POLITICS

PORTLAND, Conn. — Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton on Tuesday pressed his charge that President Bush has mishandled the economy, using a manufacturing plant as his stage to lament the loss of blue-collar jobs and to flesh out a plan to resurrect the nation’s manufacturing base.

At the Standard-Knapp corporation here–and later at a rally outside an East Haven, Conn., restaurant–Clinton sought to place the blame squarely on the incumbent for the ebbing away of America’s once-stalwart manufacturing base.

“The percentage of our workers employed in the manufacturing sector has continued to decline,” despite productivity gains posted by many companies, Clinton told the Standard-Knapp workers, who assemble packaging machines.

He said, “Just in the last four years, we’ve lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs.”

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed Tuesday that the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has fallen by 1,388,000 since Bush took office in January, 1989, to 18,150,000. Total non-farm employment grew slightly over the same period, increasing 188,000 to a total of 108,517,000 as of last month, with most of the growth in government employment.

Clinton decried the lack of a coordinated national response to the manufacturing sector’s job decline.

“Unlike our competitors, this country has no national strategy, no comprehensive partnership between business and workers and education and government to create the kinds of high-wage, high-growth jobs in manufacturing that I think are critical to our future,” he said.

Clinton’s Tuesday campaign message was meant to build upon his Labor Day efforts to depict Bush as a man who has allied himself with the rich and powerful and has forgotten needy and working Americans.

As part of offering himself as an alternative, Clinton announced what he touted as a new manufacturing policy, which largely tied together proposals he has advanced throughout his presidential campaign.

One new element in the plan calls for establishment of 170 high-tech centers that would serve as incubators for new manufacturing ideas, which would then be shared with small- and medium-sized companies. The centers would be modeled after the agricultural extensions common in rural areas of the country.

Clinton said the centers would solve the “technological gaps” that plague smaller companies, as well as retrain the scientists and engineers previously employed in the dwindling defense industry.

“There are 200,000 unemployed defense workers, technicians, scientists and engineers in California alone today,” Clinton said. “And these people have all this incredible potential to add to our national wealth, but we don’t have a system for moving them from the defense sector into the non-defense sector. The extension centers will help to do this.”

Later, however, Clinton said only 25 of the centers would be “almost exclusively” dedicated to defense workers, and another 25 to the manufacturing industry. Also, it was unclear where they would be located.

In describing his plan, Clinton demonstrated the difficulty of trying to mount a campaign as a “new style” Democrat, who is focused on the technologies and jobs of the future, and still satisfy the desires of organized labor, which has come aboard his campaign vigorously and has provided a sizable portion of the crowds at many of his recent rallies.

For instance, Clinton suggested repeatedly Tuesday that the U.S. should mimic the approaches of its chief economic competitors.

“Everybody knows we’ve lost a lot of auto jobs in the last 10 years and we’ve lost a lot of steel jobs in the last 10 years,” Clinton said. “But if you look at the Germans and the Japanese . . . when they moved people out of automobiles, they moved into other manufacturing technologies with a future. When our people moved out of automobiles, they moved into the unemployment lines.”

At the same time, though, Clinton sought to show that he remains concerned about the plight of the more traditional businesses that organized labor is trying to salvage.

To that end, he scored Bush for staging a Labor Day campaign event that he suggested missed the point.

“Just yesterday, President Bush had a great photo (opportunity) walking across the bridge that connects Mackinac Island to the mainland of Michigan–a bridge that was built with steel from a mill that is closed in the last four years,” he said.

Ultimately, Clinton settled on mixing a stew of Republican and Democratic ideas for reviving the economy.

“We’ve got to get rid of regulations that don’t make sense,” said Clinton, echoing a line that has been standard in GOP rhetoric. Then he added a distinctly liberal element: “And we’ve got to permit our companies to join together . . . as long as it doesn’t affect their competitive pricing here at home.”

At the rally in East Haven, Clinton reiterated his belief that a combination of approaches is needed to solve the nation’s economic woes.

“A lot of the problems we face today don’t fall very neatly in categories of left and right and liberal and conservative and Republican and Democratic,” he said. “We are living in a post-Cold War world where we are fighting and competing for every dollar we get.”

In general, Clinton has pledged to use the U.S. tax code to benefit domestic businesses and has promised to transfer money saved in defense cutbacks to job-creating programs.

He argued Tuesday, as he has throughout the campaign, that existing tax codes propel many companies to set up operations outside the United States, stripping the nation of jobs as a consequence.

He won his only applause from the Standard-Knapp workers when he pledged to “copy our competitors” and put the heft of the government behind businesses.

“The tax system in America should work to benefit Americans without being protectionist,” Clinton said.

The Arkansas governor also promised to streamline export laws to help companies compete overseas and said he would bolster the export offices in U.S. embassies worldwide.

Overall, Clinton said, his plan would cost about $2 billion a year over five years, financed with money now spent on military research.

Today on the Trail . . .

Bill Clinton campaigns in Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla.

President Bush campaigns in Norristown and Collegeville, Pa., and Middletown, N.J.

Vice President Dan Quayle attends a rally in San Diego and addresses a San Diego Rotary Club luncheon.

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TELEVISION

Clinton is interviewed on WJXT’s “Florida talks to Clinton.” C-SPAN will air it live at 5 p.m. PDT.

Tennessee Sen. Al Gore is interviewed on CNN’s “Larry King Live” at 6 p.m. PDT.

WASHINGTON — More than half of U.S. adults believe President Trump has “gone too far” in using the U.S. military to intervene in other countries, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

The poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was conducted Jan. 8-11, after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s capture. It found that 56% of U.S. adults think Trump has overstepped on military interventions abroad, while majorities disapprove of how the Republican president is handling foreign policy in general and Venezuela in particular.

The findings largely cut against Trump’s aggressive foreign policy stance, which has recently included efforts to exert control over Venezuelan oil, calls for the U.S. to take over Greenland and warnings that the U.S. would provide aid to people protesting in Iran. Many did see the Trump administration’s recent intervention in Venezuela as a “good thing” for stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. and a benefit for the Venezuelan people, but fewer say it’s a positive for U.S. national security or the U.S. economy.

Republicans are mostly following Trump’s lead, despite the sharp contrast with the “America First” platform he ran on. But few Republicans want Trump to go further, underscoring the risks of a continued focus abroad.

Most Republicans say Trump’s actions have been ‘about right’

While the U.S. used its military power in Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump has also made recent comments about seizing Greenland “the hard way” if Denmark’s leaders do not agree to a deal for the U.S. to take it over, and he has warned Iran that the U.S. will come to the “rescue” of peaceful protesters.

Democrats and independents are driving the belief that Trump has overstepped. About 9 in 10 Democrats and roughly 6 in 10 independents say Trump has “gone too far” on military intervention, compared with about 2 in 10 Republicans.

The vast majority of Republicans, 71%, say Trump’s actions have been “about right,” and only about 1 in 10 want to see him go further.

About 6 in 10 Americans, 57%, disapprove of how Trump is handling the situation in Venezuela, which is slightly lower than the 61% who disapprove of his approach to foreign policy. Both measures are in line with his overall job approval, which has largely remained steady throughout his second term.

Many say the U.S. action in Venezuela will be good for halting drug trafficking

Many Americans see some benefits from U.S. intervention in Venezuela.

About half of Americans believe the U.S. intervening in Venezuela will be “mostly a good thing” for halting the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Close to 4 in 10, 44%, believe the U.S. actions will do more to benefit than harm the Venezuelan people, who lived under Maduro’s dictatorship for more than a decade. But U.S. adults are divided on whether intervention will be good or bad for U.S. economic and national security interests or if it simply won’t have an impact.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats and independents to see benefits to the U.S. action, particularly its effects on drug trafficking. About 8 in 10 Republicans say America’s intervention will be “mostly a good thing” for stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the country, but fewer Republicans, about 6 in 10, believe it will benefit the U.S. economy.

Democrats and independents drive desire for U.S. to take a ‘less active’ role

Most Americans don’t want greater U.S. involvement in world affairs, the poll found. Nearly half of Americans want the U.S. to take a “less active” role, and about one-third say its current role is “about right.”

Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say they want the country to be more involved globally, including about 1 in 10 Republicans.

At least half of Democrats and independents now want the U.S. to do less, a sharp shift from a few months ago.

Republicans, meanwhile, have grown more likely to indicate that Trump’s level of involvement is right. About 6 in 10 Republicans, 64%, say the country’s current role in world affairs is “about right,” which is up from 55% in September. About one-quarter of Republicans say the U.S. needs to take a “less active role” in solving problems around the globe, down from 34% a few months ago.

Sanders writes for the Associated Press. The AP-NORC poll of 1,203 adults was conducted Jan. 8-11 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

In a major victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party, a federal court in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that California can use its newly configured congressional district boundaries for the 2026 midterm elections, increasing Democrats’ odds of winning five additional U.S. House seats and seizing control of the chamber.

Attorneys for the GOP had sought to temporarily block California’s new map, arguing that the redrawn districts, placed on the ballot by the Democratic-led state Legislature as Proposition 50 last November, were unconstitutional because they illegally favored Latino voters.

But two judges in the three-judge panel rejected Republican arguments. The maps, they found, were engineered by Democrats to favor their party’s candidates and counter similar partisan gerrymandering from Texas and other GOP-led states.

“The evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats,” District Judge Josephine L. Staton wrote in an opinion.

Whatever the intent of those who drew up the maps, Staton added, “the voters are the most relevant state actors and their intent is paramount.”

Staton, who was appointed by former President Obama, was joined by District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of former President Biden. Judge Kenneth K. Lee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, an appointee of President Trump, dissented.

Lee argued that public comments made by Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who drew up the new California map, showed race was a key factor.

“The Democratic supermajority in the California state legislature wanted to curry favor with Latino groups and voters — and to prevent Latino voters from drifting away from the party,” Lee wrote in his dissent.

The California Republican Party said it would seek an emergency injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The map drawer’s plain statements acknowledging that he racially gerrymandered the Proposition 50 maps, which he and the Legislature refused to explain or deny, in addition to our experts’ testimony, established that the courts should stop the implementation of the Prop. 50 map,” Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing this fight in the courts.”

An overwhelming majority of California voters approved the new district boundaries during a Nov. 4 special election. On Wednesday, the state’s Democratic leaders were quick to tout the judges’ decision as a victory for voters.

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed,” Newsom said in a statement. “California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop. 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded.”

“Today’s decision upholds the will of the people,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a statement. “It also means that, to date, every single challenge against Proposition 50 has failed.”

Newsom pitched the redistricting plan last summer as a way to boost Democrats’ prospects of flipping the House in the midterms after Trump pressed Texas to redraw its map to prop up the GOP’s narrow majority.

Using the new California map would not only give Democrats a better chance of shifting the balance of power in Congress and blocking Trump’s agenda during the second half of his term. It also could elevate Newsom’s status among Democrats as he weighs a 2028 White House run.

Legal experts say the odds are against Republicans getting the Supreme Court to block California’s new congressional districts. In December, the high court allowed Texas to temporarily keep its newly drawn congressional map, which could give Republicans up to five extra seats.

A federal court previously blocked Texas’ map, finding racial considerations probably made it unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court indicated it viewed the redrawing as motivated primarily by partisan politics, not race. In its ruling, the court explicitly drew a connection between Texas and California, noting that several states have redrawn their congressional maps “in ways that are predicted to favor the State’s dominant political party.”

As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued in a concurrence: “The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California), was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said he thought it unlikely that GOP attorneys could now get an injunction from the Supreme Court. The standard to get an injunction from the nation’s highest court if the lower court didn’t grant one, he noted, is supposed to be higher than the standard to get a stay if the court granted an injunction.

“The Supreme Court has already telegraphed something about what it thinks about California in that Texas ruling,” Hasen said. “Certainly, to have a majority of Republican-appointed justices side with the Republicans in both cases coming out the opposite way would not be a very good look for a Supreme Court that’s trying to say that it’s about politics.”

Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, said that attorneys for the California GOP and the federal Department of Justice might posture about an appeal, but California would likely use the new maps this year.

“You might see a filing purporting to fight it out further, but I wouldn’t expect to go anywhere,” Levitt said. “I think that the outcome … is we have an election under the lines that were passed in Proposition 50. And that’s sort of the end of the line, practically speaking.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s Texas decision, legal experts said they thought Republicans faced an uphill battle in blocking California’s maps.

“This was a long shot of a claim from the beginning,” Levitt said. “It’s a claim that, under current law, just isn’t supported by the facts … and the Supreme Court just turned a dramatically uphill case into Everest.”

One of the quirks of the legal battle over gerrymandering in California and Texas is that it is not possible to challenge the new maps on the grounds that they are drawn to give one political party an advantage. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court. That left the GOP in California challenging the new maps on racial grounds.

As attorneys presented their closing arguments last month in a Los Angeles courtroom, Staton reminded prosecutors that the burden was on the map’s challengers to prove racial intent.

But legal experts note that thinking about race when drawing district lines is not, in itself, illegal.

“Under the law at present, what matters is not whether you think about race,” Levitt said. “What matters is whether you think about race so much that you subordinated every other criterion to race in deciding where to put people.”

The GOP’s legal team tried to demonstrate racial intent by bringing to the stand RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende, who said the new 13th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley had an “appendage” that snaked northward into Stockton. Such contorted offshoots, he said, are “usually indicative of racial gerrymandering.”

Attorneys for the GOP also tried to prove racial intent by focusing on public comments made by Mitchell, the redistricting expert. Ahead of Nov. 4, they said, he told Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, a Latino advocacy group, that the “number-one thing” he started thinking about was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles.”

During December’s hearing, Staton suggested that GOP attorneys focused too much of their closing arguments on the intent of Mitchell and Democratic legislators and not of the voters who ultimately approved Proposition 50.

“Why would we not be looking at their intent?” Staton asked Michael Columbo, an attorney for California Republicans. “If the relative intent is the voters, you have nothing.”

Hsu took issue with the GOP attorneys’ narrow focus on the 13th Congressional District, arguing he engaged in a “strawman” attempt to pick out one district to make the case that there was a broader racially motivated effort to flip five seats Democratic.

Lee, however, reserved most of his criticism for the state’s legal team.

Lee questioned the idea, offered by an attorney for the state, that Mitchell’s statement about wanting to create a Latino district in Los Angeles was just “talking to interested groups” and “he did not communicate that intent to legislators.”

Lee also said Mitchell’s closeness to Democratic interest groups was an important factor. He questioned why Mitchell did not testify at the hearing and invoked legislative privilege dozens of times during a deposition ahead of the hearing.

In his dissent, Lee said Mitchell’s public statements “confirm that race was a predominant factor in devising Congressional District No. 13.”

“We should accept the state’s mapmaker’s own words at face value when he said that he wanted to bolster a majority Latino district in the Central Valley,” he argued.

While the judges’ decision is a win for Newsom, Christian Grose, a professor of political science at USC, said the major victory was the Proposition 50 vote.

“It is a win for the excellent team of lawyers with the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and the California DOJ versus an incoherent and hard-to-follow legal argument presented by the Trump Department of Justice and the California Republican Party,” Grose said.

Times staff writer Christopher Buchanan contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Top Danish diplomats met with White House officials on Wednesday to talk about President Trump’s repeated threats to take control of Greenland and left with the understanding that the United States and Denmark have a “fundamental disagreement” about the future of the Arctic territory.

Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister, told reporters that the closed-door meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been “frank, but also constructive,” and that he was hopeful the allied governments would be able to find a “common way forward” in the near future.

“For us, ideas that would not respect territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of self-determination of the Greenlandic people are, of course, totally unacceptable,” Lokke Rasmussen said. “We, therefore, still have a fundamental disagreement, but we also agree to disagree.”

In the hours leading up to the meeting, Trump said in a social media post that the “United States needs Greenland” for national security purposes — and that “anything less than” acquiring the Danish territory would be “unacceptable.” Otherwise, the president has argued, China or Russia will annex the territory because he does not think Danish officials have done enough to protect the island.

As Vance and Rubio met with the Danish officials, the White House posted a cartoon on social media that depicted two dog sleds, with Greenland’s flag on the back, facing two pathways: a sunny day at the White House or a stormy scenario with Chinese and Russian flags. The image did not show a pathway with Denmark.

Vivian Motzfeldt, Greenland’s foreign minister, told reporters after the meeting that she wants to strengthen the island’s ties with the United States. But she asserted: “That doesn’t mean that we want to be owned by the United States.”

The meeting marked the first time top officials from the three governments met to discuss Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, and it came at the same time that Denmark and allied countries announced they were increasing their military presence in and around the Arctic territory.

After the meeting, Lokke Rasmussen said a high-level working group would be formed and meet within weeks to “explore if we can find a common way forward” on security with the request that the U.S. respect Greenland’s sovereignty.

“Whether that is doable, I don’t know, but I hope it could take down the temperature,” he said.

A few hours after the closed-door meeting, Trump told reporters that he had not been briefed yet on the discussions but reiterated that “we need Greenland for national security.”

The president has long talked about making Greenland part of the United States, but his threats have escalated in the days after the U.S. military’s operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. For instance, Trump warned last week that his administration was going to “do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not.”

“If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way,” Trump said at a White House event Friday.

European and Danish leaders have repeatedly opposed the president’s plans to take over the semiautonomous territory, warning that such a move threatens to dismantle the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Trump said Wednesday that part of the reason he wants to acquire Greenland is to build a Golden Dome missile defense system. He said NATO would become “far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the United States.”

On Tuesday, Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, and Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen both came out in opposition of the president’s plans.

“If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Nielsen said at a news conference in Copenhagen.

Asked about Nielsen’s comments, Trump said: “I disagree with him. … That’s going to be a big problem for him.”

The president’s plans have also drawn opposition domestically.

In Washington, a growing number of GOP lawmakers have expressed unease about the White House’s threats to use force to acquire Greenland — let alone pursue any military action against a U.S. ally without congressional approval.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Tuesday joined Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to push legislation that would bar the departments of Defense andState from using funds to “blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control” over the territory of any other NATO member state.

In practice, the proposal — titled the “NATO Unity Protection Act — would block Trump from taking over Greenland.

“This bipartisan legislation makes clear that U.S. taxpayer dollars cannot be used for actions that would fracture NATO and violate our own commitments to NATO,” Shaheen said in a statement.

Murkowski said it was “deeply troubling” to see the United States attempt to use its resources against allies, and said such actions “must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute.”

“Our NATO alliances are what set the United States apart from our adversaries,” Murkowski said. “We have friends and allies who are willing to stand firmly alongside us as the strongest line of defense to keep those who work to undermine peace and stability from making sweeping advances globally.”

A similar bipartisan proposal was introduced in the House on Wednesday that would block federal funds from being used to occupy a NATO ally.

“America is at our strongest when we honor our alliances and stand by our allies,” said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat co-sponsoring the House measure.

Beyond diplomatic concerns, the president’s plans to buy or seize Greenland are not popular among the electorate.

About 9 in 10 registered voters oppose the U.S. trying to take Greenland by military force, while only 9% are in favor, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll. Voters are also divided on the idea of buying the territory, with 55% of voters opposing and 37% in favor.

A top Trump administration lawyer pressed a federal judge Wednesday to block a newly enacted California law that bans most law enforcement officers in the state from wearing masks, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Tiberius Davis, representing the U.S. Department of Justice, argued at a hearing in Los Angeles that the first-of-its-kind ban on police face coverings could unleash chaos across the country, and potentially land many ICE agents on the wrong side of the law it were allowed to take effect.

“Why couldn’t California say every immigration officer needs to wear pink, so it’s super obvious who they are?” Davis told U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder. “The idea that all 50 states can regulate the conduct and uniforms of officers … flips the Constitution on its head.”

The judge appeared skeptical.

“Why can’t they perform their duties without a mask? They did that until 2025, did they not?” Snyder said. “How in the world do those who don’t mask manage to operate?”

The administration first sued to block the new rules in November, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the No Secret Police Act and its companion provision, the No Vigilantes Act, into law. Together, The laws bar law enforcement officers from wearing masks and compel them to display identification “while conducting law enforcement operations in the Golden State.” Both offenses would be misdemeanors.

Federal officials have vowed to defy the new rules, saying they are unconstitutional and put agents in danger. They have also decried an exception in the law for California state peace officers, arguing the carve out is discriminatory. The California Highway Patrol is among those exempted, while city and county agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, must comply.

“These were clearly and purposefully targeted at the federal government,” Davis told the court Wednesday. “Federal officers face prosecution if they do not comply with California law, but California officers do not.”

The hearing comes at a moment of acute public anger at the agency following the fatal shooting of American protester Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis — rage that has latched on to masks as a symbol of perceived lawlessness and impunity.

“It’s obvious why these laws are in the public interest,” California Department of Justice lawyer Cameron Bell told the court Wednesday. “The state has had to bear the cost of the federal government’s actions. These are very real consequences.”

She pointed to declarations from U.S. citizens who believed they were being abducted by criminals when confronted by masked immigration agents, including incidents where local police were called to respond.

“I later learned that my mother and sister witnessed the incident and reported to the Los Angeles Police Department that I was kidnapped,” Angeleno Andrea Velez said in one such declaration. “Because of my mother’s call, LAPD showed up to the raid.”

The administration argues the anti-mask law would put ICE agents and other federal immigration enforcement officers at risk of doxing and chill the “zealous enforcement of the law.”

“The laws would recklessly endanger the lives of federal agents and their family members and compromise the operational effectiveness of federal law enforcement activities,” the government said in court filings.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent on duty Aug. 14 outside the Japanese American National Museum, where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a news conference in downtown Los Angeles.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Davis also told the court that ICE‘s current tactics were necessary in part because of laws across California and in much of the U.S. that limit police cooperation with ICE and bar immigration enforcement in sensitive locations, such as schools and courts.

California contends its provisions are “modest” and aligned with past practice, and that the government’s evidence showing immigration enforcement would be harmed is thin.

Bell challenged Department of Homeland Security statistics purporting to show an 8,000% increase in death threats against ICE agents and a 1,000% increase in assaults, saying the government has recently changed what qualifies as a “threat” and that agency claims have faced “significant credibility issues” in federal court.

“Blowing a whistle to alert the community, that’s hardly something that increases threats,” Bell said.

On the identification rule, Snyder appeared to agree.

“One might argue that there’s serious harm to the government if agents’ anonymity is preserved,” she said.

The fate of the mask law may hinge on the peace officer exemption.

“Would your discrimination argument go away if the state changed legislation to apply to all officers?” Snyder asked.

“I believe so,” Davis said.

The ban was slated to come into force on Jan. 1, but is on hold while the case makes its way through the courts. If allowed to take effect, California would become the first state in the nation to block ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers from concealing their identities while on duty.

A ruling is expected as soon as this week.

A group of Los Angeles labor unions are proposing a potential ballot measure they say would combat income inequality in the city by raising taxes on companies whose chief executive officers make at least 50 times more than their median paid employee.

The so-called “Overpaid CEO Tax” initiative was announced Wednesday at a rally outside Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner in Hollywood, and featured union workers holding signs that read “Taxing greed to pay for what we need,” and a cartoon cutout of a boss carrying money bags and puffing a fat cigar.

“It’s high time the rich paid more taxes,” said Kurt Peterson, the co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents airport and hotel employees.

Sister Diane Smith, with CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), joins The Fair Games Coalition at a rally in Hollywood Wednesdsay.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The proposal is sponsored by the “Fair Games Coalition,” a collection of labor groups that includes the Los Angeles teachers union, and comes on the heels of a statewide ballot proposal for a one-time 5% wealth tax on California billionaires that would raise money for healthcare for the most vulnerable.

Revenues raised by the CEO tax would be earmarked for specific purposes and not go directly to the city’s general fund.

According to proponents, 70% would go to the Working Families Housing Fund; 20% would go to the Street and Sidewalk Repairs Programs and 5% would go both to the After-School Programs Fund and the Fresh Food Access Fund.

In order to place the measure on the November ballot, supporters must collect 140,000 signatures in the next 120 days.

Critics say say the proposal is misguided and would drive business away from the city.

“It would encourage companies that have minimal contact and business in Los Angeles to completely pull out,” said Stuart Waldman, head of the Valley Industry & Commerce Association. “You’ll never see another hotel built in Los Angeles. It’s just one more thing that will drive business away.”

He added that $350 million for affordable housing would create about 350 units of affordable housing per year, which would not do much to affect the city’s housing crisis.

“That does nothing to help people… but on the contrary, that tax, would do more to hurt people by pushing businesses out of Los Angeles and pushing jobs out of Los Angeles,” he said.

The president of UTLA, Cecily Myart-Cruz, said teachers support the proposal not only because it would raise money for after-school programs, but because it would also help teachers find housing in L.A.

“They can’t live where we teach, because the prices are out of reach,” Myart-Cruz said.

Supporters argue the tax will not chase businesses out of Los Angeles.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, speaks in favor of a measure that would increase taxes on companies whose chief executive officers make at least 50 times more than their median paid employee.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“Sure if they want to leave the second largest market in the country, go for it. But no one’s leaving that,” Peterson said.

The ordinance, if passed by voters, would impose an additional tax of up to 10 times the company’s regular business tax, based on the pay difference between the highest-paid employee at the company and the lowest, the initiative said.

According to the coalition, the current city business tax is between 0.1% and 0.425% of gross receipts.

If a top manager at a company makes between 50 and 100 times the median employee, the company will pay an “Overpaid CEO tax” equal to the business tax otherwise paid by the company. If the top manager makes greater than 500 times the median employee, the business would be required to pay an additional tax of 10 times the business tax otherwise owed.

“The bigger the gap, the higher the tax,” Peterson said.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday rejected a request to extradite a California physician accused of providing abortion medication to a Louisiana patient, marking the latest clash between states with sharply different abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Louisiana’s request is denied,” Newsom said in a statement. “My position on this has been clear since 2022: We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services. Not today. Not ever.”

The extradition request stems from criminal charges filed in Louisiana against Dr. Rémy Coeytaux, a California-based physician accused of prescribing and mailing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident in 2023 through a telemedicine service. Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill announced the indictment Tuesday, and Gov. Jeff Landry said he would sign an extradition order.

“It’s appalling to see the California Governor and Attorney General openly admitting that they will protect an individual from being held accountable for illegal, medically unethical, and dangerous conduct that led to a woman being coerced into terminating the life of her unborn child,” Murrill said in response to California’s actions.

Since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, a growing number of states have moved to criminalize reproductive care. About 16 states, including Texas and Louisiana, now ban abortion almost entirely, with some allowing criminal penalties or civil lawsuits against providers.

Those laws have heightened concerns among physicians about potential legal exposure when traveling to or practicing across state lines — even when their home states explicitly protect reproductive and gender-affirming care.

Newsom’s office said federal and state law give the governor discretion to decline extradition requests when the alleged conduct occurred in California. The governor pointed to an executive order he issued shortly after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, as well as subsequent legislation, designed to shield California providers and patients from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions.

The case underscores a widening legal standoff between states with near-total abortion bans and those that have enacted so-called shield laws to protect providers who offer abortion care, including medication abortions, to patients from restrictive states. California is among at least eight states with such protections.

Newsom cast his decision to reject the extradition as part of a broader push by California to protect reproductive rights as Republican-led states move to restrict abortion access.

“We will never be complicit with Trump’s war on women,” Newsom said.

WASHINGTON — State and local officials are once again on the defensive after President Trump renewed threats Wednesday to strike federal dollars from “sanctuary” jurisdictions such as California and Los Angeles, which have long opposed cooperation with immigration enforcement agencies.

The ultimatum, laid out in an early morning Truth Social post, echoed sweeping statements the president made Tuesday at the Detroit Economic Club, putting billions in funding flagged for healthcare, education and transportation at stake.

“Effective Feb. 1, no more payments will be made by the federal government to states for their corrupt criminal protection centers known as sanctuary cities. All they do is breed crime and violence. If states want them, they will have to pay for them,” he said.

The U.S. government is supplying $175 billion to California this fiscal year — about a third of the state’s total 2025-26 spending plan, according to state budget records.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice created a list of dozens of state and local governments identified as “sanctuary” jurisdictions based on policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Those policies generally do not block federal authorities from carrying out immigration actions, but restrict how local resources can be used.

California Department of Justice officials were quick to point out that courts have repeatedly sided against the president on this matter, most recently in August, when a judge ruled the federal government cannot deny funding to Los Angeles and 30 other cities over policies that limit cooperation on immigration enforcement.

The ruling, by U.S. District Judge William Orrick, extended an earlier injunction that established Trump’s efforts to cut federal funding were probably unconstitutional and violated the separation of powers doctrine.

But at a December hearing, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel signaled it might overturn the injunction, as judges questioned whether the administration’s latest orders actually require agencies to cut funding in a way that exceeds their authority.

A final ruling on the appeal is pending.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said in a statement Wednesday that the substance of White House threats wasn’t clear.

“While details here are in short supply, we’ll have to take a look at whatever the president actually does,” Bonta said. “We remain prepared to take action as necessary to protect our state and uphold the law.”

Bonta has also defeated the administration over its attempts to impose illegal immigration enforcement conditions on transportation, homeland security and Victims of Crime Act funding.

On Tuesday, he announced a multistate challenge to Trump’s plans to freeze $10 billion in federal child care and social services funding amid unsubstantiated allegations that the state was “illicitly providing illegal aliens” with benefits.

Gov. Gavin Newsom took a moment to lean on the state’s winning legal record.

“Please pray for the president as he struggles with cognitive decline. He already forgot he tried this before — multiple times — and we sued him and won,” Newsom said in a statement Wednesday.

Though the White House wouldn’t comment on a specific legal framework or dollar amount for this wave of funding cuts, Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Wednesday that sanctuary cities are “incredibly dangerous” and put law-abiding Americans at risk.

She added that the Trump administration is considering “a variety of lawful options” to implement this policy.

The issue of executive overreach is at the fore for Senate Democrats, too, who are challenging the president over military action in Venezuela.

“Let me be clear: Congress—not the White House and not Donald Trump — holds the power of the purse,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).

Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto confirmed the city would take legal action to protect its access to federal dollars.

Mayor Karen Bass said she plans to work with partners at every level of government to ensure Angelenos continue to receive government services.

“Hardworking, honest Americans should not have to pay the price for the president’s continued political attack on blue states and cities,” she said in a statement.

Michael Gates, the former Huntington Beach city attorney who spent his tenure as a staunch antagonist to California’s liberal politics, is running for state attorney general as part of a slate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton.

Gates, 50, announced the launch of his campaign for the state’s top law enforcement job during an event at the Huntington Beach Pier on Wednesday flanked by Hilton, former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, who is running alongside Hilton for lieutenant governor, and a trove of supporters.

“California has the highest cost of living and the highest taxes, which are crushing families, and Sacramento elites keep scheming for ways to raise our taxes while leaving our streets unsafe for our families and our businesses,” Gates said. “Sacramento has proven that it is completely out of touch with everyday Californians.”

Gates’ speech launching his campaign struck a similar tone to the messaging he employed in his role as Huntington Beach city attorney, where he positioned himself in direct opposition to the state’s Democratic leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and current Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

Bonta this week announced he was running for reelection, opting not to run for California governor. As attorney general, Bonta has sued the Trump administration more than 50 times, calling the president’s policies “vicious, inhumane, unlawful” and, in many cases, unconstitutional.

Gates, a lifelong Republican, was first elected as Huntington Beach city attorney in 2014 and was reelected twice. He held the role until last year, when he was appointed as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. After a 10-month stint with the federal government, Gates announced he had resigned the post so he could spend more time with his family. He was rehired to work as an assistant city attorney in Huntington Beach.

During his tenure with the city, Gates engaged in legal tussles with the state over voter identification, housing mandates, immigration and other issues with mixed results.

In recent years, the city successfully sued the state to recoup millions of dollars in redevelopment agency loan money from a waterfront development and an affordable senior housing project.

But legal fights over voter identification and housing have been less fruitful. Last year, the 4th District Court of Appeal struck down Huntington Beach’s law that would require residents to show an ID to cast their ballot in local elections.

The city’s legal battle over housing requirements was also delivered a blow last year when the state Supreme Court refused to review an appellate court ruling in the state’s favor compelling the city to adhere to state mandates for affordable housing. Huntington Beach had argued its designation as a charter city exempted them from the state’s directives.

“This man, Michael Gates, he is the fighter we need for California,” Hilton said on Wednesday, drawing cheers from the crowd. “You know better than anyone because he led that revolution right here in Huntington Beach.”

WASHINGTON — The Senate is headed toward a vote Wednesday on a war powers resolution that would put a check on President Trump’s ability to carry out further military attacks on Venezuela, but the president was putting intense pressure on his fellow Republicans to vote down the measure.

Trump has lashed out at five GOP senators who joined with Democrats to advance the resolution last week, raising doubts that the measure will ultimately pass. Yet even the possibility that the Republican-controlled Senate would defy Trump on such a high-profile vote revealed the growing alarm on Capitol Hill about the president’s expanding foreign policy ambitions.

Democrats are forcing the vote after U.S. troops captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid earlier this month.

“Here we have one of the most successful attacks ever and they find a way to be against it. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s a shame,” Trump said at a speech in Michigan Tuesday. He also hurled insults at several of the Republicans who advanced the legislation, calling Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky a “stone cold loser” and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine “disasters.”

Trump’s latest comments followed earlier phone calls with the senators, which they described as terse. The president’s fury underscored how the war powers vote has taken on new political significance as Trump also threatens military action to accomplish his goal of possessing Greenland.

The legislation, even if passed by the Senate, has virtually no chance of becoming law because it would eventually need to be signed by Trump himself. But it represented both a test of GOP loyalty to the president and a marker for how much leeway the Republican-controlled Senate is willing to give Trump to use the military abroad.

At least one Republican reconsiders

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who helped advance the war powers resolution last week, has indicated he may change his position.

Hawley said that Trump’s message during a phone call last week was that the legislation “really ties my hands.” The senator said he had a follow-up phone call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that was “really positive.”

Hawley said that Rubio told him Monday “point blank, we’re not going to do ground troops.” The senator said he also received assurances that the Trump administration will follow constitutional requirements if it becomes necessary to deploy troops again to the South American country.

Hawley’s position left the vote margin for the resolution, which advanced 52-47 last week, razor thin.

However, Collins told reporters Wednesday she will still support the resolution. Murkowski and Paul have also indicated they won’t switch.

That left Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, with the crucial vote. He declined repeatedly to discuss his position but said he was “giving it some thought.”

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who has brought a series of war powers resolutions this year, said he wasn’t surprised at Trump’s reaction to senators asserting their ability to put a check on the president.

“They’re furious at the notion that Congress wants to be Congress,” he said. “But I think people who ran for the Senate, they want to be U.S. senators and they don’t want to just vote their own irrelevance.”

What is the war powers resolution?

Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the ability to declare war. But U.S. presidents have long stretched their powers to use the might of the U.S. military around the globe.

Ohio State University professor Peter Mansoor, a military historian and retired U.S. Army colonel with multiple combat tours, said that trend since World War II allows Congress to shirk responsibility for war and put all the risk on the president.

In the post-Vietnam War era, lawmakers tried to take back some of their authority over wartime powers with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. It allows lawmakers to hold votes on resolutions to restrict a president from using military force in specific conflicts without congressional approval.

“Politicians tend to like to evade responsibility for anything — but then this gets you into forever wars,” Mansoor said.

Trump’s shifting rationale for military intervention

Trump has used a series of legal arguments for his campaign against Maduro.

As he built up a naval force in the Caribbean and destroyed vessels that were allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, the Trump administration tapped wartime powers under the global war on terror by designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

The administration has claimed the capture of Maduro himself was actually a law enforcement operation, essentially to extradite the Venezuelan president to stand trial for charges in the U.S. that were filed in 2020.

In a classified briefing Tuesday, senators reviewed the Trump administration’s still undisclosed legal opinion for using the military for the operation. It was described as a lengthy document.

But lawmakers, including a significant number of Republicans, have been alarmed by Trump’s recent foreign policy talk. In recent weeks, he has pledged that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela for years to come, threatened military action to take possession of Greenland and told Iranians protesting their government that “ help is on its way.”

Senior Republicans have tried to massage the relationship between Trump and Denmark, a NATO ally that holds Greenland as a semi-autonomous territory. But Danish officials emerged from a meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Rubio Wednesday saying a “fundamental disagreement” over Greenland remains.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s recent aggression amounted to a “dangerous drift towards endless war.”

More than half of U.S. adults believe President Trump has “gone too far” in using the U.S. military to intervene in other countries, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

How Senate will tackle the war powers resolution

Republican Senate leaders were looking for ways to defuse the conflict between their members and Trump as well as move on quickly to other business.

In a floor speech Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., vented his frustration as he questioned whether this war powers resolution should be prioritized under the chamber’s rules.

“We have no troops on the ground in Venezuela. We’re not currently conducting military operations there,” he said. “But Democrats are taking up this bill because their anti-Trump hysteria knows no bounds.”

Republican leaders could move to dismiss the measure under the argument that it is irrelevant to the current situation in Venezuela, but that procedure would still receive a vote.

House Democrats have also filed a similar war powers resolution and can force a vote on it as soon as next week.

Groves writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Joey Cappelletti in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin has been notified that the Trump administration is investigating her after she organized and appeared in a video with other Democrats urging military service members to resist “illegal orders.”

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, said in a video statement released Wednesday that prosecutors were investigating her over the 90-second video she first posted on her X account in November. Slotkin said the office of U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro, the Justice Department’s chief prosecutor in the nation’s capital, reached out last week asking to interview her.

“This is the president’s playbook. Truth doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. And anyone who disagrees with him becomes an enemy,” Slotkin said. “And he then weaponizes the federal government against them. It’s legal intimidation and physical intimidation meant to get you to shut up.”

Pirro’s office said it would neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation is taking place. Slotkin first disclosed the investigation to the New York Times.

The inquiry marks another escalation in President Trump’s reaction to a video that he and his aides have labeled as “seditious” — an offense Trump said on his social media account was “punishable by death.” Slotkin and the other Democratic lawmakers who participated in the video said in November that the FBI has contacted them to begin scheduling interviews. Pirro’s involvement represents an elevation of the matter for Slotkin.

It is not clear what laws could have been violated in the video message. In it, the lawmakers, all of whom have military and national security experience, tell troops to follow established military protocols by not following commands that defy the law.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has censured Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former Navy pilot and astronaut, for participating. Hegseth is attempting to retroactively demote Kelly from his retired rank of captain. The senator is suing Hegseth to block those proceedings, calling them an unconstitutional act of retribution.

Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania also appeared in the video. It was not clear whether any other participants are being targeted by Pirro’s office or other arms of the Justice Department beyond the FBI questioning.

Slotkin was among the Democrats’ bright spots in the 2024 election, winning an open Senate seat despite Trump carrying Michigan in the presidential election. She delivered the Democratic response to his congressional address in 2025.

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — California announced an investigation into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday, with Gov. Gavin Newsom saying that the social media site owned by the billionaire is a “breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsenual sexually explicit AI deepfakes.”

Grok, the xAI chatbot, includes image-generation features that allow users to morph existing photos into new images. The newly created images are then posted publicly on X.

In some cases, users have created sexually explicit or nonconsensual images based on real people, including altered depictions that appear to show individuals partially or fully undressed. Others have generated images that appear to show minors, prompting criticism that there are not sufficient guardrails to prohibit the creation of child pornography.

The social media site has previously said “we take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary. Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

Newsom called the sexualized images being created on the platform “vile.” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said his office will use “all tools at our disposal to keep Californians safe.”

“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” Bonta said in a statement Wednesday. “This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet. I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further. We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material.”

Newsom signed a pair of bills in 2024 that made it illegal to create, possess or distribute sexually charged images of minors even when they’re created with computers, not cameras. The measures took effect last year.

Assembly Bill 1831, authored by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), expanded the state’s child-porn prohibition to material that “contains a digitally altered or artificial-intelligence-generated depiction [of] what appears to be a person under 18 years of age” engaging in or simulating sexual conduct. Senate Bill 1381, authored by Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), amended state law to more clearly prohibit using AI to create images of real children engaged in sexual conduct, or using children as models for digitally altered or AI-generated child pornography.

WASHINGTON — The State Department said Wednesday it will suspend the processing of immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries whose nationals are deemed likely to require public assistance while living in the United States.

The State Department, led by Secretary Marco Rubio, said it had instructed consular officers to halt immigrant visa applications from the countries affected in accordance with a broader order issued in November that tightened rules around potential immigrants who might become “public charges” in the U.S.

The suspension, which will begin Jan. 21, will not apply to applicants seeking non-immigrant visas, or temporary tourist or business visas.

“The Trump administration is bringing an end to the abuse of America’s immigration system by those who would extract wealth from the American people,” the department said in a statement. “Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassess immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits.”

The statement did not identify which countries would be affected by the pause, but President Donald Trump’s administration has already severely restricted immigrant and non-immigrant visa processing for citizens of dozens of countries, many of them in Africa.

A U.S. official said the list included Russia, Iran and Somalia as well as Afghanistan, Brazil and Egypt, among others. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the list had not been made public yet.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

BEIJING — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Beijing on Wednesday night, beginning a four-day visit designed to repair foundering relations between the two nations as Canada looks to develop ties with countries other than the United States.

It’s the first visit of a Canadian leader to China in nearly a decade. Carney will meet with Premier Li Qiang, his counterpart as head of government, and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“We will double non-U.S. trade over the 10 years. That means we are cognizant of that fact that the global economic environment has fundamentally changed and that Canada must diversify its trading partners,” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said in Beijing after she arrived with Carney for the visit.

China’s state media has been calling on the Canadian government to set a foreign policy path independent of the United States — what it calls “strategic autonomy.”

Canada has long been one of America’s closest allies, geographically and otherwise. But Beijing is hoping that President Donald Trump’s economic aggression — and, now, military action — against other countries will erode that long-standing relationship. Trump has said, among other things, that Canada could become the 51st U.S. state.

Carney has focused on trade, describing the trip to China as part of a move to forge new partnerships around the world to end Canada’s economic reliance on the American market. Trump has hit Canada with tariffs on its exports to the United States and suggested the vast, resource-rich country could become America’s 51st state.

The Chinese government bristled at former President Biden’s efforts to strengthen relations with Europe, Australia, India, Canada and others to confront China. Now it sees an opportunity to try to loosen those ties, though it remains cautious about how far that will go.

The downturn in relations started with the arrest of a Chinese tech executive in late 2018 at American request and was fueled more recently by the government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which decided in 2024 to follow Biden’s lead in imposing a 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles. China has retaliated for both that and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum with its own tariffs on Canadian exports including canola, seafood and pork.

“The conversation has been productive. The negotiations are continuing,” Anand said when asked if she was optimistic about a deal to reduce tariffs on canola. “Prime Minister Carney is here to recalibrate the Canada-China relationship.”

Carney met with Xi in October at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea.

Anthony and Gillies write for the Associated Press. Gillies reported from Toronto.

NUUK, Greenland — President Trump said Wednesday that NATO should help the U.S. acquire Greenland and anything less than having the island in U.S. hands is unacceptable, hours before Vice President JD Vance was to host Danish and Greenlandic officials for talks.

In a post on his social media site, Trump reiterated his argument that the U.S. “needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security.” He added that “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it” and that otherwise Russia or China would — “AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”

“NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote. “Anything less than that is unacceptable.”

Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, is at the center of a geopolitical storm as Trump insists he wants to own it — and residents of its capital, Nuuk, say it isn’t for sale. The White House hasn’t ruled out taking the Arctic island by force.

Vance, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is to meet Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart Vivian Motzfeldt in Washington later Wednesday to discuss Greenland.

Greenland residents want the U.S. to back off

Along the narrow, snow-covered main street in Nuuk, international journalists and camera crews have been stopping passersby every few feet asking them for their thoughts on a crisis which Denmark’s prime minister has warned could potentially trigger the end of NATO.

Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told The Associated Press in Nuuk that she hoped American officials would get the message to “back off.”

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told a news conference in Copenhagen on Tuesday that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.”

Asked later Tuesday about Nielsen’s comments, Trump replied: “I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything about him. But, that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Greenland is strategically important because, as climate change causes the ice to melt, it opens up the possibility of shorter trade routes to Asia. That also could make it easier to extract and transport untapped deposits of critical minerals which are needed for computers and phones.

Denmark has vowed for months to strengthen its military presence there. The Defense Ministry said that, starting Wednesday, the military is deploying “capabilities and units” related to exercises. “In the period ahead, this will result in an increased military presence in and around Greenland, comprising aircraft, vessels and soldiers, including from NATO allies,” it said in a statement.

Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said that the Danish military, “together with a number of Arctic and European allies, will explore in the coming weeks how an increased presence and exercise activity in the Arctic can be implemented in practice.”

Trump said in Wednesday’s post that Greenland is “vital” to the United States’ Golden Dome missile defense program. He also has said he wants the island to expand America’s security and has cited what he says is the threat from Russian and Chinese ships as a reason to control it.

But both experts and Greenlanders question that claim.

“The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market,” heating engineer Lars Vintner said. He said he frequently goes sailing and hunting and has never seen Russian or Chinese ships.

His friend, Hans Nørgaard, agreed, adding “what has come out of the mouth of Donald Trump about all these ships is just fantasy.”

Denmark has said the U.S, which already has a military presence, can boost its bases on Greenland. For that reason, “security is just a cover,” Vintner said, suggesting Trump actually wants to own the island to make money from its untapped natural resources.

Mikaelsen, the student, said Greenlanders benefit from being part of Denmark, which provides free health care, education and payments during study, and “I don’t want the U.S. to take that away from us.”

More diplomatic efforts

Following the White House meeting, Løkke Rasmussen and Motzfeldt, along with Denmark’s ambassador to the U.S., are due to meet with senators from the Arctic Caucus in the U.S. Congress.

A bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers is also heading to Copenhagen later this week to meet Danish and Greenlandic officials.

Last week, Denmark’s major European allies joined Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in issuing a statement declaring that Greenland belongs to its people and that “it is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told RTL radio Wednesday that his country plans to open a consulate in Greenland Feb. 6, following a decision last summer to open the diplomatic outpost.

“Attacking another NATO member would make no sense; it would even be contrary to the interests of the United States. And I’m hearing more and more voices in the United States saying this,” Barrot said. “So this blackmail must obviously stop.”

Burrows writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Catherine Gaschka in Paris contributed to this report.

Before Minneapolis was left to mourn the death of Renee Good, there was George Floyd.

Same town, same sorrow, same questions — what becomes of society when you can’t trust the authorities? What do you do when the people tasked with upholding the law break the rules, lie and even kill?

California is pushing to answer that question, with laws and legislation meant to combat what is increasingly a rogue federal police force that is seemingly acting, too often violently, without restraint. That’s putting it in the most neutral, least inflammatory terms.

“California has a solemn responsibility to lead and to use every lever of power that we have to protect our residents, to fight back against this administration and their violations of the law, and to set an example for other states about what is possible,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).

This month, California became the first state in the nation to ban masks on law enforcement officers with the No Secret Police Act, which Wiener wrote. The federal government quickly tied that new rule up in court, with the first hearing scheduled Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Now, Wiener and others are pushing for more curbs. A measure by state Assemblyman Isaac G. Bryan (D-Los Angeles) would ban our state and local officers from moonlighting for the feds — something they are currently allowed to do, though it is unclear how many take advantage of that loophole.

“Their tactics have been shameful,” Bryan recently said of immigration enforcement. He pointed out that when our local cops mask up and do immigration work after hours, it leads to a serious lack of trust in their day jobs.

Wiener also introduced another measure, the No Kings Act. It would open up a new path for citizens to sue federal agents who violate their constitutional rights, because although local and state authorities can be personally sued, the ability to hold a federal officer accountable in civil court is much narrower right now.

George Retes learned that the hard way. The Iraq war vet was dragged out of his car in Ventura County by federal agents last year. Although he is a U.S. citizen, agents sprayed him with chemicals, knelt on his neck and back despite pleas that he could not breathe, detained him, took his DNA and fingerprints, strip-searched him, denied him any ability to wash off the chemicals, held him for three days without access to help, then released him with no charges and no explanation, he said.

Currently, he has few options for holding those agents accountable.

“I just got to live with the experience that they put me through with no remedy, no resolution, no answer for anything that happened to me, and I get no justice,” Retes said, speaking at a news conference. “Everyone that’s going through this currently gets no justice.”

Weiner told me that the masks and casual aggression are “designed to create an atmosphere of fear and terror, and it is and it’s having that effect,” and that without state pushback, it will only get worse.

“If California can’t stand up to Trump, then who can?” he asked Tuesday.

Good’s wife describes her as being “made of sunshine” and standing up for her immigrant neighbors when she was shot, with her dog in the back seat and her glove box full of stuffed animals for her 6-year-old son. But you wouldn’t know that from the response of federal leaders, who quickly labeled her a “domestic terrorist” and dismissed the killing as self-defense — unworthy of even a robust investigation.

The use of masks and casual aggression is “designed to create an atmosphere of fear and terror, and … it’s having that effect,” says state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), pictured in 2024.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

“Every congressional democrat and every democrat who’s running for president should be asked a simple question: Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media one day after Good was killed.

So much for law enforcement accountability.

While Good’s death is filling headlines, there have been dozens of other instances where immigration officers’ use of force has been questionable. The Trace, an independent news source that covers gun violence, found that since the immigration crackdown began, ICE has opened fire 16 times, held people at gunpoint an additional 15 times, killed four people and injured seven.

One of those deaths was in Northridge, where Keith Porter Jr. was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent a few weeks ago, and his family is rightfully calling for an investigation.

That’s just the gun violence. Lots of other concerning behavior has been documented as well.

A 21-year-old protester was left with a fractured skull and blind in one eye last week in Southern California after an officer from the Department of Homeland Security fired a nonlethal round at close range toward his head. Most officers are taught, and even forbidden by policy, from firing such munitions at people’s heads for precisely this reason — they can be dangerous and even fatal if used incorrectly.

Across California, and the nation, citizens and noncitizens alike have reported being beaten and harassed, having guns pointed at them without provocation and being detained without basic rights for days.

The answer to police overreach in Floyd’s case was a reckoning in law enforcement that it needed to do better to build trust in the communities it was policing. Along with that came a nationwide push, especially in California, for reforms that would move local and state policing closer to that ideal.

The answer five years later in Good’s case — from our president, our vice president, our head of Homeland Security and others — has been to double down on impunity with the false claim that dissent is radical, and likely even a crime. And don’t fool yourself — this is exactly how President Trump sees it, as laid out in his recent executive order that labeled street-level protests as “antifa” and designated that nebulous anti-fascist movement as an organized terrorist group. He’s also set up National Guard units in every state to deal with “civil disturbances.”

So Vance is actually right — under Trump law, which is seemingly being enforced although not truly law, someone like Good could be dubbed a terrorist.

The situation has become so dire that this week six federal prosecutors resigned after the Justice Department pushed not to investigate Good’s shooting, but instead investigate Good herself — a further bid to bolster the egregious terrorist claim.

In the wake of Good’s killing, many of us feel the fear that no one is safe, an increasingly unsubtle pressure to self-censure dissent. Is it worth it to protest? Maybe for our safety and the safety of those we love, we should stay home. We just don’t know what federal authorities will do, what will happen if we speak out.

That’s the thinking that authoritarians seek to instill in the populace as they consolidate power. Just duck and cover, and maybe you won’t be the one to get hurt.

That’s why, successful or not, these new and proposed laws in California are fights the state must have for the safety of our residents, regardless of immigration status, and for the safety of democracy.

Because, truly, if California can’t stand up to Trump, who can?

Tabby Refael’s messages to Iran are going unanswered.

For weeks, she has called, texted and sent voice memos to loved ones in Tehran, where massive crowds have demanded the overthrow of the country’s authoritarian government.

Are you OK? Refael — a West Los Angeles-based writer and Iranian refugee — has texted, over and over. Do you have enough food? Do you have enough water? Are you safe?

No response.

When the protests, initially spurred by economic woes, began in late December, Refael consistently got answers. But those stopped last week, when Iranian authorities imposed a near-total internet blackout, at the same time that calls to telephone landlines were also failing to connect. Videos circulating online show rows and rows of body bags. And human rights groups say the government is waging a deadly crackdown on protesters in Tehran and other cities, with more than 2,000 killed.

A woman shops at Shater Abbass Bakery and Market in Westwood in June 2025 after U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Like many in Southern California’s large Iranian diaspora, Refael, 43, has been glued to her phone, constantly refreshing the news trickling out from Iran, where, she fears, there is “a wholesale massacre occurring in the literal dark.”

“Before the regime completely blacked out the internet, and in many places, electricity, there was an electrifying sense of hope,” said Refael, a prominent voice in Los Angeles’ Persian Jewish community. But now, as the death toll rises, “that hope has been devastatingly tempered with a sense of visceral dread.”

Refael’s family fled Iran when she was 7 because of religious persecution. Born a few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, she was raised in an era when hijabs were mandatory and people had to adhere, she said, to the “anti-American and antisemitic policies of the state.”

Refael has never been able to return. Like other Iranian Americans, she said she feels “a sense of guilt” being physically far from the crisis in her homeland — watching with bountiful internet and electricity, living among Americans who pay little attention to what is happening on the streets of Iran.

The demonstrations, which began Dec. 28, were sparked by a catastrophic crash of Iran’s currency, the rial. They have since spread to all of the country’s 31 provinces, with protesters challenging the rule of 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

People pass by the damaged Tax Affairs building on Jan. 10, 2026, in Tehran. Some parts of the capital have sustained heavy damage during ongoing protests.

(Getty Images)

In a post on his social media website on Tuesday morning, President Trump wrote that he had canceled planned meetings with Iranian officials, who he previously said were willing to negotiate with Washington.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote. “Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

Trump has repeatedly vowed to strike Iran’s leadership if it kills demonstrators. On Monday, he announced that countries doing business with Iran will face 25% tariffs from the U.S., “effective immediately.”

This frame grab from video taken between Jan. 9 and Jan. 11, 2026, and circulating on social media purportedly shows images from a morgue with dozens of bodies and mourners on the outskirts of Iran’s capital, in Kahrizak.

(Associated Press)

In the U.S., few, if any, places have been following the crisis as closely as Southern California, home to the largest population of Iranians outside Iran. An estimated 141,000 Iranian Americans live in L.A. County, according to the Iranian Diaspora Dashboard, which is hosted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

In Westwood — the epicenter of the community, where the eponymous boulevard is lined by storefronts covered in Persian script — the widespread opposition to Iran’s hard-line theocracy is hard to miss.

This week, the window display of one clothing store featured ballcaps that read, “MIGA / Make Iran Great Again” alongside a lion and sun, emblems of the country’s flag before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. At a nearby ice cream shop, a hand-painted sign behind the cash register read: “Stop oppressing our people in the name of Islam.” In the window of a bookstore across the street, a sign demanded “Regime change in Iran.”

On Sunday, thousands of people were marching through Westwood in solidarity with the anti-government protesters in Iran when, to their horror, a man plowed into the crowd in a U-Haul truck bearing a sign that read: “No Shah. No Regime. USA: Don’t Repeat 1953. No Mullah.” The signage appeared to be in reference to a U.S.-backed 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s prime minister, cemented the power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and lighted the fuse for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

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Police on Monday announced that the driver, Calor Madanescht, 48, was arrested on suspicion of reckless driving. He was released Monday afternoon, according to L.A. County sheriff’s inmate records.

Video shared with The Times by attendees showed protesters trying to pull him from the vehicle and continuing to punch and lash out at him as police took him into custody.

In a statement posted to X on Sunday, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli said the FBI was “working with LAPD to determine the motive of the driver” and that “this is an active investigation.”

During a Los Angeles Police Commission meeting Tuesday, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said he does not expect federal charges and that there is no apparent “nexus to terrorism.”

In Westwood this week, the mood was tense after the U-Haul incident, which, police said, caused no serious injuries. Few store owners wanted to talk as journalists went from shop to shop. Although many Iranian immigrants hope the theocratic regime in Iran will be toppled, they fear for loved ones left behind, and said they preferred to not be in the public eye.

Among those willing to speak was Roozbeh Farahanipour, chief executive of the West L.A. Chamber of Commerce and owner of three Westwood Boulevard eateries.

Roozbeh Farahanipour and his young son wave the pre-1979 Islamic Revolution flag of Iran outside his restaurant Delphi Greek in Westwood, in this June 2025 image.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

At his Mary & Robb’s Westwood Cafe — where the walls are adorned with decorative plates featuring American movie icons such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe — he conducted interviews all morning about the Sunday protest in Westwood, where he was in the crowd, just feet from the path of the U-Haul.

Farahanipour said Iranian Americans have mixed opinions about what should come next in Iran — including whether Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince and son of the late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, should have a leading role.

“At the moment, I believe everybody needs to focus on overthrowing this regime. That’s why I participated. Many other people with different backgrounds participated,” he said, adding that he is “not a monarchist” but that “the opposition is unified against the regime.”

Farahanipour was 7 when the Islamic Revolution took place. He remembers riding with his mom to school, listening to a radio reading of “people who were executed by the regime.” One day, his mom’s cousin’s name was read over the airwaves.

Although his family was not Catholic, Farahanipour, 54, attended a Catholic school. He has fond memories of soccer games between the children and priests, who played in their long religious garments. After the revolution, he said, the government attacked the school and executed the principal.

Before seeking asylum in the U.S., Farahanipour was jailed and beaten in Iran for his role as a leader of the 1999 student protests against the government. He has been repeatedly threatened, including with death, by the government over the years, he said.

In 2022, his Persian Gulf Cafe in Westwood was vandalized, its glass front door shattered, after he shared images on Instagram of a memorial at the cafe honoring Iranian women in anti-government protests that year. He said he was unfazed.

Now a U.S. citizen, “officially retired from my role as Iranian opposition,” he said he dreams of returning to Iran for a trial against Khamenei and helping to “ask for the maximum sentence for him.”

Sam Yebri — a 44-year-old Iranian Jewish refugee whose family fled the country when he was 1 — said he has spent the last two weeks constantly getting social media updates about what’s happening in Iran and reaching out to elected officials, pleading with them to speak up for protesters.

Yebri, an attorney and former L.A. City Council candidate, grew up in Westwood. He is a longtime Democrat and said it has been “so maddening to see so many friends and activists who don’t shy away from discussing other issues just absolutely silent and absent in this fight.” He said he views it as “the biggest moment in world history since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

“The regime must go,” he said, adding that he hopes Trump will “do whatever is prudent to enable the Iranian people to overthrow the brutal mullahs who have their boots on their throats.”

Yebri said he has not returned to Iran since his family fled while he was an infant. He hopes to do so someday, to visit the beautiful places his parents describe — where they honeymooned on the beaches of southern Iran and skied on its snowy mountains.

Alex Mohajer, the 40-year-old vice president of the Iranian American Democrats of California, was born in Orange County, where he was raised by a single mom who emigrated from Iran. He visited family there when he was 14 and “felt a great deal of pride” in seeing that “Western depictions of the country are far afield from reality, that it’s a very warm and loving country where the people are very hospitable and it’s very clear that they’ve lived under oppressive rule.”

Mohajer, who was unsuccessful in a 2024 bid for the California State Senate, wants a future in which he can travel back and forth freely to visit loved ones in Iran. But more immediately, he just wants to know they’re OK. His text messages are also going unanswered.

Times staff writer Libor Jany contributed to this report.

President Trump seemed angry after the Senate voted last Thursday to pass a war powers resolution to the next stage, where lawmakers could approve the measure and seek to curb the president’s ability to wage war in Venezuela without congressional authorization.

Trump said that day that five Republican senators who supported bringing the measure to a vote — Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Todd Young (Ind.) — “should never be elected to office again.”

Why should he get so riled up about this, to the point where he could put his own party’s control of the Senate at risk in November? Even if this resolution were to pass both houses of Congress, he could veto it and ultimately be unrestrained. He did this in 2019, when a war powers resolution mandating that the U.S. military cease its participation in the war in Yemen was passed in both the Senate and the House. Many people think that such legislation therefore can’t make a difference.

But the president’s ire is telling. These political moves on the Hill can get results even before the resolution has a final vote, or if it is vetoed by the president.

The Trump administration made significant concessions before the 2019 resolution was approved by Congress, in an attempt to prevent it from passing. For instance, months before it was approved, the U.S. military stopped refueling Saudi warplanes in midair. These concessions de-escalated the war and saved tens of thousands of lives.

A war powers resolution is an act of Congress that is based on a 1973 law of the same name. That law spells out and reinforces the power that our Constitution has allocated to Congress, to decide when the U.S. military can be involved in hostilities.

The U.S. military raid in Caracas that seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, is illegal according to international law, the charters of the Organization of American States and the United Nations, as well as other treaties to which the United States is a signatory. According to our own Constitution, the government violates U.S. law when it violates treaties that our government has signed.

None of that restrained the Trump administration, which has not demonstrated much respect for the rule of law. But the White House does care about the political power of Congress. If there is an expanded war in Venezuela or anywhere else that Trump has threatened to use the military, the fact that Congress took steps to oppose it will increase the political cost to the president.

This is likely one of the main reasons that the Trump administration has at least promised to make concessions regarding military action in Latin America — and who knows, possibly he did make some compromises compared with what had been planned.

On Nov. 5, the day before the Senate was to vote on a war powers resolution to halt and prevent hostilities within or against Venezuela by U.S. armed forces, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House counsel had a private briefing with senators.

They assured lawmakers that they were not going to have a land war or airstrikes in Venezuela. According to news reports, the White House counsel stated that they did not have a legal justification for such a war. It is clear that blocking the resolution was very important to these top officials. The day after that meeting, the war powers resolution was blocked by two votes. Two Republicans had joined the Democrats and independents in support of the resolution: Murkowski and Paul. That added up to 49 votes — not quite the needed majority.

But on Thursday, there were three additional Republicans who voted for the new resolution, so it will proceed to a final vote.

The war powers resolution is not just a political fight, but a matter of life and death. The blockade involved in the seizure of oil tankers is, according to experts, an unlawful use of military force. This means that the blockade would be included as a participation in hostilities that would require authorization from Congress.

Since 2015, the United States has imposed unilateral economic sanctions that destroyed Venezuela’s economy. From 2012 to 2020, Venezuela suffered the worst peacetime depression in world history. Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP, or income, fell by 74%. Think of the economic destruction of the U.S. Great Depression, multiplied by three times. Most of this was the result of the sanctions.

This unprecedented devastation is generally attributed to Maduro in public discussion. But U.S. sanctions deliberately cut Venezuela off from international finance, as well as blocking most of its oil sales, which accounted for more than 90% of foreign exchange (mostly dollar) earnings. This devastated the economy.

In the first year of Trump sanctions from 2017-18, Venezuela’s deaths increased by tens of thousands of people, at a time when oil prices were increasing. Sanctions were expanded even more the following year. About a quarter of the population, more than 7 million people, emigrated after 2015 — 750,000 of them to the United States.

We know that the deadly impact of sanctions that target the civilian population is real. Research published in July by the Lancet Global Health, by my colleagues Francisco Rodriguez, Silvio Rendon and myself, estimated the global death toll from unilateral economic sanctions, as these are, at 564,000 per year over the past decade. This is comparable to the worldwide deaths from armed conflict. A majority of the victims over the 1970-2021 period were children.

The Trump administration has, in the last few days, been moving in the direction of lifting some sanctions to allow for oil exports, according to the president’s stated plan to “run Venezuela.” This is ironic because Venezuela has for many years wanted more investment and trade, including in oil, with the United States, and it was U.S. sanctions that prohibited it.

Such lifting of sanctions would be a big step forward, in terms of saving lives of people who are deprived of food, medicine and other necessities in Venezuela, as a result of these sanctions and the economic destruction that they cause.

But to create the stability that Venezuela needs to recover, we will have to take the military and economic violence out of this campaign. There are members of Congress moving toward that goal, and they need all the help that they can get, before it’s too late.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy.”

At 94, John Rodriguez has the dubious distinction of being the oldest inmate in the California prison system.

He looks the part, with his snow-white hair and unsteady gait. But given the crime that put him in prison, he’s hardly a sympathetic character.

Rodriguez murdered his wife during a drunken rage on a December day in 1981. He claimed she’d been cheating on him. For that, he stabbed her 26 times with a paring knife. His punishment was a sentence of 16 years to life, and he’s spent most of it at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.

He’s been recommended for parole six times, all of which have been rejected by the last three governors, who characterized him as a threat to society.

Rodriguez isn’t alone in his inability to get parole. Since 1988, when California voters gave the governor the power to overrule parole board recommendations for “lifers,” the number from that category who have been freed has slowed to a trickle.

Gov. Gray Davis released only six lifers during his five-year tenure. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s numbers are higher but dropping steadily. In 2004, he released 72 lifers, but only 23 last year.

In today’s era of stiffer sentences, California politicians are less likely to let convicted murderers go free. But pressure to release the elderly and infirm is increasing, given the state’s overflowing prisons. In Sacramento recently, demonstrators urged lawmakers to start thinning the inmate population by releasing geriatric and incapacitated prisoners such as Rodriguez.

Don Specter, whose nonprofit Prison Law Office offers free legal services to California prisoners, said the Rodriguez case “shows how irrational the parole process is.”

“The law says you should pay a price for this kind of crime, but not your whole life,” he said. “The question becomes, what does the state gain by keeping this man in prison?”

Rodriguez uses a walker and is hard of hearing. He has arthritis and is often forgetful. He’s taken some hard falls over the years, breaking his arms and severely bruising himself. He’s lived in the prison hospital for two years, sleeping in a dormitory setting rather than a cell.

He’s become a fixture around the low-security hospital, where his normal daytime attire is pajama bottoms and a blue prison shirt. Part of his routine is a Sunday visit to the Indian sweat lodge on the prison grounds. And he is a regular at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, an important facet of his life if he ever wants to be released.

For the moment, though, his chances don’t look good.

His latest parole hearing is set for June, a few weeks after he turns 95. But Schwarzenegger has already turned him down once, saying that the “gravity alone of the murder” is enough to conclude that Rodriguez would pose an “unreasonable public safety risk.”

Rodriguez’s lawyer, Michael Beckman, contends that a crime that took place more than a quarter-century ago does not equate to the feeble man in prison today. Since he was sentenced, Rodriguez’s most flagrant violations involved phone privileges. Larry Vizard, a prison spokesman, said Rodriguez’s last infraction of any kind was in 1992.

Besides his clean prison record, Beckman also points to the Bronze Star that Rodriguez won during World War II and the fact that he has a family willing to take him in.

The office of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) has taken an interest in the case because of Rodriguez’s veteran’s status.

There is no organized opposition to his release except from the Monterey Park Police Department, which investigated the murder of his wife, Alicia Trejo.

“The victim is not here, and we’re still the advocate of the victim,” said Capt. James Smith, a department spokesman.

Rodriguez says he has remorse over the murder, that he was insane with jealousy because his much younger wife had taken up with a man closer to her age.

“I just want to get out and be left alone,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened and I shouldn’t have done it.”

He’s been saying that for a long time. The reasons the governors have given for denying parole focus largely on the heinous nature of the crime and concern that Rodriguez would hurt someone else if freed. According to parole hearing documents, much of that centers on the possibility that he will get drunk and go on a tear.

Beckman said Rodriguez has done 10 years more than his minimum sentence for second-degree murder, has never been a disciplinary problem and should be released.

As far back as 2002, Tom Bordonaro, then the parole board’s presiding commissioner, said that if anyone was eligible for release, it was Rodriguez. “He’s clearly done his time,” Bordonaro said after the hearing. “He’s clearly beyond his matrix.”

Words to that effect have been spoken five other times, and Rodriguez responded with gratitude — only to be told later that the parole had been reversed.

The story of John Rodriguez is set against the backdrop of a prison system in which the population is getting dramatically older, facilities are overcrowded and the mechanism to parole inmates is weighted down by bureaucracy and antiquated procedures — so much so that California is under federal court order to speed up the process to resolve the backlog.

The problem facing the prison system was perhaps summed up best — if inadvertently — by Lawrence Morrison, an L.A. County deputy district attorney, in his argument last year against Rodriguez’s release: “This is a difficult case of the type of which the board and governors and prosecutors are going to be facing with an increasing aging population,” he said. “Looking at the inmate right now sitting in a wheelchair, he looks like everybody’s grandparents.”

More and more will be looking like Rodriguez in the coming years. One recent projection is that by 2030, California will have 33,000 geriatric prisoners, compared with about 9,500 now. The increases are attributable to longer sentences, mandatory minimum-sentencing laws and tighter parole policies.

According to one study, the average cost of housing a geriatric prisoner — defined as 55 or older — is about $70,000, two to three times the cost for a younger inmate. The bill climbs even higher for those with serious physical and mental disabilities.

No one, including Rodriguez, tries to downplay the murder that sent him to prison.

As Rodriguez recounted to police, he began drinking early that morning in 1981 and, by about 5 p.m., had consumed an estimated 18 beers.

He then went to Trejo’s home and struck her when she opened the door. He began stabbing her with a paring knife, chasing her from room to room as she tried to escape. After he killed her, Rodriguez walked to his own home, where he was waiting when police arrived to arrest him. He was 68 at the time.

When his parole was rejected last year, Linda Shelton, the presiding parole board commissioner, said she wanted to help him avoid having a board decision again reversed by the governor. She suggested that he become a regular at AA meetings.

“You don’t have to talk in there,” she said. “You just have to go to meetings and listen and you might be able to help other people too.”

He does attend meetings, but Beckman contends his client wouldn’t present a problem even if he did drink: “If he drank a beer, it would probably put him to sleep.”

Beckman also said the aging inmate has been offered a place to stay on the outside.

It comes from Dolores and Antonieta PonceDeLeon of Los Angeles. Dolores said her husband, Fernando, met Rodriguez in prison, liked him and wanted the family to offer him a place to stay when he was released.

Fernando PonceDeLeon died of a heart attack 10 years ago, after his own release from prison. But mother and daughter feel duty-bound to offer Rodriguez a place to stay as a way of honoring Fernando’s wishes.

They have sent letters to the board guaranteeing a room for Rodriguez. They sent another one in mid-March when they thought the parole hearing was days away. It was later moved to June.

“He’s getting so discouraged each time he doesn’t get out,” Antonieta PonceDeLeon said. “I think he’s got a few years left where he could have a good life.”

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michael.kennedy@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A long criminal history

John Rodriguez was born in Mexico and spent most of his life in Louisiana, Texas and California. His criminal history includes several drunk driving offenses and a conviction for dealing heroin.

His first brush with the law occurred in 1929, when he was stopped in Dallas on a traffic violation. After serving in the European theater in World War II, Rodriguez returned to California, where he was arrested in 1951 — at age 38 — on suspicion of robbery.

In 1957, he was arrested in the first of 10 drunk driving offenses. And in 1961, he was convicted of conspiring to possess and sell narcotics and of possessing heroin. He was sentenced to five years to life and was paroled in 1969.

Rodriguez was married four times and fathered nine children. As far as prison and parole officials know, he has little, if any, contact with his children, the oldest of whom is 72.

During his working life, Rodriguez was a cook, an interpreter and a delivery driver. He now spends much of his day lying in a prison hospital bed, though he takes pride in the fact that he still has some vigor left.

“I don’t look like I’m old,” he said. “There’s a 70-year-old man here who looks older than me.”

Source: Times reporting

SACRAMENTO — A week after a Minnesota woman was fatally shot by a federal immigration officer, California legislators moved forward a bill that would make it easier for people to sue federal agents if they believe their constitutional rights were violated.

A Senate committee passed Senate Bill 747 by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), which would provide Californians with a stronger ability to take legal action against federal law enforcement agents over excessive use of force, unlawful home searches, interfering with a right to protest and other violations.

California law already allows such suits against state and local law enforcement officials.

Successful civil suits against federal officers over constitutional rights are less common.

Wiener, appearing before Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, said his bill has taken on new urgency in the wake of the death of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota, the 37-year-old mother of three who was shot while driving on a snowy Minneapolis street.

Good was shot by an agent in self-defense, said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who alleged that Good tried to use her car as a weapon to run over the immigration officer.

Good’s death outraged Democratic leaders across the country, who accuse federal officers of flouting laws in their efforts to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants. In New York, legislators are proposing legislation similar to the one proposed by Wiener that would allow state-level civil actions against federal officers.

George Retes Jr., a U.S. citizen and Army veteran who was kept in federal custody for three days in July, described his ordeal at Tuesday’s committee hearing, and how immigration officers swarmed him during a raid in Camarillo.

Retes, a contracted security guard at the farm that was raided, said he was brought to Port Hueneme Naval Base. Officials swabbed his cheek to obtain DNA, and then moved him to Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. He was not allowed to make a phone call or see an attorney, he said.

“I did not resist, I did not impede or assault any agent,” Retes said.”What happened to me that day was not a misunderstanding. It was a violation of the Constitution by the very people sworn to uphold it.”

He also accused Department of Homeland security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin of spreading false information about him to justify his detention. DHS said in a statement last year that Retes impeded their operation, which he denies.

Retes has filed a tort claim against the U.S. government, a process that is rarely successful, said his attorney, Anya Bidwell.

Lawsuits can also be brought through the Bivens doctrine, which refers to the 1971 Supreme Court ruling Bivens vs. Six Unknown Federal Agents that established that federal officials can be sued for monetary damages for constitutional violations. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly restricted the ability to sue under Bivens.

Wiener’s bill, if passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would be retroactive to March 2025.

“We’ve had enough of this terror campaign in our communities by ICE,” said Wiener at a news conference before the hearing. “We need the rule of law and we need accountability.”

Weiner is running for the congressional seat held by former House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

Representatives for law enforcement agencies appeared at Tuesday’s hearing to ask for amendments to ensure that the bill wouldn’t lead to weakened protections for state and local officials.

“We’re not opposed to the intent of the bill. We’re just concerned about the future and the unintended consequences for your California employees,” said David Mastagni, speaking on behalf of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, which represents more than 85,000 public safety members.

Wiener’s bill is the latest effort by the state Legislature to challenge President Trump’s immigration raids. Newsom last year signed legislation authored by Wiener that prohibits law enforcement officials, including federal immigration agents, from wearing masks, with some exceptions.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued last year to block the law, and a hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday.

After escalating incidents of violence involving federal agents taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, officials are looking to create “ICE-free” zones in L.A. County.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to bar immigration enforcement officers from county-owned spaces.

Lindsay Horvath, the District 3 supervisor, announced the motion to establish county property as “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-free” zones, prohibiting agents from staging, processing or operating in those areas.

“Los Angeles County will not allow its property to be used as a staging ground for violence caused by the Trump administration,” Horvath said at the Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting.

The motion instructs county counsel to draft an ordinance for board consideration within 30 days.

The Times reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

Since June 6, 2025, when immigration enforcement officials descended on the region — raiding four businesses including a fast-fashion warehouse in downtown Los Angeles and detaining dozens — to the first month of 2026, Horvath said, “federal immigration enforcement has too often escalated into extreme violence.”

“Our federal government is freely, without cause, murdering its own citizens in broad daylight,” she said, “in front of witnesses and cameras.”

The action comes after multiple incidents of violence in California as well as last week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota of 37-year-old Renee Good by a federal immigration agent, which spurred outcry across the country. Good, a mother of three, has been portrayed by government officials as a domestic terrorist who tried to run down an agent with her vehicle. State and local officials in Minneapolis have rejected those claims.

On Friday in Southern California, a 21-year-old protester underwent six hours of surgery after a Department of Homeland Security agent fired a nonlethal round at close range at him during a protest. The protester is shown in video, his face covered in blood, being dragged by the neck by an agent. He suffered a fractured skull around his eyes and nose and permanently lost the vision in his left eye, according to family.

An off-duty ICE agent fatally shot Keith Porter Jr. at a Northridge apartment complex on New Year’s Eve. The officer suspected that Porter was an “active shooter,” according to the DHS. Porter was firing an assault-style rifle in what family members said was an act of celebration on New Year’s Eve.

“I think it’s really important for our communities to understand what we’re saying is, you don’t have the right to come in and harass people without a federal warrant,” said Hilda Solis, District 1 supervisor and co-author with Horvath of the motion. “If [federal agents] use our property to stage, then you need to show us documentation, a federal warrant, to back that up.”

Solis said she hoped city councils and other jurisdictions would be motivated to adopt their own ordinance to create “ICE-free” zones.

Prior to President Trump taking office in 2025, ICE agents were prohibited from conducting arrests and other enforcement activity in sensitive locations, including places of worship, schools and hospitals.

A DHS directive from Jan. 20, 2025, superseded that practice, saying that officers taking enforcement action in a sensitive location should use “discretion along with a healthy dose of common sense.”

Bay Area officials are also considering the adoption of “ICE-free” zones. Alameda County officials introduced a proposal for these designated zones in November; on Thursday, officials will incorporate feedback from the county’s sheriff, district attorney, probation department, and public defender, The Oaklandside reported.

The first “ICE-free” zone ordinance was established by Chicago in October barring immigration enforcement agents from property owned or controlled by the city.

As the state continues multiyear marathon discussions on rules for what residents in wildfire hazard zones must do to make the first five feet from their houses — an area dubbed “Zone Zero” — ember-resistant, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to start creating its own version of the regulations that is more lenient than most proposals currently favored in Sacramento.

Critics of Zone Zero, who are worried about the financial burden and labor required to comply as well as the detrimental impacts to urban ecosystems, have been particularly vocal in Los Angeles. However, wildfire safety advocates worry the measures endorsed by L.A.’s City Council will do little to prevent homes from burning.

“My motion is to get advice from local experts, from the Fire Department, to actually put something in place that makes sense, that’s rooted in science,” said City Councilmember John Lee, who put forth the motion. “Sacramento, unfortunately, doesn’t consult with the largest city in the state — the largest area that deals with wildfires — and so, this is our way of sending a message.”

Tony Andersen — executive officer of the state’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which is in charge of creating the regulations — has repeatedly stressed the board’s commitment to incorporating L.A.’s feedback. Over the last year, the board hosted a contentious public meeting in Pasadena, walking tours with L.A. residents and numerous virtual workshops and hearings.

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Some L.A. residents are championing a proposed fire-safety rule, referred to as “Zone Zero,” requiring the clearance of flammable material within the first five feet of homes. Others are skeptical of its value.

With the state long past its original Jan. 1, 2023, deadline to complete the regulations, several cities around the state have taken the matter into their own hands and adopted regulations ahead of the state, including Berkeley and San Diego.

“With the lack of guidance from the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, the City is left in a precarious position as it strives to protect residents, property, and the landscape that creates the City of Los Angeles,” the L.A. City Council motion states.

However, unlike San Diego and Berkeley, whose regulations more or less match the strictest options the state Board of Forestry is considering, Los Angeles is pushing for a more lenient approach.

The statewide regulations, once adopted, are expected to override any local versions that are significantly more lenient.

The Zone Zero regulations apply only to rural areas where the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection responds to fires and urban areas that Cal Fire has determined have “very high” fire hazard. In L.A., that includes significant portions of Silver Lake, Echo Park, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.

Fire experts and L.A. residents are generally fine with many of the measures within the state’s Zone Zero draft regulations, such as the requirement that there be no wooden or combustible fences or outbuildings within the first five feet of a home. Then there are some measures already required under previous wildfire regulations — such as removing dead vegetation like twigs and leaves, from the ground, roof and gutters — that are not under debate.

However, other new measures introduced by the state have generated controversy, especially in Los Angeles. The disputes have mainly centered around what to do about trees and other living vegetation, like shrubs and grass.

The state is considering two options for trees: One would require residents to trim branches within five feet of a house’s walls and roof; the other does not. Both require keeping trees well-maintained and at least 10 feet from chimneys.

On vegetation, the state is considering options for Zone Zero ranging from banning virtually all vegetation beyond small potted plants to just maintaining the regulations already on the books, which allow nearly all healthy vegetation.

Lee’s motion instructs the Los Angeles Fire Department to create regulations in line with the most lenient options that allow healthy vegetation and do not require the removal of tree limbs within five feet of a house. It is unclear whether LAFD will complete the process before the Board of Forestry considers finalized statewide regulations, which it expects to do midyear.

The motion follows a pointed report from LAFD and the city’s Community Forest Advisory Committee that argued the Board of Forestry’s draft regulations stepped beyond the intentions of the 2020 law creating Zone Zero, would undermine the city’s biodiversity goals and could result in the loss of up to 18% of the urban tree canopy in some neighborhoods.

The board has not decided which approach it will adopt statewide, but fire safety advocates worry that the lenient options championed by L.A. do little to protect vulnerable homes from wildfire.

Recent studies into fire mechanics have generally found that the intense heat from wildfire can quickly dry out these plants, making them susceptible to ignition from embers, flames and radiant heat. And anything next to a house that can burn risks taking the house with it.

Another recent study that looked at five major wildfires in California from the last decade, not including the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, found that 20% of homes with significant vegetation in Zone Zero survived, compared to 37% of homes that had cleared the vegetation.