Many of us were running errands, working out, or having breakfast when, in true 2026 Venezuelan fashion, one event we expected happened: María Corina Machado came back to her country.
She reappeared in the middle of a Sunday mass at the Santa Rosa basilica, a church near the city of Barquisimeto, home to the most popular Virgin Mary cult: la Divina Pastora.
¡Todos los venezolanos la estábamos esperando!
Y así fue la llegada de @MariaCorinaYA a nuestro país después de meses de intentos para volver.
Venezuela cambió y se prepara para la transición definitiva a la democracia y la libertad, y lo haremos juntos, de la mano de Dios. pic.twitter.com/BC770CnQyi
Surrounded by churchgoers and members of her party, Vente Venezuela, Machado joined the mass and embraced people, in a public demonstration of prayer, faith, and hope, in line with her religious persona that made her massively popular in 2023 and 2024, when she crossed the country meeting the communities more affected by mass migration and economic collapse.
Now, many questions arise.
How did Machado come back? For the region where she is now, in western Venezuela, we can speculate she took a private plane or a boat from the Dutch islands near the Falcon coast, on a route similar to the one she made during her clandestine trip to Oslo to collect her Nobel Peace Prize in December 2025.
What will the chavista regime, and their Washington sponsors, do? As we described many times in our Political Risk Report, the chavista regime was preparing for this for months, speaking as if it wasn’t their fault that Machado wasn’t there, as if they would not have persecuted her and charged her with several crimes. Donald Trump just said that she is nice because she gifted him the Nobel Prize, so he hopes she is right.
What can happen now? Machado will organize pressure to accelerate the complicated roadmap towards rebuilding the institutions and hold elections, including a presidential one where she is finally allowed to compete. At the same time, we expect Machado to channel the public ire about blackouts and inflation, and lead a more coherent and productive campaign towards a true democratic -not only economic- transition. With the appointment of the committee that will choose new justices for the Supreme Court, while the repressive apparatus led by Diosdado Cabello continues to show muscle by harassing activists, we must expect more street action and political negotiation. This is a challenge to both Machado and Delcy Rodríguez, and a shock to the dead calm chavismo was trying to settle.
More to come. But Venezuela will get frenzied, and be interesting to global media, again.
McALLEN, Texas — The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda’s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center’s vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows of cars, a tally of patients who gather here to sit with chemotherapy needles or lie on radiation machines.
The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda’s right breast, and she still didn’t know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat.
“I’m more of a positive person myself,” Banda said, now sitting with a white wristband in a dim waiting room. But the bills are harder to dismiss, and the single mother with six children in her care repeated something like a mantra. “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.”
That’s true for many Americans, as rising healthcare costs leave more families with a sinking feeling after seeing the bill for surgery or medication. Heading into the Nov. 3 midterm elections, about half of registered voters said healthcare costs are a major problem for them and their families, up from a little more than one-third four years ago, according to a Fox News poll from September.
With party control of Congress at stake, registered voters are nearly twice as likely to say they trust Democrats over Republicans to handle healthcare, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from the same month. Those frustrations, combined with broader concerns over rising prices, have sapped support for President Trump and his Republican Party.
Banda knows how that feels. She backed Trump in each of his three campaigns, motivated by her opposition to abortion. But when cancer came, the ensuing scramble to make ends meet was painful enough to rearrange her priorities, and she started to think about voting Democratic for the first time.
The 46-year-old was ushered into a sterile room for her appointment, her phone lighted up with a text. “Please contact TD Auto Finance.”
“This one’s $1,300,” she said of the car payment bill. “I have to go back to work.”
She had been on sick leave for a year from her job selling internet service, and she needed the income to support her three children and three more she had taken in after her sister’s death.
The doctor said her reconstruction surgery could be scheduled early next year. “I was hoping for maybe December,” Banda said, “only because I’ve met my deductibles.” Come January, she would have to pay down the $7,500 again. Earlier may be possible, the doctor replied, if the skin around her surgical scar loosens.
The evening had cooled slightly by the time she walked back through the rows of parked cars, their ebb and flow marking the tide of sickness, survival and death in a small corner of a colossal healthcare industry that saves lives while taking in over $5 trillion every year.
Banda paid $8 for parking as she left.
Confronting death and debt
Two weeks later, Banda was back at work, making door-to-door rounds to sell Spectrum’s Wi-Fi in McAllen, her city along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley. Banda, holding blue fliers, walked along a row of storefronts, some that closed since she last was in the area.
She hadn’t had a sale and commission since October of last year, after the biopsy and diagnosis.
The doctor who gave her the news had hugged Banda, and she sobbed even though, she says, she never really sobs in front of other people. During chemo, her children took turns buzzing off her wispy hair. When her 9-year-old daughter’s hand quivered, a teenage cousin helped guide the clipper over her mother’s scalp.
Banda’s first impulse was to maintain normality, stability, for the children.
But that requires roughly $7,000 a month for utilities, mortgage, car payments and groceries, along with the two water leaks. Then, even with insurance through her job, the surgeries, chemo and radiation added up to over $25,000 that she’s been paying off, making Banda one of tens of millions of other people in the United States in medical debt.
Banda tries not to dwell on death and debt.
“It’ll consume you,” she says. She smothers those thoughts beneath her bubbly demeanor and avoids being alone. But that truce, between her insistence on positivity and the fears that it covers, is brittle.
Certain thoughts still arrive uninvited. Banda’s late sister, Melissa, didn’t have life insurance. Banda makes sure it’s a payment she never misses.
“Sometimes I think, and I shouldn’t think like this, but I’m worth more gone than here,” she said one day. “Obviously, the goal is not that, the goal is to beat it,” she continued, “to keep the house and keep the cars.”
So far she has, with the help of others.
On top of child support, the father of Banda’s 9-year-old often pays $400 a week for a nanny to help with the kids. Banda’s own father sent her $700 before for her recent Houston appointment, one of his many cash infusions. Her high school classmates, whom she hadn’t been in close touch with in decades, fundraised by selling grilled chicken, rice and beans from a roadside tent. Two GoFundMe fundraisers collected nearly $30,000, and Banda rented her late sister’s house while putting her own in forbearance.
But months of insecurity takes its own, sleepless toll. She needed to sell some internet services to catch up.
After sticking the Spectrum Wi-Fi fliers onto empty storefronts, she drove to pick up her kids from school. The following day she had a morning meeting at a barbershop for what would be her first sale back at work.
Turning on Trump
A lifelong Christian, Banda had voted her antiabortion stance in past elections. When her sister was kidnapped and murdered by her ex-husband in 2020, Banda retreated from religion. The cancer brought her back to church with an apology to God, but it also made her rethink her politics.
She voted for Trump in 2016, and his first four years seemed steady, she said, so she voted for him again in 2020. President Biden’s tenure, including a global pandemic and related inflation, felt like bedlam, so she voted for Trump to return to the White House in 2024.
But two years later and fighting an expensive disease, she had found no respite from high prices.
So when James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, visited one of Banda’s fundraisers — speaking about his diabetes and his work in the Texas Statehouse to lower the price of insulin — it moved her. “Imagine if he can do that for the cancer,” she said.
Talarico and his Republican opponent, state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, have different approaches to healthcare. Talarico wants all Americans to be able to join Medicare; Paxton proposed a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Talarico also supports a law guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, which Banda has voted against for years. But after she slid into debt to stay alive, after her grocery bills mounted and the high school had to comp the kids’ soccer gear she couldn’t afford, Banda’s antiabortion concerns have been superseded by worry about costs.
“Because it’s what I’m living,” she said. “I’m living it.”
Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico. “Never voted Democrat before today!!” she wrote in a text with blue heart emoji.
Awaiting news
Banda had just started a new cancer-targeting medication that cost $16,000 a month, reduced to $500 by insurance. By the afternoon, she was nauseated and fatigued, unable to eat. The malaise would keep her home the next day. She would miss the meeting with the barbershop to close her first deal since getting sick, though she felt confident it was in the bag.
But Banda pushed through the discomfort one evening to join her family as they replaced the flowers at her sister’s tomb.
She drove past the headstones and oak trees in the evening’s slanting light, and the family gathered around Melissa Banda’s tomb in an open-air mausoleum. There was no speech. Their eulogy was her father, Fidel Banda, methodically clipping and arranging the flowers for his daughter.
Banda walked along the wall of tombs. She will find out on election day whether the cancer is in remission or whether it’s spread to her organs.
“This one’s for me,” she said, pointing to a blank tomb next to her sister’s.
“Mom!” said her daughter with the huffiness of a 9-year-old. “Why would you say that?”
As Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy came under fire for releasing an attack ad featuring his Democratic competitor’s estranged mother, a mysterious news site was running a Facebook ad boosting the controversial video.
The Buckeye Bulletin, which bills itself as an Ohio-based news platform committed to “reliable journalism” and “strong editorial standards,” popped up suddenly this spring and began pumping out a steady stream of pro-Ramaswamy content.
The publication’s articles have no bylines. There is no list of staff. The website does not feature digital advertisements, nor does it prompt readers to subscribe, but there is also no disclosure of who is funding it.
A closer look at the Buckeye Bulletin’s Meta advertising data shows that its Facebook and Instagram accounts are managed by the Lincoln Media Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Orange County-based Lincoln Club — the oldest and largest conservative donor organization in California. IRS documents show that the club and foundation are associated organizations and share at least two key executives.
Meta’s advertising data shows that the Lincoln Media Foundation manages the Instagram and Facebook accounts for the Buckeye Bulletin.
(Meta)
The Buckeye Bulletin, Lincoln Club and Lincoln Media Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
The Bulletin appears to be a partisan site posing as a local news outlet ahead of the midterm elections, a strategy political scientists refer to as “pink-slime” journalism.
This is not the first time a “pink-slime” outlet has been linked to the Lincoln Media Foundation. In 2024 Max Read, director of civic innovation for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, identified seven such alleged outlets.
With the exception of one Los Angeles-focused site, those outlets all targeted critical states for the 2024 presidential election such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Read reported that the media group had spent more than $63,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads, resulting in up to 18 million impressions during the last election cycle.
“[The sites were] very clearly designed to try to influence the information environment ahead of the presidential election,” Read told The Times. “They had all been started early in the year and used advertising on Meta platforms to juice their engagement numbers.”
When asked by The Times to take a look at the Buckeye Bulletin, Read said it appeared to be “pretty much copy and paste the same tactic that they used in 2024, even down to the aesthetics of the Facebook page and Instagram account.”
“It seems like they realized this worked at some level in 2024 and is worth doing again this year,” he said.
Earlier this year, CalMatters identified another outlet tied to the Lincoln Media Foundation called the California Courier, which had been circulating Facebook advertisements criticizing Gov. Gavin Newsom and the statewide redistricting ballot measure Proposition 50.
Since the Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram pages launched in March, the outlet has shared posts touting endorsements of Ramaswamy — a biotech billionaire and former presidential candidate — as well as his platform for addressing Ohio’s healthcare crisis and his stance on religious freedom in schools.
Simultaneously, the outlet’s social media posts have highlighted the refusal of his opponent — Amy Acton, Ohio’s former public health director — to debate, comments on how she “shut down” the state’s economy during the COVID-19 pandemic and a video with a watermark from right-wing political activist Laura Loomer.
This week, the outlet turned attention to Ramaswamy’s controversial campaign ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and urges voters not to support her.
However, the ad did not acknowledge that Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather, Arthur’s husband, was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child — an omission that drew fierce condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans, including Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Others, including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, an Ohioan, have defended the ad.
Arthur and her husband fled to Pennsylvania after his 1978 indictment where he died in 2004 without having been brought back to Ohio to face the charge.
Peppered in between political content on the Bulletin’s social media feeds is a smattering of reels related to non-political news, often featuring videos lifted directly from local TV stations. These other posts are used to create a “veneer of genuine local journalism,” Read said.
The language on the Bulletin’s About Us page displays markers of artificial intelligence such as generic mission statements, polished but repetitive phrasing and vague claims about journalistic standards with no details about the publication’s staff.
Of the last 30 posts shared on the Bulletin’s Facebook as of 5 p.m. Friday, 21 were about state or national politics and 10 were about the gubernatorial race. Engagement on the posts dealing with Ramaswamy and Acton is consistently strong for a page with around 5,600 followers.
For example, a Wednesday post on Ohio State Medical Assn.’s PAC endorsing Ramaswamy received more than 770 likes, 260 comments and 150 shares. Another video posted Wednesday with the label “Amy Acton refuses to debate, says mother is lying about her” received more than 4,800 likes, 1,500 comments and 500 shares.
Meanwhile, a non-political Wednesday post on a chemical explosion in Toledo received two likes, no comments and no shares.
The unassuming social media scroller or person who clicked onto the website would have no clue of the Buckeye Bulletin’s apparent connection to a group of wealthy Southern California Republications.
The Lincoln Media Foundation was started by leaders of the historic Lincoln Club, which was founded in 1962 and once counted John Wayne and former President Richard Nixon as members.
Today, the club describes itself as being home to “the most prominent business and thought leaders” in California and says it offers members the opportunity to meet world leaders and “experience their hobbies come to life through a combination of extravagance and leisure.”
The foundation notes that it uses a digital approach to reach communities left out of the national conversation, but its website does not disclose providing funding to any news outlets.
IRS records show that the nonprofit’s financial activities kicked up dramatically in 2024, the latest year for which data are available. The Lincoln Media Foundation reported $3.88 million in revenue in 2024, compared with $738,000 in 2023, $453,000 in 2022 and $415,000 in 2021.
The Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have spent just over $10,000 boosting posts this year, according to Meta’s ad library.
That’s barely a drop in the bucket in Ohio, where hotly contested races for governor and U.S. Senate have drawn hundreds of millions in spending. But presenting a slanted political view under the guise of local news tends to offer more bang for your buck than traditional advertisements, said Georgia Kernell, an associate professor in the departments of communications and political science at UCLA.
“Voters are so sick of ads; they’re getting tons of clear paid advertisements on the radio, on the television and on their social media feeds now,” she said. “Anything that can kind of look different is going to be more likely to keep their attention.”
Presenting as a traditional news source also increases the likelihood of viewers believing that the information presented is well-researched, she said.
Nik Usher, associate professor of communications at the University of San Diego, said it’s unclear how much influence pink-slime journalism is having on voting behavior, but political strategists are willing to try any new approach to possibly make a difference in tight races.
“This is one strategic effort to throw more spaghetti at the wall, hoping it’ll stick,” Usher said.
Creators of these partisan sites further stand to benefit from the fact that artificial intelligence tools are constantly scraping content from news websites without paywalls.
Researchers at NewsGuard recently found that leading AI chat bots are citing pink-slime websites nearly half the time when users ask questions about candidates and issues in the midterm elections.
Democrats and Republicans have increasingly leveraged pink-slime journalism to influence voters in the past few election cycles.
In 2020, the New York Times identified a network of 1,300 news sites that paid freelance writers to produce biased content for Republican groups and corporate public relations firms. In 2024, the left-leaning Star Spangled Media group used a site called the Morning Mirror to promote down-ballot Democratic candidates, according to research from Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
More recently, the evolution of AI has increased the ease with which these websites can be populated with content, eliminating the need to pay writers and automating the production of social media posts.
Usher described pink-slime websites as “explosive bombs for public trust” that take advantage of the gap created by the loss of independent local papers and further diminish expectations for news to be fairly reported.
“Once these sorts of sites are pointed out to the public it further undermines distrust in political institutions, political parties, the news media,” Usher said, “especially when AI is associated with this kind of stuff.”
On television, ads for UCLA Health show up behind the Dodgers’ home plate and in the background when Justin Herbert, the Chargers’ quarterback, speaks after a game.
At the Lakers’ training facility, the health system’s logo appears on the court and throughout the building, under a marketing partnership that cost the university tens of millions of dollars.
The ads are part of the public university health system’s strategy to increase the number of Southern Californians using its providers at its fast-growing number of clinics and hospitals.
University officials say its expansion to five hospitals and 300 clinics — up from 150 locations a decade ago — has given more Southern Californians access to its academic medicine.
Lakers championship banners hang from the rafters and trophies are on display in an office overlooking the news conference as Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka, left, speaks while Lakers coach JJ Redick listens at the UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Last year, the system’s clinics and hospitals recorded 4.2 million outpatient visits — more than five times the number in 2015.
“As a public institution, we’re trying to make sure that patients within our community have access to care,” said Dr. Robert Cherry, UCLA Health’s chief medical and quality officer. “That’s the primary and overriding concern, because there’s an acute demand for our services.”
Yet healthcare economists point to repeated studies showing that hospital consolidation — where health systems expand, take over competitors and hire more of a region’s physicians — has become a leading driver of escalating health costs and insurance premiums, while doing little to raise the quality of care.
Glenn Melnick, a USC professor of healthcare finance, has documented how hospital consolidation in Northern California caused health costs to escalate. He said the mergers and acquisitions have continued, including with UCLA Health and other hospital systems in Southern California. UCI Health acquired four community hospitals in 2024.
One consequence, Melnick said, is surging insurance premiums for employers, which leave companies with little money for wage increases, while employees end up paying more for their health insurance and out-of-pocket medical costs.
“We’re now, I think, at a breaking point,” he said.
UCLA executives said the aim of the expansion was not to increase revenues the health system receives from commercial insurers. And they say they don’t believe UCLA Health is large enough to influence health costs.
“We actually represent only a small fraction of the inpatient capacity, physicians, clinics and resources available across the large and complex healthcare market in L.A.,” said Johnese Spisso, UCLA Health’s president, in an interview.
Nonetheless, the system’s expansion and its other recent financial decisions have led to protests by some of the university’s own staff and faculty, who point out the new clinics have been added mostly in wealthier neighborhoods, including Malibu and Montecito, where the majority of families have commercial insurance.
None of its clinics are in South or East Los Angeles, where more residents are covered by Medi-Cal, the state program for low-income people.
Cameron Carr during a news conference at the UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.
(Arwen Clemans/Los Angeles Times)
University of California system officials say Medi-Cal’s reimbursements are so low that they don’t cover the cost of care at the state’s five UC medical centers. Those losses, they say, must be covered by charges to those with commercial insurance.
Last month, dozens of medical residents and interns protested outside a UC Regents board meeting after UCLA Health failed to renew a Medi-Cal contract that had covered thousands of low-income patients. The doctors waved signs with slogans “Corporate Greed” and “Keep UCLA Health public.”
Dr. David Schriger, UCLA professor emeritus of emergency medicine, said that given the mission of the state’s public university, he questioned why the expansion had not included neighborhoods such as South Central L.A.
“The public should be making these decisions,” Schriger said. “It should not be at the whim of some executives.”
Santiago Munoz, UCLA Health’s chief strategy officer, said officials don’t consider neighborhood income levels when deciding where to open clinics. Instead, he said, the system has been adding clinics along freeways running north and south.
“We’re staying close to the 405 and the 101 because driving to locations in Los Angeles is inevitable, and it’s very difficult to get to Westwood,” he said.
Munoz noted that UCLA had recently leased a 20,000-square-foot space for a clinic in Inglewood, has locations in downtown Los Angeles, and provides physician services at two of L.A. County’s public hospitals.
“We are trying to go to where patients are,” Munoz said.
Worries about crowding
Nurses at the university’s flagship hospital Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood say the expansion has created crowding that has caused what they describe as an ongoing, daily crisis in the emergency room.
Patients coming from the 300 clinics for hip replacements, heart surgeries and other procedures at Ronald Reagan often wait one or two days in the emergency department until beds become available upstairs in the hospital, according to UCLA officials.
To accommodate those patients who’ve been admitted but don’t have a room, the hospital has installed dozens of beds in what was once the emergency department’s waiting room and in adjacent spaces. That has forced people waiting for emergency care into a large white tent outside, which was put up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“How do you do a good exam in a tent? It just doesn’t work,” said Dianne Sposito, a nurse who works in the emergency department. “I feel patients are in grave danger right now. Accidents are bound to happen.”
LeBron James has fun with his daughter, Zhuri, as son, Bronny, looks on during a G League game at UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
A university spokesperson said the system has “extensive strategies to keep patients safe and decompress our emergency departments.”
At the September Regents committee meeting, Spisso, UCLA Health’s president, told board members that the system needs to add as many as another 400 hospital beds so that newly-admitted patients no longer have to wait.
For months, rumors have circulated that UCLA will soon buy Providence St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, which would make the university the only hospital operator in that city. UCLA bought the city’s other hospital in 1995.
UCLA officials declined to say whether they were talking about acquiring the hospital. “We’ve found it’s best not to talk about discussions we may or may not be having unless or until we have something to announce,” Phil Hampton, a university spokesperson, said in a statement.
Consolidation hikes costs
The California Health Care Foundation found in a 2021 study that hospital markets were reaching “monopoly levels” in many of the state’s counties. The consolidation was increasing prices with “little to no improvement in quality” of care, the report said.
The study also detailed how physicians often change their referral and prescribing patterns after their practices are acquired by hospitals, sometimes requesting imaging or other procedures that are not needed.
Melnick, the USC professor, noted that when UCLA acquires physician practices and “re-designates them as hospital-outpatient departments,” the clinics can begin billing insurers for an additional “hospital facility fee” for routine office visits, imaging and minor procedures.
He added that insurers often consider UCLA as a “must-have” network, allowing it to negotiate higher reimbursement rates. When the insurer folds UCLA’s new hospitals and clinics into their plan, he said, it often agrees to raise rates at the newly-acquired providers to match what UCLA is receiving as an academic system. Patients get the same care, he said, “but there is a new name on the door.”
Munoz said that UCLA Health was adding facility fees to some bills, including for imaging, but not for physician care. “We’re running a fairly lean operation in the community when it comes to physician services and not collecting the facility fees that others are,” he said.
More income from patient charges
UCLA is not the only hospital system expanding in the L.A. region. For example, Cedars Sinai has also been adding clinics and buying hospitals.
Price data shows that insurers and patients often pay more for care at UCLA Health and Cedars.
Anthem, Southern California’s largest commercial insurer, this year is paying $20,265 to UCLA for a total knee replacement at Ronald Reagan, according to data gathered by Serif Health, a San Francisco firm that collects data from hospitals and insurers. That price is 9% higher than last year and doesn’t include physician fees, the implanted device or anesthesia.
Anthem pays Cedars more than twice as much for a knee replacement, according to Serif’s data, while it pays Providence St. John’s 22% less. Cedars’ current negotiated reimbursement is $42,559 — an increase of almost 17% over last year.
University executives said that because UCLA Health is an academic health system it provides a high volume of complex care that is more costly than care at non-academic hospitals.
UCLA’s expansion strategy has been financially successful, according to the health system’s annual report.
Last year, UCLA Health operating revenues grew by nearly 20% to more than $5 billion. After paying for expenses, its operating income was $793 million, a margin of almost 16%. That compares to the median operating margin of 1.5% for 45 academic medical centers across the country, according to a 2024 study by McKinsey & Company.
UCLA officials said the operating margin was not a good comparative measure because it doesn’t include a $496-million transfer to the university’s medical school to cover other operations including the training of physicians.
“Education, research, and clinical care are all part of our mission and our responsibilities to really train that next generation of healthcare professionals,” Spisso said.
Expansion continues
The university is now spending nearly $300 million to renovate a 170,000-square-foot building that sits on nine acres near Los Angeles International Airport. Purchased in 2024, the campus’ many offerings will include a sports medicine institute with physical therapy and advanced imaging, as well as an ambulatory surgery center with 10 operating rooms.
The university also plans to soon open a new 119-bed psychiatric hospital in L.A.’s Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. The facility was once the 204-bed Olympia Medical Center, where most patients were Black, Latino and underinsured. Olympia shut down after the university purchased it in December 2020.
The renovated hospital allows UCLA to relocate and expand the 74-bed Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which is currently on the fourth floor of Ronald Reagan Medical Center.
“We have patients waiting for mental healthcare so we made a $650-million investment in this new facility,” Spisso said. “We will probably lose around $50 million a year just operating it, but we saw it as one of the most underserved areas.”
UCLA then plans to add 103 beds to Ronald Reagan by renovating its fourth floor, increasing the medical center’s capacity by 23% to ease the overcrowding.
In 2024, the university bought the 260-bed West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley from HCA Healthcare.
Last month, Spisso told the Regents committee that the hospital, now known as UCLA West Valley Medical Center, and its surrounding clinics, were making more money than officials had expected.
LAS VEGAS — Five days after settling back into the White House, President Trump embarked on a political victory lap that took him to a rally in downtown Las Vegas.
Joined by Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, Trump told boisterous supporters that, as a first order of business, he’d directed every member of his Cabinet “to marshal all powers at their disposal to defeat inflation and bring down the cost of daily life.”
That hasn’t happened — not even close — and that failure is one big reason that Nevada’s governor is fighting for his political life.
With just over a week to go — and with more than 335,000 ballots already cast — the contest could go either way.
After a career in law enforcement and eight years as sheriff of Clark County — home to Las Vegas — Lombardo made the leap to governor in 2022 in a pandemic-fueled backlash against Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak.
Reserved by nature and a political civilian most of his life, Lombardo has spent the last four years focused on the basics — crime, education, job growth, economic development — and largely steered clear of the country’s incendiary culture wars.
Unlike other Republican lawmakers, Lombardo has also shied away from the provocations and flamboyant pugilism of the MAGA movement.
Still, Trump hangs like an anvil around Lombardo’s neck — a fact his Democratic opponent, Aaron Ford, exploits at every turn.
“And where,” Ford asked rhetorically, as traffic whooshed past, “is our current governor? As usual, he’s at Trump’s feet, serving as his doormat.”
Nevada Democratic gubernatorial candidate and current Nevada Atty. Gen. Aaron D. Ford arrives at a get-out-the-vote event on Oct. 7 in Las Vegas.
(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Ford, who’s bidding to become Nevada’s first Black governor, has one of those up-by-the-bootstraps biographies that campaign consultants see as spun gold.
He grew up in Dallas in a family that struggled to stay above water and, as a single father in his early 20s, relied on Medicaid and food stamps to get by. He worked as a waiter and a teacher to pay for law school and a Ph.D. in education before moving to Nevada in 2007. After six years in the state Senate, Ford was elected in 2018 to the first of two terms as the state’s attorney general.
Standing on the sidewalk outside a Circle K — where regular was going for $5.35 a gallon — Ford squatted to sign a blown-up copy of a “letter” to Trump demanding a $2,000 “pain-at-the-pump” rebate for every Nevada household. A line was provided, obligingly but obviously unnecessarily, for Lombardo’s signature.
Four years ago, Ford noted, when gas was around $4.68 a gallon, his Republican rival wrote on social media that hard-pressed Nevadans needed “leadership that ensures our families and businesses are protected from these disastrous policies.”
“But once he got in office,” Ford said, Lombardo “stopped fighting for us in Nevada and he started working for Trump full time.”
A few hours later, at a country-themed nightclub in northwest Las Vegas, the governor took to the stage to extol his performance these last four years.
Small-business creation and job growth are up, he told a crowd of supporters gathered on the dance floor. Teachers are better paid and more people are working in Nevada than ever before. “Kicking butt,” he said, referring to either himself, Nevada or both; it wasn’t clear which. “Kicking butt.”
Also, Lombardo added, Nevada’s crime rate has fallen for both violent and property crimes — “without any help from the attorney general.”
Lombardo has had a somewhat mixed relationship with the president.
He kept his distance during the 2024 campaign and has occasionally, selectively, taken issue with the administration since Trump returned to office. The governor, for instance, spoke out against cuts to Medicaid as well as the shuttering of wind and solar projects in Nevada. . But Lombardo didn’t help himself in the least when Trump came to town in August for another rally, this one at the Red Rock Casino. He heaped praise on the president and defended, of all things, the care and feeding of Trump’s plutocratic pals.
“Quite often when the press and the media runs him down, they think about, you know, he’s taking care of his billionaire friends,” Lombardo said. “Those billionaire friends provide jobs. Unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent.”
Naturally, the moment showed up in a campaign ad, showing the grinning governor alongside a smirking Trump and ending with the tagline: “Joe Lombardo. For Trump, Not Nevada.”
For his part, the governor has portrayed Ford as feckless and borderline corrupt.
He’s seized on the attorney general’s abundant out-of-state travel — for official business, Ford says — to portray him as a high-flier beholden to the special interests that financed his jaunts.
Lombardo has also accused Ford of being weak on crime, citing, in particular, the case of a Nevada inmate convicted of manslaughter in the killing of a pregnant woman. Ford placed the inmate’s bid for clemency on the agenda of the state pardons board — an example, Lombardo claims, of the way Ford treats criminals.
The Democrat said he was merely following procedure and would have opposed the clemency request had he not missed the board’s meeting due to an unspecified family emergency.
With a big financial advantage and the benefit of a highly practiced campaign team, Lombardo has kept the race close despite the rough political climate. But to a considerable degree, his fate is beyond anything that Lombardo can control. The key question is how big the Democratic wave is on Nov. 3 and how strong the Trump undertow.
Those forces of red and blue — more than anything either candidate says or does — will determine the winner in this most purple of states.
The 16 candidates vying for three seats on the board that overseas the Los Angeles Community College District have diverse backgrounds and varying ideas — and near unanimous agreement that district leaders need to do more to meet the basic needs of students struggling to pursue their higher education goals.
The candidates include those with experience both within and outside the district, with many citing the need to better connect students in the largest community college district in the nation with good paying jobs after they graduate. The seven-member Board of Trustees are managing a 2022 voter-approved $5.3 billion bond-funded construction boom to revitalize aging campuses and build student housing and at the same time are grasping to find ways to meet the basic needs of students, the majority of whom are low-income, juggling school with jobs.
Members of the board are elected to at-large seats and do not represent a specific area. The 900-square-mile district includes the city of Los Angeles and nearby cities, including Culver City, Montebello and Burbank.
Seat 2
In Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres is being challenged by three candidates: writer Robert Payne, business owner Kristina Irwin and educator Adriana Cabrera. Roy Payan is also on the ballot for Seat 2, but told The Times he has suspended his campaign.
Veres has served on the Board of Trustees for multiple terms and also works as a staff director and policy advisor for state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who previously ran the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and will soon take a seat on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
In responses to a Times questionnaire, Veres said during his 13 years on the LACCD Board he’s been able to strengthen job training programs, improve graduation rates and helped push to give students access to free and discounted food and emergency housing shelter.
Veres has the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment, including Durazo, Mayor Karen Bass and the county Democratic party. Four members of the board of trustees support him, as does the district’s faculty and staff unions.
Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, a campaign committee sponsored by the faculty union has paid for nearly $150,000 worth of slate mailers in support of Veres, according to campaign finance records.
An online database of campaign finance records show the other candidates, Payne, Irwin and Cabrera, have not received campaign contributions. Those candidates did not respond to a request for comment about their fundraising.
Seat 4
Seat 4 is an open race, with seven candidates running. Incumbent Sara Hernandez is stepping down and running for state senate.
The most well-funded Seat 4 candidate is Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, who recently started teaching a class on student skills at Santa Monica College, which is not an LACCD campus.
Harris has the support of a wide swath of Democratic politicians and organizations, as well as labor unions and six of seven current LACCD trustees.
Others running for Seat 4 include environmentalist and former board member Nancy Pearlman; therapist Adam Bruno; healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz; sign language educational interpreter Priscilla Umana; fire department employee Isidro Armenta; and business owner Jason Aula, who in response to the Times questionnaire, as well as in a recent press release, included comments about the Chinese Communist party and cannibalism.
Seat 6
Perhaps the most contested race is Seat 6, where incumbent Gabriel Buelna is facing off against Randall Winston, who serves as deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Bass.
Buelna failed to gain a key endorsement of the district’s faculty guild, whose executive board endorsed Winston.
James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision to endorse Winston, but said the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.
AFT 1521A, the guild representing district clerical and technical staff, issued a dual endorsement of both Winston and Buelna and has given money to both campaigns.
“I absolutely really love both,” said Andrea Edwards, president of the staff guild. “I could not choose.”
Others running for Seat 6 are community college professor Roberto David LaCarra and realtor Tonia Arey.
Buelna and Arey have accused Winston of misleading the public by listing architect as his occupation on the ballot, as well as describing himself as an educator and a teacher at West L.A. college during the campaign.
“The public doesn’t understand who he really is,” Buelna said.
Arey, who was endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., has vowed to ensure there’s more transparency and accountability surrounding the district’s nearly $10-billion annual budget.
Asked in an interview why he didn’t list deputy mayor of infrastructure as his occupation when it’s his day-to-day job, Winston said “architect seemed to resonate the most and architect is my first professional degree and fundamentally part of still how I think and act.” Winston said he is currently licensed to practice architecture but doesn’t practice day to day.
Winston said he will also start teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College later this fall and is currently helping to teach a workshop at the college on climate solutions. He also said he has mentored UCLA students.
“I believe I have met the qualifications of an educator,” he said.
The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk‘s Office disagreed and declined to allow Winston to list educator as his occupation on the ballot, according to an Aug. 27 email from the registrar’s office to Winston.
Winston said that at the time “West LA College was still completing the administrative processing for my adjunct instructor appointment.”
Before becoming deputy mayor, Winston also ran the California Strategic Growth Council, which helps fund sustainable development.
McKeever of the faculty union said he saw Winston’s long experience in development as an architect, deputy mayor and head of the growth council as an asset to the district as trustees deal with the bond-funded building program.
“This will help maintain the integrity of the bond process as the district moves forward with new construction projects,” McKeever said.
Despite not receiving the endorsement of the faculty guild, Buelna retains the support of a number of faculty members, including the president of the academic senate, Angela Echeverri.
Echeverri said Buelna “really cares about students and education” and helped successfully push for state legislation to make it easier for students to take courses in languages other than English.
The law “really opened up community colleges to people who previously couldn’t access education,” she said.
WASHINGTON — N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) has spent years trying to answer a question that has vexed the United States since the abolition of slavery: What would it actually look like to repair the damage?
In Evanston, Ill., she helped turn that question into a $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. Now, Rue Simmons is spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country.
But as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a formidable hurdle: President Trump’s administration.
The administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and its broader efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history, have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work.
Those reversals come while at least part of the world community is reexamining the past. In March the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution — only three voted against it — Argentina, Israel and the U.S. Fifty-two, including England and 27 members of the European Union, abstained.
“Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons, the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, told the Associated Press.
For more than 3½ centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million didn’t survive the journey.
Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the U.S. and their enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery, treating the enslaved and their children as property, until abolition in 1865.
Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth that is still largely concentrated among white families.
From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule, to modern-day reparations proposals, initiatives to address the legacy of slavery are entering a new era of political uncertainty.
“I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word,” said William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen.
“Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility,” he added.
“They want to steal your money for reparations,” Trump told his supporters during a speech in September. “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. … The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”
Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at UCLA, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs come in the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments.
“It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” he said.
The Trump administration disagrees and has entered the legal fight in Evanston to stop it from happening.
The Republican administration’s attacks on modern-day repayment efforts include a lawsuit in Evanston, which was initially filed by Judicial Watch.
Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, says the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without specific harm identification. He argues the city’s program is unlike historical reparations programs.
“The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Beshka told the AP.
The Justice Department this month received a federal judge’s permission to intervene in the case, alleging that the city’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.
Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, N.C., contemplating creating their own programs.
Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement to the AP that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.”
“Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them,” she said.
The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.
Georgetown University was one of the leaders, offering admission consideration for the descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’ past, an effort that has continued despite Trump’s crackdown on campus DEI efforts.
But across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders.
“People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said.
Some Virginia universities have quietly been taking steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. But otherwise there has been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office, said Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery.
The Georgetown initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana.
The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to the descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments to individuals vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity.
“We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached, said Nicky Burridge, the seminary’s spokeswoman.
“The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one,” said Ebonee Davis-Hayes, its director of reparations.
Hussein, Fields and Binkley write for the Associated Press.
WASHINGTON — In September, just weeks before Americans were set to vote in this year’s midterm elections, a sudden panic over the dangers posed by artificial intelligence caught the White House off guard. A whistleblower had gained viral attention warning the technology could soon pose an existential threat.
President Trump was quick to dismiss concerns, evoking urgency in the U.S. race to achieve global dominance in superintelligence. He rejected calls to negotiate guardrails on the most advanced AI models with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, weeks later, during a prime opportunity to do so in Washington.
Privately, the president expressed concern that public hysteria over AI could jolt markets that have become excessively concentrated in AI-related stocks. He had already seen fresh polling that showed widespread bipartisan opposition to the boom in construction of AI data centers, a push by Trump that has cannibalized chips and energy from other sectors of the economy, driving up costs.
Now, on the campaign trail in the final days before the vote, Trump is vowing to expand a “golden age” of prosperity through the end of his presidency. But experts say his policies on AI have set the U.S. economy up for a period of tremendous risk over the next two years.
Some of the world’s leading financiers are sounding increasingly alarmed about an AI bubble. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that AI stocks have become detached from financial fundamentals, pushing markets to precarious highs. Ken Griffin, the world’s richest hedge fund owner, said last week that AI is “almost certainly” fueling a market bubble that could be on the verge of a burst.
Economists warn that Trump has overseen fiscal policy that would give the federal government fewer tools than it has had in the past to respond to a crisis.
“Trump could easily run into a financial crisis before his term is up,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard. “It is entirely plausible to have a 30% — or more — drop in the stock market, and in the context of an economy so dependent on AI, this in turn could easily lead to a recession and widespread financial distress.”
Spending on data center infrastructure last winter and spring accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to independent analyses. Without it, growth would have slowed to a mere fraction of a percentage point, leaving the economy nearly stagnant and flirting with recession.
The Nasdaq 100 has about 70% of its index weight in companies that depend on AI, from semiconductor manufacturers and Big Tech giants to cloud platforms and software providers. Anthropic, one of the top AI industry leaders, plans an initial public offering next month, while its chief rival, OpenAI, expects to go public next year.
From left, Chris Painter, president of the Model Evaluation and Threat Research, Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, Paul Ohm, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Kurt Gaudette, senior vice president of Dragos, and Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the AI Futures Project, are sworn in to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks,” in Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Because government finances are already strained, with the national debt on a patently unsustainable trajectory, there is no guarantee of a sharp drop in long-term borrowing rates for the government,” Rogoff continued. “So the options for bailing out the financial sector, or fighting recession, could be much more constrained than during the global financial crisis.”
While doubling down on the promise of an untested, frontier technology, Trump’s other economic policies may be hobbling its growth. Tariffs have raised the costs of imported chips, servers, networking equipment, metals and electrical components, and visa restrictions have tied the hands of industry leaders trying to secure the world’s best talent. Runaway federal deficits have driven long-term bond interest rates, adding pressure on AI firms already strapped with debt.
Servaas Storm, an economist closely following the AI sector at the Delft University of Technology, said the industry is already facing severe financial headwinds that could precipitate a panic.
Prices for energy, chips and minerals are driving up the cost of doing business, while early AI adopters such as Microsoft, Meta and Walmart are scaling back its use as employees spend too much time correcting errors, cleaning up low-quality output and addressing security lapses.
Slower adoption could further complicate the search for revenue, particularly for companies already struggling to monetize the technology. For now, hyperscalers are shouldering the cost of financing frontier AI labs that, as Storm put it, “do not have a credible path to profitability.”
“There is indeed an AI bubble in the stock market and in data center construction, which could pop rather soon, as rising debt loads and elevated interest rates could prove too much to sustain it,” Storm said. “That moment is not imminent, but it is approaching — and it will very likely happen before the end of Trump’s presidency.”
An economy already under duress from Trump’s other economic policies — from tariffs and tax cuts to the Iran war — could precipitate further pain, said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Leading AI companies are already running “day-after” drills in anticipation of an AI-related crisis within the next year, according to Axios.
Inflation has fallen sharply from its 9% peak in 2022, during a pandemic-era surge, reaching 2.9% by the end of Biden’s presidency. Under Trump, it has climbed once again to 3.7%, driven by rising energy, transportation and housing costs — among the top concerns for voters entering next month’s vote.
Persistent inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated, squeezing borrowers. And those rates — paired with high government spending and concerns over mounting deficits — have pressured the bond market, pushing 10-year Treasury yields to levels not seen since the early 2000s.
“Financial crises, by their nature, are virtually impossible to predict,” Duffie said, asked whether he shared concerns of a potential AI bubble.
“If we know we are going to be in a crisis soon,” he added, “markets advance the crisis to now.”
BAKERSFIELD — Top Democratic and Republican leaders are sweeping through California as the Nov. 3 election approaches, evidence of the state’s pivotal role in deciding which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives and the fate of President Trump’s final two years in office.
Seizing on their party’s momentum nationwide, Democrats rallied crowds from Orange County to the Bay Area this past week. They blamed Trump and the Republican-led Congress for rising gas and food prices, massive cuts to healthcare funding, deceitful attacks on the elections process and the vilification of immigrants.
In the Central Valley, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday evening appeared alongside Randy Villegas, a Democrat challenging Republican incumbent David Valadao of Hanford in a Latino voter-heavy district in the state’s agricultural heartland. The population of the district is one of the youngest in the country, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd, and Gen Z and millennial voters are expected to play a pivotal role.
“We have the opportunity to take the reins,” said Ocasio-Cortez, one of the nation’s most well-known progressive leaders. “And to give direction to where our future will be headed. And I got to tell you, folks, the future is not with David Valadao.”
Roughly two dozen House races across the country are expected to decide the House majority, including three competitive races in California: Those of Republican Valadao, Democratic Rep. Adam Gray in the Central Valley and the open seat of retiring Republican Rep. Darrell Issa in the San Diego area.
Democrats are hoping that the new congressional maps approved by California voters in 2025 will give them an edge. The reconfigured congressional districts approved by Proposition 50 were a response by California’s Democratic leadership to Trump urging Republicans, notably in Texas, to shift their boundaries to help the GOP hold onto control of Congress during his final two years in office.
The San Joaquin Valley district represented by Valadao, which already had a Democratic majority, added about 100,000 Fresno residents, turning it even bluer. Valadao has been a perpetual target of Democrats given their longtime voter registration edge in this area.
Aside from briefly losing the seat for one term nearly a decade ago, Valadao has hung onto the seat. He comes from a dairy farming family and is well-known in the area, winning by nearly seven percentage points in 2024, outperforming Trump.
This cycle, Democrats are hammering him for supporting Trump’s budget cuts that impacted healthcare programs, a critical issue since roughly two-thirds of the population in his district is covered by Medi-Cal, as Medicaid is known in the state, the most of any district in California, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Valadao is among a handful of GOP members in California’s 52-member congressional delegation, the largest of any state in the nation, and among the Republicans targeted by Democrats in response to Trump’s efforts to keep his party in control of Congress.
“Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme is going to fail,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Buena Park on Thursday. “It’s going to fail in Texas. It’s failing in Florida, and it’s failing in North Carolina. But I’m grateful to the people of California who decided to decisively respond and create the situation where we’ll have a fair national map.”
The party in control of the White House typically loses seats in the midterm election, and Trump and the GOP face additional headwinds because of the affordability crisis that the president promised to address when he ran for reelection in 2024. Californians face some of the highest gas and electricity prices in the country.
“The MAGA extremists are on the run because they have failed. They’ve broken every promise that they’ve made to the American people,” Jeffries said, after stumping for Rep. Derek Tran (D-Orange) at a carpenters’ union hall. “Life has not gotten more affordable. Life is far too expensive. Trump policies … have increased costs on everyday Americans by thousands of dollars per year.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries interacts with members of the audience after he delivered a speech during representative Derek Tran’s “Take Back the House” rally for his reelection campaign in California’s 45th Congressional District, at Carpenters Local Union 714 in Buena Park on Thursday.
(Etienne Laurent/For The Times)
Tran narrowly unseated Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in 2024, winning by just 653 votes. The recently redrawn district, which is located primarily in Orange County, could give him an edge this election.
“Prop. 50 did help me out of the battleground districts in California,” Tran said. “I got the least amount of help, but better, still better.”
On Wednesday, the Republican House speaker acknowledged his party’s hurdles while stumping for congressional candidate Kevin Lincoln in Stockton in the Central Valley.
“We’re gonna be very sober-minded about the challenge, and I want you all to know the odds that we are facing,” Johnson said.
Campaigning for Lincoln, a former Stockton mayor and an underdog in a congressional race against Democratic Rep. Gray of Merced, Johnson acknowledged that the congressional midterm will be a “very close election.” But he argued that public polling is flawed and fought back against the notion that GOP voters are dejected.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), center left, and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) talk to reporters after a campaign event in Bakersfield on Sept. 30.
(Jae C. Hong / AP)
“Republicans are not staying home. They are not depressed,” said Johnson, who also traveled to Bakersfield to campaign for Valadao just a few weeks ago. “They’re coming out in huge numbers, and we’re going to win because of that. You know why? Because everybody knows what’s at stake.”
Lincoln, the grandson of an immigrant and the son of a teenage mother, talked up his experiences in the military and as a pastor. He aligned himself with the “hardworking” people in the Valley, suggesting that D.C. leaders were failing the district.
“When you have a job to do, you show up, you roll up your sleeves and you get that job done, and that same standard should apply to the people that we choose to send to Washington, D.C.,” he said.
Two of California’s most powerful Democrats, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Gov. Gavin Newsom, on Friday appeared at a San Francisco union hall to rally support for Democratic congressional candidates and warn that basic rights will be at risk if Republicans stay in power in Washington. They urged voters to reject Proposition 39, the Republican-led voter identification measure that comes amid Trump’s baseless claims of widespread, illegal voting by undocumented immigrants.
Pelosi, who will retire early next year after a historic 40-year run in Congress and two stints as House speaker, criticized Trump’s “vicious, malicious” attempts to undermine elections through gerrymandering, fraud claims and attempts to mandate voter ID.
“They are putting up obstacles to participation to vote. As women, if you have your husband’s name in marriage, you’re going to have to go find your birth certificate in order to vote,” Pelosi warned of voter ID requirements. After “63 years in marriage, you think I could find my birth certificate?” Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, warned that Republicans “are ruthless” in their attempts to roll back civil rights. The outgoing governor said the 2026 midterm fight began when he and state lawmakers put Proposition 50 on last year’s November ballot.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a rally, accompanied by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, right, members of the state’s Democratic Party, organized labor and other advocates in San Francisco on Friday.
(Heather Diehl / AP)
“Everything we have done to get us to this point is unbelievable,” he told union members in the Mission District. “You’re unbelievable, but it won’t mean anything unless we run through the tape.”
The Democrats were supporting state Sen. Mike McGuire, who is trying to flip one of Northern California’s redrawn congressional districts. He faces Rep. James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), who won a June special election to finish the term of the late Rep. Doug LaMalfa. “Prop. 50’s final chapter is almost here,” said McGuire, who has represented the rural North Coast in the Senate since 2014. “It is time to close the book on Donald Trump. It’s time to take America back.”
Seema Mehta reported from Buena Park, Nicole Nixon from San Francisco and Dakota Smith from Bakersfield.
JACKSON, Miss. — Portions of a Mississippi ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools can go into effect after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s ruling that blocked sections of the law from being enforced.
The parts of the law in question prevent public schools from requiring diversity training and maintaining DEI-related programs, courses and offices. It also bans public schools from discussing a list of “divisive concepts” related to race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and national origin. Public schools that violate the law could lose state funding.
The ban passed in April 2025 and is being challenged by a group of educators, students, parents and activists who say the law violates their 1st and 14th Amendment rights.
The plaintiffs have several weeks to file a petition for rehearing with the 5th Circuit. The law would take effect seven days after the petition deadline passes or if a petition is denied, according to McKenna Raney, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.
The 5th Circuit also ordered that the case be reassigned to a different district court judge after U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate issued a “botch job” temporary restraining order that contained artificial intelligence hallucinations, according to the Thursday ruling. The TRO predates Wingate’s August 2025 preliminary injunction, which the 5th Circuit overturned.
Additionally, the ruling provides clarity on the scope of the law, which opponents have criticized as overly vague.
The law does not apply to scholarly activities, student activities and groups or creative engagements, according to the 5th Circuit. The court also said concerns raised by the plaintiffs that the law would ban discussions of civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th Amendment, Juneteenth and “Of Mice and Men” are incorrect.
“It is heartening to know that at the very least these specific iterations of classroom discussions that have been happening for years in Mississippi are exempted and they can continue unimpeded,” said Raney, an LGBTQ Justice Project staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. However, Raney said the types of discussions allowed under the law are still “murky.”
MISSION VIEJO — Twenty years after the GOP last won a state-level election in California, few Republican voters believe this will be the year.
But they can hope.
“I’m praying, praying, praying that people will come out of the woodwork and show up and just vote for Steve,” said Annette Owens, a 65-year-old Orange County resident and longtime special education teacher.
Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host originally from the United Kingdom, faces Xavier Becerra, a longtime Democratic politician who is heavily favored to win the Nov. 3 election to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The 2026 elections are looking particularly grim for California Republicans, whose statewide influence over the past two decades has atrophied to super-minority levels. Redistricting from Proposition 50 removed some key GOP seats in Congress. And nationally, the party is struggling with high prices, fallout from the war in Iran and polls showing President Trump’s popularity at all-time lows.
While she is “doubtful” Hilton or any other Republicans running statewide will beat their Democratic opponents, Owens says “if anyone’s going to do it,” it’s Hilton.
The candidate had just spent nearly 40 minutes addressing several dozen Orange County moms in Mission Viejo, a hilly and affluent enclave speckled with golf courses and Spanish colonial architecture.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton visits patrons at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood, which hosted a watch party for the CNN debate between him and Xavier Becerra.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Sipping mimosas in a glass-walled event space overlooking the city’s verdant public course, women — and a couple of tagalong husbands — listened as Hilton and local Republicans argued for a change after 16 years of Democrats controlling California government.
“We can make this a place where people follow their dreams and build their lives, and that’s the ultimate test: That people are moving back to California after my first four years in government,” Hilton said.
Rachel Darvish drove from her home in Pacific Palisades to support the gubernatorial candidate. In the aftermath of the January 2025 fires, Darvish was captured on viral video angrily confronting Newsom as he toured the wreckage. She joined the Republican Party after the fires.
“I considered myself an independent up until the day I realized we had no choice,” Darvish, wearing a Hilton campaign T-shirt, said. “I think this is really the first election that the R or the D really does matter, and there is an obvious difference.”
Hilton and other Republicans acknowledge the math. Democrats outnumber GOP voters nearly 2-to-1 in California, and no-party-preference voters largely side with Democrats in statewide contests.
Hilton, who is endorsed by Trump, often declares to supporters that the race against Becerra, a President Biden-era U.S. Health and Human Services secretary and former state attorney general, “is going to be really difficult to win, but not impossible.”
As he calculates his chances of victory, the former Fox News host considers three sets of facts. The “establishment polls,” as he calls them, conducted by widely trusted pollsters, including the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Public Policy Institute of California, have shown him more than 20 percentage points behind. His internal polls also have him losing, albeit by smaller margins.
Then there are the people who come to his events.
California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks at a rally Thursday in Bakersfield.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
“Every single day I get all these people saying, ‘I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I’m voting for you because we got to have some balance, we got to have a change,’” he said in an interview on the golf course patio following his event. “A lot of them say, ‘But I’m not telling anyone.’”
Midterm elections are historically more difficult for the incumbent president’s party. While never popular in California, Trump’s approval rating recently fell to a record low of 27% in a Berkeley IGS poll.
Fierce headwinds for GOP in California
Political operatives expect anti-Trump sentiment to intensify the headwinds Republicans face in California. More than half of likely Democratic voters, and 37% overall, said a top motivator in this election is pushing back against the administration‘s policies.
“I’m not really anticipating Republicans winning for anything statewide,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative writer and former executive director of the California GOP. “If somebody’s anticipating that, then they don’t know how to do math.”
He doesn’t expect Republican turnout to drop, but “Democrat turnout could be enhanced over what it normally is. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference.”
Some Republicans are frustrated by the Democratic-only choices in the high-profile race for Los Angeles mayor, as well as the down-ballot contest for state insurance commissioner.
Darvish, who supported conservative Spencer Pratt for L.A. mayor in the primary, described the runoff between incumbent Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman as a choice between “Satan and Lucifer.”
“I’m going to have to vote for Karen Bass,” she said. “It’s really hard for me to say that,” but she does not want Raman or any candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America to win.
Some Republicans say they won’t vote for insurance commissioner, the only statewide race between two Democrats: Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor, and state Sen. Ben Allen.
Fleischman described the DSA-endorsed Kim as “nuts” and Allen, who represents Manhattan Beach, El Segundo, Beverly Hills and other cities, as “an extreme liberal” who “has enthusiastically supported virtually every Gavin Newsom policy I dislike.”
While Trump and Republicans will likely suffer midterm losses, many Democrats are “massively unpopular as well,” said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. “All politicians are underwater right now. Voters are in a pretty bad mood.”
Hilton concedes it would be easier to run a midterm race with a sitting Democratic president, but believes the Trump endorsement is not as toxic to his campaign as it might seem.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton enjoys a light moment with a woman who was happy to get gas for $3 a gallon at a gas station in Los Angeles on Oct. 8.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It doesn’t come up in really any of the meetings,” he said. “People really are asking about gas prices.”
Republican candidates and party officials are making the case that California’s longstanding homelessness and cost-of-living woes have little to do with the president.
“I can’t think of anything less relevant” than Trump, said Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Los Angeles Republican Party. “We are drowning in high taxes and high costs. Anyone trying to make this election about who the president is — and who will only be president for two more years — has a screw loose and also doesn’t have much of anything to offer.”
Hilton doesn’t engage in voter fraud allegations
Federal authorities this week charged 28 people in California with illegally registering and casting ballots as part of a broader fight to exert more control over elections, which are run by states.
Having just won an election primary in June, Hilton walks a line when discussing claims of electoral fraud. He takes issue with rules like ballot harvesting and a seven-day, post-election deadline for mail ballots to arrive, but he does not believe there is systemic fraud or cheating.
“We mustn’t let ourselves believe that every time we lose an election, it’s because they cheated,” he said when a supporter made the accusation during a Modesto town hall in August. “We lose the elections [because] we don’t win enough votes, right?”
Viewers attend a watch party at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood during the debate between gubernatorial candidates Democrat Xavier Becerra, left, and Republican Steve Hilton earlier this month.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
That’s why he is trying to reach independent voters and Democrats who “can’t stand President Trump” but “are desperate for something to change in California,” he explained as applause rippled through the heavily Republican crowd.
Hilton is counting on voters like Summer Behan, a former Democrat, to not only vote for him but persuade other disenchanted voters.
“My car got broken into 14 times in a year and a half,” Behan told Hilton during the Modesto event. “Our homeowners insurance went from $180 to $860, so we had to sell our house.”
She drives more than two hours to her nonprofit job in San Francisco.
“It’s sort of an exhausting way to live,” Behan said after the town hall. Families from her children’s schools have moved to other states, but she wants to stay. “California is beautiful, and it’s just got so much to offer people, so I want to try and stick it out and see what it looks like with different leadership.”
With just over a week to go before election day, Nithya Raman’s endorsement for mayor from the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter is in jeopardy, as members of the local and national branches tussle over the city council member’s bonafides on Palestine.
The local chapter voted to endorse Raman last month, and with that comes teams of eager doorknockers canvassing for her across the city.
The endorsement wasn’t exactly full-throated — the tally was 937 in favor and 484 against — and since then factions within the DSA have argued that she isn’t in compliance with the organization’s stance on Palestine, namely, that she doesn’t support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
The DSA’s National Political Committee, or NPC, emailed the local’s leaders saying that they were out of compliance with “R22,” a DSA resolution that requires local chapters to inquire about a politician’s positions on the BDS movement before they are endorsed, DSA-L.A.’s co-chair Leslie Chang told The Times.
Chang acknowledged that the chapter didn’t include a question about BDS on its questionnaire for Raman before it endorsed her.
“This was an oversight,” she and co-chair Sean Wakasa wrote in an email to DSA-LA members. To the group’s national political committee, leadership wrote that Raman “has always supported the right of private citizens to engage in boycotts, including BDS.”
The Raman campaign declined to comment. At a forum last month, Raman called BDS a “legitimate form of peaceful protest” without saying whether she supports the movement.
The DSA’s national political committee, which was originally set to meet on the issue last week, is now expected to meet Monday to mull either suspending the endorsement or asking Raman to clarify her position.
Chang insists the national group has no authority to rescind an endorsement made by the L.A. chapter.
“Our endorsement of Nithya was a democratic decision made by the membership, and the NPC is violating its own bylaws by considering un-endorsement and expulsion without following proper procedure,” she said in a statement to The Times. “So we’re going to continue campaigning for our entire slate and protect our chapter’s vote by all means necessary.”
A spokesperson for the DSA national organization declined to comment.
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‘City of L.A. on steroids’
As voters ready to go to the polls next month, another local race is already looming large in the background: the contest for top dog in Los Angeles County government.
Measure G, approved by a slim margin of voters in November 2024, set in motion the process of creating both a new CEO position with broad executive powers and an independent ethics commission, and it expanded the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine.
But Supervisor Kathryn Barger is now asking her fellow supervisors to take a “pause,” telling the Times in an interview that “haste makes waste” and that she is concerned about that process and the speed of its implementation. She also called into question the ethics of a sitting supervisor running for an office that is expected to pay $558,000 in total compensation.
“This position is going to change the county. We’re going to become the city of L.A. on steroids,” she said Wednesday, a day after the board’s latest meeting devolved into a contentious discussion of the county executive issue and Barger’s intention to slow down the process.
“Once again,” she added, “we are rushing to put something together, I think maybe in the hopes that no one will peel back the curtain and expose what is going on.”
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Barger committed to not run for the CEO position and called on her fellow board members to do the same. Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Hilda Solis have now publicly stated that they too will follow the pledge.
But Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, widely viewed as a potential top contender for the position, has declined to pledge not to run. Instead, she criticized Barger’s approach in an emailed statement to The Times.
“Pressuring others out of an election is political interference, no matter how many times she calls it ethics,” Horvath said, adding that voters “took this power away from politicians like Supervisor Barger because they wanted to make this choice themselves. She doesn’t get to claw it back and dress up a power grab as an ethics crusade.”
Golfing for Gates
Thirty-four years after he left his post, former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates continues to be an unexpected flashpoint in this year’s mayoral contest.
Raman said during an Oct. 13 debate that the LAPD under Gates was “the gold standard” for its noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Bass responded by accusing her of romanticizing a chief who presided over the mistreatment of Black and Latino residents.
Raman initially accused Bass of twisting her words. But this week, the council member began issuing apologies, telling CNN she “should not have said it.”
Although Bass has repeatedly denounced Gates’ 14-year tenure on the campaign trail, one of her biggest financial supporters has been keeping his legacy alive.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank and file officers and is backing Bass, has been a long-standing host of a memorial golf tournament named after Gates, who died in 2010. This year’s was billed as one of the union’s “premier fundraising events.” According to the union, proceeds go to its Officer Needs Help Fund, which helps officers and their families in times of need.
Bass’ campaign, asked about the tournament, did not immediately offer a comment. Neither did Raman and the police union.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed.
State of play
— WILL SHE, WON’T HE: Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvathendorsed Raman on Tuesday, giving the City Council member a powerful boost in the battle for votes on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.
Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, however, declined once again to endorse either Bass or Raman in the Nov. 3 runoff election, but expressed what he called “extreme concern” about Raman’s plans to remove Police Chief Jim McDonnell.
— VALLEY RAIL: Construction is set to begin this week on a 6.7-mile rail line linking Van Nuys and Pacoima. The nearly $4-billion project, which will run along Van Nuys Boulevard, will include 11 street-level stations and is projected to open in 2032, according to L.A. Metro, the Los Angeles County transit agency.
— TOP COP FLOP: Raman’s police chief woescontinued this week when she was asked by CNN anchor Elex Michaelson to name a police chief she respects. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said, before Michaelson continued with another question.
— GHOST OF GASCÓN: In the homestretch of the mayor and city attorney contests, George Gascón has been conjured as a boogeyman by opponents of progressive candidates Marissa Roy and Raman.
— LET THE GAMES BEGIN? The next mayor of Los Angeles will be in the global spotlight in 2028, when L.A. plays host to the Summer Olympic Games. And if Raman prevails over Bass, that mayor will be someone who didn’t even want the Olympics here in the first place.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program did not launch any new encampment operations this week.
On the docket next week: The DSA National Political Committee will meet Monday to discuss DSA-LA’s endorsement of Raman.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
More than $351 million in political donations has been poured into a high-stakes contest about a proposed wealth tax on the November ballot, making it one of the most costly campaigns in California history.
About 90% of the money is being spent to defeat a statewide initiative to impose a new tax on the assets of billionaires, a multifaceted opposition effort bankrolled primarily by ultra-rich Californians being targeted by a measure that supporters call an economic reckoning.
The billionaire tax, Proposition 40, would levy a one-time, 5% tax on many assets of California billionaires who lived in the state as of Jan. 1.
Millions of dollars continue to flow into the campaigns of three intertwined ballot initiatives at the center of the debate: Proposition 40, and Propositions 41 and Proposition 42, which would neuter the Proposition 40 through strategic, esoteric tax law changes.
“The pro-40 campaign picked a fight and then came to that fight with a butter knife against a nuclear arsenal,” said GOP strategist Rob Stutzman, who is not involved in any of the wealth-tax-related ballot measures. “Because they’re so well funded, in today’s multifaceted media world, they are able to show up everywhere from network TV to inside video games. That is a very, very large advantage few campaigns ever get to have.”
But, Stutzman warned, money does not guarantee a win.
In the most expensive ballot measure fights in California history, $463 million was spent on two gambling proposals 2022. The initiatives pitted some of California’s most successful Native American tribes with gaming interests against gambling corporations, including online sports gaming companies DraftKings and FanDuel. Both side’s measure failed.
People attend a rally against Proposition 40 at the Iron Workers Apprenticeship Training Center on Oct. 5 in La Palma.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The tax measure was crafted by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West in response to federal healthcare funding cuts signed by President Trump last year that are expected to reduce California’s healthcare budget by $100 billion, burdening the state’s most vulnerable residents.
“Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ slashes healthcare funding, with major coverage cuts scheduled to hit after the midterms,” said Suzanne Jimenez, the union’s chief of staff. “More than 3 million Californians could lose their health insurance. Hospitals and emergency rooms face closure. Patients will die unnecessarily when the care they need is no longer there. Proposition 40 is an emergency response to that looming disaster.”
The proposition’s supporters raised $34.3 million, nearly all of it from Jimenez’s union.
The two other measures, Propositions 41 and 42, would nullify the billionaire tax if either receives more votes.
Proposition 41 supporters say the measure aims to cut wasteful government spending by requiring audits for new state special taxes and would bar new state taxes that exempt their revenue from a state spending limit. Backers of Proposition 42 argue it would prohibit new taxes on retirement holdings, individually owned assets and other forms of personal savings.
Advocates for the billionaire tax say both are well-financed smokescreens to undercut Proposition 40.
Opposition campaigns to the wealth tax as well as the two countermeasures have received enormous donations from several of the state’s billionaires. But Building a Better California, the main funder of efforts to defeat the wealth tax, noted that its allies included Democratic and Republican politicians, prominent labor groups and business leaders.
“It’s rare for such a broad coalition to unite around any single cause in California, but it reflects the potentially devastating impact of this measure on healthcare, education, and our state’s economy,” the group said in a statement.
Among the largest donors opposing the wealth tax are billionaires Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google who has donated more than $100 million to anti-wealth-tax efforts, and former Google leader Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist L. John Doerr, who each kicked in $40 million.
Brin, Schmidt and Doerr did not respond to requests for comment.
US tech entrepreneur Sergey Brin and Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto arrive for the 2026 Met Gala celebrating “Costume Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May.
(ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
The spending disparity also reflects a divide among Democrats and their allies, many of whom support wealth taxes, but argue that the way Proposition 40 was written is disastrous to California’s volatile budget, which is dependent on the state’s wealthiest residents.
Jodi Hicks, chief executive and president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said that while her organization would support a nationwide or a California wealth tax, their primary concerns are about 40’s impacts on the state budget and healthcare in the state.
“We are opposed to this particular proposal because we think it does more harm than good,” she said, adding that after what her organization “faced last year having to scramble for dollars because of [federal funding cuts] we are committed to work with the stakeholders facing cuts and not harming the budget and finding revenue in a smart way.”
The cash imbalance between supporters and opponents of the billionaire tax is vast. Those opposed to the measure raised $316.7 million, while proponents raised nearly $34.3 million.
The Fair Games Coalition, made up of community leaders, labor organizations and advocates, announce the launch of the Overpaid CEO Tax Initiative in front of the Tesla Diner in West Hollywood in January.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
The supporters of the wealth tax spent nearly all of their money gathering signatures to place the measure on the ballot. They had $1.6 million on hand as of Oct. 17.
Now, as voters cast ballots, their campaign appears reliant on public events and media coverage, such as of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent rally in support of Proposition 40 in downtown Los Angeles.
“What you are showing people from coast to coast and all over is that, yes, we can take on the greed of the oligarchs,” he said, calling it the most important ballot measure in the country. “Yes, we can create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”
Facebook creator and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg was among the California billionaires Sanders name-checked in his remarks. After Zuckerberg told company leaders that he planned to leave the state to avoid his control over the company substantially reduced by being forced to sell enough of his stock in the social media giant to pay the proposed levy, the company on Wednesday announced the creation of a new, non-voting type of stock that would allow Zuckerberg to sell enough shares to pay the proposed tax while retaining his voting power in exchange for him agreeing to remain in the state for eight years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens as President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on Sept. 29.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Ap Photo/jacquelyn Martin)
The pro-wealth-tax campaign is sending voters emails and texts and has an online presence.
“Remember: it’s not enough to vote YES on 40. You also need to vote NO on 41 + 42,” read an email sent to voters on Tuesday. “Don’t be fooled: Props 41 and 42 are billionaire-funded initiatives designed specifically to undermine Prop 40, the California Billionaire Tax.”
Meanwhile, the anti-40 and pro-42 campaigns are inundating voters on television, streaming services, in mailboxes, through online influencers and even in digital video games such as Sim City.
Jimenez said voters will see through the blizzard of campaign messaging.
“The billionaires think voters are stupid. They think they can bury the facts under millions of dollars in advertising and disguise Prop. 42 … as protection for ordinary taxpayers,” she said. “Their spending also makes our case for us. When billionaires can afford to spend millions a day protecting their fortunes, voters can see that billionaires have plenty of money to spare.”
Sheri Sadler, a veteran Democratic media buyer, questioned how much voters were hearing about the rationale for the proposed billionaire tax.
“The yes side is severely lacking in getting their message through while the no side is dipping into different kinds of pockets,” she said.
Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School, said that beyond voter confusion about the competing ballot measures, it is certain to face legal challenges, notably about the retroactive nature of the tax, which would apply to any billionaire who lived in California as of Jan. 1. She described that as “the biggest legal pressure point.”
“It’s kind of a mess,” she said.
Times staff writer Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed to this report.
Buying a home in California requires a colossal amount of money — and coming up with a 20% cash down payment of $180,000 for a median price home is a staggering hurdle for many would-be buyers.
That down payment amount is based on the statewide median $900,000 price tag for a house, according to recent data from the California Assn. of Realtors. In Los Angeles County, the median price for a single-family home is $935,000. In Orange County, it’s $1.5 million.
Proposition 37 on the Nov. 3 ballot would allow the state to amass a $25 billion down payment assistance program for middle-class households. For perspective on the enormity of the measure before voters, one of the state’s existing down payment programs, California Dream For All, launched several years ago with $500 million, just 2% of the funding involved in Proposition 37.
The ballot measure would allow qualified prospective homebuyers to borrow up to 17% of the sales price of a new home, contributing 3% of the down payment from their own funds.
The program would not be funded by taxpayers, but instead by the interest charged to borrowers on their down payment loans, also referred to as second mortgages. The measure has garnered widespread support, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom, statewide unions and mayors from Santa Monica to San José.
“Prop. 37 is a historic opportunity to expand homeownership opportunities for generations of working families — at zero cost or risk to taxpayers,” Newsom said in a statement.
But Proposition 37 carries a significant caveat: Any home purchased through the program must be new construction, which could limit its potential reach because of the high cost of building, some critics said.
Also, the proposition does not spell out the terms or interest rates on the loans, which would be worked out if the measure is approved. And some have questioned whether there will be sufficiently robust interest from investors to buy the state-issued bonds that will be used to fund the down payment loans.
The concept of down payment assistance is not new. Cities and states, including California, have long offered such programs to low- and middle-income homeowners, either in the form of loans or grants, and there are reportedly more than 2,700 such programs across the country.
Nevada, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York all have programs to help homebuyers afford a down payment. Since 2021, New York has dispersed $70 million in down payment assistance. In Massachusetts, more than $146 million has been doled out in down payment help to homebuyers since 2020.
How the program would work
Under Proposition 37, down payment loans would work like any other, and would carry an interest rate and payback period — all of which would be determined by the California Housing Finance Agency.
To qualify, borrowers would need to have lived in the state for at least a year and earn no more than 200% of the local median income; in Los Angeles County, for example, that equates to a family of four earning no more than $216,200 a year.
Borrowers don’t have to be first-time homebuyers, which is often a requirement of down payment aid programs. But they would need to live in the home.
The program would restrict the price of qualifying homes, depending on the county where someone is trying to buy. A general estimate, though, is that would-be homebuyers would be limited to houses costing between $1 million and $1.5 million and the homes, more importantly, would need to be new construction.
While Proposition 37 has little opposition, and is supported by unions, chambers of commerce and organizations representing builders, the League of Women Voters opposes the ballot measure, concerned it would saddle residents with too much debt and that the terms of these loans are opaque, the details worked out only after the vote.
New homes only
Only buyers of newly-built homes would be eligible for these loans. That could include existing commercial buildings that had been converted into homes, such as condos or townhomes.
This provision is uncommon as many existing down payment assistance programs don’t strictly limit the type of home someone can buy — only the sale price. Bob Hertzberg, former Senate Majority Leader and the architect of the proposal, said he wanted Proposition 37 to spur new construction.
By creating more demand for new homes, he said, the hope is that builders will respond en masse.
But some groups are wary of this logic. One analysis, funded by the Proposition 37 campaign, estimated that this program could result in the building of 190,000 homes in the state, although the report’s author said it was “impossible to know” the true number given the various factors that impact housing.
Matthew Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, an organization that advocates making it easier and cheaper to build homes, said high prices make it clear that the demand for homes already exists and that Proposition 37 does little to address a bigger issue: the cost of building.
“In concept, [Proposition 37 is] a great idea,” Lewis said. “The thing we’re concerned about is, California is still way behind on its housing production goals, so there’s the risk of an unintended consequence of instead of having 10 people bidding on a house, now you’ve given a couple folks down payment assistance, and so there’s now 12 people bidding on the same house.”
To drive builders to construct eligible homes, the measure would allow them to opt into a “qualified builder” option. As long as they adhere to price caps, agree to certain labor requirements and fix repairs that arise, they’re protected from lawsuits from buyers concerning defects 10 years after construction of the home.
Homebuilders say even given some relief from litigation, they aren’t sure Proposition 37 would push construction into overdrive.
“There are so many more things the state, city and county could do to help add more supply [of homes],” said Paul Schon, a developer who builds apartments in L.A. County. He said tackling permitting times and red tape involved in building would have a greater impact. “This is minor,” he said.
Interest rates could be a tough sell
Many down payment assistance programs offer interest-free loans to homebuyers, including an existing program run by CalHFA.
But in order to be self-funding, the fixed-rate loans offered through Proposition 37 would carry interest. If passed, the state would issue revenue bonds, selling them to investors and using that money to issue loans to homebuyers. The investors are repaid with the interest paid on the loans.
Revenue bonds are generally viewed as riskier than other types of government bonds, in part because they’re backed by the promise of revenue from a specific project — in this case, payment by individual borrowers. That means interest rates on these loans could be higher than borrowers might like or be able to afford.
Hertzberg said he’s talked to investors who may be willing to buy these bonds at cheaper rates, given the crushing issue the funding is trying to solve. This would keep interest rates down for borrowers. He said he’s appealing to foundations and socially-minded tech leaders.
One of the biggest financial backers of the measure is the political nonprofit Building a Better California, which has been fighting the billionaire’s tax with help from wealthy donors, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Hertzberg, for his part, refused to name any organization or person who may be interested in buying the bonds that would fund this program.
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative,funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to addressCalifornia’s economic divide.
Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, is many things to many people.
He represents change, part of a new generation of outspoken leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.
He represents possibility: As the son of Egyptian immigrants, his trajectory is the American dream realized.
And he represents a threat to those who fear that his Muslim faith means he can’t possibly love America. El-Sayed is a handy bogeyman for Republican politicians who seek to scare their constituents into voting for them instead of the foreboding Arab name on the ballot.
But for people like me — American Muslims, or anyone with roots in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia or other Muslim-majority regions — El-Sayed embodies the exhausting experience of having to explain yourself over, and over, and over …
We know what’s truly going on when someone discovers our lineage, then apropos of nothing asks, “How do you feel about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack?” In previous eras it was, “What are your thoughts about 9/11? The Iranian hostage crisis? The PLO?”
Regardless of the decade, the underlying question was the same: How American are you, really?
For generations, the insinuation has been that your loyalty lies somewhere else and that you have a predisposed soft spot for groups such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. Beneath that Taylor Swift-loving exterior, there must be a Bin Laden fighting to get out.
It was disappointing but hardly surprising when El-Sayed was asked at a recent town hall in Caro, Mich., if he would “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The questioner, who identified himself only as Tommy, was referring to a century-old Islamist movement with branches that have been designated as terrorist organizations by various countries and U.S. administrations.
It’s worth noting that El-Sayed was born and raised in Detroit, not Egypt or Jordan. He attended the University of Michigan medical school, not a radical madrassa, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he completed a doctor of philosophy in public health (not bomb making).
El-Sayed answered the question without hesitation. “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” he said, then swiftly turned the tables and began interrogating the motives of his interrogator.
“You’re asking the question because implicitly, you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right?” El-Sayed said. “You assume that I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher order allegiance than to the Constitution, correct? Tommy, is that what you imply?”
The candidate spent four to five minutes laying bare the political motives behind what was clearly designed to be a “gotcha” moment.
His opponent in next month’s election, former Rep. Mike Rogers, has claimed without evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood funds El-Sayed’s campaign and that his family members have terrorist links. The attacks are on brand with a wider Republican strategy around sinking El-Sayed. Fearing a blue tsunami might flip the crucial swing state, Rogers and his allies have leaned heavily into Islamophobic attacks against the progressive Democrat.
It’s a campaign tactic endorsed at the highest levels. President Trump has referred to El-Sayed as a “radical jihadist” and claimed he is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, mispronounced his name, infused it with nonsensical babble and called him “Muhammad Al-Fayad.” Trump has defended his racism by stating: “I’m the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want.”
El-Sayed preferred to talk about another president while addressing Tommy’s question at the town hall. He recalled that John F. Kennedy faced similar scrutiny during his 1960 presidential campaign when asked whether his Catholic faith would make him loyal to the pope and Vatican rather than the U.S.
“His answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic president,” El-Sayed said. “He was running to be president that happened to be Catholic. I’m not running to be a Muslim senator. I’m running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim.”
The standoff between El-Sayed and Tommy (who has since been outed as Thomas Teepell, the son of a Republican strategist and a former staffer to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley) has gone viral and is now being referred to as a 2026 election Rorschach test because both the right and left believe they prevailed.
It’s unclear to me how anyone might see El-Sayed’s evisceration of Teepell’s means-to-an-end question as a victory for the right. Perhaps it comes from eight years of watching Barack Obama weather insidious and overt racist attacks with the patience of a Shaolin monk. El-Sayed reacted, therefore they won?
On the left, El-Sayed’s articulate defense was widely applauded, but there were still criticisms that he may have come off as condescending. Liberal podcasters and influencers opined that El-Sayed should have just let it slide — for the 1,000th time.
Such an easy solution when it comes from those outside the sphere of suspicion.
But the reason we’re even having this conversation is because El-Sayed is challenging the norm. His rise to a formidable candidate who is willing to publicly dismantle loaded questions like Tommy’s represents progress wrought by successive generations of immigrants who’ve had to explain themselves ad nauseam.
Our parents and grandparents went out of their way to avoid those kinds of questions by taming their accents, changing their hard-to-pronounce names or eating their “ethnic” lunches outside the break room. The hope was that they’d melt into the proverbial pot with as little friction as possible.
My father, who emigrated from Iraq, did what all his Arab friends did here in L.A. — fit in. They used Brylcreem to tame their thick hair, listened to Johnny Cash and used terms like “guys and gals” as if they’d just stepped out of an Elvis movie.
As the next generation, I made it a point to openly embrace what my dad often downplayed — that we are Arab and Muslim. But given the post-9/11 climate, it came buffered with calming disclaimers: We are not a threat. Al Qaeda does not speak for Islam. And dolma is delicious, dammit.
El-Sayed’s refusal to brush off questions aligning him with terrorists may or may not cost him the election, but it’s a victory for all of us who’ve been defusing suspicion since we were kids.
The clip from the town hall ends with El-Sayed asking Thomas if he’s a Christian who has tried to live by Christian doctrine. Thomas affirmed. Then El-Sayed asked, “Do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?” Thomas responded, “I do not.”
El-Sayed replied, “I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.”
EDINBURG, Texas — Clad in pressed jeans and cowboy hats, dozens of riders on horseback and drivers in pickups kicked up dust along a dirt road in Edinburg, near the southern tip of Texas. They were there for a cabalgata, a traditional horse procession, with a political message: Send Tejano singer Bobby Pulido to Congress.
Some were lifelong Democrats. Others had voted for President Trump two years ago. But on this Saturday, they all rode for Pulido, a Democrat trying to flip a House seat Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024.
Among them was David Lopez, 54, astride his brown horse, Black Jack. He voted for Trump because he saw him as a good businessman. But now, Lopez says the president’s tariffs have hurt his truck and trailer repair shop in nearby McAllen, and business is down about 20% from last year.
“I am voting Democrats all the way. Trump is no longer doing a good job,” Lopez said. “We need to find a way to make it out of this together.”
Lopez is part of a shift rippling through Latino communities across the country. Two years after helping return Trump to the White House with a Republican-controlled Congress, Latino voters are souring on the party in power, fueled by frustration over rising costs and the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
People cheer while listening to congressional candidate Bobby Pulido at an Oct. 16, 2026, rally in Mercedes, Texas.
In 2024, Trump won the support of 48% of Latino voters, expanding Republican gains with a group that has long leaned Democratic. Now, that support is cratering. The president’s approval rating among Latino registered voters has fallen to 24% from 38% at the start of his second term, polls show.
Among Latinos who voted for Trump, 65% say they plan to back Republicans on Nov. 3, while more than a third said they were ready to vote for a Democrat or were undecided, according to a Pew Research Center poll released this month.
More broadly, Latino voters favor Democrats in House races 51% to 24%, and those who sat out the 2024 election are leaning toward Democrats. Those shifts could help decide control of the House, in part because Republicans in Texas and Florida redrew their congressional maps betting that their 2024 gains among Latino voters would last through the midterms.
Bobby Pulido, a Latin Grammy winner and Democrat running for Texas’ 15th Congressional District, sings at the Bert Ogden Arena on Oct. 17, 2026, in Edinburg, Texas.
Nowhere is that test sharper than in the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, where voters say that Trump has failed to deliver on his economic promises and that his administration has gone too far on immigration enforcement, an issue they wanted addressed, but humanely.
In more than two dozen interviews in the Latino-majority region, voters say they are driven less by party loyalty and more by frustrations that they have been taken for granted, and want to elect politicians who take their votes seriously.
They say it has become harder to keep up with rising costs, including for the diesel that fuels their trucks and their weekly grocery runs. Builders say construction projects have ground to a halt as workers are detained or deported. And small-business owners say sales have dropped, either because customers are afraid to leave their homes or because tariffs have driven up their costs.
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1.Sebastian Guevara, 65, poses for a photo at a political rally on Oct. 16, 2026, in Mercedes, Texas. “Trump forgot about Latinos as soon as he won,” he said.2.Luis Sustaita, 49, a mariachi musician who had voted Republican in previous years, says he will be voting for Bobby Pulido.
Nidia Olivarez, 48, and her husband, Arnulfo, 55, voted for Trump in 2024 but have grown frustrated with how he has handled the economy and immigration raids in their community. This year, they’re backing Pulido over GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz in Texas’ 15th Congressional District. But not because they’ve had a change of heart about the Democratic Party.
“We are only voting for Pulido, not other Democrats,” Olivarez said. The couple are still unsure whether they’ll support any Republicans.
For them, the vote is personal. They’ve long loved Pulido’s Tejano music and like that he’s a familiar figure in their community. They trust him, she said. They’re less sure about the Republicans at the top of the ticket: Ken Paxton, the Senate nominee running against Democrat James Talarico, and Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking reelection.
“We want to see who continues to show up in the area,” Olivarez said. “That matters to us.”
People cheer during Tejano singer Bobby Pulido’s last song “Desvelado” during a concert in October in Edinburg, Texas.
Latino voters in Texas are increasingly willing to consider candidate over party, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.
“They are not just looking for what party to align with. They want to know that they can trust the person they’re voting for,” Rottinghaus said.
That dynamic will play a role in the competitive races for Texas’ 15th, 28th and 34th congressional districts and in the Senate seat, which has proved to be one of the most expensive and high-profile contests this year. In a sign of GOP concerns, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly traveled to Texas this month to rally voters.
In recent weeks, Trump has brushed off polls that show him losing ground with Latino voters.
“I think we are doing great, I won Hispanics,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I’ve done more than any other Republican in history, I got tremendous Hispanics.”
In early October, Trump was asked about Latino voters who say they feel betrayed by his administration’s immigration and economic policies. His message to them was that “we have to do what we have to do,” in reference to his immigration crackdown.
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1.People dance during Bobby Pulido’s concert. 2.A man rides his horse before a parade in support of Bobby Pulido on Oct. 17, 2026, in Edinburg, Texas.3.Bobby Pulido, in brown vest and white cowboy hat, upper left, takes a photo with rallygoers after speaking on Oct. 16, 2026, in Mercedes, Texas.
Gloria Rodriguez, a social worker in Edinburg, has seen the impact the immigration raids have had on children. Since Trump returned to the White House, she has helped coordinate services for hundreds of kids whose parents or caregivers have been detained or deported. She worries many of them will develop post-traumatic stress disorders.
“Everything they are doing with immigration is too much,” said Rodriguez, 50, who is voting for Democrats down the ballot. Her 15-year-old daughter, Angelina, says she told her mother to vote for Democrats, in part because she is scared her friends will be deported.
Luis Sustaita, 49, a mariachi who owns a music store that sells instruments to school districts, is voting Democrat this year because he says he is disheartened by the values of the modern-day Republican Party.
“There are no old-school Republicans anymore. It is all MAGA,” said Sustaita, who lives in Weslaco. “They used to be about the people. Trump is all about himself and making himself rich.”
In South Texas, Republicans and Democrats alike are trying to court voters on a more personal level. It is about identity more than political affiliation in many ways.
In the majority-Latino 15th Congressional District, Pulido’s campaign slogan is “Not team red, not team blue — South Texas I am team you.” In an interview, Pulido added that his message to Latino voters is: “I hear you loud and clear, and I believe I share values with you.”
Rodrigo Pulido, 6, with his mother, Mariana Morales, cheers as his father, Bobby Pulido, sings the last song, “Desvelado,” during his concert at the Bert Ogden Arena on Oct. 17, 2026, in Edinburg, Texas.
De La Cruz, a former insurance agent and a staunch Trump ally, said Latinos are “tired of being taken for granted” and said Pulido “has some nice records, but he’s a product of the same corrupt system that got rich and made us poorer.”
“I grew up in South Texas watching the compadre system steal from us while our families struggled to get by,” De La Cruz said in a statement. “You work hard and want a little more for your family and safe communities. I cut your taxes, protected Social Security and Medicare, stood with Border Patrol agents, and I’m fighting every day to bring down gas and grocery prices.”
Whether that message will resonate with voters will be seen on Nov. 3.
Tina Treviño, 61, said she hopes “la raza” — a term used in the Mexican American community that is widely understood as “the people” — will deliver political change to Texas. She says the system is not working for Latinos, and believes Democrats will be able to bring that change.
“It’s about Chicano power,” Treviño said. “We need that more than ever.”
About 260 California billionaires would be subject to Proposition 40’s one-time 5% wealth tax according to the Forbes Real-Time billionaires list. Just 30 of those billionaires or their spouses, or 1 in 8, spent money opposing Proposition 40, the billionaire tax, according to a Times analysis of recent campaign filings.
Billionaires have individually contributed $293 million to oppose the tax measure and to support Proposition 41 and 42, which would nullify the billionaire tax if either receives more votes, according to a Times analysis. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has given $102 million, more than a third of all billionaire money against the measure. But this is less than 1% of his estimated tax bill.
Several billionaires also contributed to the political action committee of the California Business Roundtable, which is spending to oppose Proposition 40 and support Proposition 43. Peter Thiel gave $3 million, Eric Schmidt gave nearly $2.6 million, Marco DeGeorge’s wife, Kim, gave $1.9 million, Chris Larsen gave $750,000 and Douglas Leone and his wife gave $500,000.
Proposition 40 would apply the tax to billionaires who were California residents on Jan. 1, 2026, and the taxable amount would be based on their net worth on Dec. 31. The tax is payable over five years.
Altogether, these individuals would owe at least $107 billion in taxes, according to an analysis by economists Jasper Boll, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Their research was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in August. Saez and Zucman are also architects of the tax proposal.
This amount is 5% of their combined estimated wealth by Forbes as of Oct. 16 and factors in a certain amount of tax avoidance and evasion. Spread across all 39 million Californians, the $107 billion would be roughly $2,700 per person. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that the median household net worth in California was $303,000 in 2023.
The four richest Californians — Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg — would owe 40% of the estimated taxes to be collected from the billionaire tax, according to a Times analysis. Their wealth largely comes from ownership of stock in extremely high-value technology companies.
Their net worth would increase 5% in about four months if their stock investments continues to grow as they have since December.
California billionaire wealth grew nearly threefold from 2022 to 2026, according to Times analysis of Forbes data collected by Boll and his colleagues, and much of that growth was not taxed. Billionaires’ taxable income is small compared with their wealth, because most of that wealth is invested in public stocks, and gains aren’t taxed until the stock is sold.
Page and Brin disclosed no taxable income in three of the years since 2019. Many others had similarly no publicly disclosed income. For that reason, Boll and his colleagues estimate that the Proposition 40 one-time tax would raise more than $100 billion, “with comparatively minor impacts on income tax revenue” from some billionaires leaving the state.
Based on Meta’s filings, the economists estimated that Zuckerberg’s taxable income was about $947 million in 2025, just 0.4% of his net worth.
Over the summer, Zuckerberg shared with Meta advisors his plans to relocate outside California to avoid the possibility of a significant reduction in his control over the company as a result of selling enough stock to fund a 5% tax. The advisors determined that Zuckerberg’s leadership presence at Meta headquarters was essential to the company’s success. On Wednesday, Meta announced the creation of new, nonvoting Class C common stock, which will allow Zuckerberg to sell the amount he needs to pay his potential tax bill while maintaining his voting power in exchange for his commitment to remain in the state for eight years.
Researchers at the Hoover Institution estimate the revenue to the state to be closer to $40 billion based on reports of billionaires’ residential purchases outside the state before and after Jan. 1 and their estimate of unannounced residency moves.
Chris Hoene, executive director at the California Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan group, said the residency question hinges on the amount of time spent living in the state. “Purchasing property in another location does not mean that they have changed their residency,” he said.
Ultimately, the state’s Franchise Tax Board, responsible for administering the tax, will have to assess residency. Hoene says this task is “easier for them to do than people realize.” The board will also calculate the amount of wealth subject to the tax using publicly available stock information and private assessments of personal property, such as artwork and jewelry. Real property, pensions and retirement accounts would be excluded.
Opponents of Proposition 40 are concerned that the threat of wealth taxes will lead to billionaires continuing to leave the state, resulting in a long-term decrease in state income tax revenue. Forbes recently reported that Brin registered to vote in Nevada last year. Peter Thiel disclosed Dec. 31 that he opened a new office in Miami; Florida has no wealth tax or income tax. But in July, he purchased a $130-million mansion in Bel-Air.
“The reality is the income tax loss can never get anywhere near the scale of what the wealth tax gain would be,” Hoene said.
Ninety percent of that gain would be spent on healthcare services to fill a gap in Medi-Cal from losses in federal funding that the measure’s authors estimate would total $190 billion over the next 10 years. Medi-Cal provides healthcare coverage for one-third of low-income Californians, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes a California-only tax and has instead called for a national wealth tax. Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, who are running to replace Newsom, have spoken out against the tax. Other opponents include the California Teachers Assn., the California Medical Assn., and Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. Supporters include Service Employees International Union, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the California Democratic Party and the California Federation of Labor Unions AFL-CIO.
Times staff writer Queenie Wong contributed to this report.
It was less than a month before the Nov. 3 election when Los Angeles city attorney front-runner Marissa Roy realized she’d missed her lucky manicure.
A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she had scarcely slept since her team clinched its historic $17-billion settlement with Meta in August. She’d been canvassing hundreds of voters and sounding out scores of deputy city attorneys in her bid to transform the troubled office where she’d launched her career in 2017 into the “largest public interest law firm” in L.A.
Between filming TikTok spots and prepping for formal debates, Roy has been fine-tuning her plans to avenge exploited tenants and claw back stolen wages, tame runaway civil liability, protect victims of child abuse and domestic violence, and join other elected attorneys in lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Nails didn’t make the cut.
“There’s just been too much to do,” Roy said of the chrome gel ritual she inaugurated as a volunteer for Eunisses Hernandez in 2022.
Marissa Roy outside L.A. City Hall. “I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” she said of her campaign.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Seen one way, Roy’s talismanic manicure is an object lesson for her fiercest critics: all flash and no substance, evidence the 34-year-old lacks the “gravitas” to be among the state’s most powerful elected lawyers.
But like the iridescentglitter in her campaign-matched chrome polish, the meaning shifts with the viewer’s perspective.
To supporters on the city’s restive left and the clique of California city attorneys eager to add Roy to their group chat, it’s a winking show of solidarity burnished through years of knocking on doors for fellow up-and-coming progressives. It was metallic blue for Hernandez, silver for Ysabel Jurado and ultraviolet for her own historic primary upset in June. Her backers see fierce loyalty reflected in the polish, a ritual she started while hunting salon wage thieves to sue.
“I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” Roy said of her campaign.
With her Democratic Socialists of America sass, bright amethyst blazers and Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, the lifelong Angeleno cuts a stark contrast to her rival, Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, 58, who leapfrogged to a second-place finish in the primaries amid a stoic, law-and-order campaign that sometimes slipped into Spencer Pratt-style dystopian imagery.
McKinney’s boosters point to his extraordinary biography — from penniless orphan to director of special prosecutions in the country’s largest district attorney’s office — and celebrated courtroom prowess as evidence he is better suited to handle the 120,000 violations referred to the city attorney for potential charges every year.
“John has the experience, stature, reputation, and gravitas to do the job and will be both effective and respected,” said former Los Angeles City Atty. Burt Pines. “I do not have the same confidence in her.”
Campaign materials for the Los Angeles city attorney candidate at a canvassing event in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
Roy’s allies counter that prosecuting misdemeanors is only a third of the city attorney’s job — and typically the less complex part. Whereas McKinney has never worked a civil case, Roy has managed multicity litigation and shares the credit for legal victories no attorney could secure alone. In the Meta case, Roy and her team had argued that the social media giant had intentionally designed its products to hook young children and repeatedly misled the public about known risks.
“She was one of the original four team members in California that stayed up until 2 a.m. filing the [Meta] complaint,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “She helped develop our legal strategy, particularly our deception theory, which was our core theory of legal liability for the case.”
Similarly, while McKinney’s camp paints a lawman of singular personal ability, Roy supporters describe her as brilliant, driven, and eager to lift the best and brightest around her.
“She is tenacious and works around the clock,” said San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.
She’s also infamously bubbly: When a canvasser door-knocked 9th Circuit Judge Richard Paez, for whom Roy had clerked, he reportedly asked the volunteer to give her a hug.
“She has a natural enthusiasm about her that is infectious,” said Mark Ramos, chair of Los Angeles County Democratic Party. “She’s [always] shown up, and showing up matters.”
Which matters more — individual virtue or collaborative ingenuity — now in effect divides the race for the most abstruse job in local politics: Four of L.A’s former city attorneys have endorsed McKinney, while California’s current top elected lawyers have largely lined up behind Roy.
A head-to-head match with McKinney was not what Roy envisioned last year when she launched her campaign to unseat the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. After charming L.A.’s major power brokers, she had hoped to win the primary outright and avoid a runoff so she could focus exclusively on the Meta trial in August.
“I had been planning for things to end in June,” she said.
Feldstein Soto was bogged down by scandal and soaring civil liability costs for the city. She also faced criticism for ducking challenges to President Trump’s policies, including the deployment of military troops to Los Angeles last year, a fight the city joined but did not lead.
By early spring, Roy had racked up endorsements from the state’s legal elites and leftist kingmaker Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). She earned the imprimatur of the city’s powerful Democratic clubs and its influential labor unions, while enjoying widespread support from a democratic socialist base.
Marissa Roy, left, candidate for Los Angeles city attorney, and Alyssa Acevedo, with Service Employees International Union canvass in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
L.A. voters want “the transformational leadership that they’re seeing in [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, and also in Mayor [Daniel] Lurie in San Francisco,” said L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a longtime friend of Roy’s and among her earliest endorsers. “Angelenos are increasingly impatient in wanting to see that change come to their city, too.”
Then, in April, Feldstein Soto slipped from unpopular to politically radioactive after hackers stole thousands of LAPD files from her office. That inspired a late-breaking police union endorsement and a surge of corporate cash for McKinney, boosting him to a second-place finish and knocking out Feldstein Soto in a historic rout.
McKinney touts the city attorney’s prosecutor role as a means to stem quality-of-life crimes and curb homelessness. Roy has promised to keep more Angelenos housed and protect their livelihoods through “affirmative litigation” — suits brought against slumlords and exploitative corporations under the state’s Unfair Competition Law.
“When you file these suits, you have complete discretion,” said Pines, the former city attorney who successfully lobbied the state to extend Los Angeles that power in 1977 and watched in dismay as Feldstein Soto left it to whither.
In recent years, affirmative litigation has become an essential tool for defending against punitive federal policy and recovering public funds, Pines and others said.
Seeing the San Francisco city attorney’s office sue to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage — a law that would have stymied her gay younger brother — inspired Roy to give up her elementary school dream of decoding ancient texts to pursue the law.
“Childhood Marissa spent recesses in the library buried in books about ancient Egypt,” Roy said. “It was San Francisco suing — that was when I began to become aware of the power of lawyers.”
Unlike her opponent, Roy grew up comfortably in Monrovia, largely shielded from the sacrifices her family made to afford her an elite education. The daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a white American father, she graduated from Flintridge Prep and attended University of Southern California on scholarship.
While studying law at Yale, she interned in the affirmative litigation department in the San Francisco city attorney’s office — a program Chiu lauded as “an essential training ground for the next generation of government lawyers” in a recent law review article.
Roy and her supporters say those early experiences cemented her commitment to teamwork, which is central to the less glamorous, more costly side of the city attorney’s job: serving as general counsel for myriad city agencies and legal advisor to City Hall.
“There’s absolutely more collaboration and it’s more significant given the things we’re up against,” said San Diego City Atty. Heather Ferbert, a close ally of Roy’s.
John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor running against Marissa Roy to become L.A. city attorney, speaks during a news conference on May 5, 2026.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Ferbert and others pointed to a surge in lawsuits against municipalities over everything from sidewalk trip-and-falls to police misconduct — cases that can lead to seven- or eight-figure payouts.
“If it’s not extremely unusual, it doesn’t make it to the city attorney’s desk,” said Oakland City Atty. Ryan Richardson, who endorsed Roy.
As a deputy city attorney, Roy spearheaded a trio of major wage-theft suits just a month after she was admitted to the bar. Independent expenditure groups supporting McKinney spent more than $350,000 trying to strip her of that title because she was paid by a nonprofit — an common arrangement employed by government law offices across the U.S. — while the city attorney’s office itself gave her permission to use it, and lists her as such in its court filings.
McKinney has since sought to paint Roy as the second coming of George Gascón, the polarizing district attorney who was drubbed in 2024 — a move that assumes most voters are still thinking about Gascón, or are likely to see the graying “godfather of progressive prosecutors” in a raven-haired deputy attorney general.
“The only way you disprove that is by putting your head down and doing the work 10 times harder,” Roy said. “Voters are smarter than that. People in the coalition see these tactics and are tired of them too.”
The U.S. Justice Department expanded its efforts to intervene in California’s ongoing election Friday, sending letters to more than a dozen county elections offices statewide with demands that they segregate ballots from voters the Trump administration believes are noncitizens.
The letters — which give officials 48 hours to act and threaten them with criminal punishments if they refuse — follow similar correspondence the Justice Department sent last week to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar’s office, calling for some 20,000 ballots statewide be set aside and left uncounted until state and local officials can prove that the voters are citizens.
When Weber and Logan balked, the Justice Department promptly sued them and the state in a case currently pending in federal court. The California officials have contended the Justice Department’s efforts are illegal.
The new letters, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, follow previous threats from Justice Department officials and President Trump warning that local California elections officials could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime” if they tabulate votes from the “likely noncitizens” the administration has flagged.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said 57 of California’s 58 counties were served the letters, with the exception of Los Angeles, which had already received a notice.
“The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
Essayli wrote Friday evening on X that “California does not verify citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are noncitizens on their rolls.”
Essayli wrote that “knowingly processing noncitizen ballots is a federal crime,” and said authorities “will hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law.”
The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry from The Times. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office declined to comment.
Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber, who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said, “From what I’ve been able to gather, most counties if not all of the counties are doing what I’m doing: Sat down with our counsel, went over everything,” Webber said.
Webber said two people with Justice Department credentials showed up at her office Friday and handed her a manila envelope with the letter inside demanding she comply within 48 hours to determine the citizenship of 81 people in her county.
“I can’t tell you anything other than I’m looking at it and doing my due diligence,” she said. “This is not normal protocol for us.”
Kristin Connelly, head of the Contra Costa County registrar’s office, said she was also among those who received a letter. She said she had not yet responded as of late Friday, but was in contact with her county counsel and “colleagues around the state who received similar letters today.”
“The non-partisan Contra Costa County Elections Division administers elections according to all state and federal election laws, as well as the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California. Our work is observable,” Connelly said. “This threat is not helpful and is intended to intimidate.”
The letter she received, from U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, was full of threats of criminal punishment for tabulating votes from individuals whom the county is “on actual notice” may not be U.S. citizens.
Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California, wrote that he was providing Connelly with a “subset” of “407 likely aliens” from the broader statewide list of 20,000 voters, and demanded that Connelly commit within 48 hours to working with Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security officials to identify who among those 407 “is a citizen and who is not.”
“That means sending us the nonpublic information associated with each suspected alien’s registration, which includes everything in your possession from the following: a social security number, a copy of a state ID or driver’s license or the information that appears on it, a copy of the voter registration application supporting the registration, and a copy or list of documents that were presented by the registrant at the time the person registered to vote or obtained their driver’s license if registered as part of motor voter,” Missakian wrote.
He also wrote that he was reaching out by letter “to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by-mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified.”
The Justice Department previously sued California for its voter records. A federal judge rejected the lawsuit, calling the demands a threat to democracy. The Justice Department has also lost similar cases demanding voter rolls in dozens of other states.
California Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement Friday that, “Donald Trump and Todd Blanche are trying to interfere in California elections.”
Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has oversight over federal elections, added: No matter how many lawsuits they file or how many election officials they threaten, they do not have the authority to interfere.”
Padilla told local election officials, “We have your back.”
“The Trump administration is afraid and desperate,” he said. “Their attempts to take over our elections will fail.”
The letters were a topic of discussion among members of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials Friday, with officials working on how to respond.
Logan, L.A. County’s top elections official, sent an email to fellow association members saying he had seen a copy of the letter to some counties — which he condemned as misrepresenting facts and threatening elections officials “twelve days before the election” through a “posture of intimidation.”
Logan called the 48-hour deadline for responses “unenforceable,” and noted that the Justice Department was “demanding individual level data from the named counties similar to what it has previously only obtained through subpoenas.”
Logan’s office has also said that an initial review it conducted of a subset of the 20,000 voters the Justice Department initially flagged found many were born in the U.S., many weren’t actually registered and many had never voted.
NEW YORK — The reports erupt on social media every election year: Voters say they tapped a candidate’s name on a touchscreen voting machine, only for the wrong person to light up as their selection.
With some trial and error, and occasionally help from poll workers, the voters are generally able to cast their intended ballots. Nevertheless, some come away from the experience assuming the worst — that the anecdotal issues are proof of a partisan election-rigging scheme.
As early voting in November’s midterm elections gets underway in most states, with soaring turnout in many of them, the claims have returned in force, with voters — especially Democratic ones — in Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas documenting difficulties with the ballot marking devices.
Many voters have described their experiences on social media, with some falsely interpreting the troubles as attempts at election tampering to favor Republicans. The claims come as an AP-NORC poll shows many Democrats have lost trust in election results over the last four years, with many seeing the president interfering with the vote as a major concern.
Election officials say the touchscreen challenges are almost always the result of user error or an easily fixed screen miscalibration, and say the number of complaints this year isn’t higher than it has been in years past, despite the outsized attention on social media. They emphasize that voters can select a candidate as many times as needed, consult a poll worker for help and review selections before submitting their ballot.
Elections in the U.S. are decentralized, with thousands of election jurisdictions controlling the vote, each with different rules set by state and sometimes local governments. That structure makes the nation’s voting process extraordinarily complicated. It also shields it from widespread fraud.
“Almost all of the claims of vote flipping are understandable human error,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who noted disinformation purveyors often seize on well-meaning concerns to sow doubt in the voting process. “Is there one of us who hasn’t had a butt dial or mistyped something on our phones? It is not nefarious.”
Many voters, including Dolly Parton’s sister, report issues
The complaints about touchscreen machines switching votes have gathered tens of thousands of likes, shares and views on social media in recent days, popping up in various high-population areas across the country, including Tennessee’s Williamson and Davidson counties, homes to Franklin and Nashville.
Stella Parton, the sister of the late country singer Dolly Parton, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday that at her polling place near Nashville she had to “go back three times and correct my vote” because it kept defaulting to Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
She added: “I’m putting this out here because when we vote, we take it seriously but we try not to hold up the long lines. Do it anyway. Don’t let them rig this election.”
Chad Gray, election administrator in Williamson County, said officials there had found no discrepancies in the voting equipment. If problems or questions do arise, he said, people from each party will examine the devices and make sure they are working properly.
Tennessee Elections Coordinator Mark Goins told WSMV in Nashville that the issues reported in his area were “not a vote-flipping situation.” “It’s more like an unintended touch that they may not even realize,” Goins said.
Another Facebook user explained in a video that when his mother-in-law attempted to vote for Democratic candidates in Kendall County, Texas, the machine kept selecting Republicans. He said she was ultimately able to vote as desired and contended that it could have been user error, but still concluded people were “jacking with our elections.”
Staci Decker, elections administrator in Kendall County, said “100% of the time” the issue can be attributed to a voter tapping the wrong part of the box onscreen or from voters tapping the screen too hard, causing it to become miscalibrated. She said her policy is for staff to recalibrate the screens every few days to ensure the accuracy of the touchscreen.
“This is part of an attempt at every election (especially the bigger ones) to scare voters away,” Decker said in an email. “Every single piece of equipment used in our election is tested before it can be used in an election.”
Reports of voting machine errors common during high-turnout elections
In South Carolina, where an X user said a machine made it hard for her to vote for Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews, state election officials haven’t seen any unusual increase in reports of voters having trouble making selections, said Sydni Bain, a spokesperson with the state’s election commission.
“We commonly receive some of these reports during elections, particularly statewide elections with high turnout,” she said. “We encourage all voters to be careful in making their selections and to review their ballot before it is cast.”
In Bexar County, Texas, where an X user reported having to tap the screen forcefully to get the machine to register her choice of Democrat James Talarico instead of Republican Ken Paxton for Senate, election officials said they couldn’t confirm any equipment issues.
“This could possibly be user error,” said John Moreno, the county’s assistant public information officer. “If a voter has concerns about their ballot, they should bring it to the attention of the on-site judge.”
Kristin Miles, president of the Texas Assn. of County Election Officials and election administrator in Bastrop County, said “vote-switching” claims come up every election cycle.
“Nearly every case comes back to the screen calibration on older touchscreen machines, not a change to anyone’s vote,” she said.
Officials emphasized that machines are tested before each election and that in most jurisdictions, there is a postelection audit that consists of a manual hand count of a sample of paper ballots.
Voting machine company explains what to do if you encounter problems
Voters across the country cast ballots in various ways, including with ballot marking devices that print a paper record or with paper ballots they fill out by hand.
The counties where most of the recent vote-flipping social media reports are concentrated use ExpressVote ballot marking devices from a company called Election Systems & Software. The machines let voters make their selections on a touchscreen. Then, a paper record is typically printed for review before the votes are tabulated.
Katina Granger, senior manager of public relations for the Nebraska-based ES&S, said the company works closely with election officials and provides technical support when needed but has not been made aware of any widespread issue with voting machines this cycle.
She said when a voter is having difficulty, they should ask a poll worker for assistance. If they’ve already printed a ballot that doesn’t reflect their intended selections, “they should notify a poll worker rather than cast it so the jurisdiction can follow its procedures for replacing the ballot.”
Swenson and Goldin write for the Associated Press. AP writers Anna Wilder in Austin, Texas, and video journalist Kristin M. Hall in Nashville contributed to this report.
BLAINE, Wash. — The Trump administration’s top border official defended plans to build a wall and other infrastructure in Texas’ Big Bend region despite mounting opposition against the project and a court-ordered pause on construction, saying his goal of fortifying the country’s borders was “non-negotiable.”
In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott argued that the $46-billion wall project was justified despite a bipartisan coalition of landowners, local businesses and environmentalists who view it as a waste of taxpayer money that could be destructive to a region with historically low migrant crossings.
“Our No. 1 goal right out the gate is we have to know who and what is coming into the United States,” Scott said on Thursday. If the Big Bend region were left without a wall or other border infrastructure while other areas along the border get those fortifications, he said, “I am 100% convinced it will be completely overrun and destroyed.”
The fight over Big Bend has become a major test for how far the Republican administration is willing to go for the border wall, President Trump’s signature infrastructure project.
Scott, a former Border Patrol agent, was tapped by Trump to complete it.
His agency is responsible for executing a plan funded last summer by Republicans in Congress to line the roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico with a mixture of 30-foot-tall steel walls, vehicle barriers, new roads and surveillance technology to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling.
The Trump administration says it is building about 12 miles a week. Scott, who gets daily progress updates, said it will be complete by the end of Trump’s second term. The primary border wall — some areas also get a secondary layer — will be done by the end of December 2027.
“We’re actually ahead of schedule,” Scott said.
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1.Charlie Angell stands on an overlook of the Rio Grande river2.Pamela Priddy, center, holds up signs with others during a weekly protest against barriers along the border in the Big Bend region, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, in Study Butte, Texas.(John Locher / Ap Photo/john Locher)
Big Bend is a test for the Trump administration’s plans for the wall
The wall plan has run into resistance in places like Big Bend. The Trump administration was dealt a major setback earlier this month when a judge ordered a pause on border wall construction in the region, citing what could be a likelihood that plaintiffs “will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction.” The administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the order.
The ruling included any construction in Big Bend National Park, an area that has seen a loud bipartisan outcry, including from some Republican lawmakers.
After bulldozers were spotted in the park tearing up ground in August, Scott ordered a pause on all construction-related activity there while he went to talk to people in the region. He said the agency is making other outreach to locals to discuss how to build projects so they don’t mar the park.
“We’re talking through and figuring out what is the right solution for that area,” he said.
Scott said he can’t get into specific details on what the agency’s plans are for the park because of the numerous ongoing lawsuits, but he reiterated that the project won’t include tall steel walls.
He also said that the agency’s stated goal of protecting the country and knowing what’s coming in and going out is “non-negotiable.”
He said the region’s formidable natural barriers were not enough to prevent people from entering the country illegally through other more navigable points. And he expressed concern that cartels that control smuggling from Mexico into the U.S. would exploit any opening.
CBP has come under fire for immigration enforcement tactics
Scott leads an agency of 67,000 employees responsible for controlling who and what comes into the country through official border crossings like airports or seaports and stopping illegal smuggling and migration outside those official border crossing points.
The agency came under heavy scrutiny last year when its officers were sent into cities deep inside the country to help carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Agents with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement patrol in a neighborhood after apprehending a person on Jan. 31 in St. Paul, Minn.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
As protests against an operation rocked Minneapolis, a Border Patrol officer and a CBP officer both fired shots in an encounter that killed a U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti. The shooting eventually prompted the Trump administration to wind down high-profile city-based crackdowns. A CBP officer who was the face of the missions, Gregory Bovino, who led a helicopter raid at a large apartment building and used chemical agents to confront demonstrators, retired earlier this year.
Scott said while CBP still helps ICE, it’s now less involved in immigration enforcement far from the country’s borders because ICE has since hired more officers to its ranks. Scott wouldn’t comment on the investigation into the Pretti killing, saying that it was being handled by the FBI and was ongoing. And when asked about Bovino’s tactics, he said the officer didn’t report to him during the operations.
Scott spoke to the AP just outside the border with Canada, where he met with border security representatives from other countries to share information about threats and trends. During his trip, he visited an operations center where he said Canadian and American law enforcement work together.
That border has far fewer threats than the U.S. border with Mexico. Scott said cartels in Mexico are increasingly sending drones into the United States to move contraband and keep tabs on Border Patrol agents. In Mexico, the cartels have been using drones to attack each other or Mexican law enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, recently announced temporary flight restrictions targeting unauthorized drone activity in a zone extending a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border as a way to counter cartels.
“We want to make sure,” Scott said, “that threat does not come into the United States.”
