POLITICS

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday refused to box himself in on how long U.S. military operations will last in Iran, saying the conflict in the Middle East could stretch from a month to potentially “far longer” as he frames the mission as one that is necessary to eliminate a “colossal threat” to American interests.

“Whatever the time is, it’s OK. Whatever it takes,” Trump said at a White House event. “Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it.”

Hours earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the duration of the military operation remains fluid, and that Trump has “all the latitude in the world” to determine how long the war in Iran will go on.

“Four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back,” Hegseth told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

The Trump administration’s shifting time frames and open-ended objectives in Iran have deepened uncertainty around an expanding conflict in the Middle East, particularly as American troops have already been killed in action and officials warn of more U.S. casualties.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday that additional U.S. military forces are already moving into the region, and warned that the conflict will not be a “single, overnight operation” and that he expects “additional losses.”

A fourth U.S. fatality

The development came as military officials confirmed a fourth American service member had been killed by Iranian counterattacks and that three American jets were mistakenly shot down in Kuwait in an “apparent friendly fire incident” — and as airstrikes continued to fall across the Middle East, where missile defense systems were unable to intercept every attack and deaths mounted into the hundreds.

As the U.S. and Israel continued to hammer Tehran and other targets across Iran and in Lebanon, retaliatory strikes by Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, were reported in Israel as well as at U.S. facilities and other targets inside Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, according to the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, to Iran’s east, Pakistan and Afghanistan were engaged in their own battles, further destabilizing the region.

In addition to hundreds of people dead, including Iranian schoolchildren, other civilians and migrant workers in the Gulf, the fighting has impacted the world’s production of oil and natural gas — disrupting tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz at the southern end of the Persian Gulf and causing oil prices to shoot up.

Saudi Arabia said it intercepted Iranian drones attacking an oil refinery near Dammam, with the refinery shutting down as a precaution, the AP reported. Iran denied targeting the facility.

Air travel disrupted

The war also disrupted air traffic globally, as major airports in the Gulf, including in Dubai, halted or radically scaled back flights. The travel interruptions rippled around the world, and airline stocks tumbled.

Israel had implemented nationwide restrictions on activities as it fended off attacks from Iran and residents hid in bomb shelters. Iran reported strikes at multiple schools in the country had left young students dead.

As the conflict unfolds in real time, Trump and Hegseth have refused to rule out sending American troops into Iran, and the president has signaled that the “big wave” of military attacks is yet to come.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told the New York Post on Monday. ”I say, ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

When asked by a reporter whether U.S. troops were currently on the ground, Hegseth told reporters they were not, but then bristled at further questions about potential future deployments.

“Why in the world would we tell you, the enemy or anybody, what we will do or will not do in pursuit of an objective?” Hegseth said.

The Trump administration’s objectives in the war have been equally hard to pinpoint. Trump said Saturday that the operation is aimed at razing Iran’s military and nuclear capability and dismantling Iran’s theocratic regime, but on Monday said the goal is to eliminate the threats posed by the “sick and sinister regime” but not the government itself.

Hegseth said the attacks in Iran are not part of a “so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change and the world is better off for it today.” The U.S. and Israel attack on Saturday killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

‘Second or third place is dead’

In an interview with ABC News on Sunday evening, Trump suggested his administration had considered some figures to replace Khamenei, but said those people are now dead.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump said. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

The Trump administration’s messaging, meanwhile, was consistent in its vengeful rhetoric.

Hegseth and Trump both warned that any threat to Americans would be met with force.

“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation, we will kill you,” Hegseth said.

Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute, said a long misconception in “the way the U.S. reads Iran” is the belief that Khamenei ruled the country alone, and that taking him out would create a massive leadership vacuum or a sharp shift in the nation’s policies.

But while Khamenei was certainly an “intransigent” force in Iran, killing him won’t “lead to a major shift inside the country,” Harris said.

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said whether the U.S. can get out of Iran on a relatively short timeline depends on whether those in power in Iran now are willing to negotiate terms that Khamenei and other leaders who have been killed rejected.

“If the remnants of the regime are ideologically committed to what they were under Khamenei,” Radd said he “can’t see Trump backing down” and would expect the war to rage on.

Other leaders in Iran are fundamentalist and aligned with Khamenei, but given the U.S. has shown a willingness and ability to capture and assassinate foreign leaders, they might back down out of self-preservation.

“In the short term, there should be a wait-and-see approach as to what this reconstituted regime looks like,” he said.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump announced that he was taking the United States to war against Iran, he offered a long list of ambitious goals.

He said the operation aimed not only to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but also to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and defang its proxy forces in the Middle East.

Then he added the most audacious objective of all: regime change.

“To the great, proud people of Iran … the hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “Take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

That was a striking turnabout for Trump, who campaigned for president in 2016 promising: “We’re going to stop the reckless and costly policy of regime change.”

But it’s far from clear that the president has a coherent plan for replacing Iran’s radical Islamist autocracy with a friendlier regime. Nor is it clear that he’s fully committed to the goal.

On Monday, at a White House event, Trump reiterated the military goals of the operation, but did not mention regime change — suggesting he may be having second thoughts. However, he did describe the current Iranian regime as “sick and sinister.”

Military experts and Iran scholars are virtually unanimous that airstrikes alone, no matter how destructive, are unlikely to transform the Islamic republic into a peaceable, democratic country.

“Air power rarely produces friendly regime change,” said Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago, a prominent scholar of air power. “Bombing can destroy targets. It does not reliably reshape politics.”

A more likely outcome is that Iran’s militant Islamic security force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, will seize power, experts said. The Washington Post has reported that the CIA also made that assessment before the war began.

A takeover by the Revolutionary Guard would change the names of the people in charge, but it would fall far short of a genuine regime change.

Trump has said he doesn’t believe ground troops will be necessary, although he hasn’t ruled them out. He hasn’t offered a plan for pushing Iran’s theocratic rulers out of power beyond continuing the airstrikes. The outcome on the ground, he said Sunday, is up to ordinary Iranians.

“Be brave, be bold, be heroic and take back your country,” he said in a video message on Sunday. “America is with you. I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise. The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help.”

In an interview with the New York Times, he said he hopes the Revolutionary Guard will simply “surrender” to the opposition forces it was brutalizing only a month ago.

In effect, he is abandoning the so-called Pottery Barn rule — “You break it, you own it” — that was popularized by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell before the Iraq war in 2003. Trump’s message to Iranians looks like: “I’ll break it, you own it.”

Iran’s democratic opposition is fragmented

The central problem with Trump’s apparent theory of regime change, scholars say, is that the Revolutionary Guard and other security services are well-organized and well-equipped, but the country’s democratic opposition is fragmented.

“Even if the clerical regime were to fall, the security forces are best positioned to take its place,” warned Richard N. Haass, a former top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, he added, “the political opposition is not united or functioning as a government-in-waiting. It is not in a position to accept defections [from the regime], much less provide security.”

Some experts argue that there is more the administration could be doing to improve the prospects for regime change, without putting troops on the ground.

Haass faulted the Trump administration for failing to work more closely with the Iranian opposition to prepare it for a role in a potential future government.

Others said the United States should now make it clear that it would provide substantial economic aid to a new Iranian regime, but only if its behavior is benign. Iran’s economic crisis, its worst in recent history, helped spark the popular uprising in January that the regime suppressed at the cost of thousands in lives.

“There are more steps the administration could be taking now to help the democratic opposition,” said Kelly Shannon, a visiting scholar at George Washington University. “Close coordination with dissidents on the ground. Protection from the security forces if they open fire. Money, including support for a general strike fund. Assistance with ensuring internet access for all Iranians. And ensure that airstrikes don’t hit Evin Prison or other prisons where dissidents are being held; a lot of potential opposition leaders are in there.”

Scenarios for the future

If the Revolutionary Guard remains intact, Iran experts have described several different scenarios for the regime that may emerge.

One might be called the Venezuela scenario: an Iran ruled by officers from the current regime who have agreed to cooperate to some extent with the United States. This would resemble the situation in Venezuela, where the United States captured President Nicolás Maduro but left the rest of his regime in power.

Trump has already endorsed that quick-fix scenario and said he’s willing to open talks with the newly named successors to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” he told the New York Times.

Another option might be called the Hamas scenario: a battered and weakened Islamic Republic could stay in power but remain hostile to the United States, even after losing much of its military infrastructure.

A third possibility would be the Libya scenario: an Iran in which the regime has been toppled, and several factions battle for power. That’s what happened in Libya after the United States and other countries used air power to help overthrow longtime dictator Moammar Kadafi.

But none of those scenarios would be the transition to democracy that many Iranians hope for — the more positive version of regime change.

Trump’s search for offramps

Trump, meanwhile, sounds as if he is already looking for an opportunity to declare victory and withdraw.

In an interview with Axios on Saturday, he said he believes he has several “offramps” from the war.

“I can go long and take over the whole thing — or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians, ‘See you again in a few years.’”

“He seems to be looking for an offramp,” Haass said. “He may say ‘It’s up to the Iranian people’ and leave the opposition to its fate…. He might claim a victory in terms of obliterating — or, I guess, ‘re-obliterating’ — Iran’s nuclear program and downgrading its ballistic missiles.”

“But he would still face a danger in that scenario. If it comes down to a physical confrontation [between the regime and the opposition], the opposition could be killed in even larger numbers before. … After offering regime change as one of the reasons for the war, we may not only fail to produce regime change; we could see a second massacre.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to limit the reach of the 2nd Amendment and deny gun rights to “habitual” users of drugs, including marijuana.

But most of the justices sounded skeptical. They questioned whether marijuana users are so dangerous they should not have firearms.

They noted too that President Trump signed a recent executive order to reclassify marijuana as lesser controlled substance.

“Why is this a test case?,” asked Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Federal laws on “controlled substances” and the 2nd Amendment created a conflict between gun rights and illegal drugs, but Gorsuch said marijuana users are not seen as a particular danger to the public.

“This is an odd case to have chosen” to resolve this legal dispute, he said.

Most of the justices said they were wary of ruling broadly to decide the legal status of other addictive drugs.

At issue was a provision of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which forbids gun possession by any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”

The Justice Department says about 300 people per year are charged with a crime under this provision. They include Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, who was charged and convicted of lying about his drug addiction when he applied for a handgun permit.

The case brought together civil libertarians and gun rights advocates, who said millions of Americans could face criminal charges if the government’s view is upheld.

Deputy Solicitor Gen. Sarah Harris, representing the administration, said the court should uphold the law to deny guns to habitual users of unlawful drugs.

“Congress decided it is dangerous to mix firearms with controlled substances,” she said.

But Erin Murphy, a Washington attorney, said gun owners have not been notice that having a handgun at home could lead to a criminal prosecution if they sometimes use marijuana.

She said the court should hand down a “narrow” decision that spares her client.

Ali Hemani, a Texas man, was investigated by the FBI in 2020 for his family’s suspected ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist group.

When the FBI obtained a warrant to search his home, agents found a Glock pistol and 60 grams of marijuana as well as 4.7 grams of cocaine in his mother’s room. Hemani said he used marijuana about every other day.

He was charged with illegal gun possession because he was an unlawful drug user.

But citing the 2nd Amendment, a federal judge and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the charges on the grounds that he was not under the influence of drugs at the time of his arrest.

Appealing, the Trump administration said the Supreme Court should uphold the 1968 law and deny guns to those who are “habitual users” of illegal drugs.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said this prosecution “falls well within Congress’s authority to temporarily disarm categories of dangerous persons — here, habitual drug users.”

From the nation’s founding, “habitual drunkards” could be prohibited from having guns and that historic principle supports denying guns to habitual drug users.

The American Civil Liberties Union defended Hemani said the government’s view threatens to broadly extend the reach of the criminal law.

“Like tens of millions of Americans, Ali Hemani owned a handgun for self-defense, keeping it safely secured at home. Like many of those same Americans, he also consumed marijuana a few days a week,” they said in their brief.

“According to the government, those two facts alone sufficed to make him an ‘unlawful user’ of a controlled substance who could face criminal penalties.”

SACRAMENTO — The race for California governor couldn’t be much closer. And that’s scary for Democrats.

Only the top two vote-getters in the June 2 primary — regardless of their party — will advance to the November election. And although still unlikely, it’s increasingly conceivable that both could be Republicans.

“Scare tactics,” claim naysaying Democrats of such speculation.

But Democrats should have heeded scary rumblings 10 years ago when long shot Donald Trump was first running for president — and not buried their heads in the sand again two years ago when Joe Biden was feebly seeking reelection.

They ignored the warning signs and paid the price.

Now, the latest independent poll of likely voters shows that Republican candidates are running in two of the top three places for governor — meaning it’s possible both could qualify for the November ballot, guaranteeing the first election of a GOP chief executive in 20 years.

The best odds are on one Democrat and one Republican finishing in the top two — virtually assuring a Democratic victory in November.

California is too solidly Democrat — and President Trump too despised here — to envision a Republican beating a Democrat to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

But Democrats could beat themselves if the current field of candidates remains intact. There essentially are eight Democrats and only two Republicans competing in the primary.

If the combined Democratic vote is splintered among the eight Democratic contestants, the two Republicans could end up finishing first and second.

“It’s hard to come up with the math that makes that work,” asserts Mark Baldassare, polling director for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. He just completed a survey in which “a lot of things show that a Democrat and Republican [top-two finish] is the likely outcome,” he says.

But political data guru Paul Mitchell has been running primary election simulations and after Baldassare’s latest poll, he calculated the chances of an all-Republican finish at 18%.

That seems like the danger zone.

The solution is for some Democratic candidates who have little hope of winning to drop out of the race — very soon, in fact. They shouldn’t even file their official candidacy papers that are due by Friday. After that deadline, it’s impossible to remove their names from the ballot even if they’re no longer really running.

The PPIC poll, released last week, showed a statistical tie between the top five contenders — three Democrats and two Republicans, all within 4 percentage points of each other.

The breakdown:

Republican former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, 14%; Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter, 13%; Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, 12%; Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, 11%; Democratic hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, 10%.

Then came five Democratic stragglers.

Former U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state Controller Betty Yee each had 5%. Trailing them were San José Mayor Matt Mahan with 3% and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond at 2%.

Mahan’s a centrist wild card who jumped into the race while the polling was underway. So, there’s a valid excuse for his poor showing.

Swalwell and Steyer entered late last year and apparently took votes away from Porter and Becerra.

Porter and Yee are the only prominent female candidates, but they aren’t particularly being helped by female voters, the poll showed.

There was good news in the survey for Democrats hoping to pick up more congressional seats in California and help the party seize control of the House of Representatives from Republicans.

Asked whether they’d vote for a Democrat or Republican for Congress, 62% replied Democrat and only 36% Republican. That’s not surprising, since Democrats already hold 43 of California’s 52 seats.

Newsom and the Democratic-controlled Legislature last year gerrymandered California’s House districts with the goal of gaining at least five more seats. Voters approved that move by passing Proposition 50.

The especially bright news in the poll for Democrats was that in the five new House districts considered the most competitive, Democrats had a slight edge in voter preference. That was also true in districts held by Republicans.

Additionally, Democrats are much more enthusiastic than Republicans about voting in the congressional contests.

In the competitive districts, nearly two-thirds of voters disapprove of tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in corralling undocumented immigrants. And 57% disapprove of Trump.

Anti-Trump sentiment is extremely high among all voters — 30% approval and 70% disapproval.

One head-scratcher in the poll was the voters’ denial about their political polarization. They were asked what qualification they considered most important in choosing a governor. Only 6% said it was the candidate’s political party. Rubbage.

“There are very few people who are voting outside their party,” Baldassare notes.

Two-thirds of voters answered that a candidate’s stand on issues is the most important consideration for them. Voters of both parties, plus independents, rated a candidate’s position on “affordability” as “very” important — and it topped their list of concerns.

A majority of voters said California is “going in the wrong direction.” This is a gloomy finding for Democrats who have been ruling state government — and most large cities — for many years.

But a much larger majority believe the country also is headed in the wrong direction. Back at ya, Republicans. It’s the GOP that’s in total control of the federal government.

Both parties in California have reasons to run scared this year.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: California Democrats unite against Trump, differ on vision for state’s future
Salud: Retired 100-year-old fighter pilot from Escondido receives Medal of Honor
The L.A. Times Special: Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris have traveled parallel paths. Will they collide in 2028?

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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AUSTIN, Tex. — The lobby walls of the Driskill Hotel are hung with the portraits of figures of Texas political lore, men like Sam Houston and William B. Travis of Alamo fame. But on a rainy evening, a rather demure-looking woman in a conservative black suit and tidy tucked hairdo is the center of attention.

First, Texas Democratic Party chairman Bob Slagle comes up to hug and say hello. They chat briefly about how well things are going in the presidential campaign.

Then two young women walk by, one whispering to the other, “Is that Sarah Weddington?” They turn back and stop to introduce themselves. As the two say goodby, one adds: “Of course, it goes without saying how much I admire you.”

Weddington is used to this by now. The 46-year-old lawyer gained fame from her first case, Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1972 Supreme Court decision.

Since then, Weddington has spent almost two decades advocating abortion rights. Today, she has been in her adopted hometown of Austin signing copies of her new book, “A Question of Choice: The Lawyer Who Won Roe v. Wade,” for a parade of admirers. Longtime friends presented many of the almost 500 copies she signs; young women like the two who paused to thank her offered others.

Weddington stood for more than five hours at a podium, first at a university bookstore and later in the hotel ballroom, signing in a consistently elegant hand. Everyone is greeted with a smile, some with hugs. An aura of restraint surrounds her, an almost Victorian quality in a woman some see as a sort of virago, a demon of the left who has led the charge for legalized abortion.

Some friends describe her as “ladylike”; almost all say she is very private.

And yet her book begins with a revelation that she had kept a very personal secret. In 1967, while a young, unmarried law student at the University of Texas, this daughter of a minister and graduate of a small Methodist college, traveled to “a dirty Mexican border town to have an abortion, fleeing the law that made abortion illegal in Texas.”

She was accompanied by her then-boyfriend and later husband, fellow law student Ron Weddington. Divorced amicably in 1974, they kept the secret until the publication of the book. “I am a very private person and would never have talked about this if I hadn’t felt that I wanted to do everything I could to help win it again. That I can’t win it in the courts, nobody can. That’s where we have to win is at the ballot box. And it was like I had to give it everything I had and it was the one thing I had never given. . . .

“My own thoughts about it are that if I had to write a caption it would be ‘giving up privacy in order to save it.’ I feel like I’m giving something very precious up and that is the ability to live my life in privacy. . . . We always had an agreement not to talk about this without talking to the other, and he (her former husband) always observed it.”

Journalist Linda Ellerbee, a friend and fellow Texan, suggested that Weddington humanize her book to make it more accessible to readers. The first draft, Weddington acknowledges, was long and perhaps too legalistic: “First, I wanted to write the perfect book, and I couldn’t write that book. Then someone said, ‘Why don’t you practice writing the book,’ and I could do that because I was freeing myself.”

Weddington admits that a more likely publication date would have been 1993, the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But in the last few years, it became increasingly obvious to her that the landmark decision was in jeopardy: “In the book, I say if anybody had said to me in 1969 or 1973, ‘You will still be talking about this in 1992,’ I would have thought they were crazy.”

As president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, she had witnessed the first skirmishes of what she calls a war of attrition during the early years of the Reagan presidency. But at that point, she says, “We still had the trump card, the Supreme Court.”

Reagan, who she notes signed California’s liberal 1967 abortion law, then began to make conservative appointments to the high court. And at that point, Weddington says, “I began to say I was for mandatory life support systems for older justices.”

The 1989, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services decision was the real turning point, she says, and now she sees the battle lines on three fronts: the Supreme Court, the Congress, which is considering the Freedom of Choice Bill, and state legislatures.

Her book’s publication, just two months before the fall election, is no accident. President Bush, she says, made “a pact with the radical right” in 1988, and abortion-rights advocates cannot risk more of his court appointments: “The sands of time ran out when Clarence Thomas was confirmed.”

Weddington says Bill Clinton would sign the Freedom of Choice Act. But even a Clinton victory will not persuade her to sit back and say the fight is over. The Arkansas governor has supported some restrictions, as Weddington describes them, particularly regarding abortions for minors. “We are trying to educate him; it’s not a natural,” she says. “I don’t think you can elect Clinton and say, ‘Well, let’s forget about that.’ ”

For this activist lawyer, who drew her strength from the women’s movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the fight is not over on other fronts, either. She sees a need to engage the younger generation and to remind Americans why Roe was so important.

“Intellectually, they believe that choice should be available, but emotionally, they have never known what it was like for it not to be,” Weddington says of younger Americans. “You can’t expect them to have the same emotional memories and commitments, and yet I don’t think you can preach to them.”

The book’s final section is a call to arms, a detailed plan for action that gives Roe defenders a game plan. Weddington expects the fight to continue well into the next century and plans to continue the battle.

“I think this issue is so basic you can’t desert it, and while it’s in trouble, you’ve got to keep plugging,” she says. “I see a new group of people who haven’t been as active, but I think they will be more comfortable with a broader focus.” That focus, she says, should include family issues and support for birth control programs.

*

In one sense, Weddington admits, her career peaked at age 27 when she stood before the U.S. Supreme Court and argued her case for a woman’s right to choose. But the legal fight that began at a garage sale fund-raiser in 1969 and culminated in Roe–and her subsequent service as a special assistant on women’s issues in the Carter White House–was heady stuff for a young woman from Abilene.

She also served as one of the first women in the Texas House of Representatives (1973-1977) and was frequently mentioned as a candidate for statewide office, long before Ann Richards, her former legislative aide, won the governor’s race. Privately, a few friends admit that the stellar political career has passed Weddington by.

Elective office is not likely at this point. “I have a question whether the price is worth it,” she says. “There’s no money, and everybody is in a sour mood. When I ran, I ran to do something, and right now I don’t see that you can do that much. . . .”

For her beliefs, Weddington has paid a high personal price. She is dogged by activists opposed to abortion. At the Austin bookstore signing, several security guards were on hand.

But Roe v. Wade has also given Weddington opportunities to spread her message. For several years, she and Phyllis Schafly toured on a sort of abortion cross-fire show. Apart from not sharing the same views, they never even shared the same car. “We once tried to find something to talk about, and the only thing we agreed on was airplane coffee was usually bad,” Weddington says.

Now, Weddington plans to continue to teach part time at the University of Texas, speak around the country and ready herself for the barrage of publicity next year on the 20th anniversary of Roe. Should Clinton be elected, she would not mind serving as an adviser, but she would not want to have a full-time position in Washington. And she would like to write another book or two.

Not the least of her contributions is the impact Weddington has had on young people, particularly women. Time after time, during her Austin book signing, women in their 20s approach her, say that they had heard her speak before and tell her that she has changed their lives.

And at the last minute, three young women dash in from the rain and ask Weddington to sign their books. All three are recent graduates of the University of Texas law school and all three are Texas Supreme Court clerks. When Weddington asks how many women are in their law class, they say about 150.

Weddington smiles and says there were five when she graduated 24 years ago.

SACRAMENTO — A proposed initiative to require Californians to show identification every time they vote, and election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens, appears to have enough support to qualify for the November ballot.

Proponents say they have collected more than 1.3 million voter signatures on petitions supporting the ballot measure, far more than required under California law, and plan to submit them to county elections officials Monday for verification.

The Republican-led push for the voter ID initiative comes at a time of growing distrust in the integrity of the electoral process nationwide, a wariness intensified by President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and false assertions that droves of undocumented immigrants are swaying elections with illegal votes.

Proponents of voter ID contend that such laws prevent election fraud and, along with proof of citizenship mandates, prevent noncitizens from voting. Opponents say ID mandates threaten the fundamental constitutional rights of Americans who do not have the mandated documentation readily available, and that the restrictions are unnecessary given that voting by noncitizens is rare and already outlawed in the U.S.

The partisan divide over whether voters must provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, one of Trump’s top priorities, continues to consume Washington. House Republicans passed the mandate in early February but the legislation — known as the SAVE Act — has bogged down in the Senate.

Democrats say that under the SAVE Act, many state driver’s licenses would not be adequate documentation to prove U.S. citizenship, forcing people to produce a passport or birth certificate — which many voters do not have. According to a 2023 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice and others, 9% of U.S. adult citizens do not have proof of their citizenship that’s readily available. The survey found that 11% of adult citizens of color were unable to readily access those documents, compared with 8% for white American adults. They accused Republicans of trying to prevent millions of Americans from voting in the next election in order to keep Congress under GOP control.

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said that both the SAVE Act and proposed ballot measure in California are not only unnecessary, but harmful to democracy.

“Both are aimed at solving problems that don’t exist,” Chemerinsky said. “There is no evidence of a problem of non-citizens voting. Nor is there evidence of significant fraud with voters casting votes under false names. But both would limit who can vote. As for the SAVE Act, many people don’t have a birth certificate or passport.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaks during a news conference on Feb. 11 at the U.S. Capitol. Johnson was joined by Republicans to speak about the passage of the SAVE America Act, an election bill backed by President Donald Trump that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and require photo identification at the ballot box.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who supports and voted for the SAVE Act, said it is a simple way to restore voter confidence in elections. But he said the bill’s fate appears grim.

“I don’t think they have the votes,” Calvert said Friday.

Which is why, Calvert says, California must join other states and enact commonsense voter ID and citizenship requirements that can attract bipartisan support. The longtime Republican congressman said he does not believe there has been widespread voter fraud in the U.S., or a that a flood of noncitizens has been voting, but that does not mean those have not happened to some degree and would sway both tightly contested local elections and congressional races.

“I’ve always said it’s probably a small amount, but it’s enough to change an outcome of elections, and could change the numbers we have in Congress,” Calvert said.

The California ballot measure

The petitions being submitted for the California Voter ID Initiative will be reviewed by county election officials, who must verify that the people who signed are registered voters in the state and that the proponents collected at least the 874,641 valid signatures required to qualify for the November ballot.

The ballot measure will make significant changes to how Californians vote, and enact new mandates on county elections officials. Among the top changes being proposed:

• Every time a voter casts a ballot in person in any election in California, they must present government-issued identification.
• Californians voting by mail will be required to list on the ballot envelope the last four digits of a “unique identifying number from a government issued identification” — essentially a pin number like people use at an ATM — that matches the one the voter designated when they registered to vote.
• The California secretary of state and county election officials will be required to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens by “using government data,” which according to supporters could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, jury summons information and other government records.
• The secretary of state and county election officials must maintain accurate voter registration lists.
• If requested, the state would be required to a provide eligible voters with free voter identification cards for use during elections.

“We’re creating the legal obligation that in California, when we do voting, we want our election officers to actually give a damn about whether someone’s a citizen,” said Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), one of the main forces behind the proposed ballot measure. “That’s what we’re asking. That’s why voters support this, because it’s not a burden on the voter. It really is a burden on the election officers to do their job.”

Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego speaks at a press conference in July to announce a campaign to require voter identification in California.

(Tran Nguyen / Associated Press)

But Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, called the proposed ballot measure an underhanded attempt by Trump and Republicans to make it even harder for people in the state to vote — which they see as a political advantage. The Californians who will suffer the most are “communities of color, people with disabilities, elderly folks, folks who move around a lot, folks who have recently experienced a name change.”

“California elections are already secure. This initiative isn’t really about election integrity. It’s part of this broader national playbook from President Trump and the current federal administration to make voting harder and to create doubts in the minds of the public and to really sow chaos on election day,” Farrell said. “The measure would create new strict barriers for eligible voters. It could wrongfully flag naturalized citizens, and it will create new ways to challenge results.”

Noncitizens who vote in California risk being charged with a felony and deported, she said.

Farrell’s organization has joined with the ACLU of Northern and Southern California, Common Cause, Disability Rights California and other groups to oppose the proposed measure.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analysts Office estimates the new requirements under the proposed ballot measure could potentially cost state and local governments “tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars” annually.

What’s the law now in California?

Currently, 36 states require or request that voters provide identification at the time they cast a ballot, and 10 states have strict laws requiring people to produce government-issued photo IDs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Under current law, Californians are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. They are required to provide identification when registering to vote, and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and a U.S. citizen.

To register to vote, Californians must provide their driver’s license number or state identification card number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, along with other information. The state is required to validate the information using relevant databases, including records at the state Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration.

Along with a driver’s license, U.S. passport or state identification card, acceptable identification also can include photo identification cards issued by a school, a credit card company, a gym, an insurance company, an employer or a public housing agency. Californians have the option of providing certain other documents, as long as they contain the person’s name and address, including: utility bills, bank statements, government checks, rental statements or government-issued bus passes.

First-time voters who did not present identification when they registered to vote must present ID the first time they cast a ballot in a federal election.

When ballots are sent by mail, election officials are required to verify a voter’s signature on the ballot by comparing it with the signature on the official voter registration records on file.

BERKELEY — University of California President James B. Milliken, in his first extensive interview since taking the helm of the nation’s premier public higher education system, defended UC’s diplomatic approach to President Trump’s fusillade of actions against the institution — contrasting it with the more aggressive fight Harvard is waging with the government.

UC has not repeatedly sued the federal government or publicly criticized Trump, while Harvard battles the administration in and outside court amid billions in White House funding freezes.

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“We could have said, ‘We’re going to sue tomorrow.’ We saw that movie with Harvard,” Milliken said of his first seven months on the job dominated by federal attacks. “Harvard is still in negotiations to settle the federal government’s actions, but they have had a series of devastating enforcement actions taken … Given our responsibility to the university and to the state of California, the better course for us was to engage.”

Yet days after the interview, the U.S. Department of Justice leveled another strike against UC in a lawsuit alleging UCLA “routinely ignored” and “failed to report” employee complaints of antisemitism since 2023.

In a statement after the interview, Milliken said UC has already committed to combating anti-Jewish hatred without court interference.

“Antisemitism has no place at UC and we have taken important actions to protect our Jewish students, faculty and staff … We will always have work to do, and our commitment to our community is unwavering,” the statement said. “In light of this — and our oft-cited willingness to work with the government in good faith — the new lawsuit is unfortunate and, in our view, unnecessary.”

In a wide-ranging interview at UC Berkeley’s Grimes Engineering Center, Milliken, 68, offered his assessment of Trump’s actions to overhaul higher education and declined to say whether UC would pay an amount smaller than the $1.2-billion proposed fine over UCLA’s alleged campus antisemitism.

On federal talks, Milliken said UC would “never compromise” on its independence, governance, values and academic freedom.

James B. Milliken.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

He touted UC’s accomplishments despite the challenges: Four faculty members received Nobel prizes last year — the largest ever number from one institution — and UC secured more patents for inventions last year than any university in the world.

Aside from Trump, UC faces internal pressures: multiple campuses, including UCLA, are in deficit. Labor unions are demanding better job conditions. Members of the UAW 4811 academic workers union have authorized a potential strike.

Milliken spoke in favor of diversity, celebrated immigrants and said he wanted to expand student access to the university. He said UC should lead on artificial intelligence.

Milliken started in August after more than six years as chancellor of the University of Texas system. He previously held top roles at the City University of New York, the University of Nebraska and the University of North Carolina. A news and history buff and former Wall Street lawyer who prefers reading paper over pixels, he often cites his study of “The Gold and the Blue,” a two-volume chronicle of UC’s ascent in the 1950s and struggles during the political turmoil of 1960s written by former UC Berkeley Chancellor turned UC President Clark Kerr.

He said his job is “to do everything we can to demonstrate the value that’s delivered by these amazing places … I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty in the current political environment,” but, he added, universities have been a national boon “over generations.”

Trump and higher education

Adjusting to the possibility of further retrenchment of Washington’s university research funding is among Milliken’s top concerns.

UC relies on $17.5 billion annually in federal monies, including research grants, Pell grants and hospital payments for Medicare and Medicaid. Last year, the government suspended $584 million in UCLA federal medical, science and energy research grants before a UC faculty-led lawsuit restored the money. But roughly $170 million in grants is still on hold systemwide.

Another independent faculty- and union-led federal suit has temporarily halted the $1.2-billion UCLA settlement demand seeking rightward ideological change on campus. But UC remains open to talks to quash federal probes on its own terms.

James B. Milliken.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Milliken was vague on the status of negotiations and whether UC would pay a fine — such as the $200 million Columbia University signed off on last year — to settle federal investigations.

“It would be foolhardy of me to speculate on what ultimately might be proposed to the University of California or what we might find acceptable,” he said.

He declined to specify how he would uphold his promises to protect UC’s independence, governance, values and academic freedom.

“I’m not going to go into detail on those because it gets pretty close to the line of what could be a discussion with the federal government,” Milliken said.

Educational access

Milliken was more verbose on the role of higher education and his big-picture visions for UC.

College “helps make sure that we have an educated citizenry that is prepared to actively participate in a democracy that understands our civic traditions, that understands our political system, that understands how our economic system works,” Milliken said.

“Talent is universal,” he said, “but opportunity often isn’t.” Universities “match this talent with the opportunity.”

But federal moves have threatened to change access to education. The Trump administration has sued California’s public universities and community colleges for allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition. A Trump travel ban on dozens of countries has stalled student and faculty applications from Asian, African and South American nations, while a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign hires could hurt university and hospital recruitment.

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Milliken pledged to protect immigrants.

“I think we need to take a step back and recognize how fundamental the country’s embrace of people from around the world has been,” Milliken said. “It has been an enormous boon in terms of talent and culture and the kinds of things that make this country what it is today. I know people are worried, they’re anxious. In some cases, they’re afraid … One of the things that our university presidents and chancellors think about every day is keeping these communities safe.”

Lifelong learning

UC — home to several of the most selective and prestigious campuses in the nation — continues to grow in size and popularity. The system set a record enrollment of about 301,000 students in 2025. And 252,000 high school and transfer students have submitted applications for the coming fall, another record high. Yet, vast numbers of academically qualified students do not get in, especially to UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Campuses, including UCLA, have upped professional certificate programs and extension school offerings in recent years. Milliken said universities should further embrace learning programs outside of the undergraduate experience. UCLA is developing a plan called “UCLA for Life” to reimagine the Westwood campus’ role for professionals.

“A four-year baccalaureate experience is not enough to prepare you for 40 years or 50 years of a career. You’re going to need to retool, going to need to re-skill. And I look at universities. Students ought to turn to their alma maters. There’s a relationship that you ought to have for life,” Milliken said.

The university’s future and evolution

Milliken wants UC to take on a lead role in AI.

“The continued adaptation of AI is inevitable, and there are good things and not so good things about that. But UC is the most important, impactful university in the world, and it should not be following others in developing what is the ethical and responsible,” Milliken said. “… We’re in a place where I think leadership, whether we wanted it or not, is a responsibility.”

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More Californians should take stock of UC’s role outside of undergraduate education, he said.

“Two-thirds of our students are undergraduates. It’s a hugely important thing. But so is the research we do. So is the healthcare that we do across the state. So is the work we do at national laboratories which support incredible innovation and national security,” he said.

Milliken said he hoped the cuts to university research were a short-term “aberration.”

New research funding state bond bill

UC has put its weight behind a $23-billion bond proposal that will be on the November ballot to create a California Foundation for Science and Health Research, which would fund university and private institutions in ways similar to the National Institutes of Health.

If voters pass it, Milliken said the measure would “go an enormous way” toward making up for federal losses but that it was “impossible to speculate” on the extent as federal research funding, priorities and procedures fluctuate.

“I hope we never get to the question of whether California can replace federal funding,” he said. “Would I like to see it supplement, ensure that disruptions — even if shorter term — don’t derail the important science that’s going on here and the preparation of the next generation of scientists? Yes, I think that’s an incredibly worthwhile endeavor for the state.”

More from The Times’ interview with Milliken:

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After the fraudulent election of July 28, 2024, Nicolás Maduro announced he would deepen the “Communal State” as a model of popular participation. In his words, it was necessary to “accelerate the construction of popular power” and “transfer more powers to the communes.” The implicit promise: more communes, more consultations, and more participation should equal more solutions.

I put that promise to the test with data from Mérida, a state where public services (especially water and electricity) fail every day. In mid-2024, power outages were almost four hours a day, enough to ruin an entire family.

In May of that year, a professor at the University of the Andes, Israel José Ramirez, died in the building where I lived with my family. That day, the power went out as well. The professor was inside an elevator that became trapped between the first and second floors. When he forced the mechanical lock on the door to try to get out, he found himself facing a void: the elevator car wasn’t at the floor’s level. He tried to jump but couldn’t reach. He fell to the bottom of the elevator shaft, about three stories high. He died on impact.

Electricity in that part of the city usually took four to eight hours to return. That day, it only took half an hour. The desperation of a prolonged power outage led Professor Ramírez to open the elevator doors, and his life ended there. This tragedy was a partial motivation for conducting this research.

Between August and July 2025, I did an internship at the National Institute of Statistics. There, I was able to review the records of 198 projects from the Concrete Action Agendas (ACA in Spanish) in 64 communes in the state of Mérida. The ACAs are the central mechanism of the chavista Communal State for participatory planning: consultations in which the communes identify their priority problems (called “critical nodes”) and vote on the projects they want the State to implement. These 64 communes represented 82% of the 78 registered in the state. The remaining 14 were excluded from the analysis because the officials responsible for transcribing the community assessments into the databases made so many errors that the information was unusable.

The communes understand the workings of the State better than many public officials.

Official reports stated: “Project in progress” or “Project completed.” But something didn’t add up. Local communities kept voting on the same service problems year after year. Someone was lying.

I needed to separate the propaganda from reality. I did something simple: I took each problem that a commune voted on in 2022 and tracked it for four years. If it stopped appearing in subsequent consultations, the government could claim it had been resolved. If it continued to appear year after year, it meant that people had been shouting the same thing for four years. And if it disappeared without explanation (neither resolved nor voted on again), nobody knew what had happened. The State simply ignored it.

Using this detector, I audited 198 projects. The results are summarized in the following graphs:

These charts reveal three dimensions of failure.

First of all, who decides: of the 198 projects, 51.5% (102) were assigned to ministries and the national government for implementation, while another 25.8% (51) fell to the Mérida governorship. The communes diagnose the needs, but Caracas decides whether to open or close the tap of resources. Only 19.2% (38 projects) remained under municipal or communal control.

Second, what happened to them: almost half of the projects were not even considered. Only a quarter (50 projects, 25.3%) were completed after years of consultations. The State received the diagnosis, knew exactly what the people needed, and decided to do nothing. Third, participation wasn’t the problem: 76.8% of the communes (152 projects) participated in all four national consultations, from the first in 2022 to the last in 2025. The core chavista voter base mobilized, filled out forms, and voted. The system didn’t fail due to a lack of participation. The problem isn’t that the communities don’t know how to organize themselves. The problem is that when they do organize, the system ignores them.

Now, what problems are the communes identifying? These are summarized in the following chart:

This chart’s revelation is devastating: two out of every three communes in Mérida (43 out of 64, or 67%) identified water as their priority problem. This isn’t an isolated issue affecting just one or two communes. It’s a systemic crisis impacting the entire state. Four problems (water, roads, housing, and electricity) account for 60% of all project requests in Mérida.

Now, we can see how the ACA projects are distributed in Mérida in the following chart:

Of the 198 projects analyzed, 54 are related to water. More than a quarter (27%) of all projects. The first four categories (water, roads, housing, and electricity) account for 62.63% of all projects. The Pareto principle applied to poverty: 20% of the causes explain 80% of the problems. And how many of those 54 water projects were actually implemented?

Behind these figures are real families, of course. Take the example of the Doña Simona commune in Lagunillas, Mérida, which has a serious drinking water problem. In 2022, they voted for water in the first referendum. In 2023, they voted for water again. In 2024, the same. And in 2025, four years later, they were still voting for water. Four referendums. The same problem. Why? In a conversation with the Mérida’s INE office, where I did a summer internship, they revealed the number that explains everything: $10,000. That’s the budget per project. Always. It doesn’t matter if the community asks for an aqueduct or paint for a school.

With $10,000 you can’t build an aqueduct. It’s barely enough for 200 meters of pipe. You can’t dredge a river. You can’t pave a road. You can’t solve a water crisis that affects 43 of the state’s 64 communes. The communes learned this lesson. If you need water but it costs $50,000, you’re better off asking for paint. At least that’s something they will greenlight.

Four years of voting for water. And in the end, paint for the walls of a run-down public school.

So, what happened in Doña Simona? In the third and fourth consultations, the community changed its vote. They no longer asked for the aqueduct they needed. They voted for something “realistic”: participating in the Bricomiles, the program where soldiers paint school facades and repair sports field roofs. It’s not that the people of Doña Simona are unaware of what’s happening in their community, but rather that they’ve learned to play the system: the State only funds projects that cost less than $10,000. “Citizen participation” then revealed itself not as empowerment, but as an exercise in adjusting real needs to the ridiculously small budget the government is willing to provide. Four years of voting for water. And in the end, paint for the walls of a run-down public school.

However, one thing is certain: the communes of Mérida are always right. When the problem is electricity, they assign it to Corpoelec. When it’s water, to Aguas de Mérida. When it’s housing, to the Ministry of Housing. I reviewed 198 projects and didn’t find a single exception. The communes understand the workings of the State better than many public officials.

This accuracy remained consistent across all 64 communes, throughout the four consultations, and in all 198 projects. Then I thought: if the diagnosis is so precise, if the communes are doing their job, the system should be producing results. Water flowing through pipes. Paved streets. Stable electricity. I measured the relationship between the quality of the diagnosis and the effective resolution of problems. This graph shows the main conclusion of this research, which I call the Great Disconnect.

The dark blue cells confirm what we already saw: the communes diagnose with surgical precision. The system works like clockwork in the diagnostic phase. So I asked the obvious question: if the communities diagnose perfectly, does the State provide solutions?

The answer was once again devastating. There is no correlation. None. The gray cells say it all: a commune correctly identifying its problem predicts absolutely nothing about whether that problem will be solved. Neither the accuracy of the diagnosis, nor the urgency of the problem, nor how many times people have voted for the same thing matters. None of that matters.

The factors that determine whether a project is implemented operate completely outside the formal Commune Action Board (CAB) system. They are external, opaque, probably related to circumstantial political will, erratic budgets, or the constant turnover of officials.

This is the Great Disconnect: a system that diagnoses with surgical precision and does nothing.

My data shows what that means: more people shouting in empty rooms. The communes are just an authoritarian excuse to overrepresent their political power.

The success or failure of a project doesn’t depend on whether the commune identified its need, whether the responsible institution was selected correctly, how urgent the problem is, or how many times people have voted for the same thing. What determines whether a project is implemented operates entirely outside the formal CAB system. These are external, opaque factors, probably related to short-term political will, erratic budgets, or the constant turnover of officials. The communities do their part. The Venezuelan State does not.

The problem with the Communal State in Mérida isn’t one of scale, it’s structural. There’s no shortage of communes: 64 are already functioning. There’s no lack of participation: 76.8% of the communes participated in the four consultations. The system works exactly as it was designed, mobilizing the chavista base to diagnose problems, making them believe they are participating, and then systematically ignoring their demands. It’s not a failure. It’s the design.

My data shows what that means: more people shouting in empty rooms. The communes are just an authoritarian excuse to overrepresent their political power. The reality is that the wife of Professor Israel Ramírez found him dead in the elevator shaft because there was no electricity in the building that day. In some neighborhoods of Mérida, people probably voted for electricity in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. And in 2026, if this policy continues, they will continue to vote for it.

Despite its reputation as a leader of resistance, California saw more pro-Trump crowds than any other state during the president’s term in office.

That’s according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project from the University of Connecticut and Harvard University that documents political gatherings of all kinds. By combing news reports and social media, the group has cataloged some 4,500 pro-Trump gatherings nationwide since he took office in 2017. Of those, 417 events were in California. Florida was a distant second, with 253 events.

California is one of bluest states, but it’s also the most populous — 17.5 million people voted in the 2020 election. Though Joe Biden won the election here by a 2-1 margin, Trump claimed around 6 million votes, a higher raw total than in any other state.

After adjusting for size, California doesn’t look so exceptional in terms of Trump gatherings: It ranks 20th out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., in protests per Trump voter. Washington was at the top, with 108 pro-Trump events in the past four years, despite having fewer than 19,000 people voting for the president.

The protests in California haven’t been limited to the red parts of the state. The top three counties are in Southern California: Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties combined had 174 events, about 40% of the pro-Trump protests in the state. Of the top 10 counties, the only one that went to Trump in the election was Kern, home of Bakersfield and a center of the oil and gas industry.

The researchers study the crowds and classify the political causes that motivate people to show up for each gathering. Many events provided only general support for the president, protesting officials who spoke against him or rallying in support of his campaign promises. Some protests were more specific, such as events opposing public health regulations related to the pandemic, supporting policing efforts or opposing the Black Lives Matter movement.

The data show a spike in pro-Trump protests after the 2020 election. After Biden was named the winner, there were a wave of protests supporting Trump’s disproved claims that the election had been stolen. On Jan. 6, the day the U.S. Capitol was raided, there were 15 protests of the election results in California, more than in any other state.

The number of gatherings in support of the president have been dwarfed by those opposing him. Over the last four years, there were nearly 38,000 anti-Trump events tracked by the consortium, eight times more than the number of pro-Trump gatherings. Again, California led the nation, hosting more anti-Trump rallies than any other state.

WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump’s older sister, a former federal judge, is heard sharply criticizing her brother in a series of recordings released Saturday, at one point saying of the president, “He has no principles.”

Maryanne Trump Barry was secretly recorded by her niece, Mary Trump, who recently released a book denouncing the president, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” Mary Trump said Saturday she made the recordings in 2018 and 2019.

In one recording, Barry, 83, says she had heard a 2018 interview with her brother on Fox News in which he suggested that he would put her on the border to oversee cases of immigrant children separated from their parents.

“His base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this,” Barry says.

At another point she says: “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God.” She adds: “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy — .”

Barry can also be heard saying that she guesses that her brother has never read her opinions on immigration cases.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asks her aunt.

Barry responds: “No. He doesn’t read.”

The recordings were first reported by the Washington Post. The Associated Press then obtained the recordings.

The recordings came to light just a day after the late Robert Trump, brother to Maryanne and the president, was memorialized in a service at the White House. Later, the president was dismissive of the recordings.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people,” Trump said in a statement. “Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before.”

In the weeks since the release of Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle, she has been questioned about the source of some of its information. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt. On Saturday, Mary Trump revealed that she had covertly taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry.

“Mary realized members of her family had lied in prior depositions,” said Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump. He added: “Anticipating litigation, she felt it prudent to tape conversations in order to protect herself.”

The president has frequently spoken highly of his sister; the recordings are the first time a family member, outside of Mary Trump, has been critical of him.

The recordings appear to illuminate tension between the president and his sister. At one point Barry says to her niece: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump’s book was filled with attacks on her uncle, including the assertion — he denied it — that he paid someone to take the SATs for him as he sought to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania.

In one recording, Barry says that a Joe Shapiro took the test for Trump. The president was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told have said he never took a test for anybody.

Bastardi said of Mary Trump: “She never expected to learn much of what she heard, including the president’s sister, federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, state that Donald Trump had paid someone to take an SAT exam for him.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump, his Treasury secretary and his choice to lead the Federal Reserve believe they can coax the U.S. economy back to a boom reminiscent of the 1990s.

They are putting their faith in artificial intelligence to duplicate what happened when another technology arrived during the Clinton era: the internet. Back then, the American economy surged as businesses became more productive, unemployment tumbled and inflation remained in check.

Trump expresses confidence that his nominee to become Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, can unleash an economic bonanza by jettisoning what the president sees as the central bank’s hidebound reluctance to slash interest rates.

Many economists are skeptical.

The world looks a lot different today than it did when the Spice Girls ruled radio and “Titanic’’ dominated the box office. And the story the Trump team is telling — that a visionary Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, fueled the 1990s boom by keeping interest rates low — is incomplete at best.

“The administration is offering a rather distorted version of what actually happened in the 1990s,’’ economist Dario Perkins of TS Lombard said in a commentary.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration believes history can repeat itself. All that’s been missing, Trump says, is a Fed chair with Greenspan’s foresightedness.

AI’s influence over interest rates

Trump has repeatedly attacked current Fed chief Jerome H. Powell, whose term as chair ends in May, for his caution in lowering rates while inflation hovers above the central bank’s 2% target. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on social media in January that the president sought to replace Powell with someone with “an open, Greenspan-like mind.”

“Our nation can see productivity boom like we did in the ’90s when we are not encumbered by a Federal Reserve which throws the brakes on,’’ Bessent wrote.

On Jan. 30, Trump said he was picking Warsh.

In speeches and writings, Warsh has argued that AI-driven improvements in productivity could justify lower interest rates.

These views align with Trump’s desires for Fed rate cuts but mark a break with Warsh’s past as an inflation hawk.

In the aftermath of the 2007-09 Great Recession, Warsh — then a Fed governor — objected to some of the central bank’s efforts to help the struggling economy by pushing down rates even though unemployment exceeded 9%. He warned then, wrongly, that inflation would soon accelerate.

At issue now are gains in productivity and the possibility that AI will make them bigger — much bigger.

To economists, productivity improvements are almost magical. When companies roll out new machines or technology, their workers can become more efficient and produce more stuff per hour. That enables firms to earn more and to raise employees’ pay without raising prices. In short: Surging productivity can drive economic growth without spurring inflation.

Greenspan and the internet

In the mid-1990s, Greenspan was contending with a strange set of economic circumstances: Wages were rising but inflation wasn’t heating up.

Big productivity gains might have explained things, but government data showed no sign of them. Other Fed policymakers worried that surging wages and tame inflation couldn’t coexist and that higher prices were coming. They wanted to raise interest rates.

But Greenspan suspected that the official productivity numbers were missing something. For one thing, they didn’t jibe with the amazing tales of efficiency improvements the Fed was hearing from companies investing in computers and turning to the internet.

So he ordered his lieutenants to dig through decades of productivity numbers. The official statistics they assembled told an implausible story: Services firms — including retailers and legal practices — had supposedly seen productivity fall over the years, despite intense competitive pressure and massive investments in technology.

Greenspan didn’t believe it. He persuaded his Fed colleagues that the government’s numbers were wrong and were understating productivity. They agreed in September 1996 to hold off on raising rates.

The economy took flight.

Tardily, productivity advances began to show up in the official data. Overall, American economic growth surpassed 4% every year from 1997 through 2000, something it would do again only once in the next quarter century. The unemployment rate plunged to 3.8% in April 2000, the lowest in three decades. Inflation stayed in its cage, coming in below 2% — later the Fed’s official target — for 17 straight months in 1997-99.

History repeats itself … maybe?

American productivity looked strong in the second and third quarters of 2025, and some economists attribute the improvements to the early adoption of AI; they see bigger gains and stronger economic growth ahead.

Others aren’t so sure.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at consulting firm RSM, wrote that the 2025 productivity improvements “are not because of artificial intelligence’’ but reflect investments in automation that companies made when they couldn’t find enough workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Those investments are starting to pay off,’’ Brusuelas wrote.

Economist Martin Baily, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, believes it will take time for AI to have a big effect on the way companies do business and on the nation’s productivity.

“Companies don’t change that fast,” said Baily, chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors during the boom era. “It’s expensive to change. It’s risky to change. The managers don’t necessarily understand the new technology that well. So they have to learn how to use it. They have to train their staff. All that stuff takes a long time.’’

A productivity boom can raise the economy’s speed limit — how fast it can grow without pushing prices higher. But it might not justify lower interest rates, Fed Gov. Michael Barr said in a speech last month.

Businesses will borrow to invest in AI, putting upward pressure on interest rates. Likewise, American workers and their families probably would save less and borrow more in anticipation of higher wages, the payoff for being more productive; that would put still more pressure on rates to rise.

Bottom line, Barr said: “The AI boom is unlikely to be a reason for lowering policy rates.’’

Even Greenspan’s Fed eventually came to the same conclusion, reversing course and starting to raise its benchmark rate in mid-1999, taking it from 4.75% to 6.5% in less than a year. (The rate Trump complains about now is around 3.6%.)

“Warsh and Bessent talk only about the dovish 1995/96 version of Greenspan; they overlook the hawkish 1999/2000 variant,’’ Perkins wrote.

Then and now

Many of Warsh’s potential future colleagues on the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee see the late-1990s experience differently than he does, setting up what could be a clash at the central bank if the Senate confirms Warsh as chair.

Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said last week that “the analogy to the late ‘90s is a little harder for me to understand.” Greenspan’s insight was that productivity gains meant the Fed could hold off on raising rates, not that it should slash them, Goolsbee noted.

“It wasn’t, ‘Should we cut rates because productivity growth is higher?’” he said.

The economic backdrop that awaits Warsh is also far less friendly than the one Greenspan enjoyed.

Greenspan was avoiding rate hikes at a time when the usually profligate U.S. government was running rare budget surpluses and didn’t need to borrow so desperately. Now, after a series of spending hikes and tax cuts, deficits are piling up year after year, and the Congressional Budget Office expects federal debt to hit a historic high of 120% of America’s gross domestic product by 2035.

Nor was productivity the only thing controlling inflation in the 1990s. Countries were lowering tariffs and dismantling trade barriers. Immigration was surging.

Now, due largely to Trump’s policies, notably his sweeping taxes on imports and his crackdown on immigration, the world is much different. “Trade barriers are going up,’’ Perkins wrote. “Globalization has given way to de-globalization.’’

“That benign era is clearly behind us,’’ said Michael Pearce, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

Wiseman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

Early in Michael McIndoe’s shift on Jan. 2, 2025, his crew got their marching orders: Pick up hoses left overnight at the scene of the Lachman fire.

McIndoe, a captain at Fire Station 69 in Pacific Palisades, didn’t think the plan was a good idea, he said in sworn testimony obtained by The Times. He had read the National Weather Service’s forecast for the day — temperatures were expected to be warmer — and handling any lingering hot spots would be easier with hoses in place.

While he was still at the station, he said, he relayed his concerns by phone to Battalion Chief Mario Garcia, who was in charge of the operation.

Garcia “said something along the lines of, ‘OK. Let me go check it out, and then I’ll get back to you,’ ” McIndoe testified last month.

Despite the warning, Garcia’s orders never changed, and McIndoe spent a couple hours or so that morning rolling up hose lines.

At one point, McIndoe said, he came across a smoldering ash pit. He retrieved a backpack with water from his engine, sprayed into the ground with a couple gallons of water and dug up the dirt with his hand tool until he was satisfied it was cool.

Days later, amid high winds, embers from the Lachman fire ignited into the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

McIndoe was one of a dozen Los Angeles firefighters deposed in January in a lawsuit filed by Palisades fire victims against the city and the state. Transcripts and videos of the testimony were released Thursday and Friday, backing up earlier reporting by The Times that crews were ordered to pack up their hoses despite signs that the Lachman fire was not completely out.

One firefighter, Scott Pike, testified that he informed a captain of hot spots and ash pits in the area but that he never received orders to take care of the hazards.

Garcia testified that no one informed him of any concerns about picking up the hoses and that he believed the decision was made before his shift.

The testimony raises questions about why LAFD officials did not address concerns expressed to them about weather conditions and potentially dangerous hot spots that could flare up into another fire. With Pike and McIndoe saying they were following directions from above, and Garcia and the battalion chief from the prior shift appearing to pass the buck to others, it is unclear who made the decision to leave the Lachman fire.

LAFD spokesperson Stephanie Bishop declined to answer the question of who decided to pull the hoses, citing an ongoing investigation. She also would not answer whether officials had identified the captain whom Pike spoke with or determined what the captain did with his concerns.

Pike said he did not know the captain’s name but believed the captain was from Engine 69.

McIndoe testified that he was the captain on Engine 69 that day. In an email Saturday, McIndoe said he was not authorized to speak with the media but wanted to correct the record: “I did not speak to, nor do I recall seeing, Firefighter Pike the day that we picked up hose at the Lachman fire.”

Garcia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pike did not respond to a request for comment.

That day, McIndoe testified, he saw Garcia on the hill picking up hoses and brought up their earlier conversation.

“I just went up to him, and I said, ‘Hey, I hope you don’t think I’m just trying to get out of work,’ ” McIndoe said. “And he said, no, that’s — that’s fine. Something along those lines, and that that’s all I can really recall.”

He said he was trying to clarify with Garcia that he believed “that the hose should stay up a little bit longer.”

Garcia testified that when he got to the burn scar, no one raised any concerns about the hose pickup, nor did he see any need to leave the equipment at the site.

He said he thought the decision to pick up the hoses was made before his shift — though he was “not 100 percent sure” — and that it was a “collaborative decision, based off all the information that was received.”

By the time he got up to the burn area, Garcia testified, half the hose had already been picked up. He walked the perimeter to ensure there was a line cut around it and that it was cold, and did not see any smoke or any sign that the fire was not fully extinguished.

“Came across several members,” he said. “Nobody mentioned anything about there being any concerns of any sort.”

Battalion Chief Martin Mullen, who was on duty before Garcia, testified that he walked the perimeter four times and left the hose lines in place overnight as a precaution, keeping two assistant chiefs, Vinny Alvarado and Joseph Everett, in the loop. Mullen said they informed another top chief, Phillip Fligiel.

The hoses could be hooked up again quickly “if something were to happen,” Mullen testified.

Mullen testified that he also notified Garcia: “I told him I left him hose lines in place overnight, you need to walk that and make sure there’s nothing going on up there.”

Mullen, who said he was not involved in deciding when to pick up the hoses, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an email Sunday, Everett said: “I was not present or assigned to that incident. As a result I made no command decisions nor do I have information as to anyones testimony.”

Text messages obtained by The Times through a public records request in December show that Fligiel, Alvarado and Everett were making plans to remove the equipment on Jan. 1. The Lachman fire, which federal prosecutors believe was deliberately set, flared up shortly after midnight on Jan. 1, 2025. A few hours later, at 4:46 a.m., the LAFD announced that it was fully contained at eight acres.

“I imagine it might take all day to get that hose off the hill,” Fligiel said in a group chat early the morning of Jan. 1. “Make sure that plan is coordinated.”

At 1:35 p.m. on Jan. 2, Garcia texted Fligiel and Everett: “All hose and equipment has been picked up.”

Earlier that day, Pike was making troubling observations that led him to think that the entire area needed to be re-investigated. He saw about five smoky areas and ash pits, including one he remembered vividly that was too hot to touch with his gloved hand.

“So I just kicked it with my boot to kind of expose it, and there was, like red hot, like, coals,” he testified. “And I even heard crackling.”

Pike, a 23-year LAFD veteran based at a station in Sunland, was working an overtime shift at Fire Station 23, the LAFD’s second outpost in the Palisades, that day. He relayed his observations to a captain and two firefighters.

“That’s how I approached him, is like, ‘Hey, Cap … We have hot spots in general. We have some ash pits,’ ” Pike testified about his conversation with the captain. “That’s an alert to double-check the whole area and maybe we need to switch our tactics.”

Pike testified that it was not his job “to overstep and tell him what to do. He earned that rank.”

The captain, he said, suggested possibly bringing hand tools or a backpack filled with water up the hill to extinguish any hot spots. Pike went back to picking up the hose while awaiting new orders, which never came.

Pike testified that he felt his colleagues — the captain and two firefighters — blew him off.

“It kind of sits heavy with me that nobody listened to me,” he said.

In his deposition, McIndoe did not recall details about other conversations he had that day.

He was asked by a plaintiffs’ attorney: “Any dialogue with anyone else that you haven’t told me about concerning any of the work that was being done up there at the Lachman fire site, in terms of checking for smokers? Making sure that you got all the hose? Anything like that?”

McIndoe responded: “I don’t recall specific conversations. I think I may have had a conversation with one or two of the other captains that were on scene before we left.”

McIndoe testified that he told that captain — whom he said was from Fire Station 37 — that he thought it would be a good idea to leave the hose out because the warm weather could preheat the ground and bring up smokers, “and it would be nice to have the hose lines in place to address those.”

The Times reported in October that crews were ordered to leave the Lachman fire, even though the ground was still smoldering and rocks were hot to the touch.

In a text message reviewed by The Times, a firefighter who was at the scene wrote that Garcia had been told it was a “bad idea” to leave because of the visible signs of smoking terrain, which crews feared could start a new fire if left unprotected.

“And the rest is history,” the firefighter wrote.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — To receive Medicaid health coverage, some adults will soon have to show they are working, volunteering or taking classes. But to gather that proof, many states first will have to spend millions of dollars improving their computer systems.

Across the nation, states face an immense task and high costs to prepare for the Jan. 1 kickoff of new Medicaid eligibility mandates affecting millions of lower-income adults in the government-funded healthcare program.

The first half of a $200-million federal allotment has already begun flowing to states to help implement the new requirements. But the tab for the needed technology improvements and additional staff is likely to exceed $1 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of budget projections in more than 25 states. That extra cost will be borne by a mixture of federal and state tax dollars.

The task is not as simple as pushing through a software update on your smartphone or personal computer. That’s because each state has its own system for managing Medicaid, often requiring experts to make customized changes.

“Our current eligibility systems are pretty old, and the ability to change them is very, very difficult,” said Toi Wilde, chief information officer for the Missouri Department of Social Services.

As a consequence of states’ new financial burden, some eligible people may lose their healthcare coverage, officials warn.

New requirements affect millions, but not all

The Republican tax and spending law signed last year by President Trump is financed, in part, by sweeping Medicaid changes intended to cut government spending. Two of the most prominent will apply in four-fifths of the states, affecting Medicaid enrollees ages 19 through 64, without young children, whose incomes are above the typical eligibility cutoff.

Those Medicaid participants will have to work or do community service at least 80 hours a month, or enroll at least half-time as a student. They also will face eligibility reviews every six months, instead of annually, meaning they could lose coverage more quickly when their circumstances change.

The two provisions together are projected to save the federal government $388 billion over the next decade, resulting in 6 million fewer people with health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But states first must update their online portals used by Medicaid participants, their aging computer systems used by state workers and their methods of verifying information through various databases.

Most will have to turn to private contractors to meet the time crunch. At least 10 companies have agreed to offer discounted services, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Making those technology upgrades “is going to be a lift. It’s not something straightforward. It’s not easy,” said Jason Reilly, a partner at Guidehouse, a firm that is advising several states on the Medicaid requirements.

Most states don’t currently collect employment or education information about Medicaid participants. So states are looking to tap into outside sources to verify job and school data. But there’s no database of community volunteers.

And states are still waiting on federal rules — not due until June — to define some of the exceptions to the work requirements, such as how to determine who qualifies as “medically frail.”

States face extra pressure to get it right because the federal government will start penalizing states with too many Medicaid payment errors in October 2029.

Congress guaranteed all states a share of the $200 million allotted for Medicaid work and eligibility changes. But states must apply for additional federal money. The federal government covers up to 90% of states’ costs to develop systems for determining Medicaid eligibility, 75% of costs to maintain those systems and half of most other administrative costs.

Missouri won early approval for the 90% federal funding rate. State lawmakers now are fast-tracking a $32-million appropriation needed to solicit bids for vendors to start upgrading technology platforms and improving a chatbot for Medicaid participants. Over the next year, the state’s social services agency expects to need about 120 additional workers — at a cost of $12.5 million — to handle the extra administrative workload.

Other states also project large costs. Maryland expects to spend over $32 million in federal and state funds to implement the Medicaid changes, Kentucky more than $46 million, and Colorado over $51 million. Arizona estimates it could cost $65 million — and require 150 additional staffers — to implement the new federal requirements.

Some states surveyed by the AP reported even higher expected costs, though they didn’t always provide a breakdown for how much is due to new Medicaid mandates and how much pertains to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program changes also contained in Trump’s massive law.

Several states, including Arkansas, said they are still working on cost estimates for the Medicaid changes. Arkansas instituted a Medicaid work requirement in 2018-19, and thousands of people were dropped from the rolls before a federal court ended it. Many of the technology changes required by the new federal mandates could be covered under an existing vendor contract and have “a minimal financial impact on our Medicaid budget,” the Arkansas Department of Human Services said in an email.

Nebraska has said it plans to launch Medicaid work requirements in May, seven months ahead of the federal deadline. But the state has not detailed any associated costs and did not respond to inquiries from the AP.

Georgia’s work requirement prompts concerns

Georgia is currently the only state requiring some Medicaid recipients to work, after receiving special federal approval several years ago to expand coverage to some adults not otherwise eligible.

The Georgia Pathways to Coverage program racked up more than $54 million of administrative costs from 2021 through the first part of 2025 — twice the amount of medical assistance paid out over that same period, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Almost all of those costs came from technology changes to its eligibility and enrollment system.

Some Medicaid analysts point to Georgia’s costs and Arkansas’ enrollment losses as reasons for caution as work requirements roll out in other states.

“A huge amount of funding is going to go to vendors to construct these complicated red-tape systems that prevent people who need it from getting healthcare,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University.

“In my view, that is a big, big risk.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press.

According to President Trump, the United States attacked Iran because the Iranian regime posed “imminent threats” to the U.S. and its allies, including through its use of terrorist proxies and continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” he said in a recorded statement Saturday.

According to leading Democrats in Congress, Trump’s justification is questionable, especially given his claims of having “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in separate U.S. bombings last year.

“Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and part of a small group of congressional leaders — the Gang of Eight — who were briefed on the operation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That divide is bound to remain an issue politically heading into this year’s midterm elections, and could be a liability for Republicans — especially considering that some in the “America First” wing of the MAGA base were raising their own objections, citing Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges to extricate the U.S. from foreign wars, not start new ones.

The debate echoed a similar if less immediate one around President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, also based on claims that “weapons of mass destruction” posed an immediate threat. Those claims were later disproved by multiple findings that Iraq had no such arsenal, fueling recriminations from both political parties for years.

The latest divide also intensified unease over Congress ceding its wartime powers to the White House, which for years has assumed sweeping authority to attack foreign adversaries without direct congressional input in the name of addressing terrorism or preventing immediate harm to the nation or its troops.

Even prior to the weekend bombings, Democrats including Sen. Adam Schiff of California were pushing Congress to pass a resolution barring the Trump administration from attacking Iran without explicit congressional authorization.

“President Trump must come to Congress before using military force unless absolutely necessary to defend the United States from an imminent attack,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the armed services and foreign relations committees, said in a statement Thursday.

In justifying the daylight strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just two days later, Trump accused the Iranian government of having “waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder” for nearly half a century — including through attacks on U.S. military assets and commercial shipping vessels abroad — and of having “armed, trained and funded terrorist militias” in multiple countries, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Trump said that after the U.S. bombed Iran last summer, it had warned Tehran “never to resume” its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland,” he said.

Other Republican leaders largely backed the president.

“The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it. If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Every president has talked about the threat posed by the Iranian regime. President Trump is the one with the courage to take bold, decisive action,” said Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi.

While Iran’s coordination with and sponsorship of groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are well known, Trump’s claims about its ongoing development of nuclear weapons systems are less established — and the administration has provided little evidence to back them up.

Democrats seized on that lack of fresh intelligence in their responses to the attacks, contrasting Trump’s latest claims about imminent threats with his assertion after the separate summer bombings that the U.S. had all but eliminated Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

“Let’s be clear: The Iranian regime is horrible. But I have seen no imminent threat to the United States that would justify putting American troops in harm’s way,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight. “What is the motivation here? Is it Iran’s nuclear program? Their missiles? Regime change?”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the Trump administration “has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” and must do so.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the Trump administration needs congressional authority to wage such attacks barring “exigent circumstances,” and didn’t have it.

“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” he said.

After the U.S. military announced Sunday that three U.S. service personnel were killed and five others seriously wounded in the attacks, the demands for a clearer justification and new constraints on Trump only increased.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said Sunday he is optimistic that Democrats will be unified in trying to pass the war powers resolution, and also that some Republicans will join them, given that the strikes have been unpopular among a portion of the MAGA base.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who partnered with Khanna to force the release of the Epstein files, has said he will work with him again to push a congressional vote on war with Iran, which he said was “not ‘America First.’”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said that whether or not Iran represented an “imminent” threat to the U.S. depends not just on its nuclear capabilities, but on its broader desire and ability to inflict pain on the U.S. and its allies — as was made clear to both the U.S. and Israel after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which Iran praised.

“If you are Israel or the United States, that’s imminent,” he said.

What happens next, Radd said, will largely depend on whether remaining Iranian leaders stick to Khamenei’s hard-line policies, or decide to negotiate anew with the U.S. He expects they might do the latter, because “it’s a fundamentalist regime, it’s not a suicidal regime,” and it’s now clear that the U.S. and Israel have the capabilities to take out Iranian leaders, Iran has little ability to defend itself, and China and Russia are not rushing to its aid.

How the strikes are viewed moving forward may also depend on what those leaders decide to do next, said Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute.

If the conflict remains relatively contained, it could become a political win for Trump, with questions about the justification falling away. But if it spirals out of control, such questions are only likely to grow, as occurred in Iraq when things started to deteriorate there, he said.

Israel and the U.S. are currently betting that the conflict will remain manageable, which could turn out to be true, Harris said, but “the problem with war is you never really know what might happen.”

On Sunday, Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Israel and the wider Gulf region. Trump said the campaign against Iran continued “unabated,” though he may be willing to negotiate with the nation’s new leaders. It was unclear when Congress might take up the war powers measure.

As a Clinton supporter, I am very disappointed that the President fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for speaking on masturbation (Dec. 10), while Ronald Reagan let Surgeon General C. Everett Koop speak his mind on AIDS, birth control and condom use–all positions with which Reagan disagreed–for both of the former President’s terms. Perhaps Reagan recognized that doctors speak of things, in clear, uncensored language, in a way that politicians cannot.

I have never seen such sore winners as the Republicans are this year. Their call for Elders’ head heralds some very dark days to come. Clinton needs to learn a lesson from this, a lesson he seems loath to learn: You cannot appease your enemies by sacrificing your friends. You will lose your friends and your enemies will call you a coward.

DAVID VAN CHANEY, West Hollywood

*

It is good to see Clinton moving to the right. He may not have, as yet, fully embraced “Three strikes and you’re out” but at least “Three faux pas and you’re out” is a start.

WARREN M. LENT, Los Angeles

*

“She Pulled No Punches” (editorial, Dec. 10) is surprisingly acute and on target, both as to the rationale for Elders’ dismissal as surgeon general and as to the lamentable restraint on public discourse in our country–suffered by those who do their homework well and let us know what they think.

I think it cheeky of you to offer kind words at all for one who frequently shoots from the lip. She is the Jesse Helms of the left, though with far kinder heart and broader perspective. I will miss her in the way one misses sitting on the edge of the chair when someone rises to speak, half-afraid yet hoping some truth will out.

On the masturbation comment that got her canned, the practice needs no encouragement from the classroom. Bravo, Dr. Elders, and keep talking straight. You are in the grand tradition of free speech.

VERNON STORY, Community United Methodist Church, Desert Hot Springs

*

Being outspoken is not a virtue worth defending when what you have to say is just plain dumb. Which is why I can’t believe you would write an editorial supporting Elders. This woman has embarrassed herself virtually every time she has opened her inarticulate mouth. Have you not been listening?

Whatever has kept Clinton from firing her before this is a mystery. The number of mind-numbing statements made by this surgeon general over the last two years is far too extensive to list here but to me, her most classic remark had to do with violence in America: “We need safer weapons and safer bullets,” said she. No further comment.

JUDIE GAUGENMAIER, Studio City

*

It fascinates me that we will accept political babble and allow ourselves to go into denial, and when we are confronted with the truth as given to us by Elders we rebuke the truth and the messenger.

BEN BOELMAN, Placentia

*

Dr. Jack Kevorkian would have been a better choice for surgeon general than Elders.

DWIGHT M. CATES, Ventura

SAN ANTONIO — A heated U.S. Senate race in Texas entered its final stretch Sunday with candidates from both parties making final pitches to voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary, the nation’s first big contest of the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn is trying to avoid being the first incumbent GOP senator from Texas to lose a primary, fighting challenges from Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.

Democrats, hungry to win a Senate race in the state for the first time since 1988, see an opening, but have their own knotty race to figure out.

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a rhetorical brawler and regular antagonist to President Trump, is stressing her federal experience and was scheduled to meet voters in the Dallas area with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. Crockett was endorsed Friday by former Vice President Kamala Harris.

State Rep. James Talarico, a soft-spoken seminarian who emphasizes his crossover appeal to Republicans, was set to hold a rally in San Antonio as part of a final tour that he describes as a movement.

But Cornyn’s precarious stature as an incumbent vulnerable in his party’s primary has been the focus of a majority of the the massive sums spent by both sides in the run-up to Tuesday’s balloting.

“Complacency is a killer,” Cornyn told voters Saturday at a seafood restaurant in the Woodlands, a Houston suburb. “It kills relationships. It kills careers.”

Senate Republican leaders in Washington, working to hold their thin majority, have worried out loud for months that Democrats could have a shot at a long out-of-reach Texas seat if Republicans nominate Paxton, who is popular with Trump voters but has had years of legal problems, which led to his impeachment three years ago. He was acquitted.

Talarico, who has raised more money than Crockett, is part of the Texas primary’s record fundraising pace. His campaign has spent $13 million on television advertising since the start of the year, the most of any single entity in the crowded field of groups spending on either side, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Heading into Tuesday’s primary elections, the cost of advertising and reserved advertising time had topped $110 million, the most ever for a Senate primary. Most of it — more than $67 million — had been spent by Cornyn’s campaign and allied groups, much of it attacking Paxton, but also lately trying to keep Hunt from advancing.

If no candidate receives at least 50% of the vote Tuesday, the primary proceeds to a runoff between the top two vote recipients on May 26.

A late visit to Texas on Friday by Trump, who used the Port of Corpus Christi as a backdrop for a speech highlighting energy production, drew all of the top Republican candidates. And while the president said Friday he’s “pretty much” decided whom to endorse, he declined to name him.

“We have a great attorney general, Ken Paxton. Where’s Ken? Hi, Ken,” Trump said. He continued, “And we have a great senator, John Cornyn. Hi, John.”

Noting that they’re in a “little bit of a race,” Trump added: ’It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people.”

Despite his long career in Texas politics, Paxton has painted himself as a Washington outsider and a staunch supporter of Trump.

“I’m not going up to Washington, D.C., to join the swamp club,” Paxton said at a campaign event in Fort Worth. “I will go up there and fight for you.”

Beaumont and Murphy write for the Associated Press and reported from San Antonio and Oklahoma City, respectively.

BOSTON — Eight-year-old Martin Richard was a bright, sunny boy who loved to ride his bike and went “wild” when he played offense on his soccer team, scoring the winning goal in a championship game last year.

Krystle Campbell was the vivacious assistant manager of local steakhouse, the first to backstop fellow workers by running plates from the kitchen. She could instantly smooth over diners’ complaints with her smile.

They were both cheering on the sidelines of the Boston Marathon on Monday when two bombs went off with a thunderous boom and cloud of white smoke, claiming them as the first victims of the blast. Boston University officials confirmed the death of a third person Tuesday: a graduate student who has not been identified.

Friends and family members of the victims were still in shock after Monday’s chaos. Martin’s father, Bill Richard, who was tending to his wife and 6-year-old daughter, who were injured in the blast, released a statement thanking strangers for their prayers.

“We also ask for your patience and for privacy as we work to simultaneously grieve and recover,” he said.

Campbell’s mother, Patty, emerged briefly on the front steps of her family’s modest two-story home in Medford.

“We are heartbroken at the death of our daughter,” Campbell told reporters, her voice shaking between sobs. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

As federal investigators chased leads in the effort to find the perpetrators, doctors at Boston’s trauma centers tended to the more than 170 people wounded in the explosions, many of whom have been released. Dr. George Velmahos, the leader of the trauma team at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that although many of its surgeons trained on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, they were confounded by the severity of the injuries they confronted as waves of patients arrived at the emergency rooms Monday.

Some of the patients were in surgery for hours as doctors tried to remove metal fragments, spiky metal pieces that looked like nails without heads, and pellets that had shredded their limbs. But the positive outlook of many of them left Velmahos “moved and really amazed.”

“Some of them woke up today with no legs and told me they were just happy to be alive,” Velmahos said. “Some of them said they thought they were lucky.”

Among the relatives and friends who kept watch at Mass General was 39-year-old Corey Comeau, who was visiting his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend Tuesday afternoon.
Comeau, a chef at Stephanie’s restaurant on Newbury Street, near what is now a crime scene, said his cousin was “still a little shellshocked” but that his cousin’s 24-year-old girlfriend suffered worse injuries.

“They say they can save her leg,” Comeau said as he stood outside the hospital after visiting.

“I can’t believe I’m even saying that. It’s not normal conversation.” Still, he said, the mood inside the hospital was “much calmer today than last night” with doctors going from patient to patient and conferring with families.

“These are some of the best hospitals in the world. The staff has been unbelievable,” he said.

At the same time, Monday’s chaos bred confusion, as in the case of Krystle Campbell.

Campbell had been watching the marathon alongside her friend Karen, her grandmother Lillian Campbell said, and the family at first believed that she had survived with serious injuries to her legs. But the family learned Tuesday morning that it was Karen who lived.

Lillian Campbell said her granddaughter stopped by her house for the last time last Thursday afternoon, when they drank tea and talked for several hours about work, friends and life.

“She loved being around people. She loved doing things for people,” said Lillian Campbell, 79, who noted that her granddaughter moved in to take care of her after she underwent surgery a few years ago. “She was hard worker. She was bubbly all the time.”

Nick Miminos, who had recently hired Campbell as an assistant manager at Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington, Mass., said the 29-year-old “had one of those personalities that belongs in hospitality.”

“The wait staff loved working with her,” Miminos said. “She would run food for them, clear the tables for them. She wasn’t just a figurehead. She enjoyed getting her hands dirty.”

Not far away in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, neighbors and friends of the Richard family grieved at a candlelight vigil for young Martin. Bill Richard had been a force in restoring the historic neighborhood. His wife, Denise, who suffered critical injuries Monday, was a librarian at the Neighborhood House Charter School, where Martin and his 6-year-old sister, Jane, were enrolled.

Twins Andreas and Alejandro Calderon, 10, came by the Richard house to place a soccer ball, signed with their names, on the family’s porch. The boys recalled Martin hopping around the playground at recess and unleashing his energy on the soccer field.

“When we put him on defense and goalie he would do good, but he would save his energy so when we put him on offense he would go wild,” said Andreas, whose father coached the team.

Other friends posted their memories of Martin on Facebook and Twitter. Among the more searing images was a picture of Martin, with his gap-toothed smile, holding a blue sign he had made with magic markers.

“No more hurting people,” his sign said. “Peace.”

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alana.semuels@latimes.com

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

Also contributing were Times staff writers Maeve Reston and Alan Zarembo in Los Angeles.

Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.

Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?

Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.

With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.

So he effectively broke the rules.

Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.

The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.

In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.

Then came the deluge.

In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.

Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.

But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.

The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”

Well.

That was a lot of wasted time and energy.

Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.

In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.

But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.

Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.

That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.

(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)

In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.

But that’s not necessarily so.

The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.

In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.

But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.

By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.

In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.

Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?

Santa Cruz tried out the surveillance company Flock Safety for a little over a year before deciding it was time to move on.

Cambridge, Mass., also had enough and tore up its contract in December. Now, some officials in San Diego have begun to have second thoughts of their own.

In recent months, dozens of cities have cut ties with Flock — the nation’s largest provider of automated digital license plate readers — over fears that data the company captures is helping power President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The same can’t be said in one particularly surprising place: Los Angeles. Here, Flock still has an eager customer base of local elected officials, police officers, homeowners associations and businesses.

Unlike some of its competitors, the Atlanta-based company has not only marketed its plate readers to law enforcement as a vital crime-fighting tool, but aggressively pitched its product to private citizens, experts say.

“They are tremendous investigative tools,” said LAPD spokesman Capt. Michael Bland.

But for critics, there’s an obvious downside: the potential tracking of law-abiding citizens without a warrant on a scale once thought unimaginable.

“These can be really powerful tools to find someone, and identity them. But when you don’t have a suspect, everyone can be a suspect,” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a professor of law at Texas A&M University.

A Flock spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Typically mounted on street poles or atop police cars, plate readers continuously monitor passing vehicles, recording their location at a specific date and time. But Flock’s AI-powered cameras go even further by also documenting other identifying vehicle details, such as make, model and color, as well as any distinctive markings like scratches or dents on a bumper.

From there, police can easily search for the location of specific vehicles in the company’s vast national database, allowing them not only to potentially retrace the whereabouts of someone suspected of a crime, but also receive predictions about future movements.

In a presentation to the Picfair Village Neighborhood Assn., Flock boasted that its plate readers had helped solve “10% of reported crime in the U.S.” In L.A., the company said, its technology had been deployed to nab porch pirates and car thieves, not to mention played a role in solving a “high-profile crime involving stolen weapons from a politician’s home.”

The problem, at least in the minds of a growing number of privacy and immigration advocates, is that the readers capture a vast amount of information not related to any specific criminal investigation. The ability of federal authorities to access Los Angeles Police Department surveillance data directly from companies like Flock or from regional intelligence hubs called fusion centers undermines the city’s promise as a haven for immigrants, critics say.

“License plate readers play a critical role in providing directions and a road map to ICE for going out to kidnap people,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which last spring wrote a letter to the Police Commission urging it to rewrite the LAPD’s policies to ensure information on law-abiding drivers isn’t shared with federal authorities.

The commission, the LAPD’s civilian oversight panel, ordered a study on the department’s license plate reader system that is expected to be completed this summer.

LAPD officials say records collected by the plate readers are accessible only to five smaller police agencies with which the department has data-sharing agreements. Furthermore, they say the use of the readers, like with other police technology, is restricted by state laws that limit information sharing with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Plate-reading technology has been around for decades. But as the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown has ramped up, residents, privacy advocates and officials in some cities across the country have mounted campaigns urging their local governments to stop using the technology.

Much of the backlash has been aimed specifically at Flock — a heavyweight in the surveillance market that contracts with a reported 5,000 U.S. policing agencies. The company’s data-sharing with federal authorities and cybersecurity lapses have been documented by 404 Media and other outlets.

After previously denying it had federal contracts, Flock Chief Executive Garrett Langley admitted in interviews in recent months that the company has worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. The company has since said that it has severed ties with both agencies, and responded to other concerns by giving communities more power to decide whom to grant access to state or nationwide lookup networks.

In Bloch-Wehba’s view, Flock’s meteoric rise is a triumph of marketing over results.

“There’s very little evidence on the actual impact of these technologies on violent crime rates at all,” said Bloch-Wehba, who noted an explosion of surveillance technology in 2020 to monitor protesters or enforce rules implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

In the L.A. area, Flock has gone head to head with competitor Vigilant Solutions, which has for years supplied the majority of the LAPD’s plate readers. But today, cops tout Flock cameras at community meetings and some City Council members have paid to bring them to their districts.

Flock has also sought to flex its political might. City records show the company has stepped up its lobbying efforts at City Hall in recent years — hiring Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based firm whose employees now include former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino.

Many Flock plate readers, though, have been purchased by community groups. In most cases, residents band together to raise money to buy the devices, which they then either grant access to or donate to the LAPD via the Police Foundation, the department’s nonprofit charity. By donating the equipment, neighborhood groups may get to control what type of technology is installed and by whom.

“My real preference would be a fully staffed LAPD, and then we don’t have any cameras,” said Jim Fitzgerald, who lives in Venice and serves on its neighborhood council.

Roy Nwaisser, who chairs the Encino Neighborhood Council’s public safety committee, said that Flock often played up the shortage of police officers during its presentations to residents in his neighborhood.

“I personally have concerns with how Flock conducts their businesses, but they are the biggest player and if LAPD is working with them, they just have to make sure that there are those safeguards,” he said. “I don’t know that automated license plate readers are all that effective when owned by neighbors living on the street who decided to get together.”

Police executives have defended the practice, saying license plate data has helped solve untold numbers of crimes, from run-of-the-mill porch theft to high-profile cases like the 2024 attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a Florida golf course. The technology also came into play during an investigation into the fatal drive-by shooting of a 17-year-old boy at a North Hills intersection last month. According to a search warrant affidavit, detectives tracked a suspect vehicle to a home in Sun Valley after it was captured by several scanners near where the shooting occurred.

Because so many plate scanners are in private hands, it’s difficult to say how many of the devices are in operation citywide.

The L.A. Bureau of Street Lighting, which is responsible for installing the devices on city-owned property, said it has mounted 324 over five years — though that tally doesn’t include mobile plate readers.

Bland said the LAPD has 1,500 police vehicles equipped with the scanners. Police also have access to an additional 280 plate readers in fixed locations throughout the city, which are owned privately or by the department, he said. He estimated that about 120 of those readers belong to Flock.

The cameras are also integrated with the department’s new drones, which are being paid for by a $1.2-million donation from the Police Foundation.

The devices are also used for many other purposes outside of regular law enforcement. Big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s have installed Flock cameras across hundreds of parking lots. Many border crossings have them. In East L.A., they are used as an emissions-reduction tool by tracking semi-trailers. USC uses them to enforce parking violations, and the L.A. Department of Transportation has deployed such cameras to nab motorists who park in bus lanes.

Since the beginning of 2025, a small-but-growing number of states and cities have enacted laws aimed at curbing the use of surveillance technology such as license plate readers.

Under California law, police agencies are required to adopt detailed usage and privacy policies governing license plate data, restrict access to authorized purposes, and regularly audit searches to prevent misuse. Gov. Gavin Newsom previously vetoed a bill that would have restricted use of such data, saying the regulations would impede criminal investigations, but the bill has been reintroduced this year.

Nearly 50 cities nationwide have opted to deactivate their scanners or cancel contracts with Flock, mostly in recent months, according to the website DeFlock.me, which has set out to map locations of the company’s cameras. Responding to public pressure, some places like Santa Cruz canceled their contracts after realizing that they had been sharing their data more broadly than they had known, including with federal authorities.

Other Flock customers, like Oakland, have dug in and decided to keep their cameras at the urging of local homeowners association representatives and small business owners — but over the objections of the city’s own Privacy Advisory Commission.

Among the places that have started to reconsider their relationship with Flock is San Diego. In December, city leaders split on the issue, but ultimately voted to keep using Flock’s scanners after a contentious public hearing meeting in which they heard from hundreds of residents opposed to the surveillance technology.

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said he voted against working with Flock based on what he saw as the company’s poor track record of “data retention” and “consumer protections.” Although the city has operated Flock plate readers and cameras for years, the stakes are far higher now, he said.

“We have a presidential regime that is not only flouting the law, but takes pride in ignoring due process, in violating rights of people they deem unworthy of the rights and protections,” said Elo-Rivera, who represents an ethnically diverse district in San Diego’s Mid-City area. “They have a by-any-means-necessary approach when it comes to immigration enforcement. And now they have a tool that makes it very easy for them to track people down.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

LAREDO, Texas — A month after ICE agents sent the young Ecuadoran mother and her 7-year-old daughter to a sprawling detention center 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, they were finally free.

But when the bus pulled up to a migrant shelter in the Texas border city of Laredo, dropping off a half-dozen families lugging bags stuffed with belongings, the stress of recent weeks tracked mother and daughter like the long shadows on that mid-February afternoon.

Night after night inside south Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center with hundreds of other families, the grade-schooler wept and pleaded to know why they were being held.

“She would tell me, ‘Mom, what crime did I commit to be a prisoner?’ I didn’t know what to tell her,” said the 29-year-old, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear being identified could negatively affect their immigration case. Her husband was deported to Ecuador soon after they were taken into custody.

Many Americans were alarmed last month when photos circulated showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis detaining a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spider-Man backpack. The concern followed Liam Conejo Ramos and his father when they were sent to Dilley, surrounded by chain-link fences on a dusty plain about 75 miles south of San Antonio.

But Liam was hardly an outlier. ICE has been holding hundreds of children at Dilley — many for months.

“We are all Liam,” Christian Hinojosa, an immigrant from Mexico, said by phone from Dilley, where she and her 13-year-old son were held for more than four months. They were released this month and allowed to return home to San Antonio, where she works as a health aide.

She noted that Liam and his father were released from Dilley after 10 days, after members of Congress and a judge intervened.

“My son says, ‘That’s unfair, Mama. What’s the difference between him and us?’”

Ramping up family detentions

When the Obama administration opened Dilley in 2014, nearly all families detained there had recently crossed the border from Mexico. Detentions at the facility were scaled back by the Biden administration in 2021, before it was closed three years later.

Since being reopened by President Trump’s administration last spring, life inside Dilley — a compound of trailers and other prefabricated buildings — has been shaped by three decisive changes.

The number of detained families has risen sharply since last fall. The government is holding many children well beyond the 20-day limit set by long-standing court order. And many detainees have lived in the U.S. for several years, with roots in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, according to lawyers and other observers.

“Just imagine that you’re a child and you’re taken out of your surroundings,” said Philip Schrag, a Georgetown University law professor and author of “Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America.”

Suddenly you’re in “a completely strange environment with the doors locked and guards in uniform roaming around,” said Schrag, who counseled Dilley detainees as a volunteer lawyer during the Obama administration.

ICE booked more than 3,800 children into detention during the first nine months of the new Trump administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. On an average day, more than 220 children were held, with most of those detained longer than 24 hours sent to Dilley. More than half of Dilley detainees during that period were children.

Nearly two-thirds of children detained by ICE were eventually deported, and almost 1 in 10 left the country when their parents accepted voluntary departure, according to an AP analysis of the latest comprehensive data. About a quarter were released in the U.S., requiring their parents to check in regularly with ICE as their legal cases proceed.

The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply since the period covered by the data, nearly tripling between fall and late January to more than 1,300, according to Relevant Research, which analyzes immigration enforcement data.

“We’ve started to use 100 days as a benchmark for prioritizing cases because so many children are exceeding 20 days,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits Dilley regularly to ensure compliance. In a visit this month, Welch said she counted more than 30 children who had been held for over 100 days.

The increased detention of children comes as the Trump administration has gutted a Department of Homeland Security office responsible for oversight of conditions inside Dilley and other facilities.

“It’s a particular concern that family detention is being increased,” said Dr. Pamela McPherson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist contracted by Homeland Security from 2014 until last year to inspect and investigate conditions at Dilley and other ICE facilities holding children. “Just who’s providing that check and balance now?”

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who represents the congressional district where Dilley is located, said multiple visits have convinced him criticism of the center is unfair.

He said he’d been impressed by Dilley’s facilities and the professionalism and dedication of staff. “They’re not doing policy. They’re just fulfilling a duty,” Gonzales said.

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to detailed questions about Dilley submitted by the AP. But both Homeland Security and ICE objected to allegations of poor care and conditions there.

“The Dilley facility is a family residential center designed specifically to house family units in a safe, structured and appropriate environment,” ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said in a statement this week. Services include medical screenings, infant care packages and classrooms and recreational spaces, he noted.

But concerns about Dilley are personal for Kheilin Valero Marcano, a Venezuelan immigrant detained with her husband and 1-year-old daughter, Amalia, in December and held for nearly two months.

When the child got a high fever, Valero Marcano said Dilley staff told her it was just a virus. Two weeks later, Amalia started vomiting, then losing weight. Valero Marcano said she took her to the Dilley doctor’s office at least eight times, and was offered only Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The baby was eventually sent to two hospitals, where doctors diagnosed COVID-19, bronchitis, pneumonia and stomach virus, she said.

ICE disputed Valero Marcano’s account, saying in a statement the baby “immediately received proper medical care” at Dilley before being sent to the hospital. Back in Dilley, “she was in the medical unit and received proper treatment and prescribed medicines,” it said.

The family’s return to Dilley coincided with a measles outbreak there. They were released earlier this month after their lawyers petitioned the court.

“I’m so worried for all the families who are still inside,” Valero Marcano said.

A teen in distress

After more than two months in a cramped room at Dilley with three other families, the 13-year-old girl’s depression turned increasingly dark.

The eighth-grader stopped eating after finding a worm in her food, family members said. Staff sometimes withheld medications she’d long been prescribed to keep her anxiety in check and help her sleep.

When a total lockdown was imposed, a guard blocked the teen from leaving the crowded room to join her mother and sister in the bathroom. She spiraled into crisis, and used a plastic knife from the cafeteria to cut her wrist.

“She said she didn’t want to live anymore because she preferred to die rather than having to keep living in confinement,” her mother, Andrea Armero, told the AP in a video call from Colombia, where the family was deported this month. The AP generally avoids identifying people who attempt or die by suicide.

The girl’s struggles began before she arrived at Dilley. Soon after starting middle school in Colombia, she learned a family member had sexually abused her younger sister. Armero said she saw no option but to leave, and in early 2024 she and her daughters traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and applied for asylum.

Living with family in Florida, the 13-year-old was doing well in school but sometimes experienced panic attacks about being sent back to Colombia. Under a psychiatrist’s care, she was prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications and regularly saw a therapist. Then, in December, ICE agents detained Armero and her daughters during a routine check-in.

At Dilley, the 13-year-old calmed herself by drawing, producing haunting pictures of a girl locked inside gates. But when she and other detainees took part in a protest after 5-year-old Liam and his father got to Dilley, guards took away drawing materials and ordered everyone to stay inside.

The teen’s mental health collapsed. She tried to harm herself with the plastic knife, Armero said, and repeatedly hit her head. The family was put into isolation without seeing a doctor, then deported to Colombia on Feb. 11 after a judge ordered them removed, she said.

Dilley discharge documents described “active problems,” including a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm,” in addition to a “history of post-traumatic stress disorder” and “history of anxiety.” AP also spoke with detainees and attorneys who independently described the girl’s suicide attempt.

Responding to questions from AP, a Department of Homeland Security official acknowledged there had been “a case of self-harm” inside the facility, but did not specify what had happened, or how staff handled the incident. When AP asked for details, the department did not respond to follow-up questions.

“No child at Dilley … has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment,” said Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that operates the facility under contract with ICE. Gustin declined to answer specific questions about the 13-year-old girl, citing privacy rules.

Detention weighs on children

On a phone call from inside Dilley, 13-year-old Gustavo Santino-Josa introduced himself to a reporter by name and the nine-digit identification number ICE assigned him when he was taken into custody with his mother.

“Until today I don’t know what we did wrong to get detained,” Gustavo said. “I’ve seen my mom cry almost daily, and I ask God that we can go out and go home soon.”

He worried they might never be released.

“My mom says that as long as there is hope it is worth fighting for,” Gustavo said before handing the phone to his mother, Christian Hinojosa, the healthcare aide originally from Mexico.

“All his friends have left already,” his mother said. “Some were deported. Some got released recently. And it hurts. It hurts to see people leaving and you’re staying here.”

Dilley was built to hold 2,400 people, housed in clusters ICE calls “neighborhoods.” Bunk beds are arranged side-by-side for up to four families, frequently putting parents with young children in close quarters.

Once in full operation, Dilley is expected to generate about $180 million in annual revenue for CoreCivic, according to the company’s recent filing with securities regulators.

In a video on its website, CoreCivic says Dilley’s “open campus layout allows residents to move freely and unescorted throughout the day.”

It does not mention that parents and their children are locked inside.

In response to questions from the AP, CoreCivic’s Gustin said the staff at Dilley includes a pediatrician, pediatric nurse practitioner and other trained medical professionals and mental health services workers to “meet the needs of children and families in our care.”

In talks with parents of children held at Dilley, however, the same problems come up repeatedly, said Welch, the children’s rights lawyer.

Kids cry often and don’t get enough sleep, in part because lights are on around the clock, she said. The water tastes terrible and causes stomachaches and rashes, so some families stick to what they can buy in the commissary.

Their children don’t eat enough and have lost weight, Welch said. There are classrooms, but instruction is limited to an hour daily, mostly filling out worksheets.

A 14-year-old girl, identified in court papers by the initials NVSM, reported there were tensions with up to 12 people sharing their room. At night when she and her mother tried to sleep, others insisted on turning up the TV.

“I feel very sad and stressed to be here,” the teen said in an account filed with the court that oversees a binding settlement governing detention and release of children. “My nerves are so high. I don’t know what is happening. My muscles will twitch because I’m so nervous and on edge.”

Concerns about oversight

As the government’s detention of parents and their children came under scrutiny in 2014, an ICE official claimed that family detention centers, equipped with basketball courts and medical clinics, were “more like a summer camp.”

The characterization irritated McPherson, the child psychiatrist who, along with another physician, was retained in 2014 by Homeland Security to inspect family detention centers. Their contracts were not renewed by the Trump administration last year after Homeland Security announced sweeping staff reductions.

“Having a clean place to sleep, having food, that’s not the same thing as having family and community,” McPherson said.

The doctors’ investigations of family detention centers exposed consistently inadequate staffing and disregard by administrators for the trauma caused by detention, concerns they reported in 2018 to a Senate caucus set up to hear from whistleblowers.

At Dilley, the doctors noted a persistent shortage of pediatricians and the inability to hire a child psychiatrist from the time they began their inspections until they alerted senators.

Employees unsure how to deal with 2-year-olds biting and hitting one another placed the children and their parents in medical isolation for days, McPherson and her colleague told senators. Without supervision, a nurse at Dilley gave adult-strength hepatitis A shots to about 250 children in 2015, the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. reported.

Homeland Security responded to many of the findings by making changes before a special committee recommended in late 2016 that the government discontinue family detention except in rare cases. The first Trump administration increased family detention before the Biden administration began phasing it out in 2021.

That the Trump administration is again holding families at Dilley after so many warnings feels “dystopian,” McPherson said.

“The decision to knowingly traumatize children and subject them to chronic stress, I just have no words for it,” she said.

Worries even after release

Huddled around picnic tables at the Laredo migrant shelter, parents released from Dilley searched anxiously for flights back to the homes they left behind. They called relatives, friends, teachers, anyone who might help with money to get there.

The young Ecuadoran mom talked of returning to Minneapolis, where her 2-year-old daughter, born in the U.S., was staying with a friend. With her husband deported, parenting will be entirely her responsibility.

That means getting her 7-year-old back in school. Then the woman, who had a work permit and a job in a Minneapolis restaurant before being detained, needs to keep her children fed.

“Let’s go home, Mom, but don’t go back to work because ICE is going to pick you up again,” the little girl said. Her mother tried to reassure her.

That won’t happen, she said, because now they have a special paper telling ICE to leave them alone.

She hopes that’s a promise she can keep.

Burke, Geller and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. AP data reporter Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — For a decade, President Trump promised to end what he calls forever wars, casting himself as a leader opposed to prolonged conflicts in the Middle East and who would rather pursue peace in the world.

Now, early in his second term, Trump is taking military action against Iran that could expand well beyond a limited effort to halt the country’s nuclear program.

In a video posted on Truth Social, the commander-in-chief said American forces also plan to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” He warned members of Iran’s military to surrender or “face certain death.” And urged the Iranian people to take the moment as an opportunity to rise up against their government.

“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces,” Trump said.

Trump, who has been considering a strike on Iran for several weeks, acknowledged he reached the decision to attack while aware of the human toll that could come with it.

“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war,” he said. “But we are doing this, not for now, we are doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”

Trump’s military campaign in Iran is a sharp turn in tone for a president who has long been critical of open-ended conflicts in the Middle East, and marks a shift from an America-first agenda message that helped him return to the White House.

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump said in his November 2024 victory speech as he promised to focus national resources on domestic priorities rather than foreign conflicts.

As Trump advocated to bring home American forces from deployments around the world and to withdraw from key defense treaties, his position resonated with a war-weary electorate in the lead up to the election.

Fewer than six in 10 Americans (56%) believed the United States should take an active role in world affairs ahead of the election — the second-lowest level recorded since the question was first asked in 1974, according to polling by the Council on Foreign Affairs.

Trump’s posture on war in the Middle East had been consistent before he ran for office.

In 2013, he criticized former President Obama’s negotiations with Tehran, predicting in a post on Twitter, that Obama would “attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly.” That same year, Trump warned that “our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.”

And in a heated February 2016 debate, Trump attacked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, stating that his brother George W. Bush lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities to get the U.S. into the Iraq War. Trump called the Iraq War a “big, fat mistake” that “destabilized the Middle East.”

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none,” he said.

Trump’s confrontation with Iran bears little resemblance to those early rebukes.

Trump has yet to present evidence of an imminent threat to the United States from Iran’s nuclear program — a capability he claimed to have “obliterated” just eight months ago — and has instead framed the military campaign as one to ensure Tehran never develops nuclear weapon at all.

“It is a very simple message,” he said. “They will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump’s shift has already drawn the attention of congressional Democrats, many of whom are calling the president out for backing out on his promise to end foreign wars — and are demanding that he involve Congress in any further military actions.

“Regardless of what the President may think or say, he does not enjoy a blank check to launch large-scale military operations without a clear strategy, without any transparency or public debate, and not without Congressional approval,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) criticized Trump for “drawing the country into yet another foreign war that Americans don’t want and Congress has not authorized.”

The military involvement in Iran is not the first time that members of Congress have complained about the Trump administration’s willingness to sideline the legislative branch on decisions that could trigger broader conflicts this year.

In January, Trump ordered military forces to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and said the United States would run the sovereign nation until further notice. He threatened military action in Colombia, whose leftist President Gustavo Petro has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics.

Trump has alienated allied nations when he said he was willing to send American troops to seize Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. And on Friday, he said U.S. is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.

His actions have coincided with his annoyance at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to seek peace in the world. At one point, the president said he no longer felt an “obligation to think purely of Peace” because he didn’t get the recognition.

Trump’s shifting tone, and his use of violent war imagery in his pretaped remarks about Iran, have rattled even part of his base.

“I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this,” said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative who recently left Congress after a bitter fight with Trump. “This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!”

Republican leaders, however, are largely standing behind the president.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Iran “posed a clear and unacceptable threat” to the United States and has refused “the diplomatic off-ramps.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (D-La.) said Trump took the action after exhausting “every effort to pursue peaceful and diplomatic solutions.”

Other top Republican lawmakers rallied behind the president, too.

“The butcher’s bill has finally come due for the ayatollahs,” Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in a post on X. “May God bless and protect our troops on this vital mission of vengeance, and justice, and safety.”

Politicians going on entertainment shows is hardly new, but Vice President Al Gore’s appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman” Wednesday took the use of popular culture further than before.

Politicians, classically, have used popular culture programs two ways: First, to repair and humanize their image, as Richard Nixon did playing the piano on the Jack Paar show in 1960 or appearing on “Laugh-In” in 1968, or as Bob Dole recently did appearing with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” to tell self-deprecating jokes and demonstrate that he is more than just a mean guy.

Second, politicians have used popular culture to reach out to new audiences, as President Clinton did during the campaign last year, appearing on Arsenio Hall’s show and on MTV.

“The important thing about going on MTV was not what he said, but the fact that he was there, reaching out to young people on their channel, welcoming them into the process,” Clinton media adviser Mandy Grunwald explained.

Gore’s appearance on Letterman’s new CBS show was slightly different. He did crack jokes with Letterman about his stiff image and the job of being vice president–even reading his own Top 10 list of good things about the office, including “After they sign a bill, there’s a lot of free pens.” But the vice president actually wanted to build support for a substantive public policy, his plan for reinventing government.

He demonstrated the government’s method of safety-testing an ash tray, or “ash receiver, tobacco (desk type).” Gore and Letterman donned safety goggles and smashed the ash tray with a hammer on a U.S.-mandated maple plank.

“This is a step beyond the talk shows,” or playing the saxophone in dark sunglasses, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

And that made it risky too.

In effect, the Clinton Administration “has embraced popular culture as part of a general strategy, to use it to get their message out,” said Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group in Washington that studies TV.

“The danger is you can be used up by popular culture,” since the entertainment world does not operate by the same rules as the world of politics and journalism.

Politicians cannot demand equal time. And a politician with real power can look foolish tangling with an entertainer.

Vice President Dan Quayle discovered the risks after he criticized the fictional TV character Murphy Brown for her decision to have a child out of wedlock.

Not only did “Murphy Brown’s” producers retaliate with a program that denounced Quayle’s ideas in a way that was unadorned and quite serious political rhetoric, but the 1992 Emmy Awards show was converted into a diatribe against Quayle and the Republican Party for its criticism of Hollywood’s values.

According to Lichter’s Center, which monitors political humor on late-night shows, Leno, Letterman et al. are more focused on politics than ever.

In his first six months in office, Clinton has been the brunt of nearly 400 late-night jokes. George Bush, after six months, had been the brunt of about 60.

Gore, meanwhile, has been the brunt of as many jokes as Quayle was in his first six months as the First Sidekick.

“Let me give you an idea of just how boring our new vice president is,” Letterman had said of Gore on an earlier night. “Al Gore’s Secret Service code name is Al Gore.”