Seventy percent of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state history have occurred since fall 2017, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
To understand the pace and extent of rebuilding in the most significant of these fires, The Times relied on data from state and local governments.
The Times obtained data in February from the Cal Fire Damage Inspection Database, known as DINS, which documents buildings burned in wildfires. We filtered for residential structures — single-residence, multiple-residence and mixed-use commercial/residential — that were destroyed.
We limited our reporting to fires that destroyed 1,000 or more residential structures during this period — aside from January’s Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County. There were five: Tubbs (2017), Carr (2018), Camp (2018), Woolsey (2018) and North Complex (2020).
The Times analysis showed 22,438 residential structures burned in the five fires. About 75% were single-family homes, 23% were mobile homes and fewer than 2% were apartment, condominium or other multifamily buildings. Because of data limitations, a multifamily building was counted as one residential structure no matter how many units it had. In its reporting, The Times used “residential structure” and “home” interchangeably.
The fires destroyed homes across 16 local jurisdictions. To determine when and how many homes were rebuilt, The Times in March and April collected certificate of occupancy data from building departments in each community. Additionally, The Times accessed data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which regulates mobile home parks.
Using GIS software, The Times plotted coordinates in the Cal Fire data to match each destroyed structure to the city or county responsible for issuing a permit to rebuild it. From there, The Times merged assessor parcel numbers of destroyed homes from the Cal Fire data with those of rebuilt homes from local and state building data obtained from each jurisdiction. Finally, The Times summarized certificates of occupancy issued by day to plot the reconstruction timeline for each fire. For uniformity, the results are limited to homes approved prior to April 1.
The Times deviated from its methodology for a specific situation. The Tubbs fire destroyed a 162-lot mobile home park in Santa Rosa. Two apartment buildings for low-income senior citizens together comprising 132 units have been built on the site. Given that the Times analysis designated 162 mobile homes as destroyed, the analysis was adjusted to count the 132 replacement apartment units.
Overall, the analysis concluded that 8,420 homes have been rebuilt, 38% of those destroyed in the five fires.
The Times results could differ from reports published by some jurisdictions for two reasons: Local jurisdictions may have conducted more rigorous inventories of destroyed buildings than detailed in the Cal Fire DINS data and their rebuilding numbers can be continuously updated.
President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that would allow hugely popular social video app TikTok to continue to operate in the United States.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, had been under pressure to divest its ownership in the app’s U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban, due to security concerns over the company’s ties to China.
Congress passed legislation calling for a TikTok ban to go into effect in January, but Trump has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the country.
Under an agreement that Trump said was approved by China’s President Xi Jinping, TikTok’s U.S. operations will be operated through a joint venture run by a majority-American investor group. ByteDance and its affiliates would hold less than 20% ownership in the venture.
About 170 million Americans use TikTok, known for its viral entertaining videos.
“These safeguards would protect the American people from the misuse of their data and the influence of a foreign adversary, while also allowing the millions of American viewers, creators, and businesses that rely on the TikTok application to continue using it,” Trump stated in his executive order.
Trump, who years ago led the push to ban TikTok from the U.S., said at a press event that he feels the deal satisfies security concerns.
“The biggest reason is that it’s owned by Americans … and people that love the country and very smart Americans, so they don’t want anything like that to happen,” Trump said.
Trump said on Thursday that people involved in the deal include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Dell Technologies Chief Executive Michael Dell and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Vice President JD Vance said the new entity controlling TikTok’s U.S. operations would have a value of around $14 billion.
Murdoch’s involvement would probably entail Fox Corp. investing in the deal, a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly told The Times. Fox Corp. owns Fox News, whose opinion hosts are vocally supportive of Trump.
The algorithms and code would be under control of the joint venture. The order requires the storage of sensitive U.S. user data to be under a U.S. cloud computing company.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last Saturday that the app’s data and privacy in the U.S. would be led by Oracle.
Ellison is a Trump ally who is the world’s second-richest person, according to Forbes.
TikTok already works with Oracle. Since October 2022, “all new protected U.S. user data has been stored in the secure Oracle infrastructure, not on TikTok or ByteDance servers,” TikTok says on its website.
Ellison is also preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the media company that owns HBO, TNT and CNN, after already completing a takeover of Paramount, one of Hollywood’s original studios.
“The most important thing is it does protect Americans’ data security,” Vance said at a press gathering on Thursday. “What this deal ensures is that the American entity and the American investors will actually control the algorithm. We don’t want this used as a propaganda tool by any foreign government.”
TikTok, which has a large presence in Los Angeles, did not respond to a request for comment.
Terms of the deal are still unclear. Trump discussed the TikTok deal with China’s Xi Jinping in an extended phone call last week. Chinese and U.S. officials have until Dec. 16 to finalize the details.
WASHINGTON — America’s public health system is headed to a “very dangerous place” with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team of anti-vaccine advisors in charge, fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Susan Monarez warned senators on Wednesday.
Describing extraordinary turmoil inside the nation’s health agencies, Monarez and former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry described exchanges in which Kennedy or political advisors rebuffed data supporting the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Monarez, who was fired after just 29 days on the job following disagreements with Kennedy, told senators deadly diseases like polio and whooping cough, long contained, are poised to make a comeback in the U.S.
“I believe preventable diseases will return, and I believe we will have our children harmed by things they don’t need to be harmed by,” Monarez said before the Senate health committee.
Monarez describes her firing by RFK Jr.
Monarez said she was ordered by Kennedy to resign if she did not sign off on new vaccine recommendations, which are expected to be released later this week by an advisory panel that Kennedy has stocked with medical experts and vaccine skeptics. She said that when she asked for data or science to back up Kennedy’s request to change the childhood vaccination schedule, he offered none.
She added that Kennedy told her “he spoke to the president every day about changing the childhood vaccination schedule.”
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who chairs the powerful health committee, listened intently as Monarez and Houry described conversations with Kennedy and his advisers.
“To be clear, he said there was not science or data, but he still expected you to change schedule?” Cassidy asked.
Cassidy carefully praised President Trump for his commitment to promoting health policies but made it clear he was concerned about the circumstances surrounding Monarez’s removal.
Houry, meanwhile, described similar exchanges with Kennedy’s political advisors, who took an unprecedented role in preparing materials for meetings of the CDC’s advisory vaccine panel.
Ahead of this week’s meeting of the panel, Houry offered to include data around the hepatitis B shot that is administered to newborns to prevent spread of the deadly disease from the mother. She said a Kennedy advisor dismissed the data as biased because it might support keeping the shots on the schedule.
“You’re suggesting that they wanted to move away from the birth dose, but they were afraid that your data would say that they should retain it?” Cassidy asked.
Critical vaccine decisions are ahead
During the Senate hearing, Democrats, all of whom opposed Monarez’s nomination, also questioned Kennedy’s motives for firing Monarez, who was approved for the job unanimously by Republicans.
“Frankly, she stood up for protecting the well-being of the American people, and for that reason she was fired,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats.
Monarez said it was both her refusal to sign off on new vaccination recommendations without scientific evidence and her unwillingness to fire high-ranking career CDC officials without cause that led to her ousting.
Kennedy has denied Monarez’s accusations that he ordered “rubber-stamped” vaccine recommendations but has acknowledged he demanded firings. He has described Monarez as admitting to him that she is “untrustworthy,” a claim Monarez has denied through her attorney.
While Senate Republicans have been mostly loath to challenge Trump or even Kennedy, many of them have expressed concerns about the lack of availability of COVID-19 vaccines and the health department’s decisions to scale back some childhood vaccines.
Others have backed up Kennedy’s distrust of the nation’s health agencies.
Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, a doctor, aggressively questioned Monarez about her “philosophy” on vaccines as she explained that her decisions were based on science. Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville said Trump was elected to make change and suggested Monarez’s job was to be loyal to Kennedy.
“America needs better than this,” Tuberville said.
The Senate hearing was taking place just a day before the vaccine panel starts its two-day session in Atlanta to discuss shots against COVID-19, hepatitis B and chickenpox. It’s unclear how the panel might vote on the recommendations, though members have raised doubts about whether hepatitis B shots administered to newborns are necessary and have suggested COVID-19 recommendations should be more restricted.
The CDC director must endorse those recommendations before they become official. Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, now serving as the CDC’s acting director, will be responsible for that.
“I’m very nervous about it,” Monarez said of the meeting.
Seitz and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mike Stobbe in New York and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.
Los Angeles County is moving to add more checks on how federal immigration officials can access data collected by the Sheriff’s Department that can be used to track where people drive on any given day.
County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a motion, introduced by Supervisor Hilda Solis, to beef up oversight of data gathered by law enforcement devices known as automated license plate readers.
It’s already illegal in California for local law enforcement agencies to share information gleaned from license plate readers with federal agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant.
But after a summer of ramped-up deportations, the county supervisors decided to impose more transparency on who’s requesting license plate data from the Sheriff’s Department — and when the agency provides it.
The change will create a clear policy that the data cannot be “disclosed, transferred, or otherwise made available” to immigration officials except when “expressly required” by law or if they have a warrant.
“In a place like Los Angeles County, where residents depend on cars for nearly every aspect of daily life, people must feel safe traveling from place to place without fear that their movements are being tracked, stored, and shared in ways that violate their privacy,” the motion states.
Supervisor Kathryn Barger cast the sole no vote. Helen Chavez, a spokesperson for Barger, said the supervisor voted against the motion because it calls for the county to support a bill that would limit the amount of time law enforcement can keep most license plate data to 60 days. Law enforcement has opposed that bill, she said.
Across the country, law enforcement agencies use cameras to collect data on millions of vehicles, poring over the records for clues to help find stolen vehicles, crime suspects or missing persons.
A sheriff deputy’s patrol car is equipped with a license plate scanner. The plate numbers are instantaneously processed and if the registered vehicle owners are wanted for felonies or certain types of misdemeanors, if they are registered sex or arson offenders or if an Amber Alert has been issued, an alarm will sound to alert the officer.
(Los Angeles Times)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement it has roughly 366 fixed licensed plate readers from Motorola Vigilant and 476 from Flock Safety in contract cities and unincorporated areas. An additional 89 mobile systems from Motorola are mounted on vehicles that patrol these areas.
The department said its policy already prohibits it from sharing data from plate readers, known as ALPR, with any entity that “does not have a lawful purpose for receiving it.”
“LASD shares ALPR data with other law enforcement agencies only under an executed inter-agency agreement, which requires all parties to collect, access, use, and disclose the data in compliance with applicable law,” the statement read. “LASD has no current agreements for ALPR data sharing with any federal agency.”
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the agency has multiple resources at its “fingertips to ensure federal law is enforced in Los Angeles, and throughout the entire country.”
“These sanctuary politicians’ efforts to stop the Sheriff’s Department from cooperating with ICE are reckless and will not deter ICE from enforcing the law,” McLaughlin said.
Southern California law enforcement departments — including LAPD and authorities in San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties — have been accused of routinely flouting state law by sharing license plate data with federal agents. A recent report from CalMatters cited records obtained by the anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy that showed more than 100 instances in a single month when local police queried databases for federal agencies.
“When you collect this data, it’s really hard to control,” said Catherine Crump, director of UC Berkeley’s Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “It’s no different from once you share your data with Meta or Google, they’re going to repackage your data and sell it to advertisers and you don’t have any idea which of the advertising companies have your data.”
Even with the board cracking down on data sharing, advocates say it’s nearly impossible to ensure federal agents are barred from license plate data in L.A. County.
Dave Maass, the director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said private companies that operate in California still collect and sell data that ICE can use.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has its own license plate readers around Southern California, he said.
Maass said even if a county bars its local sheriff’s department from sharing data with ICE, it’s difficult to guarantee the rule is followed by the rank-and-file. Immigration officers could informally pass on a plate number to a deputy with access to the system.
An L.A. County Sheriff’s Department patrol car equipped with a license plate reader can scan somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 plates a day.
(Los Angeles Times)
“Maybe they run the plate,” Maass says. “Unless there’s some public records release from the Los Angeles side of things, we just really don’t know who accessed the system.”
Under the motion passed Tuesday, the sheriff department would need to regularly report what agencies asked for license plate data to two county watchdogs groups — the Office of Inspector General and the Civilian Oversight Commission.
“Having somebody who is somewhat independent and whose role is more aggressively overseeing reviewing these searches is actually quite a big deal,” Maass said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary and a longtime vaccine skeptic, struck a defiant tone Thursday as he faced bipartisan criticism over changes he has made to reorganize federal health agencies and vaccine policies, telling senators that he is determined to “eliminate politics from science.”
In the testy appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy repeatedly defended his record in heated exchanges with senators from both parties and questioned data that show the effectiveness of vaccines. In turn, senators accused him of taking actions that contradict his promise seven months earlier that he would do “nothing that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines.”
“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearing you promised to uphold the highest standard for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a top-ranking Senate Republican and a physician, said during the hearing.
Kennedy forcefully denied that he has limited access to vaccines and defended his record in restoring trust in federal healthcare agencies under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“They deserve the truth and that’s what we’re going to give them for the first time in the history of the agency,” Kennedy told senators.
From the outset, it was expected that Democrats would slam Kennedy’s record. Some of them called on him to resign and accused him of politicizing federal health policy decisions. But three other Republicans, including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who was key in advancing Kennedy’s nomination, joined Democrats in criticizing Kennedy’s actions, mostly pertaining to vaccine policy changes.
Thursday’s session marked a peak of bipartisan frustration over a string of controversial decisions by Kennedy that have thrown his department into disarray. Kennedy dismissed an entire advisory panel responsible for vaccine recommendations and replaced its members with known vaccine skeptics. He withdrew $500 million in funding earmarked for developing vaccines against respiratory viruses. And, just last week, he ousted the newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention following disagreements over vaccine policy.
In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Susan Monarez, the former CDC director, wrote that she was forced out after she declined to recommend people “who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric” to an influential vaccine advisory panel.
At the hearing, Kennedy said Monarez was lying. Instead, he said he fired her because he asked her if she was trustworthy, and she told him, “no.”
He added that he fired all the members of the vaccine panel because it was “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.”
“We depoliticized it and put great scientists on it from a very diverse group, very, very pro-vaccine,” he claimed.
In questioning, however, members of his own party questioned his support for vaccines. At one point, Cassidy, a physician, read an email from a physician friend who said patients 65 and older need a prescription to get a COVID-19 shot.
“I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines,” Cassidy said.
“You’re wrong,” Kennedy responded.
In that same exchange, Cassidy asked Kennedy if he believed President Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for his administration’s work on Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that sped the development of the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments.
“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.
Cassidy said he was surprised at his answer because he believes Kennedy is trying to restrict access to the COVID-19 vaccine. He also expressed dismay at Kennedy’s decision to cancel $500 million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology, which Cassidy said was key to the operation.
Kennedy’s position on vaccines have reverberated beyond Capitol Hill.
Ahead of the hearing, more than 1,000 employees at the health agency and national health organizations called on Kennedy to resign. Seemingly in support of Kennedy’s direction, Florida announced plans to become the first state to end all vaccines mandated, including for schoolchildren. And three Democratic-led states — California, Washington and Oregon — have created an alliance to counter turmoil within the federal public health agency.
The states said the focus of their health alliance will be on ensuring the public has access to credible information about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Almost as if in a parallel universe, Kennedy told senators on Thursday that his goal was to achieve the same thing, after facing hours of criticism on his vaccine policies.
“I am not going to sign on to something if I can’t make it with scientific certainty,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I am antivax, it just means I am pro-science.”
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of U.S. damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Hegseth also fired Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, chief of the Navy Reserve, and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversees Naval Special Warfare Command, another U.S. official said.
No reasons were given for their firings, the latest in a series of steps targeting military leaders, intelligence officials and other perceived critics of Trump, who has demanded loyalty across the government. The administration also stripped security clearances this week from additional current and former national security officials.
Taken together, the moves could chill dissent and send a signal against reaching conclusions at odds with Trump’s interests.
Agency’s assessment contradicted Trump
Kruse’s firing comes two months after details of a preliminary assessment of U.S. airstrikes against Iran leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back only a few months by the military bombardment, contradicting assertions from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The president, who had pronounced the Iranian program “completely and fully obliterated,” rejected the report. His oft-repeated criticism of the DIA analysis built on his long-running distrust of intelligence assessments, including one published in 2017 that said Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including the DIA — has been declassifying years-old documents meant to cast doubt on those previous findings, which have been endorsed by bipartisan congressional committees.
After the June strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, Hegseth lambasted the press for focusing on the preliminary assessment but did not offer any direct evidence of the destruction of the facilities.
“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was a historically successful attack,” Hegseth said at a news conference at the time.
Democrats raise concerns
While the Pentagon has offered no details on the firings, Democrats in Congress have raised alarm over the precedent that Kruse’s ouster sets for the intelligence community.
“The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the administration to show why Kruse was fired, or “otherwise, we can only assume that this is another politically motivated decision intended to create an atmosphere of fear” within the intelligence community.
Trump has a history of removing government officials whose data and analysis he disagrees with. Earlier this month, after a lousy jobs report, he fired the official in charge of the data. His administration also has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites.
Other military and intelligence changes
The new firings culminate a week of broad Trump administration changes to the intelligence community and new shake-ups to military leadership.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced this week that it would slash its staff and budget and revoked more security clearances, a tactic the administration uses against those it sees as foes. The Pentagon also said the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, Gen. David Allvin, planned to retire two years early.
Hegseth and Trump have been aggressive in dismissing top military officials, often without formal explanation.
The administration has fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the Navy’s top officer, the Air Force’s second-highest-ranking officer and the top lawyers for three military service branches.
In April, Hegseth dismissed Gen. Tim Haugh as head of the National Security Agency and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, who was a senior official at NATO.
No public explanations have been offered by the Pentagon for any of the firings, though some of the officers were believed by the administration to endorse diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Trump has demanded government agencies purge DEI efforts.
The ousters of Kruse, Lacore and Sands were reported earlier by the Washington Post.
Toropin, Jalonick and Price write for the Associated Press.
The Pew Research Center estimates the undocumented population in the U.S. has grown substantially since 2021.
A new study from the Pew Research Center released Thursday shows that the number of unauthorized immigrants — the organization’s terminology for undocumented people — reached an all-time high of 14 million people in 2023. That’s up 3.5 million from 2021, which marks the largest two-year jump the center has recorded.
Pew has sub-categorized unauthorized immigrants in two groups: those with deportation protections and those without.
“There are some people who enter the country without authorization and have remained in that status since,” the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew, Mark Hugo Lopez, told The Times. “There are others who may have come to the U.S. legally — for example on an H-1B visa — but their visa expired, they overstayed their visa and are now also classified as unauthorized immigrants, even though they entered the country legally.”
Lopez went on to explain that there’s another subset: people who entered the country without authorization but are granted a number of exemptions, particularly temporary protection from deportation through different programs. This includes people like those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or those who are in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Unauthorized immigrants with protections were largely responsible for the increase from 2021 to 2023, Pew found.
Overall, unauthorized immigrants made up 27% of the total foreign-born population in the U.S. in 2023, with 8 million having no protections and 6 million having some level of protection.
When it came to families with mixed status, most children — 4.6 million out of 6.1 million — living with an unauthorized immigrant parent are U.S. citizens.
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In regard to the U.S. workforce, unauthorized immigrants made up 5.6% of the national workforce. In California, unauthorized immigrants made up 8% of the statewide workforce by 2023.
One aspect of the research that stood out to Lopez the most was the shift in where immigrants to the U.S. are coming from, even if the country with the most people coming to the States remains the same.
“Unauthorized immigrants from Mexico are still the single largest group of unauthorized immigrants, but there are immigrants coming from many other parts of the world: from China, from India, from countries in Africa, from other parts of Latin America, including Venezuela,” Lopez noted.
Though the results of the latest Pew report focused on in-depth research of data from 2021 to 2023, the center acknowledged the new state of affairs for unauthorized immigrants over the last two years.
“The Trump administration, and the Biden administration as well, has changed who has protections and those who don’t,” Lopez said. “One large group — those in the CHNV program — had temporary protections from deportations and even permits to work in the United States temporarily. However, the Trump administration has revoked those protections, and now those immigrants are are no longer protected from possible deportation.”
Based on statistics from the Department of Homeland Security and other available government data, Pew estimates that the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population probably continued to increase through mid-2024. With the start of the new year and new presidency in 2025, Pew estimates that the unauthorized immigrant population probably declined by quite possibly as much as 1 million people. Despite that falloff, it is still believed that — as of July 2025 — the unauthorized immigrant population “almost surely” remains higher than in July 2023.
In January 2025, the census estimated the U.S. foreign-born population at an all-time high of 53.3 million people (15.8% of the total U.S. population). The agency’s data showed a decline during the first six months of 2025 and by June 2025, the foreign-born population was 51.9 million — a drop of 1.5 million people from its peak in January.
That change in data may be attributed to several different factors, Lopez pointed out.
“That may be a real decline, but it also may be that perhaps what we are seeing is a change in the way people are responding to the survey,” he said. “Or perhaps people are not responding to the survey at all, which may have an impact on our estimate of how many immigrants live in the country.”
Regarding the effect of self-deportations on the overall immigrants population in the U.S., Lopez said there is currently no data available to Pew that can definitively point to how much that process has affected the population.
“People make decisions to return to their home countries or maybe go to another country to pursue opportunities, whether economic or otherwise,” he explained. “So the idea of a particular self-deportation is really more that maybe people were choosing to leave and they’ve left in the last few months and it has more to do with their own opportunities or other decisions. While it would be great to know whether or not self-deportation has happened and how much so, we need more data to be able to give a precise estimate for that.”
With many uncertainties regarding potential future difficulties in gathering demographic information, Lopez acknowledged that Pew will have to adapt to the times.
“It is possible that we may have to make further adjustments to our estimate to capture undercount and other challenges in collecting data about immigrants and particularly unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.,” he said.
Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are driving even U.S. citizens away
“Are we even safe as American citizens?” asked L.A. resident Julie Ear in a video interview with The Times’ Diana Ramirez Santacruz — citing instances in which U.S. citizens have been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “ Even though we were born here, we don’t know if we’re gonna be safe long term.”
This year, Ear documented her mother’s self-deportation at the Tijuana airport in a TikTok video that has garnered 9.3 million views.
Longtime Angeleno Nicole Macias applied for dual Mexican citizenship last year and has since turned to social media to educate others about the dual citizenship process.
“The political climate right now in Los Angeles is really crazy. A lot of people just feel unsafe,” Macias told The Times. “A lot of people are turning back to this idea of being able to go back to Mexico and have an easier lifestyle.”
In the wake of ICE raids in L.A., artists band together for immigrants
Curator Love, Este Hogar no le abre la puerta a I.C.E.
(Amelia Tabullo)
De Los contributing writer Sarah Quiñones Wolfson wrote about how members of the L.A. arts community are using their work to raise funds to support immigrants in the city.
Quiñones Wolfson spoke with a slew of artists whose work depicts and benefits the L.A.’s vibrant and vital immigrant populations. Included in the article are striking photos of the previously mentioned artwork with a message.
In the piece, Erika Hirugami — an academic curator and founder of the immigrant-focused art enterpriseCuratorLove — introduced me to the inclusive phrase “undocplus” (also spelled “undoc+”) which refers to formerly or currently undocumented people, emphasizing a shared lived experience.
Stories we read this week that we think you should read
Stories we read this week that we think you should read Unless otherwise noted, all stories in this section are from the L.A. Times.
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California-specific agony
(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
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.
WASHINGTON — Between June 6 and June 22, immigration enforcement teams arrested 1,618 immigrants for deportation in Los Angeles and surrounding regions of Southern California, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS did not respond to requests for information on how many of those arrested had criminal histories and a breakdown of those convictions.
As immigration arrests have occurred across Southern California, demonstrators have protested the federal government’s actions and bystanders have sometimes confronted immigration officers or videotaped their actions. Between June 6 and June 22, 787 people have been arrested for assault, obstruction and unlawful assembly, a DHS spokesperson said.
Figures about the Los Angeles operation released by the White House on June 11 indicated that about one third of those arrested up until that point had prior criminal convictions.
The “area of responsibility” for the Los Angeles field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the Central Coast, as well as Orange County to the south, Riverside County to the east and up the coast to San Luis Obispo County.
Data from the first days of the Los Angeles enforcement operation show that a majority of those arrested had never been charged with or convicted of a crime.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Monday that 75% of nationwide arrests under the Trump administration have been of immigrants with criminal convictions or pending charges. But data published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement show that figure is lower in recent weeks.
Nationally, the number of people arrested without criminal convictions has jumped significantly and many of those are nonviolent offenders, according to nonpublic data obtained by the Cato Institute that covers the period from last Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year, to June 15. The most frequent crimes are immigration and traffic offenses.
Serious violent offenders account for just 7% of those in custody, according to Cato.
Immigration enforcement officers have recently intensified efforts to deliver on President Trump’s promise of mass deportations. In California, that has meant arrests of people in courthouses, on farms and in Home Depot parking lots.
But, with a daily goal of 3,000 arrests nationwide, administration officials still complain that agents are failing to arrest enough immigrants.
Democrats and immigrant community leaders argue that agents are targeting people indiscriminately. Despite the chaotic nature of the raids and protests in Los Angeles, 1,618 arrests by DHS in southern California over more than two weeks is about 101 arrests per day — a relatively small contribution to the daily nationwide goal.
Perhaps the bigger achievement than the arrests themselves, advocates say, is the fear that those actions have stoked.
Times staff writer Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.
At the top of a hill in a sprawling Santa Clarita industrial park in the shadow of Magic Mountain’s roller coasters, a significant chapter in the history of motorsports was written.
But the story isn’t finished yet.
From the outside, the building is nothing special. Behind its walls, however, Honda Racing Corporation has designed, tested and built the engines that have won 14 of the last 21 IndyCar championships and all five IndyCar races this season. In Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, a race Honda has won 15 times since 2004, four of the top six starters will have Honda engines, including two-time winner Takuma Sato, who qualified second.
It’s a level of dominance unmatched in IndyCar history — in a series Honda probably helped save.
A technician works on an engine at Honda Racing Corporation. All of Honda’s engines for North American racing series are built in Santa Clarita.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
Amid the open-wheel civil war between Championship Auto Racing Teams and the Indy Racing League, Honda was prepared to walk away. Robert Clarke, who started Honda Performance Development (before it was renamed HRC in 2024) and made it a cutting-edge research and development facility, convinced American Honda president Koichi Amemiya to supply engines to IRL teams in 2003 after Honda left CART in 2002.
“It just was not Honda’s image of what a race car should be. That’s why Honda initially didn’t want to be involved,” Clarke said. “In my discussion with the president it was ‘OK, we developed all these skills and know-how. Are we just going to give that up and just walk away?’ That’s crazy.
”We invested literally billions of dollars. And we’ve seen the success.”
Chevrolet and Toyota eventually did quit, leaving Honda as the only IndyCar engine manufacturer for six seasons. Amemiya then doubled down, funding Honda’s move to its 123,000-square-foot home while expanding its workforce to 250 from an original staff of fewer than 10.
Honda hasn’t looked in the rearview mirror since.
Clarke, 75, left Honda in 2008 though he’s still something of an executive emeritus, one who wears the brand on his sleeve and often refers to the company with the collective pronoun “we.”
Robert Clarke, left, speaks to IndyCar driver Dario Franchitti at Mid-Ohio Race Course in July 2007.
(Jay LaPrete / Associated Press)
He was 10 when his father took him to his first race to watch a friend run in an amateur open-wheel event. When young Robert was invited into the garage and allowed to work on the car “I was hooked,” he said. “My bedroom walls were covered with pictures of Formula One cars and all kinds of racing.”
He took the long road to Honda racing, though, studying architecture and art/industrial design in college, then teaching for five years at Notre Dame. His first job at Honda was in the motorcycle accessory and product planning departments but when the company announced it was going to enter open-wheel racing, Clarke volunteered and he was soon tasked with building the program from the ground up.
That was in 1993. By the time Clarke left Honda 15 years later, the company’s place as a major force in IndyCar racing was secure and Honda’s two-story hilltop headquarters became his legacy.
The focus of work in the building now is mainly on supporting Honda teams in IndyCar and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. As such, it has become a one-stop shop for racing teams, housing comprehensive engine research and development operations; prototype and production parts manufacturing; engine preparation and rebuilding; a material analysis facilities; more than a half-dozen engine dynamometer test cells; a machine shop; electronics lab; parts center; multiple conference rooms; and administrative offices.
A view of the machine shop at the at the Honda Racing Corporation in Santa Clarita.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
Next year it will provide support for Honda’s effort to supply Formula One engines to Aston Martin.
Mostly the building is a maze of quiet office space where engineers sketch out their designs on computer screens, well-lit assembly bays where mechanics assemble the prototypes, and the noisy high-tech dyno rooms where those prototypes are tested. Every stage of a racing engine, from conception and construction to being shipped to the track, is managed at the facility.
“We develop the technology quickly,” said David Salters, the British-born engineer who heads HRC. “We try them. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t work and you try again. The point of having a racing facility inside your company is you can be agile. You can try stuff. You can train the people.
“The people are the most important thing of all this.”
The whole process is more NASA than NASCAR in that there’s not a speck of grease or oil on the bright, white vinyl flooring and everybody’s hands are clean.
David Salters, president of Honda Racing Corporation.
(Michael L. Levitt / LAT Images via American Honda Motor Co.)
“This is a world-class facility. It needs to be clinical and professional in the processes and systems we have here,” said Salters, who was head of engine development for the Ferrari F1 team and held a similar position at Mercedes-Benz before joining Honda a decade ago.
“It’s like an operating theater. We’re basically dealing with engines or electrical systems, which are like jewelry. They cannot tolerate dirt or anything like that. Everything has to be spotless and clean and well-organized. This is aerospace.”
And when the engines don’t work, they’re brought back to HRC and the engineering process is repeated in reverse in search of flaws. As for why they’re doing all that in a sleepy bedroom community better known for its paved bike paths and rustic hiking trails than for its motorsports history, that’s easy: Location, location, location.
Clarke originally expected to recruit engineers from Indianapolis and Charlotte, N.C., the heartland of American racing, while Honda insisted on keeping its operations near its corporate offices in Torrance. Clarke feared dropping people from the Midwest and South into L.A.’s traffic-clogged sprawl would be such a culture shock, he’d lose his best engineers.
So he chose Santa Clarita, which was isolated enough to not feel like L.A., but close enough to Torrance to be accessible. And the building came with an “Only in L.A.” feature: It shares a driveway with the studio where the popular TV series “NCIS” is filmed.
“Every so often a helicopter will land in the car park and we’re all told we can’t go outside in case we get swept away,” Salters said with a chuckle. “There was some ‘Star Trek’ thing where they decided our foyer could be useful. So for a few weeks we had a movie set in our foyer; we rented it out.
“You’ve got to look at business opportunities.”
Adi Susilo, chief engineer of powertrain at Honda Racing Corporation, looks over large monitors before the start of the 12 Hours of Sebring in March.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
It’s early on a chilly Saturday in March and HRC’s headquarters is mostly empty save for one corner on the building’s second floor where nearly a dozen people, some wearing headphones, have gathered behind computer screens facing six giant TV monitors.
A continent away, in central Florida, more than 50 cars are lined up for the 12 hours of Sebring. Each driver with a Honda engine has an engineer monitoring their car’s performance.
Before the pandemic, engineers would travel and work with race teams on site. But for the last four years the engineers have been working mostly at HRC, monitoring in-car telemetry that provides real-time information about everything from engine status and tire pressure to suspension behavior.
“Data is king,” said Adi Susilo, one of the HRC engineers. “Humans make mistakes. Data rarely does.”
F1 teams have monitored telemetry remotely for years, but it didn’t become common in IndyCar racing until 2023. Now it’s a vital part of every major racing series, including NASCAR.
Powertrain chief engineer Adi Susilo looks at a full-size mock up of an IMSA prototype at Honda Racing Corporation.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
Engineers work out of what looks like a college classroom, only quieter. When the sound of a disembodied voice does cackle out of a headphone, it sounds like NASA Mission Control, the tone flat and unemotional, the conversation short and to the point.
“It’s better for solving problems,” said Susilo about working away from the track. “If there’s a problem, you just walk downstairs and talk to the guy who built the engine.”
That won’t be the case Sunday. For the Indy 500, Susilo said it’s all hands on deck, so most of Honda’s race-day engineers are in Indianapolis where the telemetry will be broadcast to their work stations in trailers at the track.
“A few of the IndyCar races are run that way,” he said, “but the 500 is almost always run that way just because everyone’s out here for the event. We’re also testing a new, hopefully more robust, telemetry streaming as it’s much harder to make sure we get 15 car’s worth of data.”
At first, the idea of having engineers looming electronically over the timing stand was a hard sell. Trusting someone with clean fingernails watching the race on monitors thousands of miles away wasn’t easy for some crew chiefs.
“What happens for people like me is that you have to erase the old-school way of thinking,” said Mike Hull, a former mechanic and driver who is now the managing director for Chip Ganassi Racing and chief strategist for driver Scott Dixon, a six-time IndyCar champion. “You’re electronically shoulder to shoulder with them.
“If you don’t listen to what somebody has to say, it stifles free thinking. Free thinking sends you down a path that you may not have originally been on, but makes you stronger at what you’re doing.”
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1.Race engines being assembled at Honda Racing Corporation.2.A technician in the HRC machine shop works on an engine.3.Engineers monitor data during the 12 Hours of Sebring in March.4.A engineer monitors telemetry remotely from HRC headquarters.(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
Dixon, the 2008 Indy 500 champion who will start Sunday’s race in the second row, agrees. Which is he why he’s made several trips to HRC to personally thank the engineers who design his engines and those who help direct his races.
“You always feel like there’s a big group behind you,” he said. “You just don’t get to see all them in one place but you know the machine is there, working pretty hard.”
One drawback, Dixon said, is you have to be careful what you say on the radio during races because you never know who’s listening.
“Twenty people at home, just on the team side, will be listening just on that one car,” he said. “So the communication is very wide open. You definitely have to watch your Ps and Qs.”
Two years later race teams have grown so comfortable with people looking over their shoulders, the engineers have become as much a part of the team as the cars. So when a nearby wildfire forced the evacuation of the building, Honda rented rooms at a nearby hotel, set up their TVs, computer monitors and a coffee machine in a conference room and worked from there.
“We’re pretty blind without it. The race teams are pretty competitive,” Susilo said. “They feel that instinct still does work. But it’s more data-driven.”
Honda powertain engineer Jake Marthaler monitors data during the 12 Hours of Sebring in March.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
Given the investment, the pressure can be intense.
“Every two weeks we want to have the latest development. We want to have made progress,” Salters said. “Every two weeks you have a deadline and the deadline does not move. It’s not like they’re going to say ‘OK, we’ll just delay the race a week.’ The flag drops, you’ve got to be ready.
“It’s sort of an engineering sport isn’t it? It’s like a true sport; the best team will win.”
If the IndyCar-Honda marriage has mostly been good for both sides, it has recently hit a rocky patch.
Honda’s supply contract with IndyCar ends next year and the company hasn’t hid its distaste over the cheating scandals that have recently tarnished the series. Last week Team Penske drivers Josef Newgarden, the two-time defending Indy 500 champion, and Will Power were forced to the back of the field for the start of Sunday’s race after illegally modified parts were found on their cars. Team Penske, which uses Chevrolet engines, was also caught cheating at the beginning of the 2024 season.
On Wednesday, the team fired three of its top racing executives. IndyCar, which is owned by Roger Penske (also the owner of Team Penske) said it is exploring the creation of an independent governing body absent of Penske employees.
Scott Dixon drives into the first turn during practice for the Indianapolis 500 on Friday.
(Michael Conroy / Associated Press)
That may not be enough to restore trust in the series. Honda, which supplies engines to 13 full-season IndyCar entries and three Indy 500-only cars, has declined to comment on the rules violations, but confirmed its continued participation in the series beyond 2026 may depend on Penske’s ability to separate himself from policing the series he owns and also competes in.
Honda said in a written statement Thursday that it has many concerns, among them “the relatively high overall cost to participate as an engine supplier” and “the potential (perceived or real) conflict of interest which may exist” with Penske’s ownership of the racing series, three of the cars competing in the series and his “significant stake” in Ilmor Engineering, which designs and manufactures engines for Chevrolet, Honda’s biggest competitor.
“Honda continues to have ongoing negotiations with IndyCar’s management and technical teams regarding our future as an engine supplier for the series,” said Chuck Chayefsky, manager of Honda & Acura Motorsports.
Whatever road Honda takes with IndyCar, it’s unlikely to change most of the day-to-day work at HRC, which is heavily involved with IMSA and will soon be working on F1 power-unit development.
So while the cars may change, the racing will never stop.
The car Ryan Hunter-Reay drove to victory for Andretti Autosport in the 2014 Indianapolis 500 sits on display at Honda Racing Corporation in Santa Clarita.
(Robert Hanashiro / For the Times)
“Thirty years ago our sole purpose in life was to look after racing in North America for Honda and Acura,” Salters said before last week’s events in Indianapolis. “Last year we changed that. We’re now part of a global racing organization. That’s another opportunity for associates here.”
“The automotive world, it’s pivoting,” he continued. “We are trying some new stuff. We’ll see how it goes.”
One chapter has been written. But the story isn’t finished.
