Politics Desk

It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.

So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.

Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”

Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet on Feb. 2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared that a war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”

And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.

“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.”

No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.

So of course Trump did it.

As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.

Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real-estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.

A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.

But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.

President Trump speaks as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador listens during an event in the White House Rose Garden on July 8, 2020.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.

“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”

No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”

Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.

No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.

Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark and constantly referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.

Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies.

Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught — our relationship is just too complicated. But when another American president marked the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far different.

In 1947, Harry S. Truman became the first U.S. commander in chief to visit Mexico City. At a state dinner at the National Palace, he acknowledged that “it would be foolish to pretend that fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”

People visit the monument to the Niños Héroes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on Aug. 14, 2019.

(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Images)

But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.

“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”

The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.

“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”

Today, “Viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.

The latest nauseant from MAGA types pretending to care about children was dished up last week, but amid the internment of kindergartners, the slashing of funds to catch child predators and a measles outbreak at a detention center, you are forgiven for missing it.

I am talking about a coordinated campaign launched by the religious right to overturn gay marriage, arguing it harms children. The effort is a direct attack on the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges decision making same-sex marriage a fundamental right of equality under the 14th Amendment, but also seeks to engage churches on the issue and change public opinion.

Good luck with that last part. Most Americans support marriage equality. But the Supreme Court? That’s much iffier these days.

But what disturbs me the most, while we wait for litigation, is that the campaign is yet another disingenuous ploy by MAGA to use children as an excuse for attacking civil rights, and attempting, Christian nationalist-style, to impose religious values on general society.

MAGA frames so much hate — especially around immigrants and diversity — as protection of children, and through decades’ worth of conspiracy theory has attempted to paint LGBTQ+ parents as deviant and predatory. (QAnon, for example, was all about saving kids from gay and Democratic predators.)

In reality, it’s the MAGA folks who are traumatizing children.

“Our children are afraid. They’re terrorized,” Chauntyll Allen told me. She’s the St. Paul, Minn., school board member who was arrested recently for her part in the church protest of a pastor who is also an ICE official.

“And we’re not just talking about immigrants,” she continued. All kids “are watching this, they’re experiencing this, and they’re carrying the terror in their body. What is this going to do for our society in 20 years?”

This campaign to undo marriage equality, far from protecting kids, is just another injury inflicted on them for political gain. It features two California cases that are meant to show how terrible any form of same-sex parenting is, but mischaracterizes the facts for maximum outrage.

The campaign also specifically targets in vitro fertilization and surrogacy as dangerous gateways to promoting LGBTQ+ families, an increasingly common position in far-right religious circles that would like to see more white women having babies through sex with white husbands.

Attacking marriage equality isn’t about protecting children any more than deporting immigrants is about stopping crime. Allowing it to be framed that way actually puts in danger the stability of the approximately 300,000 kids nationwide who are being raised by about 832,000 couples in same-sex marriages.

It endangers the physical and mental health of LGBTQ+ kids in any family who are growing up in a world that is increasingly hostile to them — with gender and identity hate crimes on the rise.

And it endangers everyone who values a free and fair democracy that separates church and state by eroding the rights of the vulnerable as precedent for eroding the rights of whomever ticks them off next. If LGBTQ+ marriages aren’t legally protected, how long before racists come for the Loving decision, which legalized interracial marriage?

If you doubt the MAGA agenda extends that far, when Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced her fourth pregnancy, one lovely fellow on social media wrote, “There is nothing exciting about this. We will never vote for your race traitor husband.”

Hate is a virus that spreads how it pleases.

Those behind the effort to undo marriage equality say that by legalizing the ability for LGBTQ+ folks to tie the knot, America put “adult desires” ahead of children’s well-being, which is dependent on being raised in a home that includes a married man and woman.

Never mind the millions of kids being raised by single parents, grandparents (looking at you, JD Vance) or other guardians who aren’t the biological John-and-Jane mommy and daddy of conservative lore. Never mind the many same-sex marriages that don’t include kids.

“Americans need to understand the threat that gay marriage poses to children and that natural marriage is directly connected to children protection,” Katy Faust, the leader of the campaign, said in an interview with a Christian news website.

Of course, the campaign also makes no mention of the hundreds of children currently held in detention camps around the country — on some days, the number of children locked up just by ICE (not Border Patrol or in the care of other agencies) has skyrocketed to 400 under Trump, according to the Marshall Project.

Outside of lockup, Black and brown children are being traumatized daily by the fear that they or their parents will be taken or even killed by federal agents. Thousands of kids across the country, including in California, have stopped going to school and other public places for fear of endangering themselves or their families. Don’t expect to see these folks campaigning to protect those kids.

The campaign also ignores the fact that U.S. Department of Justice funding to combat sex crimes against children was just slashed, leaving victims and prosecutors without crucial resources to fight that real and undoubtedly harmful exploitation of our youth by sex traffickers.

And Epstein. I cannot even start on save-the-children folks who seemingly ignore the victims of the sex crimes detailed in those files — many of them children at the time — while wringing their hands over families who don’t look like their own. It is a mind-blowing amount of hypocrisy.

But of course, none of this is about saving children — yours, mine or anyone’s.

But framing it around protecting children is a powerful manipulation — a last-ditch effort as same sex marriage does in fact become more accepted. Because who doesn’t want to save our kids? From whatever.

Don’t be surprised if this effort gains traction in coming months. As we head into elections, the MAGA machine will attempt to turn the lens away from immigration and back to old-school issues such as feminism, abortion and same-sex marriage, which time and again its base has been willing to vote on regardless of what else is happening.

Because they actually don’t care about kids. They care about power, and they’re perfectly willing to exploit kids to get it.

MINNEAPOLIS — The sites of the three consequential deaths span just over two miles of south Minneapolis. George Floyd in 2020, Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month.

The death of Floyd, after a police officer dug a knee into his neck for more than nine minutes, was a catalyst for the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that sought law enforcement reforms and accountability.

Those of Good and Pretti, shot by federal immigration agents, have similarly sparked demands that federal agents to stop using violence in pursuit of President Trump’s mass deportation effort.

The sites are close enough to walk in an hour. So, on Sunday, I did.

Mementos, drawings, signs and flowers are covered by fresh snow outside of Unity Foods where George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.

George Floyd

Floyd was killed just outside of Cup Foods, since renamed Unity Foods. On a wall outside the convenience store, Esther Osayande’s painting “Sankofa” depicts a bird with its head turned back, surrounded by flames.

The description says it is a metaphorical symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana to express “the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present.”

“Sankofa tells us that we as a people can rise above conflicts of ego and treat all beings we meet as brothers and sisters,” it states.

On the same wall, someone spray painted, “My cries are 4 humanity.”

The memorial, known locally as George Floyd Square, encompasses a nearby covered bus stop, where a visitor had written that “race is a made up idea to keep ppl down.” Against the shelter glass, someone had taped a typed notice of emergency. It lists “martyrs” killed by authorities — Good, Floyd, Philando Castile and others before them.

“This ICE operation is somehow simpler AND more malicious than the kill count accumulated by our PD,” the notice reads. “This is slave catching. This is gestapo.”

A memorial to Renee Good at the location where she was shot in Minneapolis.

Nearly six years after Floyd’s death, some of the memorial art has begun to fade under the sun. A metal archway gives way to a plastic A-frame board describing Floyd and the global movement that his murder inspired.

“George’s name has become a rallying cry for those who believe in a better future, one where all people are treated with dignity and respect,” it reads.

Few people gathered at the memorial Sunday morning, but real and fake flowers, blanketed by snow, covered the site. A family with children got out of an SUV and walked around. A young photographer snapped some shots. And a couple took their time weaving through the makeshift garden.

Floyd’s cousin Paris Stevens is co-chair of Rise and Remember, which preserves the memorial and leads tours of the area. She said the organization wanted to give the community a safe space to grieve, “because everybody has lost someone.”

The thread linking the deaths of her cousin, Good and Pretti, Stevens said, is that they all could have been prevented. The fact that people have begun to visit all three sites is a sign of how unjust killings bring out the humanity in people, she said.

“How do we care for one another in times of need?” she asked. The answer, in part, is found in the artwork, writings and flowers at the three memorials.

“For this to happen, it’s like we’re picking up the ball and running again,” she said. “We’ve been here before and we know what to do.”

A memorial for Renee Good marks the location the 37-year-old woman was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Portland Avenue near East 34th Street in Minneapolis.

Renee Good

Portland Avenue, where Good died less than a mile from Floyd, is lined with Craftsman-style homes. Many displayed “ICE OUT” or “Black Lives Matter” signs — or both — in their front windows.

One window posed a question: “How many weren’t filmed?”

Stapled to a telephone pole was a letter addressed to federal agents: “It might be hard to understand why almost all Our City’s residents are angry with Your Mission (which has changed radically over the past year). This handbill intends to resolve confusion. I hope it finds you well.”

Another telephone pole struck a different tone:

“ICE ARE
TERRORISTS
KIDNAPPERS
MURDERERS.”

On a wooden fence, Good’s portrait accompanied those of Floyd and other Black men killed by police in Minnesota in recent years, among them Daunte Wright, Winston Boogie Smith Jr. and Amir Locke.

A handwritten sign quoted Good’s last words: “I’m not mad at you, dude.”

Keeping snow off of Good’s memorial — not far from where George Floyd was killed — has been a losing battle.

In the center of Good’s memorial, a man gingerly brushed snow from cardboard signs, shook out bouquets of flowers and wiped off teddy bears. It was a losing battle. Snow was falling, leaving fresh white dots on everything he cleared.

A woman walked up with a handful of yellow tulips. “Hello, is there somewhere I should put these in particular?”

“Anywhere is fine,” said the man.

American, Mexican and LGBTQ+ flags hung from the site. One handwritten note, signed by “A DHS employee,” stated: “We will never forget you.”

A sign hangs between two trees near the Good memorial and reads, “The resistance is rooted in love — ICE out!”

Some mourners had shared small tokens of positivity. “Please take a pocket heart,” read one laminated sign. “Keep it with you to be a constant reminder that you are loved!”

Others, knowing Good had been a poet, wrote poems of their own:

Towards new ages imagined yet still out of hand

We’ll build a place safe for us all where you stood

Where love’s lyrics echo we’ll compose what we can

To that I offer these words, would they were as good as

Good’s.

Among the couple dozen people at the site were Kayla Gardner, 29, and three friends. Gardner said she had brought flowers to place at each of the three memorials.

“I wanted to get to Renee and Alex’s,” she said, “but we didn’t want to leave out George, too. He’s right here.”

A memorial for intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.

Alex Pretti

On a traffic pole down the street, above a “Lost Cat” sign, a note in Spanish warns residents of increased immigration police presence since Dec. 22. It advises residents not to leave their homes unless necessary, to have groceries delivered and to establish an emergency plan for their children.

“These are difficult and uncertain moments for our community,” it says.

Lake Street, a hub of Latino businesses, is about halfway between where Good and Pretti were killed. Murals on side streets depict women cooking tortillas on a comal and musicians playing guitar and accordion. Businesses there have responded to the immigration raids in a variety of ways.

A notice in Spanish posted on the door of a western wear shop says, “Closed for the security of our clients.”

A nearby Ecuadorean restaurant, meanwhile, offers delivery but not sit-down service.

A person wipes tears away while visiting the Pretti memorial on Feb. 1.

Pretti died near Glam Doll Donuts, along another vibrant stretch of diverse, immigrant-owned restaurants known as Eat Street. As the days went on after his killing, fewer news cameras turned up, but mourners kept coming.

Standing over the memorial that has grown to take up the length of a building, a man in a The North Face jacket sobbed quietly. Another lighted incense sticks and stuck them in the snow.

Votive candles depicted Jesus, the Virgin of Gudalupe and Mister Rogers.

Candles burn near the Pretti memorial. Some depicted Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Mister Rogers.

A letter offers a source of comfort: “If I have two rooms, one dark, the other light, and I open the door between them, the dark room becomes lighter without the light one becoming darker. I know this is no headline, but it’s a marvelous footnote.”

Also on display were lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which call out White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Home Security Secretary Kristi Noem:

It’s our blood + our bones

And these whistles + phones

Against Miller +

Noem’s Dirty Lies.

New artwork appears daily. An oil painting depicting a smiling Pretti in glasses, a beanie and a scarf, was among the most recent.

Leah Dunbar, 50, was moved to tears looking at it. Dunbar, who lives nearby, had brought Somali chicken sambusas for fellow mourners standing in the cold.

The George Floyd memorial marks the spot at the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue where he was killed in 2020 at age 46.

Reflecting on his death, she had asked herself, “What is the good that is coming out of this? Do we have space in our lives to see the good?”

“Of course we do,” she said. “Look — people are making, people are creating, people are sharing.”

Tariff turmoil. Threats against Iran. An anti-immigration surge that has taken two innocent lives.

And there’s a sizable slump hitting the stock, bond, precious metals and cryptocurrency markets.

What’s the connection?

The answer is: Not much.

When it comes to Trump policies, investors have come to realize that Trump is often all talk, little action—that’s the underpinning of the “TACO” trade, for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” which I described in May.

As recently as Jan. 20, for example, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell by more than 2% in a possible reaction to Trump’s saber-rattling over Greenland and threat to hike tariffs on European countries he felt were thwarting his imperial ambitions.

The next day, the index began a comeback, rising nearly 1.2%. By three sessions later, it had recovered all that first day’s loss. The index went on to set an all-time record on Jan. 27, one week after the Greenland sell-off.

The latest sell-off in the investment markets doesn’t appear to be connected to Trump’s policymaking. The current narrative blames artificial intelligence. There’s an inchoate expectation that AI will have a great economic impact, though little of that has emerged thus far, and no one is very clear on what form it will take or even whether it will happen at all.

Investors and investment analysts don’t really know what to make of AI. From reading the most recent market commentaries, one might conclude that investors are unnerved by the potential of AI to upend industries across the spectrum.

“For two years, we have been talking about how AI is going to change the world,” Michael O’Rourke, chief investment strategist at Jonestrading, told Bloomberg. “In the past two weeks, we have seen signs of it in practice.”

The evidence that most Wall Street pundits cite is the downdraft in technology stocks, including software companies that (according to the narrative) may lose their franchise to AI bots. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index has lost a cumulative 5.6% since notching a high on Jan. 28 and has lost 6.2% since its all-time intraday high, reached on Oct. 29.

Yet companies that are seen as winners in the AI derby, such as Google parent Alphabet (down 5.4% this week) and chipmakers AMD (down about 26% since its recent peak in late January) and Nvidia (down 7.5% in the last week), also have been caught in the downdraft.

Leaving the hard numbers aside, conjectures about the effects of AI on individual companies are exactly that — conjectures. The specific trigger of the current downdraft, it’s said, was the release by AI company Anthropic of a tool with which law firms can use the company’s Claude AI bot for tasks including document reviews and research.

Anthropic’s announcement this week sent shares of legal publishing and legal technology companies plummeting. Thomson Reuters, the publisher of Westlaw, was among those most severely hit — down nearly 20% since the announcement.

Yet Anthropic’s real impact on the legal publishing and tech businesses is, at this moment, the subject of sheer speculation. No one can say whether the AI firm will actually dislodge the incumbent providers, several of which already claim to be powering their services with AI.

The sell-off was driven by “a lot of unsophisticated investors just really thinking that AI is going to immediately overnight take away the business of these legacy players,” Ryan O’Leary, a research director at International Data Corp., told Law.com. “A lot of this stuff has been offered for years from the legacy legal technology providers.”

Much of the recent commentary is produced by investment mavens searching for explanations for market moves in recent news nuggets. That’s always a mug’s game. Investors are looking in the wrong place when they try to tie market swings to current events.

(I know whereof I speak, for I used to have the job of conjuring up just such explanations for a market story on a daily basis.)

My favorite investment guru, Barry Ritholtz, author of the 2025 primer “How Not to Invest,” points out that the markets typically give back some portion of their gains after steep run-ups.

“Markets,” Ritholtz wrote, “go up and down; it is easier to ride out a downturn when you realize the giveback is but a small percentage of the recent gains.”

That may be what’s happening now. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index has lost about 43 points this year. But that’s less than two-thirds of a percentage point, and it comes after the index turned in average annual gains of more than 23% from the start of 2023 through the end of last year. The Nasdaq composite has lost about 700 points this year, but that’s about 3% of its value, and it comes after gaining 43.4% in 2023, 28.6% in 2024 and 20.4% in 2025.

This record evokes the classic remark of physicist I.I. Rabi at the 1954 hearing convened to consider stripping J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance because of his opposition to developing the hydrogen bomb. After listing Oppenheimer’s wartime accomplishments, including overseeing the invention of the plutonium bomb, Rabi asked the inquisitors, “What more do you want, mermaids?”

Stocks and bonds aren’t the only investment showing signs of exhaustion after a period of sizable gains. Bitcoin traded as high as $97,916 on Jan. 13; on Thursday it traded at about $63,426. That’s a loss of more than 35% — but then, bitcoin is notoriously volatile.

None of this means that the investment markets’ performance is always driven by animal spirits. Real-world events can have significant and sometimes lasting effects. But those events tend to be intrinsic to business rather than externalities such as White House maneuvers or geopolitics.

Consider what happened to the Dow Jones industrial average on Jan. 27. That day, shares of the giant healthcare company UnitedHealth lost nearly 20% of their value due to as a weak earnings report, along with the Trump administration’s plan to limit rate increases for Medicare Advantage plans, an important component of UnitedHealth’s business, next year. The company’s plunge brought down the Dow by more than 400 points, or 0.8%.

But the Dow comprises only 30 companies, weighted by share prices, so a sharp change in an expensive stock can exert strong pressure on the average. But the rest of the market took the news in stride, with the S&P 500 riding a gain of about 0.4% to an all-time high.

It’s also true that the markets aren’t entirely immune to Trump’s policies. The problem is that investors and market outsiders often take him at his word, when he’s merely throwing out options, and thus overreact. Investors tend to take Trump’s tariff threats as done deals, when in the final analysis he has chickened out.

Expectations that the tariffs would drive inflation much higher, for instance — an eventuality that might actually have a genuine effect on the economy and therefore on market values — haven’t been borne out. But the reason, notes Paul Krugman, is that “effective tariff rates have risen much less than headline rates.”

That’s because some countries and some businesses have negotiated carve-outs from the official rates. Despite Trump’s blustering, more than 87% of the value of exports from Canada and Mexico still enjoy tariff exemptions under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement of 2018, which Trump, after all, negotiated and signed.

And Trump does have the power to turn his whims into reality, in ways that could have real-world effects on society and the economy.

All that can be said right now is that hasn’t happened yet. But many of his policy pronouncements remain so nebulous and unrealized that if you’re looking for why the stock market has been in a slump, you would be well advised to look elsewhere.

With the Trump administration reportedly in talks to create an anti-fraud task force for California, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta on Thursday vehemently denounced what he described as the administration’s “reckless” and “false” rhetoric about fraud plaguing the state.

At a news conference at the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles, Bonta said the Trump administration’s claims that state programs are overrun by fraud and that its government was itself perpetrating or facilitating this fraud was “outrageous and ridiculous and without basis.”

Bonta said most states struggle with some fraud from outside actors, saying that “anywhere there’s money flowing there’s a risk” and that the state’s Department of Justice has thrown immense resources into cracking down on illicit activities and recovering funds for taxpayers.

As a politicized national fight over waste, fraud and abuse led by Republicans have targeted California and its Democratic leadership, Bonta and other state officials have moved swiftly to combat the claims.

In California, Bonta said, authorities have recovered nearly $2.7 billion through criminal and civil prosecutions since 2016, including some $740 million through Medi-Cal fraud related prosecutions, about $2 billion under the state’s False Claims Act, and an additional $108 million from a task force focused on rooting out tax fraud in the underground economy.

State authorities have frequently partnered with the federal government in the past on such investigations and welcome a good-faith partnership in the future, Bonta said.

CBS News reported on the creation of a California-focused fraud task force earlier this week, citing multiple unnamed sources familiar with the plans. The outlet, whose new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, has been aligned with Trump and spearheaded a major overhaul of the news organization, reported that the president plans to soon sign an executive order naming Vice President JD Vance as head of a group that would also include the head of the Federal Trade Commission as vice chairman.

Trump’s rhetoric fueled doubts about California programs and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership at the start of the year, when he declared that “the fraud investigation of California [had] begun.”

On the president’s social media platform, in formal letters and in recent news conferences, officials in the Trump administration have alleged fraud in child care, hospice funding and unemployment benefits.

Last week, the topic took center stage again when Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, posted a video accusing Armenian crime groups of carrying out widespread hospice fraud in Los Angeles.

That viral video received more than 4.5 million views on X.

Oz’s video received fierce backlash from California politicians and the local Armenian community, who collectively alleged that it contained baseless and racially charged attacks on Armenians.

The video shows Oz being driven around a section of Van Nuys where he says that about $3.5-billion worth of medicare fraud has been perpetrated by hospice and home-care businesses, claiming that “it’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.”

He also points to Armenian language signs, incorrectly referring to them as written in a cerulean script, and saying “you notice that the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect and it also highlights the fact that this is an organized crime mafia deal.”

Newsom filed a civil rights complaint against Oz on Jan. 29, asking the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the “racially charged and false public statements” made in the video.

On Monday, California Sen. Adam Schiff followed suit, demanding an independent review of Oz’s alleged targeting of Armenian American communities.

“To suggest markers of Armenian culture, language, and identity are indicative of criminality underscores a discriminatory motive that could taint any investigation into fraud and incite the further demonization of the community,” Schiff said in a statement.

Glendale City Councilmember Ardy Kassakhian said in an interview that Oz’s statements feed into the Trump administration’s playbook of using allegations of fraud to sow racial divisions.

“This time the focus just happens to be the Armenians,” he said. “In places like Minnesota, it’s the Somali community.”

California has been investigating healthcare fraud since a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation uncovered widespread Medicare fraud in the state’s booming but loosely regulated hospice industry.

From 2010 to 2020, the county’s hospices multiplied sixfold, accounting for more than half of the state’s roughly 1,200 Medicare-certified providers, according to a Times analysis of federal healthcare data.

Scores of providers sprang up along a corridor stretching west from the San Gabriel Valley through the San Fernando Valley, which now has the highest concentration of hospices in the nation.

The state Department of Justice has charged more than 100 people with hospice-related fraud since 2021 and shuttered around 280 hospices in the last two years, according to data from the California Department of Public Health.

But those shuttered hospices barely represent a dent in the massive hospice home healthcare industry. There are 468 hospice facilities in the Van Nuys area alone, according to the state database of medical facilities.

There are 197 licensed medical practices, including 89 licensed hospices, in a single two-story building located at 14545 Friar St. in Van Nuys — suggesting a concentration of fraudulent businesses.

When asked why the number of licensed medical practices in Van Nuys and at that address are so high, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health said that the department is committed to fighting fraud and unable to comment on pending investigation.

Recent turmoil in Minnesota has demonstrated the potential ripple effects of allegations levied by the Trump administration.

Ahead of sending in thousands of immigration enforcement agents into the Midwest state, Trump had repeatedly cited a fraud case involving funds for a child nutrition program involving COVID-19 pandemic relief funds.

He used the case, which involved a nonprofit where several Somali Americans worked, to vilify the immigrant community, even though the organization was run by a white woman. After the state became a lightning rod, Gov. Tim Walz dropped his reelection plans.

At Thursday’s news conference, Bonta described major cases in other states, such as $11.4 million healthcare fraud and wire fraud conspiracy involving a nursing assistant in Florida and a $88.3 million Medicaid fraud case in in Ohio involving over billing by a pharmacy benefit manager — to show abuse of state programs is not unique to California — or to blue states.

“We know Vance hails from Ohio, so maybe he should take a look in his own backyard before leading an unnecessary political stunt focused on California,” Bonta said. “We thought we should set the record straight.”

Times staff writers Melody Gutierrez and Dakota Smith contributed to this report.

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina and the United States said they reached an expansive trade deal Thursday, boosting President Javier Milei as he moves to open up the South American nation’s notoriously protectionist economy and reflecting the close alliance between the radical libertarian and President Trump.

Argentina’s foreign minister, Pablo Quirno, posted a selfie on social media showing him and several diplomats beaming after emerging from a meeting in Washington where he said they’d signed the pact.

“Congratulations to our team and thanks to the U.S. Trade Representative’s team for building this great agreement together,” Quirno wrote. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative also confirmed the deal.

The countries announced a framework for the agreement in November, saying Argentina would ease restrictions on a range of American imports, including cattle, dairy products, medicines, chemicals, machinery, medical devices and vehicles. Those were key concessions for Argentina, where local industries long protected by steep tariffs have expressed concern about their ability to compete with American manufacturers.

The U.S., for its part, would remove reciprocal tariffs on imports of “certain unavailable natural resources” and ingredients for pharmaceutical goods from Argentina, according to the framework.

At the time, the White House reached similar frameworks with Ecuador, Guatemala and El Salvador — part of what it described as an effort to improve the ability of American firms to sell industrial and agricultural products in Latin American countries and bring down food prices for U.S. consumers.

Officials did not immediately offer details about the final version of the U.S.-Argentina deal signed Thursday.

The agreement marks the latest development in the close alliance between Trump and Milei, who has reshaped Argentine foreign policy to align with the U.S., earned Trump’s praise for stabilizing his nation’s crisis-prone economy and traveled to the U.S. more than a dozen times in the last two years. Milei is scheduled to appear at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate next week to speak at a gala.

Trump supported Milei’s fiscal program last year with a $20-billion credit line that succeeded in calming markets and boosting Milei’s prospects in a crucial midterm election in October. The U.S. Treasury also directly purchased U.S. dollar-denominated Argentine bonds that ratings agencies were classifying as “junk” at the time and snapped up the volatile local currency that Argentines were dumping in droves.

The extraordinary intervention drew backlash from across the U.S. political spectrum.

Trump’s MAGA base questioned the need to bail out a far-flung country that’s not only of little importance to the U.S. but also directly competes with its exports of corn, wheat, meat and oil.

Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage that Trump was staking taxpayer money on a political gift to an ideological soulmate.

That criticism has continued, with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, on Thursday appealing to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to end the $20-billion lifeline.

In a letter, she wrote that even though the Treasury promised its credit line for Argentina “was for an acute, short-term, and urgent purpose, it appears … to have left open the possibility of continued use.”

Debre writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

Billionaire developer Rick Caruso is not running for Los Angeles mayor, in a last-minute twist less than two days before the deadline to enter the race.

Caruso had been reconsidering whether or not to run, citing a Times article, published Wednesday, in which two unnamed sources described Mayor Karen Bass’ involvement in watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire.

“Rick is incredibly moved by the outpouring of support but reached an earlier decision in a thoughtful process and it stands. He will not be a candidate for mayor,” said Mike Murphy, a political consultant for Caruso.

Caruso’s decision reaffirms the one he made last month, when he announced that he would not run for mayor or governor, ending a long period of speculation among political watchers. Caruso, who ran against Bass in 2022, said at the time that he was “deeply disappointed to step back from an election I believe is so critical to California’s future.”

His decision not to run comes the same day that former Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Austin Beutner bowed out of the race due to the death of his 22-year-old daughter.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath was still weighing a decision and said Thursday that she was receiving many calls from labor and business leaders who would support her run. Maryam Zar, founder of the Palisades Recovery Coalition, was also thinking about entering the race.

Bass already faces challenges from reality television star Spencer Pratt, a Republican who lost his home in the Palisades fire; Rae Huang, a community organizer who is a democratic socialist; and Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and nonprofit executive.

Candidates have until noon on Saturday to file their paperwork.

Caruso, the developer of popular malls such as the Grove and the Americana at Brand, lost to Bass by 10 percentage points in 2022 despite outspending her 11 to 1 after throwing $100 million of his own fortune into the race.

The 66-year-old served as president of the L.A. Police Commission in the 2000s, helping to hire William Bratton as police chief. He was appointed to the Department of Water and Power board in 1984, at age 26 — the youngest commissioner in city history at the time.

Caruso is a former Republican who registered as a Democrat in 2022 and has faced questions about his past party registration.

The developer has made public safety and quality of life issues his main talking points, along with criticism of Bass over the city’s handling of the Palisades fire.

Caruso — whose son and daughter lost their homes in the Palisades fire — called The Times’ latest reporting on the after-action report an “absolute outrage.”

“Karen Bass actively covered up a report meant to examine the most significant disaster in Los Angeles history,” he said. “This is a complete loss of public trust and an intentional act of covering up the actions that led to people dying.”

Bass’ office said the mayor did not make changes to the report.

“There is absolutely no reason why she would request those details be altered or erased when she herself has been critical of the response to the fire,” the office said in a statement Wednesday after the Times article was published.

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minneapolis man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of cyberstalking and threatening to kill or assault Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers involved in the crackdown in Minnesota.

Federal prosecutors said in a statement that Kyle Wagner, 37, of Minneapolis, was charged by complaint, and that a decision to seek an indictment, which is necessary to take the case to trial, would be made soon.

Court records in Detroit, where the case was filed, did not list an attorney who could speak on Wagner’s behalf. The complaint was filed Tuesday and unsealed Thursday.

Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi alleged in a statement that Wagner doxed and threatened law enforcement officers, claimed an affiliation with antifa and “encouraged bloodshed in the streets.”

And at the White House on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt held up Weber’s photo at the daily briefing and said such conduct by “left-wing agitators” won’t go unpunished.

“And if people are illegally obstructing our federal law enforcement operations, if they are targeting, doxing, harassing and vilifying ICE agents, they are going to be held accountable like this individual here who, again, is a self-proclaimed member of antifa. He is a domestic terrorist, and he will be held accountable in the United States,” Leavitt told reporters.

President Trump announced in September that he would designate antifa a “major terrorist organization.” Antifa, short for “anti-fascists,” is an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups and is not a singular entity. It consists of groups that resist fascists and neo-Nazis, especially at demonstrations.

When Trump administration border policy advisor Tom Homan announced Wednesday that about 700 federal officers deployed to Minnesota would be withdrawn immediately, he said a larger pullout would occur only after there’s more cooperation and protesters stop interfering with federal personnel.

According to prosecutors, Wagner repeatedly posted on Facebook and Instagram encouraging his followers to “forcibly confront, assault, impede, oppose, and resist federal officers” whom he referred to as the “gestapo” and “murderers.”

The complaint alleges Wagner posted a video last month that directly threatened ICE officers with an obscenity-laden rant. “I’ve already bled for this city, I’ve already fought for this city, this is nothing new, we’re ready this time,” he said, concluding that he was “coming for” ICE.

The complaint further alleges that Wagner advocated for physical confrontation in another post, stating: “Anywhere we have an opportunity to get our hands on them, we need to put our hands on them.”

It also details how Wagner used his Instagram account to dox a person identified only as a “pro-ICE individual” by publishing a phone number, birth month and year, and address in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park. The complaint says Wagner later admitted that he doxed the victim’s parents’ house.

Federal prosecutors didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on why the case was filed in Michigan instead of Minnesota. The alleged doxing was the only Michigan connection listed in the complaint.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota has been hit by the resignations of several prosecutors in recent weeks amid frustrations with the surge and its handling of the shooting deaths of two people by government officers. One lawyer, who told a judge that her job “sucks,” was removed from her post.

Trump’s chief federal prosecutor for Minnesota, Dan Rosen, told a federal appeals court in a recent filing that his office is facing a “flood of new litigation” and is struggling to keep up just with immigration cases, while his division that handles civil cases is down 50%.

Rosen wrote that his office has canceled other civil enforcement work “and is operating in a reactive mode.” He also said his attorneys are “appearing daily for hearings on contempt motions. The Court is setting deadlines within hours, including weekends and holidays. Paralegals are continuously working overtime. Lawyers are continuously working overtime.”

Karnowski writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Eric Tucker and Nathan Ellgren in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Senate Republican Leader John Thune warned Thursday that Congress is not close to an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security, signaling that another short-term extension may be the only way to avoid a shutdown as Democrats demand “nonnegotiable” ICE reforms ahead of the Feb. 13 deadline.

The Republicans are increasingly looking to punt the full funding package a second time if negotiations collapse. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Thune said that such a move would not include any reforms lawmakers had previously negotiated, including body cameras for immigration agents.

“As of right now, we aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement that would enable us to fund the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “If [Democrats] are coming to the table demanding a blank check or refusing to consider any measures but their own, they’re likely to end up with nothing.”

He spoke hours after House and Senate Democrats announced they were aligned behind a list of 10 demands they say must be passed before approving the Homeland Security funding package through September.

Democrats are pressing for statutory limits on immigration raids, new judicial warrant requirements, body-worn cameras, identification rules for agents and enhanced oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — reforms they say are necessary to rein in what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called an agency “out of control.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats are planning to propose the legislation as soon as possible.

“We want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this, because this is turning America inside out in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Schumer said.

The coordinated demands signal unity among House and Senate Democrats after a rocky week on Capitol Hill. In a slim vote, 21 House Democrats joined Republicans on Tuesday to end a partial government shutdown by temporarily extending Homeland Security funding through Feb. 13.

The two-week stopgap, called a “continuing resolution,” was meant to leave time for the two parties to debate how to rein in ICE after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

But that truce has quickly unraveled. Republican leaders have little appetite for the full slate of reforms. Some have indicated openness to narrower changes, such as expanding body camera programs and training, but reject mask bans and the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already ruled out warrant requirements, which would limit immigration agents from entering private property without a court order. In remarks to reporters Wednesday, he also hinted at some interest in attaching voter ID and anti-sanctuary city policies to negotiations.

“It will be part of the discussion over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll see how that shakes out. But I suspect that some of the changes — the procedural modifications with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will be codified,” he said.

Johnson was confident the two sides could make a deal without further delays, adding that negotiations are largely between “the White House, Schumer and Senate Democrats.”

President Trump has privately supported the short-term extension to cool tensions while publicly defending immigration agents and expressing skepticism toward Democrats’ reform push, according to House leadership.

White House border policy advisor Tom Homan also announced a drawdown of 700 federal agents from Minneapolis this week as what officials framed as a goodwill gesture amid negotiations.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the administration is willing to consider some of the demands Democrats have made, but said some of their requests are not “grounded in any common sense and they are nonstarters for this administration.”

Leavitt did not specify which reforms the administration was willing to consider. She did, however, say the president is committed to keeping the government open and supporting “immigration enforcement efforts in this country.”

The White House did not respond when asked if the president would support a short-term spending measure should negotiations stall.

Republicans continue to warn that a failure to reach a deal would jeopardize disaster response funding, airport security operations, maritime patrols, and increased security assistance for major national events, including the upcoming World Cup in Los Angeles.

“If we don’t do it by the middle of next week, we should consider a continuing resolution for the rest of the year and just put this all behind us,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus.

Democrats, however, remain adamant that verbal assurances are no longer enough.

“These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,” Jeffries said.

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.

Former Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner said Thursday that he is dropping out of the race for mayor, citing the recent death of his 22-year-old daughter.

Beutner, one of several candidates seeking to oust Mayor Karen Bass in the June 2 primary, made his announcement a month after the death of Emily Beutner, the youngest of his four children.

“My family has experienced the unimaginable loss of our beloved daughter Emily. She was a magical person, the light of our lives. We are still in mourning,” Beutner said in a statement. “A successful campaign, and more importantly the job of Mayor, requires someone who is committed 24/7 to the job. Family has always come first for me. That is where I need to be at this time.”

Beutner’s daughter died Jan. 6 at a hospital, according to officials with the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office, which has not yet determined a cause.

The announcement comes as the lineup of candidates is still in flux, with Saturday’s filing deadline fast approaching.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has been weighing a run, as has Maryam Zar, founder of the Palisades Recovery Coalition. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022, is once again considering a mayoral bid — even though he publicly ruled that out last month — after The Times reported Wednesday that Bass was involved in watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire.

Bass’ team said the mayor did not make changes to the report, saying “there is absolutely no reason why she would request those details be altered or erased when she herself has been critical of the response to the fire.”

Bass, who is seeking a second four-year term, already faces challenges from reality television star Spencer Pratt, a Republican who lost his home in the Palisades fire; Rae Huang, a community organizer who is also a democratic socialist; and Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and nonprofit executive.

If Bass secures more than 50% of the vote, she will win outright, avoiding a November runoff.

Beutner, who entered the contest in October, spent much of his campaign denouncing Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. The fire severely damaged Beutner’s home in Pacific Palisades and completely destroyed the residence of Beutner’s mother-in-law.

During the early months of his campaign, Beutner also criticized the mayor for hiking the fees that the city charges for trash pickup, sewer maintenance and other basic services.

In his statement withdrawing from the race, Beutner continued to highlight some of the problems he discussed during his campaign.

“Los Angeles is a special place, but every day it’s becoming less affordable, less safe and a more difficult place to live,” he said. “To solve these problems, new ideas are needed along with leadership capable of implementing them.”

Beutner’s daughter, a student at Loyola Marymount University, was found last month by the side of a highway in Palmdale in a “state of medical distress,” according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She later died at a hospital.

After that, Beutner largely disappeared from the public eye, canceling more than a dozen campaign events and asking the public for privacy.

NEW YORK — The Trump administration on Thursday will launch TrumpRx, a website it says will help patients buy prescription drugs directly from manufacturers at a discounted rate at a time when health care and the cost of living are growing concerns for Americans.

The government-hosted website is not expected to be a platform for buying medication but instead set up as a facilitator, pointing Americans to drugmakers’ direct-to-consumer websites where they can make purchases.

The site’s unveiling, set for Thursday evening, was announced by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who in a post on X called it “a state of the art website for Americans consumers to purchase low cost prescription drugs.”

She said President Trump will make the announcement alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and Joe Gebbia, director of Trump’s National Design Studio.

The president first teased TrumpRx in September while announcing the first of his more than 15 deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices to match the lowest price offered in other developed nations. He said in December the website would provide “massive discounts to all consumers” — though it’s unclear whether the prices available on drugmakers’ websites will routinely be any lower than what many consumers could get through their insurance coverage.

The website’s expected Thursday release comes after it faced multiple delays, for reasons the administration hasn’t publicly shared. Last fall, Oz told Trump the site would share prices for consumers before the end of the year. An expected launch in late January was also pushed back.

The president has spent the past several months seeking to spotlight his efforts to lower drug prices for Americans. He’s done that through deals with major pharmaceutical companies, including some of the biggest drugmakers like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck, which have agreed to lower prices of their Medicaid drugs to so-called “most favored nations” pricing. As part of the deals, many of the companies’ new drugs will also be launched at discounted rates for consumer markets through TrumpRx.

Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear, and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost.

Trump’s administration also has negotiated lower prices for several prescription drugs for Medicare enrollees, through a direct negotiation program created by a 2022 law.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

COLLINGSWOOD, N.J. — The shawarma, falafel wraps and baklava at Jersey Kebab are great, but many of its patrons are also there these days for a side of protest.

A New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia has rallied around the restaurant’s Turkish owners since federal officers detained the couple last February because they say their visas had expired.

In fact, business has been so good since Celal and Emine Emanet were picked up early in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that they have moved to a bigger space in the next town over. Their regulars don’t seem to mind.

The family came to the U.S. seeking freedom

Celal Emanet, 52, first came to the U.S. in 2000 to learn English while he pursued his doctorate in Islamic history at a Turkish university. He returned in 2008 to serve as an imam at a southern New Jersey mosque, bringing Emine and their first two children came, too. Two more would be born in the U.S.

Before long, Celal had an additional business of delivering bread to diners. They applied for permanent residency and believed they were on their way to receiving green cards.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began and the delivery trucks were idled, Celal and Emine, who had both worked in restaurants in Turkey, opened Jersey Kebab in Haddon Township. Business was strong from the start.

It all changed in a moment

On Feb. 25, U.S. marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested the couple at the restaurant. Celal was sent home with an ankle monitor, but Emine, now 47, was moved to a detention facility more than an hour’s drive away and held there for 15 days.

With its main cook in detention and the family in crisis, the shop closed temporarily.

Although the area is heavily Democratic, the arrests of the Emanets signaled to many locals that immigration enforcement during President Trump’s second term wouldn’t stop at going after people with criminal backgrounds who are in the U.S. illegally.

“They were not dangerous people — not the type of people we were told on TV they were looking to remove from our country,” Haddon Township Mayor Randy Teague said.

Supporters organized a vigil and raised $300,000 that kept the family and business afloat while the shop was closed — and paid legal bills. Members of Congress helped, and hundreds of customers wrote letters of support.

Space for a crowd

As news of the family’s ordeal spread, customers new and old began packing the restaurant. The family moved it late last year to a bigger space down busy Haddon Avenue in Collingswood.

They added a breakfast menu and for the first time needed to hire servers besides their son Muhammed.

The location changed, but the restaurant still features a sign in the window offering free meals to people in need. That’s honoring a Muslim value, to care for “anybody who has less than us,” Muhammed said.

Judy Kubit and Linda Rey, two friends from the nearby communities of Medford and Columbus, respectively, said they came to Haddon Township last year for an anti-Trump “No Kings” rally and ate a post-protest lunch at the kebab shop.

“We thought, we have to go in just to show our solidarity for the whole issue,” Kubit said.

Last month, with the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis dominating the headlines, they were at the new location for lunch.

The legal battle hasn’t ended

The Emanets desperately want to stay in the U.S., where they’ve built a life and raised their family.

Celal has a deportation hearing in March, and Emine and Muhammed will also have hearings eventually.

Celal said moving back to Turkey would be bad for his younger children. They don’t speak Turkish, and one is autistic and needs the help available in the U.S.

Also, he’d be worried about his own safety because of his academic articles. “I am in opposition to the Turkish government,” he said. “If they deport me, I am going to get very big problems.”

The groundswell of support has shown the family they’re not alone.

“We’re kind of fighting for our right to stay the country,” Muhammed Emanet said, “while still having amazing support from the community behind us. So we’re all in it together.”

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is refusing to voluntarily comply with a Justice Department investigation into a video she organized urging U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders” — escalating a dispute that President Trump has publicly pushed.

In letters first obtained by the Associated Press, Slotkin’s lawyer informed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro that the senator would not agree to a voluntary interview about the video. Slotkin’s legal team also requested that Pirro preserve all documents related to the matter for “anticipated litigation.”

Slotkin’s lawyer separately wrote to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, declining to sit for an FBI interview about the video and urging her to immediately terminate any inquiry.

The refusal marks a potential turning point in the standoff, shifting the burden onto the Justice Department to decide whether it will escalate an investigation into sitting members of Congress or retreat from an inquiry now being openly challenged.

“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said in an interview Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”

‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back’

Last November, Slotkin joined five other Democratic lawmakers — all of whom previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies — in posting a 90-second video urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful.

The lawmakers said Trump’s Republican administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and called on troops to “stand up for our laws.”

The video sparked a firestorm in Republican circles and soon drew the attention of Trump, who accused the lawmakers of sedition and said their actions were “punishable by death.”

The Pentagon later announced it had opened an investigation into Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot who appeared in the video. The FBI then contacted the lawmakers seeking interviews, signaling a broader Justice Department inquiry.

Slotkin said multiple legal advisers initially urged caution.

“Maybe if you keep quiet, this will all go away over Christmas,” Slotkin said she was told.

But in January, the matter flared again, with the lawmakers saying they were contacted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, security threats mounted. Slotkin said her farm in Michigan received a bomb threat, her brother was assigned a police detail due to threats and her parents were swatted in the middle of the night.

Her father, who died in January after a long battle with cancer, “could barely walk and he’s dealing with the cops in his home,” she said.

Slotkin said a “switch went off” in her and she became angry: “And I said, ‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back.’”

Democratic senators draw a line

The requests from the FBI and the Justice Department have been voluntary. Slotkin said that her legal team had communicated with prosecutors but that officials “keep asking for a personal interview.”

Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, in the letter to Pirro declined the interview request and asked that she “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.” In the other letter, Bharara urged Bondi to use her authority to direct Pirro to close the inquiry.

Bharara wrote that Slotkin’s constitutional rights had been infringed and said litigation is being considered.

“All options are most definitely on the table,” Slotkin said. Asked whether she would comply with a subpoena, she paused before responding: “I’d take a hard look at it.”

Bharara, who’s representing Slotkin in the case, is a former U.S. attorney in New York who was fired by Trump in 2017 during his first administration. He’s also representing Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California in a separate case involving the Justice Department.

Kelly has similarly pushed back, suing the Pentagon last month over attempts to punish him for the video. On Tuesday, a federal judge said that he knows of no U.S. Supreme Court precedent to justify the Pentagon’s censuring of Kelly as he weighed whether to intervene.

Slotkin said she’s in contact with the other lawmakers who appeared in the video, but she wouldn’t say what their plans were in the investigations.

A rising profile

Trump has frequently and consistently targeted his political opponents. In some cases, those attacks have had the unintended consequence of elevating their national standing.

In Kelly’s case, he raised more than $12.5 million in the final months of 2025 following the “illegal orders” video controversy, according to campaign finance filings.

Slotkin, like Kelly, has been mentioned among Democrats who could emerge as presidential contenders in 2028.

She previously represented one of the nation’s most competitive House districts before winning a Senate seat in Michigan in 2024, even as Trump carried the state.

Slotkin delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s address to Congress last year and has since urged her party to confront him more aggressively, saying Democrats had lost their “alpha energy” and calling on them to “go nuclear” against Trump’s redistricting push.

“If I’m encouraging other people to take risk, how can I not then accept risk myself?” Slotkin said. “I think you’ve got to show people that we’re not going to lay down and take it.”

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press.

A tech executive who made a fortune developing education software, then waded into the fight against homelessness, is now entering the race for Los Angeles mayor.

Adam Miller, co-founder of Better Angels, a nonprofit focused on preventing homelessness and building affordable housing, filed paperwork on Wednesday to run against Mayor Karen Bass in the June 2 primary election.

Miller, in an interview, said the city is on a downward trajectory and beset with problems — and needs someone with strong leadership skills at City Hall.

“A lot of the issues we face in the city are management problems, and I know how to manage,” he said. “I’ve managed effectively teams that are big and small. I’ve managed teams that are domestic and international. And I’ve managed programs at every stage, so I know how to scale things up and make them operate at scale for a big system.”

The 56-year-old entrepreneur and nonprofit executive is making his move at a moment when the candidate lineup remains unsettled. Even with Saturday’s deadline for filing candidate paperwork fast approaching, some are still undecided on whether to run.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has spent several days hinting that she may jump into the race, while also taking shots at Bass on CNN and elsewhere.

Maryam Zar, who founded the Palisades Recovery Coalition in the wake of the Palisades fire, is also weighing a run. Even real estate developer Rick Caruso, who publicly ruled out a mayoral bid last month, told KNX on Wednesday that he may reconsider.

Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner, who launched his campaign in October, has been out of the public eye since the death of his 22-year-old daughter on Jan. 6. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt has spent the last several weeks promoting his book “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” and emerged earlier this week to file his candidate paperwork.

Community organizer Rae Huang has been courting the city’s left-leaning voters, appearing with podcaster Hasan Piker in a conversation about housing policy.

Meanwhile, Bass has been using the trappings of her office to promote her work, scheduling two State of the City speeches in a three-month span. The first of those, delivered Monday, sounded in many ways like a campaign stump speech, except longer.

After Miller filed his paperwork, Bass spokesperson Douglas Herman immediately derided him, describing Miller as a “wealthy venture capitalist” who sold software that helped large companies “systematically lay off workers.”

“The last thing Los Angeles needs now is another self-funder who doesn’t understand the crisis of affordability in our city,” Herman said. “Mayor Karen Bass will continue working to solve the biggest problems facing our city with groundbreaking efforts on housing affordability, reductions in street homelessness and public safety stats sitting at 60-year lows.”

Miller pushed back on the mayor’s statement, saying his company’s software was used for training and helping employees build their skills. He said that, although he will provide a loan to his campaign to get things started, he will be raising money like any other campaign.

Miller is the former chief executive of Cornerstone OnDemand, the global training and development company that he built over more than two decades, growing it to more than 3,000 employees. The publicly traded company was sold in 2021 to a private equity firm for $5.2 billion, he said.

The Brentwood resident has been heavily focused on philanthropy, serving as chair of the nonprofit 1P.org, which is a charitable foundation that provides funding to other nonprofit groups.

Miller said he and his wife, Staci, while mapping out their philanthropic work, chose to focus on intractable problems at the local, state, national and global level. Locally, he said, homelessness was the issue they identified as the most intractable.

1P.org has been providing funding to Better Angels, which has been working to build affordable housing while also distributing micro-loans to families facing eviction. In addition, the nonprofit has developed an app to help homeless outreach workers stay connected.

Sara Reyes, executive director of SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, said its 700 volunteers use Better Angels’ outreach app to maintain relationships with one another and their clients in neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Atwater Village.

The app is not integrated with the homeless database maintained by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county partnership, and would be more effective if it was, Reyes said.

Miller said the city needs help with issues that go well beyond homelessness. For example, he said, city leaders have made L.A. “one of the least developer friendly cities in the country,” hindering the construction of new homes.

“We have a major housing shortage,” he said. “We have an unacceptable number of people who are unhoused. We have affordability issues. I’d say city cleanliness is on the decline. We are not well prepared for disasters, as was clearly seen last year.”

“These are our homelands.”

“We are still here.”

The statements are objectively true: The Timbisha Shoshone have lived in what’s now popularly known as Death Valley for thousands of years. And they still live there, in a small village inside the national park that has about 30 full-time inhabitants.

In 2000, Congress officially recognized these two facts in the text of the hard-fought Homeland Act, which transferred nearly 7,800 acres of land, including the village site, back to the Timbisha Shoshone.

But federal officials have now taken issue with those seemingly innocuous sentences, according to Mandi Campbell, tribal historic preservation officer for the Timbisha Shoshone and a resident of the village.

The rationale? Orders from President Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directing the National Park Service to review interpretive materials for content that the administration feels “inappropriately disparages Americans.”

Only certain types of Americans, as it turns out: The executive order also has been cited in a lawsuit by the city of Philadelphia as the presumptive reason the NPS removed an exhibit on enslaved people from Independence National Historical Park.

Participants take time out for a photo during a march organized by the Timbisha Shoshone to mark the 25th anniversary of the Homeland Act.

(Kim Stringfellow)

And it’s prompted Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts to stop showing films about women and immigrant textile mill workers, according to the New York Times, which also reported that plaques referencing climate change have been removed from Muir Woods National Monument in California and Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park in South Carolina.

On top of that, Trump officials recently ordered the removal or editing of signs and other materials in at least 17 national parks in Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming, The Washington Post reports.

Back to Death Valley — a name that, by the way, members of the Timbisha Shoshone have never liked. Campbell told me that a celebration of the Homeland Act’s 25th anniversary that took place Friday at the national park’s Furnace Creek Visitor Center was supposed to include the unveiling of updates to its interpretive exhibit. The tribe had planned to place in a display case earrings and a medallion that members once gifted to former park Superintendent J.T. Reynolds to mark the passage of the act, along with some descriptive language, she said.

Ahead of the event, the Park Service submitted the additions to its parent agency, the Interior Department, for review. Campbell said that agency officials replied that not only could the new exhibit not include the new phrases “these are our homelands” or “we are still here,” but that similar language that’s been on display since 2012 would also be placed under review.

Interior Department spokesperson Elizabeth Peace said this is not true. “The Department has a long-standing history of working closely with tribal partners as part of exhibit development and review, and the park was never told they could not use that specific language or phrases,” she wrote in an email.

Peace went on to explain that although the new exhibit is under review pursuant to the executive and secretarial orders — both titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history” — the department hasn’t made any final decisions.

The review, according to Peace, is meant to ensure that parks tell “the full and accurate story of American history,” which includes addressing enslaved and Indigenous people, “informed by current scholarship and expert review, not through a narrow ideological lens.”

So, the 25th anniversary celebration went ahead without acknowledging the ongoing debate about the new exhibit.

There was a march from the village to the visitor center in which tribal members walked behind a banner that read, “We are still here,” which, Campbell said, was meant to echo a protest staged on Memorial Day in 1996 in which the Timbisha Shoshone demanded the restoration of their homelands after negotiations with the federal government broke down. That rally was widely credited with restarting the talks that eventually led to the passage of the Homeland Act.

Three decades later, the struggle continues. “Why do we still have to fight to be heard?” Campbell wondered earlier this week. “We weren’t even in history books. And we still can‘t tell our story. When do we get our chance?”

Despite the recent controversy, the tribe has a good relationship with the Death Valley-based NPS officials, Campbell said, and she’s confident they’ll be able to work through whatever happens next together.

After Friday’s march, tribal council members and park officials gave a series of speeches at the visitor center saluting their strong partnership and all the work that it’s taken to get to this point. Then they took pictures and ate cake.

More recent land news

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you probably are aware of how lawmakers have been using the Congressional Review Act, which enables Congress to overturn recent federal rules with a majority vote, to revoke specific Bureau of Land Management plans that limit mining and drilling in specific places. This was unprecedented until last year but has since been used to throw out BLM plans in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Now, a decision by the Government Accountability Office has cleared the way for Congress to throw out the BLM plan for Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which protects the land from mineral extraction, limits grazing and prioritizes conservation. Experts expect Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy or another Utah member of Congress to introduce a bill to do so this year, according to Caroline Llanes of Rocky Mountain Community Radio. If it passes, it would mark the first time the act has been used to roll back protections in a national monument.

Four former U.S. Forest Service chiefs are speaking out against the agency’s move to repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The 2001 rule protecting 58 million acres of national forests from road building and logging was supported by both political parties, and is needed to protect sensitive wildlife and maintain clean drinking water, argues an op-ed published in the Hill.

The Forest Service has revised its oil and gas leasing rules to “streamline” the permitting process by replacing parcel-by-parcel environmental reviews with a broader review that can sometimes cover millions of acres, reports Jake Bolster of Inside Climate News. Environmental groups told Bolster that the move will increase the likelihood that the agency misses sensitive habitat when deciding where to allow drilling.

Some environmental advocates are concerned about a new order from Interior Secretary Burgum that seeks to expand hunting and fishing access on federal public lands. “It flips conservation on its head and treats wildlife protection as the exception,” said Michelle Lute, executive director of nonprofit Wildlife for All. Others say the directive is more of a statement of values than something that will result in drastic changes on the ground. “It’s a nice nod to the hunting and angling community that acknowledges ‘we know these areas mean a lot to you,’” said Ryan Callaghan, president and chief executive of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers.

A few last things in climate news

Much has been made of a record-setting rainy season that’s helped lift California out of drought. But an extraordinarily warm January has left the snowpack across the Sierra Nevada and much of the Western U.S. far smaller than usual, Times water and climate change reporter Ian James writes. That means more hard times for the snowmelt-fed Colorado River, which provides water for farms and cities across seven states.

A federal judge recently ruled that a wind project off the coast of New York state can go forward — the fifth time a court has ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to halt major offshore wind projects, write Jennifer McDermott and Alexa St. John of the Associated Press. Meanwhile, the administration has also been stymieing solar and wind energy projects on land by halting or delaying once-routine federal approvals, find Brad Plumer and Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times.

Peninsular bighorn sheep seeking to migrate back and forth across the California-Mexico border, as they’ve long done, are now being hampered by razor wire installed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Jacumba Wilderness, according to our wildlife and outdoors reporter Lila Seidman. Similar scenarios are playing out across the Southwest, where the 1,954-mile border cuts through the habitat of more than 80 threatened and endangered species.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.socialon Bluesky.

Frank Clem, a pickleball pal of mine, recently put out the word that he was collecting whistles to deliver to the front lines of anti-ICE demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles, Highland Park, Pasadena and other locations.

I was out of the country at the time, but shortly after I returned, I thought about Clem when Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by ICE agents at a protest in Minnesota. It wasn’t long before the Trump administration’s top officials took turns blaming the victim, lying about the circumstances and calling Pretti an assassin.

Pretti’s distraught parents responded with this:

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”

And yet entirely unsurprising, given the state of disinformation and the blatant corruption of legal and moral codes of conduct under Trump, who just the other day was blowing gas yet again about the 2020 election being stolen.

How do you stand up to a president who hypocritically pardons drug kingpins and other rabble, including the barbarians who beat up cops and ransacked the Capitol, even as he invades cities to terrorize and abduct working people?

Maybe you blow a whistle, for starters.

I know, it’s a small gesture. But Clem and others are choosing sides, standing up for their communities, and refusing to remain silent as it becomes clear that the ICE agenda is less about law and order and more about the politics of scapegoating.

I came upon a story on Fox11 about a broader whistle brigade in Los Angeles. Musician Hector Flores, of Las Cafeteras, said he had been distributing free whistles to coffee shops because “we’ve got to protect one another,” and a whistle can sound the alarm that ICE agents are on the prowl.

If Trump were honest about rounding up violent criminals, we wouldn’t need this kind of resistance. But arrests of immigrants with no criminal records are increasing, and the majority of them are here to work and support their families. And U.S. employers have embraced and relied on them as essential contributors to the economy.

When I couldn’t immediately get hold of Flores, I called the owner of Cafe de Leche, the Highland Park coffee shop he had delivered whistles to. Matt Schodorf told me he was fresh out of whistles, and I thought of Clem, who agreed to meet me at Cafe de Leche with a special delivery.

Clem, an actor, is someone you want on your pickleball team because he comes to play and he covers a lot of ground. You might have seen him in theater productions, on TV shows or in movies, and you couldn’t possibly not have seen him as the emu farmer in a Liberty Mutual commercial.

Clem walked past a window sign that says “I Like My Coffee Without ICE” and took a seat at Cafe de Leche. He was wearing an L.A. ballcap and carrying a shopping bag containing hundreds of whistles.

A sign reading “I like my coffee without ICE” is posted in the window of Cafe de Leche in Highland Park. Cafe owners Matt and Anya Schodorf have been giving away whistles to customers to be used for ICE sightings and at demonstrations.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Black whistles. Red whistles. Whistles with strings and whistles with hooks to clip onto key chains.

Enough for a symphony.

“It’s 18, 20 bucks for, like, a hundred whistles,” Clem said, displaying a sandwich-size baggie of 100 multicolored whistles in the shape of small pencils.

Clem has been buying them in bulk on the internet, accepting donated whistles from friends, and making his with a 3D printer. He said he had already given away more than 1,500 the last few weeks at rallies and demonstrations.

People smile, Clem said, “when they see the possibilities,” when they join the chorus and the cause, and rather than retreat in silence, make themselves heard. Stiff opposition to ICE atrocities in Minneapolis has led to the withdrawal of hundreds of agents, so maybe a corner is being turned.

“We’re blowing $20 on coffee, right?” Clem said. “But here’s $20 you can spend on something and really feel like you’re getting some kind of return on it. … Throw me 100 whistles, and we’ll get them into the hands of people that might make a difference.”

Schodorf joined us with a cleaned-out whistle rack that said “Free Ice Alarms” on it, and said he’d be glad to fill the rack with Clem’s contributions. Before long, it was loaded up with 100 whistles and placed on the front counter.

When I asked Schodorf about joining ranks with the whistle brigade, he mentioned his wife, Cafe de Leche co-owner Anya Schodorf.

“She grew up here, but she was born in Nicaragua,” he said, and it’s hard to not to get involved when “they’re just profiling people right off the streets. I mean, nobody feels safe … and they’re charging the brown people, right? My wife would identify as that, and she’s afraid to go out of the house.”

Schodorf said they’ve been scrambling to keep the business running after they lost their Cafe de Leche restaurant in the fire that tore through Altadena a year ago. A photo of them in the ruins of their other shop hung on the wall, along with other photos of the destruction in Altadena.

“I don’t know what to do,” Schodorf said about the ICE tactics in Highland Park and beyond, “but I feel like we want to raise the voices of people.”

His wife entered the shop and greeted friends and customers before joining us. She has been a U.S. citizen for decades, and yet she feels as though the color of her skin makes her a suspect.

Anya and Matt Schodorf, owners of Cafe de Leche in Highland Park, talk about their fears about ICE in the community.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“You can scream from the top of your lungs that you’re a citizen, and they don’t care,” Anya said. “I honestly can’t think straight … and it’s really hard for me to concentrate.”

Anya said she walks and sometimes runs on Arroyo trails but has begun taking extra precautions, like calling her husband and leaving the line open. She went to a park in Pasadena recently and got worried after entering a restroom.

“I heard … a commotion outside and I got nervous,” Anya said. “And then I came out and saw ICE people kind of harassing the workers, like city workers. They’re city landscapers, and I panicked. I went back into the bathroom, like, what do I do? And why should I be panicky? I’m a citizen.”

Her kids are just as concerned about her as she is.

“It’s my son I really worry about,” Anya said. “He says, ‘Make sure you have your passport.’ Yeah, my kids. They’re really worried. And my son is like, please be careful. … It’s that additional stress that they don’t need — that they have to worry about me.”

The Schodorfs said ICE agents recently grabbed a neighborhood fixture — a guy who sells tamales.

“They’re just picking people off, right and left,” Matt said.

“He’s like 72,” Anya said.

The first whistles delivered by Hector Flores were gone before long.

“It was just a matter of hours,” Matt said. “I think it’s twofold. It’s people who think they might need it just for themselves, but it’s people who feel like they might need it for other people. … It’s been wildly popular.”

“We’re a good country,” Anya said. “But we’re falling into the hands of people that are cruel and they don’t really care about anyone but themselves, and they are enriching themselves.”

Clem said that at rallies, he’s making sure to offer whistles to vendors.

“People selling hot dogs and churros,” he said. “They’re asking how many they can take for their families and friends, right? I want them to take as many as they can. I’ve got 1,500 of these things sitting on my dining room table.”

Clem said he was never really a protester, but “anyone who has eyes can see” the alarming level of corruption coming out of the White House.

“My dad fought in the Battle of the Bulge, right?” Clem said. “My dad fought Nazis and fascists in World War II, and he was always warning me growing up that it could happen here. So now, the least I can do is pass out whistles.”

When Clem’s whistles were on display at the counter, one of the first customers was Hana McElroy. She ordered a coffee and took a whistle.

“I’m a nanny, and I pick up a couple of kids from their preschool and I know and love so many kids with parents in pretty tenuous situations,” said McElroy, who is Irish American. “It’s just been a scary time to be an Angeleno.”

Hana McElroy, right, picks up a free whistle while ordering a cup of coffee from Soleil Hernando at Cafe de Leche.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

McElroy said she knows some of the Latina nannies who take their charges to the little park across the street from Cafe de Leche, and she worries about them too.

McElroy showed me a whistle on her key chain but said it was broken. Soleil Hernando, a barista, told her after she’d taken one of Clem’s whistles that they were free, and she should take as many as she wanted.

McElroy grabbed another.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has acknowledged he is eyeing a presidential bid, has incensed both Democrats and Republicans over immigrant healthcare, underscoring the delicate political path ahead.

For a second straight year, the Democrat has asked state lawmakers to roll back coverage for some immigrants in the face of federal Medicaid spending cuts and a roughly $3-billion budget deficit that analysts warn could worsen if the AI bubble bursts. Newsom has proposed that the state not step in when, starting in October, the federal government stops providing health coverage to an estimated 200,000 legal residents — comprising asylees, refugees and others.

Progressive legislators and activists said the cost-saving measures are a departure from Newsom’s “health for all” pledge, and Republicans continue to skewer Newsom for using public funds to cover any noncitizens.

Newsom’s latest move would save an estimated $786 million this fiscal year and $1.1 billion annually in future years in a proposed budget of $349 billion, according to the Department of Finance.

State Sen. Caroline Menjivar, one of two Senate Democrats who voted against Newsom’s immigrant health cuts last year, said she worried the governor’s political ambition could be getting in the way of doing what’s best for Californians.

“You’re clouded by what Arkansas is going to think, or Tennessee is going to think, when what California thinks is something completely different,” said Menjivar, who said previous criticism got her temporarily removed from a key budget subcommittee. “That’s my perspective on what’s happening here.”

Meanwhile, Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland criticized Newsom for glossing over the state’s structural deficit, which state officials say could balloon to $27 billion the following year. And he slammed Newsom for continuing to cover California residents in the U.S. without authorization. “He just wants to reinvent himself,” Strickland said.

It’s a political tightrope that will continue to grow thinner as federal support shrinks amid ever-rising healthcare expenses, said Guian McKee, a co-chair of the Health Care Policy Project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.

“It’s not just threading one needle but threading three or four of them right in a row,” McKee said. Should Newsom run for president, McKee added, the priorities of Democratic primary voters — who largely mirror blue states like California — look very different from those in a far more divided general electorate.

Americans are deeply divided on whether the government should provide health coverage to immigrants without legal status. In a KFF poll last year, a slim majority — 54% — were against a provision that would have penalized states that use their own funds to pay for immigrant healthcare, with wide variation by party. The provision was left out of the final version of the bill passed by Congress and signed by President Trump.

Even in California, support for the idea has waned amid ongoing budget problems. In a May survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, 41% of adults in the state said they supported providing health coverage to immigrants without authorization, a sharp drop from the 55% who supported it in 2023.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, other administration officials, and congressional Republicans have repeatedly accused California and other Democrat-led states of using taxpayer funds on immigrant healthcare, a red-meat issue for their GOP base. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz has accused California of “gaming the system” to receive more federal funds, freeing up state coffers for its Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, which has enrolled roughly 1.6 million immigrants without legal status.

“If you are a taxpayer in Texas or Florida, your tax dollars could’ve been used to fund the care of illegal immigrants in California,” he said in October.

California state officials have denied the charges, noting that only state funds are used to pay for general health services to those without legal status because the law prohibits using federal funds. Instead, Newsom has made it a “point of pride” that California has opened up coverage to immigrants, which his administration has noted keeps people healthier and helps them avoid costly emergency room care often covered at taxpayer expense.

“No administration has done more to expand full coverage under Medicaid than this administration for our diverse communities, documented and undocumented,” Newsom told reporters in January. “People have built careers out of criticizing my advocacy.”

Newsom warns the federal government’s “carnival of chaos” passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he said puts 1.8 million Californians at risk of losing their health coverage with the implementation of work requirements, other eligibility rules, and limits to federal funding to states.

Nationally, 10 million people could lose coverage by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Health economists have said higher numbers of uninsured patients — particularly those who are relatively healthy — could concentrate coverage among sicker patients, potentially increasing premium costs and hospital prices overall.

Immigrant advocates say it’s especially callous to leave residents who may have fled violence or survived trafficking or abuse without access to healthcare. Federal rules currently require state Medicaid programs to cover “qualified noncitizens” including asylees and refugees, according to Tanya Broder with the National Immigration Law Center. But the Republican tax-and-spending law ends the coverage, affecting an estimated 1.4 million legal immigrants nationwide.

With many state governors yet to release budget proposals, it’s unclear how they might handle the funding gaps, Broder said.

For instance, Colorado state officials estimate roughly 7,000 legal immigrants could lose coverage due to the law’s changes. And Washington state officials estimate 3,000 refugees, asylees, and other lawfully present immigrants will lose Medicaid.

Both states, like California, expanded full coverage to all income-eligible residents regardless of immigration status. Their elected officials are now in the awkward position of explaining why some legal immigrants may lose their healthcare coverage while those without legal status could keep theirs.

Last year, spiraling healthcare costs and state budget constraints prompted the Democratic governors of Illinois and Minnesota, potential presidential contenders JB Pritzker and Tim Walz, to pause or end coverage of immigrants without legal status.

California lawmakers last year voted to eliminate dental coverage and freeze new enrollment for immigrants without legal status and, starting next year, will charge monthly premiums to those who remain. Even so, the state is slated to spend $13.8 billion from its general fund on immigrants not covered by the federal government, according to Department of Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer.

At a news conference in San Francisco in January, Newsom defended those moves, saying they were necessary for “fiscal prudence.” He sidestepped questions about coverage for asylees and refugees and downplayed the significance of his proposal, saying he could revise it when he gets a chance to update his budget in May.

Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, pointed out that California passed a law in the 1990s requiring the state to cover Medi-Cal for legal immigrants when federal Medicaid dollars won’t. This includes green-card holders who haven’t yet met the five-year waiting period for enrolling in Medicaid.

Calling the governor’s proposal “arbitrary and cruel,” Savage-Sangwan criticized his choice to prioritize rainy-day fund deposits over maintaining coverage and said blaming the federal government was misleading.

It’s also a major departure from what she had hoped California could achieve on Newsom’s first day in office seven years ago, when he declared his support for single-payer healthcare and proposed extending health insurance subsidies to middle-class Californians.

“I absolutely did have hope, and we celebrated advances that the governor led,” Savage-Sangwan said. “Which makes me all the more disappointed.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.

Hello and happy Thursday. I’m Times columnist Anita Chabria, filling in for Washington bureau chief Michael Wilner. Today we are talking about circling the drain, and whether its possible to escape the flush after the swirl has started.

Yes, I’m talking about President Trump’s latest latest grab at the levers of power, and whether it will pull us all down. Trump floated the existentially disturbing idea recently that the federal government should “take over” elections.

“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said Monday on a podcast, making no attempt to keep election integrity nonpartisan.

This came shortly after the federal government raided a Georgia election office, still doggedly pursuing the very fake conspiracy that the 2020 vote was rigged against Trump. Lurking in the background of photos of that abuse of power was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime peddler of conspiracy theories including that Ukraine housed secret U.S. biolabs.

It’s not just possible but likely that Gabbard will find “evidence” of fraud in Georgia because she has been claiming election interference since at least 2016 and reality has seemingly never been an impediment to her beliefs.

So some sort of report or “proof” probably will appear in coming months that Trump was right all along and that Democrats have tricked us all by stealing votes across the country.

That will be the basis for Trump to demand Congress “secure” the midterm election, and we all know how good they are at standing up to him.

But before we go there, let’s do a quick refresher on how Democrats supposedly steal elections, because that’s at the heart of what comes next.

It’s the immigrants, stupid

Trump (drawing from preexisting conspiracy theories promoted by many folks he has now placed in powerful positions) blames undocumented immigrants for his loss in 2020.

Under a long-running conservative election fraud hoax, Democrats allegedly made some sort of secret deal to allow Black and brown immigrants to illegally enter the country, if they would then promise to illegally vote en masse for Democrats.

“If we don’t get them out, Republicans will never win another election,” Trump said on that same podcast. “These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally, and it is amazing that the Republicans are not tougher on it.”

This narrative has been proven false literally dozens if not hundreds of times in courts across the country, and by the rational minds of those who understand how impossible it would be for a conspiracy of this magnitude and complexity to go undetected — much less actually work.

Long before Harmeet Dhillon, the San Francisco Bay Area lawyer now demanding voter data as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, used her official power to pursue this false conspiracy, she spent years upon years filing lawsuits and doing media appearances making the same claims.

And time and again, she and others were swatted down by courts (and common sense and evidence) because illegal immigrants working in collusion with Democrats to steal the vote is not a real thing.

But now election deniers are in power, and the gravitational pull away from truth is accelerating. Conspiracy is reality as we get closer to the ballot box.

ICE them out

And if immigrants indeed are stealing elections in between raping our women and eating cats and dogs, there is an answer: ICE.

Who better to secure ballot boxes than a masked, terrifyingly unaccountable armed federal force of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that maybe answers only to Corey Lewandowski (the shadowy political operative always at Kristi Noem’s side) and Stephen Miller?

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Kavanaugh stops — basically stopping folks for living while brown or Black — are legal, these agents have probable cause galore. Add to that a new, legally unfounded directive that they can detain folks at will, without a warrant, and you have the perfect force to suppress an election.

Imagine if on election day, ICE roams the street in Democratic-leaning, nonwhite neighborhoods, stopping and even detaining folks as they go to polls. Demanding papers, dragging away dissenters.

“Your damn right,” Trump hanger-oner Steve Bannon said recently, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Would you go to the polls in that scenario? Would you allow your 18-year-old to go or your elderly parent? I’d think twice, even as crucial as this vote is.

And here’s a bit of outrage you can aim at Democrats: Congressional leadership considered including a ban on ICE at polling places as part of their proposed deal to keep government funded — but didn’t. Once again, for those in the back, Democrats could have tried to stop this, but chose not to.

But wait! That’s not all!

Why can’t we just mail in our ballots, you ask. Well, that would be because changes by Trump to the U.S. Postal Service, and how ballots may be counted, are going to make it harder to ensure that mail-in ballots are received and counted as they traditionally have been handled. So mailing your ballot may work out fine, or may not.

And there you have it, that’s how a free and fair democracy spins into the vortex of authoritarianism, where elections are held, ballots are counted, but reality is lost.

You are antigravity

But folks, we are not there yet. Today is not that day!

There are things you can do, aside from peacefully protesting. People can start to make sure that their identification is in order (as Orwellian as that sounds) and help others to do so as well.

It’s likely that in some places at least, voter identification laws will make it harder to cast a ballot, and people will need to start getting birth certificates, Social Security cards or other paperwork now in order to comply with those rules. Ask who in your community needs that kind of help and how you can provide it.

People are going to need ways to vote in person and support doing it. If you are an employer, would you consider giving folks time off to vote, since poll lines may be long? Would you sign up to help those without transportation get to polls? Would you help with voter registration drives to get people signed up to vote?

And you can be certain that election conspiracy believers will be observing the vote, as they always do. Can you train now to be a responsible and fair poll watcher, to ensure there is balance and fairness in these observations?

The one thing we can’t do is believe Trump is unstoppable, that the point of no return has already passed, and democracy is flowing out the sewer pipes into the sea. In fact, we have 271 days to reverse this.

It will take mass participation on multiple levels — but it can be done.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Supreme Court, with no dissents, rejects GOP challenge to California’s new election map
The deep dive: Fulton County in Georgia Challenges the F.B.I.’s Seizure of 2020 Ballots
The L.A. Times Special: California doctor sent abortion pills to Texas woman. Under a new law, her boyfriend is suing

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. Jeff Bezos Wednesday gutted his newspaper, the Washington Post. Its motto is “Democracy dies in darkness,” but also, democracy dies in layoffs by billionaires who can afford to send their wives into space for fun, but don’t want to pay for journalism that criticizes a dear leader.

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SACRAMENTO — National union leaders, including the head of one of California’s largest labor organizations, on Wednesday urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to protect workers as artificial intelligence threatens to replace or surveil employees — and warned that a failure to do so could hurt his presidential ambitions.

“This is a priority for the entire nation,” Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said at a news conference near the state Capitol. “He cannot spend his time waiting to be done in California and think he’s not going to get questions about the true issues surrounding AI, Big Tech and the Big Tech billionaires that are trying to buy our government.”

Gonzalez, a former state lawmaker from San Diego, said the federation is sponsoring a package of new bills aimed at reining in the use of AI and protecting the rights of workers, including safeguards against spying in the workplace and restrictions on layoffs.

The package of bills supported by labor organizations includes:

• Senate Bill 947 by Sen. Jerry McNerney (D-Stockton), which would require human oversight if an algorithm is used to justify the discipline or termination of an employee.
• Senate Bill 951, introduced by Sen. Eloise Gomez Reyes (D-Colton), which would require employers to provide a 90-day advance notice to workers and local and state governments before AI-related layoffs. It would apply to cases affecting 25 or more workers or 25% of the workforce, whichever is less. Recent layoffs, including at Amazon, Expedia and Pinterest, have been tied to AI, although some economists argue it’s challenging to determine whether that was the primary factor.
• Assembly Bill 1331, dubbed “No bosses in the bathroom,” would grant workers the right to remove workplace surveillance tools when entering public bathrooms or certain employee-only areas. The bill, authored by Assemblymember Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles), would subject employers to a $500 civil penalty for violations.

Gonzalez said labor organizations are often told to “work it out” with businesses but argued this was a dead end.

“We are not going to be able to achieve guardrails by working with bosses who want no guardrails,” she said. “It is time that the governor engages with workers in the workplace. Every AI convening he does, everybody he’s pulled together is [representing] AI and Big Tech lobbyists.”

Gonzalez was joined Wednesday by Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, and other labor leaders from Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.

“This is the most urgent issue that we [as workers] are facing,” Shuler said. “This is a crisis and no one is prepared.”

In a joint letter addressed to Newsom, they implored the governor to act quickly to establish meaningful safeguards around the technology.

“This fight extends beyond devastating job losses and new forms of union busting,” a copy of the letter states. “There is dignity in human work that is the foundation of a healthy, productive democracy. The future of our economy and our society cannot be left to the unchecked whims of profit driven technology corporations and billionaires.”

In an email to The Times, Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said the governor had a strong record of fighting for workers’ rights, including raising the minimum wage and expanding sick leave and other worker protections.

“No Governor has done more than Governor Gavin Newsom to regulate AI in a way that protects workers without killing jobs or innovation,” she wrote. “Under his leadership, California has taken the most comprehensive, worker-centered approach to AI in the country.”

Adults in the United States are growing increasingly concerned about the ramifications of AI, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. Fifty percent of those surveyed last year said they are “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A man convicted of trying to assassinate Donald Trump on a Florida golf course in 2024 was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison after a federal prosecutor said his crime was unacceptable “in this country or anywhere.”

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pronounced Ryan Routh’s fate in the same Fort Pierce courtroom that erupted into chaos in September when he tried to stab himself shortly after jurors found him guilty on all counts.

“American democracy does not work when individuals take it into their own hands to eliminate candidates. That’s what this individual tried to do” Assistant U.S. Atty. John Shipley told the judge.

Routh’s new defense attorney, Martin L. Roth, argued that “at the moment of truth, he chose not to pull the trigger.”

The judge pushed back, noting Routh’s history of arrests, to which Roth said: “He’s a complex person, I’ll give the court that, but he has a very good core.”

Routh then read from a rambling, 20-page statement. Cannon broke in and said none of what he was saying was relevant, and gave him five more minutes to talk.

“I did everything I could and lived a good life,” Routh said, before the judge cut him off.

“Your plot to kill was deliberate and evil,” she said. “You are not a peaceful man. You are not a good man.”

She then issued his sentence: Life without parole, plus seven years on a gun charge. His sentences for his other three crimes will run concurrently.

Routh’s sentencing had initially been scheduled for December, but Cannon agreed to move the date back after Routh decided to use an attorney during the sentencing phase instead of representing himself as he did for most of the trial.

Routh was convicted of trying to assassinate a major presidential candidate, using a firearm in furtherance of a crime, assaulting a federal officer, possessing a firearm as a felon and using a gun with a defaced serial number.

“Routh remains unrepentant for his crimes, never apologized for the lives he put at risk, and his life demonstrates near-total disregard for law,” the prosecutors’ sentencing memo said.

His defense attorney had asked for 20 years plus the mandatory seven for the gun conviction.

“The defendant is two weeks short of being sixty years old,” Roth wrote in a filing. “A just punishment would provide a sentence long enough to impose sufficient but not excessive punishment, and to allow defendant to experience freedom again as opposed to dying in prison.”

Prosecutors said Routh spent weeks plotting to kill Trump before aiming a rifle through shrubbery as the Republican presidential candidate played golf on Sept. 15, 2024, at his West Palm Beach country club.

At Routh’s trial, a Secret Service agent helping protect Trump on the golf course testified that he spotted Routh before Trump came into view. Routh aimed his rifle at the agent, who opened fire, causing Routh to drop his weapon and run away without firing a shot.

In the motion requesting an attorney, Routh offered to trade his life in a prisoner swap with people unjustly held in other countries, and said an offer still stood for Trump to “take out his frustrations on my face.”

“Just a quarter of an inch further back and we all would not have to deal with all of this mess forwards, but I always fail at everything (par for the course),” Routh wrote.

In her decision granting Routh an attorney, Cannon chastised the “disrespectful charade” of Routh’s motion, saying it made a mockery of the proceedings. But the judge, nominated by Trump in 2020, said she wanted to err on the side of legal representation.

Cannon signed off last summer on Routh’s request to represent himself at trial. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that criminal defendants have the right to represent themselves in court proceedings, as long as they can show a judge they are competent to waive their right to be defended by an attorney.

Routh’s former federal public defenders served as standby counsel and were present during the trial.

Routh had multiple previous felony convictions, including possession of stolen goods, and a large online footprint demonstrating his disdain for Trump. In a self-published book, he encouraged Iran to assassinate him, and at one point wrote that as a Trump voter, he must take part of the blame for electing him.

Fischer writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Democrats are threatening to block funding for the Homeland Security Department when it expires in two weeks unless there are “dramatic changes” and “real accountability” for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement agencies carrying out President Trump’s campaign of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota and across the country.

Congress is discussing potential new rules for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection after officers shot and killed two people in Minneapolis in January. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries reiterated their party’s demands on Wednesday, with Schumer telling reporters that Congress must “rein in ICE in very serious ways, and end the violence.”

Democrats are “drawing a line in the sand” as Republicans need their votes to continue the funding, Jeffries said.

The negotiations come amid some bipartisan sentiment that Congress should step in to de-escalate tensions over the enforcement operations that have rocked Minnesota and other states. But finding real agreement in such a short time will be difficult, if not “an impossibility,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Tuesday.

Trump last week agreed to a Democratic request that funding for Homeland Security be separated from a larger spending bill and extended at current levels for two weeks while the two parties discuss possible requirements for the federal agents. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said this weekend that he was at the White House when Trump spoke with Schumer and that they were “on the path to get agreement.”

But it’s unclear whether the president or enough congressional Republicans will agree to any of the Democrats’ larger demands that the officers unmask and identify themselves, obtain judicial warrants in certain cases and work with local authorities, among other asks. Republicans have already pushed back.

And House GOP lawmakers are demanding that some of their own priorities be added to the Homeland Security spending bill, including legislation that would require proof of citizenship before Americans register to vote. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other Republican senators are pushing for restrictions on sanctuary cities that they say don’t do enough to crack down on illegal immigration. There’s no clear definition of sanctuary jurisdictions, but the term is generally applied to state and local governments that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

It’s also uncertain whether Democrats who are furious over the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement operations would be willing to compromise.

“Republicans need to get serious,” Schumer, a New York Democrat, said, adding that they will propose “tough, strong legislation” in the next day.

A look at Democrats’ demands and what Republicans are saying about them:

Agreement on body cameras

Republicans say they are open to officer-worn body cameras, a change that was already in the underlying Homeland Security spending bill. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem backed that up on Monday when she ordered body-worn cameras to be issued to every DHS officer on the ground in Minneapolis, including those from ICE. She said the policy would expand nationwide as funding becomes available.

The bill already directed $20 million to outfit immigration enforcement agents with body-worn cameras.

Gil Kerlikowske, who served as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2014 to 2017, said that most agents are “very supportive” of cameras because they could help exonerate officers. But he added that complex questions remain, including when footage should be released and when cameras must be activated.

“When do you turn it on? And if you got into a problem and didn’t have it on, are you going to be disciplined? It’s really pretty complex,” he said.

Schumer said Tuesday that the body cameras “need to stay on.”

Disagreement on masking

As videos and photos of aggressive immigration tactics and high-profile shootings circulate nationwide, agents covering their faces with masks has become a flash point. Democrats argue that removing the masks would increase accountability. Republicans warn it could expose agents to harassment and threats.

“State law enforcement, local folks don’t do it,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Committee for Homeland Security. “I mean, what’s so special about an ICE law enforcement agency that they have to wear a mask?”

But Republicans appear unlikely to agree.

“Unlike your local law enforcement in your hometown, ICE agents are being doxed and targeted. We have evidence of that,” Johnson said on Tuesday. He added that if you “unmask them and you put all their identifying information on their uniform, they will obviously be targeted.”

Immigration officers are already required to identify themselves “as soon as it is practical and safe to do so,” according to federal regulations. ICE officials insist those rules are being followed.

Critics, however, question how closely officers adhere to the regulations.

“We just see routinely that that’s not happening,” said Nithya Nathan Pineau, a policy attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Judicial vs. administrative warrants

Democrats have also demanded stricter use of judicial warrants and an end to roving patrols of agents who are targeting people in the streets and in their homes. Schumer said Tuesday that they want “arrest warrants and an end to racial profiling.”

Most immigration arrests are carried out under administrative warrants, internal documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize the arrest of a specific person but do not permit officers to forcibly enter private homes or other nonpublic spaces without consent. Traditionally, only warrants signed by judges carry that authority.

But an internal ICE memo obtained by the Associated Press last month authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move that advocates say collides with 4th Amendment protections.

Democrats have not made clear how broadly they want judicial warrants used. Jeffries of New York said that Democrats want to see “an end to the targeting of sensitive locations like houses of worship, schools and hospitals.”

Johnson said Tuesday that Democrats are trying to “add an entirely new layer” by seeking warrants signed by a judge rather than the administrative warrants that are signed by the department. “We can’t do that,” he said.

The speaker has said that an end to roving patrols is a potential area of agreement, but he did not give details.

Code of conduct and more accountability

Democrats have also called for a uniform code of conduct for all ICE and federal agents similar to that for state and local law enforcement officers.

Federal officials blocked state investigators from accessing evidence after Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, demanded that the state be allowed to take part, saying that it would be “very difficult for Minnesotans” to accept that an investigation excluding the state could be fair.

Hoping for a miracle

Any deal Democrats strike on the Department of Homeland Security is unlikely to satisfy everyone in the party. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said she would never support an agreement that didn’t require unmasking.

“I ran for Congress in 2018 on abolish ICE,” Pressley said. “My position has not changed.”

Thune, of South Dakota, has repeatedly said it’s an “impossibility” to negotiate and pass something so complicated in two weeks. He said any talks should be between Democrats and Trump.

“I don’t think it’s very realistic,” Thune said Tuesday about finding quick agreement. “But there’s always miracles, right?”

Jalonick and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press. AP writer Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren Price was taken to a hospital by paramedics on Wednesday after fainting during a Black History Month event at City Hall.

Price, 75, was taken by ambulance at Los Angeles General Medical Center, where he was in stable condition, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said.

Price is “in stable condition, is in recovery and doing well,” Harris-Dawson told the audience at Wednesday’s council meeting. “But out of abundance of caution, he obviously won’t be with us in council today.”

The incident took place on the third floor bridge linking City Hall and City Hall East, which is currently displaying an exhibit of prominent Black women community leaders, according to Price spokesperson Angelina Valencia-Dumarot. Price spoke at a ceremony celebrating the exhibit, which had scores of attendees, before feeling faint and needing to lean on one of his aides for help, she said.

It was not the first such medical incident to involve Price at a public event. Last year, Price fainted while appearing at a groundbreaking for the upgrade of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which is located in his district.

At the time, a Price staffer said he was suffering from dehydration. He missed a month of council meetings after that event.

On Wednesday, Valencia-Dumarot said her boss was getting “the care that he needs” at the hospital.

“His wife is with him, his family is with him, and we’re all just wishing him well and sending our prayers,” she said.

The medical incident comes a roughly week after a judge ruled that a corruption case against Price can proceed to trial. Price has been charged with embezzlement, perjury and having a conflict of interest, by casting votes on real estate projects whose developers had hired his wife.

Price’s lawyer said there is no evidence that the council member was aware of the conflicts. All of the projects were approved with overwhelming support, and Price’s vote made no difference in the final result, the attorney said.