Politics Desk

Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso declined once again to endorse either incumbent Mayor Karen Bass or challenger Nithya Raman in the Nov. 3 runoff election, but expressed what he called “extreme concern” about Raman’s plans to remove Police Chief Jim McDonnell.

The billionaire developer lost to Bass in the 2022 election, and was a staunch critic of the mayor for her response to the 2025 Palisades fire. Even so, he appeared with the mayor at his upscale Palisades Village shopping center Tuesday to promote a new program to streamline city utility services.

While declining to endorse Bass, Caruso commended the mayor by saying “she’s done her work, and she’s worked with the team, and I compliment this.”

“In comparison, Councilwoman Raman has made statements that we should all ask for an explanation to,” Caruso said, citing her plans to replace McDonnell. “I do show extreme concern when a candidate is talking about firing a chief of police.”

Raman’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At last week’s televised mayoral debate, Raman said that if elected mayor she would replace McDonnell, saying the LAPD appeared to be protecting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during their operations in L.A. Raman didn’t give a clear timeline of when she would act.

Bass has publicly backed the chief she hired two years ago, and warned that the Police Department could be thrown into disarray if he is removed before the 2028 Olympic Games.

Caruso applauded Bass’s support for McDonnell at Tuesday’s event.

“I don’t think we need LAPD being a lab experiment for the DSA,” Caruso said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Raman. “It’s going to take L.A. in the wrong direction, and we should all be concerned about the direction she wants to take LAPD.”

When pressed by reporters about a possible endorsement, Caruso said, “I can’t answer that tonight or today. I’ll let you know.”

Caruso also declined to make an endorsement at a groundbreaking he attended with the mayor last month for the new Palisades Recreation Center, calling both Bass and Raman “tough choices.” Bass also sidestepped questions from The Times at the September event about whether she’d welcome Caruso’s endorsement.

Caruso funneled more than $100 million of his own fortune into his 2022 mayoral campaign, outspending Bass 11 to 1. Bass defeated Caruso by nearly 10 percentage points. Caruso didn’t run for the 2026 race, despite many expecting him to challenge Bass again.

Caruso said Tuesday that he and Bass haven’t always agreed on policy, but came together to help Pacific Palisades in a time of crisis. Caruso has played a prominent role in helping rebuild Pacific Palisades and Altadena following the fires.

The 67-year-old developer is behind popular L.A. malls, including the Grove and the Americana at Brand. He also owns Palisades Village, which first opened in 2018 and closed down after the fires destroyed much of downtown. Palisades Village reopened on Aug. 15, after 19 months and more than $100 million in renovations, Caruso said.

“I know what I’ve seen in the last year and a half, and the help she’s leaned in and given to this community,” Caruso said of Bass. “So, we did get together because it has to transcend politics, and we have to do the right thing.”

Bass and Caruso both acknowledged their longstanding relationship, dating back to Bass’s days in Sacramento, she said. The pair have been in constant communication since the 2022 mayoral race and started directly collaborating immediately after the Palisades fire, she said.

“My love for the city transcends politics, and I’m going to stand behind people that are doing right for the city and doing right for the people of the city that need the help the most,” Caruso said. “That’s why I’m standing here today.”

Caruso joined Bass Tuesday to announce Power Ready LA— an effort that will streamline how the Department of Water and Power delivers utility services to commercial and residential projects.

The effort will result in lower upfront costs for eligible housing and commercial projects, Bass said. It builds on an executive directive the mayor signed in April, which aims to cut delays, introduce tech automation and speed up building permits for residential and commercial development.

The Tulare County elections office in the Central Valley was suddenly getting peppered with questions from baffled voters.

On the afternoon of Oct. 13, residents began calling and showing up in person at the registrar of voters’ office in Visalia, worried they would be accused of committing fraud by trying to vote twice.

That’s because, much to the surprise and chagrin of county elections staff, thousands of voters had accidentally been mailed duplicate ballots for the Nov. 3 midterm election.

In the agricultural city of Tulare, a place surrounded by walnut and almond orchards as far as the eye can see, 7,791 voters received extra ballots because of an error by the private printing vendor, said Michelle Baldwin, the county registrar of voters, who noted that safeguards were in place to keep the extra ballots from being counted.

The county’s longtime ballot printer, Porterville-based ProVote Solutions, “has accepted full responsibility for the mistake,” she said.

ProVote Solutions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It is unfortunate that it happened,” Baldwin said. “Of course, we would have preferred this didn’t happen, but it did, and we tried to get right on it and respond within 24 hours.”

It’s the kind of error that, in most election years, probably would be just a minor news story. County elections officials would be trusted with their explanation for the mistake, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

But this midterm has been beset by a growing distrust in the integrity of mail-in ballots following President Trump’s attempt to restrict them before the November election — an effort that was blocked last month by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump, who remains fixated on his 2020 election loss, has repeatedly alleged — without providing evidence — that voting by mail leads to widespread cheating and fraud. He has focused specifically on California, where every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. Seven other states do the same.

On Monday, federal officials charged 28 people with election-related crimes in California, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Among them were several green card holders, some of whom said they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

In this tense political climate, Becker said, even straightforward election mistakes are magnified on social media and become the subject of conspiracy theories, making the job of local elections officials much more difficult.

“Accidents do happen,” Becker said. “Our elections are incredibly decentralized, run by hundreds of thousands of human beings. As a result, we know there is going to be human error, but our elections are not designed to be perfect. That’s impossible. What they are designed to do is be resilient against human error.”

Becker said it is not unheard of for a voter to receive two ballots. Sometimes, a voter will call the local registrar to request a new one because theirs has not arrived by mail — only to have the original eventually show up. And in other states where voters are required to formally request a mail ballot, they may forget they have done so and show up to vote in person.

That’s why, he said, there are well-established checks to protect against double voting. When a voter casts a ballot, they are “marked immediately” in statewide systems that show they’ve done so, he said.

Ballot errors are rare but not unheard of.

On Monday, the Imperial County registrar of voters announced that a “mailing error” caused duplicate ballots to be sent to 160 voters who requested confidential voter status, meaning that, for safety reasons, their identity and contact information are kept off public voting rolls.

“The error occurred as the Registrar of Voters’ Office was updating its procedures to follow changes in California law,” the elections office said in a statement, adding that, on Jan. 1, elected officials and candidates for public office became eligible for confidential voter status, “requiring changes to how their ballots are processed and mailed.”

Tulare County is a mostly rural place that voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Portions of the city of Tulare — population 74,000 — are in the redistricted but perennially competitive 22nd Congressional District, where a close race between Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Democratic challenger Randy Villegas, a political science professor at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, could determine the balance of power in Congress.

Robert Jones, a strategist for the Valadao campaign, told The Times on Tuesday that the campaign had been in close communication with the registrar’s office and was not overly concerned.

“We have a lot of faith in the Tulare County registrar and elections office,” Jones said, “and we would imagine that, with the extra scrutiny, it will be diligent in making sure that only registered voters vote and that they vote only one time.”

Villegas’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mark Martinez, a political science professor at Cal State Bakersfield, said conspiracy theories about the error in Tulare add to what is already a tense political climate in the Central Valley, where a recent surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations has disrupted agricultural communities, sent families scrambling to find detained loved ones, and led to a drop in school attendance.

“People will walk away, stay away or avoid political events especially if you look like me — if you look brown or Latino,” Martinez said.

The duplicate-ballot error in Tulare last week quickly went viral in conservative social media circles, with claims that something nefarious was going on in the middle of a House battleground district. One post on X by right-wing media personality Eric Daugherty said, “Trump is right, this is the MESS mass mail-in voting creates!” and “Stop the cheat!” It was viewed more than 450,000 times on that platform, and screenshots of the post were widely shared on Facebook with additional commentary.

The Republican-leaning city of Tulare has just over 34,500 registered voters, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Not all of them are in Valadao’s district.

About 23% of voters in the city received duplicate ballots.

Countywide, about 3% of the 227,000 registered voters were affected.

Baldwin said that as soon as residents started reporting their duplicate ballots, elections staffers immediately contacted the vendor, which confirmed the evening of Oct. 13 that the batch of nearly 7,800 ballots had been accidentally reprinted and mailed.

The vendor, she said, quickly printed postcards explaining what happened and drove them more than three hours to a postal facility in Sacramento so they would be promptly processed and received by voters by the end of the week.

The mailer, in English and Spanish, instructs those who got two ballots to “securely destroy the duplicate ballot” instead of returning it.

Baldwin said that if anybody submits two ballots, “it will be flagged” by safeguards already in place.

The barcode on each voter’s mail return envelope is connected to his or her voter record, she said. Before a mailed ballot is accepted for counting, elections staff scan the barcode, record that the ballot has been received, compare the envelope signature with the signature on a person’s voter record, and check to see if the person has already voted.

“Your vote stays private,” Tulare County elections staff wrote in a Facebook post explaining safeguards against voting more than once. “After verification, your ballot is separated from the return envelope before counting. The envelope barcode tracks your ballot’s return, not your voting choices.”

In the comments section, one resident was frustrated but circumspect.

“I am livid this happened THIS YEAR OF ALL YEARS!!” the resident wrote. “And also, glad there are protections in place in case any fools try to use both. Good grief!!”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is deferring an additional $1.2 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California, citing concerns about potential fraud in a state program that helps older adults and people with disabilities with everyday tasks.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said federal officials took action after they grew concerned about the rapid expansion of California’s personal care services program in recent years. State officials were notified of the decision Tuesday, he said.

“California has been growing that program 24% in the last three years. That is twice the rate of every other state average in the country,” Oz said. “Impossible for us to understand how that could be so we are taking major action in California.”

Oz did not provide any evidence of fraud but suggested the state was paying people too much taxpayer money to help with services that could be offered for free, like “paying somebody to carry groceries upstairs for your mom.”

“Many of you would carry groceries upstairs for your mom for free, but in California, they will pay you a lot of money for it,” he said.

The move is the latest in a series of efforts by the administration to withhold federal money from California. In May, the administration held back $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to the state over concerns about “fraudsters” in the state’s hospice and in-home care programs. The actions have been part of a broad effort by the administration to rein in fraud in federal healthcare benefits programs, particularly in Democrat-led states.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the office has been critical of the administration’s past efforts.

In May, Newsom’s office called the action to withhold funds for in-home care programs a “sick” and politically motivated attack on services that are meant to “keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes.”

Those services usually cover assistants who help people with daily tasks such as bathing, laundry or cooking. They also provide needed care such as injections under the direction of a medical professional. A 2020 report by the California state auditor found that nearly three-quarters of In-home Supportive Services caregivers assist a family member.

Newsom’s office, however, has argued that the program saves taxpayers money, saying IHSS care costs $30,000 a year, while nursing home care costs $137,000 a year.

California’s hospice industry has had problems in the past and authorities have tried to crack down on the issue. A Times investigation in 2020 found that providers were billing Medicare for hospice services and equipment for patients who were not actually dying while the industry boomed.

The Trump administration, led by Vice President JD Vance, has tried to focus attention on the issue of waste, fraud and abuse as a centerpiece policy platform to bring down healthcare costs.

On Tuesday, Trump and Vance announced a $25-million whistleblower program designed to pay out cash to people who tip off the federal government about fraudsters. The program will offer a 1% commission for tips that lead to a successful conviction. Trump said he would be the sole arbitrator of who gets to keep the money.

“I’ll determine whether or not the person is deserving, and I will be very generous believe me. We are not looking to save on that,” Trump said. “I promise you I will be fair.”

Trump said the money will be handed out “expeditiously and fairly.”

“I promise there is nothing in this for me,” he said.

The White House referred comment about the decision to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The federal agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vice President JD Vance declined Monday to endorse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reelection a day after President Trump endorsed the embattled Israeli leader.

“The president has the most influential endorsement in American or international political history,” Vance said during an interview with journalist Mark Halperin.

“I endorse American candidates, and that’s where I’m focused on the midterms,” Vance said, while traveling Monday to campaign for Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley of North Carolina. “So, I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections.”

Vance has campaigned for a foreign leader — then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, last spring before the right-wing leader’s party lost that country’s parliamentary election.

Vance’s deference to Trump on Netanyahu comes at an extraordinarily sensitive time for Jewish Americans and the U.S. alliance with Israel. Concerns about antisemitism have surged across the political spectrum ahead of the midterm elections.

Republicans have been eager to portray Democrats, notably Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, as hostile toward Jews and Israel, while they deal with their own internal schisms.

Vance has faced skepticism from Jewish Republicans about his commitment to Jewish Americans and the U.S. alliance with Israel.

Last month, Vance spoke privately in Las Vegas to the Republican Jewish Coalition, a leading GOP group committed to advocating for a strong U.S. relationship with Israel and against antisemitism.

Vance left a positive impression on his RJC audience while stopping short of disavowing influential conservative podcast host Tucker Carlson.

Vance has faced general questions about his association with Carlson, a former Fox News host who faced backlash last year for interviewing antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

In June, Vance sharply criticized members of Israel’s government for opposing Trump’s efforts to resolve the war with Iran.

In July, Vance said elements of the Israeli government had tried to influence American sentiment to derail negotiations.

“There are some people within their system that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” Vance said during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Beaumont writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats’ top campaign spending group is wading into Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race for the first time this year, an aggressive move in a deep-red state that signals a party on the offensive as Republicans look to protect a slim majority.

The Senate Majority PAC, aligned with Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, will spend $1.2 million on a new television advertisement to boost Scott Colom, a district attorney, in his campaign against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The ad, first disclosed to the Associated Press, is set to start Wednesday and run through Election Day.

“Senate Majority PAC has been watching this race closely, and it is clear Colom is running a competitive race that has put Hyde-Smith on her heels,” group spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.

With just two weeks to go in the race, it’s unclear what impact the ad will have in a matchup that’s been set since Colom won a March primary. Still, it’s a substantial investment in a race that’s seen only about $8 million in total spending, with Colom outspending Hyde-Smith nearly $4.6 million to $3.2 million, according to AdImpact.

Hyde-Smith, first appointed and then elected in 2018, is running for reelection in a state Republicans have long dominated. In the 2024 presidential race, Republican Donald Trump won Mississippi by nearly 23 percentage points over Democrat Kamala Harris, and a Democrat hasn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1982.

However, some Democrats believe Hyde-Smith is vulnerable, and she underperformed Trump by 6 percentage points in 2020, the year he lost his White House reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden.

The television ad touts Colom’s time as district attorney, while labeling Hyde-Smith a “do-nothing” senator.

“A decade in power, Hyde-Smith hasn’t passed one piece of legislation, but she did vote to kick people off Medicaid,” a narrator says in the ad, which will run on television stations statewide alongside a digital campaign.

Hyde-Smith’s campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Colom has raised Democratic hopes in a year when electoral winds are at their backs. Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock was the latest high-profile Democrat to campaign with Colom last week, and Harris, who was Biden’s vice president, is set to rally with Colom on Thursday.

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and were expected to face a friendlier map this year with fewer seats to defend. But high costs and gas prices amid an unpopular war in Iran under a Republican president have made Democrats optimistic, with the Senate Majority PAC spending its final weeks investing in conservative territory. It’s already announced spending in Kansas, where megachurch pastor and Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton is trying to unseat Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.

Colom would be his state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, the 12-year period after the U.S. Civil War when the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted.

Some Democrats have criticized national groups for not spending more in Southern states like Mississippi.

“I worry, to be very honest, that Democrats are missing a real opportunity to invest in a serious and sustained way in the South,” Warnock said Sunday on NBC’s ”Meet the Press.”

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press.

Come Election Day, a Quaker leader will travel from the nation’s capital to her home state of Ohio. A Christian minister and a Jewish rabbi will stand vigil outside a polling place in Arizona. A Buddhist nun will offer support to voters in Wisconsin.

In battleground states across the country, these faith leaders and hundreds of their colleagues will assume the role of poll chaplains for one day. They will deploy to nine states — Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia and Texas — where contentious races are expected to raise political tensions.

Faiths United in Saving Democracy, a nonpartisan coalition of interfaith and secular partners, is helping to train and certify this volunteer force of clergy members and lay peacekeepers in time for the Nov. 3 elections.

They’ll wear identifying hats and vests, and stay outside the poll centers, with the goal of maintaining a calm, reassuring presence to encourage more voters to exercise their rights without fear or hesitation, said co-founder Barbara Williams-Skinner. As of Oct. 19, they’ve recruited 1,235 poll chaplains and peacekeepers, she said.

A non-partisan effort to take the fear out of voting

While the idea of poll chaplains has been around for several years, Williams-Skinner said “2026 is going to be different” because there is widespread concern that the presence of federal immigration agents could create a chilling effect.

“The fear is real,” she says, worrying that it could deter eligible voters in mixed-immigration-status families and communities of color. Department of Homeland Security officials have consistently said they have no plans to send immigration agents to the polls, although DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said they could show up for a specific reason, such as arresting someone if they have a warrant.

The coalition has offered training online and in person. Participants get information about immigrant rights, de-escalation techniques and phone numbers to call in tight situations, Williams-Skinner said.

The initiative, strongly rooted in the Black church, has expanded to include diverse faiths as well as non-religious people, she said.

“This is a movement built by unusual coalitions,” she said. “You have white, Mainline Protestants, Quakers, traditional Baptists, Black church leaders, imams, rabbis — all kinds of people who probably would not work together or haven’t worked together in the past.”

While most participating groups are moderate or progressive, Williams-Skinner says it is a strictly nonpartisan initiative.

“We don’t get hung up on who’s moderate or who’s conservative. People just need to be able to vote, unafraid,” she said.

Concerns about voter intimidation motivate chaplains

A Pew survey following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025 showed 85% of Americans, across political lines, believe political violence is on the rise.

Polling places have been targeted by protesters in past elections. In 2022, members of a group claiming to monitor ballot drop boxes in Arizona were ordered to stay at least 250 feet away after voters complained about intimidation. In 2020, following Election Day, a crowd stormed a vote-counting center in Detroit, many incited by online conspiracy theories about election fraud.

As the mob banged on the center’s doors and windows, the Rev. Steve Bland was among several faith leaders who put their bodies between the building and the crowd. Bland, who leads Detroit’s Liberty Temple Baptist Church, is continuing that work as a poll chaplain.

The pastor says de-escalation often involves “using the right words to calm a situation” or giving intimidated voters the moral support and reassurance that they are safe to exercise their civic right. Bland said he did precisely that for an elderly, Black woman during a prior election.

“She left and came back with two of her grandsons who also voted,” he said. “Without that intervention, three people wouldn’t have voted that day.”

The Rev. Bankole Akinbinu, senior pastor of Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, said training in conflict resolution and de-escalation has given him the confidence to serve as a poll chaplain. A millennial, he has sought to engage younger people by recruiting peacekeepers from college campuses.

His motivation comes from seeing voter suppression attempts in North Carolina and other states.

“I look at our forefathers and the struggle they had to endure to afford us the privilege of voting,” Akinbinu said. “I look at my children and the nation I want to hand them.”

Steven Huefner, deputy director of the Election Law Program at The Ohio State University, says poll chaplains might be able to calm the frayed nerves of a voting public that is constantly exposed to divisive rhetoric and news about political violence. While political violence has increased, he says, it’s not widespread.

“Election workers are well-trained and can run elections quite well,” he said.

Faith leaders have historically played the role of peacekeepers, said Wendy Cadge, professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and founder of the think tank Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.

And now chaplaincy — beyond traditional worship spaces — is attracting more clergy.

“People are feeling called to chaplaincy because they want to be with people in difficult times,” Cadge said. “They don’t want to worry about what color the carpet is in the church or if their youth programs are attracting enough people. It’s a different kind of work.”

Chaplains find inspiration in theology

Clergy deploying on Election Day say they are heeding a strong, faith-driven calling to serve as poll chaplains.

In Arizona, Rev. Katie Sexton, executive director of Arizona Faith Network, embraces the initiative as a way to reach across the political divide.

“The ballot box is a place where we’re all seen as equal,” she said, adding that it reflects the Christian belief that all humans are created in the image of God. “There is such power in that.”

On Oct. 6, Sexton and several others participated in a training session — one of the last before the midterms — at Temple Chai, a Reform synagogue in Scottsdale.

Rabbi Emily Segal, who leads the congregation, will be a poll chaplain for the first time next month. The work, she says, aligns with what the Torah and Talmud teach about a healthy and just society.

Throughout American history, interfaith coalitions have created powerful change and served as sources of inspiration, Segal said. “Any time we can come together with faith partners around our shared values for societal good is a real source of holiness for our community.”

Bridget Moix, a Quaker leader, will travel to her native Ohio on Election Day.

“In our faith tradition, we think about voting as a sacred act we want to protect,” she said.

For Reirin Gumbel, resident teacher at the Milwaukee Zen Center, it’ll be a third time, come November.

“As Buddhists, the Metta Sutra we chant says every being has the same rights, and that we should have compassion toward all,” she said.

Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, spiritual leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, is considering becoming a poll chaplain for the first time. In a highly contentious campaign in Elahi’s state, Abdul El-Sayed is the first Muslim Democratic candidate to run for a U.S. Senate seat.

The imam said he is tired of anti-Muslim vitriol that has surfaced ahead of the midterms.

“As interfaith clergy, we stand for principles not personalities,” he said. “The Quran tells us to stand for what’s right — truth, justice, peace, human rights and the dignity of human beings, whoever they may be.”

Bharath writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is hoping that $5,000 checks can juice Republican turnout in November’s midterm elections — but even some of his devoted fans are doubting that government payouts would arrive.

“I mean, I guess it’s good for some people. I really don’t care,” said Jamie Alvarez, who attended Trump’s recent Alaska rally in a red, white and blue outfit. “I don’t feel like your vote should be bought. I feel like you should vote for who you feel is going to do the best job.”

Joseph Eatherton was attending that same rally and said he was “not sure if it’s necessary.” When asked whether Trump could deliver on the promised money, he said, “I don’t know, and I hate being an armchair quarterback.”

The offering of government checks has become a go-to tactic for Trump when he faces a political jam. He’s previously endorsed $2,000 in dividends from tariff revenues and large refunds from spending cuts achieved by the Department of Government Efficiency, neither of which materialized. The latest example could reveal how much voters still trust Trump as they decide control of Congress in the midterm elections on Nov. 3.

Staunch supporters such as Lucy Martinez, the president of a Republican women’s club who attended a recent Trump rally in Texas, said there’s no doubt in their minds.

“I think that I will get the $5,000,” she said. Out of all the presidents, Trump is someone “who kept his promises to his people and all the United States.”

Trump has dished out payments as elections approach

However, many voters are already embittered by his economic leadership. His critics see a president who failed to tame inflation and keep America out of overseas conflicts, and whose agenda has fueled higher prices as the war with Iran appears to be at a stalemate.

“The trust on this is already gone for most people,” said Amy Frederiksen, a former Republican Minnesota Senate majority leader who now runs a public affairs firm.

“I just don’t see the energy around that line,” she added. “Most people know that’s a blatant over-the-top promise like several he’s made in the last couple of years, and they’re not buying it.”

As the midterms approach, Trump has also pledged a $90 payment to 20 million Medicare enrollees and $500 “rebates” for people the administration says were overcharged for their Obamacare plans. He has automatically enrolled every U.S. child in “Trump accounts” to invest in stocks.

The $5,000 payouts would only occur, Trump says, if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Trump acknowledges that the cost would exceed $1 trillion, but it’s not clear that the White House is seriously engaging with the proposal’s ramifications, from the increased deficit to the likely boost to inflation.

The White House said the payments are possible because of Trump’s trade deals, investment commitments by foreign countries, government stakes in private companies and deals for oil and minerals.

The administration’s position is that the payments will help people recover from the inflation that began in 2021 under then-President Joe Biden, though Republicans, at the time, attributed that inflation to excessive government checks tied to pandemic relief.

When The Associated Press asked several weeks ago if the administration was modeling the economic impact from the checks, Christopher Phelan, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said he would “refrain” from answering.

Roughly half of registered voters say Donald Trump does not keep his promises to Americans, according to an AP-NORC poll from September. About 3 in 10 say Trump tries to keep his promises but is unable to, while only about 2 in 10 say he keeps his promises.

Republican voters are more accommodating. About half say Trump tries to keep his promises but is unable to, and about 4 in 10 say he keeps his promises.

Republican candidates aren’t echoing Trump’s promise

Trump is talking about the payments as a sure thing.

“If the Republicans win, you’ll each have $5,000 in your pocket and economic success for our country like we have never seen before,” he said at a Saturday rally in Kentucky. “And remember, ’cause they like to say, ‘Oh, well, maybe he won’t do that.’ Uh, I always do it.”

Campaign spending tracked by AdImpact suggests that Republicans are not running advertisements either on television or online about the promise. The few advertisements that do exist are from pro-Democratic groups such as Rolling Sea Action Fund that conclude with the voiceover, “Come on, do you really think he’s sending you a check? Yeah, right, we won’t get fooled again.”

At a Friday rally in Georgia, Trump noted that he had previously delivered a $1,776 “Trump dividend” to troops in the military. But those payments came from a congressionally approved housing supplement.

Trump claims the nation could not afford the payments if Democrats hold a chamber in Congress because the nation would be “flat broke.” But he said that one caveat is that the money could only be spent in the U.S., rather than in China, Japan or France. He joked that people should spend the check at his luxury club in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Let’s have lunch at Mar-a-Lago, where for $5,000, you’ll get one hamburger and a small dessert,” he told the crowd in Georgia.

Some in the crowd took Trump at his word that he would fight to get them the money. But they added the caveat that if he didn’t come through, it would not be his fault.

“I could use $5,000,” said Mike Boatman, a 58-year-old from Evansville, Indiana, who travels the country attending the president’s rallies. “I mean, he’s done everything he’s said he’s going to do.”

Boak, Bohrer and Barrow write for the Associated Press. Bohrer reported from Wasilla, Alaska, and Barrow reported from Dalton, Georgia. AP reporters Aaron Kessler and Linley Sanders in Washington and Lekan Oyekanmi in San Antonio, Texas, contributed to this report.

In what may be one of the most comical self-owns in recent politics, the esteemed attorneys of the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that despite the extravagant and terrifying misuse of their investigative power under the Trump administration, they have so far been able to identify only 28 people in all of California who may have voted illegally.

“The announcement today by the United States DOJ makes the point that there is no widespread voter fraud,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said after the news conference announcing the results of “Operation Protect the Vote.”

Twenty-eight people out of about 23 million registered voters in the state — and not all of them even tried to vote, according to the feds. That’s about 1 in 820,000 folks allegedly registering or voting illegally, a rate that roughly matches how often people in the United States get struck by lightning in a given year.

So much for Trump’s endless claims that there is a vast, organized conspiracy between Democrats and undocumented people to have them vote in large numbers to steal elections. I’ll point out here that none of those charged Monday have been accused of colluding with one another or with Democratic overlords.

All the power of the government — investigative, technological, legal — has been thrown at finding these mysterious, diabolically clever ballot baddies. And now, thanks to Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, and his colleagues across this great state, we now know that all 28 of them will be held accountable, if the government can prove wrongdoing. And let’s be clear — people who vote illegally should be held accountable.

But wait, there’s more, because this election-stealing plot by immigrants certainly doesn’t stop at the state line. Seamus Hughes of Court Watch, an excellent site that tracks federal litigation, reported Monday that since the start of this administration, 169 people have been charged federally with illegally registering or voting.

That number includes the new California cases, so it means an additional 141 potentially illegal voters have been charged across the U.S. — all told about 1 in 1.25 million registered voters being accused of illegally registering or voting, making this crime slightly less likely than guessing a six-digit pin code on the first try.

There. Is. No. Election. Stealing.

But that’s where the funny part ends, because this attack on California elections is serious and just getting started.

The federal government, you’ve probably read, is suing California, claiming it gave the state a janky thumb drive with 20,000 names of registered voters that it sort of strongly suspects maybe aren’t legal voters. Important note here: The government has been very careful not to claim that these people voted illegally, just that it might be so based on questionable data, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The feds gave the state a silly 48-hour deadline to agree to change constitutional law, dump common sense and sequester these 20,000 ballots, if they were even returned, to double-check they were cast by valid voters.

When California rightfully refused — because elections are run by states, not the federal government — the federal government sued on the thinnest of legal grounds. It basically claimed that voting illegally is illegal, and if California doesn’t do exactly what Trump wants, it could be violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by impeding the feds from enforcing the crime of voter fraud.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli speaks at a news conference Monday at which officials announced that 28 people in California had been charged with voter fraud.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Which is basically arguing that if the state government fails to stop voter fraud using the flawed methods Trump likes, then the state is somehow stopping federal authorities from prosecuting voter fraud themselves. But didn’t they just enforce it with 28 cases?

Get ready, because “state-facilitated voter fraud,” is a new right-wing thing.

California is “being complicit in non-citizens voting in our elections, and as they were warned last week, not only is it a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences,” Essayli said, which if it happened would give Trumped-up charges a whole new meaning.

Essayli said state officials are not being “good faith actors,” but I’ll argue that shoe is on the other foot. The list of 20,000 alleged, suspected, maybe-maybe-not illegal voters was likely drawn from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, created by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, if you can remember that unfortunate relic.

It sought to draw data from more than a dozen government databases that were not only not compatible with such information sharing, but which had been kept separate until now for privacy reasons. Americans in general did not want the government collecting unified, know-all records of every citizen.

Luckily for us, I guess, the SAVE system can’t actually create reliable, unified records. It confuses people, convolutes them, merges records of people with similar names, and in general has been deemed unreliable by data experts.

In September, the good folks at the UCLA Voting Rights Project joined with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights to sue the federal government over its use of that system to target naturalized citizens for removal from voter rolls. Turns out, the government appears to be targeting immigrants who are now citizens with these voter fraud accusations.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, naturalized citizens make up about 1 in 10 eligible voters, and nearly a quarter of them live in California. But they also live in swing states such as Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed may draw such voters, and in other places such as Georgia and Nevada where races might be decided by only a few votes.

These arrests and lawsuits while voting is already underway in the midterms are a not-subtle form of voter suppression. Imagine being a naturalized citizen in the Central Valley, where ICE is driving rampant fear and where Republican Rep. David Valadao is running against Democrat Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District — one of the nation’s most closely contested races.

Would you consider sitting this election out just in case your ballot draws the frightening eye of the federal government? Even knowing that your vote is legal, what if you lived in a mixed-status household? Would it be worth risking voting if it meant a knock at the door from immigration checking on your status, and maybe finding that family member who lacks it?

Why take the risk?

“Basically, what they’re doing now is just completely harassing and intimidating naturalized citizens who are legally eligible to vote through these actions,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Voting Rights Project.

And if the vote isn’t suppressed enough to give Trump the results he wants, these prosecutions and lawsuits feed the beast of conspiracy, giving Trump fodder to claim the results are fake, the election stolen.

And round and round we go, reckoning with Trump’s claims that lightning is striking everyone, everywhere, all at once, because the vote didn’t go his way.

At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.

Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.

Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.

Both were among the 28 people charged with federal election-related crimes Monday, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials had touted the arrests during a news conference hours before as proof that California elections are corrupted by noncitizen voters — as President Trump has long alleged.

State officials said the isolated instances of noncitizens voting, if accurate, are not evidence of widespread voter fraud. They also raised questions as to whether the charges could be trusted to be accurate — citing similar accusations being disproved elsewhere in the country.

Election experts have said many instances of noncitizens registering to vote are a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of the immigrant — not intentional criminality.

“We know from past experience that sometimes people register to vote accidentally, as when there is a mistake at the DMV,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote Monday in a blog post. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law.”

Four of the defendants charged Monday had initial court appearances later that afternoon. Beforehand, more than a dozen of their loved ones milled around the federal courthouse in downtown L.A., antsy and clearly worried.

One woman, her baby and young daughter in tow, struggled to find the right courtroom. Another woman — Domínguez’s daughter — cried in the hallway as she waited for her mother’s case to get called up. When Domínguez moved to stand before the judge, she blew a kiss to her husband and daughter in the second row. She wore a black back brace and her legs were cuffed.

A third defendant — Omar Muñoz, 72, a lawful permanent resident from Belize whose arrest at his home in Commerce was captured by photographers in images transmitted around the world — shuffled into a court room shackled at the waist, his feet cuffed, still wearing the red and black pajama pants he’d been arrested in.

Homeland Security Investigations task force officers escort a suspect accused of illegally registering to vote to a processing facility at Federal Building in Los Angeles on Monday.

(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)

Muñoz was charged with fraudulently registering to vote in September 2019, and then voting in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, when he claimed to have never falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in the past.

In the court room, Muñoz held a hand over his heart as he waved to his family in the first row of the gallery.

Hasen, the UCLA expert, wrote that the government’s blasting out images of Muñoz being arrested was clearly “meant to convey that the problem of noncitizen voting in California is both pervasive and serious, crimes that are undetected by willfully ignorant California election officials.”

But the reality, he wrote, “is likely far different,” with voter fraud limited to isolated cases, some with less nefarious intent.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Monday that the cases represent strong federal work to ensure that noncitizens aren’t negating the votes of eligible U.S. voters — a problem he said California officials have refused to recognize despite federal authorities providing the proof.

Essayli dismissed the idea that those charged may have been unaware of what they were doing. “You have to go out of your way to register to vote, it’s not something that just happens to you,” Essayli said.

José Antonio Bañuelos-Díaz, 42, a Mexican national and West Adams resident, appeared in court wearing a reflective vest with the name of a landscaping company, blue jeans and boots with the American flag on them. He’d been on his way to work when he was arrested.

During the hearings, the defendants only spoke to acknowledge that they reviewed and understood the charges against them. In every case, the federal prosecutor said the government was not seeking detention.

The magistrate judge ordered the four released on personal recognizance and said they were not required to be under supervision. They are all set to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on November 9. Their deputy federal public defenders did not respond to a request for comment.

Lliani Orantes, Muñoz’s daughter and a nurse who was born in the U.S., said her father had been hauled out of the family home by federal authorities after they swarmed and cordoned off the block. She said the family was rushing to figure out what happened, including whether Muñoz could have been confused with younger relatives of the same name, including a U.S.-born son who is a registered voter.

Orantes also expressed frustration with the handling of her father’s arrest — to which federal authorities had clearly alerted some media, who were brought along for the raid.

She said her father is recovering from cervical surgery, rotator cuff repair on a shoulder and a double knee replacement, and that he was pulled out of the family’s home “like he was a dog” as part of what she described as a “political ploy, an example used for the operation” — which federal authorities dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”

“They’re trying to instill fear in society,” she said.

“We have so much more in the world to be dealing with, do we really need to focus on these little things that could be taken care of in a different fashion? In a different way? Like, hey, somebody from immigration visit the home,” she said.

Acting United States Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter speaks at a news conference Monday to announce charges against 28 people in California accused of illegally registering to vote as noncitizens.

(David Butow/For The Times)

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — who is defending the state and top election officials for the state and Los Angeles County against a lawsuit from the Justice Department alleging they are not treating alleged voter fraud by noncitizens seriously enough — said Monday that voting illegally is wrong and “one off, isolated incidents” of it should be prosecuted.

But Bonta denied that there is widespread voter fraud in the state, called 28 cases brought out of the 23 million registered voters in California a “drop in the bucket,” and said he’d be watching how those cases play out in court.

“We’ll see what the facts show, and whether they’ll have to drop charges or whether they’ll be able to prosecute,” he said.

About 3 p.m. Monday, the four defendants at the downtown courthouse were released and exited the court room, some to family members waiting in the hallway to hug them.

Domínguez wiped away tears as she recounted her arrest, showing bruises on her wrists from the handcuffs.

“They were accusing me of voter fraud since 2006,” she said. Domínguez said the accusations don’t even make sense considering she has never voted.

“If I would have committed all those frauds about voting registration and whatever they’re saying, since 2006, wouldn’t you imagine that I would have been voting all these other years?” she asked.

In a visual presentation at their news conference, federal authorities alleged that 21 of the 28 people charged had actually voted. Domínguez was not one of them.

Domínguez said she’s been a lawful permanent resident since the late 1980s, and that she applied for U.S. citizenship earlier this year. As part of the application process, she said she told an immigration agent that the only people registered to vote in her household were her husband, who previously became a U.S. citizen, and her daughter, who was born in the country.

Since then, Domínguez said she has just been waiting on the citizenship ceremony, “but it never came through.”

Instead, she was arrested Monday when she was about to leave for work as an administrative assistant.

“I never, ever in my entire life … thought this would ever happen to me,” she said.

Acting U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter stands next to a display showing photos of people charged with illegally registering to vote during a news conference on Monday.

(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Muñoz and his family gathered outside the courthouse. Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he’d been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn’t open the door, they’d break it down.

He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars and several agents from different agencies descending on his home, and recalled thinking, “What movie am I in?”

“That’s a lot of money. Taxpayers paying for that,” he said. “They could have sent me a letter saying report to the court.”

Muñoz — who said he came to the U.S. legally in 1975 and has “paid all my taxes” since — said he explained to the arresting agents that he’d had six surgeries recently and they “didn’t care.” He said he didn’t learn about the charges against him until four hours later.

Muñoz’s son, Omar Muñoz Jr., questioned why federal agents didn’t take his father’s age and ailments into consideration.

“We understand that there’s a procedure that has to be addressed at court. But 5 in the morning, handcuffed? It’s just the way everything was done, and what my mom had to go through. It’s not just an impact on my father’s health, but also on my mom,” he said. “There is a law, we understand that. But innocent until proven guilty.”

Muñoz’s wife, Esmeralda, echoed her son’s questions about why so many agents were deployed to their home.

“Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person,” she said she told a federal agent. “It’s unbelievable.”

Dozens of groups have lined up behind the proposal, including the Trust for Public Land, TreePeople, Friends of the Los Angeles River and many others. At City Hall, the measure is backed by Rodriguez and several other council members as well as City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

Rodriguez and Mejia signed the ballot argument in favor of Charter Amendment PRK, as did Rev. Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, Nicole Chase, president and chief executive of the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley, and several others.

Backers of the measure say the parks department provides an essential safety net for the city’s low-income residents, offering summer camps, sports activities and senior programs for free or at reduced prices.

When temperatures soar, the city’s recreation centers welcome residents who lack air conditioning. During emergencies, those facilities are converted into places of refuge from fires, floods or other disasters.

Despite those varied responsibilities, the department has been underfunded for years, said Tori Kjer, executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, who pushed for the measure to reach the ballot.

“If you talk to many Angelenos, they are unhappy with their local park, and that is because we have not funded it with the resources it needs,” she said.

Kjer said the department never recovered from the 2008 recession, when city leaders cut staffing by more than 25%, leaving it with about 1,500 workers last year. The city also began charging the department for the cost of water, electricity, trash pickup and other city services.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor whose intrepid reporting became a symbol of the network’s global reach and influence, announced Monday she will end her 43-year run in June.

Amanpour, 68, told colleagues in a memo she will step away from her eponymous daily CNN program at the end of the year. She will continue her Saturday program, “The Amanpour Hour,” until May before exiting the following month.

Amanpour was one of CNN’s first breakout stars, traveling the world to report on global hot spots and helping build CNN’s strong reputation for international coverage, especially in war zones. She was front and center as the network delivered images of the first Gulf war, the Bosnian war and conflicts in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran.

Amanpour’s announcement arrives as CNN faces uncertainty under new ownership. Skydance absorbed the network as part of its $111-billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. International bureaus are expected to be the first place where CNN and Skydance’s CBS News are expected to consolidate resources. Deliberations over editorial direction are likely to be intense.

There have been reports of internal strife at the London bureau at CBS News over the tone of its Middle East coverage since Bari Weiss, a strong supporter of Israel, took over as the network’s editor in chief last year. Weiss replaced Claire Day, a longtime veteran of the network, with Shayndi Rice, a former Wall Street Journal editor, overseeing all of the network’s international operations.

In a memo to staff obtained by The Times, CNN Worldwide Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Thompson said he has discussed Amanpour’s future for several months. “Like so many CNNers who will hear the news today, I’m very sorry to see her go, but I’ve come to accept that this is the right time for her, both personally and professionally,” he wrote.

Amanpour did not offer a reason for her departure, devoting most of her memo to thanking the production crews who worked with her over the years. She said she will continue to co-host “The Ex-Files,” a podcast she co-hosts with her ex-husband Jamie Rubin, a former journalist who served in the State Department during the Clinton administration.

Amanpour was born in London and raised in Tehran. Her family fled Iran in 1979 during the Islamic Revolution. She arrived at CNN in 1983, working as a news desk assistant in Atlanta and then at its New York bureau with the ambition of becoming a foreign correspondent.

Amanpour’s reporting from war zones and ability to land interviews with global leaders made her one of the most recognizable journalists in the world. During her time at CNN, she served as a contributor to the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.” She also served as anchor of the ABC News Washington roundtable program “This Week” from August 2010 to December 2011.

Amanpour’s work has been recognized with 16 News and Documentary Emmy Awards, four Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards and three DuPont-Columbia Awards.

Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.

Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.

Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.

State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.

“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”

State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”

“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”

Shifting claims

For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”

When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.

In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.

“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.

The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”

McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.

“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.

McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.

How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.

U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”

Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information,” but required “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.”

Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”

Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.

In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.

She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.

McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.

What’s ahead

Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.

Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.

“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”

McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”

He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider outlawing school diversity policies that limit Asian American students at magnet programs and selective high schools.

Three years ago, the court ruled that Harvard and other universities may not discriminate on whom they admit based on the race of their applicants. Evidence in that case showed that Asian applicants with very high test scores were often turned down.

But the justices have been divided over admissions rules for highly selective high schools in Boston, New York and Fairfax County, Va., as well as magnet programs for gifted middle school students.

In most instances, judges have said school officials may use “race-neutral” policies to achieve racial diversity. For example, giving an automatic admission to the top 5% of the students in all of a big city’s high schools or its middle schools could achieve greater racial and ethnic diversity.

But the court’s conservatives, led by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, have condemned such policies as thinly disguised racial discrimination.

Magnet programs exist across the country, including in California and Los Angeles, and were conceived as a form of voluntary integration — a way to get white students to attend the same schools as nonwhite students, without having to resort to forced busing.

The idea was that a special school program would be attractive enough to serve as a “magnet” for white students to enroll at a school they might not otherwise attend. A mix of white and nonwhite students was seen as a benefit to the nonwhite students, because white students would be sharing the fate of the nonwhite students.

Asian students were frequently part of that original equation on the nonwhite side of the ledger and counted with other students classified as nonwhite, such as Black or Latino students. But in terms of student achievement, Asian students have performed more like white students, frequently surpassing white students academically.

One subset of magnet schools requires a selective admissions process, and these are at the center of the current dispute.

The court agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Montgomery County, Md., who were upset by a sharp drop in Asian students at its four magnet schools for gifted students.

For a decade, the school board had been troubled that fewer than 15% of the students at its magnet schools were Black or Latino, even though they made up about half of the student population.

In contrast, Asian students were less than 15% of the county’s student population but made up about half of the enrolees at the magnet programs.

After several years of debate, school officials dropped the use of a countywide competitive test and chose top performing students at all of its middle schools using a lottery.

That prompted a lawsuit that reached the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Fairfax County in northern Virginia had adopted a somewhat similar policy for the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology. A federal judge ruled for Asian parents and said their students had been deprived of a “level playing field” in competing for admission.

But the 4th Circuit, by a 2-1 vote, disagreed and said Asian American students were still winning more seats than their percentage of the school population.

The Assn. for Education Fairness, the parents group in Montgomery County, lost for the same reason in the 4th Circuit. The number of admitted Asian students had declined, but their percentage remained well above their share of school population.

They appealed and urged the Supreme Court to rule on their case and to clarify the law.

“School districts across the country have overhauled admissions criteria for competitive public schools after concluding that existing systems produced undesirable racial enrollment patterns,” they said.

They said the court should end this type of racial discrimination against Asian students.

However, a longtime champion of admissions policies that rely on social and economic fairness said he hoped the court would side with Montgomery County.

“The Supreme Court has long disfavored racial preferences and pointed to race-neutral programs that look at factors like socioeconomic disadvantage as the right way to do affirmative action,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

He said the Maryland school board followed that rule.

“It essentially provided an admissions break to students based not on race, but on the economic disadvantage of the elementary school they attended. The question now opened is whether the court will stand by precedent or move the goal posts. Is the court opposed to racial preferences, or to racial diversity itself?”

Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, has an extensive magnet system, with 66 whole-school magnets and 268 magnet centers within a larger campus.

At this point, many of the magnets provide no discernible integration benefit and are viewed instead as inducements for any student to enroll. Many magnets are nearly all students of color because few white students apply.

A few schools, however, have more applicants than spaces, and the district relies on “the Magnet Priority Point System and the need to maintain a racially balanced enrollment, and by available space.”

Parents must mark one federally recognized race or ethnicity on the application, or it won’t be processed. A family gets points, for example, if a student applied unsuccessfully for a magnet in the past.

In L.A. Unified, 53 schools are designated for students rated as “gifted,” and there are four campuses with programs for highly gifted students, typically identified by a professional evaluator.

Available recent data for the highly gifted program at North Hollywood High indicated that the largest percentage of students, about 38%, were Asian. Overall, the district’s enrollment is about 3.5% Asian.

The justices will hear arguments in the case early next year.

Savage reported from Washington and Blume from Los Angeles.

MIAMI — More than 100,000 people from Ukraine and Sudan can stay in the United States without immediate risk of deportation, the Department of Homeland Security said, in what amounts to a temporary reprieve after their right to stay in the country was set to expire Monday.

Temporary Protected Status was set to end Oct. 19 for about 101,000 Ukrainians and 1,800 Sudanese. But DHS said an announcement “will be made at the appropriate time.” Until then, the department said in a written statement, Ukrainians and Sudanese in the U.S. covered by those temporary measures “retain protection.” The Department did not indicate how long they could stay or when a final announcement would be made on their status.

DHS did not respond to a question about whether they can keep their work permits, but TPS generally allows people to work while their protections remain in effect.

The decision Monday marks another incident where the Trump administration, which has previously sought to end these temporary protections from deportation and send people back to their home countries, has allowed people covered by the temporary status to stay in the country but without giving any guidance as to how long.

The context of the decisions to keep the protections

The Trump administration has already terminated TPS for more than 1 million people from 13 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Syria.

But in a change in practice roughly a month ago, the administration kept protections in place for nearly 200,000 Salvadorans whose TPS was set to expire Sept. 9. In that case they also said that they were going to make a decision at the appropriate time and that in the meantime, people from El Salvador could continue to work and live in the U.S.

Activists and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been raising the alarm over the upcoming deadline for TPS to expire for Ukrainians, arguing that conditions remain unsafe for them to return home amid the war with Russia.

Ukraine was first designated for TPS in April 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion two months earlier. The Biden administration subsequently extended the designation, most recently in January 2025, when DHS authorized an additional 18 months of protection through October 2026.

The TPS program for Sudan was established in 1997, and since then, successive U.S. administrations have extended it due to the armed conflict and political instability that have plagued the African nation.

The decision Monday comes two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, when Trump’s hard line immigration policies will face a test at the ballot box.

The TPS program has offered protections for decades but is controversial

The U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.

It allows people already in the country to remain and work, for renewable periods if the homeland security secretary determines conditions are unsafe for their return. But it doesn’t give them a pathway to permanent residency.

Supporters say that using this tool protects people from being returned to dangerous situations and that uprooting people covered by TPS after years of living in the U.S. is cruel. Critics, especially in the Trump administration, say successive administrations have extended these protections for years regardless of what has happened in the home countries.

Federal rules say TPS is automatically extended for six months if the secretary doesn’t make a determination at least 60 days before the designation expires.

Advocates are grateful for DHS decision, warn about the war

“We’re grateful for an extension, however temporary, for TPS holders from Ukraine and Sudan,” said Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief, an organization that has provided humanitarian assistance in both countries. “We encourage the administration and Congress to consider longer term relief for women, men and children trying to carve out stability while their countries of origin remain in upheaval.”

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, noted Ukraine and Sudan are not safe and meet the legal conditions for TPS to be extended.

“Russia’s war on Ukraine is nearing its fifth year, and Ukrainians are bracing for another winter under drone and missile strikes, driving civilian casualties and devastating critical infrastructure. Sudan remains locked in a brutal civil war marked by famine, widespread human rights abuses and the hallmarks of genocide,” Vignarajah said. “It is not safe for these families to go home.”

Salomon writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Rebecca Santana contributed to this report from Washington.

MIAMI — Former Cuban President Raúl Castro is facing more charges in Florida related to the 1996 downing of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles after the U.S. government indicted the former leader earlier this year.

Florida Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier on Monday accused Castro, 95, of directing spies to infiltrate the exile group Brothers to the Rescue and ordering the attack on their planes. The state charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder is based largely on a federal indictment announced in May that included charges of murder and destruction of an airplane.

It remains unclear whether Castro will ever step foot in a U.S. courtroom. Uthmeier said the arrest warrant will restrict Castro’s ability leave the island nation and prevent him from traveling to any place with an extradition agreement with the U.S.

“I’m not ignorant of the fact that Raúl Castro is an older man who’s probably not looking to march himself into Miami,” Uthmeier said. “I think others would get him before the court of law would, but at the end of the day, we stand ready to prosecute the case.”

According to the state complaint, Castro was the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and First Vice President of Cuba when he gave the final authorization to shoot down the planes. Cuban Directorate of Intelligence agents operating as part of the Wasp Network in the Miami area and the Florida Keys infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and reported flight plans, investigator said.

On Feb. 24, 1996, three unarmed Cessna aircraft departed Opa-Locka Airport in Miami-Dade County. Well outside Cuba’s territorial waters, Cuban MiGs destroyed two of the civilian planes with air-to-air missiles, killing the four occupants, the complaint said. Both aircraft were traveling away from Cuba and received no warning despite contact with Havana air traffic control, U.S. officials said.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the federal indictment earlier this year a political stunt that sought only to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba.” He accused the U.S. of lying and manipulating events surrounding the shootdown.

“Our historic federal indictment laid the groundwork, and James and his team have now taken the important step of bringing charges under Florida law,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones said at a news conference.

Castro took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel Castro in 2006 before handing power to a trusted loyalist, Díaz-Canel, in 2018.

While he retired in 2021 as head of the Cuban Communist Party, he is widely believed to wield power behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro.

Meanwhile, President Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since U.S. forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Cuban government’s longtime patron.

After ousting the Venezuelan leader earlier this year, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.

Fischer writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday directed the federal government to bolster federal research into women’s health, a move pushed by his wife, first lady Melania Trump.

The Republican president signed an executive order that creates a new women’s health division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force to focus on the issue. That panel was set to hold its first meeting Monday after the Trumps held a Rose Garden signing ceremony.

“Beginning today we will change the reality of women’s health,” Melania Trump said. “Previous generations fought for women’s rights. Our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest.”

The president, who spoke after his wife, said the order will “promote new research and really go after the understudied diseases affecting women.” The order is also intended to promote diagnostic technology and improve treatment.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who recently completed treatment for breast cancer, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the White House task force. Donald Trump said the task force will coordinate with various federal agencies and programs. The order does not include specific funding goals.

The initiative comes after a series of meetings the first lady had with federal health officials.

The president called it a “historic action” and praised the first lady’s work.

“She’s accomplished so much,” he said before pivoting into unscripted commentary on White House renovations, including the patio stone that now covers what was once the Rose Garden lawn.

Shifting back to women’s health, the president expressed surprise that some of the order’s requirements had not already been imposed.

“Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?” he said, after recalling that he’d asked Melania Trump, “Are you sure they don’t have that?”

The executive order calls for targeting maternal health, mental health and endometriosis. It also mentions other health concerns and diseases, including Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, heart disease and stroke.

Melania Trump helped shape the order and the task force in consultation with physicians, White House officials, Kennedy and the Republican president. The initiative adds a new dimension to her policy portfolio as first lady.

In Donald Trump’s second term, the first lady has focused on improving foster care systems and expanding technology and artificial-intelligence access in education. In Trump’s first presidency, the first lady’s signature initiative, Be Best, focused on child well-being, safe social media use and reducing drug abuse.

The White House ceremony comes weeks before Nov. 3 elections and as Donald Trump’s job approval ratings have declined, including among women.

About 4 in 10 independent women supported Trump during the 2024 election against Democrat Kamala Harris and in the pre-presidency period, according to AP-NORC polls. That dropped to around a quarter in the opening months of this midterm election year, the period marked by Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown in U.S. cities and the opening weeks of the Iran war.

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

The opposition delegation, comprising members of Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, sits opposite its regime counterparts during the latest round of talks. Source: Jorge Rodríguez via X. 

In recent days, pressure regarding the timeline for political change has intensified, a sense of urgency that I both understand and share. To the long years of democratic struggle, we must add the dire economic and social conditions that afflict us. The urgency is real, and I share it. 

This is why this sense of urgency is shared. We all want to reach democracy without any further delay. It is in no one’s interest to postpone political change. Whether one is sitting at the negotiating table, viewing it with suspicion, or opposing it entirely, we all want the same thing: to arrive at democracy as soon as possible.

Acknowledging this common ground is essential. To suggest that this shared goal divides us is untrue and undermines future stability; it is a strategic error. Who benefits from fracturing what unites us? Who gains from destroying the common ground we have built over the years?

Therefore, I believe our differences do not lie in our shared destination, but rather in the path that circumstances have allowed us to take toward it. This reflection is precisely what gives this article its title: “It’s a transition, not a revolution.”

The revolution that never was

For years, we worked toward a “clean slate.” Paradoxically, we dreamed of a revolution. We longed for the moment when chavismo would pack up its belongings and relinquish power. Perhaps this shared expectation stemmed from our tradition of seeking radical ruptures. For many reasons, we hoped that Maduro would simply fly away. But that did not happen.

Instead, on July 28, 2024, chavismo stole the election, subjected us to repression, and clung to power. We did everything in our power to defeat them, and it was not enough. We reached the absolute limit of democratic resilience and paid the price for fighting for our country. Then came January 3, 2026. On that day, a foreign military operation took Nicolás Maduro away, but left the Rodríguez faction behind. That is how it happened, and that is how it remains.

The Trump administration did what we either could not or would not do. Time will allow us to process the weight of that reality, and I do not intend to dwell on it here. For now, I will simply point out the obvious: the United States took risks, opened the door to a new political landscape, and became the most influential actor in the power equation. To put it plainly: they paid for the party, and now they are calling the tune.

The time for this “feast of bitter pills” has arrived, and we are discovering that swallowing them is far more difficult than we had imagined.

Perhaps some reader, channeling an inner Che Guevara, might accuse me of treason. Well, my dear rebellious reader, that is not the case. Acknowledging this reality is entirely compatible with a love for our country; it does not make me a sellout. The United States removed Maduro and opened the door to a transition toward democracy. It may not be the transition we dreamed of or planned for, but it is the one that is actually possible. What followed the dictator’s capture was not a revolution, but the beginning of a transition—a process of gradual, progressive change driven by institutional reforms and political consensus.

Unlike revolutions, which seek a radical break from the previous order, transitions do not start from scratch. Instead, they identify elements from the old regime that can survive and transform them to fit within the new democratic order that is being built. It is a matter of profound change without having to destroy everything, of transforming existing institutions to place them at the service of democracy. And that is what we are working on.

A feasible transition

Given this, the practical question is how to reconcile the genuine sense of urgency—which unites us—with the timeframes required for a transition. I do not have a definitive answer to this question. However, I would like to share three tasks that could contribute to the transition.

First, we must learn to swallow bitter pills. 

For years, we were warned that, when the time came, we would face an extensive menu of pills—a metaphor for the unpopular measures, difficult concessions, and uncomfortable decisions that would inevitably come with a process of political change.

We listened, took note, and pressed on. Well, the time for this “feast of pills” has arrived, and we are discovering that swallowing them is far more difficult than we had imagined. Now, it is urgent that we learn how to do so—and, above all, that we create the conditions to ensure that every sacrifice is worth it.

I have no ready-made formulas for this task. Each person will have to find their own way to confront these contradictions, to process the inconveniences and the costs that must be borne. What is clear to me is that we must learn to do so without losing sight of the causes for which we have fought for so many years.

The nature of the political change now beginning to emerge demands a process of collective healing, one that will require both time and maturity.

Second, we must engage in civic education. 

We need to take the time to speak to the nation and explain what is unfolding. We must also be capable of putting ourselves in the shoes of others, understanding that our distrust runs deep, nurtured by decades of deception, broken promises, and accumulated frustrations.

The leadership required at this moment must be democratic and empathetic, one willing to listen, understand, engage in dialogue, and build. More than thirty years of persecution and repression have left deep wounds in our national soul. The nature of the political change now beginning to emerge demands a process of collective healing, one that will require both time and maturity.

This process will not be resolved through staged photographs or superficial gestures. I am speaking of a profound, human, and authentic effort toward recognition, acceptance, and reparation—a task that allows us to rediscover one another as a society, take ownership of our history, and regain the trust necessary to build a shared future.

Third, we must offer certainty to everyone. Venezuelans do not lack patience; what we lack is the certainty needed to navigate the tunnel that lies ahead. We are capable of enduring sacrifices, but we need to know that these efforts will be worth it. If we can see that light at the end of the tunnel, we will have reason to remain patient and perseverant.

The certainties we can offer today must be built step by step—through actions, commitments, and results

Perhaps this is the most difficult challenge of all. Transitions toward democracy are inevitably marked by uncertainty and a lack of transparency. One need only read the memoirs or listen to the testimonies of those who lived through similar experiences to recognize ourselves in their dilemmas, contradictions, fears, and hopes. There is something profoundly human in those stories that feels familiar to us.

That is why political education, the building of consensus, and the gradual restoration of democratic dynamics are so important. They serve as ways to provide guidance amidst uncertainty, rebuild trust, and give meaning to the sacrifices we are called upon to make. The certainties we can offer today must be built step by step—through actions, commitments, and results that allow Venezuelans to recognize that we are moving toward democracy.

From desirable outcomes to real possibilities

One of our greatest challenges is to accept that the revolution we wanted to bring about for so many years was not to be, and that today we are facing a transition currently in the making. Its success will depend, in large part, on our ability to understand the nature of this process, to embrace reality—with all its possibilities and limitations—and to learn how to navigate the path that has opened up before us.

We will need to do so with intelligence, patience, generosity, and a sense of historical responsibility. Above all, we must act in unity, placing Venezuela above our differences. Because, in the end, that is what it is all about: seizing the opportunity we have to build the democracy for which we have fought so hard.

WASHINGTON — Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander adults have become more disillusioned with President Trump and Republicans as the Nov. 3 midterm elections approach, according to a new AP-NORC/AAPI Data poll, giving Democrats a substantial edge on major issues like the economy and health care.

The survey, which was conducted from Sept. 8-15 by AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, reveals that Trump’s standing on the economy has fallen among AAPI adults over the course of his second term.

About one-quarter of AAPI adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president overall. Only about 2 in 10 approve of his performance on the economy, which the vast majority of AAPI adults see as one of the most important issues for the upcoming election.

But although AAPI adults trust Democrats more than Republicans on a wide range of issues, views of the Democratic Party itself are still split.

Rebecca Larocco, a 45-year-old Korean American in Corning, Iowa, voted for Trump in 2016 and is leaning Republican in the midterm elections. She approves of his immigration policies but is unsure about Trump’s handling of the economy as the Iran war continues to compound gas prices.

“Where I’m at, it’s went up almost $1.50 (a gallon),” she said. “I didn’t expect to go into war at all, that has been definitely unexpected and I’m not sure… I’m just hoping they’ll do what they’re saying and get our economy back on track, get immigration and crime lowered.”

The economy is a top issue for AAPI adults

The economy remains top of mind for an overwhelming majority of the AAPI adult population when they consider the midterms. With the ongoing Iran war affecting gas prices and other costs staying elevated, Americans overall are deeply pessimistic about the state of the economy and see it as a high priority for the midterms. That includes AAPI adults — according to the poll, about 9 in 10 rank the economy as one of the most important issues for the upcoming election, and about 8 in 10 say this about the cost of living.

The economy, the cost of living and healthcare dwarf other issues for AAPI adults. About 7 in 10 AAPI adults say healthcare is one of the most important issues for the election, while only about half say this about foreign policy, crime, immigration, election fairness or climate change.

At the same time, Trump’s economic approval among AAPI adults has dropped about 10 percentage points over the course of the year, and there are other signs his popularity has waned with this group. In late 2024, just after the election, about 4 in 10 AAPI adults had a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of Trump. That’s fallen to about 3 in 10 now.

“What the data show is that any gains that he made not only during the 2024 election — there was a bit of a honeymoon period that Trump enjoyed after the election before Inauguration Day — that has now largely disappeared,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder and executive director of AAPI Data.

Len Takahashi, 57, of Universal City, Texas, describes himself as conservative but voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections and for Republicans in midterm elections. For this midterm election, he is simply open to candidates who prioritize the economy.

“I would like policies that look in the best interest of the American public,” said Takahashi, who is Japanese American. “That could be bringing down spending, a balanced budget of U.S. spending, bringing down inflation, working towards a more stable economy and, lastly, just a better atmosphere between the far left and far right.”

AAPIs trust Democrats more on most issues but are not entirely sold on the party

Democrats have gained at Republicans’ expense since Trump returned to the White House when it comes to AAPI adults’ trust in handling many key issues.

In a March 2025 poll, AAPI adults were evenly divided over which political party would better handle the economy and immigration. Now, Democrats have a roughly 20-percentage-point advantage on both issues.

Meanwhile, around two-thirds of AAPI adults have a “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable view of the GOP. Only about one-quarter have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view.

But while trust in the Democrats on specific issues has increased, AAPI adults are ambivalent about the party as a whole. About half, 48%, of AAPI adults have a “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party, while 44% have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable impression.

A separate AP-NORC survey of registered voters in September found, similarly, that while voters in general are deeply dissatisfied with Trump and the GOP, few think either party is capable of solving important problems.

Louise Rider, 40, is a Democrat living in Chicago. She believes Democrats are better than Republicans across all issues but says she’s unhappy with how the party has governed.

“I don’t think the Democrats are doing great, I think they need a lot of change as a party,” she said. “It’s kind of a helpless feeling, that nothing will get done with both parties unless there’s major changes.”

Some Republicans still stand behind Trump. James Finley, 74, of Lenox, Massachusetts, said Trump deserves some understanding because he cannot bring down high prices overnight. When it comes to Republicans in general, Finley is a little more critical.

“They’ve had the majority for a couple of years,” said Finley, whose ancestry includes Japanese heritage. “I think they could have done a little bit more or maybe a lot more in terms of passing certain things that I wanted to pass.”

Still, he sticks to the party line and because “all I ever hear from Democrats is to get Trump,” Finley said.

AAPIs concerned about fair midterm elections

As the election approaches, many AAPI adults are worried about problems with misinformation, legal challenges to the results, and voter suppression. About half of AAPI adults say it’s a “major problem” in U.S. elections that people who are eligible are not allowed to vote, while about two-thirds see foreign government attempts to influence results as a “major” problem.

Looking ahead to the November election, about half of AAPI adults are “extremely” or “very” concerned about fake or false information about the candidates, and about half also feel this way about legal challenges to the election results.

Finley is unsure if the voting process can be tightly monitored to prevent undocumented or unregistered people from attempting to vote.

But Takahashi, the conservative from Texas, is worried that Trump will try to manipulate the election.

He’s concerned, he said, that Trump would amplify claims of “fraud in the election system” should the midterms not go in his favor. “(He’ll) make that a point to distract the American public,” he said.

Tang, Jiang and Sanders write for the Associated Press. Tang reported from Phoenix and Jiang from New York. The poll of 1,023 U.S. adults who are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander was conducted Sept. 8-15, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based Amplify AAPI Panel, designed to be representative of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is ±4.7 percentage points. This poll is part of an ongoing project exploring the views of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, which are usually not highlighted in other surveys because of small sample sizes and lack of linguistic representation.

The measure aims to tackle the cost of what it takes to run a campaign and to broaden the pool of people who could run for office without being tethered to any individual, group or special interest.

“The increasing costs of political campaigns can force candidates to rely on large contributions from wealthy donors and special interests, which can give those wealthy donors and special interests disproportionate influence over governmental decisions,” the measure states.

There have been several attempts to allow for public campaign financing in California. Five charter cities, including Los Angeles, and at least 14 other states already allow some version of it.

“This bill will restore control to local governments and the state by giving counties, districts, general law cities, and the state the same option that charter cities currently have to enact public financing of campaigns,” a Senate rules committee analysis states.

SACRAMENTO —  When does positive reform become negative regression? That’s what Californians need to answer before voting on Proposition 45, which would substantially change the state’s landmark environmental protection law.

The business-backed ballot measure would make it much easier and less costly to build loads of projects — not just housing, but also water works, clean energy and transportation facilities.

It also, however, would give citizens much less time and fewer tools to assess and oppose projects they deem unfit for their area — like freeway expansions or giant warehouses.

“It tips the scale from favoring the public and the environment to favoring developers and polluting projects,” asserts state Sen. Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas), chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee.

“It’s an overreach.”

“We streamline the building process for billionaires to erect stadiums. Why don’t we do it for middle-class homebuyers?” declares Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Assn., a major backer of Proposition 45.

It’s a bitter, high-stakes fight that’s too close to call. Polling has indicated the outcome could be decided in the final days before the Nov. 3 election.

Proposition 45 would be the most significant overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act since Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan signed it in 1970.

CEQA — as it’s commonly called and used as a four-letter obscenity by developers — is justifiably credited with keeping California air less polluted, water relatively clean, urban traffic from being worse and more outdoors open to the public.

It requires developers — private and public — to undergo a lengthy process of analyzing a project’s environmental effects and reducing their negative impacts.

But over the years CEQA became blatantly abused.

Union blackmailers — ”greenmailers” — threatened frivolous CEQA lawsuits unless developers caved to labor demands. Business rivals drove off potential competitors by filing protracted suits that wore down investors. NIMBYs — ”not in my backyard” — fought local projects that crowded their spaces or blocked views.

As a CEQA battle dragged on, the developers’ costs soared and many cut their losses by abandoning the project. Home building plummeted in California and the law of supply and demand ruled. Housing costs skyrocketed.

Project opponents legitimately concerned about environmental impacts also filed lawsuits, but they weren’t the developer’s big problem — not like the CEQA abusers.

Finally, prodded by Gov. Gavin Newsom, lawmakers have been responding in recent years to the developers’ frustration. They’ve been pecking away at CEQA with meaningful reforms for most types of housing, especially urban apartment projects near transit hubs.

“You’ve got to just move things,” Newsom exclaimed at an economic summit in Long Beach last week. “I’m just done with the [CEQA] litigation…. Years and years of B.S…. Eight years to develop something? Give me a break.”

But the nearly termed-out governor still hadn’t taken a position on Proposition 45.

Money and power, of course, have always had their privileges in the state Capitol. Billionaire sports team owners have had no trouble securing CEQA exemptions for construction of new stadiums or arenas. The exemptions are handed out like free bobbleheads.

In fact, Newsom recently signed legislation essentially granting a CEQA exemption in San Diego for a 16,000-seat sports arena and housing project led by Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke.

Dunmoyer says that lawmakers “have done quite a bit” to expedite housing, “although not quite enough. It has been limited in scope and size — limited to urban infill and close to transit. It doesn’t address the overwhelming amount of housing needs in California.

“It doesn’t help the first-time middle-class homebuyers or address market rate rentals.”

He pegs the cost of a CEQA battle at $75,000 per new home, noting that’s added to the selling price — if the dwelling ever gets built.

Opponents of Proposition 45 argue that the measure’s backers wish to return California home building to 1960s sprawl when the state’s population was half its current size and there was more usable open space to pave over with roads and subdivisions — more orchards to rip up and wetlands to drain. And that led to longer smog-spewing car commutes to city jobs.

“Sprawl housing is not affordable housing,” Blakespear says. “There are costs to build new infrastructure like utility lines and water facilities, and high insurance costs. Then taxpayers have to clean up the pollution.

“Do we really want new sprawl housing developments in wildfire areas? We need to incentivize [urban] infill housing, instead of in the middle of the forest or the desert.”

Proposition 45 — generated by the state Chamber of Commerce — would streamline the CEQA approval process for several types of construction projects the measure deems “essential.” They include housing, water systems, clean energy, health facilities, jails, fire stations, wildfire reduction, broadband access and transportation.

Two very controversial projects were excluded — the bullet train and delta tunnel —
and so was nuclear power.

Opponents insist that the proposition eases the way for construction of massive data centers. But backers adamantly deny it, and they make sense. The anti-45 campaign is trying to scare voters with a Halloween bogeyman.

But there’s plenty of other ugly and smelly potential projects that could benefit.

If this were solely about housing, it wouldn’t ring so many alarms.

Here’s how I see it: We elect a governor and Legislature to handle such complex issues. Let them — especially the new governor, presumably Xavier Becerra — consider enacting new CEQA reforms, holding months of public hearings and ultimately compromising on a deal.

OK, maybe that’s dreaming. But it beats voters trying to wrap their heads around this in a few days.

Unlike regular legislation, if the ballot measure did pass and flaws emerged, it would be very hard for lawmakers to amend, requiring a two-thirds vote.

Proposition 45 rolls back CEQA protections too far — especially with a dangerous anti-environment California abuser in the Oval Office.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: ‘He’s everywhere’: This California Republican wants to make his party relevant again
CA vs. Trump: Big assertions, sharp exchanges, little clarity define DOJ election battle with California
The L.A. Times Special: Voter guide to the 2026 California general election

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

SACRAMENTO — He made millions playing an indestructible action hero in the movies, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sounded altogether mortal as he talked for the first time Wednesday about the pain and frustration he has felt since his holiday skiing accident.

At a news conference where he released his new budget, Schwarzenegger told reporters that since his surgery two weeks ago he has been in continuous pain.

“The operation was a very complicated operation,” he said, “and I don’t think I can ever remember having had pain — ongoing pain, 24 hours a day — like after this operation.”

In a statement put out last month after the Dec. 23 accident, the governor’s doctor described the surgery planned for Schwarzenegger as routine.

Schwarzenegger had previously said nothing publicly about his accident, and his staff had refused to confirm reports that the governor tripped and fell while standing on a mountain slope in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Adi Erber, a ski instructor who was with the governor at the time, said Schwarzenegger’s pole got caught in one of his skis, causing the fall. Schwarzenegger was then carried down the slope on a toboggan and taken to a hospital.

Asked for his own account of how the accident happened, Schwarzenegger offered a few details about his complicated medical history, which has included steroid use, a heart valve replacement, a torn rotator cuff and broken ribs. He said that he has also had an artificial hip put in — a procedure that, he maintained, helped cause the leg break.

Schwarzenegger said that because he was moving “at a very slow speed,” his ski stayed on.

Had he been moving fast, he said, the ski would have popped off, probably sparing him any real injury.

“I had an artificial hip that was replaced around five years ago,” he said. “Because it was vulnerable, the ski torqued the leg, and it broke the femur because of that. If I were to have that accident at 50 mph — and many times I’ve crashed at that speed — nothing happens.

“So this is what the unfortunate thing was.”

Soon after the injury, speculation bubbled up that the governor’s steroid use might have left his bones weakened, making him more susceptible to a break. Schwarzenegger has admitted using steroids when he was a champion bodybuilder.

The governor’s office released a statement from his orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Kevin Ehrhart, addressing the steroid question.

“Any suggestion that Gov. Schwarzenegger’s injury was sustained as a result of anabolic steroid use is wrong and has no basis in fact,” Ehrhart said. “His bone was completely healthy and rock solid.”

Normally upbeat in his public appearances, Schwarzenegger said the accident has left him shaken. He has looked thinner and somewhat drawn since the surgery.

At his inauguration last week, First Lady Maria Shriver clutched the governor’s arm as he took the oath of office — as if holding him up — and handed him bottled water afterward. Shriver also attended the governor’s budget address.

Schwarzenegger suggested Shriver has been at the receiving end of his darkened mood.

“So it’s really annoying to me, and believe me, there’s nothing I hate more than having an obstacle like this. So this is very frustrating to me. It’s very tough on my wife.

“When I get frustrated and have those obstacles, I’m very angry a lot of times,” he said, “and so I’m working through all of this and trying to get rid of this problem as soon as I can.”

peter.nicholas@latimes.com

While Republican Steve Hilton has spent months jackrabbiting around California during his long-shot bid for governor, Democratic front runner Xavier Becerra just recently emerged from quasi hibernation and stepped into political daylight.

Hilton has blasted Becerra as taking the state’s voters for granted, failing to hold public campaign events to explain his detailed plans to address California’s many ills. Despite pledging to participate in multiple debates, Becerra brushed aside several invitations, agreeing to just a solitary one-hour face-off against Hilton on CNN in late September.

That month, Hilton held 14 public events, a dozen more than Becerra, but the Democrat’s spokesperson said he appeared at multiple functions sponsored by other groups. Hilton wasn’t buying it.

“He is a useless nothing, a totally unaccomplished pipsqueak who is so smug, so arrogant, so entitled, that he somehow thinks he’s owed this job just because he was picked as a useful puppet by the Sacramento machine,” Hilton, a former Fox News commentator and British political strategist, said last week in West Sacramento.

On Oct. 10, Becerra, a longtime member of Congress and Biden’s secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, scoffed at his GOP rival.

“Uh, hello?” Becerra said sarcastically to reporters in Sacramento after being asked about his absence from the campaign trail.

“That Steve Hilton doesn’t see me on Fox News is his problem, not mine. I am gonna talk to voters,” Becerra said, rattling off a list of his recent campaign events. “I will talk to them until November the 3rd, and then I’ll be ready to talk to voters and taxpayers and the people of California when I’m the next governor.”

On Thursday, Becerra held a news conference in downtown Los Angeles with Latino leaders and famed Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez urging voters to turn out despite alleged intimidation efforts by the Trump administration.

On Monday, he held get-out-the-vote events in Santa Clarita and Glendale, shortly after he campaigned for former state Sen. Richard Pan, a congressional candidate, in Sacramento, and urged voters to cast their ballots early at an event in Santa Rosa. In September, Becerra promoted Proposition 1, a proposal on the November ballot that would allow the state to sell nearly $11.3 billion in bonds to fund affordable housing.

“We know we can get these men and women who are wearing these orange vests to work and keep them working, so they can afford to buy a house if we pass Proposition 1,” Becerra said, standing alongside union members in front of a chain-link fence encircling a vacant lot in North Long Beach.

Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra held a news conference in Long Beach on Sept. 4 to highlight his housing agenda.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who endorsed Becerra in April and appeared at the housing event, pushed back on the notion that Becerra is taking the election for granted after winning a top spot in the primary, positioning him to be the first Mexican American elected governor of California.

“I’ve seen firsthand the work that has taken place under the radar that may not be explicitly, openly political or openly be seen as campaigning, but it is the kind of thing you want to see,” Richardson said in an interview on Thursday, adding that he saw Becerra meeting with elected officials of both parties, the mayors of the state’s largest cities and labor leaders. “I’ve seen a very active candidate that has been making sure that real time was put into building relationships that will ultimately translate to a successful governorship, because that’s the goal. I mean, ultimately, what we want is a leader who has the relationships to lead our state.”

Becerra’s campaign said that the candidate has frequently met with voters since the primary without press coverage to hear from Californians, and that he would be a frequent public presence in the weeks before the election, when “voters really get engaged, when ballots land in their mailbox,” said spokesman Jonathan Underland.

“People have incredibly busy lives. They are worried about affording their healthcare, putting food on the table, paying for gas to fill their tank,” Underland said. “What is at the forefront of Secretary Becerra’s mind is the very real problems that Californians are facing every day.”

In contrast, Hilton has been publicly barnstorming California since the June primary.

Becerra’s schedule is not surprising given Democratic dominance in California, where the party’s registered voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1. While appearing at parades, pancake breakfasts and in voters’ living rooms can be effective for candidates running in local campaigns, the most effective way for candidates to reach voters in a state as vast as California is through sustained advertising buys, which can cost tens of millions of dollars.

“If you’re the Democrat running in California, the operating theme of your campaign is do no harm and measure the drapes and figure out how you’re going to put an administration together and what is the tone that you’re going to set for that administration,” said Tim Rosales, a veteran GOP consultant who led businessman John Cox’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial campaign and previously worked on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful effort to replace Gov. Gray Davis in the 2003 recall campaign.

Newsom was more active in the 2018 general election campaign against Cox than Becerra has been this year, but Rosales argued that could be because Becerra views it as the final chapter of his political career, which also may have been the case with former Gov. Jerry Brown in his 2014 reelection campaign. Newsom, however, is pondering a 2028 run for the White House.

“This is potentially more of a swan song for Xavier Becerra, the icing on the cake for a long and distinguished political career, and for Gavin Newsom, it was a stepping stone,” Rosales said.

Becerra has raised $40.5 million, as of Friday, while Hilton has raised $29 million, according to the fundraising disclosure reports filed with the state. Those figures do not include the exponential advantage that Becerra had in independent expenditure committees’ spending over Hilton in the primary.

Veteran Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, an advisor to Schwarzenegger, said that while Becerra will almost certainly be the state’s next governor, he should be cautious about his approach weeks before the November election.

“What he needs to be careful of is a big Democratic night across the United States that looks muted in California, and if that happens, the analysis will be that it’s his fault,” Stutzman said. “He should want to optimize his political capital as the clear leader of his party now in California. So he has to be a little careful of leaving some political capital on the table by not creating a stronger brand over the next three weeks.”

The last gubernatorial race that was viewed as competitive took place in 2010 between Brown and former eBay chief Meg Whitman, then a Republican who spent $144 million of her personal wealth on her campaign.

That contest drew national attention, but Brown beat Whitman by nearly 13 percentage points. Every gubernatorial election since that race has been sleepy and ignored in national politics, with Democratic candidates coasting to victory. The state has seen contentious gubernatorial primaries, notably in 2018, and this year, when the Democratic field was so crowded that party leaders urged low-polling candidates, including Becerra, to drop out.

He won the top spot in the primary after then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) dropped out amid rape and sexual assault allegations.

Mason Harrison, who worked for Republicans Carly Fiorina in a 2010 Senate bid and Neel Kashkari in a 2014 gubernatorial campaign, and worked with Hilton on business ventures but is not affiliated with his campaign, noted that while Brown was well-known by Californians because of decades in the public eye, Becerra is not. However, given Democrats’ edge in the state’s voter registration, as well as current headwinds against the GOP in California and across the nation, it’s unsurprising that Becerra has been less visible than Hilton. Harrison compared Becerra’s campaign to Biden’s in 2024 before the then-president bowed out of the race.

“The calculus seems to be, the more he gets out on the campaign trail, the greater the potential of him having a misstep in an interview or getting some tough question that he’s going to have to answer, and what’s the advantage of that in a year when you’re running against a party that, by historical standards, stands to lose significantly,” Harrison said. “Why make it more competitive by making yourself more vulnerable?”

Indeed, Becerra previously committed to multiple debates, but has participated in one so far and appears unlikely to agree to another. Still, he has repeatedly disputed the notion that he is taking the race for granted.

“If I were trying to coast, I’d be out on the coast right now instead of here with you all,” he told reporters one sweltering August afternoon in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, an area he represented in Congress.

Xavier Becerra, center, walks with Helen Ota, left, president of the 2026 Nisei Week Foundation, while touring businesses and meeting with business community leaders at Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles on Aug. 18.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

While there, he met with local business and community leaders. And he bought merchandise and delicacies, including a sweet mango mochi wrapped in a thin, fluffy pancake at a 123-year-old Japanese confectionery.

Times staff writer Nicole Nixon contributed to this report from Sacramento.