Politics Desk

A judge approved a plan Friday to move more than 100 youths out of a troubled Los Angeles juvenile hall that has been the site of riots, drug overdoses and so-called “gladiator fights” in recent years.

Los Angeles County Superior Judge Miguel Espinoza signed off on the L.A. County Probation Department’s plan to relocate dozens of detainees from Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, months after a state oversight body ordered the hall to be shut down.

The Downey facility, home to approximately 270 youths, most of whom are between the ages of 15 and 18, has been under fire since last December, when the Board of State and Community Corrections ordered it closed because of repeated failures to meet minimum staffing requirements. The probation department has faced a years-long struggle to get officers to show up to work in the chaotic halls.

But the probation department ignored the state board’s order to shut down. Since the body has no power to enforce its own orders and the California Attorney General’s Office declined to step in, Los Padrinos continued to operate in defiance for months. In that time frame, several youths suffered drug overdoses, a teen was stabbed in the eye and 30 probation officers were indicted for allegedly organizing or allowing brawls between youths.

Acting on a legal challenge brought by the L.A. County Public Defender’s Office, Espinoza last month ordered probation officials to begin shrinking the number of youths held at Los Padrinos so it could comply with state regulations.

Roughly three-quarters of the youths at Los Padrinos are awaiting court hearings connected to violent offenses including murder, attempted murder, assault, robbery, kidnapping and gang crimes, according to the probation department.

The probation department made its plan to de-populate Los Padrinos public earlier this month, promising to remove 103 detainees from the facility by June.

Under the department’s plan, youth who are awaiting trial on cases that could land them in the county’s Secure Youth Treatment Facility will be moved to Barry J. Nidorf Hall in Sylmar. Others will be moved out of Los Padrinos and into the lower-security camps, where some juvenile justice advocates say teens perform much better and are far less likely to act violent.

“This plan reflects our continued commitment to balancing public safety, legal compliance, and the rehabilitative needs of the young people in our care,” the department said in a statement. “It is key to note that the court denied an indiscriminate mass release of youth, and that Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall will not be fully depopulated or closed.”

Espinoza originally weighed shutting down the facility last year when the public defender’s office questioned the legality of its continued operation in defiance of the BSCC. On Friday, he declined to adopt a plan from the Probation Oversight Commission that could have resulted in the release of some youths through a review process.

Some members of the oversight body expressed frustration that Espinoza’s order won’t solve the larger issues that have plagued the probation department for years. Milinda Kakani, a POC board member and the director of youth justice for the Children’s Defense Fund, also noted the moves might cause some youths to backslide by returning them to Nidorf Hall after they had already graduated from the prison-like SYTF, which some derisively refer to as “The Compound.”

“I imagine it’s deeply damaging to a young person to go back to the facility they had worked so hard to get out of,” Kakani said.

Espinoza warned he could take further action if the department’s plan does not bring it into compliance with state regulations. It was not clear when the next BSCC inspection of Los Padrinos would take place and a spokeswoman for the oversight body did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The probation department must provide Espinoza with an update on conditions at Los Padrinos by July.

NEW YORK — Christine Farro has cut back on the presents she sends her grandchildren on their birthdays, and she’s put off taking two cats and a dog for their shots. All her clothes come from thrift stores and most of her vegetables come from her garden. At 73, she has cut her costs as much as she can to live on a tight budget.

But it’s about to get far tighter.

As the Trump administration resumes collections on defaulted student loans, a surprising population has been caught in the crosshairs: hundreds of thousands of older Americans whose decades-old debts now put them at risk of having their Social Security checks garnished.

“I worked ridiculous hours. I worked weekends and nights. But I could never pay it off,” says Farro, a retired child welfare worker in Santa Ynez, Calif.

Like millions of debtors with federal student loans, Farro had her payments and interest paused by the government five years ago when the pandemic thrust many into financial hardship. That grace period ended in 2023 and, earlier this month, the Department of Education said it would restart “involuntary collections” by garnishing paychecks, tax refunds and Social Security retirement and disability benefits. Farro previously had her Social Security garnished and expects it to restart.

Farro’s loans date back 40 years. She was a single mother when she got a bachelor’s degree in developmental psychology and when she discovered she couldn’t earn enough to pay off her loans, she went back to school and got a master’s degree. Her salary never caught up. Things only got worse.

Around 2008, when she consolidated her loans, she was paying $1,000 a month, but years of missed payments and piled-on interest meant she was barely putting a dent in a bill that had ballooned to $250,000. When she sought help to resolve her debt, she says the loan company had just one suggestion.

“They said, ‘Move to a cheaper state,’” says Farro, who rents a 400-square-foot casita from a friend. “I realized I was living in a different reality than they were.”

Student loan debt among older people has grown at a staggering rate, in part due to rising tuitions that have forced more people to borrow greater sums. People 60 and older hold an estimated $125 billion in student loans, according to the National Consumer Law Center, a six-fold increase from 20 years ago.

That has led Social Security beneficiaries who have had their payments garnished to balloon by 3,000% — from approximately 6,200 beneficiaries to 192,300 — between 2001 and 2019, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This year, an estimated 452,000 people aged 62 and older had student loans in default and are likely to experience the Department of Education’s renewed forced collections, according to the January report from CFPB.

Debbie McIntyre, a 62-year-old adult education teacher in Georgetown, Ky., is among them. She dreams of retiring and writing more historical fiction, and of boarding a plane for the first time since high school. But her husband has been out of work on disability for two decades and they’ve used credit cards to get by on his meager benefits and her paycheck. Their rent will be hiked $300 when their lease renews. McIntyre doesn’t know what to do if her paycheck is garnished.

She floats the idea of bankruptcy, but that won’t automatically clear her loans, which are held to a different standard than other debt. She figures if she picks up extra jobs babysitting or tutoring, she could put $50 toward her loans here and there. But she sees no real solution.

“I don’t know what more I can do,” says McIntyre, who is too afraid to check what her loan balance is. “I’ll never get out of this hole.”

Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective debtors union says it’s striking how many older people dial into the organization’s calls and attend its protests. Many of them, he says, should have had their debts canceled but fell victim to a system “riddled with flaws and illegalities and flukes.” Many whose educations have left them in late-life debt have, in fact, paid back the principal on their loans, sometimes several times over, but still owe more due to interest and fees.

For those who are subject to garnishment, Brewington says, the results can be devastating.

“We hear from people who skip meals. We know people who dilute their medication or cut their pills in half. People take drastic measures like pulling all their savings out or dissolving their 401ks,” he says. “We know folks that have been driven into homelessness.”

Collections on defaulted loans may have restarted no matter who was president, though the Biden administration had sought to limit the amount of income that could be garnished. Federal law protects just $750 of Social Security benefits from garnishment, an amount that would put a debtor far below the poverty line.

“We’re basically providing people with federal benefits with one hand and taking them away with another,” says Sarah Sattelmeyer of the New America think tank.

Linda Hilton, a 76-year-old retired office worker from Apache Junction, Ariz., went through garnishment before COVID and says she will survive it again. But flights to see her children, occasional meals at a restaurant and other pleasures of retired life may disappear.

“It’s going to mean restrictions,” says Hilton. “There won’t be any travel. There won’t be any frills.”

Some debtors have already received notice about collections. Many more are living in fear. President Trump has signed an executive order calling for the Department of Education’s dismantling and, for those seeking answers about their loans, mass layoffs have complicated getting calls answered.

While Education Secretary Linda McMahon says restarting collections is a necessary step for debtors “both for the sake of their own financial health and our nation’s economic outlook,” even some of Trump’s most fervent supporters are questioning a move that will make their lives harder.

Randall Countryman, 55, of Bonita, Calif., says a Biden administration proposal to forgive some student debt didn’t strike him as fair, but he’s not sure Trump’s approach is either. He supported Trump but wishes the government made case-by-case decisions on debtors. Countryman thinks Americans don’t realize how many older people are affected by policies on student loans, often thought to be the turf of the young, and how difficult it can be for them to repay.

“What’s a young person’s problem today,” he says, “is an old person’s problem tomorrow.”

Countryman started working on a degree while in prison, then continued it at the University of Phoenix when he was released. He started growing nervous as he racked up loan debt and never finished his degree. He’s worked a host of different jobs, but finding work has often been complicated by his criminal record.

He lives off his wife’s Social Security check and the kindness of his mother-in-law. He doesn’t know how they’d get by if the government demands repayment.

“I kind of wish I never went to school in the first place,” he says.

Sedensky writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — In a massive setback, House Republicans failed Friday to push their big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee, as a handful of conservatives joined all Democrats in a stunning vote against it.

The hard-right lawmakers are insisting on steeper spending cuts to Medicaid and the Biden-era green energy tax breaks, among other changes, before they will give their support to President Trump’s “big beautiful bill.” They warn the tax cuts alone would pile onto the nation’s $36-trillion debt.

The failed vote, 16-21, stalls, for now, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s push to have the package approved next week. But the holdout lawmakers vowed to stay all weekend to negotiate changes as the president is returning to Washington from the Middle East.

“Something needs to change or you’re not going to get my support,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

Tallying a whopping 1,116 pages, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, named with a nod to Trump, is teetering at a critical moment. Conservatives are holding out for steeper cuts to Medicaid and other programs to help offset the costs of the tax breaks. But at the same time, lawmakers from high-tax states including New York and California are demanding a deeper tax deduction, known as SALT, for their constituents.

Johnson has insisted Republicans are on track to pass the bill, which he believes will inject a dose of stability into a wavering economy.

Democrats slammed the package, but they will be powerless to stop it if Republicans are united. They emphasized that millions of people would lose their health coverage if the bill passes while the wealthiest Americans would reap enormous tax cuts. They also said it would increase future deficits.

“That is bad economics. It is unconscionable,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democratic lawmaker on the panel.

The Budget panel is one of the final stops before the package is sent to the full House floor for a vote, which is expected as soon as next week. Typically, the job of the Budget Committee is more administrative as it compiles the work of 11 committees that drew up various parts of the big bill.

But Friday’s meeting proved momentous. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and have just a few votes to spare to advance the measure, including on the Budget Committee.

Four Republican conservatives initially voted against the package — Roy and Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Andrew Clyde of Georgia. Then one, Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, switched his vote to no.

The conservative holdouts from the Freedom Caucus are insisting on deeper cuts — particularly to Medicaid. They want new work requirements for aid recipients to start immediately, rather than on Jan. 1, 2029, as the package proposes.

Roy complained that the legislation front-loads new tax cuts and spending while back-loading the savings.

“We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price,” Roy said.

“Sadly,” added Norman, “I’m a hard no until we get this ironed out.”

At the same time, the New Yorkers have been unrelenting in their demand for a much larger SALT deduction than what is proposed in the bill, which could send the overall cost of the package skyrocketing.

As it stands, the bill proposes tripling what’s currently a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, increasing it to $30,000 for joint filers with incomes up to $400,000 a year.

Rep. Nick LaLota, one of the New York lawmakers leading the SALT effort, said they have proposed a deduction of $62,000 for single filers and $124,000 for joint filers.

The conservatives and the New Yorkers are at odds, each jockeying for their priorities as Johnson labors to keep the package on track to pass the House by Memorial Day and then onto the Senate.

“This is always what happens when you have a big bill like this,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.). “There’s always final details to work out all the way up until the last minute. So we’re going to keep working. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

At its core, the sprawling package extends the existing income tax cuts that were approved during Trump’s first term, in 2017, and adds new ones that the president campaigned on in 2024, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay and some auto loans.

It increases some tax breaks for middle-income earners, including a bolstered standard deduction of $32,000 for joint filers and a temporary $500 boost to the child tax credit, bringing it to $2,500.

It also provides an infusion of $350 billion for Trump’s deportation agenda and to bolster the Pentagon.

To offset more than $5 million in lost revenue, the package proposes rolling back other tax breaks, namely the green energy tax credits approved as part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Some conservatives want those to end immediately.

The package also seeks to cover the costs by slashing more than $1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs over the course of a decade, in part by imposing work requirements on able-bodied adults.

Certain Medicaid recipients would need to engage in 80 hours a month of work or other community options to receive healthcare. Older Americans receiving food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, would also see the program’s current work requirement for able-bodied participants without dependents extended to include those ages 55-64. States would also be required to shoulder a greater share of the program’s cost.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates at least 7.6 million fewer people with health insurance and about 3 million a month fewer SNAP recipients with the changes.

Mocking the name of the bill, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called it “one big, beautiful betrayal.”

“To pay for it,” Democratic Rep. Morgan McGarvey said, “kids in Kentucky will go hungry, nursing homes and hospitals will close, and millions of Americans will be kicked off their health insurance. It’s wrong.”

Mascaro and Freking write for the Associated Press. AP writer Leah Askarinam contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — A humanities federation and a state council have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to reverse local funding cuts made by Trump advisor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Oregon Council for the Humanities, names DOGE, its acting administrator, Amy Gleason, and the NEH among the defendants.

The plaintiffs ask the court to “stop this imminent threat to our nation’s historic and critical support of the humanities by restoring funding appropriated by Congress.” It notes the “disruption and attempted destruction, spearheaded by DOGE,” of a partnership between the state and the federal government to support the humanities.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, maintains that DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities exceeded their authority in terminating funding mandated by Congress.

DOGE shut down the funding and laid off more than 80% of the staff at the NEH in April as part of an executive order signed by President Trump.

The humanities is just one of many areas that have been affected as Trump’s Republican administration has targeted cultural establishments including the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts. The moves are part of Trump’s goals to downsize the federal government and end initiatives seen as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which he calls “discrimination.”

The humanities groups’ lawsuit said DOGE brought the core work of the humanities councils “to a screeching halt” this spring when it terminated its grant program.

The filing is the most recent lawsuit filed by humanities groups and historical, research and library associations to try to stop funding cuts and the dissolution of federal agencies and organizations.

The funding freeze for the humanities comes when state councils and libraries have been preparing programming for the summer and beginning preparations for celebrations meant to commemorate next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Requests for comment Friday from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the White House were not immediately returned.

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday that federal law enforcement is investigating a social media post made by former FBI Director James Comey that she and other Republicans suggest is a call for violence against President Trump.

In an Instagram post, Comey wrote “cool shell formation on my beach walk” under a picture of seashells that appeared to form the shapes for “86 47.”

Numerous Trump administration officials, including Noem, said Comey was advocating for the assassination of Trump, the 47th president. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately,” Noem wrote.

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary used by the Associated Press, says 86 is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” It notes: “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

The post has since been deleted. Comey subsequently wrote, “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.

“It never occurred to me,” Comey added, “but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

Comey’s original post sparked outrage among conservatives on social media, with Donald Trump Jr. accusing Comey of calling for his father’s killing.

Current FBI Director Kash Patel said he was aware of the post and was conferring with the Secret Service and its director.

James Blair, White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs, noted that the post came at a delicate time given that Trump is traveling in the Middle East.

“This is a Clarion Call from Jim Comey to terrorists & hostile regimes to kill the President of the United States as he travels in the Middle East,” Blair wrote on X.

Comey, who was FBI director from 2013-17, was fired by Trump during the president’s first term amid the bureau’s probe into allegations of ties between Russian officials and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Comey wrote about his career in the bestselling memoir “A Higher Loyalty.”

He is now a crime fiction writer and is promoting his latest book, “FDR Drive,” which is being released Tuesday.

MADISON, Wis. — A Wisconsin judge charged with helping a man illegally evade immigration agents is seeking donations to fund her court defense.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan announced Friday that she’s set up a fund to cover the costs of her defense. The fund issued a statement saying that the case against her is an “unprecedented attack on the independent judiciary by the federal government.”

Dugan has hired a group of high-powered lawyers led by former U.S. Atty. Steve Biskupic. She’s looking to tap into anger on the left over the case to help pay them. Dozens of people demonstrated outside Dugan’s arraignment Thursday at the federal courthouse in Milwaukee, demanding she be set free and accusing the Trump administration of going too far.

Federal prosecutors allege Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a hearing in a domestic violence case when Dugan learned immigration agents were in the courthouse looking to arrest him. According to court documents, Flores-Ruiz illegally returned to the U.S. after he was deported in 2013.

Angry that agents were in the courthouse and calling the situation “absurd,” Dugan led Flores-Ruiz out a back door in her courtroom, according to an FBI affidavit. Agents eventually captured him following a foot chase outside the building.

FBI agents arrested Dugan at the county courthouse on April 25. A grand jury on Tuesday indicted her on one count of obstruction and one count of concealing a person to prevent arrest. The charges carry a total maximum sentence of six years in federal prison.

Dugan pleaded not guilty during her arraignment. Her attorneys have filed a motion seeking to dismiss the case, arguing that she was controlling movement in her courtroom in her official capacity as a judge and therefore is immune from prosecution.

The state Supreme Court suspended Dugan following her arrest. A reserve judge has taken over her cases.

The fund statement said that Dugan plans to resume her work as a judge and they won’t accept contributions that could compromise her judicial integrity. She will accept money only from U.S. citizens but won’t take donations from Milwaukee County residents; attorneys who practice in the county; lobbyists; judges; parties with pending matters before any Milwaukee County judge; and county employees.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske will manage the fund.

Richmond writes for the Associated Press.

They arrive at the U.S. border from around the world: Eritrea, Guatemala, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ghana, Uzbekistan and so many other countries.

They come for asylum, insisting they face persecution for their religion, or sexuality or for supporting the wrong politicians.

For generations, they had been given the chance to make their case to U.S. authorities.

Not anymore.

“They didn’t give us an ICE officer to talk to. They didn’t give us an interview. No one asked me what happened,” said a Russian election worker who sought asylum in the U.S. after he said he was caught with video recordings he made of vote rigging. On Feb. 26, he was deported to Costa Rica with his wife and young son.

On Jan. 20, just after being sworn in for a second term, President Trump suspended the asylum system as part of his wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration, issuing a series of executive orders designed to stop what he called the “invasion” of the United States.

What asylum seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules, where people can be deported to countries they know nothing about after fleeting conversations with immigration officials while others languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

Attorneys who work frequently with asylum seekers at the border say their phones have gone quiet since Trump took office. They suspect many who cross are immediately expelled without a chance at asylum or are detained to wait for screening under the U.N.’s convention against torture, which is harder to qualify for than asylum.

“I don’t think it’s completely clear to anyone what happens when people show up and ask for asylum,” said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council.

Restrictions face challenges in court

A thicket of lawsuits, appeals and countersuits have filled the courts as the Trump administration faces off against activists who argue the sweeping restrictions illegally put people fleeing persecution in harm’s way.

In a key legal battle, a federal judge is expected to rule on whether courts can review the administration’s use of invasion claims to justify suspending asylum. There is no date set for that ruling.

The government says its declaration of an invasion is not subject to judicial oversight, at one point calling it “an unreviewable political question.”

But rights groups fighting the asylum proclamation, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, called it “as unlawful as it is unprecedented” in the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

Illegal border crossings, which soared in the first years of President Biden’s administration, reaching nearly 10,000 arrests per day in late 2024, dropped significantly during his last year in office and plunged further after Trump returned to the White House.

Yet more than 200 people are still arrested daily for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border.

Some of those people are seeking asylum, though it’s unclear if anyone knows how many.

Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for the San Diego office of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her office sometimes received 10 to 15 calls a day about asylum after Biden implemented asylum restrictions in 2024.

That number has dropped to almost nothing, with only a handful of total calls since Jan. 20.

Plus, she added, lawyers are unsure how to handle asylum cases.

“It’s really difficult to consult and advise with individuals when we don’t know what the process is,” she said.

Doing ‘everything right’

None of this was expected by the Russian man, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution if he returns to Russia.

“We felt betrayed,” the 36-year-old told the Associated Press. “We did everything right.”

The family had scrupulously followed the rules. They traveled to Mexico in May 2024, found a cheap place to rent near the border with California and waited nearly nine months for the chance to schedule an asylum interview.

On Jan. 14, they got word that their interview would be on Feb 2. On Jan. 20, the interview was canceled.

Moments after Trump took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it had scrubbed the system used to schedule asylum interviews and canceled tens of thousands of existing appointments.

There was no way to appeal.

The Russian family went to a San Diego border crossing to ask for asylum, where they were taken into custody, he said.

A few weeks later, they were among the immigrants who were handcuffed, shackled and flown to Costa Rica. Only the children were left unchained.

Turning to other countries to hold deportees

The Trump administration has tried to accelerate deportations by turning countries like Costa Rica and Panama into “bridges,” temporarily detaining deportees while they await return to their countries of origin or third countries.

Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the U.S. to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama.

To supporters of tighter immigration controls, the asylum system has always been rife with exaggerated claims by people not facing real dangers. In recent years, roughly one-third to half of asylum applications were approved by judges.

Even some politicians who see themselves as pro-immigration say the system faces too much abuse.

“People around the world have learned they can claim asylum and remain in the U.S. indefinitely to pursue their claims,” retired U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a longtime Democratic stalwart in Congress, wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, defending Biden’s tightening of asylum policies amid a flood of illegal immigration.

An uncertain future

Many of the immigrants they arrived with have left the Costa Rican facility where they were first detained, but the Russian family has stayed. The man cannot imagine going back to Russia and has nowhere else to go.

He and his wife spend their days teaching Russian and a little English to their son. He organizes volleyball games to keep people busy.

He is not angry at the U.S. He understands the administration wanting to crack down on illegal immigration. But, he adds, he is in real danger. He followed the rules and can’t understand why he didn’t get a chance to plead his case.

He fights despair almost constantly, knowing that what he did in Russia brought his family to this place.

“I failed them,” he said. “I think that every day: I failed them.”

Sullivan writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON  — When Nancy Pelosi first held the speaker’s gavel in 2007, liberals in her caucus wanted to impeach President Bush over the Iraq war. Pelosi resisted.

More than a decade later, the San Francisco Democrat returned to the speaker’s rostrum with a new Democratic majority, hearing similar calls to impeach a Republican president.

This time, too, she resisted for months. But President Trump, she insists, left her no choice.

Trump’s offenses, she said in an interview Tuesday in the speaker’s office, justified impeachment in a way Bush’s had not.

“What could be worse than that? Misrepresenting to the public what the basis of the war was,” Pelosi said. But, she continued, Trump’s efforts to enlist a foreign government, Ukraine, in domestic U.S. politics, asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals, “is so overwhelming that for us to not do this would be a dereliction of our own duties.”

The process Pelosi set in motion when she said the House would begin the impeachment is now on the eve of completion. Lawmakers are scheduled to open debate Wednesday on an impeachment resolution that is all but certain to pass on a near-party-line vote.

With that vote, impeachment will stand as a key part of her legacy, her colleagues agree — along with becoming the country’s first female speaker of the House and shepherding the Affordable Care Act into law.

Republicans, who have defended the president, say the impeachment effort will put the Democratic majority at risk.

The impeachment vote “will be a stain on Nancy Pelosi’s legacy as speaker,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), denouncing what he called “a personal vendetta against the president.”

Pelosi’s allies paint a very different picture.

“All this is coming out now because, as Nancy says, ‘the times have found us,’” said former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a friend of Pelosi’s. “The times have found her.”

In the eyes of Democrats, Boxer added, the speaker has become “the chief antagonist or the chief opponent to the man who has taken a wrecking ball to America.”

That position wasn’t ordained a year ago.

When Pelosi’s party regained the majority after the 2018 election, a small but vocal faction of Democrats were calling for her to step aside. Her initial months back in the speaker’s office were marked by tension between progressives and moderates among the sometimes unruly House Democrats.

Members on the party’s left “were rambunctious; they assumed the caucus would get in their way. So they spoke out,” said former Rep. George Miller, a longtime ally of Pelosi’s.

Paradoxically, however, impeachment, which many saw as a divisive issue, has caused Pelosi’s party to coalesce around her. Critics who just a year ago said she should step aside have put their trust in her political instincts, saying the House would have been rolled by Trump under a less powerful speaker.

And to the surprise of some Democrats, who considered her out of touch with a younger generation in the party, Pelosi has become a pop culture symbol of Democratic resistance by standing up to the president on live television or even just by walking out of the White House in a fashionable coat.

“In her whole career, she has always prided herself on being measured. But the times she has stepped out of that measured status have been blockbusters,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), a Pelosi ally. “I think she has found a newer voice — to be used sparingly but effectively.”

Pelosi has insisted all along that Democrats are not impeaching Trump because of politics. Disagreements over separation of children from their families at the border, gun control or climate change need to be resolved at the ballot box, she said.

“Impeachment, politics — [they] have nothing to do with each other,” she repeated in the interview.

But politics is an inevitable part of impeachment. If Democrats hold the House majority in November and defeat Trump for reelection, Pelosi’s management of the process will garner political credit. If they fail, she will take much of the blame. In the year ahead, preserving the House’s Democratic majority will be her top political responsibility.

She insists the prospect doesn’t worry her.

“We’re on a good path with all of that. If impeachment never existed, we would still have to be protecting our incumbents,” she said.

One measure of Pelosi’s effectiveness: She has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin. The president once avoided personal attacks on Pelosi, but in recent weeks has dropped that deference, repeatedly referring to her as “crazy,” and recently insulting her teeth.

On Tuesday, in a vitriolic six-page letter, he accused her of lying about her faith.

“You are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the President,’ when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense,” Trump wrote.

“You are making a mockery of impeachment, and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans,” he wrote.

Pelosi said she has prayed for whoever the president is and has felt it important to say that publicly.

“I don’t hate anybody. And if I were to ever resort to such an emotion, I wouldn’t waste it on him,” she said in the interview. “It is not something that’s in my upbringing or my character.”

Pelosi’s allies say she attends Roman Catholic Mass regularly, including on foreign trips with other lawmakers. Last weekend she went with Republicans and Democrats to Mass at St. Alphonse Church in Luxembourg.

“I prayed for [Trump] that God — that his heart will receive God’s grace to help everyone in our country, not just the privileged few, which seems to be the course that he is on,” Pelosi said.

The decision to open an impeachment inquiry came after a hectic weekend in late September filled with church services — a memorial for Pelosi’s longtime friend, journalist Cokie Roberts, and the funeral for Emily Clyburn, the wife of House Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. As Pelosi flew from Washington to South Carolina and then to New York, she drafted the speech she would give announcing the decision — at one point losing her notes on a plane.

The announcement on Sept. 24 came before television cameras in a hallway off the speaker’s office — a space typically reserved for high-level announcements. From there, she sent the investigation to six House committees, primarily the House Intelligence Committee that she once helped lead, now headed by her close ally, Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank).

Schiff said Pelosi was “deeply engaged” in the investigation but “never attempted to micromanage.”

“What she has done is consult with the chairs of the various committees, and try to arrive at consensus,” he said.

Pelosi succeeded in bridging disputes among Democrats over how broad the articles of impeachment should be — and how quickly to move. Democrats close to her describe a process of constant communication with members, whether on the phone or in person on the House floor. That has allowed her to act as a barometer, measuring the pressure on the lawmakers.

“I know people think she goes up there and cracks the whip,” said John Lawrence, who was Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005 to 2013. “That’s just not the case.”

She “derives her strength from the fact people believe — regardless whether the final decision reflects personal preference — they were able to make their case and had opportunity to be consulted.”

Pelosi, however, has also developed a level of support among Democratic voters that she did not have a year ago, when even many Democrats conceded that she was an electoral liability in some congressional districts. By wagging her finger at the president during a meeting in the Oval Office and merely exiting the White House in a stylish orange coat, she has become the subject of memes and political logos.

Those moments were spontaneous, she says.

“All of them [are] a part of something vis-a-vis him,” she said. “It was really more about him than about me.”

She didn’t wear the burnt-orange coat with a collar — one that she bought for the inauguration of Barack Obama — to make a point, she said.

“No, it was clean, it was warm,” she said. “Being from California, I don’t have many real winter coats.”

Pelosi has said she considered retirement when it appeared Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016. When Trump won, she stayed on to protect the Affordable Care Act, the piece of legislation Pelosi counts as her top legislative accomplishment.

She refused to speculate on whether she would once again think of stepping down if a Democrat wins in 2020.

“I have no intention of weakening the position I’m in now by making myself a lame duck for what comes next,” she said. “When that comes, we’ll see.”

But when the day comes, there’s little chance she’d remain in Washington as many former politicians do, she says.

“Every single day that I leave,” she said of her San Francisco district, “it’s enticing to stay in California.”

On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Trump vs. CASA Inc. Though the case arises out of President Trump’s January executive order on birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment, Thursday’s oral argument had very little to do with whether everyone born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen. Instead, the argument mostly focused on a procedural legal issue that is just as important: whether lower-court federal judges possess the legitimate power to issue nationwide injunctions to bring laws or executive orders to a halt beyond their districts.

There is a very straightforward answer to this question: No, they don’t. And it is imperative for American constitutionalism and republican sef-governance that the justices clearly affirm that.

Let’s start with the text. Article III of the Constitution establishes the “judicial Power” of the United States, which University of Chicago Law School professor Will Baude argued in a 2008 law review article “is the power to issue binding judgments and to settle legal disputes within the court’s jurisdiction.” If the federal courts can bind certain parties, the crucial question is: Who is bound by a federal court issuing an injunction?

In our system of governance, it is only the named parties to a given lawsuit that can truly be bound by a lower court’s judgment. As the brilliant then-Stanford Law School professor Jonathan Mitchell put it in an influential 2018 law review article, an “injunction is nothing more than a judicially imposed non-enforcement policy” that “forbids the named defendants to enforce the statute” — or executive order — “while the court’s order remains in place.” Fundamentally, as Samuel L. Bray observed in another significant 2017 law review article, a federal court’s injunction binds only “the defendant’s conduct … with respect to the plaintiff.” If other courts in other districts face a similar case, those judges might consider their peer’s decision and follow it, but they are not strictly required to do so. (For truly nationwide legal issues, the proper recourse is filing a class-action lawsuit, as authorized by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.)

One need not be a legal scholar to understand this commonsense point.

Americans are a self-governing people; it is we the people, according to the Constitution’s Preamble, who are sovereign in the United States. And while the judiciary serves as an important check on congressional or executive overreach in specific cases or controversies that come before it (as Article III puts it), there is no broader ability for lower-court judges to decide the law of the land by striking down a law or order for all of the American people.

As President Lincoln warned in his first inaugural address: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by” the judiciary, “the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Simply put, the patriots of 1776 did not rebel against the tyranny of King George III only to subject themselves, many generations later, to the black-robed tyranny of today. They fought for the ability to live freely and self-govern, and to thereby control their own fates and destinies. Judicial supremacy and the concomitant misguided practice of nationwide injunctions necessarily deprive a free people of the ability to do exactly that.

It is true that Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury vs. Madison established that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” But it is also true, as Marshall noted in the less frequently quoted sentence directly following that assertion: “Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” Note the all-important qualifier of “apply the rule to particular cases.” Marbury is often erroneously invoked to support judicial supremacy, but the modest case- and litigant-specific judicial review that Marshall established has nothing to do with the modern judicial supremacy and nationwide injunctions that proliferate today. It is that fallacious conception of judicial supremacy that was argued Thursday at the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., one of the swing votes in CASA, is not always known for judicial modesty. On the contrary, in clumsily attempting to defend his institution’s integrity, he has at times indulged in unvarnished judicial supremacist rhetoric and presided over an unjustifiable arrogation of power to what Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist No. 78, referred to as the “least dangerous” of the three branches.

If Roberts and his fellow centrist justices — namely, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — have any sense of prudence, they must join their more stalwart originalist colleagues in holding that nationwide injunctions offend the very core of our constitutional order. Such a ruling would not merely be a win for Trump; it would be a win for the Constitution and for self-governance itself.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

It’s a bitter feud the likes of which are seldom seen in law enforcement circles — or at least those that boil over into public view.

For over seven years now, Orange County’s top prosecutor and a decorated former cop have been locked in an acrimonious dispute that shows little sign of abating. Both parties have accused the other of fractured ethics and corruption, and even an independent arbitrator likened the situation to a simmering cauldron.

Damon Tucker, a former supervising investigator for the county, has alleged in a lawsuit that he uncovered potential evidence of money laundering, terrorist threats and extortion by his then-boss, Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer. Tucker claims in his lawsuit that Spitzer and others quashed the probe and then fired the investigator as an act of retaliation, leaving him humiliated and shunned by law enforcement.

Spitzer has publicly called Tucker a “dirty cop,” and accused him of working with his opponents — including former Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas — to launch an investigation to hurt him politically. Tucker’s behavior, Spitzer says, was a “disgrace to the badge.”

Now, in yet another escalation of this Orange County drama, Tucker has called on the California attorney general, the U.S. Department of Justice, the State Bar of California and other agencies to investigate Spitzer; the OCDA Bureau of Investigation Chief Paul Walters; and former Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Shawn Nelson, who is now an Orange County Superior Court judge.

“These allegations must be fully investigated,” Tucker wrote in a letter to those agencies.“Failure to investigate these men casts a shadow over our system of justice.”

Tucker’s call for an investigation of events dating back nearly a decade comes as the district attorney’s office is already facing increased scrutiny over its treatment of employees. Both Spitzer and Nelson face a potential civil trial next week over accusations they retaliated against female employees who say they were sexually harassed by former Senior Assistant Dist. Atty. Gary LoGalbo, a onetime friend of Spitzer’s who is now deceased.

Spitzer and Walters have declined to discuss Tucker’s accusations with The Times. Nelson, through a court spokesperson, also declined, saying judges were prohibited by ethical rules from discussing cases before the court or in media reports.

The California Attorney General’s office confirmed that it is reviewing Tucker’s complaint but would not comment further. The State Bar has also begun a review of the allegations and has requested more information and documentation, according to a letter reviewed by The Times. A spokesperson for the State Bar declined to comment or confirm whether a complaint was received, adding that disciplinary investigations are confidential.

The U.S. Department of Justice would neither comment nor confirm that it had received the letter. Tucker said he also sent a letter to California’s Commission on Judicial Performance. The commission also declined to comment.

A veteran investigator of nearly 30 years, Tucker was fired from the DA’s office in December 2020 over allegations he had initiated a unilateral investigation into Spitzer shortly after he took office.

Tucker sued the county — alleging he was fired and retaliated against for uncovering corruption — and in 2022 he won his job back, along with lost wages. Last year, he received a $2-million out-of court settlement from the county, according to Tucker’s attorney.

Kimberly Edds, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said a non-disparagement agreement signed by Tucker and Spitzer as part of the settlement prevented the office from commenting.

Tucker’s accusations date to an inquiry that was begun in October 2016, when another district attorney investigator, Tom Conklin, was assigned to assist the Fair Political Practices Commission in looking into allegations of campaign finance irregularities by Spitzer, who was at the time an Orange County supervisor but was considering a run for district attorney.

In his recent letter to multiple agencies, as well as in his lawsuit, Tucker alleges the investigation into Spitzer was left unfinished and, even though he and another investigator at one point suggested it should be forwarded to the FBI or state attorney general, the investigation was never referred to an outside agency.

A year after the 2016 investigation began, Conklin’s report was leaked to the Orange County Register, and the newspaper reported that Conklin had been unable to corroborate the allegations.

The leak came at a key time for Spitzer, who had just announced his campaign for district attorney. At the time, he told the Register the investigation had been politically motivated by his political rival, Rackauckas, and that nothing had been found. At the time, a spokesperson for Rackauckas confirmed the investigation but declined to comment on the allegations.

The leak sparked an internal investigation in the district attorney’s office and, when the initial investigator retired, Tucker was ordered to finish the case.

Tucker was tasked with finding out who leaked the report, but after reviewing the case, Tucker concluded that Conklin’s investigation was incomplete.

At least 10 identified witnesses in the case were never interviewed, and several leads had not been followed, according to an investigative summary written by Tucker, and given to a senior deputy district attorney he consulted with in the case.

During his investigation, Tucker reached out to superiors and colleagues at the district attorney’s office and said the allegations against Spitzer needed to be sent out to an outside agency, such as the FBI, for an impartial review.

Tucker said that as he continued to investigate and prepared to send the case to an outside agency, things suddenly changed.

The day after Spitzer was elected district attorney in 2018, Tucker said Walters ordered him to stop digging into the accusations, and to remove any mention of Spitzer’s name from questions in his investigation, according to an investigative summary and sworn depositions, taken in Tucker’s lawsuit against the county. Two days later, Tucker was removed from the case.

In a sworn deposition, Walters confirmed he ordered Tucker to remove questions about Spitzer from his investigation the day Spitzer became the district attorney-elect.

“That’s where I have to tell Tucker, ‘You can’t be asking all these questions about Spitzer,” Walters testfied. “It’s not the case. And I make him redact all that stuff.”

Tucker maintains that, up until the election, Walters supported his investigation.

“I was doing the right thing,” Tucker told The Times. “This should have been sent out.” Walters declined to respond to The Times about that accusation.

However, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said it was Tucker who refused to turn over the investigation.

“He was given the opportunity and declined to do so,” said Edds, the D.A’.s spokesperson. “He was offered the opportunity repeatedly.”

Tucker disputes that assertion.

Spitzer has characterized Tucker’s investigation as being politically motivated, and has pointed out in sworn depositions that Tucker had donated to his opponent, Rackauckas, and was friends with Rackauckas’ chief of staff, Susan Kang.

According to county records, Tucker made a $2,000 donation to Rackauckas’ campaign in August 2018, after he’d been assigned to investigate the leak.

Tucker had also been critical of Spitzer during the campaign in multiple Facebook posts, before and after he took up the case.

“I think they sent him off on this fishing expedition to get something on me after the primary election in 2018,” Spitzer said in a deposition. “He’s investigating me while he’s making a major campaign contribution to my opponent? That’s not objective.”

SEOUL — In South Korea, the Trump administration’s 25% tariff on imported cars has sent local automakers Hyundai and Kia scrambling to protect one of the country’s most valuable exports. But General Motors, which last year shipped 418,782 units from its factories here to American consumers — or 88.5% of its total sales — may be facing a much larger predicament.

Unlike Hyundai and Kia, which control over 90% of the domestic market here, the Detroit-based automaker produces budget SUVs like the Chevrolet Trax or Chevrolet Trailblazer almost exclusively for the U.S. market. The Trax has been South Korea’s most-exported car since 2023.

That business model has made GM, which operates three factories and employs some 11,000 workers in the country, uniquely exposed to Trump’s auto tariffs, resurfacing long-running concerns in the local automobile industry that the company may ultimately pack up and leave.

Until last month’s tariffs, cars sold between the U.S. and South Korea were untaxed under a bilateral free trade agreement. That helped South Korea become the third-largest automobile exporter to the U.S. last year to the tune of $34.7 billion — or around half of its total automobile exports. In contrast, South Korea bought just $2.1 billion worth of cars from the U.S.

Earlier this month, GM executives estimated that the tariffs would cost the company up to $5 billion this year, adding that the company would boost production in its U.S. plants to offset the hit. With additional factories in Mexico and Canada, GM currently imports around half of the cars that it sells in the U.S.

“If the U.S. tariffs remain in place, GM will no longer have any reason to stay in South Korea,” said Lee Ho-guen, an automotive engineering professor at Daeduk University.

“The tariffs may add up to $10,000 to the sticker price on cars shipped to the U.S., while GM sells less than 50,000 units a year in South Korea. There is very little room for them to adjust their strategy.”

Kim Woong-heon, an official in GM Korea’s labor union, said that the union is approaching current rumors of the company’s potential exit with a dose of caution, but added that broader concerns about the company’s long-term commitment remain.

“The cars we’re manufacturing here are on the lowest end of GM’s price range so labor costs will make it impossible to immediately shift production to the U.S.,” he said.

“But we have painful memories of GM shutting down one of its factories in 2018, so we get nervous every time these rumors surface.”

GM Chevrolet automobiles bound for export sit parked at the Port of Incheon in South Korea.

(SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This isn’t the first time that GM’s prospects in the country have come under question. The company first established itself in South Korea in 2002 by acquiring the bankrupt Daewoo Motor Co. in a government-backed deal that some at the time criticized as “GM taking the cream off Daewoo for almost nothing.”

Struggling to compete with the likes of Hyundai, GM briefly positioned itself as a production base for European and Asian markets until its bankruptcy in 2009.

Amid the global restructuring efforts that followed, concerns that it would close its South Korean operations led the government to once again intervene. In the end, GM stayed after receiving $750 million in financing from the country’s development bank on the condition that it would remain open for at least 10 more years.

But in 2018, the company closed its factory in the city of Gunsan, which had employed around 1,800 workers, and spun off its research and development unit from its manufacturing base — a move that many saw as the company strategically placing one foot out the door.

In February, shortly after President Trump announced the 25% tariffs on foreign-made cars, Paul Jacobson, GM’s chief financial officer, hinted that the company may once again be facing similarly tough decisions:

“If they become permanent, then there’s a whole bunch of different things that you have to think about in terms of, where do you allocate plants, and do you move plants.”

In recent weeks, executives from GM Korea have sought to assuage the rumors that the company’s South Korean operations would be affected.

“We do not intend to respond to rumors about the company’s exit from Korea,” said Gustavo Colossi, GM Korea’s vice president of sales, at a news conference last month. “We plan to move forward with our sales strategies in Korea and continue launching new models in the coming weeks and months, introducing fresh GM offerings to the market.”

The union says the company’s two finished car plants have been running at full capacity, with an additional 21,000 units recently allocated to the factory in Incheon, a city off the country’s western coast — a sign that business will go on as usual for now.

But with GM’s 10-year guarantee set to expire in 2027, Kim, the union official, said that their demands for measures that prove the company’s commitment beyond that have gone unanswered.

These include manufacturing GM’s electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in South Korean factories, as well as making a greater range of its products available for sale in South Korea and other Asian markets.

”If the company intends to continue its operations here, it needs to make its business model more sustainable and not as reliant on imports to the U.S.,” Kim said.

“That will be our core demand at this year’s wage and collective bargaining negotiations.”

GM’s immediate prospects in the country will depend on the ongoing tariff talks between U.S. and South Korean officials that began last month with the goal of producing a deal by July 8.

Although South Korean trade minister Ahn Duk-geun has stressed that cars are “the most important part of the U.S.-South Korea trade relationship,” few expect that Seoul will be able to finesse the sort of deal given to the U.K., which last week secured a 10% rate on the first 100,000 vehicles shipped to the U.S. each year.

Unlike South Korea, which posted a $66-billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year, the U.K. buys more from the U.S. than it sells. And many of the cars that it does sell to the U.S. are luxury vehicles such as the Rolls-Royce, which Trump has differentiated from the “monster car companies” that make “millions of cars.”

“At some point after the next two years, I believe it’s highly likely GM will leave and keep only their research and development unit here, or at least significantly cut back on their production,” Lee, the automotive professor, said.

In the southeastern port city of Changwon, home to the smaller of GM’s two finished car plants, local officials have been reluctant to give air to what they describe as premature fearmongering.

But Woo Choon-ae, a 62-year-old real estate agent whose clients also include GM workers and their families, can’t help but worry.

She says that the company’s exit would be devastating to the city, which, like many rural areas, has already been under strain from population decline.

GM employs 2,800 workers in the region, but accounts for thousands more jobs at its suppliers. The Changwon factory, which manufactures the Trax, represented around 15% of the city’s total exports last year.

“People work for GM because it offers stable employment until retirement age. If they close the factory here, all of these workers will leave to find work in other cities, which will be a critical blow to the housing market,” she said.

“Homes are how people save money in South Korea. But if people’s savings are suddenly halved, who’s going to be spending money on things like dining out?”

Reporting from Keene, N.H. — On Aug. 28, 1990, Carl Babbitt, in the midst of a cocaine- and alcohol-fueled blackout, killed a man. Almost a quarter-century later to the day, he stood 50 feet from Hillary Rodham Clinton and revealed his past.

“You look at me as a regular person. But I served 11 years in prison,” he began.

As unpredictable as New Hampshire town hall meetings can be for presidential candidates, it was nevertheless a jaw-dropping start to an audience member’s question.

Babbitt, 54, said he was thrown out of his home by his mother as a child and later sexually abused by a foster parent.

“I turned to drugs and alcohol to cover that pain,” he recalled. He would eventually seek treatment but was denied care because he lacked insurance, and six months later stabbed a man to death during a fight. He served 11 of the 15 to 18 years he was sentenced to for manslaughter and was released from prison in 2000.

“I’ve been out clean and sober for 15 years, and I cannot find a full-time job because every time they run a background check, ‘You’re a convicted felon,’” he told Clinton, adding that it is a roadblock that he and many others face.

“What would you suggest we do?” he finally asked.

This wasn’t a standard New Hampshire town hall meeting, and on a day of headlines about her email server and her attacks on Republicans, it was precisely the kind of issue Clinton had come to Keene to address.

TRAIL GUIDE: All the latest news on the 2016 presidential campaign >>

Heroin abuse in particular has been an issue that voters have repeatedly confronted Clinton about on the campaign trail, and on Tuesday, she offered a window into a possible presidential role as convener-in-chief, discussing potential policy specifics and seeking more from a panel of locals with different perspectives on the crisis, including the county sheriff and treatment center and hospital representatives.

The first stop Clinton made this year in the state as a candidate was in Keene. And there for the first time she heard about an issue that had reached almost epidemic status in New Hampshire.

“I have to confess, I was surprised,” Clinton recalled Tuesday. “I did not expect that I would hear about drug abuse and substance abuse and other such challenges everywhere I went.”

Hands shot up throughout the school event room when the audience was asked whether someone’s drug abuse had affected their lives. According to statistics provided by Clinton’s campaign, New Hampshire has the highest per-capita rate of addiction and second-lowest treatment capacity in the nation, with 320 drug-related deaths last year alone.

On Saturday, hundreds attended a candlelight vigil at New Hampshire’s Capitol in Concord to remember victims of drug overdoses. WMUR-TV reported two weeks ago that more than 400 people turned out in Manchester, the state’s largest city, at the first police forum on the heroin abuse crisis in the city.

“We know this is happening, but it’s not yet a big issue” in the campaign, Clinton said as she opened what the campaign called a community forum on substance abuse and opiate addiction. “Some people question why, since I’m running for president, would I be talking in New Hampshire about substance abuse?”

“Really, it’s simple for me. That’s what people talk to me about.”

Since her initial April visit, Clinton’s campaign staff have been holding meetings in the state and online to discuss possible policies she could offer as president to address substance abuse issues.

After the initial discussion, Babbitt, who two years ago earned a degree in drug counseling and now works as the volunteer director for a church’s after-prison ministry program, asked Clinton about how he could get nonprofit status to fund it and whether Pell Grants could be used to help provide education for people in and out of jail.

Clinton cited studies that found those who are educated while in prison had sharply reduced recidivism rates. She said that once people had “paid their debt to society” they should not only have voting rights restored, but be “given a chance to present yourself for jobs, for housing.”

“At the end of the day, people can make their own judgment. But you shouldn’t be automatically disqualified,” she said, referring to a campaign that seeks to remove questions about a criminal record in the early stage of a job application process.

In an interview after the event, Babbitt said prison was the best thing that had happened to him.

“If it weren’t for prison, I’d be dead,” he said.

But the Worcester, Mass., native, who now lives in Keene and said he had never before attended a campaign event, said he hopes Clinton “follows through on her promises.”

“Other candidates should get involved, because it’s not only a community problem, it’s a national problem,” he said. “When they get out, if we don’t help them … they wind up right back in jail, costing us as taxpayers.”

For more campaign coverage, follow @mikememoli

WASHINGTON — Through a mix of marketing and campaign discipline, Barack Obama turned the selection of his running mate into a genuine drama.

For weeks, the Obama campaign kept silent about virtually every aspect of the process, with the candidate coyly telling reporters the other day that he had made up his mind — and “wouldn’t you like to know” exactly when he would tell the world?

Top campaign strategists and surrogates for Obama professed to know nothing about his intentions, the better to keep the mystery alive.

Obama’s handling of the announcement is the latest example of his penchant for crafting big, attention-grabbing events out of what are normally predictable campaign steps.

Every presumptive nominee needs a No. 2. But Obama led the search in a way that kept the public focus squarely on himself while giving his campaign an organizational lift.

In a clever bit of salesmanship, the campaign invited people to “be the first to know” the name of Obama’s choice, offering to send the news in a text message.

In return, people gave up their e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers — data the campaign can use to mobilize turnout come election day. The campaign has declined to say how many people signed up.

But news that the No. 2 pick was Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. leaked before the text was sent.

For all the stagecraft, some Democratic Party veterans warned that Obama’s efforts could backfire if the vice presidential choice turned out to be a familiar name — as it did. Voters might decide that Biden didn’t warrant the extended drumroll of the last few days.

Then there is the risk that Obama will be seen as overly consumed with campaign theatrics. His Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, is already portraying Obama as a shallow celebrity. Obama’s trip overseas — another example of how his campaign constructed an attention-getting moment — may have played into such perceptions.

There is nothing unusual about a presidential candidate traveling abroad. McCain also went overseas after clinching the nomination.

But Obama turned the trip into a signature moment of his campaign, a test of his ability to hold his own with world leaders.

Network anchors covered the journey with an intensity that left the McCain campaign envious. The emotional apex was Obama’s speech to a huge crowd in Berlin, some waving flags handed out by Obama aides.

But since returning home, Obama has seen his lead over McCain diminish in national polls.

Don Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that the build-up for Obama’s vice presidential announcement will end up subjecting the nominee to an uncomfortable degree of scrutiny.

“All this coaxing, this being coy and planning to the nth degree is going to invite the most detailed critical scrutiny that you’ve ever seen,” Fowler said before Biden’s name leaked out.

“In spite of the fact that [the rumored choices] are all wonderful people, none of them is Jesus and none of them is Moses. Even their friends can point out shortcomings.”

Another test of Obama’s campaign strategy comes Thursday, when he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in a Denver football stadium that can seat 76,000 people.

The traditional location would be the smaller indoor arena where the rest of the convention will unfold. But Obama is raising the stakes by moving the event to a bigger venue, putting more pressure on himself to deliver an exceptional speech.

Any number of things could go wrong; a heavy rain could spoil the mood.

But as with the running-mate drama, the Obama campaign went with an unorthodox choice to make more of the moment and to exploit interest in the speech for organizing purposes.

Obama aides said that spectators who are given tickets to the event will be asked to go out and register Democratic voters.

In that way, Obama’s speech may serve to strengthen an already formidable field operation.

But if he is flat that night, the acoustics do not work or the lighting is poor, he may wish he had stuck to the more controlled environment of the Pepsi Center.

Mark Fabiani, communications director for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, said that Obama is taking a calculated risk with his stadium speech.

“It’s double-edged, because it creates tremendous expectations,” Fabiani said.

He noted that the last nomination speech in such a venue was by John F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago in Los Angeles.

“So this is going to be something that most people haven’t seen in their lifetime,” he said.

But at the same time, “if you let expectations get out of control, and you can’t satisfy them, you’ve got yourself into a big hole,” he said.

Fabiani sees the timing of the vice presidential announcement as another gamble. By waiting this long, Obama succeeded in drawing out the suspense. But he also gave up days of coverage devoted to the newly minted Democratic ticket.

Now that news of Biden’s selection is out, media coverage will turn quickly to the convention and the enduring saga about the role there of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Fabiani said.

“They’ve waited until the last minute before the convention. . . . With the Clintons looming large at the convention on Monday and Tuesday, people are pretty quickly going to move to that,” he said.

—

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Four months after the San Bernardino mass shooting, state lawmakers on Tuesday gave initial approval to five gun control bills, including measures that would outlaw assault rifles with detachable magazines, ban possession of clips holding more than 10 rounds and require homemade guns to be registered with the state.

The bills approved by the state Senate Public Safety Committee were introduced in response to the December shooting in San Bernardino that left 14 people dead and 22 others wounded at the hands of two terrorists.

One of the measures the panel sent toward the Senate floor would outlaw assault rifles with easily detachable bullet magazines like one of the weapons used in the mass shooting in San Bernardino.

The bill prohibits the sale of semiautomatic, centerfire rifles with a “bullet button,” a recessed button that, when pressed, allows removal of the magazine. Those who already own them must register them with the state as assault rifles.

Democratic state Sens. Isadore Hall of Compton and Steve Glazer of Orinda introduced the measure, SB 880, in response to the discovery of a gun with a bullet button that was in the possession of the San Bernardino terrorists.

“These weapons of war don’t belong in our communities,” Glazer told the Senate panel before it approved the measure he coauthored with Hall.

Hall said there is an urgent need to close a loophole in the law that bans assault weapons.

“For years, gun owners have been able to circumvent California’s assault weapons law by using a small tool to quickly eject and reload an ammunition magazine,” Hall said.

The measure is opposed by gun owner rights groups including the National Rifle Assn., according to its lobbyist, Ed Worley.

“We continue to oppose banning guns for citizens who have no criminal background,” Worley told the panel. “People should be able to own any kind of gun they want to own in the United States of America.”

The Senate panel also approved a bill by Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) that would ban the possession of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds, closing a loophole in a law that already prohibits their manufacture and sale in California.

Hancock noted that four large-capacity magazines were found among the weapons of the two shooters in San Bernardino. Since 1980, 435 people have been killed in 50 mass shootings involving large-capacity magazines, some of which can hold 100 rounds of ammunition, she said.

The magazines have already been banned in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“By banning these weapons statewide we would be taking a step to preventing future mass shootings and creating safer communities in California,” Hancock told the Senate panel.

Republican Sen. Jeff Stone voted against the bill.

“Today we want to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens who have been collecting guns,” Stone said.

————

FOR THE RECORD

April 20, 11:35 a.m.: An earlier version of this story mistakenly attributed a quote to Sen. John Moorlach. The statement was from Sen. Jeff Stone.

————

The measure was also opposed by others including Worley and Sam Paredes, the executive director of Gun Owners of California, who said millions of large-capacity clips are already in the hands of Californians.

“Here we are trying to confiscate people’s property,” Worley told the panel.

Paredes said many law enforcement officers are given large-capacity magazines.

“That is what they may need to protect themselves,” Paredes said. “Why should it be any different for a law-abiding citizen?”

The Senate committee also approved a bill that would allow the state to collect information on those who buy ammunition for firearms. An earlier law that would have required bullet purchasers to provide identification and a thumbprint was struck down by a court in 2010 on the grounds that its definition of handgun ammunition was vague.

That case is on appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The new bill by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León (D-Los Angeles), SB 1235, would clarify that the previous law applies to all ammunition, including bullets for long guns and handguns as well as shotgun shells, which he hopes will address the lower court’s concerns.

The panel also approved a bill requiring those who build guns at home to register them with the state, get a serial number and undergo a criminal background check.

“These firearms are called ‘ghost guns’ because they are built at home … with no serial numbers or background checks involved,” De León told the panel before it approved the bill on a 5-3 party-line vote. “These are weapons that have the ability to kill or maim a human being.”

Hundreds of ghost guns have been seized in California, and they have been used in major crimes, including a mass shooting in 2013. The measure is backed by the California Police Chiefs Assn.

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“Gun-smithing has become easier than putting together Ikea furniture because of the 3-D printer,” said Chief Jennifer G. Tejada of the Emeryville Police Department. “This bill will decrease the number of untraceable firearms in California.”

The measure is opposed by groups including the NRA and Gun Owners of California.

“We’re going to take hobbyists who enjoy making guns and we’re going to make them criminals,” Worley said.

The panel also approved measures that would require firearms owners to report lost or stolen guns to authorities within five days and another to create a gun violence prevention research center at a University of California system campus.

Meanwhile, a bill that would have required all gun sales to be videotaped failed to pass an Assembly committee on Tuesday.

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Updates from Sacramento

A Los Angeles construction worker from Vietnam was among 13 immigrants roused by guards in full combat gear around 2:30 a.m. one day last week in a Texas detention facility, shackled, forced onto a bus and told they would be deported to Libya, two of the detainees’ lawyers said.

“It was very aggressive. They weren’t allowed to do anything,” said Tin Thanh Nguyen, an attorney for the Los Angeles man, whom he did not identify for fear of retaliation.

Libya, the politically unstable country in North Africa, is beset by “terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict,” according to the U.S. State Department. Human rights groups have documented inhumane conditions at detention facilities and migrant camps, including torture, forced labor and rape.

The construction worker, who has a criminal conviction on his record, had lived in the U.S. for decades and has a wife and teenage daughter. He was arrested after appearing at an annual immigration check-in at a Los Angeles office two months ago and then shuffled around to various detention facilities before arriving at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall.

In the early morning hours of May 7, he was placed on the bus from the detention facility south to what was likely Lackland Air Force Base. From there, he and the rest of the group sat for hours on the tarmac in front of a military plane in the predawn dark, unsure what was going to happen. The men hailed from Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Mali, Burundi, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico and the Philippines, the attorneys said. None were from Libya.

“My client and the other men on the bus were silent,” Nguyen said in court files. “My client was extremely scared.”

The plane hatch was open. Military personnel bustled in and out, appearing to bring in supplies and fuel the plane. Photographers positioned themselves in front of the military aircraft.

“Suddenly the bus starts moving and heading back to the detention facility,” said Johnny Sinodis, an attorney for another detainee, a Filipino who grew up and went to college in the United States and also had a criminal conviction.

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Massachusetts had issued a warning to the administration to halt any immediate removal to Libya or any other third country, as it would violate a previous court order that officials must provide detainees with due process and notice in their own language. Lawyers had scrambled to get the order after media reports confirmed what their clients had told them: Removals to Libya appeared imminent.

Sinodis said his client and others were returned to the detention unit and placed in solitary confinement for 24 hours.

In his declaration, he said his client spoke to a Mexican and a Bolivian national who were in the group. Each had been told that their home countries would accept them, but the officials still said they were going to send them to Libya.

It’s been a week since the incident, and the lawyers said they are still fighting to stop their clients deportations to a third country.

The Trump administration deported hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador, invoking a wartime law to speedily remove accused gang members. Their deportation drew immediate challenges and became the most contentious piece of the immigration crackdown. Officials have also sent people to Panama who were not from that country.

This month, the foreign minister of Rwanda said in a televison interview it was in talks with U.S. officials to take in deported migrants.

It’s unclear how Libya came to be a possible destination for the immigrants. Two governments claim power in the nation. The Tripoli-based Government of National Unity has denied any deal with the Trump administration. The Government of National Stability, based in Benghazi, also rejected reports that it would take deportees.

The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that it had information that at least 100 Venezuelans held in the Salvadoran megaprison weren’t told they were going to be deported to a third country, had no access to a lawyer and were unable to challenge the removal.

“This situation raises serious concerns regarding a wide array of rights that are fundamental to both U.S. and international law,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement. “The manner in which some of the individuals were detained and deported — including the use of shackles on them — as well as the demeaning rhetoric used against migrants, has also been profoundly disturbing.”

Sinodis said his client had already been in custody for months and been told that he would be deported to the Philippines in late April. But that month, he was transferred from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash., to Texas. An officer in Tacoma told him the decision to move him there came from “headquarters,” according to court documents.

On May 5, he was scheduled to be interviewed by two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Texas. He expected to learn of his deportation date. Instead, they handed him a one-page document that said he would be deported to Libya. He was shocked, Sinodis said.

The man asked the officers whether there was anything he or his attorney could do to avoid this. They said no.

Nguyen said his client, who doesn’t speak English fluently, had a similar experience on the same day. The officers handed him a document in English that they said would allow him to be free in Libya. He doesn’t even know where Libya is and refused to sign the document. The officers told him he would be deported no matter what he did.

The next day, Sinodis said, his client’s commissary and phone accounts were zeroed out.

Sinodis finally reached an officer at the detention center who told him, “That’s crazy,” when asked about Libya. His client must have misheard, he said. But his client, who grew up on the West Coast, speaks fluent English.

Then on May 7, as things unfolded, the attorney reached another officer at the facility, who said he had no information that the man was going to Libya, and referred him back to an officer in Tacoma. A supervisor downplayed the situation.

“I can assure you this is not an emergency because the emergency does not exist,” the supervisor told him, according to court documents.

Shortly after noon that day, a detention center officer who identified himself as Garza called and told him he was looking into it, but so far had “no explanation” for why his client was told this, but he also couldn’t guarantee it didn’t happen.

Less than an hour later, his client called to tell him that he had been taken to an air base. He said when he was pulled out of his cell in the early morning, he saw the same two officers that interviewed him and asked him to sign the removal papers.

“He asks the officers, ‘Are we still going to Libya?” Sinodis said. “They said yes.”

DOWNIEVILLE, Calif. — Patrice Miller, 71, lived by herself in a small yellow house beneath towering mountain peaks on the edge of a burbling river in this Sierra County village. She doted on her cats and her exotic orchids, and was known to neighbors for her delicious homemade bread. One fall afternoon in 2023, after Miller had failed for several days to make her customary appearance at the town market, a store clerk asked authorities to check on her.

A short time later, a sheriff’s deputy found Miller’s lifeless body in her kitchen. Her right leg and left arm had been partially gnawed off. On the floor around her were the large paw prints of a bear.

Months after her death, officials would make a stunning disclosure, revealing that an autopsy had determined that Miller had likely been killed by the animal after it broke into her home. It marked the first known instance in California history of a fatal bear attack on a human.

But amid the contentious politics around black bears and other apex predators in California, not everyone accepts the official version of how she died.

“We don’t believe the bear did it,” said Ann Bryant, executive director of the Bear League in the Tahoe Basin. “And I will go on record as saying that. … We’ve never had a bear kill anybody.”

The story of Miller’s grisly end — and the increasingly heated battles around predators in California — have come roaring into the state Capitol this spring. Lawmakers representing conservative rural districts in the state’s rugged northern reaches argue that their communities are under attack, and point to Miller as one example of the worst that can happen. One solution they have pushed is changing the law to allow people to set packs of hunting dogs after bears to haze them. A similar measure has been floated — for now unsuccessfully — to ward off mountain lions considered a threat.

Wildlife conservation advocates are aghast. They say turning dogs on bears is barbaric and won’t make anyone safer. They contend the proposed laws don’t reflect a scientifically backed approach to managing wild populations but instead are pro-hunting bills dressed up in the guise of public safety. The real solution, they say, is for humans living near bears to learn to safely co-exist by not leaving out food or otherwise attracting them.

“These people are using [Miller’s death] to try to start hounding bears again,” said Bryant, who maintains that Miller, who was in poor health, must have died before the bear came into her home and devoured her. “She would roll in her grave if she knew that in her death people would create a situation where people were going to mistreat bears, because she loved bears.”

In a recent report, the Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates there are now 60,000 black bears roaming California and notes a marked increase in reports of human-bear conflicts.

(John Axtell / Nevada Department of Wildlife)

Founded in 1849, Downieville, population 300, is one of California’s oldest towns, and also one of its quaintest. Colorfully painted wooden buildings sit at the junction of two rivers, beneath majestic pines and mountain peaks.

Along with tourists, who flood in in the summer for rafting and mountain biking, the town also receives frequent visits from bears and mountain lions. More recently, wolves have arrived with deadly force, snatching domesticated cattle off the open pastures that stretch across the plains on the other side of the mountains east of town.

Miller wound up here about a decade ago, at the end of a rich, complicated life. She had worked in an oil refinery, and also as a contractor. She was a master gardener, expert at transplanting Japanese maples, according to her neighbor, Patty Hall. She was a voracious reader and a skilled pianist. But she also struggled with a variety of serious ailments and substance abuse, according to neighbors and officials.

Longtime residents in the area were used to the challenges of living among wild animals. But in the summer of 2023, Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher said he started getting an overwhelming number of calls about problem bears.

“We had three or four habituated bears that were constantly here in town,” said Fisher. “They had zero fear. I would say, almost daily, we were having to go out and chase these bears away, haze them.”

But bears have a sharp sense of smell, a long memory for food sources and an incredible sense of direction. If a tourist tosses them a pizza crust or the last bits of an ice cream cone, or leaves the lid off a trash can, they will return again and again, even if they are relocated miles away.

That summer, Fisher said, no matter what he did, the bears kept lumbering back into town. It was unlike anything he had experienced, he said, and he had grown up in Downieville. “A police car with an air horn or the siren, we would push the bear up out of the community. Fifteen minutes later, they were right back downtown,” he said.

Founded in 1849, Downieville, population 300, is one of California’s oldest towns and also one of its quaintest.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

And then there were the bears harassing Miller and her neighbors.

“There were three bears,” recalled Hall, who lives just up the hill from the home Miller rented. “Twice a night they would walk up and down our [porch] stairs. The Ring cameras were constantly going off.”

Fisher said some of Miller’s neighbors complained that she was part of the lure, because she was not disposing of her garbage properly. Some also alleged she was tossing food on her porch for her cats — and that the bears were coming for it. Miller’s daughter later told sheriff’s officials that bears were “constantly trying” to get into her house, and that “her mother had physically hit one” to keep it out. One particular bear, which Miller had nicknamed “Big Bastard,” was a frequent pest.

Fifty miles from Downieville, in the Lake Tahoe Basin, the Bear League was getting calls about Miller, too. The organization, which Bryant founded more than two decades ago, seeks to protect bears by helping residents coexist with them. This includes educating people about locking down their trash and helping to haze bears away from homes.

“We got calls [from her neighbors] that told us she had been feeding the bears, tossing food out to them, and let them come into her house,” Bryant said. She added that some thought, erroneously, that the Bear League was a government organization, and “maybe we had the ability to enforce the law” against feeding bears.

Hall, Miller’s friend, told The Times that Miller was not feeding bears. Still, the problems continued.

Eventually, officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife were called and told Miller she could sign a “depredation permit,” after which authorities could kill bears trying to get into her house. But Miller declined to do so, Fisher said.

In early November, Miller stopped showing up around town, prompting calls for a welfare check.

A little before 3 p.m. on Nov. 8, 2023, Deputy Malcolm Fadden approached Miller’s home, which was a short walk from the sheriff’s office. The security bars on the kitchen window had been ripped off. The window itself had been busted from the outside.

“I knocked on the door,” Fadden wrote in his report, but got no answer.

Patrice Miller was found dead in her rental cottage in November 2023. Bear advocates take issue with an autopsy report that said she probably was killed in a bear attack.

(Jessica Garrison / Los Angeles Times)

Through the window, he saw blood streaked across the living room floor. He took out his gun and burst into the house, where he was greeted by a giant pile of bear scat. He found Miller in the kitchen, her half-eaten body surrounded by food and garbage, which, Fadden wrote, had been “apparently scattered by bears.”

Fisher was horrified. Already frustrated at what he saw as the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s lackluster response to the escalating bear incursions that summer, now he wanted the bear that had fed on Miller to be trapped and killed.

He said the department told him that for the bear to be killed, “the person who lives at the house has to sign the [depredation] permit.” Fisher said he responded: “How many times do I have to tell you the person who lives at that house was eaten by the bear?”

This was the start of a long-running conflict between the sheriff and agency officials that would complicate the release of the autopsy findings about Miller’s death, and also convince Fisher that more aggressive steps were needed to protect his community.

Eventually, Fisher managed to get a depredation permit for the bear that had fed on Miller; his deputies tracked down her landlord, who as the homeowner could sign it. Wildlife officials set up a trap near Miller’s house, and in short order, a bear was caught.

But, according to Fisher, officials initially said it wasn’t the same bear. They said DNA tests showed that the bear who had eaten her was male, and the bear they had caught appeared to be female. They intended to release the bear, he said.

Fisher padlocked the cage, and threatened to call the media. In response, he said, wildlife officials sent a biologist, who determined the bear in the trap was male. It was shot that night.

At that point, few people, including Fisher, believed that the bear had actually killed Miller, as opposed to feeding on her after she died of natural causes. Though there are recorded instances of fatal black bear maulings in other U.S. states, they are rare, and there had been no reports of one in California. Fisher issued a news release saying that the death was under investigation, but that “it is believed that Patrice Miller passed away before a bear, possibly drawn by the scent or other factors, accessed the residence.”

After performing an autopsy, however, the pathologist on contract with Sierra County came to a different conclusion. She issued a report that found that Miller had “deep hemorrhage of the face and neck“ as well as “puncture injuries (consistent with claw ‘swipe’ or ‘slap’).” These injuries, she noted, were “characteristics more suggestive of a vital reaction by a living person.” In short: The pathologist found that Miller was probably killed by the bear.

Because of Fisher’s feud with Fish and Wildlife, that autopsy report, dated Jan. 4, 2024, wouldn’t become public for months.

Fisher said the state agency was refusing to provide him with copies of the DNA analysis of the bear that had been trapped in Miller’s yard. He wanted to see for himself that it matched the DNA evidence collected at her home, saying he hated the thought that a bear that had feasted on a person might still be roaming his town.

“I requested DNA from Fish and Wildlife, and they refused to provide it to me,” he said. “So I withheld the coroner’s report. We stopped talking.”

He said he verbally told department officials that the pathologist believed Miller had been killed by the bear — a seemingly noteworthy development. He said that officials responded: “I guess we’ll see when we get the report.”

In an email to The Times, state wildlife officials confirmed that Fisher had verbally shared the results of the autopsy report, but said they felt they needed to see the report to do their “due diligence before making an announcement about the first fatal bear attack in California.” The agency had sent an investigator to the scene after Miller’s death, who like Fisher and his deputies, thought the evidence suggested she had died of natural causes, said agency spokesperson Peter Tira.

By the time Fisher got the autopsy report, it was deep winter in the mountains, and bear activity decreased. Then came spring, and along with the blossoms, the bears came back to Downieville.

Bears were knocking over trash cans and breaking into cars. In May, residents on Main Street reported that a bear had broken into multiple houses, including one incursion that involved a bear standing over 82-year-old Dale Hunter as he napped on his couch.

A few days later, a bear tried to break into the cafeteria at Downieville High School while students were at school.

Fisher declared the bear a threat to public safety. Fish and Wildlife eventually issued a depredation permit, and the bear was shot.

That led to a story in the Mountain Messenger, the local paper. In it, the sheriff dropped a bombshell: “Miller was mauled to death after a black bear entered her home,” the paper reported. The story went on to say that the sheriff had made “numerous attempts” to inform Fish and Wildlife “about Miller’s death and more recent dangerous situations.”

After the story ran, state Sen. Megan Dahle, a Lassen County Republican who at the time served in the Assembly, set up a conciliatory meeting between Fish and Wildlife and Fisher. They have been meeting regularly ever since, Fisher said.

Fisher got his DNA results confirming that the bear trapped in Miller’s yard was the same bear that had eaten her. And Fish and Wildlife officials finally got a copy of the pathology report, which said Miller was probably alive when she encountered the bear.

The revelation made headlines around the state. “We’re in new territory,” Capt. Patrick Foy of Fish and Wildlife’s law enforcement division told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bryant and other bear advocates found the release of such a significant finding so long after the fact confounding.

“I absolutely do not believe it,” Bryant said. If the bear had killed her, Bryant added, “the evidence should have been so clear, like immediately.”

“We don’t believe the bear did it,” Ann Bryant, executive director of the Bear League, says of Patrice Miller’s death. “We’ve never had a bear kill anybody.”

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

The Downieville saga unfolded as bears seemed to be making news all over California.

To many, it seemed there were just many more bears encroaching on human settlements. A Fish and Wildlife report released last month estimated there are now 60,000 black bears roaming the Golden State, roughly triple the figure from 1998, the last time the department issued a bear management plan. That’s the highest population estimate for anywhere in the contiguous U.S., although the report also suggests that California’s bear population has been stable for the last decade.

In the Lake Tahoe area, where 50,000 people live year-round and tens of thousands more crowd in on busy tourist weekends, bears were breaking into houses and raiding refrigerators; they were bursting into ice cream shops and strolling along packed beaches.

State and local officials went into overdrive, trying to teach residents and tourists how to avoid attracting bears. The state set money aside for distribution of bear-proof trash cans and “unwelcome mats” that deliver a jolt of electricity if bears try to break into homes.

The Bear League will loan Tahoe Basin residents “unwelcome mats” that deliver a little jolt of electricity to bears if they try to break into homes.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

The Bear League stepped up its efforts. From a small office on Bryant’s property, the organization’s 24-hour hotline was ringing, and volunteers were rushing out with paintball guns to haze bears and to advise people on how to bear-proof their houses.

The tensions continued to escalate, nonetheless, between people who wanted to protect bears at all costs and those who wanted some problem bears trapped and relocated — or killed. In 2024, after a homeowner in the Tahoe area fatally shot a bear he said had broken into his home, many people were outraged that the Department of Fish and Wildlife declined to file charges.

Advocates also complained that the state has fallen behind in its efforts to help people and bears coexist. In recent years, the state had hired dedicated staff to help people in bear country, but the money ran out and some of those people were laid off, said Jennifer Fearing, a wildlife advocate and lobbyist.

“We have the tools to minimize human-wildlife conflict in California,” Fearing said. “We need the state to invest in using them.”

In Sierra County, the sheriff had come to a different conclusion. “We’ve swung the pendulum too far on the environmental side on these apex predators,” Fisher said.

Earlier this year, Fisher found common cause with newly elected GOP Assemblymember Heather Hadwick. “Mountain lions, bears and wolves are my biggest issue. I get calls every day about some kind of predator, which is crazy,” said Hadwick, who represents 11 northern counties.

In February, she introduced a bill, AB 1038, that would allow hunters to sic trained dogs on bears to chase them through the woods, but not kill them. While California has a legal hunting season for bears, it is strictly regulated; the use of hounds to aid the chase has been banned since 2013.

Hadwick argued that hounding bears would increase their fear of humans, which she said some are starting to lose: “We’re keeping them in the forest, where they belong.”

Bears have a long memory for food sources and an incredible sense of direction. If a tourist tosses them a pizza crust or leaves the lid off a trash can, they will return again and again.

(California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

Wildlife advocates showed up in force last month to oppose Hadwick’s bill in an Assembly committee hearing. Sending hounds after bears is cruel, they said. Plus, hounding bears in the woods would have no impact on the bears knocking over neighborhood trash cans and sneaking into ice cream stores.

Fisher testified in favor of the bill, and spoke of Miller’s death.

Lawmakers listened, some with stricken looks on their faces. But in a Legislature controlled by Democrats, Hadwick did not garner enough votes to send her bill on to the full Assembly; it became a two-year bill, meaning it could come back next year.

Fisher returned to Sierra County, where he has continued to advocate for locals to have more power to go after predators. The current situation, he said, is “out of control.”

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — President Trump said Thursday that the United States and Iran have “sort of” agreed to terms on a nuclear deal, offering a measure of confidence that an accord is coming into sharper focus.

Trump, in an exchange with reporters at a business roundtable in Doha, Qatar, described talks between American envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as “very serious negotiations” for long-term peace and said they were continuing to progress.

Still, throughout his four-day visit to the Gulf this week, the president has underscored that military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities remains a possibility if the talks derail.

“Iran has sort of agreed to the terms: They’re not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust,” Trump said at the business event. “We’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran.”

Without offering detail, he signaled growing alignment with the terms that he has been seeking.

A top political, military and nuclear advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told NBC News on Wednesday that Tehran stands ready to get rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium that can be weaponized, agree to enrich uranium only to the lower levels needed for civilian use and allow international inspectors to supervise the process.

Ali Shamkhani added that in return, Iran wants an immediate lifting of all economic sanctions.

On Thursday, hours after Trump said the two sides were getting closer to a deal, Araghchi said Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium remained a core right of the Iranian people and a red line in nuclear talks.

“We have said repeatedly that defending Iran’s nuclear rights — including enrichment — is a fundamental principle,” the official said. “This is not something we concede, either in public discourse or in negotiations. It is a right that belongs to the Iranian people, and no one can take it away.”

Trump said his demands have been straightforward.

“They can’t have a nuclear weapon. That’s the only thing. It’s very simple,” Trump said. “It’s not like I have to give you 30 pages worth of details. It is only one sentence. They can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

But Trump on Wednesday suggested he was looking for Tehran to make other concessions as part of a potential agreement.

Iran “must stop sponsoring terror, halt its bloody proxy wars and permanently and verifiably cease pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Trump said in remarks at a meeting in Saudi Arabia, the first stop on the Mideast trip.

Before moving on to the United Arab Emirates from Qatar on Thursday, Trump stopped at a U.S. military installation at the center of American involvement in the Middle East and spoke to U.S. troops. The Republican president has used his visit to Gulf states to reject the “interventionalism” of America’s past in the region.

Al-Udeid Air Base was a major staging ground during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The base houses some 8,000 U.S. troops, down from about 10,000 at the height of those wars.

Trump told the troops that his “priority is to end conflicts, not start them.”

“But I will never hesitate to wield American power if it’s necessary to defend the United States of America or our partners,” he said.

Trump has held up Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar as models for economic development in a region plagued by conflict. He urged Qatari officials to use their influence to entice Iran to come to terms with his administration on a nuclear deal.

Trump later flew to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for the final leg of his trip. He visited the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the country’s largest mosque. The United Arab Emirates’ founder, Sheikh Zayed, is buried in the mosque’s main courtyard.

Trump took his shoes off, which is customary, as he stepped into the house of worship and spent time marveling at the architecture.

“It’s beautiful,” Trump said.

He later attended a state visit hosted by United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the Qasr Al Watan presidential palace. Trump and his delegation were greeted by children wearing traditional robes and waving small U.S. and United Arab Emirates flags, and they were guided through a space exhibit inside the palace.

Al Nahyan also presented Trump with the Order of Zayed, the United Arab Emirates’ highest civil decoration and credited Trump with building the two nations’ economic partnership to new heights.

“This partnership has taken a significant leap forward since you assumed office,” he told Trump.

As he made his way to Abu Dhabi on Thursday, Trump reminded reporters about President Biden’s 2022 fist bump with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a moment roundly criticized by human rights activists already upset by the Democrat’s decision to hold the meeting. Trump noted in contrast that while in Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week, he had shaken many hands.

“They were starving for love because our country didn’t give them love,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “They gave him a fist bump. Remember the fist bump in Saudi Arabia? He travels all the way to Saudi Arabia … and he gives him a fist bump. That’s not what they want. They don’t want a fist bump. They want to shake his hand.”

Miller and Madhani write for the Associated Press. Madhani reported from Dubai. AP writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran and Gabe Levin in Dubai contributed to this report.

BATON ROUGE, La. — A legal challenge against a first-of-its-kind measure that recategorized two widely used abortion-inducing drugs as “controlled dangerous substances” in Louisiana can move forward, a judge ruled Thursday.

Baton Rouge-based Judge Jewel Welch denied the Louisiana attorney general’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed last year by opponents of the law, who argue that the reclassification of the pills is unconstitutional and could cause needless and potentially life-threatening delays in treatment during medical emergencies.

Attorneys for defendants in the suit, including Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill, argued that the lawsuit was premature. But attorneys for the plaintiffs, who include a doctor and pharmacist, said that since the law took effect in October, the measure has impacted how the plaintiffs handle and obtain the drugs on a “regular basis.”

A hearing date for the challenge has not yet been set.

Louisiana became the first state to heighten the classification of misoprostol and mifepristone, which have critical reproductive healthcare uses in addition to being used as a two-drug regimen to end pregnancies.

Passage of the measure by the GOP-dominated Legislature marked a new approach in conservative efforts to restrict access to abortion pills. In 2023, nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the country were medication abortions.

Now labeled as “Schedule IV drugs,” the pills are in the same category as the opioid tramadol and other substances that can be addictive. Under the new classification, there are more stringent storage requirements and extra steps to obtain the drugs. Testifying against the legislation, doctors stressed the drugs would be stored in locked containers or elsewhere that may result in slower access during emergency situations where every second is vital.

In the legal challenge, which was filed in October, plaintiffs say the law may slow access to “lifesaving treatment for people experiencing obstetrical emergencies” and make it “significantly harder” for people to “obtain proven, effective remedies necessary for their treatment and care.” Plaintiffs are asking the judge for a permanent injunction, ultimately to halt the law.

The legislation spawned from antiabortion groups and a Republican state senator’s effort to prevent coerced abortion and make it more difficult for bad actors to obtain the drugs. The lawmaker pointed to the case of his sister in Texas who in 2022 was slipped seven misoprostol pills by her husband without her knowledge; she and the baby survived. Over the past 15 years, news outlets have reported on similar cases — none in Louisiana — but the issue does not appear widespread.

“The Louisiana Legislature spoke loud and clear last year that they stand for life and are against this controlled substance being prescribed without a prescription from a doctor,” Murrill said ahead of the hearing.

Prior to the reclassification, a prescription was still needed to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol in Louisiana. Before the change, medical personnel told the Associated Press that in hospitals the drugs — which are also used to treat miscarriages, induce labor and stop bleeding — were often stored in an OB-GYN unit in a “hemorrhage box” in the room, on the delivery table or in a nurse’s pocket, to ensure almost-immediate access in common emergency situations.

With the heightened classification also comes increased charges. If someone knowingly possesses mifepristone or misoprostol without a valid prescription for any purpose, they could be fined up to $5,000 and sent to jail for one to five years. The law carves out protections for pregnant women who obtain the drug without a prescription to take on their own.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the Birthmark Doula Collective, an organization of people trained to provide pregnancy care before, during and after birth; Nancy Davis, a woman who was denied an abortion in Louisiana and traveled out of state for one after learning her fetus would not survive; and a woman who said she was turned away from two emergency rooms instead of being treated for a miscarriage.

Louisiana currently has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, which includes abortions via medication.

Cline writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The head of the U.S. Space Force is moving ahead with plans to pull talent from Air National Guard units to help build up the still new-military service — but several governors remain opposed and argue it tramples on their rights to retain control over their state units.

Overall, the plan would affect only 578 service members across six states and the Air National Guard headquarters and augment the Space Force without creating a separate Space Force National Guard — something the service has said would not be efficient because it would be so small.

“We are actively pursuing where do we want our part-time workforce? What type of work do they do?” the head of Space Force, Gen. Chance Saltzman, said Thursday at a Politico conference.

The transferred service members would be a part-time force like they are now, just serving under the Space Force instead of their state units.

But space missions are some of the most lucrative across the military and private sectors, and the states that lose space mission service member billets are potentially losing highly valuable part-time workforce members if they have to move away to transfer to the Space Force.

Last month, the National Governors Assn. said the transfers violate their right to retain control over their state units.

“We urge that any transfers cease immediately and that there be direct and open engagement with governors,” the association said in April. The group was not immediately available to comment on Space Force’s plan.

“There’s a lot of concern in the National Guard about these individuals who are highly skilled that want to be in the Guard being transferred out,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin said at an Air Force manpower hearing this week.

Congress directed the transfers in its 2025 defense bill. But the contention between the states and the Space Force has meant the service hasn’t so far been able to approach individual members about transferring in.

According to the legislation, each National Guard will get the option to either stay with their units — and get retrained in another specialty — or join the Space Force. Those who do transfer would be allowed to remain in their home state to perform their mission for at least the next 10 years, according to the 2025 legislation.

The affected personnel include 33 from Alaska, 126 from California, 119 from Colorado, 75 from Florida, 130 from Hawaii, 69 from Ohio and 26 from Air National Guard headquarters

Copp writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing Thursday to a lawyer for President Trump who was appealing rulings that blocked his plan to deny citizenship to newborns whose parents were in this country illegally or temporarily.

None of the justices spoke in favor of Trump’s plan to restrict birthright citizenship, and several were openly skeptical.

“Every court is ruling against you,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “There’s not going to be a lot of disagreement on this.”

If his plan were to take effect, “thousands of children will be born and rendered stateless,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Thursday’s hearing was devoted to a procedural question raised by the administration: Can a single federal judge issue a nationwide order to block the president’s plan?

Shortly after Trump issued his executive order to limit birthright citizenship, federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state declared it unconstitutional and blocked its enforcement nationwide.

In response, Trump’s lawyers asked the court to rein in the “epidemic” of nationwide orders handed by district judges.

It’s an issue that has divided the court and bedeviled both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Trump’s lawyers argued that on procedural grounds the judges overstepped their authority. But it is also procedurally unusual for a president to try to revise the Constitution through an executive order.

Thursday’s hearing did not appear to yield a consensus on what to do.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the plaintiffs should be required to bring a class-action claim if they want to win a broad ruling. But others said that would lead to delays and not solve problem.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said he was looking for a way to decide quickly. “How we get to the merits expeditiously?” he asked.

One possibility was to have the court ask for further briefing and perhaps a second hearing to decide the fundamental question: Can Trump acting on his own revise the long-standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment?

Shortly after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, which begins with the words: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Prior to that time, Americans were citizens of their states. Moreover, the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott decision said Black people were not citizens of their states and could not become citizens even if they were living in a free state.

The amended Constitution established U.S. citizenship as a birthright. The only persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the laws of the United States were foreign diplomats and their families and, in the 19th century, Indians who were “not taxed” and were treated as citizens of their tribal nations.

However, Congress changed that rule in 1924 and extended birthright citizenship to Native Americans.

Since 1898, the Supreme Court has agreed that birthright citizenship extended to the native-born children of foreign migrants living in this country. The court said then “the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth, notwithstanding the alienage of parents” had been established by law.

The decision affirmed the citizenship of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who were living and working there, but who were not U.S. citizens.

But several conservative law professors have disputed the notion that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States means simply that people living here are subject to the laws here.

Instead, they say it refers more narrowly to people who owe their undivided allegiance to this country. If so, they contend it does not extend broadly to illegal immigrants or to students and tourists who are here temporarily.

On Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order proclaiming the 14th Amendment does not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.” He said it would be U.S. policy to not recognize citizenship for newborns if the child’s mother or father was “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

Immigrants rights groups sued on behalf of several pregnant women, and they were joined by 22 states and several cities.

Judges wasted no time in declaring Trump’s order unconstitutional. They said his proposed restrictions violated the federal law and Supreme Court precedent as well as the plain words of the 14th Amendment.

In mid-March, Trump’s lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court with “a modest request.” Rather than decide the “important constitutional questions” involving birthright citizenship, they urged the justices to rein in the practice of district judges handing down nationwide orders.

They have “reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” they said.

A month later, and without further explanation, the court agreed to hear arguments based on that request.

The justices are likely to hand down a decision in Trump vs. CASA, but it may not come until late June.