concern

WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declined to testify Tuesday before a House subcommittee investigating alleged fraud and mismanagement in the region’s homelessness system, but that did not stop her from going after Republican leaders on the panel.

As the hearing began, Bass’ reelection campaign accused “extremist Republicans in Congress” of staging a politically motivated attack on Los Angeles and its efforts to address homelessness, months after the Trump administration attempted to suspend federal funding for the city.

“Los Angeles will not be bullied,” Bass wrote. “Not by this President, and not by this Congress. I’m going to keep doing my job — cleaning up encampments, getting Angelenos inside, and making LA safer.”

Bass had notified Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, on Sept. 4 that she would not be available to testify, but her absence still drew criticism from Burchett, who told The Times he was willing to use the “fullest extent of the law” and possibly issue subpoenas to compel her to testify.

“I’d like to get her in,” he said after the hearing. “I realize that we have elections coming up and she knows that as well as anybody … but I would hope that she would come up here and answer questions.”

Burchett added that there are “legitimate questions” about how federal homelessness funds were used in Los Angeles and what he believes was their mismanagement. In his opening remarks, Burchett said he was concerned about how the city spent federal funds given the ongoing homelessness issue in the area.

“Los Angeles is at the center of American homelessness,” Burchett said, and specifically pointed to Skid Row as an example of the “abject failure” of the city’s approach to homelessness. “Under Mayor Karen Bass, law and order in the neighborhood has collapsed.”

Burchett added that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was “ripe for corruption and financial mismanagement,” and raised concerns about contracts that have been doled out to nonprofits in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas.

Bass had served on LAHSA’s 10-member board since 2023 but stepped down last week, in part citing scheduling issues. Burchett suggested she “suddenly removed herself” from the board to dodge accountability after being asked to testify.

In a letter sent this month, Burchett noted that he wanted to scrutinize how homelessness has gotten worse during her tenure as mayor. David Michaelson, the mayor’s attorney at City Hall, pushed back on Burchett’s assertions, saying unsheltered homelessness in L.A. — the number of people living outside or in their vehicles — has dropped by 11% since Bass took office in 2022.

“She has achieved these results by focusing on interim housing, not ‘Housing First,’ and has also challenged certain ‘Harm Reduction’ strategies that are ineffective,” Michaelson wrote. “For example, Mayor Bass ordered that City contractors no longer provide needles to drug users and instead focus on services that encourage rehabilitation and protection of human life.”

Burchett’s effort to force Bass to testify over concerns about “potential misallocation of federal dollars” by LAHSA is the latest example of congressional Republican leaders trying to examine California’s handling of regional issues and finances. In the last year, Republican have launched investigations into the Palisades wildfire preparations as well as the distribution of charity funds for the victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said Tuesday’s hearing was an “unserious and political show targeting” the most vulnerable Americans and the services they need.

“Housing is a human right, and we’re not going to sit here while you use the housing and homeless crisis of this country to try to cough up whatever you’re trying to do politically before the midterms,” Stansbury said.

During the hearing, Burchett showed a short video of Skid Row, filmed by Jonathan Choe, a MAGA-aligned news influencer, who offered testimony during the hearing as well. Choe mostly focused his testimony on his concerns about substance abuse not being enough of a priority in addressing homelessness.

Paul Webster, a senior fellow at the Cicero Institute and executive director of the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, also testified. Prior to the hearing, he testified in writing that LAHSA — the region’s primary Continuum of Care administrator — has been marked by financial mismanagement and fraud even as its federal funding has grown.

“Los Angeles and its utilization of federal homeless assistance policy is not an outlier,” Webster wrote. “It is the leading edge of a system that lacks accountability, effective monitoring, and prioritizes inputs rather than outcomes.”

Burchett said the panel will continue to take a “good hard look” at homelessness in Los Angeles and other “leftists” cities. He added that he intends to file legislation to require federally funded housing services to offer substance abuse treatment.

Also Tuesday, the LAHSA board voted not to compete with the city and county to keep carrying out many of its core duties, such as operating a homeless database and applying for federal funds on behalf of other agencies.

With L.A. city and county agencies preparing their own applications, a decision to compete with them “would only fracture regional collaboration during an already complex time,” LAHSA said in a statement.

The decision comes a few months after the Trump administration sought to suspend LAHSA from applying for and receiving federal funds. The agency sued to block that effort, winning a partial victory in federal court. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that decision on appeal.

In response to the suspension and the ongoing legal battle, the federally mandated board that contracted with LAHSA for those functions put next year’s contract out to bid, forcing the agency to compete.

LAHSA, already diminished by the county’s decision last year to divert its homelessness funds to a new county homelessness department, now retains contracts for programs in the city. But Bass has said the city needs to take over those as well.

Ceballos reported from Washington, Smith from Los Angeles.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is brushing aside growing concern among leading scientists and bipartisan lawmakers that artificial intelligence could soon pose an existential threat to humanity, fueling anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley that the president may not fully grasp the urgency of the threat.

Alarm mounted throughout the summer as researchers at leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, found the pace of development far outstripping their expectations — and observed troubling behaviors that hinted at more serious risks ahead.

But an online warning Tuesday from an Anthropic researcher who resigned in protest of its ongoing work has generated viral attention this week, prompting questions to Trump, who dismissed the concerns out of hand.

“It’s going to be fine,” he told one reporter. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom.”

In another exchange, traveling with reporters Thursday night, the president said he had no concerns with the breakneck pace of AI progress.

“No, I don’t have any,” he said. “I have concerns that if we don’t win in AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position.”

A senior industry source told The Times that leading AI companies are focused less on convincing the president of the dangers ahead than on working with lawmakers on potential regulation, as the administration remains divided over how to proceed — and as Trump appears to lack a clear understanding of the risks.

Among the president’s advisors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Office of the National Cyber Director have expressed the greatest concern with the potential of an unchecked intelligence explosion, the source said.

But “most of the administration is accelerationist,” the source added. “It’s not clear the president understands the technology. He may just be figuring out what all of this means.”

Leading American AI companies have argued that government regulation would tie their hands in an arms race toward superintelligence against China, the only other major player in the field.

But the Trump administration signaled an interest in negotiating AI guardrails with China during the president’s visit to Beijing this spring, after Anthropic announced the development of a frontier model with extraordinary abilities to hack the world’s most advanced security systems.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington on Sept. 24 for an official summit and state dinner at the White House, with AI development expected to top the agenda.

The prospect of halting development seems far-fetched. But some leading voices in the sector have proposed a moratorium on computing power used to train the most advanced models, giving time and space to develop research on interpretability — the study of how artificial intelligence actually thinks and acts.

The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, this week signaled to staff a willingness to unilaterally slow their work on frontier systems. The company discovered in July that rogue AI agents had schemed in secret to break out of the virtual sandbox created to contain them, infiltrating the open internet and hacking a private company.

Anthropic also announced this week concerning findings of human misuse of its models, including instances of unidentified individuals attempting to circumvent their security controls to build biological weapons. One such incident was linked back to a military research complex. The company also said Iran has tried to use its models to target U.S. Navy ships.

In June, after Anthropic shared news of the development of its most powerful model, named Mythos, with the administration, Trump directed the establishment of a framework that creates some government oversight over the public release of the country’s most advanced AI systems. The details of that framework, which was designed over the summer, remain classified.

“The fact is that the release of Mythos back in February spooked the federal government, both in terms of protecting government systems from cyberattacks and over the broader national security implications,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The real question is whether this shift is happening fast enough,” Mehta added. “Recent events — the repeated incidents of models escaping their sandboxes and hacking websites, the increasingly sophisticated coordination and communication among agents, and the concerns coming from lab insiders — has made this an even more urgent issue.”

Leading AI companies have begun using their most advanced models to train new ones — a process known as recursive self-improvement that could eventually drive intelligence growth beyond human control.

“If you have a superadvanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us,” said Jacob Coxon, the resigned Anthropic researcher whose social media post attracted over 150 million views.

“We can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers,” he told CBS News. “AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place, and then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there. And maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating.”

He is just the latest senior researcher at a top AI company to sound the alarm.

In July, more than 1,300 employees at leading artificial intelligence companies published an open letter, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” urging the U.S. government to establish international safeguards that would allow countries to collectively slow the pace of automated AI research.

Evan Hubinger, who leads the division of Anthropic aimed at aligning AI models to human interests, added fuel to concerns this week in a post that substantiated Coxon’s concerns.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best,” he added, “but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence, and are not clearly on track to.”

On Friday, yet another member of the Anthropic alignment team, Joe Benton, said he had resigned from the company two weeks ago because AI companies are “racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human.”

“Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing,” Benton said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks.”

Bipartisan legislation, titled the Frontier Act, has brought together disparate camps of the Republican and Democratic parties, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.). The bill, introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), proposes embedding independent government auditors in AI labs and installing a federal “kill switch” to shut down agents in case of emergencies.

The White House has not formally commented on the legislation.

“I do believe there are many in the federal government taking this seriously — but we have to appreciate the tremendous uncertainty and competing interests policymakers face,” said Daniel Remler, a senior fellow with the Technology & National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Nobody says regulating at the frontier would be easy,” he added.

SACRAMENTO — Long the epicenter of the global tech industry, California is taking more action to shield its children, communities and workers from the threats posed by the very industry that’s become central to the state’s identity and enviable economy.

State lawmakers on Monday passed new safeguards around social media and artificial intelligence — and are poised to approve restrictions on data centers — at a time when technology has become intertwined with people’s daily lives.

Efforts to rein in the power of Big Tech extend beyond concerns that TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms are harming young children.

Unions and workers worry that AI will take their jobs, and lawmakers are trying to tackle privacy and safety issues as AI features get added into smart glasses and toys. Californians are concerned that the proliferation of data centers will increase their electricity bills and strain water supplies.

“There’s a heightened level of tech anxiety right now, and that manifests itself from social media to data centers to AI taking jobs,” said Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach). “People are coalescing and they’re demanding that policymakers make change.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has previously vetoed some bills aimed at adding restrictions on Silicon Valley businesses, will still have to weigh in on whether to sign the pieces of legislation into law.

The Democratic governor has acknowledged the challenge of adopting regulations that protect the public without going too far and potentially stifling the technology industry’s growth, which brings critical revenue to the state budget.

“I think that’s the constant tension,” Newsom said in an interview earlier this summer. “We’re constantly sort of fighting that balance.”

The governor, who has close relationships in the technology industry from his time in San Francisco, said only a couple other states have attempted to regulate artificial intelligence like California. The state, he said, leads on regulation of social media.

“We’re not rolling over, certainly,” Newsom said. “We’re leaning forward, and we’re iterating. We will push the boundaries and litigate.”

The looming restrictions on social media follow a landmark Meta Platforms legal settlement aimed at making social media safer for young people. Parents, politicians and child advocacy groups are worried that social media is contributing to depression, anxiety, eating disorders and other issues.

The actions being pushed in the California legislature are more sweeping than that settlement, however. One of the bills passed by lawmakers on Monday, Assembly Bill 1709, would bar certain online platforms from providing an “addictive feature” to users under 16 years old and add ways to verify users’ ages.

Under the bill, prohibited addictive features include autoplay and feeds that display recommended content.

The addictive nature of autoplay and other features is “harmful, full stop, and that they’re not appropriate for the developing brain,” said Lowenthal, who authored the bill.

After watching technology “run free” in California for years, legislators are now seeking to “pump the brakes a little bit,” said Samantha Vigil, a UC Davis researcher who built a registry tracking social media legislation in states across the country.

“They want to reevaluate what is working,” said Vigil. “What is healthy and beneficial, and what is progress just for the sake of having a new iteration of something?”

All 50 states have introduced or passed some type of digital media or technology-related legislation, tackling smartphone use in schools, social media and chatbots, Vigil said.

Other countries have taken more stringent steps to limit social media use among young people. Australia banned social media use for those under 16, but enforcing the law has been challenging because young people have tried to get around the restrictions.

California isn’t trying to ban social media; instead, it’s trying to limit how platforms design their features.

Parents and state attorneys general have not waited for policy makers to act. They have sued Meta, Google and other tech companies over the alleged harms their products have done to young people.

In late August, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay up to $17 billion and make child-safety changes to resolve a multi-state lawsuit alleging the tech company designed and deployed harmful features while misleading the public about potential harms. Meta and YouTube also lost a social media addiction lawsuit earlier this year in Los Angeles.

Assembly Bill 1709 goes further. For example, Meta’s settlement gives teens the option to pick a non-algorithmic feed and turn off autoplay but, unlike in the legislation, it’s not mandatory. The bill would also apply to other platforms outside of Meta. Meta declined to comment.

Tech industry and business group opposing the bill say it is too blunt and could cut off access to social media’s benefits, according to the bill’s analysis.

“The durable path is to enforce the targeted laws California already has and to strengthen parental tools rather than an overlapping framework whose scope can be redrawn by regulation,” said Robert Boykin, TechNet’s Executive Director for California and the Southwest.

California lawmakers passed another Lowenthal bill aimed at holding social media liable for harm caused to children. Under Assembly Bill 2, social media companies could face fines of up to $1 million per child for negligent harm.

California lawmakers this year also attempted to tackle two other perils of the technological world — the rapid development and implementation of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of the massive data centers that are essential to sustaining the AI universe.

National and state union leaders have urged California legislators and Newsom to protect workers from the threats of AI to replace workers, saying it posed an existential threat to the foundation of a healthy, productive democracy.

“AI must remain a tool controlled by humans, not the other way around,” said Sen. Jerry McNerney (D-Pleasanton).

The state Legislature on Monday approved McNerney’s bill, Senate Bill 947, which would bar employers from “solely” using automated decision-making systems to discipline or fire employees. If an employer primarily relies upon this system, a human must verify the decision.

Lawmakers also approved Senate Bill 951, introduced by Sen. Eloise Gomez Reyes (D-Colton), which would require employers to provide a 60-day advance notice to workers and local and state governments before AI-related layoffs. Lawmakers also approved Assembly Bill 1609, which requires large private businesses that serve customers to provide access to human customer service representatives and to disclose to use of chatbots.

They passed another bill by Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) that enacts a four-year moratorium on the sale and manufacturing of AI-chatbot powered toys over concerns that the technology can harm children.

On Friday, lawmakers agreed on a compromise on proposed legislation to regulate energy use by California’s growing data center industry, measures prompted by community fears about the massive complexes. Lawmakers say the legislation would help protect consumers from growing electricity costs driven upward by the sprawling facilities and to track the centers’ immense energy and water consumption.

At a June hearing on Senate Bill 886 to regulate data centers’ energy use, Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo (D-Chatsworth) said it’s just “a handful of companies that are gonna make trillions of dollars” from AI. They should pay for related utility infrastructure upgrades, she added.

“People, I would argue, are not even begging to use AI,” she said. “They’re struggling to figure it out to keep up with the times, but don’t even really want it.”

The California legislature is expected to vote on two of the bills to regulate the controversial industry within the next day.

Whether Newsom will embrace the legislature’s efforts to corral big Tech in California — in part of in whole — remains unclear.

Newsom last year vetoed a similar AI bill from McNerney to ban automated decision-making systems to discipline employees over worries that it could restrict companies’ ability to use customer ratings. That element was dropped in this year’s legislation.

Newsom last year signed Assembly Bill 56 that required social media platforms to display mental health warning labels to users under 18 starting in January 2027. But he also vetoed Senate Bill 771 that aimed to hold social media platforms liable if they amplified content that contributed to hate crimes and other violent acts, saying that the legislation was “premature” and current civil rights laws might be adequate.

Lowenthal said he’s heard from California families who are anxious about social media and seeking “relief” from their concerns about how the platforms are affecting their children.

“This is a kitchen-table topic,” he said. “I’ve yet to find a family with school-age children in the state of California, any corner of the state, that is not going through this right now.”

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

New headlines this week are raising concerns for parents of high school football players.

According to a study published from researchers at Mass General Brigham, Boston University and the Concussion & CTE Foundation, one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 might have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). There were 338 brains donated to study, and 315 of them had evidence of CTE, a brain disorder that can happen because of repeated injuries to the head.

Allan Walsh, a sports agent and lawyer, said in a tweet: “This is a crisis.”

Parents have previously debated among themselves the risks and rewards in letting a son or daughter play a contact sport, but this new study regarding football head injuries is once again going to rattle, if not cause a retreat, from some allowing family members to participate in football.

“It causes concern,” said Mike Hamilton, a former high school football and basketball coach who has a son playing football at Chatsworth High. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Do I want him to play?’ I’m apprehensive. He has a passion for the game. He’s conscience about his health. What gives me relief is knowing that practices are going well. There are protocols parents should abide by. We didn’t let our son play football until he got to high school because of the hits.”

Tim Moscicki, an athletic trainer at Loyola High for 38 years, said much has changed for the better in protecting football players from concussions and other head injuries. He said new policies, improved equipment, a focus on tackling fundamentals and new protocols are all having an impact.

Loyola athletic trainer Tim Moscicki doing baselining of students in 2014 to help diagnose concussions.

(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)

He remembers the days when coaches would say, “He got his bell rung.” The player would sit out a few plays, then get put back in. Now that term is barred from everyone’s vocabulary. New rules requiring players to sit out a minimum of seven days following a concussion while needing clearance from a doctor to return and tackling restrictions put in during weekly practices show the CIF is taking CTE concerns in a serious matter for high school sports.

“To me. football has gotten a lot safer,” Moscicki said. “Right now, given what’s in place, it’s safe to play football. Kids are being held out now when they develop any kind of symptom. Back in 1990, if a kid had a concussion and they were free of symptoms for 24 hours, we’d give them their helmet back, ‘You can play.’

“My thing it’s still up to parents if they want their sons to play football. My youngest played football, oldest played lacrosse. There’s always a risk. There’s a risk riding a bike. There’s risk playing baseball. It’s a just a little higher in the full-contact sports. The standards have changed so much. There really wasn’t a return to play protocol in the ‘70s ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Moscicki was one of the first high school athletic trainers to do baselining of all students, giving them tests of their balance and brain functions so it can be used and compared with a similar exam if the student is suspected of having a concussion. Loyola also started a return-to-school program because students with concussions have headaches that also affects their school work.

Parents must understand “you cannot prevent a concussion,” Moscicki said.

“If you get hit hard enough, there’s nothing out there that would 100% prevent a concussion,” he said. “A concussion happens as a result of your brain hitting the inside of your skull.”

The good news is everyone seems to be endorsing funding research into head injuries, including the NFL. It’s still too early to conclude where the research is headed.

That’s where parental choice comes into play.

“Football is a sport,” Moscicki said. “You don’t have to play it. You don’t have to watch it.”

And yet, the Super Bowl is the most watched annual television broadcast in the United States, with lots of monetary rewards for those who participate.

There are many challenges ahead. Pierce College and Orange Coast College paused their junior college football programs this year for lack of players. Junior varsity programs at lots of high schools have been discontinued for lack of players. A CIF participation survey for 2025-26 found 11-man football is the most popular boys sport with 87,718 participants, a drop of 4% from last school year.

“Anything that’s a contact sport runs a risk,” Hamilton said. “You want to protect your son.”

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche’s fidelity to President Trump nearly cost him his confirmation. Now comes Blanche’s real test.

Trump’s former personal attorney has stepped into the commanding role facing a challenge that other leaders of the Republican president’s Department of Justice could not overcome: threading the needle between Trump’s boundary-busting demands and a prosecutor’s duty to uphold the rule of law. At the same time, Blanche must try to stabilize a workforce shaken by an exodus of experienced lawyers and an erosion of trust in the judicial branch.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press during a trip to Puerto Rico this week, Blanche promised to lead the department with integrity, dismissing concerns from critics who say his actions so far — including an indictment against longtime Trump foe and former FBI Director James Comey — call into question whether Blanche is still functioning as Trump’s personal lawyer.

A slew of ongoing politically charged investigations under Blanche’s watch could force him to choose between his long-standing loyalty to the president and the foundational principles of the Cabinet agency he leads. At stake is the fate of a department already reeling under a president who has made clear his desire for retribution over the criminal scrutiny he faced.

“My integrity, my commitment to the rule of law is the same today that it was the day I graduated,” Blanche told the AP when asked where he would draw the line on requests from the White House. “I would never do anything unethical or improper or violate my oath, no matter the circumstances.”

Critics disagree.

As acting attorney general, Blanche came under fire from lawmakers, including many Republicans, for signing off on a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate Trump’s allies who believed they were politically prosecuted. He also greenlit a deal that granted Trump, the Trump Organization, and two of his sons immunity from tax audits. Those moves, unusual steps aimed at granting the president and his allies far-reaching benefits, put Blanche’s confirmation at risk, prompting key senators to express concern.

Blanche, like Trump’s other attorneys general, walks a tightrope

In the AP interview, Blanche addressed criticism of the department under his leadership, his priorities as attorney general and losses the administration has had in high-profile cases. He also depicted the Justice Department as an institution whose independence had eroded long ago — a characterization at odds with decades of fierce autonomy that challenged the highest echelons of power in Washington and beyond.

Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in New York, is walking the same tightrope as Trump’s three other Senate-confirmed attorneys general. They found their pledges to uphold the rule of law and the department’s ethical norms at odds with the president’s demands to bend the institution to his will.

During Trump’s first term, one attorney general infuriated Trump over his withdrawal from an investigation into Trump’s winning White House campaign and was forced out. Another submitted his resignation weeks after breaking with Trump over Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Blanche’s immediate predecessor, Pam Bondi, was ousted in April after failing to deliver successful prosecutions against the president’s political enemies.

Blanche’s narrow confirmation this month over opposition from two Republican senators underscored growing concerns about the dismantling of the Justice Department’s long-standing tradition of independence from the White House, which is meant to protect the impartiality of politically sensitive investigations and prosecutions.

Concerns that the Justice Department is being weaponized

Blanche bristles at the suggestion that the Justice Department should be independent of the president and he has made clear his view that the executive has both the power and the right to shape and control the law enforcement agency.

He has staunchly defended the integrity of cases the administration has brought against the president’s perceived political opponents, often pointing to his own experience representing Trump in criminal cases brought by Democratic President Joe Biden’s Justice Department. Blanche and the president have characterized those cases as politically motivated.

“I think attorneys general and others have said, ‘Oh, we’re independent.’ I don’t think that’s actually true,” Blanche told the AP.

Blanche claimed the Justice Department was not truly independent when he was a federal prosecutor or during the Biden administration. But that characterization ignores the fact that under Biden, the Justice Department investigated Biden himself over his handling of classified documents and secured felony charges in two separate cases against his son Hunter before Biden pardoned him.

The two criminal cases filed by special counsel Jack Smith against Trump were based on allegations, supported by long-running investigations, that Trump had classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and obstructed government efforts to get them back, and conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

Growing distrust of the Justice Department among judges

Blanche has sought to highlight the administration’s focus on tackling illegal immigration, violent crime and drug-trafficking cartels, spotlighting cases such as the takedown of a Puerto Rican gang that he announced during his visit to the U.S. island territory.

But Blanche’s policy priorities are often overshadowed by a growing number of investigations that have drawn criticism that the department is being used as a weapon in the president’s campaign of retribution.

Blanche’s supporters have argued that the close relationship he developed with Trump while serving as his criminal defense lawyer can make him more effective at pushing back on or explaining the legal constraints of the president’s demands. Others wonder whether he will fare any better than Bondi up against the same skeptical court system, and factual and legal hurdles, that impeded efforts to deliver the sought-after results.

Blanche is also confronting growing distrust of the Justice Department among judges, who in multiple cases have accused government lawyers of withholding information or misleading courts. Courts in some cases have quashed subpoenas or ordered the review of grand jury transcripts, and the criminal cases against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were dismissed after a judge found the prosecutor who brought them was illegally appointed.

But Blanche played down concerns that the erosion of judicial trust could impede his efforts to advance his agenda.

“The isolated incidents that make the news are not reflective of the way the bench feels in my view, or the way prosecutors are doing their job around the country,” Blanche said.

Richer writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pitching a plan to help shield local police officers who make immigration arrests from possible financial consequences if they are accused of on-duty misconduct.

The agency is proposing to subsidize liability insurance for state and local officers who are trained and deputized to enforce federal immigration laws, according to a planning document published Friday.

ICE’s partnerships with local departments have soared since President Trump returned to the White House last year and may get an additional boost with liability insurance by removing a hurdle that has made some local police departments reluctant to join. The Associated Press is the first to report on this insurance proposal.

Under the plan, officers would purchase insurance covering up to $500,000 in personal liability, which typically funds legal fees, settlements and judgments. Officers would be reimbursed up to $250 annually — roughly what the insurance is expected to cost.

One prominent critic of ICE’s immigration crackdown said the program would be yet another way for officers to avoid personal accountability for misconduct.

“The concern here is that ICE is going above and beyond to guarantee law enforcement does not have even the slightest risk of liability for violating Americans’ rights while helping ICE arrest people,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, who has called on Congress to make it easier to sue ICE agents for wrongdoing.

ICE outlined the plan in a document informing industry officials that it is considering hiring a contractor to help provide outreach, training and communications support for its so-called 287(g) partnerships with local departments, which are named for a section of a 1996 immigration law. The contractor would hire the insurance vendor and process the reimbursements, among other tasks.

ICE has asked for industry feedback by Thursday. The proposed timeline for launching the program and its estimated cost are unclear.

ICE had no immediate comment on the plan.

Arrests by ICE’s local partners have spiked since last year

During Trump’s second term, ICE has offered generous financial incentives to participating local agencies, increasing the number who have partnered with the federal government, as well as the number of arrests.

Nearly 1,600 agencies in 32 states now have agreements to participate in ICE’s task force model, in which trained local officers can interrogate, arrest and charge people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to ICE data.

Departments qualify for funding to help cover expenses like their officers’ pay, equipment and vehicles. With encouragement from state and local Republican officials, agencies in Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia have been among the leaders.

Arrests made through such programs jumped to an average of 3,000 per month in the first two months of 2026, according to the most recent ICE data provided to the University of California Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. That compares to a monthly average of 250 in 2024 under President Biden.

Local departments, officers worried about liability for ICE work

As local officers increasingly carry out federal immigration work, they and their departments have expressed concerns about the civil liability that could result from claims alleging excessive use of force, wrongful arrest and illegal search and seizure, among other things.

That’s because insurance policies that cover their local work may not apply. Pennsylvania’s risk pool, for instance, recently made clear that it would exclude “proactive immigration enforcement activities” from coverage, forcing several participating counties to search for other insurance options.

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said he found insurance to cover his 13 deputies participating in the program at a cost of $20,000 in annual premiums.

“I want to make sure the guys are additionally covered, so we had to spend the money,” he said, adding that federal funding would cover the cost.

Federal officers usually enjoy legal immunities and a government-funded defense when they face lawsuits. But those protections may not always apply to local officers, which has heightened their concerns over liability and the need for insurance.

Although civil lawsuits are the main concern, professional liability insurance typically helps cover legal fees for officers facing criminal investigations as well.

Sheriffs’ group says ICE’s insurance idea sounds promising

Justin Smith, a former Colorado sheriff who is executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Assn., said ICE’s plan sounds promising and that he was eager to speak with ICE about how the plan would work.

Smith said he has shared concerns with ICE that some sheriffs are reluctant to join the partnerships because of the potential liability at a time when immigration enforcement faces intense public protests and media scrutiny. Smith said others who are partnering with ICE have already started facing legal claims tied to their immigration work, which can be costly whether or not deputies are ultimately found to have done anything wrong.

“Right now, any time you are working on immigration there is going to be a much higher potential for there being problems and having suits and issues,” he said. “They’re recognizing that it is a different environment. And I think trying to be good partners with us as best they can.”

Under their agreements, ICE warns local departments that they are responsible for the costs of incidents that give rise to liability. But it seeks to reduce the risk by saying local officers performing ICE-authorized functions are “acting under color of federal authority,” which would bar lawsuits against individual officers.

The agreements also state that local officers who face civil lawsuits can ask the U.S. Department of Justice to represent them, and that ICE will generally support their requests. But the final decision on whether to do so rests with the department.

Foley writes for the Associated Press.