economic issues that people are upset about. I say that because you saw the mass deportations affecting things like construction sites, which were left empty of workers, so people who were trying to build housing at a time of housing scarcity were being targeted. You saw farmworkers getting targeted in the fields, which led to higher food prices.

The war on immigrants is a war on the working classes. By doubling down on it, Trump is going to be trying desperately to confuse people into thinking that immigrants are to blame for the economic pain that everybody is feeling. When in reality, the economic pain that everybody is feeling is because of this war on immigrants which is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into mass surveillance, mass incarceration of people based on their race and language. It is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.

Trump has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth on his immigration messaging. He recently acknowledged that people might have thought he was too tough on immigration, but this appointment of Miller signals that he will be going harder on the issue. What is the calculation there in your view?

He’s trying to exploit the echo chambers, which makes sense for a dear friend of the tech elites for him to know how to do that. He’s hoping that one piece of information will reach one audience and another piece of information will reach the other audience. So the people who are fed up with the war on immigrants will hear him say that he’s scaling it back and they’ll be happy and they’ll support him. The people who love the war on immigrants, which are fewer and fewer every day, will hear about Stephen Miller and get really excited about that. He’s just hoping that the [online] algorithm will work in his favor.

You’ve previously spoken about noticing a shift in Miller’s immigration mindset over the years, can you talk about that change?

During the first administration, he was focused entirely on strangling legal pathways into this country, such as gutting the asylum and refugee systems, and restricting green card access and separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. All of this geared towards racially reengineering the demographics of this country. During the second administration, he’s done some of that with these mass deportations where he’s directed agents to round people up at worksites and where they’ve been racially profiling people and detaining people based on their skin color and language and blue-collar jobs as opposed to their criminal records.

At the same time, Miller has been one of the most vocal proponents of Trump’s foreign interventions and invasions, which have set the stage for the mass displacement of new refugees and immigrants. Watching Miller be so vocally supportive of these interventions, I realized he had shifted, and that he was no longer primarily motivated by restrictionist ideologies and white nationalist ideologies — it was about class.

Trump and Miller are using the war on immigrants to manufacture and maintain a permanent underclass in the United States, which is something that has been done by many administrations for many generations. But they’ve taken it to an astounding level that has caused an unprecedented amount of economic, spiritual and psychological pain across this country.

With Democrats gaining a bunch of seats in the Senate and the House, and taking control of a bunch of state legislatures, what can they do to potentially minimize Miller’s effect in the White House?

It is imperative that the Democrats use their majorities not only to investigate the crimes against humanity that this administration has been committing, but also to deliver on behalf of working families. At the center of that has to be ending the war on immigrants. They have to abolish ICE. They have to pass legislation to protect the longtime undocumented population — who Democrats have said that they’ve been going to protect for many administrations and have not prioritized, even when they previously had majorities in Congress.

If they do not deliver on behalf of working families by emancipating the subjugated classes, then they’re admitting they too are in alliance with the pillaging classes and that they are no different from Trump and Miller. The main thing they have to do is counter any maneuvers that Miller is going to be making from the White House. They can’t just be all talk. They have to deliver in concrete ways for working families and they’re not going to be able to do that if they ignore the immigrant community that has been at the center of the Trump administration’s persecution.

Nithya Raman’s win upends L.A. Latino politics

A few weeks back in this newsletter, I discussed how Latino voters would be the deciding factor in the L.A. mayoral race as the demographic helped carry Mayor Karen Bass in the primary, with her winning 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in the June 2 election.

Five months, much campaigning and the botched response to a massive warehouse fire in heavily Latino Boyle Heights later, Bass’s competitor, Councilmember Nithya Raman, courted the Latino vote in last week’s election. A Times analysis of early election returns showed Raman won big in the heavily Latino neighborhoods such as Wilmington, South L.A. and Pico-Union.

My colleague and Latino voting expert Gustavo Arellano wrote about how Raman’s win was the death knell for L.A.’s Latino political establishment.

Arellano discussed how Bass consistently aligned herself with a cohort of moderate Latino politicians — such as City Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Imelda Padilla, Assemblymember Celeste Rodriguez and Rep. Luz Rivas — at reelection events. Conversely, Raman focused on activating younger, more progressive Latinos throughout her campaign.

The L.A. Latinos’ traditional political machine was in trouble before hitching its wagon to Bass’s failed reelection campaign, Arellano noted. It began in 2022 when three City Council members were embroiled in an audio leak scandal, which created an avenue for two democratic socialists to grab council seats. The Latino old guard also lost two more council members in 2024, and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, bastion of that political class, ran a supremely unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign this year.

Raman’s grassroots approach met Latino voters where they were and not where she thought they were supposed to be — something Bass’ chief campaign strategist, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, could learn a lesson from.

“The mayor ran on a very institutional playbook of getting a bunch of Latino politicians together so they could tell Latinos how to vote,” Marco Santana, who ran for City Council earlier this year, told Arellano. “That doesn’t work anymore. Latinos want deeds.”

One actor’s pursuit to dub “The Lion King” in Quechua

Voice actor Fernando Valencia grew up in the Andean Peruvian town of Huanimpampa, where the Indigenous language of Quechua is still an integral part of everyday life. He noticed that the dialect is never represented in dubbed versions of Hollywood family hits, which creates a barrier for comprehension among children whose primary language is Quechua.

To point out this lack of availability and to show that an avenue for accessibility was possible, Valencia dubbed segments of Hollywood blockbusters such as “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Lion King” into the language spoken by nearly 10 million South Americans.

He has since dared to dub “The Lion King” — the first movie Valencia watched in its entirety as a child — fully into Quechua. Valencia’s attempts are documented in Peruvian filmmaker Augusto Zegarra’s debut feature, “Runa Simi,” which is the name of the Quechua language in Quechua and translates to ”language of the people.”

De Los contributor Carlos Aguilar recently spoke with Valencia and Zegarra about the film and the voice actor’s monumental undertaking.

“If I keep my language and culture in a fragile little jar, someone will come along and trample it, and it will disappear forever,” Valencia said. “But if I open this little jar and build bridges, it will be difficult to eliminate it because it will be integrated into the world.”

A similar linguistic venture to preserve a native language was completed by Tweedie Waititi, the sister of Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi, who partnered with Disney to dub multiple titles into te reo Māori.

Valencia’s mission was given a major bump after Peter and Benjamin Bratt, whose mother, Eldy Banda, is an Indigenous activist of Quechua descent, signed on to the project as executive producers.

“It felt like a statement to have someone who has never heard of the Quechua language, maybe someone in Europe or the U.S., ask what runa simi is and then being able to tell them: ‘You’re already speaking it! By saying the words runa simi, you’re already using the language,’” Zegarra said.

Stories we read this week that we think you should read

Unless otherwise noted, stories below were published by the Los Angeles Times.

Politics and immigration

Arts and entertainment

Southern California

AUGUSTA, Maine — As Republicans dig out from under a midterm landslide, they can point to a single bright spot on the nationwide congressional map. That’s Maine’s 2nd congressional district, the only seat that went from blue to red without the help of redistricting.

It was far from a resounding victory. Even though President Trump won the district by 9 points two years ago, it took a former Republican governor, Paul LePage, to squeak out a victory over Matt Dunlap, the Democratic state auditor.

The Associated Press called the race Thursday after officials finished the ranked choice voting process to determine the winner.

LePage and Dunlap were competing to replace Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who is retiring from Congress.

The only other seats that went from blue to red are Texas’ 32nd congressional district and Tennessee’ 9th congressional district, but both of those flips were enabled by redistricting efforts that made the electorates far more conservative.

Meanwhile, Democrats have flipped 44 seats, and a handful of races have not yet been called.

Dunlap conceded last week and LePage declared victory, and he’s been in Washington for orientation for new members.

“Paul LePage is already hard at work for the people of Maine,” said Brent Littlefield, a spokesperson for LePage.

Maine has only two congressional districts. The 1st is heavily Democratic and includes Portland and wealthy coastal towns. The 2nd includes a few small cities and vast rural and forested areas, and is home to industries such as logging, potato farming and lobster fishing. It’s more conservative than most of New England.

Golden had found success in the 2nd by running as a moderate Democrat who was willing to break with his party. However, he announced last year that he would not run for a fifth term, saying he had “grown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness that are now common from some elements of our American community.”

As governor from 2010 to 2018, most of LePage’s two terms predated Trump’s presidency, but he aligned himself with the president toward the end of his time in office. The two shared a brand of brash, conservative populism, with LePage once saying he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular.”

However, LePage also criticized Trump’s tariffs on Canada, a key trading partner for Maine, and expressed support for legal immigration. When he declared victory last week, LePage vowed to make the state’s interests a priority in Washington.

“If it is good for Maine, I will work hard to make it happen. If it is bad for Maine, I will oppose it,” he said.

Whittle writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court announced Friday it will rule on President Trump’s ban on asylum claims at the southern border, testing a key part of his hard-line policy on immigration.

At issue is a clash between the promise of asylum for those fleeing persecution and the reality of a border overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands who arrived seeking to apply.

Trump’s lawyers said his ban on asylum claims in January 2025 was his “single most effective policy” in ending the chaos along the border.

“Over preceding four years, at least eight million illegal aliens were encountered along the southern border,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer told the court, “and countless millions more evaded detection and illegally entered the United States.”

The sheer numbers of people coming to the border had “overwhelmed the system,” making it impossible for U.S. officials to screen and interview asylum seekers, he said. Lacking facilities to detain applicants, most were released into the country.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and other immigration rights advocates said the right of individuals to seek asylum was recognized in U.S. law and could not be abolished.

The law authorizes asylum for people who can demonstrate they are fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality or belonging to a particular social or political group.

Federal judges in Washington agreed that asylum must be preserved. They said immigration officials were free to reject claims for asylum but they could not eliminate the right for the entire category of potential applicants.

However, their ruling was put on hold while the administration appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The president does not have the right to unilaterally override the protections Congress has afforded those fleeing danger,” said Lee Gelernt, lead counsel and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The courts are right to reject this unprecedented power grab that would put countless lives in danger. We look forward to making our case before the Supreme Court.”

Keren Zwick, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, said the plaintiffs in the case “fled persecution and torture, including political imprisonment and threats from the Taliban. Yet, the Trump administration refused to honor its obligation to consider them for asylum.”

Instead, some of them “were removed to third countries and then pushed back to the very place they fled. This vicious attack on due process and human rights has put thousands of lives in danger.”

Federal immigration law gives the president broad authority to close the border to most migrants.

It says he “may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

The court said it would hear the case of Mullin vs. Refugee and Immigrant Center early next year and rule by June.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a temporary ground stoppage on all flights in the United States.

The stoppage was announced Friday afternoon and impacted flights nationwide, including at Los Angeles International Airport.

“Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” the FAA advisory read, “all departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice.”

Inbound international flights would be handled “on a case by case basis,” the advisory said.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation said on X that “FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”

It marks the second full ground stop since 9/11 and it’s unclear how long it will last. The one was in 2023 and caused by technical issues.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Fallout from Jensen Huang’s ouster as Nvidia Corp. chief executive officer is reaching deep into Washington, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is confronting accusations that his department didn’t do enough to keep the company’s prized artificial intelligence chips out of China’s hands.

As the ultimate overseer of U.S. export control programs, Lutnick is accountable for any policy or enforcement gaps that allowed Nvidia’s AI processors to reach unauthorized Chinese buyers. Internal tension over his role burst into the open on Friday when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed him for failing to blacklist a Singapore-based company, Megaspeed, over possible violations.

“Treasury, [the U.S. Trade Representative office] and State — they were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months, but Commerce has the pen,” Bessent said in an interview with CNBC. “We have all the authorities that we need. They just need to be implemented.”

Lutnick is a controversial figure in President Trump’s orbit. People with ties to the White House, who asked not to be identified describing private conversations, said he’s been marginalized within the administration for a while. At the same time, his exit has been predicted before, and he’s still in the job.

As of Thursday, the Commerce chief retained Trump’s blessing. In a statement, the White House said Trump maintains complete confidence in the secretary and his ability to serve in the position.

Congress is now demanding answers from Lutnick and other Trump administration officials about decisions that may have made it easier for China to obtain Nvidia’s advanced chips as well as the degree to which Silicon Valley leaders like Jensen Huang may have influenced policy.

Pressure on the administration and the tech sector is escalating a week after an election where voters expressed intense frustrations over the impact of the AI boom.

Huang’s abrupt departure was prompted by revelations that he’d had an affair with a woman suspected by U.S. officials of spying for China and that Megaspeed had been under investigation by Commerce for possible export control violations. Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing, while the former Nvidia chief’s romantic partner, Alice Huang, is now in China.

“I would like for Secretary Lutnick ASAP to come testify before the Senate Banking Committee because we have a lot of bipartisan questions and concerns about what’s happened over the last year,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said in an interview on Fox News.

Late Thursday night, a Commerce Department spokesperson, Kristen Eichamer, said Lutnick had agreed to testify.

Axios reported on Wednesday that Trump had authorized a new crackdown on companies suspected of diverting advanced AI chips to China, but that Lutnick delayed acting on the directive. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) called the report “deeply, deeply disturbing.”

On at least three separate occasions earlier this year — in May, August and earlier this month — Trump approved taking action against suspected diversions of Nvidia chips to China, Axios reported.

This week’s events, Krishnamoorthi said in an interview Wednesday, deserve “tremendous scrutiny not only by obviously Nvidia’s board, but by the intelligence community and the U.S. government as well.”

Further complicating the dynamic are allegations by Democratic lawmakers that Lutnick’s sons, who hold leadership positions at Cantor Fitzgerald, are profiting off policy decisions that he makes. Lutnick, who previously was chief executive of Cantor, divested his stake as legally required before becoming secretary, and elevated his sons to top jobs at the firm.

The Commerce Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment.

One element of the Nvidia imbroglio is a little-known but powerful Commerce Department agency that’s known as the Bureau of Industry and Security and falls under Lutnick’s jurisdiction.

The bureau regulates exports of a wide range of products — including advanced AI chips — and it’s set to face renewed scrutiny as lawmakers threaten investigations of the bureau’s leader, Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler.

The Senate Banking Committee is already planning inquiries into Lutnick and Kessler’s decision-making. The two men “must explain why they have not closed export control loopholes and act today to ensure our advanced technology is not fueling China’s military,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement.

In late summer 2025, Nvidia General Counsel Tim Teter called Kessler to ask whether the Bureau of Industry and Security was involved in the Singapore government’s recent detention of Alice Huang. The bureau was not involved in that action, citing people familiar with the matter.

An Nvidia spokesperson has said that Teter was unaware of the affair at the time he called Kessler about Alice Huang’s detention in Singapore. But in the weeks following the call, Bureau of Industry and Security staffers were muzzled in their ability to investigate the company, including a mandate that they route all requests of Nvidia through Kessler, Bloomberg reported.

Bureau of Industry and Security spokespeople earlier denied any wrongdoing.

“It’s really important to understand what the Commerce Department knew about Megaspeed,” said Ben Buchanan, former White House special advisor for AI during the Biden administration, in an interview. “This is an incident where the enforcement is not good. The decision-making has not been good.”

Diaz and Eastland write for Bloomberg.

It’s been nearly 150 years since a Black man has represented Deep South and deep red Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.

That changed Wednesday evening as Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, who had been endorsed by President Donald Trump. For many in the state and for Black Americans across the nation, Colom’s victory reflects the ambitions that were thwarted by generations of systemic oppression and violence.

Janice Johnson, who lives in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, says having a Black senator has been a long time coming. “In the last few years we have seen great strides,” she said.

Out of all the southern states, Mississippi has a special place in the struggle over Black Americans’ exclusion from the nation’s promises of freedom and justice. There’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Mississippi-born journalist who investigated 19th century lynching across the South, and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose 1955 kidnapping and murder by white men in Mississippi reinvigorated the Civil Rights Movement.

There’s Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field secretary who fought at Normandy in World War II and organized Black voter registration until his 1963 assassination. And Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader who challenged Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents Mississippi’s 2nd District, was a student organizer for Hamer while studying at Tougaloo College, where Colom’s victory celebration was held Wednesday night. And now, Thompson is watching his mentee, Sen.-elect Colom, fill a more than 145-year gap of Black leadership in statewide office.

“From my perspective, I now have a partner in Washington,” Thompson said before introducing Colom.

“I can’t help but think about Medgar Evers on Veterans Day,” Colom said during a victory speech. “A moment like this, where he served his country and came home to Mississippi, when they wouldn’t let him vote. But he had the faith that Mississippi could make progress. … He had faith that a day like this was possible.”

He added, “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this.”

Johnson, who watched part of Colom’s victory speech from home, says she understands that Black voters, alone, aren’t responsible for Colom’s win. White voters, too, had to be fed up with the state’s economy, school systems and crumbling health care infrastructure for the poor — Black and white — under Republican rule.

“The most important part is we’ve got to have faith that Mississippi is ready to do the right thing,” an elated Johnson told The Associated Press on Thursday. “We as a people — and Mississippi as whole — are ready to show the nation. We have to work together, and that was his message. He wants to help pull us together.”

Jerome Dunn, a barber in Jackson, echoed Johnson’s sentiment.

“It takes everybody to vote, not one single race,” said Dunn, 59, who is Black and also voted for Colom. “I think people are looking for him to work for everybody. People are tired of Republicans and what they believe.”

Two came before Colom

Blanche K. Bruce, a Republican, was the second Black man in the Senate from Mississippi after that state’s legislature elected him to a six-year term. He served from 1875 to 1881. Hiram Revels, another Republican, was the first after the Senate voted to seat him in 1870 to fill a vacancy left empty since the start of the Civil War. Revels’ term expired about a year later.

Bruce and Revels were among 16 Black men from southern states who served in Congress during the period of Reconstruction, which aimed to address the inequities experienced by Black people during enslavement, while preparing reentry for the 11 Southern states that seceded from the union at the start of the U.S. Civil War.

Once Reconstruction ended and federal troops were withdrawn, freed slaves in the South lost many of the freedoms gained following the war as Southern states enforced racial segregation through Jim Crow-era laws.

White conservatives have dominated Mississippi’s Statehouse and congressional delegation ever since. Nearly all were white Democrats as laws restricted where Black people could live, work and go to school. That weight carried on through the Civil Rights era, but during the late 1960s white elected leaders in Mississippi switched political parties and became Republicans.

Colom’s win represents “a pretty significant change in Mississippi politics,” said Brian Shoup, head of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University.

“We haven’t seen a Democrat win the Senate since the 1980s and even then that was a traditional kind of more southern conservative Democrat,” the professor said. “We haven’t had an African American senator since the era of Reconstruction, so this is obviously a very significant and important election in Mississippi history.”

Mississippi has been burdened by its racial legacy

Black voters in Mississippi and across the South were faced with the reality of redistricting efforts designed to reduce Black representation in elected positions, set off in late April by a Supreme Court decision that gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling helped fuel increased voter turnout.

But it’s difficult for many to ignore Mississippi’s troubling past involving race relations, from the lynching of Black people by the Ku Klux Klan and other mobs to the killings of Evers and Till.

In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Mississippi as a state “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.”

Colom’s election is historic and means things are changing in parts of the South, said Elnora Fisher, 68, of Greenville, who was born and raised in Mississippi where she remembers that simply living often didn’t seem fair to Black people.

“As I understood, my grandparents always tried to save up to vote,” Fisher said. “They had to pay a tax to vote.”

As a child during the 1960s, Fisher said her mother took her to an NAACP meeting. “While we were there the white police stopped the meeting and made us leave,” she said.

Black people in Mississippi should be ecstatic with Colom as a U.S. senator, Fisher added.

“Here in Mississippi, so much has been taken from the poor people and given to the rich people,” she said. “I hope Colom will give back to the people who helped get him where he is.”

Good may come of it all with so many eyes on the results of the contest between Colom and Hyde-Smith, said Shoup, the professor. Mississippians, along with the rest of the nation, may be ready to begin healing from the past.

“This race, the fact that it has been so close, and it has activated so much turnout, might portend the prospects of maybe being able to talk about these things in a more civil and open fashion,” he said.

Williams writes for the Associated Press. Sophie Bates in Jackson, Miss., and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed to this report.

DODGE CITY, Kan. — Jose Del Real looked over the crowd from the stage in a park, at hundreds of his neighbors with furious signs tucked under their arms, voicing their anger at immigration agents who had descended on their town and started rounding up their friends and family. His daughters, in the front row, were crying.

Del Real, an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq, hadn’t voted in a decade. He thought it wouldn’t matter in this ruby red corner of Kansas. But the midterm election was weeks away. He draped an American flag over his shoulders, put on his Iraq veteran cap and ended his speech with a message: “None of this matters if you do not vote. Let’s go vote.”

They did. This county and two of its neighbors in southwestern Kansas, Republican strongholds where a steady stream of immigrants have settled over the decades to work at feed lots and slaughterhouses, swung wildly to the left. The shift helped elect a Democratic U.S. senator from Kansas for the first time in nearly a century, signaling the limits of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.

Since Democrats won back control of Congress in a decisive rebuke to Republicans, Trump has sent mixed messages about how he plans to handle immigration enforcement going forward. He suggested that his approach to deportations was too harsh but also named hard-liner Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Both parties will be recalibrating their approach ahead of the next presidential campaign.

Here in Kansas, late September raids ignited a maelstrom of rage, turning many who had been apathetic, like Del Real, into determined voters.

Masked officers in tactical gear banged on doors before dawn. They stopped cars in the middle of intersections. Businesses shuttered. Families feared leaving their houses. Children stopped going to school. Some livestreamed themselves being detained. One man pleaded “God help me” in Spanish, his hands shaking, as he asked anyone watching to let his family know.

The resistance came not only from Democrats or the Latino population, which has grown to about two-thirds of Dodge City. Kansas’ embattled Republican senator, Roger Marshall, who would lose his reelection bid to Adam Hamilton, issued a statement pleading with the administration to consult local officials before launching raids.

Del Real regrets he didn’t vote in 2024, when Trump roared back into office pledging mass deportations.

“We had to see it in front of us,” Del Real said. “I had to see it in the flesh.”

This corner of Kansas is responsible for much of the country’s beef

The gates leading into Dodge City boast that it’s the “Queen of the Cowtowns.” Its main street is named after the classic Western set here, “Gunsmoke.” Murals celebrating cowboy history mix with evidence of a changing culture: storefronts showcasing quinceañera dresses, Mexican bakeries, city signs printed in both Spanish and English.

Del Real’s family came from Mexico when he was a kindergartner. Like most here, they came to work. The area — Dodge City and the region’s other hubs, Garden City and Liberal — is known as the Golden Triangle of Meatpacking, responsible for about a quarter of the U.S. beef supply.

Some here thought their importance to the nation’s food might spare them from the administration’s deportation campaigns, said Amy Soberanes, a 25-year-old local organizer.

Soberanes, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said she and others tried for years to get people — particularly their young, Latino neighbors — engaged.

But, from rural Kansas, immigration raids in places like Minneapolis and Chicago felt abstract.

Then they saw their own streets in social media videos.

People were furious, said Soberanes, who worried the daily protests could get out of hand. They told people not to slash tires or break windows, to store up their anger and take it out on Election Day.

“We’ll see them at the ballot box,” she recalls repeating.

Her phone rang and rang. People she’d hassled to vote for years asked: How do I register?

“If ICE hadn’t come, we would still be red, 100%,” she said. “And so I thank Donald Trump for sending immigration here.”

Answers about the immigration raids never came

No one knew immigration officers were coming.

Dodge City Commissioner Rick Sowers said he and other city officials found out just like everyone else, through social media or masses of unmarked trucks on their neighbors’ lawns.

They scrambled to get answers from the federal government – who they were looking for, who was in charge, how long they would stay – and never did.

The Trump administration issued statements naming five “heinous criminals” they said had been arrested. But the Wichita Eagle dug into that claim and found none of those people were actually apprehended during the surge: Four had been deported months before and the fifth was already in prison, the newspaper found.

The agency said it detained 104 people from southwest Kansas.

Local officials have still never seen a list, Sowers said.

Local Republican Chairman Scott Fischer, who describes himself as a supporter of strong borders, was surprised by the operation’s intensity.

“There was a little showmanship,” he said. “I don’t know why it was like that.”

He said he still considers the county red — it voted, narrowly, for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson. The Associated Press called that race Thursday: Masterson lost to Democrat Cindy Holscher.

But some Dodge City Republicans abandoned the party in the U.S. Senate race.

Dr. Russell Arben Fox, political science professor at Friends University in Wichita, said swings as dramatic as that one couldn’t have happened without some white, moderate Republicans changing their minds.

More than half of Kansas voters in the Senate race disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 midterm voters. That’s consistent with the 61% of voters who say this nationally.

Most of the Latino immigrants here are hard-working, family-oriented, faithful people – a perfect fit for conservative Kansas values, Fischer said, so local Republicans tend to have a nuanced view on immigration.

Some public officials have for years begged the federal government for reforms to provide a pathway for these workers who run the region’s economy.

“In general terms, mass deportation is not practical,” Fischer said. “When we say send them all home, what does that mean? Who is them?”

Dodge City residents came together to help during the raids

To many here, “them” this time meant relatives and friends. In this small town, nearly everybody is connected to everybody else, so they did what they could to help.

Oscar Soto delivered food to people afraid to leave home during the deportation raids.

He started calling it “the black week,” after the black plague. That’s what it felt like to him, a pestilence that arrived suddenly.

His mother came here from Mexico, he said, and though she is here legally, she was terrified.

“It seemed unreal,” he said. “It was stuff that’s never been seen here, and it was day after day after day.”

He works at a family-owned grocery, and strung a garland of flags from around the world above the counter when it opened. Most customers are from Mexico and Guatemala, he said, but he wanted to signal that the store was for everyone.

Then he hung a big American flag from the ceiling. It means to him that anyone, from anywhere, can come here, work hard and build a life, free from fear.

That belief in the American dream was shaken for him when ICE arrived.

So he registered to vote for the first time at age 39.

He stood in line to cast his ballot, amazed by how many young, Latino voters were waiting along with him.

Galofaro writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

Nov. 13, 2026 9:21 AM PT

WASHINGTON — Abdul El-Sayed has proposed “TrumpCare,” a golden insurance card providing universal healthcare, dangling the president’s name on the ambitious Democratic plan.

James Talarico has suggested Donald Trump could become a man of history like Lyndon B. Johnson, who was seen as a master of congressional dealmaking.

And even Hakeem Jeffries, in line to become the House speaker in January, has left the door open to working with the other side of the aisle “wherever and whenever possible” to deliver for the American people.

Democrats who swept into power by riding voter backlash to Trump are now pitching ways to collaborate with the president, playing to his vanity and his love of making deals to propel their own agenda.

The offers coming from the Democrats carry both practical and political applications — a strategy to show that the party is serious about the hard work of legislating and also an acknowledgment that Trump’s signature is needed for new laws.

Trump himself has said he doesn’t want to spend the final two years of his presidency simply vetoing bills from the Democrats in control of Congress. It was only a few short years ago, during his first term, that Trump stunned Republicans by cutting deals with the Democratic leaders he called “Chuck and Nancy” — Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats appeal to Trump’s vanity

Before the next Congress begins in January, Democrats are trying to entice Trump with the prospect of timeless glory to a president fixated on making his mark on Washington.

All he has to do, they say, is work with them to deliver sweeping policies like Medicare for All.

“Donald, this is on the table. Guarantee healthcare for every American, from cradle to grave,” El-Sayed, who won the U.S. Senate race in Michigan after Trump branded him a terrorist sympathizer, wrote on social media.

He attached mock-ups of a gold-colored card, with Trump’s name and signature far more prominent than the small text reading “Medicare for All.”

Universal healthcare has long been anathema to Republicans, although Congress — and even the Republican president himself — will face pressure to deal with rising costs.

Trump’s willingness to slog through extended negotiations with Democrats is an open question, and his past promises of dealmaking have been hit and miss. He reiterated Thursday he is willing to work with Democrats.

“I’m going to be vetoing a lot of things that they’re going to send me initially that are bad for the country, and I think eventually they’re going to call in, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s make a deal,’ and we’ll be able to make deals on healthcare, on drug prices,” the president told commentator Stephen A. Smith in an interview.

Trump’s choice of Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff may foreclose some of those opportunities, however. Jeffries described Miller as a “stone-cold racist” and said he has “zero interest” in working with him.

The pitches from Democrats keep coming

The pitches from some of Democrats’ most high-profile new arrivals in Washington will help shape the party’s approach for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

Talarico, the Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, described the ways that Johnson is memorialized on Capitol Hill and remembered for shaping civil rights and social services as a senator and president.

“If President Trump wants the same plaques and portraits and busts as LBJ, we can help make that a reality,” Talarico said Thursday at the What’s Next conference in Denver, where many Democrats gathered to plot their way forward.

Talarico made his pitch to Democrats as much as to Trump. After getting the fulsome repudiation of Trump they’ve been seeking for a decade, the party’s base voters may not be eager to see their newly elected leaders standing with him for a bipartisan signing ceremony at the White House Rose Garden that he paved over to create a patio resembling his Mar-a-Lago resort.

However, Talarico said Americans are counting on bold changes before the next president takes office after Trump’s second term ends.

“Some of these reforms may not pass until 2029, but the American people cannot wait two years for change,” he said. “So we must work with President Trump.”

The eagerness to work with Trump is notable from El-Sayed and Talarico, who were among the president’s most frequent targets as he hop-scotched the country for Republicans ahead of the midterms. He singled them out for especially personal attacks, questioning El-Sayed’s loyalty to the United States and labeling the Texan as “Talafreako.”

Cooper and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. Cooper reported from Phoenix.

Nov. 13, 2026 8:04 AM PT

DENVER — Fresh off the best electoral performance in half a century, Democratic officials and strategists converged on Denver Thursday to plot a further course for the party and revel in their gains.

The two-day What’s Next conference, hosted by a new group called Majority Democrats, was put on politicos’ calendars months ago as another stepping stone as the party charted its way out of its post-2024 political wilderness.

Now Democrats will have to figure out what to do with majorities in both chambers of Congress and control of at least 12 new state legislative chambers.

“The fever has broken. The fog has lifted,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. “And now it falls upon us to rebuild the foundation of this great nation and to fulfill the promise of America.”

Barely a week after voters repudiated President Trump and his Republican Party, Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico said Democrats must work with him. Voters are hungry for results and can’t wait two years for Trump to leave office, he said, urging Democrats to avoid both intraparty fights and excessive caution.

“We can’t let them down,” Talarico said. “We can’t play it safe. We can’t get bogged down in the same petty fights. We can’t settle for nibbling around the edges, or results people will only feel a decade from now.”

Former Atty. Gen. Eric Holder echoed that theme, saying now “is not a time for timidity” and warning Democrats against aimlessly reaching for bipartisanship.

“For too long, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have been uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power,” Holder said. “This must end.”

Armed with charts, graphs and preliminary data about who voted and why, Democratic data analysts tried to explain a shockingly widespread victory that few saw coming. Democrats won because so many 2024 Trump voters stayed home, said David Shor, one of the party’s most prominent number crunchers.

“The reality is that most of the voters we lost two years ago still have not become Democrats,” Shor said. To win them back, the new Democratic majority needs to stay focused on addressing the economic concerns that are top of mind for voters, he said.

The conference features newly elected Democrats and potential presidential candidates, including former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

It’s a who’s-who of rising Democratic talent and a showcase for the party.

The gathering is also a showcase of sorts for Denver, which remains in the hunt for the party’s 2028 convention after last hosting one in 2008. The city is selling itself as a modern example of a purple state turning solid blue.

The Democrats gathered at a concert venue in central Denver. Attendees could crowd into the auditorium or watch speakers on a Jumbotron in an outside plaza flanked by food trucks and, on the horizon, 14,000-foot-high snowcapped peaks.

The group Majority Democrats seeks to bridge the traditional left-center splits that have riven the party for years, particularly since the 2024 election that returned Trump to the White House. It particularly positions itself as the voice of a new generation of party leaders tired of old ideological and establishment battles, and the speaker list skews noticeably young.

Rob Sand, who was elected Iowa’s first Democratic governor in nearly two decades, explained his decision to hold town hall meetings in every county and allow anyone to ask questions unfiltered. Voters want politicians who listen and answer their questions honestly, he said.

“There’s literally no question that I can be asked, no answer that I could give, no matter how bad, that would speak more loudly than me handing the microphone to someone at my event who says they are Republican,” Sand said.

The conference also includes various party leaders, such as the likely next House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, who has engendered suspicion among some on the left who continue to target the party’s Washington power structure.

Riccardi and Cooper write for the Associated Press. Cooper reported from Phoenix.

SACRAMENTO — More than a quarter of registered voters in California are unsure if they will fill out the upcoming 2030 Census, largely due to privacy concerns, according to a new poll.

The survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed 72% of voters said their household is certain to fill out the census. Of the 28% who expressed reluctance, 16% said they will “probably” fill it out; 5% said there is a 50-50 chance they would; 3% said they probably or certainly will not; and 4% were unsure.

The once-per-decade national population count is used to reapportion the U.S. House of Representatives’ 435 seats among the states. It is also used to determine federal funding for schools, healthcare, transportation and other public services.

By law, all responses to the national Census are kept confidential, a fact that was mentioned by pollsters when they asked respondents about the topic.

“We’re in a moment where there are a lot of reasons to be distrustful and a lot of concerns,” said Eric Schickler, co-director of the IGS Poll. “But the census, people have been filling that out their whole adult lives, so to see this level of concern and then that spill over into willingness to respond was certainly bracing.”

Younger voters and voters of color were more likely to express reluctance about completing the census. Fewer than half, 46%, of those under the age of 30 said they would definitely fill out the census. The same was said by about two-thirds of Black (68%) and Latino (65%) voters, as well as voters between the ages of 30 and 39 (63%). Just 57% of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters were certain they would participate.

Half of voters said they were either “very” or “somewhat confident” that their household’s census responses would be kept private, while 43% were “not too” or “not at all confident” and the remainder unsure.

“These findings are a warning, and we still have time to act. Doubt about confidentiality is an undercount in the making,” said Ditas Katague, who directed California’s Census 2020 outreach. She added that “protections are strong, but a law people don’t trust protects no one. That infrastructure has to be built now, not in 2029.”

The Trump administration has proposed new rules for the 2030 Census that would exclude many noncitizen residents from political apportionment and remove questions about race, ethnicity and sexual orientation from the survey.

The president previously moved to exclude undocumented immigrants from apportionment and include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, but the effort was abandoned when he left office.

“Hearing about, do noncitizens get counted, or hearing discussion about the intensified immigration enforcement, all of that kind of creates an atmosphere where a lot of people are concerned about how their responses would be treated,” Schickler said. Especially “if they have family members or are themselves non-citizens.”

With a stagnant population, California is expected to lose as many as four congressional seats after the 2030 Census, according to the nonpartisan American Redistricting Project, while fast-growing Texas and Florida could gain four and two seats, respectively.

If enacted, Trump’s proposed rule to exclude undocumented immigrants and others without permanent residency, including people with Temporary Protected Status, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, refugees, asylum seekers, could further diminish congressional representation for California and other states, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report.

The Golden State previously lost one congressional seat following the 2020 Census.

The poll surveyed 2,787 registered voters in California from Oct. 19-25, online in English and Spanish, and has an estimated margin of error of about 2.5 percentage points in either direction.

Funding for the poll was provided in part by the Los Angeles Times and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund.

A day after the Democrats swept to victory in the midterms, online right-wing discourse in the aging corners of Facebook turned to calls for an armed conflict with Muslims and socialists.

“Vote from the rooftops” said the caption on an image of a sniper taking aim from a rooftop. The slogan is a euphemism in rightwing subculture that if voting fails, it’s time to take up arms.

Another post warned of a coming civil war with “no one left to protect Muslims and social democrats” if they defund the police.

“I got a feeling that Abdul El Sayid won’t be around too long,” said another post, referring to the Michigan senator-elect, who faced one of the ugliest islamophobic campaigns.

Hate speech and calls for violence online aren’t new. But the problem has grown worse in recent years, experts said, after social media platforms including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram rolled back content moderation and fact-checking policies over fears of censorship and bias.

Anti-immigration rhetoric, election denialism and health skepticism are recurring themes for violent and false narratives in extreme right-wing online subcultures, weaponized by politicians. Incendiary speech has been further boosted by AI-powered slop that’s worsened an ailing information ecosystem.

In the runup to the midterms, wishes of harm and violent threats targeted at candidates running for office jumped fivefold on Elon Musk’s X, according to the Center for Countering Digital Harm, a non-profit based in Washington DC. The research analysed replies to posts from ten candidates in battleground races from Michigan to Texas, and found hundreds calling for violence.

A similar analysis in June found violent threats and hate against U.S. politicians on Facebook quadrupled after Meta cut its fact checking program in January 2025, according to CCDH. Hate and violent speech targeted at President Trump also doubled during that period.

“These findings point to a continued pattern of platforms’ safeguards failing to proactively remove content that contributes to our increasingly violent political culture,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, a nonprofit based in Washington.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company regularly issues “public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025.” Meta removed content it found to violate its policies, the spokesperson said.

Platforms have long struggled to strike a balance between free expression and censorship. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg began as a free speech absolutist, but had to beef up moderation and introduce third party fact checking after anti-minority hate speech on Facebook fueled real world violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia a decade ago.

The debate intensified during the COVID 19 pandemic over censoring speech that doubted or joked about the origins of the virus and anti-vaccine content, and culminated in the removal of Donald Trump’s account after inflammatory posts on the day of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022 changed the moderation landscape even further. As the billionaire railed against “woke” culture, he fired the platform’s moderation and fact-checking teams. Musk replaced it with the crowdsource program known as Community Notes that enables users to fact-check and flag problematic posts.

When Trump returned as President in 2024, the pendulum had swung back. Accused of censoring conservative views, Zuckerberg in public hearings attributed the pandemic-era speech policing to government pressure, and expressed regret over not speaking sooner. In 2025, he said that across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, the company would remove content filters around immigration and gender.

“The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” Zuckerberg said in a video message. He described Trump’s 2024 victory as a “cultural tipping point” to correct the over-censorship, and replaced fact checking with Community Notes.

Now, explicit calls for civil war or posts calling to prepare for the coming fight are on the rise on social media, experts say, especially in the lead up to and days after the midterms.

“So are we wearing camo or what? Sorry, this will be my first ever civil war,” read a Facebook post. Another image with a rifle read: “If it’s time to hide them, then it’s time to use them.”

“Problematic content on Meta platforms, which is primarily Facebook and Instagram, has increased after Meta rolled back its kind of fact-checking and anti-hate speech policies,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis professor of communication.

She pointed to an April study that found that Instagram failed to remove 93% of flagged hateful and extremist content by white supremacist and Nazi accounts.

Wojcieszak’s research showed that Meta’s stricter moderation before the 2020 election reduced misinformation exposure by 72%. However, contrary to popular belief, reducing exposure alone did not alter political attitudes or diminish polarization.

Meta has argued that the greater tolerance of offensive speech has resulted in fewer overall complaints about content takedowns.

“Should we prefer to catch 95% of hateful speech at the cost of mistakenly flagging 1% of unobjectionable content, or is it better to live in a world in which 99% of hateful speech is caught but 5% of unobjectionable content is taken down? There’s no right answer,” said Olivier Boutin, UC Berkeley PhD student, studying political misinformation.

Other platforms also have loosened their rules about policing content. Last year, YouTube also began encouraging its moderators to leave up videos that may break its policies, increasing the threshold for offensive content to half a video, from a quarter.

Zuckerberg had called for the Trump administration’s support to push back against governments in Europe and Latin America pressuring American platforms to censor. Meta has moved its U.S. content moderation teams to Texas out of California, and has taken the stance that it will wait for people to report content before taking it down to reduce censorship.

UC Davis’ Wojcieszak said lasting change is possible only with regulation and penalties for platforms spreading hate.

“Without stricter and overt regulation, I do not think that the ‘blue wave’ will change anything by itself,” Wojcieszak said, referring to the big win by Democrats in the midterms. “Like I cannot imagine that suddenly Musk or other platform CEOs would say, ‘Oh, you know, now the Democrats are my best buddies. Let me change back to stricter moderation policies.’”

Still, many believe the Democrats’ win has set the stage for tougher tech and platform regulation.

Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, reasserted his “progressive” credentials earlier this week after playing a key role in Trump’s deportation campaign. Meta’s Washington whisperer, Joel Kaplan, who helped Zuckerberg get close to Trump, will quit after a 15 year stint.

Some argue that there needs to be more consistency to avoid big swings between strict content moderation and free-for-all speech.

“We don’t want this ridiculous pendulum swinging where [tech CEOs are] sucking up to whoever’s in power,” said Ahmed of CCDH. “What the people want is transparency and accountability. So, if they [social media platforms] do contribute to causing real world harm, we should be able to hold them liable for it.”

Mohammadjamal Azizi, an Iranian refugee living in Tujunga, panicked when his wife called him last month about a message from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement instructing her to contact Iranian government officials in Washington about her case.

The United States and Iran have been at war for months, and the pair claimed asylum to enter the country as Christian converts, so Azizi’s wife was surprised and terrified. She thought that after close to two years in a detention facility, it meant the U.S. government planned to deport her.

“If they send me back to Iran, what will happen to me?” Azizi recalls his wife saying through tears.

Documents in a lawsuit brought against U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio unsealed last week contend that the Trump administration has been in secret conversations with Iran to plan deportations, even as the two nations have been at war.

The lawsuit, filed in July by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund in U.S. District Court in Washington, accused the U.S. immigration officials of sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with their home country and described a coordinated effort between the two governments to identify Iranians and pressure them to return.

At a hearing Oct. 15, court transcripts show, the Trump administration acknowledged its plan to deport Iranians back to the country, saying “the government is executing lawful orders of removal.”

In a statement to The Times, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended its talks with Iran, saying that ICE “actively coordinates” with countries to secure travel documents and is “committed to ensuring that illegal aliens are informed of their right to communicate with their consular representatives.”

In the Los Angeles area, which is home to the largest population of people of Iranian descent outside of Iran, the confirmation of deportation talks has sparked fear among refugees and immigrant advocates.

Yasmine Chubin, executive director of the Iranian advocacy group, said the organization’s attorneys knew of at least a dozen detainees approached about removal in recent weeks. All were asylum seekers and a majority were Christian converts who entered the U.S. through the Southern border, and were held in detention for 18 months or longer. One attempted suicide upon hearing he might be returned to Iran, Chubin said.

“We’re at war and it’s unsafe to send anyone back to Iran,” Chubin said. “We find it really alarming, both the level of coordination between ICE and Iran and the unrestricted access officials have to Iranian nationals.”

Pastor Kevin Kang of Tujunga United Methodist Church, who has helped to house Azizi and other formerly detained refugees from Iran and elsewhere, said asylum seekers are under immense pressure to include detailed information in their application, but are afraid the information they include could end up in the hands of the government they fled from.

“All of this is horrifying,” Kang said. “These are people who have fled to this country because they want to be able to worship in the way they want.”

Homeland Security said “As promised, the Trump Administration is employing all lawful options to execute the largest deportation operation in history.”

The department said its handling of asylum seekers is “in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”

Historically, the U.S. has rarely deported people to Iran, and has often welcomed Iranian dissidents, exiles and others who fled the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But the Trump administration has reversed decades of that approach in service of its broader hard-line immigration crackdown. This, despite the fact that Trump has encouraged Iranians to rise up against their government, telling them during January protests that “help is on its way,” and at the outset of the war: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Some 600 Iranians were put in immigration detention last year, according to records obtained by the National Iranian American Council, another advocacy group. Between September 2025 and January 2026, the U.S. arranged three flights to return more than 100 Iranian nationals to Iran, according to information ICE disclosed in a court filing in the ongoing case.

ICE attempted to remove at least eight Iranians over the weekend, but the flight set to leave from Arizona, routed through Pakistan, was abruptly canceled for unknown reasons. The group has still been told they could be put back on a flight in coming days, according to immigration attorneys involved.

Homeland Security declined to comment on the canceled deportation flight or confirm future removal operations.

During the Oct. 15 hearing, Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney for the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, described a June incident in which Iran officials who operate out of Pakistan’s embassy in Washington interrogated an Iranian man in California.

The man, whose name is redacted in court documents, was picked up by ICE when he attended a scheduled appointment at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service office in San Jose, and taken to the California City Detention Facility.

A week later, a detention officer led him to a private room where two men were waiting to speak with him. He was not told who they were beforehand, according to court documents. The visitors told the detainee they knew “a great deal” about him, including that he had been affiliated with an Iranian opposition group and lived in Camp Ashraf, just across the border in Iraq, before resettling in the U.S. in 2015.

“We know everything about you, do not worry,” the detainee recalled one of the men saying, according to court filings.

The fact that Iranian officials showed up that soon after the man’s detainment and were familiar with his case was “really indicative” of information sharing between the two governments, Kirkpatrick said in an interview.

At the Oct. 15 hearing, Judge Ana C. Reyes expressed surprise at the government’s position, according to the transcript.

“What you’re telling me is that the United States of America is going to send individuals back to that region facing what you and I and everyone who would ever look at this would know would be at a minimum a serious threat of certain death” she asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. It is — the government is executing lawful orders of removal,” replied Justice Department attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel.

Though Reyes did not ultimately issue a preliminary injunction, she did order the administration to notify her in writing five days before the government sends any detainees to Iran.

It has left those in custody unsure of what will happen next.

Azizi and his wife, Hannaneh Alikaram, left Iran and requested asylum in the U.S. in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they could face as Christian converts. Back home they had twice been arrested which they said was due to their faith, according to their testimony in court.

To enter the country, they flew to Brazil and took the perilous overland route through the Darien Gap. They entered the U.S. at the southern border and were taken into custody.

Azizi was freed from detention about a year ago, with his asylum application approved. Alikaram’s nearly identical application, however, was rejected, with the judge overseeing her case citing consistencies in her testimony. Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their case.

When Azizi, who goes by his Christian name Liam, contacted Iranian officials on behalf of his wife last month as instructed, he was told only that she was not on a current list of Iranian nationals scheduled to be deported.

“That was a relief,” he said.

In the spring, the couple filed a habeas corpus petition challenging Alikaram’s detention, which is still pending, as well as a motion to expedite the request due to a heart condition she has. She remains in custody at Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana.

“I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” Azizi said. “We are still waiting.”

Over the last half a century, Chinese spies have taken aim at a wide swath of California targets.

They have worked as a Boeing aerospace engineer and a naval engineer at defense contractor Power Paragon to obtain highly classified information on U.S. space shuttle and Navy projects. They have assumed the roles of electrical engineering professor at UCLA and software engineer at Google and even worked as a driver and aide to the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Intelligence experts say that China continues to ramp up its network of spies and assets across California, as underscored this week after Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang admitted he was embroiled in an extramarital affair when allegations surfaced that he had a relationship with a suspected Chinese spy. On Thursday morning, Huang announced his resignation.

“For years, the FBI has been sounding the alarm regarding China’s ambitious efforts to gain technological, economic and geopolitical superiority,” said former Assistant Chief Horace Frank of the Los Angeles Police Department, who oversaw intelligence. “Their activities constitute a long-term strategic threat — not only to the United States, but to the world. Their counterintelligence strategy is not only about stealing secrets today; it’s about securing strategic advantages tomorrow. They recognize that human vulnerabilities (sex, money, ego and ambition) can be crucial when it comes to them attaining this quest for global dominance.”

For China, California is a key espionage hub because it combines three attractive targets: advanced technology industries, major research universities and a large concentration of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, according to William Hannas, lead analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. China’s main objectives are to accelerate its technological development, reduce dependence on foreign suppliers and achieve leadership in strategically important fields, including artificial intelligence, Hannas said.

“Silicon Valley is especially important,” he said, “because it offers access not only to existing technologies, but also to innovations at their earliest stages.”

California is also a focal point of China’s espionage efforts, some experts say, because it has the highest number of Chinese residents in the continental U.S.

“It has been easier for both the spies and agents of influence to hide in plain sight, because they can more easily integrate themselves into their communities compared to places with a lower proportion of Asian Americans and Chinese residing overseas,” said Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Walking a fine line

For the U.S., Shih said, guarding against Chinese spies involves a delicate balance.

Officials must avoid politicizing the issue in such a way that they cast suspicion on Chinese scientists or Asian Americans based on race and ethnicity.

Already, many Chinese people working for California companies feel like they are being targeted, he said, and some complain the
suspicion means they are passed over for promotions. And there have been high-profile cases of Asian Americans unfairly accused of spying.

“Corporations need to put a lot of race and nationality neutral policies in place to secure their property rights,” Shih said. “Things were way too lax before, but now we’re running the risk of a witch hunt. The worst thing that could happen, and is somewhat happening now, is that a witch hunt in the U.S. drives many otherwise totally innocent scientists to China, and ends up helping China to develop technologies that one day will replace U.S. technology or even challenge U.S. military superiority.”

A race for technology leadership

Beijing’s leaders are seeking to catch up with — and eventually surpass — the U.S. in the frontier spheres of defense, aerospace and technology. Increasingly, China is also positioning assets in California to launch cyberhacking attacks and seek political influence and spread propaganda, intelligence experts said.

“They will try anything,” said retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent James Gaylord said of China’s Ministry of State Security, the nation’s principal civilian intelligence and security service.

Gaylord, who led multiple counterintelligence operations in California, said Chinese spies and agents are everywhere in the state, infiltrating private companies and even government offices.

“Unlike the Russians, the Chinese favor a shotgun approach,” he said. “‘A thousand grains of sands’ is how they refer to it.”

In addition to cultivating relationships with California’s technology CEOs to secure direct insights into U.S. artificial intelligence policies, China’s spies are also logging on to social media to try to cultivate relationships with students at top research institutions such as Stanford University.

As some spies adopt the ancient espionage practice of honey potting, using sexual or romantic allure to extract sensitive information, Gaylord frequently delivers a blunt warning to California’s tech bosses.

“If you’ve got access to technology, if you’re a billionaire and a 50-year-old balding man, and you’ve got a 25-year-old woman thinking you’re hilarious and the most interesting thing, it’s not you,” he tells them. “It is what you have access to.”

Chinese spies have embarked on affairs with high-level California politicians. According to declassified FBI interviews, disgraced former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell told investigators in 2015 that he had sexual relations a handful of times with Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese spy.

They have also compromised U.S. counterintelligence. In 2001, the FBI opened an inquiry after receiving credible information that Katrina Leung, a San Marino businesswoman it recruited as an informant in the early 1980s, was actively working as a double agent for China. It discovered that Leung, whose code name was “Parlor Maid,” was in a sexual relationship with her agency handler of 18 years, FBI Supervisory Special Agent James J. Smith, and had an affair with William Cleveland, another FBI agent. It also found that, over the years, FBI officials had learned of several incidents indicating that Leung provided classified U.S. government information to China.

Leung was charged in 2003 with obtaining, copying and retaining national security documents, but the U.S. government ultimately blocked the defense from talking to a key witness: her former FBI supervisor, Smith. After pleading guilty to lesser charges, Leung avoided a stiff prison sentence. She and Smith now live together, according to public records, in a $1.4-million San Leandro home in Alameda County.

A long history of spycraft

According to Hannas, China’s foreign technology acquisition program dates to the 1950s. Initially, the focus was on obtaining specific military technologies and components. Then, it expanded to manufacturing processes, advanced commercial technologies and, eventually, the underlying science from which new technologies emerge.

“The methods expanded accordingly, from conventional espionage and technology purchases to cyber operations, academic collaborations, talent recruitment, overseas investments, and systematic exploitation of publicly available research,” Hannas said. “The objective evolved from acquiring particular products to acquiring the capacity to innovate.”

One of the earliest documented occurrences of Chinese espionage in California occurred in 1979, the year Beijing and Washington set aside their differences and established full diplomatic relations.

According to the Department of Justice, Dongfan “Greg” Chung, a Chinese-born aerospace engineer who worked on NASA’s space shuttle program in Downey, sent a technology professor in China three sets of classified documents by sea freight. He then wrote to the professor to ask what else he could do for his homeland.

About 27 years later, FBI officials searching Chung’s home found more than 250,000 pages of documents containing decades’ worth of sensitive trade secrets that Chung had shared with China, including stress analysis reports and design information for the space shuttle, B-1 bomber engineering manuals, and plans for the fueling system of a Delta IV rocket.

Chung was convicted of economic espionage and acting as an agent of China in 2009. The following year, he was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison.

Investigators found out about Chung when they were investigating Chi Mak, a Chinese-born electrical engineer who orchestrated one of the most notorious family-run espionage rings.

A devout Maoist who worked for Power Paragon, Mak allowed China to make 20-year leaps in technology, said Gaylord, who led the landmark counterintelligence investigation. Mak gave China the Quiet Electric Drive to subdue the sound of submarine propulsion, the advance combat system called AEGIS, and the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System allowing jets to carry heavier payloads off aircraft carriers that is now on China’s fleet. In 2008, he was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison.

The convictions of Chung didn’t stop China.

In 2020, a former USC professor, Hao Zhang, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for conspiring to steal smartphone signal technology. In 2024, former U.S. Navy sailor Wenheng Zhao received 27 months in prison for delivering military operation details to a Chinese intelligence officer. In January, Jinchao Wei, a former sailor on the USS Essex in San Diego, was sentenced to more than 16 years for espionage after taking bribes for photos and documents.

China tends to have a different relationship with its spies than nations such as Russia.

In addition to using highly trained Ministry of State Security agents, Shih said, it relies on a much larger number of amateurs and ordinary Chinese people to assist with technology acquisition, political influence and harassment of dissidents — and it doesn’t care what happens to them.

“In the Cold War, they used to say, ‘I got one of your guys, you got one of my guys, we’ll trade,’” Shih said. “The Chinese government has never tried to get any of these people back. It’s like, well, if you get caught, you go to jail. That’s it. Too bad.”