SACRAMENTO — Atty. General Rob Bonta said Monday that he anticipates the Trump administration, which last week announced plans to use federal election monitors in California, will use false reports of voting irregularities to challenge the results of the Nov. 4 special election.
Bonta, California’s top law enforcement officer, said on a call with reporters that he is “100%” concerned about false accusations of wrongdoing at the polling places.
Bonta said it would be “naive” to assume Trump would accept the results of the Nov. 4 election given his history of lying about election outcomes, including his loss to President Biden in 2020.
The attorney general also warned that Trump’s tactics may be a preview of what the country might see in the 2026 election, when control of the U.S. House of Representatives — and the fate of Trump’s controversial political agenda — will be at stake.
“All indications, all arrows, show that this is a tee-up for something more dangerous in the 2026, midterms and maybe beyond,” Bonta said.
The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced it would send election monitors to five California counties where voters are casting ballots in the Proposition 50 election to decide whether to redraw state’s congressional boundaries.
Federal election monitors will visit sites across Southern California and in the Central Valley, in Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, the Justice Department said last week.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the move an “intimidation tactic” aimed at suppressing support for Proposition 50 and inappropriate federal interference in a state election.
While federal monitoring is routine, particularly in federal elections, it recently has been viewed with heightened skepticism from both parties. When the Justice Department under President Biden announced monitoring in 86 jurisdictions across 27 states during last November’s presidential election, some Republican-led states balked and sought to block the effort.
Democrats have been highly suspect of the Trump administration’s plans for monitoring elections, in part because of Trump’s relentless denial of past election losses — including his own to Biden in 2020 — and his appointment of fellow election deniers to high-ranking positions in his administration, including in the Justice Department.
The California Republican Party requested the election monitors and cited several concerns about voting patterns and issues in several counties, according to a letter it sent to the Dept. of Justice.
Bonta, in his remarks Monday questioned the GOP claims, and denied the existence of any widespread fraud that would require federal election monitors. He compared the monitors to Trump’s decision to dispatch the National Guard to Democratic-led cities, despite an outcry from local politicians who said the troops were not necessary.
More broadly, Bonta told reporters that the Trump administration appears to be ready to fight the Nov. 4 results if Prop. 50 passes.
“People vote and you accept the will of the voters — that’s what democracy is. But that’s not what they’re teeing themselves up to do based on everything that we’ve seen, everything that’s been said,” said Bonta, describing Trump’s recent call on social media for Republicans to “wake up.”
Bonta also said that the state would dispatch observers — potentially from his office, the secretary of state and county registrars — to watch the federal monitors at polling places.
Early voting has already started in California, with voters deciding whether to temporarily reconfigure the state’s congressional district boundaries. The Democratic-led California Legislature placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot in an effort to increase their party’s numbers in the U.S. House of Representatives .
Gov. Gavin Newsom and other backers of the measure have said they generally support independent redistricting processes and will push for nonpartisan commissions nationwide, but argued that Democrats must fight back against Trump’s current efforts to have Republican states reconfigure their congressional districts to ensure the GOP retains control of Congress after the 2026 election.
Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the U.S. Dept. of Justice, declined to comment on Bonta’s remarks. Baldassarre also declined to say how many election monitors would work in California.
Federal election monitors observe polling places to ensure compliance with the federal voting rights laws, and are trained to observe and act as “flies on the wall,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan and nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, in an interview last week.
“Generally, what you do is walk inside, stay off to the side, well away from where any voters are, and take some notes,” said Becker, an attorney who formerly worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
A judge temporarily blocked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s attempt to take over Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls on Friday, finding that despite evidence of a “systemic failure” to improve poor conditions, Bonta had not met the legal grounds necessary to strip away local control.
After years of scandals — including frequent drug overdoses and incidents of staff violence against youths — Bonta filed a motion in July to place the county’s juvenile halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed monitor would manage the facilities, set their budgets and oversee the hiring and firing of staff. An ongoing staffing crisis previously led a state oversight body to deem two of L.A. County’s halls unfit to house children.
L.A. County entered into a settlement with the California Department of Justice in 2021 to mandate improvements, but oversight bodies and a Times investigation earlier this year found the Probation Department was falling far short of fixing many issues, as required by the agreement.
On Friday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Hernandez chastised Bonta for failing to clearly lay out tasks for the Probation Department to abide by in the 2021 settlement. Hernandez said the attorney general’s office’s filings failed to show that a state takeover would lead to “a transformation of the juvenile halls.”
The steps the Probation Department needs to take to meet the terms of the settlement have been articulated in court filings and reports published by the L.A. County Office of the Inspector General for several years. Hernandez was only assigned to oversee the settlement in recent months and spent much of Friday’s hearing complaining about a lack of “clarity” in the case.
Hernandez wrote that Bonta’s motion had set off alarm bells about the Probation Department’s management of the halls.
“Going forward, the court expects all parties to have an ‘all-hands’ mentality,” the judge wrote in a tentative ruling earlier this week, which he adopted Friday morning.
Hernandez said he would not rule out the possibility of a receivership in the future, but wanted more direct testimony from parties, including Probation Department Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa and the court-appointed monitor over the settlement, Michael Dempsey. A hearing was set for Oct. 24.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The Department remains fully committed to making the necessary changes to bring our juvenile institutions to where they need to be,” Vicky Waters, the Probation Department’s chief spokesperson, said in a statement. “However, to achieve that goal, we must have both the authority and support to remove barriers that hinder progress rather than perpetuate no-win situations.”
The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper educational and therapeutic programming and detaining youths in solitary confinement for far too long.
Bonta said in July that the county has failed to improve “75%” of what they were mandated to change in the 2021 settlement.
A 2022 Times investigation revealed a massive staffing shortage was leading to significant injuries for both youths and probation officers. By May of 2023, the California Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar shuttered due to unsafe conditions. That same month, an 18-year-old died of an overdose while in custody.
The county soon reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, but the facility quickly became the site of a riot, an escape attempt and more drug overdoses. Last year, the California attorney general’s office won indictments against 30 officers who either orchestrated or allowed youths to engage in “gladiator fights.” That investigation was sparked by video of officers allowing eight youths to pummel another teen inside Los Padrinos, which has also been deemed unfit to house youths by a state commission.
In court Friday, Laura Fair, an attorney from the attorney general’s office, said that while she understood Hernandez’s position, she expressed concern that teens are still in danger while in the Probation Department’s custody.
“The youth in the halls continue to be in grave danger and continue to suffer irreparable harm every day,” she said.
She declined to comment further outside the courtroom. Waters, the Probation Department’s spokesperson, said she was unaware of the situation Fair was describing but would look into it.
Despite the litany of fiascoes over the last few years, probation leaders still argued in court filings that Bonta had gone too far.
“The County remains open to exploring any path that will lead to better outcomes. But it strongly opposes the DOJ’s ill-conceived proposal, which will only harm the youth in the County’s care by sowing chaos and inconsistency,” county lawyers wrote in an opposition motion submitted last month. “The DOJ’s request is almost literally without precedent. No state judge in California history has ever placed a correctional institution into receivership.”
Under the leadership of Viera Rosa, who took office in 2023, the Probation Department has made improvements to its efforts to keep drugs out of the hall, rectify staffing issues and hold its own officers accountable for misconduct, the county argued.
The department has placed “airport-grade” body scanners and drug-sniffing dogs at the entrances to both Nidorf and Los Padrinos in order to stymie the influx of narcotics into the halls, according to Robert Dugdale, an attorney representing the county.
Dugdale also touted the department’s hiring of Robert Arcos, a former high-ranking member of the Los Angeles Police Department and L.A. County district attorney’s office, to oversee security in the facilities.
The motion claimed it was the Probation Department that first uncovered the evidence that led to the gladiator fight prosecutions. Bonta said in March that his office launched its investigation after it reviewed leaked footage of one of the incidents.
No, a federal judge ruled, Trump cannot command the California National Guard to invade Portland, Ore. At the request of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and others, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut broadened a temporary restraining order that had blocked Oregon’s National Guard from being used by the federal government. It now includes not just California’s troops but troops from any state. At least for the next two weeks.
It’s the kind of legal loss Trump should be used to it by now, especially when it comes to the Golden State. Since Trump 2.0 hit the White House this year with Project 2025 folded up in his back pocket, the state of California has sued the administration 42 times, literally about once a week.
While many of those cases are still pending, California is racking up a series of wins that restored more than $160 billion in funding and at least slowed down (and in some cases stopped) the steamrolling of civil rights on issues including birthright citizenship and immigration policy.
“We have won in 80% of the cases,” Bonta told me. “Whether it be a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, and more and more now permanent final injunctions after the whole trial court case is done.”
I’ll take it. We all need some positive news. I don’t often write just about the good, but in these strange days, it’s helpful to have a reminder that the fight is always worth having when it comes to protecting our rights. And, despite the partisan Supreme Court, the reason that we are still holding on to democracy is because the system still works, albeit like a ’78 Chevy with the doors rusting off.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom has made himself the face of California’s fights against Trump, taking on a pugnacious and audacious attitude especially on social media, the day-in, day-out slugging in those battles is often done by Bonta and his team in courtrooms across the country.
It’s hard to recall, but months ago, Newsom called a special session of the Legislature to give Bonta a $25-million allowance to defend not just California but democracy. And in a moment when many of us fear that checks and balances promised in the Constitution have turned out to be little more than happy delusions, Bonta has a message: The courts are (mostly) holding and California’s lawyers aren’t just fighting, they’re winning.
“We can do things that governors can’t do,” Bonta said. “No role and no moment has been more important than this one.”
Bonta told me that he often hears that Trump is disregarding the courts, so “what’s the point of litigation at all? What’s the point of a court order at all? He’s just going to ignore them.”
But, he said, the administration has been following judges’ rulings — so far. While there have been instances, especially around deportations, that knock on the door of lawlessness, at least for California, Trump is “following all of our court orders,” Bonta said.
“We’re making a difference,” he said.
A few days ago, the U.S. Department of Education was forced to send out a final chunk of funds it had attempted to withhold from schools. Bonta, in a multistate lawsuit, successfully protected that money, which schools need this year to help migrant children and English learners, train teachers, buy new technology and pay for before- and after-school programs, among other uses.
That’s a permanent, final ruling — no appeals.
Another recent win saw California land a permanent injunction against the feds when it comes to stopping their payments for costs associated with state energy projects. That a win both for the climate and consumers, who benefit when we make energy more efficiently.
Last week, Bonta won another permanent injunction, blocking the Trump administration’s effort to tie grants related to homeland security to compliance with his immigration policies. Safety shouldn’t be tied to deportations, especially in California, where our immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding community members.
Those are just a few of Bonta’s victories. Of course, Trump and his minions aren’t happy about them. Stephen Miller, the shame of Santa Monica, seems to have especially lost his marbles over the National Guard ruling. On social media, Miller seems to be attacking the justice system, and attorneys general such as Bonta.
“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Never mind that the Oregon judge who issued the National Guard ruling is a Trump appointee.
“Their goal, I think, is to chill and pause and worry judges; to chill and pause and worry the press; to chill and pause and worry attorneys general who stand up for the rule of law and for democracy, who go to court and fight for what’s right and fight for the law,” Bonta said.
Bonta expects the administration, far from learning any lessons or harboring self-reflection during this mad dash toward autocracy, to continue full speed ahead.
“We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see it fast, and we’re going to see it escalate,” he said. “None of that is good, including putting military in American cities or, you know, Trump treating them like his royal guard instead of the National Guard.”
Even when the Trump administration loses, “they always have this like second move and maybe a third, where they are always trying to advance their agenda, even when they’ve been blocked by a court, even when they’ve been told that they’re acting unlawfully or unconstitutionally,” he said.
On Monday, Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent the court’s ruling on the National Guard, a massive escalation of his effort to militarize American cities.
But California remains on a winning streak, much to Trump’s dismay.
It’s my bet that as long as our judges continue to honor the rule of law, that streak will hold.
The federal Office for Victims of Crime announced in the summer that millions of dollars approved for domestic violence survivors and other crime victims would be withheld from states that don’t comply with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
California, 19 other states and the District of Columbia sued, alleging that such preconditions are illegal and would undermine public safety.
The administration then took a different tack, announcing that community organizations that receive such funding from the states — and use it to help people escape violence, access shelter and file for restraining orders against their abusers — generally may not use it to provide services to undocumented immigrants.
California and other states sued again, arguing that the requirements — which the administration says the states must enforce — are similarly illegal and dangerous. Advocates agreed, saying screening immigrant women out of such programs would be cruel.
The repeated lawsuits reflect an increasingly familiar pattern in the growing mountain of litigation between the Trump administration, California and other blue states.
Since President Trump took office in January, his administration has tried to force the states into submission on a host of policy fronts by cutting off federal funding, part of a drive to bypass Congress and vastly expand executive power. Repeatedly when those cuts have been challenged in court, the administration has shifted its approach to go after the same or similar funding from a slightly different angle — prompting more litigation.
The repeated lawsuits have added complexity and volume to an already monumental legal war between the administration and states such as California, one that began almost immediately after Trump took office and is ongoing, as the administration once again threatens major cuts amid the government shutdown.
The White House has previously dismissed California’s lawsuits as baseless and defended Trump’s right to enact his policy agenda, including by withholding funds. Asked about its shifting strategies in some of those cases, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration “has won numerous cases regarding spending cuts at the Supreme Court and will continue to cut wasteful spending across the government in a lawful manner.”
Other administration officials have also defended its legal tactics. During a fight over frozen federal funding earlier this year, for instance, Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” — sparking concerns about a constitutional crisis.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said the pattern is a result of Trump overstating his power to control federal funding and use it as a weapon against his political opponents, but also of his dangerous disregard for the rule of law and the authority of both Congress and federal judges. His office has sued the administration more than 40 times since January, many times over funding.
“It is not something that you should have to see, that a federal government, a president of the United States, is so contemptuous of the rule of law and is willing to break it and break it again, get told by a court that they’re violating the law, and then have to be told by a court again,” Bonta said.
And yet, such examples abound, he said. For example, the Justice Department’s repeated attempts to strip California of crime victim funding echoed the Department of Homeland Security’s repeated attempts recently to deny the state disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding, Bonta said.
Homeland Security officials first told states that such funding would be conditioned on their complying with immigration enforcement efforts. California and other states sued, and a federal judge rejected such preconditions as unconstitutional.
The administration then notified the states that refused to comply, including California, that they would simply receive less money — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — while states that cooperate with immigration enforcement would receive more.
California and other Democratic-led states sued again, arguing this week that the shifting of funds was nothing more than the administration circumventing the court’s earlier ruling against the conditioning of funds outright.
Bonta’s office cited a similar pattern in announcing Thursday that the Trump administration had backed off major cuts to AmeriCorps funding. The win came only after successive rounds of litigation by the state and others, Bonta’s office noted, including an amended complaint accusing the administration of continuing to withhold the funding despite an earlier court order barring it from doing so.
Bonta said such shifting strategies were the work of a “consistently and brazenly lawless and lawbreaking federal administration,” and that his office was “duty-bound” to fight back and will — as many times as it takes.
“It can’t be that you take an action, are held accountable, a court finds that you’ve acted unlawfully, and then you just take another unlawful action to try to restrict or withhold that same funding,” he said.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law, said he agreed with Bonta that there is “a pattern of ignoring court orders or trying to circumvent them” on the part of the Trump administration.
And he provided another example: a case in which he represents University of California faculty and researchers challenging Trump administration cuts to National Science Foundation funding.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought talks to reporters outside the White House on Monday, accompanied by House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Vice President JD Vance.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
After a judge blocked the administration from terminating that funding, the Trump administration responded by declaring that the funds were “suspended” instead, Chemerinsky said.
The judge then ruled the administration was violating her order against termination, he said, as “calling them suspensions rather than terminations changed nothing.”
Mitchel Sollenberger, a political science professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of several books on executive powers, said Trump aggressively flexing those powers was expected. Conservative leaders have been trying to restore executive authority ever since Congress reined in the presidency after Watergate, and Trump took an aggressive approach in his first term, too, Sollenberger said.
However, what Trump has done this term has nonetheless been stunning, Sollenberger said — the result of a sophisticated and well-planned strategy that has been given a clear runway by a Supreme Court that clearly shares a belief in an empowered executive branch.
“It’s like watching water run down, and it tries to find cracks,” Sollenberger said. “That’s what the Trump administration is doing. It’s trying to find those cracks where it can widen the gap and exercise more and more executive power.”
Bonta noted that the administration’s targeting of blue state funding began almost immediately after Trump took office, when the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo asserting that vast sums of federal funding for all sorts of programs were being frozen as the administration assessed whether the spending aligned with Trump’s policy goals.
California and other states sued to block that move and won, but the administration wasn’t swayed from the strategy, Bonta said — as evidenced by more recent events.
On Wednesday, as the government shutdown over Congress’ inability to pass a funding measure set in, Russell Vought — head of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Trump administration’s purse-string policies — announced on X that $8 billion in funding “to fuel the Left’s climate agenda” was being canceled. He then listed 16 blue states where projects will be cut.
Vought had broadly outlined his ideas for slashing government in Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for Trump’s second term, which Trump vigorously denied any connection to during his campaign but has since broadly implemented.
On Thursday, Trump seemed to relish the opportunity, amid the shutdown, to implement more of the plan.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump posted online. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
Bonta said Wednesday that his office had no plans to get involved in the shutdown, which he said was caused by Trump and “for Trump to figure out.” But he said he was watching the battle closely.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) chalked Vought’s latest cuts up to more illegal targeting of blue states such as California that oppose Trump politically, writing, “Our democracy is badly broken when a president can illegally suspend projects for Blue states in order to punish his political enemies.”
Cities and towns have also been pushing back against Trump’s use of federal funding as political leverage. On Wednesday, Los Angeles and other cities announced a lawsuit challenging the cuts to disaster funding.
L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto said the cuts were part of an “unprecedented weaponization” of federal funding by the Trump administration, and that she was proud to be fighting to “preserve constitutional limits on executive overreach.”
The votes of Californians who drop their ballots in mailboxes on Nov. 4 may not be counted because of U.S. Postal Service processing delays, state officials warned Thursday.
In many parts of the state, a ballot dropped in the mail is now collected the next day, said Atty. General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber at a news event Thursday.
The change affects voters who live 50 miles or more from six regional mail processing facilities in Los Angeles, Bell Gardens, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Richmond and West Sacramento, according to Bonta’s office.
Ballots that aren’t postmarked on or before Election Day are not counted.
The large swaths of the state affected by the Postal Service changes include both rural and urban areas such as Bakersfield, the Central Valley, the Central Coast, Palm Springs and more.
The warning by state officials to drop off ballots earlier than Election Day marks a dramatic shift in California, where mail-in voting has become accessible and popular. All registered voters in California receive a vote-by-mail ballot.
“If you want your vote to count, which I assume you do, because you’re putting it in the mail, don’t put it in the mail on Election Day if you’re 50 miles from these voting centers,” Bonta said.
In the Nov. 4 special election, California voters will decide on Proposition 50, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats to try to boost their party’s numbers in Congress by redrawing district boundaries.
The proposal came in response to a redistricting measure in Texas that seeks to increase the number of congressional Republicans at the behest of President Trump.
Postal Service representative Natashi Garvins said in an email that same-day postmarking has never been guaranteed. Garvins said that customers who want a manual postmark should visit a Postal Service location and request one at the counter.
At Thursday’s news event, state officials unveiled a large map with six circles around the mail facilities. Communities located outside the circles are affected by the postmarking change. The Secretary of State’s office wasn’t able to provide a figure for how many registered voters are affected.
Elections expert Paul Mitchell examined the map at The Times’ request.
“This is going to be a significant change for any voters who are outside of these circles that have recently voted by mail on election days,” said Mitchell, who drew the proposed congressional districts that will be before voters on Nov. 4.
Some municipalities have elections on the Nov. 4 ballot in addition to Proposition 50, Mitchell noted.
A news release from the U.S. Postal Service in February outlined some of policy changes, which appear to be part of a 10-year plan rolled out several years ago.
The Postal Service isn’t funded by the government but does receive some money from Congress for certain services.
Bonta on Thursday defended his decision to not immediately inform voters about the changes, arguing that the announcement would have gotten lost in the news cycle.
“Now is a perfect time to tell people about this,” said Bonta. “This is the voting window. This is when people are thinking about voting.”
Weber said her office was only informed “a couple of weeks ago” about the changes.
Ballots will go out to California registered voters starting Oct. 6. Voters can mail ballots, drop them off at a ballot box or take them to a vote center.
Weber on Thursday also responded to questions about faulty voter guides mailed to some voters, which mislabeled a congressional district represented by Rep. George Whitesides (D-Agua Dulce) as District 22 rather than District 27.
Weber blamed the Legislative Analyst’s Office for the error and said her office caught the mistake. About 8 million people will receive postcards informing them of the error, she said, at a cost to taxpayers of about $3 million to $4 million.
Meanwhile, Newsom on Thursday signed a pair of bills that he said will protect elections from undue influence.
Senate Bill 398 by Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange) makes it a crime to offer voters financial payments or the chance to win a prize in exchange for casting a ballot or registering to vote.
The new law exempts transportation incentives, such as rides to voting locations, or compensation provided by a government agency to vote.
The bill was introduced in response to Elon Musk’s America PAC announcing in 2024 that it would hold a lottery in swing states for $1 million for those who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.
The plan was widely criticized as an effort to drive voter registration in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump.
SB 42, also by Umberg, places a measure on the November 2026 ballot asking voters whether the state should repeal its statewide ban on public financing of campaigns.
If voters approve, California could begin considering systems where taxpayer dollars help fund candidates for public office, which supporters say diminishes the power of wealthy donors to sway the outcome of races. Charter cities are already permitted to have public financing programs, with Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Francisco among those that have chosen to do so.
Newsom said the bills are part of a broader push in California to safeguard democracy.
“Right now, our founding ideals and values are being shredded before our eyes in Washington D.C., and California will not sit idle,” Newsom said. “These new laws further protect Californians’ voices and civic participation in what makes our state and our country great.”
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.
“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.
The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.
In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.
Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.
Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.
Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.
“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”
Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.
Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.
Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.
California and other Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration on Monday for allegedly stripping them of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal security and disaster relief funding based on their unwillingness to aid in federal immigration enforcement.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said the latest funding reduction — which the states were notified of over the weekend — flew in the face of last week’s ruling. He criticized it as an illegal effort to force Democratic states into complying with a federal immigration campaign they have no legal obligation to support.
“Tell me, how does defunding California’s efforts to protect against terrorism make our communities safer?” Bonta said in a statement. “President Trump doesn’t like that we won’t be bullied into doing his bidding, ignoring our sovereign right to make decisions about how our law enforcement resources are best used to protect our communities.”
The White House referred questions on the lawsuit to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The agency has previously argued that its core mission is to defend the nation’s security against threats, including from illegal immigration, and therefore that it should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining that mission.
The funding in question — billions of dollars annually — is distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and have been distributed “evenhandedly” for decades by administrations of both political parties, the states’ lawsuit argues.
The funding, authorized by Congress in part after disasters such as September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, pays for things such as the salaries and training of first responders, testing of state computer systems for vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, mutual aid compacts among regional partners and emergency responses to disasters, the states said in their lawsuit.
Bonta’s office said California expected about $165 million, but was notified it would receive $110 million, a cut of $55 million, or a third of its funding. Other blue states saw even greater reductions, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, it said.
Other states that are supporting the Trump administration’s immigration policies received large increases, and some more than 100% increases, the suing states said.
They said the notifications provided no justification for the reductions, noting only that they were made at the direction of Homeland Security. And yet, the reason was clear, they said, including because of recent comments by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials who have stated outright that states who do not cooperate with federal immigration policies and that maintain sanctuary policies would see reduced funding.
“The explanation for DHS and FEMA’s last-minute decision to reallocate $233 million in homeland security funds — the Reallocation Decision — is apparent. Although DHS has for decades administered federal grant programs in a fair and evenhanded manner, the current Administration is taking money from its enemies,” the states wrote in their lawsuit. “Or, as defendant Secretary Noem put it succinctly in a February 19 internal memorandum, States whose policies she dislikes ‘should not receive a single dollar of the Department’s money.’”
The states also filed a motion for a temporary restraining order to immediately block the funding cuts — and prevent the Federal Emergency Management Agency from disbursing any related funds that could not be recouped later — as the case proceeds.
Just last week, a federal judge ruled that the administration setting immigration-related conditions on similar emergency funding was “arbitrary and capricious,” and unconstitutional.
“DHS justifies the conditions by pointing to its broad homeland security mission, but the grants at issue fund programs such as disaster relief, fire safety, dam safety, and emergency preparedness,” the judge in that case wrote. “Sweeping immigration-related conditions imposed on every DHS-administered grant, regardless of statutory purpose, lack the necessary tailoring.”
Last month, another judge ruled in a third case that the Trump administration cannot deny funding to Los Angeles or other local jurisdictions based on their sanctuary policies.
In their lawsuit Monday, California and the other states argued that the Trump administration appeared “undeterred” by last week’s ruling against pre-conditioning funding on immigration enforcement cooperation.
After being “frustrated in its first attempt to coerce [the states] into enforcing federal civil immigration law,” the states wrote, “DHS took yet another lawless action” by simply reallocating funding to “more favored jurisdictions” willing to support the administration’s immigration crackdown.
Bonta said the law requires such funding to be distributed based on objective assessments of “threat and risk,” but the weekend notifications showed the Trump administration doing little more than “rushing to work around last week’s order” and “force and coerce” blue states into compliance in a new way.
“This is a lawless, repeat offender administration that keeps breaking the law,” he said.
Bonta said the lawsuit is the 40th his office has filed against the current Trump administration to date. He said his office was in conversation with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, and that they both believe that “we deserve all the funding that has been appropriated to us.”
Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. All were also party to the litigation challenging preconditions on such funding that was decided last week.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta on Monday accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr of unlawfully intimidating television broadcasters into toeing a conservative line in favor of President Trump, and urged him to reverse course.
In a letter to Carr, Bonta specifically cited ABC’s decision to pull “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air after Kimmel made comments about the killing of close Trump ally Charlie Kirk, and Carr demanded ABC’s parent company Disney “take action” against the late-night host.
Bonta wrote that California “is home to a great many artists, entertainers, and other individuals who every day exercise their right to free speech and free expression,” and that Carr’s demands of Disney threatened their 1st Amendment rights.
“As the Supreme Court held over sixty years ago and unanimously reaffirmed just last year, ‘the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech,’” Bonta wrote.
Carr and Trump have both denied playing a role in Kimmel’s suspension, alleging instead that it was due to his show having poor ratings.
After Disney announced Monday that Kimmel’s show would be returning to ABC, Bonta said he was “pleased to hear ABC is reversing course on its capitulation to the FCC’s unlawful threats,” but that his “concerns stand.”
He rejected Trump and Carr’s denials of involvement, and accused the administration of “waging a dangerous attack on those who dare to speak out against it.”
“Censoring and silencing critics because you don’t like what they say — be it a comedian, a lawyer, or a peaceful protester — is fundamentally un-American,” while such censorship by the U.S. government is “absolutely chilling,” Bonta said.
Bonta called on Carr to “stop his campaign of censorship” and commit to defending the right to free speech in the U.S., which he said would require “an express disavowal” of his previous threats and “an unambiguous pledge” that he will not use the FCC “to retaliate against private parties” for speech he disagrees with moving forward.
“News outlets have reported today that ABC will be returning Mr. Kimmel’s show to its broadcast tomorrow night. While it is heartening to see the exercise of free speech ultimately prevail, this does not erase your threats and the resultant suppression of free speech from this past week or the prospect that your threats will chill free speech in the future,” Bonta wrote.
After Kirk’s killing, Kimmel said during a monologue that the U.S. had “hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Carr responded on a conservative podcast, saying, “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Two major owners of ABC affiliates dropped the show, after which ABC said it would be “preempted indefinitely.”
Both Kirk’s killing and Kimmel’s suspension — which followed the cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” by CBS — kicked off a tense debate about freedom of speech in the U.S. Both Kimmel and Colbert are critics of Trump, while Kirk was an ardent supporter.
Constitutional scholars and other 1st amendment advocates said the administration and Carr have clearly been exerting inappropriate pressure on media companies.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, said Carr’s actions were part of a broad assault on free speech by the administration, which “is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st amendment.”
Summer Lopez, the interim co-chief executive of PEN America, said this is “a dangerous moment for free speech” in the U.S. because of a host of Trump administration actions that are “pretty clear violations of the 1st Amendment” — including Carr’s threats but also statements about “hate speech” by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and new Pentagon restrictions on journalists reporting on the U.S. military.
She said Kimmel’s return to ABC showed that “public outrage does make a difference,” but that “it’s important that we generate that level of public outrage when the targeting is of people who don’t have that same prominence.”
Carr has also drawn criticism from conservative corners, including from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC. He recently said on his podcast that he found it “unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.”
Cruz said he works closely with Carr, whom he likes, but that what Carr said was “dangerous as hell” and could be used down the line “to silence every conservative in America.”
California’s top law enforcement official has weighed in on Monday‘s controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on immigration enforcement.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta condemned the decision, which clears the way for immigration agents to stop and question people they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally based solely on information such as their perceived race or place of employment.
Speaking at a news conference Monday in downtown L.A., Bonta said he agreed with claims the ACLU made in its lawsuit against the Trump administration. He called indiscriminate tactics used to make immigration arrests a violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
Bonta said he thinks it is unconstitutional “for ICE agents, federal immigration officers, to use race, the inability to speak English, location or perceived occupation to … stop and detain, search, seize Californians.”
He also decried what he described as the Supreme Court’s increasing reliance on its emergency docket, which he said often obscures the justices’ decision-making.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “And the emergency docket has been used more and more. You often don’t know who has voted and how. There’s no argument. There’s no written opinion.”
Bonta called Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s opinion “very disturbing.”
The Trump-appointed justice argued that because many people who do day labor in fields such as construction or farming, engagement in such work could be useful in helping immigrant agents determine which people to stop.
Bonta said the practice enables “the use of race to potentially discriminate,” saying “it is disturbing and it is troubling.”
The California Department of Justice will sue the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and its sheriff, Robert Luna, for what Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called a “humanitarian crisis” inside of the county jails.
Inmates are housed in unsafe, dirty facilities infested with roaches and rats, Bonta said in a news conference Monday, and lack basic access to clean water and edible food. “More alarming, people are dying,” he said.
There have been over 205 in-custody deaths in four years, Bonta said, with 40% caused by suicide, homicides and overdoses. He called for comprehensive reform, but said the county forced his hand by refusing to comply.
“I’d prefer collaboration over litigation, but the county has left us with no choice, so litigation it is,” he said.
Bonta called for L.A. County and the sheriff’s department to provide inmates with adequate medical, dental and mental health care, protect them from harm, provide safe and humane confinement conditions. He also called on jail officials to better accommodate the needs of disabled inmates and those with limited English proficiency.
Bonta painted a dark portrait of L.A. County’s jails, describing filthy conditions, vermin and insect infestations, a lack of clean water and moldy and spoiled food. He said prisoners face difficulty obtaining basic hygiene items and are not permitted to spend enough time outside of their cells.
L.A. County, which houses the largest jail system in the country, has long been criticized for poor conditions. As it has expanded to hold around 13,000 people on any given day, decades — perhaps a century — of mistreatment and overcrowding have been documented.
The system lost a federal lawsuit in 1978 after decades of dirty, mold-ridden and overcrowded jails prompted inmates to fight back through the courts, and frequently faces suits alleging it fails to provide proper food, water and shelter.
The state’s lawsuit comes amid a years-long struggle to close and replace Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, from which inspectors regularly document poor conditions: mold, mildew, insufficient food and water and, more recently, a report last year that said jailers were too busy watching an “explicit video” to notice a noose hung inside a cell.
“In June 2024, the Sybil Brand Commission reported that multiple dorms at Men’s Central were overcrowded with broken toilets, some containing feces that could not be flushed; a urinal that caused ‘effluence to emerge through the mid-floor drain’ when flushed; and ceilings that had been painted over to cover mold,” Bonta’s office wrote in its complaint.
In addition to Luna and the sheriff’s department, the county Department of Health Services, Correctional Health Services and its director, Timothy Belavich, were also named as defendants.
The lawsuit decried the “dilapidated physical condition of the facility and the numerous instances of violence and death within its walls.” It went on to explain that the county Board of Supervisors voted to close the chronically overcrowded Men’s Central Jail twice, including in 2020.
The sheriff’s department has said it would be difficult to close the jail because of the high volume of inmate admissions and lack of viable alternatives.
But in-custody deaths this year are on track for what Bonta’s office described as at least a 20-year high with 36 reported so far, or about one a week, according to the county’s website.
Inmates have been known to set fires in rooms with no smoke alarms — not to cause mischief, but to cook and supplement cold, sometimes inedible meals.
Some inmates — many of whom have been arrested recently and have not been convicted of crimes — are left to sleep on urine-soaked floors with trash bags as blankets and no access to medications and working plumbing. A 2022 lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union called the conditions “medieval.”
“The LASD jails,” the state attorney general’s office wrote in the complaint, “have a longstanding history of deplorable conditions and constitutional violations.”
Last fall, the state sued the southeastern Los Angeles County community alleging that Norwalk’s policy violated anti-discrimination, fair housing and numerous other state laws. Norwalk leaders had argued its shelter ban, which also blocked homeless housing developments, laundromats, payday lenders and other businesses that predominantly served the poor, was a necessary response to broken promises from other agencies to assist with the city’s homeless population.
“The Norwalk City Council’s failure to reverse this ban without a lawsuit, despite knowing it is unlawful, is inexcusable,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “No community should turn its back on its residents in need — especially while there are people in your community sleeping on the streets.”
The settlement, which needs judicial approval before taking effect, calls for Norwalk to repeal its ban at an upcoming City Council meeting, Bonta said in a release. In addition, the city will dedicate $250,000 toward the development of new affordable housing, formally acknowledge that the ban harmed fair housing efforts and accept increased state monitoring of its housing policies.
Bonta said that the legal action shows the state will not back down when local leaders attempt to block homeless housing.
“We are more than willing to work with any city or county that wants to do its part to solve our housing crisis,” Bonta said. “By that same token, if any city or county wants to test our resolve, today’s settlement is your answer.”
Norwalk officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Norwalk stood out compared to other communities that have found themselves in the state’s crosshairs in recent years. Many cities that have fought state housing policies, such as Beverly Hills and Coronado, are predominantly wealthy and white. By contrast, Norwalk is a Latino-majority, working- and middle-class city. Elected leaders in the city of 100,000 have said they’ve borne a disproportionate burden of addressing homelessness in the region.
Though the ban led to the cancellation of a planned shelter in Norwalk, city leaders contended that the policy largely was a negotiating tactic to ensure that the state and other agencies heard their concerns. Last year, the city said that even though the shelter ban remained on its books, it would not be enforced.
“This is not an act of defiance but rather an effort to pause, listen, and find common ground with the state,” city spokesperson Levy Sun said in a statement following a February court ruling that allowed the lawsuit to proceed.
The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General’s Office have entered into an “enforceable agreement” meant to reform the troubled agency following a scandal that led prosecutors to toss dozens of criminal cases linked to officers who sent racist text messages, officials said.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced the reforms — which will include changes to the agency’s use-of-force and internal affairs practices, along with attempts to curtail biased policing — during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday morning.
Bonta credited former Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah Hart with approaching him after the scandal first erupted in 2021, leading to collaborative reform efforts.
“The Torrance Police Department has demonstrated a commitment to self reflection to looking inward … to address systemic challenges,” Bonta said Thursday.
The California Attorney General’s Office announced its Torrance investigation in December 2021, the same day a Times investigation first revealed the contents of the text messages and the names of most of the officers involved. Court records and documents obtained by The Times showed the officers made offensive comments about a wide range of groups. They joked about “gassing” Jewish people, attacking members of the LGBTQ community and using violence against suspects.
The worst comments were saved for Black men and women, who the officers repeatedly called “savages” or referred to with variations of the N-word. One officer shared instructions on how to a tie a noose and posted a picture of a stuffed animal being hung inside police headquarters. Another message referred to the relatives of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, a Black man shot to death by Torrance police in 2018, as “all those [N-word] family members,” according to court records.
Sometimes, the officers blatantly fantasized about the deaths of Black men, women and even kids.
One officer shared pictures of tiny coffins intended to house the bodies of Black children they would “put down.” Another imagined executing Black suspects.
“Lucky I wasn’t out and about,” one officer wrote in response to a text about Black men allegedly involved in a Torrance robbery, according to records reviewed by The Times in 2022. “D.A. shoot team asking me why they are all hung by a noose and shot in the back of the head 8 times each.”
The officers also suggested a political allegiance in their hate-filled text thread. In a conversation about needlessly beating a female suspect, Sgt. Brian Kawamoto said he wanted to “make Torrance great again,” a play on President Trump’s ubiquitous campaign slogan.
The texts were sent between May 2018 and February 2022, according to investigative reports made public by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Bonta said Thursday that roughly a dozen officers were involved in the thread. At least seven of those officers are no longer employed by the agency, according to court records and a POST database.
The group of officers that The Times linked to the texts has been involved in at least seven serious use-of-force incidents in Torrance and Long Beach, including three killings of Black and Latino men, according to police use-of-force records and court filings.
While Concannon and Chavez were investigated as part of the scandal, The Times has never seen evidence that they sent racist text messages. In the past, authorities have said, some officers under investigation were aware of the texts but did not send any hateful messages themselves.
The scandal may not have come to light if not for the actions of former officers Cody Weldin and Michael Tomsic, who were charged with spray painting a swastika inside of a vehicle that was towed from a crime scene in 2021. That incident prompted former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón to launch an investigation into possible hate crime charges. While a hate enhancement was never charged in the vandalism case, it led to the execution of warrants on the officers’ cellphones that unveiled the texts.
Tomsic and Weldin pleaded guilty to vandalism earlier this year and gave up their right to be police officers in California. Disciplinary records made public earlier this year identified Weldin as the “owner” of the group text in which many of the racist remarks were found. The group was dubbed “The Boys,” records show.
By engaging in “collaborative reform,” Bonta chose the least forceful method of reform in Torrance. Often, the attorney general’s office will seek court-mandated reform through a settlement, as it has with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s and probation departments, so that it may ask a judge to force change if a police agency doesn’t comply.
In 2021, Hart personally approached Bonta’s office, seeking to work together on reform, which may have led the attorney general to use a softer method. Interim Police Chief Bob Dunn, who came to Torrance in 2023 after a long career with the Anaheim Police Department, said he believes Hart’s actions should show the department is committed to reform in the wake of the ugly scandal.
“It was the department that identified the behavior, the department that did the investigation and the department that took the case for criminal filing on the initially involved officers,” Dunn said of the city’s reaction to the revelation of the text messages in 2021.
In recent years, Dunn said, the department has taken steps to improve its use-of-force and police pursuit review processes by deploying sergeants to respond to any force incident. The hope, Dunn said, is to collect better information from individual cases that can be used to train officers in deescalation. Hart also created a Chief’s Advisory Panel to collect greater community input on issues facing the department, including bias allegations, according to Dunn.
SACRAMENTO — Seven months into President Trump’s second term, California has filed 37 lawsuits against his administration and spent about $5 million doing it.
Before you go off on a government-spending rant, let me drop this figure on you: For each dollar the state has spent in litigation with Trump, it has recouped $33,600 in funds that the federal government has tried to take away from the Golden State, according to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.
That, as he put it during a Monday news conference, is “bringing the receipts.”
These aren’t dollars Californians were wishing for or begging for from the federal government — these are funds that have already been legally allotted to the state but which the Trump administration is attempting to stop for reasons petty, ideological or both. They pay for teacher training, immunizations, tracking infectious diseases, keeping roads safe, disaster recovery and on and on. And they are predominantly your tax dollars, being withheld from your state.
“What we’re demanding is that we get the funding that’s already been legally approved and appropriated,” Bonta said.
But as much as it’s about paying for the basics that keep California going, it’s also about protecting an inclusive and equitable way of living that defines the ethos of our state. Don’t tread on us! Californians get to spend our money how we see fit.
“When you add it all up, you see the totality of what’s at stake: the California dream,” Bonta said. “The idea that every Californian, no matter how they look, where they live or how much money they have, can send their kid to school, go to the doctor when they’re sick and put food on the table and a roof over their heads.”
Or as Gov. Gavin Newsom put it, it’s litigation not for the sake of suing, but to “defend, to stand tall, to hold the line in terms of our values, the things we hold dear.”
It’s serious times, folks. Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t stand for LGBTQ+ rights, for immigrants’ rights, for women’s rights, for due process or even public schools. But so far, the courts have held, for the most part, to their responsibility to be a check on this unbalanced administration.
Of course, lawyers win cases, sometimes regardless of facts. I want to give a shout out to our state Department of Justice. Bonta may be the state’s top lawyer, but there is a whole army of legal folks behind these lawsuits.
The $5 million spent so far has been entirely in-house, Bonta said. This cash isn’t going to expensive outside counsel, but, as my colleague Kevin Rector points out, money that is funding the smart, talented attorneys and staff who work for taxpayers.
More than a few of them were around during Trump’s first term, when the state was involved in more than 120 lawsuits against his administration. Many of those suits were about process — the haphazard, rules-be-damned way Trump seeks to implement his policies.
Our California lawyers learned then that courts do in fact uphold law, and simply pointing out that rules have to be followed was often enough to stop Trump. While we now have a seasoned legal team that understands the weaknesses in what Trump is doing, the sort-of-funny part is that he’s still doing it. Few lessons learned, which is good for California.
So far, these lawsuits by California have ensured that about $168 billion that Trump would have cut off instead continued to flow to California. Bonta said that in the 19 cases that have made it in front of a judge so far, he’s succeeded in 17, including winning 13 court orders directly blocking Trump’s “illegal actions.”
He’s also secured wins outside of court, including when the U.S. Department of Education recently backed down after freezing school funding weeks before school is set to start. That funding, under threat of a lawsuit, has been restored.
Bonta said that while the state is fighting every lawsuit with rigor, two are personal to him and “remain sort of the most important in terms of what they represent.”
They happen to be the first two suits the state filed, shortly after Trump took office. The first was about birthright citizenship, and Trump’s bid to end it. It’s a case Bonta says is “very meaningful” to him.
Bonta was born in the Philippines and immigrated to the United States when he was 2 months old, living in a trailer in the Central Valley town of La Paz, the home of the United Farm Workers. His parents left their country to avoid martial law as the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos gained power, and worked with civil rights leaders including Cesar Chavez once they settled here.
So it makes sense that an executive order that would leave about 24,500 babies born each year in California without U.S. citizenship hits hard with Bonta.
Bonta, along with attorneys general of several other states, filed that lawsuit the day after Trump took office, in response to an executive order he signed on Inauguration Day. So far, multiple courts have expressed deep skepticism of that order, and the idea that the Constitution and prior Supreme Court rulings should be ignored in favor of Trump’s position.
The second case that Bonta takes personally is a multistate pushback on Trump’s sweeping halt of federal funding. That case put at risk about $3 trillion nationwide, including that $168 billion in California, about a third of the state budget.
Coming up next is a challenge to the deployment of Marines and National Guard troops in Los Angeles. The Trump administration has been quietly removing those soldiers in recent days, perhaps in preparation for asking the court to drop that case, which seems like a loser for them. No troops, no case. We’ll see how it goes in a few days.
“The Marines and the National Guardspeople arrived to quiet streets in L.A.,” Bonta said. “The president has been incredibly, in my view, disrespectful to these patriots. He’s treated them as political pawns.”
The $5 million the state has spent so far on legal fights with Trump is part of $25 million the Legislature set aside earlier this year during a special session. Bonta said that even that will likely not be enough to keep the challenges flowing for the next three and a half years.
Newsom, for his part, is all in and promised that Bonta “will not be in need of resources to do his job.” (And yes, I know it raises his profile for a 2028 presidential run.)
As much as it seems ridiculous that we are setting aside this huge chunk of change for legal fees at a moment when we are facing a budget crisis, the cost of letting Trump run roughshod over our state is much higher. This is money well spent.
Because it’s not just our federal funding at stake, it’s the California dream.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Monday that his office has spent more than $5 million fighting the Trump administration in court over the last six months, but saved the state nearly $170 billion.
“That means that for every one dollar we’ve been given by the legislature and the governor from special session funding to do this work — and we are very grateful for that funding — we’ve returned $33,600 for the state,” Bonta said during an afternoon news conference alongside Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Just to put it in perspective, if you told a Wall Street investor they’d get a $33,000 return on every one dollar invested, they would trip over themselves to get in on that deal.”
Bonta’s calculations are based on a mountain of litigation his office has filed against the administration since President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, including 37 lawsuits — many alongside other liberal-led states — and 47 amicus briefs backing other litigants’ lawsuits against the administration.
The vast majority of the savings Bonta claimed were the result of one particular lawsuit, in which California and other states successfully challenged a Trump administration effort to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding to the states — including what Bonta said was $168 billion for California alone.
“In his first week in office, President Trump went after a full-third of California’s budget — and we went to court less than 24 hours later and stopped him in his tracks,” Bonta said.
Bonta also cited court orders his office has won protecting $7 billion in transportation funding to maintain roads, highways, bridges and other infrastructure; $939 million in education funding for after-school and summer learning and teacher preparation; $972 million in healthcare funding for identifying, tracking and addressing infectious diseases, ensuring immunizations and modernizing public health infrastructure; and $300 million for electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. However, it has previously derided California’s efforts to block Trump’s agenda in the courts. Last month, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Times that Newsom was “destroying” the state and that Trump has been trying to “step in and save Californians from Gavin’s incompetence.”
The state legislature during a special session in February allocated Bonta’s office an extra $25 million to staff up and fight Trump in court. As part of that allocation, the legislature required that Bonta provide regular reports on how the money is spent. Bonta and Newsom’s news conference Monday followed the first of those reports being submitted to lawmakers.
Bonta said much of the $5 million his office has spent to date was used to pay for in-house attorneys and paralegals, and that none has been spent on outside counsel. He also said that, given the pace and scope of the work to date, his office will eventually need more funding.
“We’re grateful for the $25 million and the ability to draw down that $5 million so far. We do think we will need more going into the future, and I’m hopeful that through the conversations that we have — talking about what we would use it for, our success so far, what the continuing threats are down the road — that we’ll get to a place that will work for everybody,” Bonta said.
Newsom, citing Bonta’s financially consequential wins in court already, promised he’ll get the funding.
“Let me assure you, he will not be in need of resources to do his job,” Newsom said. “This report only highlights why I feel very confident in his ability to execute and to deliver results for the people of this state.”
Bonta’s report outlined 36 lawsuits his office had brought against the Trump administration through Wednesday. Those lawsuits challenged Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce, cut healthcare funding and research, dismantle the Department of Education and reduce education funding. They also challenged Trump administration efforts to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and restrict voting access in California, among other things.
On Friday Bonta’s office filed its 37th lawsuit, challenging the administration’s efforts to effectively ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth nationwide.
Newsom said Bonta’s work to date shows exactly why it was necessary for him and other California leaders to call a special session and allocate the additional funds. California sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times, and they knew it would need to sue the second Trump administration, too.
“We were mindful that past is prologue,” Newsom said, and the added resources they provided Bonta’s office “have come to bear great fruit.”
Bonta said there is no time to slow down now, as the Trump administration continues to violate the law, and that his team is ready to keep fighting.
“We know that this work is just the beginning,” he said, “but we are not backing down.”
California and a coalition of other liberal-led states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over a provision in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that bars Planned Parenthood and other large nonprofit abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funding for a host of unrelated healthcare services.
The measure has threatened clinics across the country that rely on federal funding to operate. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who is helping to lead the litigation, called it a “cruel, backdoor abortion ban” that violates the law in multiple ways.
The states’ challenge comes one day after Planned Parenthood won a major victory in its own lawsuit over the measure in Boston, where a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the ban from taking effect against Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide.
Federal law already prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funding to pay for abortions, but the new “defund provision” in the bill passed by congressional Republicans earlier this month goes further. It also bars nonprofit abortion providers that generated $800,000 or more in annual Medicaid revenue in 2023 from receiving any such funding for the next year — including for services unrelated to abortion, such as annual checkups, cancer screenings, birth control and testing for sexually transmitted infections.
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice have argued that the measure “stops federal subsidies for Big Abortion,” that Congress under the constitution is “free to decline to provide taxpayer funds to entities that provide abortions,” and that Planned Parenthood’s position should not hold sway over that of Congress.
In announcing the states’ lawsuit Monday, Bonta’s office echoed Planned Parenthood officials in asserting that the provision specifically and illegally targets Planned Parenthood and its affiliate clinics — calling it “a direct attack on the healthcare access of millions of low-income Americans, disproportionally affecting women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and communities of color.”
Bonta’s office said the measure threatened $300 million in federal funding for clinics in California, where Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider, and “jeopardized the stability” of Planned Parenthood’s 114 clinics across the state, which serve about 700,000 patients annually — many of whom use Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid.
During a virtual news conference Monday, Bonta noted that federal funds already don’t cover abortions. He said the new provision was “punishment for Planned Parenthood’s constitutionally protected advocacy for abortion” and “a direct attack on access to essential healthcare for millions who rely on Medicaid.”
“The Trump administration and Congress are actually gutting essential lifesaving care, like cancer screenings and STI testing, simply because Planned Parenthood has spoken out in support of reproductive rights,” Bonta said. “The hypocrisy is really hard to ignore. A party that claims to be defenders of free speech only seem to care about it when it aligns with their own agenda.”
Bonta added: “Rest assured, California will continue to lead as a reproductive freedom state, and will continue to defend healthcare as a human right.”
In their lawsuit, the states argue that the measure is unlawfully ambiguous and violates the spending powers of Congress by singling out Planned Parenthood for negative treatment, and that it will harm people’s health and increase the cost of Medicaid programs for states by more than $50 million over the next decade.
In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood also argued that the measure intentionally singled it and its affiliates out for punishment, in violation of their constitutional rights, including free speech.
In granting Planned Parenthood’s request for a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote Monday that she was “not enjoining the federal government from regulating abortion and is not directing the federal government to fund elective abortions or any healthcare service not otherwise eligible for Medicaid coverage.”
Talwani, an Obama appointee, wrote that she also was not requiring the federal government “to spend money not already appropriated for Medicaid or any other funds.”
Instead, Talwani wrote, her order blocks the Trump administration from “targeting a specific group of entities — Planned Parenthood Federation members — for exclusion from reimbursements under the Medicaid program,” as they were likely to prove that “such targeted exclusion violates the United States Constitution.”
In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, White House spokesman Harrison Fields said the “Big, Beautiful Bill” was “legally passed by both chambers of the Legislative Branch and signed into law by the Chief Executive,” and Talwani’s order granting the injunction was “not only absurd but illogical and incorrect.”
“It is orders like these that underscore the audacity of the lower courts as well as the chaos within the judicial branch. We look forward to ultimate victory on the issue,” Fields said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment on the states’ lawsuit.
Jodi Hicks, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, joined Bonta during his news conference. She welcomed the states’ lawsuit, saying “an attack this severe requires a multi-pronged response with both short and long term strategies.”
Hicks said it’s particularly important that California is helping to fight back, given the huge stakes for the state.
“California is the most impacted state across the country because of the volume of patients that we have, but also because of the amount of Medicaid that our state takes,” she said. “It speaks to our values. And this defund provision is certainly [an] attack on values — most heavily on California.”
Bonta is leading the lawsuit along with the attorneys general of Connecticut and New York. Joining them are Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.
Bonta noted the lawsuit is the 36th his office has filed against the Trump administration in the last 27 weeks.
California and a coalition of other liberal-led states filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent demand that they turn over the personal information of millions of people receiving federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
USDA Secretary Brooke L. Rollins informed states earlier this month that they would have to transmit the data to the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service to comply with an executive order by President Trump. That order demanded that Trump’s agency appointees receive “full and prompt access” to all data associated with federal programs, so that they might identify and eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Last week, USDA officials informed state SNAP directors that the deadline for submitting the data is Wednesday and that failure to comply “may trigger noncompliance procedures” — including the withholding of funds.
In announcing the states’ lawsuit Monday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said the “unprecedented” demand “violates all kinds of state and federal privacy laws” and “further breaks the trust between the federal government and the people it serves.”
Bonta’s office noted that states have administered the equivalent of SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — for 60 years. It said that California alone receives “roughly $1 billion a year” to administer the program in the state and that “any delay in that funding could be catastrophic for the state and its residents who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.”
The USDA has demanded data for all current and former SNAP recipients since the start of 2020, including “all household group members names, dates of birth, social security numbers, residential and mailing addresses,” as well as “transactional records from each household” that show the dollar amounts they spent and where. It said it may also collect information about people’s income.
Meanwhile, a Privacy Impact Assessment published by the agency showed that it also is collecting data on people’s education, employment, immigration status and citizenship.
The USDA and other Trump administration officials have said the initiative will save taxpayers money by eliminating “information silos” that allow inefficiencies and fraud to fester in federal programs.
“It is imperative that USDA eliminates bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency and enhances the government’s ability not only to have point-in-time information but also to detect overpayments and fraud,” Rollins wrote in a July 9 letter to the states.
The Trump administration, which is pursuing what Trump has called the biggest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the nation’s history, has requested sensitive data from other federal programs and services — including Medicaid and the IRS — to share with immigration officials.
That has raised alarm among Democrats, who have said that tying such services to immigration enforcement will put people’s health at risk and decrease tax revenue. California sued the Trump administration earlier this month for sharing Medicaid data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On Monday, Bonta raised similar alarms about the administration’s demand for SNAP data, questioning what it will do with the information and how families that rely on such assistance will react. His office said it appeared to be “the next step” in the administration’s anti-immigrant campaign.
“President Trump continues to weaponize private and sensitive personal information — not to root out fraud, but to create a culture of fear where people are unwilling to apply for essential services,” Bonta said. “We’re talking about kids not getting school lunch; fire victims not accessing emergency services; and other devastating, and deadly, consequences.”
Bonta said the USDA demand for SNAP benefits data is illegal under established law, and that California “will not comply” while it takes the administration to court.
“The president doesn’t get to change the rules in the middle of the game, no matter how much he may want to,” Bonta said. “While he may be comfortable breaking promises to the American people, California is not.”
The new data collection does not follow established processes for the federal government to audit state data without collecting it wholesale. During a recently concluded public comment period, Bonta and other liberal attorneys general submitted a comment arguing that the data demand violates the Privacy Act.
“USDA should rethink this flawed and unlawful proposal and instead work with the States to improve program efficiency and integrity through the robust processes already in place,” they wrote.
Last week, California and other states sued the Trump administration over new rules barring undocumented immigrants from accessing more than a dozen other federally funded benefit programs, including Head Start, short-term and emergency shelters, soup kitchens and food banks, healthcare services and adult education programs.
The states did not include USDA in that lawsuit despite its issuing a similar notice, writing that “many USDA programs are subject to an independent statutory requirement to provide certain benefits programs to everyone regardless of citizenship,” which the department’s notice said would continue to apply.
Bonta announced Monday’s lawsuit along with New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James. Joining them in the lawsuit were Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the state of Kentucky.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Wednesday he will ask a judge to allow the state to take control of L.A. County’s juvenile halls.
The move comes after years of failure to comply with court-ordered reforms that have been marked by riots, drug overdoses, allegations of child abuse and the death of a teenager.
In a statement, Bonta said he will ask a judge to place the county’s halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed official would take over “management and operations of the juvenile halls” from the L.A. County Probation Department, including setting budgets and hiring and firing staff.
Bonta is expected to discuss the move at a news conference in downtown L.A. around 9:45 a.m. A probation department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The scandal-plagued halls have failed to see significant improvement under the probation department’s management. Two facilities were shut down in 2023 after repeatedly failing to meet basic standards to house youth under California law. That same year, 18-year-old Bryan Diaz died of a drug overdose at the Secure Youth Treatment Facility and reports of Xanax and opiate overdoses among youths in the halls have become a regular occurrence in recent months.
Nearly three dozen probation officers have been charged with crimes related to on-duty conduct in the past few years, including 30 indicted earlier this year by Bonta for staging or allowing so-called “gladiator fights” between juveniles in custody. Officers also routinely refuse to come to work, leaving each hall critically short-staffed.
“This drastic step to divest Los Angeles County of control over its juvenile halls is a last resort — and the only option left to ensure the safety and well-being of the youth currently in its care,” Bonta’s statement Wednesday said. “For four-and-a-half years, we’ve moved aggressively to bring the County into compliance with our judgment — and we’ve been met with glacial progress that has too often looked like one step forward and two steps back. Enough is enough. These young people deserve better, and my office will not stop until they get it.”
The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper programming, and detaining youths in solitary confinement in their rooms for far too long. A 2021 court settlement between L.A. County and the state attorney general’s office was aimed at improving conditions for youth and tamping down on use of force.
But the situation has seemingly only gotten worse in the last four years. Incidents in which staff use force against youths have increased over the life of the settlement, records show. The L.A. County inspector general’s office has published six reports showing the department has failed to meet the terms of the state oversight agreement. Oversight officials have caught several probation officers lying about violent incidents in the halls after reviewing video footage that contradicted written reports.
After the state shut down the county’s other two major detention centers, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey was reopened but quickly became a haven for chaos. In its first month of operation, there was a riot and an escape attempt and someone brought a gun inside the youth hall.
Late last year, California’s Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Los Padrinos closed too after it failed repeated inspections, but Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa ignored the order, leading some to call on Bonta to intervene. Eventually, an L.A. County judge ordered the probation department to begin emptying Los Padrinos until it came back into compliance with state standards.
Six months into President Trump’s second term, his predilection for picking on California has never been on fuller display, turning the state broadly and Los Angeles specifically into key battlegrounds for his right-wing agenda.
Federal officials are investigating L.A. County’s gun permitting policies, and have sought to overturn a host of education, health and environmental regulations. They have talked not only of enforcing federal laws for the benefit of California residents, but of showing up in full force — soldiers and all — to wrench control from the state’s elected leaders.
Kristi Noem has lunch with National Guard troops at the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard on May 5 in Los Angeles.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
“We are not going away,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a news conference in Los Angeles last month. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country, and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
The antagonism toward California is not entirely surprising, having been a feature of Trump’s first term and his recent presidential campaign. And yet, the breadth and pace of the administration’s attacks, aided by a Republican-controlled Congress and a U.S. Supreme Court convinced of executive power, have stunned many — pleasing some and infuriating others.
“Trump’s been able to go much further, much faster than anyone would have calculated, with the assistance of the Supreme Court,” said Bob Shrum, director of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future.
“In a second Trump term, he’s clearly either feeling or acting more emboldened and testing the limits of his power, and Republicans in Congress certainly aren’t doing anything to try to rein that in,” said California Sen. Alex Padilla, who was forced to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents after confronting Noem at her news conference. “It’s enraging. It’s offensive.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) is removed from the room after interrupting a news conference with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
“What is clear after six months is we now have some measure of checks and balances in California, a counterweight to one-party supermajority control at the state level,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin). “From securing the border to reversing the ban on gas cars to protecting girls’ sports, balance and common sense are returning to our state.”
Rob Stutzman, a longtime GOP strategist in California who is no fan of Trump, said the president’s motivations for targeting California are obvious, as it “is the contrast that he basically has built MAGA on.”
Visuals of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounding up immigrants in liberal California are red meat to the MAGA base, Stutzman said. “What they’ve been able to do in California is basically create the live TV show that they want.”
But Trump is hardly the only politician who benefits from his administration being on a war footing with the nation’s most populous blue state, Stutzman said. There is a “symbiotic relationship that Democrats in California have with Trump,” he said, and leaders such as Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also benefit politically when they’re seen as standing up to the president.
“If not for Trump’s assault on California, was Gavin Newsom in South Carolina?” Stutzman asked, of what many viewed as an early presidential campaign stop earlier this month. “Would Karen Bass otherwise have been given a lifeline after her disastrous performance with the fires?”
Bass, in a statement to The Times, defended her record, saying both homelessness and homicides are down and fire recovery is moving quickly. She said the Trump administration was helpful with early fire response, but “now they’ve assaulted our city” with immigration raids — which is why L.A. has joined in litigation to stop them, as her “number one job is to protect Angelenos.”
Bob Salladay, a senior advisor to Newsom, dismissed the idea that battling Trump is in any way good for California or welcomed by its leaders. “That’s not why we’re fighting him,” he said. “We’re fighting him because what he’s doing is immoral and illegal.”
Protesters gather in front of City Hall to denounce the Trump administration while attending a “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstration on Thursday in Los Angeles. This is one of hundreds of Good Trouble protests happening around the country in honor of the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Salladay agreed, however, that the last six months have produced a stunning showdown over American values that few predicted — even with the conservative Project 2025 playbook laying out much of it in advance.
“We knew it would be bad. We didn’t know it would be this bad,” Salladay said. “We didn’t know it would be the president of the United States sending U.S. troops into an American city and taking away resources from the National Guard for public theater.”
What’s being fought over?
When protests over early immigration raids erupted in scattered pockets of L.A. and downtown, Trump dramatized them as a grave threat to citywide safety, in part to justify bringing in the military. Local officials say masked and militarized agents swarming Latino and other immigrant neighborhoods and racially profiling targets for detention have undermined safety far more than the protests ever did.
Trump has since pulled back about half the troops, but thousands remain. A federal judge recently ordered federal agents to stop using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate arrests, but raids continue.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is demanding California counties provide lists of noncitizens in their jails.
Protesters walk onto the fields adjacent to the Glass House, where immigration raids took place July 10 in Camarillo.
(Julie Leopo / For The Times)
Beyond L.A., officials and industry leaders say immigration raids have badly spooked workers in farming, construction, street vending and other service sectors, with some leaving the job for fear of being detained. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war with trading partners has made it more difficult for some farmers to purchase equipment and chemical supplies.
The Justice Department is suing the state for allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports, alleging such policies violate federal civil rights law. It is suing the state over an animal welfare law protecting hens from being kept in small cages, blaming the policy for driving up the cost of eggs in violation of federal farming regulations. It is investigating L.A. County’s gun permitting process, suggesting excessive fees and wait times are violating people’s gun rights.
Work continues on the California High Speed Rail, Hanford Viaduct.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The legal antagonism has cut in the opposite direction, as well, with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office having sued the Trump administration more than 30 times in the last six months over a range of issues.
Bonta has sued over billions of dollars in cuts to education funding and billions of dollars in cuts to medical research and development. He has sued over Trump executive orders declaring that California must radically restrict voting access, over Trump’s unilateral tariff scheme and over clawbacks of funding and approvals for wind energy and electric vehicle charging stations.
Bonta called the Trump administration’s targeting of the state “a lot of show” — and “disrespectful, inappropriate and unlawful.” He noted a lot of wins in court for the state, but also acknowledged the administration has scored victories, too, particularly at the Supreme Court, which has temporarily cleared the way for mass layoffs of federal employees, the dismantling of the Department of Education and the undoing of birthright citizenship.
But those rulings are “just procedural” for now as litigation continues, Bonta stressed, and the fight continues.
“We are absolutely unapologetic, resolute, committed to meeting the Trump administration in court and beating them back each time they violate the law,” Bonta said.
Who benefits?
After six months of entrenched political infighting between the U.S. and its largest state, who benefits?
Trump, officials in his administration and some state Republicans are adamant that it is good, hardworking, law-abiding people of California, who they allege have long suffered under liberal state policies that reward criminals and unauthorized immigrants.
“What would Los Angeles look like without illegal aliens?” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top policy advisors, recently asked on Fox News — before suggesting, without proof, that it would have better healthcare and schooling for U.S. children and “no drug deaths” on the streets.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller arrive to a bill signing event in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday..
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to The Times that “Gavin Newscum” — Trump’s favorite insult — is “destroying” the state, and that Trump “has had to step in and save Californians from Gavin’s incompetence.”
“First, when Newscum was chronically unprepared to address the January wildfires, and more recently when he refused to stop violent, left-wing rioters from attacking federal law enforcement,” Jackson said. “This doesn’t even account for Newscum’s radical, left-wing policies, which the Administration is working to protect Californians — and all Americans — from, like letting men destroy women’s sports, or turning a blind eye to child labor exploitation.”
Trump, she said, “will continue to stand up for Californians like a real leader, while Newsom sips wine in Napa.”
Some Republicans in the state strongly agree, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is running for governor. With Trump in office, Bianco said, “there’s finally someone working and looking out for Californians’ best interests.”
He said Trump called in troops only because of the “embarrassing” failure of L.A. officials to maintain order. He said the only reason ICE is going after unauthorized immigrants in the streets — with some bystanders admittedly caught in the fray — is that California sanctuary laws prevent agents from just picking them up in jails.
“This is an absolute failure of a Democrat-led agenda and Democrat policy that is forcing the federal government to go into our neighborhoods looking for these criminals,” Bianco said. “Californians are being punished for it because of failed California leadership, not because of the federal government.”
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said Trump called in troops only because of the “embarrassing” failure of L.A. officials to maintain order.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Newsom, Bass and other liberal officials, of course, have framed Trump’s actions in the state in very different terms.
In a recent filing in the federal case challenging the constitutionality of ICE’s immigration tactics in L.A., California and 17 other liberal-led states argued those tactics had left citizens and noncitizens afraid to go outside, turned “once bustling neighborhoods into ghost towns” and devastated local businesses.
State and local officials have said they are fighting the administration so aggressively because Trump’s policies threaten billions in federal funding for the state in education, healthcare, transportation and other sectors.
California Sen. Adam Schiff, a staunch adversary of Trump, said he has had particularly troubling conversations with farmers up and down the state, who are feeling the pain from Trump’s immigration polices and tariffs acutely.
“Their workers are increasingly not showing up. Their raw materials are increasingly more expensive because of the tariffs. Their markets are shrinking because of the recoil by other countries from this kind of indiscriminate turf war,” Schiff said. “Farmers are really in the epicenter of this.”
“Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who doesn’t believe that it’s his job to represent the whole country — only the states that voted for him,” Schiff said. “The president seems to have a particular, personal vendetta against California, which is obviously [a] deep disservice to the millions of residents in our state, no matter whom they voted for.”
A ‘model’ for what’s next?
During her Los Angeles news conference, Noem said that federal officials in L.A. were “putting together a model and a blueprint” that could be replicated elsewhere — an apparent warning against other blue cities and states bucking the administration.
California officials saw it exactly that way. Bass has accused the administration of “treating Los Angeles as a test case for how far it can go in driving its political agenda forward while pushing the Constitution aside.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass arrives at MacArthur Park on July 7 as federal agents staged there.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
What happens next, several political observers said, depends on whether the antagonism continues to work politically, and whether the administration starts acting on its threats to crack down even more.
When Bass showed up in person to object to heavily armed immigration agents storming through MacArthur Park recently, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino allegedly told her that she and other L.A. officials and residents “better get used to” agents being in the city, who “will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, when asked if Bass would be arrested, said they were “keeping everything on the table.”
Trump has suggested Newsom should be arrested, too, saying, “I’d do it.” Padilla was taken forcefully to the ground and handcuffed at a Noem press event. Trump has accused Schiff of criminal fraud for claiming primary residency in mortgage paperwork for a home in his district and one near his work in Washington, D.C., which Schiff called a baseless political attack.
Padilla said it’s all to be expected from a Republican administration that hates and fears everything that his state stands for, but that Democrats aren’t backing down and will continue to “organize, organize, organize” to defend Californians and win back power in the midterms.
“We’re not the fourth largest economy in the world despite our diversity and immigrant population, but because of it,” Padilla said. “Diversity and migrants doing well and making our country stronger is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare — and that has made California his No. 1 target.”
Federal immigration agents near MacArthur Park in the Westlake area on July 7.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
Schiff said the administration’s actions in California in the last six months are indeed producing “the TV show that Trump wanted to show his MAGA base,” but “it’s a TV show that is not going over well with the American people.”
“The more Trump tries to inflict harm and pain on California, and the more he disrupts life in California cities and communities, the more he makes the Republican brand absolutely toxic,” Schiff said, “and the more harm that he does to Republican elected leaders up and down the state.”
Alleging widespread and egregious violations of housing and tenant laws, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sued Southern California real estate tycoon Mike Nijjar in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday.
In the lawsuit, Bonta accused Nijjar, family members and their companies of subjecting tenants to vermin infestations and overflowing sewage, overcharging them and violating anti-discrimination laws.
The suit says that Nijjar is one of California’s largest landlords, operating multibillion dollars in holdings. Nijjar family companies, commonly known as PAMA Management, own 22,000 rental units, primarily in low-income neighborhoods in Southern California.
The suit follows a more than two-year California Department of Justice investigation into Nijjar’s holdings, Bonta said.
“PAMA and the companies owned by Mike Nijjar and his family are notorious for their rampant, slum-like conditions — some so bad that residents have suffered tragic results,” Bonta said in a statement. “Our investigation into Nijjar’s properties revealed PAMA exploited vulnerable families, refusing to invest the resources needed to eradicate pest infestations, fix outdated roofs and install functioning plumbing systems, all while deceiving tenants about their rights to sue their landlord and demand repairs.”
Bonta is seeking penalties against Nijjar and his family business entities, restitution for tenants, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and injunctive relief barring Nijjar and PAMA from continuing unlawful business practices.
A representative for Nijjar said he forcefully rejects the claims in the lawsuit.
“The allegations in the complaint are false and misleading, and its claims are legally erroneous,” Nijjar attorney Stephen Larson said in a statement. “We look forward to demonstrating in court that Mr. Nijjar and his companies are not only compliant with the law, but they provide an extraordinary service to housing those disadvantaged and underserved by California’s public and private housing markets.”
Nijjar’s real estate empire has long been on authorities’ radar.
In 2020, LAist detailed wide-ranging dangerous conditions at Nijjar’s properties dating back years, including a fire at a PAMA-owned mobile home in Kern County that resulted in the death of an infant. The mobile home was not permitted for human occupancy, according to the report and Bonta’s lawsuit. Two years later, The Times wrote a series of stories about Chesapeake Apartments, a sprawling 425-unit apartment complex in South L.A., where Nijjar’s tenants complained of sewage discharges, regular mold and vermin infestations and shoddy repairs. Chesapeake had the most public health violations of any residential property in L.A. County over the previous five years, according to a Times analysis at the time.
Prior attempts at accountability for Nijjar and his companies have been spotty and ineffective. After the 2016 mobile home fire that killed the infant in Kern County, the California Department of Real Estate revoked the licenses associated with Nijjar’s company at the time. In response, Nijjar and family members reorganized their business structure, the suit said.
The L.A. city attorney’s office resolved a nuisance abatement complaint against PAMA at Chesapeake in 2018, only for the widespread habitability problems to emerge. A similar case filed by the city attorney’s office against a PAMA property in Hollywood remains in litigation more than three years after it was filed. In the meantime, Nijjar’s companies have settled multiple habitability lawsuits filed by residents.
Bonta said that PAMA has taken advantage of lax and piecemeal accountability efforts and its low-income tenants’ vulnerability. Most residents, he said, have low or fixed incomes with few alternatives other than to endure the shoddy conditions in their rentals.
The lawsuit alleges that the habitability problems at PAMA properties are “ongoing business practices” — the result of decisions to make cheap repairs rather than necessary investments in maintenance, the use of unskilled handymen, lack of staff training and failure to track tenant requests.
“Nijjar and his associates have treated lawsuit after lawsuit and code violation after code violation as the cost of doing business and have been allowed to operate and collect hundreds of millions of dollars each year from families who sleep, shower, and feed their children in unhealthy and deplorable conditions,” Bonta said. “Enough is enough.”
Besides tenants’ living conditions, the suit alleges Nijjar and PAMA have induced residents into deceptive leases, discriminated against tenants on public assistance programs and issued unlawful rent increases.
The suit contends PAMA’s leases attempt to invalidate rights guaranteed under law, including the opportunity to sue and make repairs the landlord neglected and deduct these costs from the rent. The company has told Section 8 voucher holders that there are no units available when others are being rented to applicants without vouchers, the complaint said.
The case alleges that PAMA has violated California’s rent cap law on more than 2,000 occasions. The law limits rent increases to 5% plus inflation annually at most apartments. PAMA, the suit says, shifted mandatory shared utility costs, which used to be paid by the landlord, onto tenants’ bills in an attempt to evade the cap. The combination of the new utility costs and rent hikes resulted in total increases of up to 20%, more than double the allowable amount, according to the suit.
California officials on Monday filed a federal lawsuit over the mobilization of the state’s National Guard during the weekend’s immigration protests in Los Angeles, accusing President Trump of overstepping his federal authority and violating the U.S. Constitution.
As thousands of people gathered in the streets to protest raids and arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump mobilized nearly 2,000 members of the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said that state officials could handle the situation and that Trump was sowing chaos in the streets for political purposes.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said the decision by Trump and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which spells out the limits of federal power. Bonta said the state will seek a restraining order for the “unlawful, unprecedented” deployment of the National Guard, and argues in the 22-page lawsuit that an impending deployment of U.S. Marines was “similarly unlawful.”
“Trump and Hegseth ignored law enforcement’s expertise and guidance and trampled over our state’s, California’s, sovereignty,” Bonta said at a news conference.
Experts and state officials say Trump’s actions and the subsequent lawsuit have thrust the U.S. into uncharted legal territory. Bonta said there have not been many court rulings on the questions at play because the statute Trump cited “has been rarely used, for good reason.”
“It is very unusual and unnecessary, and out of keeping with our constitutional tradition, that they are there without the consent of the governor, in a situation where the governor says that state authorities have the situation under control,” said Laura A. Dickinson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School.
Whether Trump’s action was illegal, Dickinson said, “is really untested.”
Trump and the White House say the military mobilization is legal under Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Forces. The statute gives the president the authority to federalize the National Guard if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States,” but says the Guard must be called up through an order from the state’s governor.
Because founders distrusted military rule, the Constitution allows the president to deploy the military for civil law enforcement only in “dire, narrow circumstances,” Bonta’s complaint argues. But, the lawsuit says, the Trump administration appears to be using the statute “as a mechanism to evade these time-honored constitutional limits.”
Trump has said that the mobilization was necessary to “deal with the violent, instigated riots,” and that without the National Guard, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”
Days of protests after the ICE raids included some violent clashes involving protesters, local police and federal officials and some vandalism and burglaries. Local officials have decried those actions but have defended the right of Angelenos to peacefully demonstrate.
“It was heading in the wrong direction,” Trump said at the White House. “It’s now heading in the right direction. And we hope to have the support of Gavin, because Gavin is the big beneficiary as we straighten out his problems. I mean, his state is a mess.”
The part of the law that “the Trump administration is going to have difficulty explaining away” requires that orders to call up the National Guard “be issued through the governors, which is obviously not happening here,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
Less black and white, she said, is what happens “if the president tries to exercise the authority provided by that law to federalize the National Guard and the governor refuses to issue the orders.”
As the governor, Newsom is the commander in chief of the California National Guard. On Saturday night, Hegseth sent a memo to the head of the California Guard to mobilize nearly 2,000 members. The leader of the state National Guard then sent the memo to Newsom’s office, the complaint says. Neither Newsom nor his office consented to the mobilization, the lawsuit says.
Newsom wrote to Hegseth on Sunday, asking him to rescind the troop deployment. The letter said the mobilization was “a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation, while simultaneously depriving the state from deploying these personnel and resources where they are truly required.”
Hegseth issued another memo Monday night deploying another 2,000 members of the National Guard, the lawsuit says.
Newsom has warned that the executive order that Trump signed applies to other states as well as to California, which will “allow him to go into any state and do the same thing.”
Legal experts said the statute that the White House used to justify the National Guard mobilization is usually invoked in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807, a wide-reaching law that gives presidents the emergency power to call up the military in the United States if they believe the situation warrants it.
Goitein said presidents generally invoke the Insurrection Act, then use the statute that Trump cited as the “call-up authority” to actually mobilize the military. How the law stands on its own, she said, “is one of the legal questions that have not come up before in the courts.”
The Insurrection Act has been invoked 30 times in the history of the country, and Trump has not invoked it in Los Angeles. It was last invoked in 1992, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to federalize the National Guard in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.
The last time a president sent the National Guard into a state without a request from the governor was six decades ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson mobilized troops in Alabama to defend civil rights demonstrators and enforce a federal court order in 1965.
Bonta’s office said the specific statute that Trump is using has been invoked only once before, when President Nixon mobilized the National Guard to deliver the mail during a U.S. Postal Service strike in 1970.
The argument that Trump has violated the 10th Amendment is a clever subversion of a line of thinking that has traditionally been backed by conservative judges, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.
The 10th Amendment says that the federal government has only the powers specifically assigned by the Constitution, and other powers are controlled by the states.
“Deploying over 4,000 federalized military forces to quell a protest or prevent future protests despite the lack of evidence that local law enforcement was incapable of asserting control and ensuring public safety during such protests represents the exact type of intrusion on state power that is at the heart of the 10th Amendment,” state lawyers argue in the lawsuit.
“The state has a strong argument that … by nationalizing the state guard, that Trump is commandeering the state,” Chemerinsky said.
He said the Supreme Court has ruled on the 10th Amendment only a handful of times in recent decades, including saying that Congress couldn’t require states to accept federal mandates related to sports betting, background checks for guns and radioactive waste disposal.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
