criminal charge

More than a month after he was arrested on suspicion of felony assault with a deadly weapon with great bodily injury, UCLA backup quarterback Pierce Clarkson has taken a major step toward being able to resolve his case while avoiding charges altogether.

After the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office referred the case to the L.A. City Attorney for possible misdemeanor consideration, the latter agency has decided to handle the matter via a city attorney hearing, according to Ivor Pine, deputy director of communications for the City Attorney.

A city attorney hearing is an informal proceeding that allows individuals who face certain misdemeanors to resolve their situation with a hearing officer without a criminal filing.

The resolution of such hearings, including conditions imposed to remediate and rehabilitate, are fact-dependent and vary matter to matter, according to Pine. If the participant successfully complies with the conditions, the case is diverted and no charges are filed. If the participant fails to comply, then criminal charges may be filed.

A UCLA athletic department spokesperson said Tuesday evening that there was no update on Clarkson’s status with the team. He had been suspended from all team activities pending the resolution of legal proceedings after his Sept. 5 arrest.

Before his suspension, Clarkson had been one of the top backups to quarterback Nico Iamaleava. The son of quarterback guru Steve Clarkson, Pierce Clarkson had transferred to UCLA this offseason after having spent last spring at Mississippi. The former St. John Bosco High standout spent his first two college seasons at Louisville, where he played sparingly.

Luke Duncan has been UCLA’s top backup in Clarkson’s absence, playing briefly at the end of the Bruins’ victory over Michigan State.

They called them the “worst of the worst.” For more than a month and a half, the Trump administration has posted a barrage of mugshots of L.A. undocumented immigrants with long rap sheets.

Officials have spotlighted Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man convicted in 1997 of second–degree murder for his role in slaying two teens at a high school graduation party.

They have shared blurry photos on Instagram of a slew of convicted criminals such as Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted in 1996 of sexual penetration with a foreign object with force and assault with intent to commit a felony. And Eswin Uriel Castro, a Mexican convicted in 2002 of child molestation and in 2021 of assault with a deadly weapon.

But the immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security showcase in X posts and news releases do not represent the majority of immigrants swept up across Los Angeles.

As the number of immigration arrests in the L.A. region quadrupled from 540 in April to 2,185 in June, seven out of 10 immigrants arrested in June had no criminal conviction — a trend that immigrant advocates say belies administration claims that they are targeting “heinous illegal alien criminals” who represent a threat to public safety.

According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of ICE data from the Deportation Data Project, the proportion of immigrants without criminal convictions arrested in seven counties in and around L.A. has skyrocketed from 35% in April, to 46% in May, and to 69% from June 1 to June 26.

Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement, said the Trump administration was not being entirely honest about the criminal status of those they were arresting.

Officials, he said, followed a strategy of focusing on the minority of violent convicted criminals so they could justify enforcement policies that are proving to be less popular.

“I think they know that if they were honest with the American public that they’re arresting people who cook our food, wash dishes in the kitchen, take care of people in nursing homes, people who are just living in part of the community … there’s a large segment of the public, including a large segment of Trump’s own supporters, who would be uncomfortable and might even oppose those kinds of immigration practices.”

In Los Angeles, the raids swept up garment worker Jose Ortiz, who worked 18 years at the Ambiance Apparel clothing warehouse in downtown L.A., before being nabbed in a June 6 raid; car wash worker Jesus Cruz, a 52-year-old father who was snatched on June 8 — just before his daughter’s graduation — from Westchester Hand Wash; and Emma De Paz, a recent widow and tamale vendor from Guatemala who was arrested June 19 outside a Hollywood Home Depot.

Such arrests may be influencing the public’s perception of the raids. Multiple polls show support for Trump’s immigration agenda slipping as masked federal agents increasingly swoop up undocumented immigrants from workplaces and streets.

ICE data shows that about 31% of the immigrants arrested across the L.A. region from June 1 to June 26 had criminal convictions, 11% had pending criminal charges and 58% were classified as “other immigration violator,” which ICE defines as “individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE’s system of record at the time of the enforcement action.”

The L.A. region’s surge in arrests of noncriminals has been more dramatic than the U.S. as a whole: Arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions climbed nationally from 57% in April to 69% in June.

Federal raids here have also been more fiercely contested in Southern California — particularly in L.A. County, where more than 2 million residents are undocumented or living with undocumented family members.

“A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. “But it’s hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you’re going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.”

Trump never said he would arrest only criminals.

Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally.

Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: “That doesn’t mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation’s borders are off the table.”

As White House chief advisor on border policy Tom Homan put it: “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem.”

Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE’s top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record.

Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals.

“There aren’t enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,” Bier said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there’s half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It’s not millions and millions.”

By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants.

“70% of ICE arrests,” the agency said in a news release, “are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.”

But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June.

In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge.

Still, ICE kept insisting it was “putting the worst first.”

As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump’s deportation agenda is falling.

A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump’s handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said “dangerous criminals.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles.

“The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. “They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.”

When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law.

“ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,” Homan told CBS News earlier this month. “We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they’re going to be arrested too.”

Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety.

“It’s a big backtracking from ‘These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,’ to ‘This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,’” Bier said.

The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California.

It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its “sanctuary state” law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson.

Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. “Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, “those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation’s safety and security.”

As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not “What does the data say?”

Instead, we should ask: “How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?”

“I don’t think it’s reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals — or everyone as saints,” Kocher said. “Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.”

The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction.

“If we don’t like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,” Kocher said. “And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.”

In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion’s pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force.

But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole.

A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled “President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won’t.”

The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder.

CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody.

But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose.

“It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

NASHVILLE — Kilmar Abrego Garcia will remain in jail for at least a few more days while attorneys in the federal smuggling case against him spar over whether lawyers have the ability to prevent Abrego Garcia’s deportation if he is released to await trial.

The Salvadoran national whose mistaken deportation became a tinderbox in the fight over President Trump’s immigration policies has been in jail since he was returned to the U.S. on June 7, facing two counts of human smuggling.

Although a federal judge has ruled that he has a right to be released and even set specific conditions for his release, his attorneys expressed concern that it would lead to immediate detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deportation.

On Sunday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ruled that Abrego Garcia does not have to remain in jail before that trial. On Wednesday afternoon, she will set his conditions of his release and allow him to go, according to her order. However, his defense attorneys and prosecutors have said they expect him to be taken into custody by ICE as soon as he is released on the criminal charges.

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said during a news conference before Wednesday’s scheduled court hearing that it’s been 106 days since he “was abducted by the Trump administration and separated from our family.” She noted that he has missed family birthdays, graduations and Father’s Day, while “today he misses our wedding anniversary.”

Vasquez Sura said their love, their faith in God and an abundance of community support have helped them persevere.

“Kilmar should never have been taken away from us,” she said. “This fight has been the hardest thing in my life.”

Federal prosecutors are appealing Holmes’ release order. Among other things, they expressed concern in a motion filed Sunday that Abrego Garcia could be deported before he faces trial. Holmes has said that she won’t step between the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security — it is up to them to decide whether they want to deport Abrego Garcia or prosecute him.

Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty June 13 to smuggling charges that his attorneys have characterized as an attempt to justify his mistaken deportation in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Those charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop for speeding in Tennessee during which Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers. At his detention hearing, Homeland Security special agent Peter Joseph testified that he did not begin investigating Abrego Garcia until April this year.

Holmes said in her Sunday ruling that federal prosecutors failed to show that Abrego Garcia was a flight risk or a danger to the community. He has lived for more than a decade in Maryland, where he and his American wife are raising three children.

However, Holmes referred to her ruling as “little more than an academic exercise,” noting that ICE plans to detain him. It is less clear what will happen after that. Although Abrego Garcia can’t be deported to El Salvador — where an immigration judge found he faces a credible threat from gangs — he is still deportable to a third country as long as that country agrees to not send him to El Salvador.

Loller writes for the Associated Press.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation has become a flashpoint in President Trump’s immigration crackdown, pleaded not guilty on Friday to human smuggling charges in a federal court in Tennessee.

The plea was the first chance the Maryland construction worker has had in a U.S. courtroom to answer the Trump administration’s allegations against him since he was mistakenly deported in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The Republican administration returned Abrego Garcia to the U.S. last week to face criminal charges related to what it said was a human smuggling operation that transported immigrants across the country. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee during which Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers. His lawyers have called the allegations “preposterous.”

Friday’s hearing will also focus on whether Abrego Garcia should be released from jail while awaiting trial on the smuggling charges. A federal judge will hear arguments from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers and attorneys for the U.S. government.

Before the hearing began in Nashville, Abrego Garcia’s wife told a crowd outside a church that Thursday marked three months since the Trump administration “abducted and disappeared my husband and separated him from our family.”

Her voice choked with emotion, Jennifer Vasquez Sura said she saw her husband for the first time on Thursday. She said, “Kilmar wants you to have faith,” and asked the people supporting him and his family “‘to continue fighting, and I will be victorious because God is with us.’”

Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who had been living in the United States for more than a decade before he was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration. The expulsion violated a 2019 U.S. immigration judge’s order that shielded him from deportation to his native country because he likely faced gang persecution there.

While the Trump administration described the mistaken removal as “an administrative error,” officials have continued to justify it by insisting Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His wife and attorneys have denied the allegations, saying he’s simply a construction worker and family man.

U.S. attorneys have asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes to keep Abrego Garcia in jail, describing him as a danger to the community and a flight risk. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys disagree, pointing out he was already wrongly detained in a notorious Salvadoran prison thanks to government error and arguing due process and “basic fairness” require him to be set free.

The charges against Abrego Garcia are human smuggling. But in their request to keep Abrego Garcia in jail, U.S. attorneys also accuse him of trafficking drugs and firearms and of abusing the women he transported, among other claims, although he is not charged with such crimes.

The U.S. attorneys also accuse Abrego Garcia of taking part in a murder in El Salvador. However, none of those allegations is part of the charges against him, and at his initial appearance June 6, the judge warned prosecutors she cannot detain someone based solely on allegations.

One of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys last week characterized the claims as a desperate attempt by the Trump administration to justify the mistaken deportation three months after the fact.

“There’s no way a jury is going to see the evidence and agree that this sheet metal worker is the leader of an international MS-13 smuggling conspiracy,” private attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

In a Wednesday court filing, Abrego Garcia’s public defenders argued the government is not even entitled to a detention hearing — much less detention — because the charges against him aren’t serious enough.

Although the maximum sentence for smuggling one person is 10 years, and Abrego Garcia is accused of transporting hundreds of people over nearly a decade, his defense attorneys point out there’s no minimum sentence. The average sentence for human smuggling in 2024 was just 15 months, according to court filings.

The decision to charge Abrego Garcia criminally prompted the resignation of Ben Schrader, who was chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee. He posted about his departure on social media on the day of the indictment, writing, “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”

He did not directly address the indictment and declined to comment when reached by The Associated Press. However, a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter confirmed the connection.

Although Abrego Garcia lives in Maryland, he’s being charged in Tennessee based on a May 2022 traffic stop for speeding in the state. The Tennessee Highway Patrol body camera video of the encounter that was released to the public last month shows a calm exchange between officers and Abrego Garcia. It also shows the officers discussing among themselves their suspicions of human smuggling before sending him on his way. One of the officers says, “He’s hauling these people for money.” Another says Abrego Garcia had $1,400 in an envelope.

Abrego Garcia was not charged with any offense at the traffic stop. Sandoval-Moshenberg, the private attorney, said in a statement after the video’s release that he saw no evidence of a crime in the footage.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit over Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation isn’t over. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have asked a federal judge in Maryland to impose fines against the Trump administration for contempt, arguing that it flagrantly ignored court orders forseveral weeks to return him. The Trump administration said it will ask the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it followed the judge’s order to return him to the U.S.

Loller, Mattise and Finley write for the Associated Press. Finley reported from Norfolk, Va.

WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation to El Salvador became a political flashpoint in the Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement, was being returned to the United States to face criminal charges related to what the Trump administration said was a massive human smuggling operation that brought immigrants into the country illegally.

He is expected to be prosecuted in the U.S. and, if convicted, will be returned to his home country in El Salvador at the conclusion of the case, officials said Friday.

“This is what American justice looks like,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said Friday in announcing the return of Abrego Garcia and the criminal charges.

The charges stem from a 2022 vehicle stop in which the Tennessee Highway Patrol suspected him of human trafficking. A report released by the Department of Homeland Security in April states that none of the people in the vehicle had luggage, while they listed the same address as Abrego Garcia.

Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime, and the officers allowed him to drive on with only a warning about an expired driver’s license, according to the Homeland Security report. The report said he was traveling from Texas to Maryland, via Missouri, to bring in people to perform construction work.

In response to the report’s release in April, Abrego Garcia’s wife said in a statement that he sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, “so it’s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle. He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing.”

The Trump administration has been publicizing Abrego Garcia’s interactions with police over the years, despite a lack of corresponding criminal charges, while it faces a federal court order and calls from some in Congress to return him to the U.S.

Authorities in Tennessee released video of a 2022 traffic stop last month. The body-camera footage shows a calm and friendly exchange with Tennessee Highway Patrol officers.

Officers then discussed among themselves their suspicions of human trafficking because nine people were traveling without luggage. One of the officers said, “He’s hauling these people for money.” Another said he had $1,400 in an envelope.

An attorney for Abrego Garcia, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said in a statement after the footage’s release in May that he saw no evidence of a crime in the released footage.

“But the point is not the traffic stop — it’s that Mr. Abrego Garcia deserves his day in court,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

The move comes days after the Trump administration complied with a court order to return a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico despite his fears of being harmed there. The man, identified in court papers as O.C.G, was the first person known to have been returned to U.S. custody after deportation since the start of President Trump’s second term.