Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna was leading challenger and former Sheriff Alex Villanueva by a wide margin in his bid for reelection Tuesday, according to early returns, in a rematch of the 2022 race between the two lawmen.
Early returns also showed L.A. County voters favoring Measure A, which would establish binding arbitration for sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and other public safety employees who by law cannot go on strike.
A second county ballot measure, Measure E, was far ahead in early returns. Measure E asks voters to create an independent ethics commission that previously was approved by another measure, and address administrative missteps that invalidated funding approved by voters in 2020 to support jail alternatives.
In the sheriff’s race, Villanueva was seeking to regain the job he lost in 2022 when Luna successfully challenged him for reelection.
This contest was lower profile than the 2022 race, but the stakes are just as high, as the new Los Angeles County sheriff will face a host of challenges, from navigating relationships with federal and local agencies to boosting recruitment and retention.
Luna pitched himself to county voters as a calmly effective operator who has brought down crime while building relationships with local, state and federal leaders that suffered under his predecessor’s tenure. The incumbent highlighted his department’s successful navigation of World Cup security and the Trump administration’s deployment of federal immigration agents and troops to L.A. as examples of the efficacy of his approach.
Villanueva, on the other hand, has sought to depict L.A. County as more dangerous under what he describes as the overly permissive approach of Luna. The former sheriff claimed Luna has presided over a deep decline in department morale and staffing while being too soft on drug users, the homeless and petty criminals.
Representatives of the Luna and Villanueva campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday evening.
Both men guided the department through tumultuous periods for the county. Villanueva was sheriff for nearly two years at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Luna was in office during the Eaton and Palisades fires.
The next four years promise further challenges. The Olympic Games are less than two years away, and the sheriff’s department will be expected to play a major role keeping millions of visitors and athletes safe.
The new sheriff also will be expected to rein in the department’s budget, which has experienced ballooning overtime costs as sworn vacancies have risen markedly under both sheriffs.
Villanueva claims Luna is out of touch with deputies and that they are leaving the force en masse in response to his poor leadership skills. Villanueva said he would improve staffing by redirecting overtime spending and serving as a beacon to would-be deputies who’ve been turned off by Luna.
But Luna denies that deputies are fleeing the department and says he’s taken major steps to improve the hiring process. He has hired an outside contractor to speed up applicant background checks and provided an avenue for many new deputies to go from the academy to patrol instead of first requiring a stint in one of the county’s jails.
Among the two countywide ballot measures, Measure A was the highest profile, with unions representing county deputy sheriffs, firefighters and others spending millions of dollars in support.
Measure A would mandate binding arbitration between the county government and negotiators who represent deputies, firefighters, lifeguards and other public safety employees in the event contract talks reach an impasse.
Currently, the county supervisors can impose a final offer that employees must accept because by law, public safety personnel are not allowed to strike.
Supporters say the measure adds balance to the negotiations process and removes the unilateral authority of the county Board of Supervisors. The change is backed by unions representing county firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and other public safety employees.
County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath authored the motion, which has the support of four out of the five supervisors. No formal opposition has been filed. Supervisor Holly Mitchell raised financial concerns about the measure but has not officially opposed it.
Measure E on the county ballot would fix issues with Measure J, which was approved by voters in 2020, and Measure G, which passed in 2024.
Measure J earmarked at least 10% of locally generated, unrestricted revenue to incarceration alternatives. However, some of the ballot language in Measure G unintentionally repealed Measure J — an administrative error that was discovered in June 2025. Amendment E would partly ensure the funding to incarceration alternatives remains in effect.
The amendment also would enshrine in the county charter the seven-member ethics commission and ethics compliance office that was created when Measure G passed.
The amendment has the support of Horvath and other supervisors, as well as the League of Women Voters of L.A. County, who said Measure J shouldn’t be undone by an administrative error.
Los Angeles voters will head to the polls Tuesday to vote on a slew of ballot measures, including a half-cent sales tax that would beef up the city’s Fire Department — but which also would cost Angelenos more to fill up their gas tanks, buy clothes and dine out.
Another measure would allow the City Council to meet just once a week, instead of three times as required by the City Charter.
In all, there are eight ballot measures before L.A. voters that could have a significant impact on how the city government functions, and which take just a simple majority to pass.
Here’s a roundup:
Measure FD: Sales tax hike for the Fire Department
Voters will consider a half-cent increase to the city’s retail sales tax, bumping it from 10.25 cents per dollar spent to 10.75 cents per dollar spent. The tax hike is expected to raise an estimated $345 million annually and would be funneled into a separate fund specifically for the Fire Department.
The sales tax increase was spearheaded by the union representing rank-and-file firefighters, who have long complained the department is underfunded.
The city still would be required to fund the department at the same average percentage out of the general fund, ensuring extra revenue generated by the tax would add to its regular budget.
Opponents say this would be the third sales tax hike since 2024, costing an average of $86 per person and $345 for a family of four in additional sales taxes each year.
The firefighters union said the tax fund is essential to increase the number of firefighters and lower response times across the city.
Charter Amendment EE: Fewer City Council meetings
Amendment EE would allow the Council to meet once a week instead of three times, as required under the City Charter.
The Council voted 12-0 to put the measure on the ballot, with three council members absent. Council members in support of the measure said the three meetings are costly and ineffective, and noted their time is better spent working in their district.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez opposed the measure, saying it would reduce the time available for L.A. residents to engage with their representatives in a public forum and could lead to council members rushing through deliberations on important matters.
The amendment also would approve changes to how the city governs. If passed, independent inspectors for the L.A. Police and Fire Departments would have more power to conduct audits, and it would increase the penalties for campaign finance violations. The changes also include raising the number of signatures needed for a ballot referendum and would bar ethics commissioners from running for City Council or the Los Angeles Board of Education for five years after they leave office.
Proposition TE: An exception to the ‘mansion tax’
Proposition TE would grant a one-time exemption to Palisades fire victims from paying the so-called “mansion tax” if they sell their home within five years of the disaster.
The “mansion tax,” or Measure ULA, took effect in 2023 and imposed an additional 4% transfer tax on all L.A. property sales above $5.4 million and a 5.5% tax on sales above $10.9 million. Despite its nickname, the tax also falls on more modest multifamily residences like apartment buildings that exceed the sales price benchmarks.
The proposition would exempt Pacific Palisades homeowners from paying the tax, regardless of whether they lived at the property or not. It also would refund any resident who already sold their property and paid the tax.
The proposition was spearheaded by Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the region. Supporters say fire victims have been through enough and should have more flexibility as they navigate expensive rebuilding costs.
Opponents argue the proposition is too broad and should have included only victims whose primary residence was destroyed.
Charter Amendment LA: Restructuring how the city administers public works
Amendment LA is intended to more efficiently deliver basic city services for infrastructure in need of repair, including streets in need of repaving, dangerous sidewalks and broken streetlights. It also would leverage existing resources to open up sources of revenue.
The measure would reduce the sway of the Board of Public Works or pave the way to eliminate it, while also increasing the power of the director of public works. Critics oppose the elimination of the board, saying it would weaken accountability and increase public scrutiny.
Charter Amendment PL: Streamlining the Planning Department
L.A. residents have for years complained that navigating the Planning Department to build or open businesses is complicated and confusing.
Amendment PL includes five proposals that would increase efficiency and streamline certain parts of the Planning Department, which controls land use and approves construction and renovation projects.
The changes would consolidate seven Area Planning Commissions into one, partly to lower costs and ensure that all appeals and applications are governed by the same logic. It also would give the City Council more flexibility in approving taller buildings and set deadlines to speed up rulings from the City Planning Commission.
Charter Amendment PRK: Doubling the money for recreation and parks
Amendment PRK would double the minimum amount of money set aside for the Department of Recreation and Parks by reworking the parameters of the city budget.
The department is in charge of maintaining green spaces, playing fields and senior centers in the city. The City Charter mandates the department receive .0325% of the total assessed value of taxable properties, which is about $303 million for the park system this year and would be around $493 million in 10 years.
If the measure passes, that would double, meaning the park system would get a minimum of $986 million by 2036.
Supporters say the existing city allocation isn’t enough and has led to deteriorating recreation centers, swimming pools and restrooms. Critics warn it would force city officials to cut other services to make room for this additional funding.
Charter Amendment PRT: Changes to airports, harbor and water and power departments
Charter Amendment PRT is part of a package of proposed changes to the City Charter to increase transparency, build public trust and streamline operations. It would change how airports, harbors and the Department of Water and Power are managed.
The amendment would require that two of the seven members of the Los Angeles World Airport’s board of commissioners, who oversee Van Nuys and Los Angeles International airports, live in Van Nuys and three live around LAX.
It also would require the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners allocate a portion of its operating income from the Port of Los Angeles to investments in waterfront public access projects. The harbor is one of the busiest in the country and generates revenue from the operators at its terminals. PRT also would broaden public insight into how lease agreements with the port affect the local workforce.
Supporters say people overseeing Van Nuys and LAX should have a firsthand understanding of living near the airports.
No ballot argument against PRT was submitted, although the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce said it opposes the measure, citing concern over the additional requirements it would impose on businesses and the potential impact on port operations.
Charter Amendment SC: Altering LAUSD’s campaign finance rules
Amendment SC wouldn’t make major changes, but would clarify rules on campaign finance for candidates running for a seat on the Board of Education, which oversees LAUSD.
Language would be simplified to clarify that the same rules apply for mayoral candidates and Board of Education candidates, except in certain instances. Some of those rules include governing campaign contribution limits, filing deadlines, public disclosures and fundraising windows.
Supporters say it won’t make any substantive changes, but instead make the rules easier to understand by deleting duplicated language. No argument was provided against the amendment.
When Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman was asked recently about the ways the LAPD was falling short, she pointed out that the agency had stopped posting neighborhood-level crime statistics. The lack of data, she said, gives an incomplete picture of how safe the city is — and also undermines the public’s already shaky trust in police.
Her comments during a recent mayoral debate thrust the issue of police secrecy into the spotlight, while giving voice to a growing number of critics of LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell who argue that his department is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to transparency.
Frustration by neighborhood groups over the missing crime data has boiled over in recent weeks, thanks in part to Raman’s comments. But it also comes as free press advocates complain that the department’s responsiveness to public records requests has slowed, and as officers increasingly face accusations of targeting journalists in the field during protests.
When Mayor Karen Bass and LAPD officials were asked about the disappearing crime data at a news conference last week, a senior department official fielded the question and chalked it up to a “software issue,” which the department was working on and hoped to have resolved soon. A Bass spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
In an interview with KNX radio this week, McDonnell claimed that changes to internal policies and state law had made the LAPD more transparent today about its operations and functions than ever before.
McDonnell declined an interview request through a spokesperson on Friday.
“The Department remains committed to transparency and to keeping the public informed,” the spokesperson, Officer Jeff Lee, wrote in an email. “That includes public access to crime data, timely handling of California Public Records Act requests within available resources, and respect for the rights of members of the media covering public events.”
In the spring of 2025, roughly a year after the LAPD released thousands of police officer photos that it later tried to claw back, the department quietly stopped posting files released in response to public records requests, cutting off access to a trove of documents that were once available through the the city’s data portal. Department watchdogs have long argued that such records allow residents to evaluate how the LAPD and other agencies are performing.
Reports based on the investigations of police shootings and other serious uses of force that used to be released shortly after they were presented to the Police Commission, the LAPD’s civilian oversight body, now take months to be produced.
The department’s inability to respond to records requests in a timely fashion seems designed to defuse public outrage, critics argue; dragging out the time it takes to release records means that information becomes available long after most citizens have moved on, they contend. Activists routinely pack the Police Commission’s Tuesday meetings to decry what many refer to as “secret police.”
McDonnell has acknowledged delays in producing records, saying that the unit tasked with reviewing and releasing the information is “grossly understaffed.” But progress on filling some of these vacancies has been slow.
LAPD officials have said that a recent change to state law that now requires police departments to release more information about officer misconduct and cases that involve serious uses of force has placed additional burden on the unit. Adding to the backlog are prolific requesters who flood the department with complex and time-consuming inquiries, all of which have to undergo several levels of review to avoid the release of private data, they argue.
McDonnell has also come under fire for his officers’ behavior toward journalists during protests last year against President Trump’s immigration crackdown. In July 2025, a federal judge issued an order prohibiting LAPD officers from targeting media members with crowd-control weapons.
In the months since, media groups have denounced the department for continuing to violate the order, which has deepened the tensions between police leaders and the press. Since June 2025, the city has been hit with dozens of legal claims from protesters and journalists who claim that LAPD officers used excessive force against them.
Police officials have accused some independent journalists of behaving more like demonstrators than reporters, and argued that the use of less-lethal weapons was justified after officers were provoked or had their commands disobeyed in chaotic situations.
Press freedom advocates say that under McDonnell, the department’s relationship with the local news media has gotten increasingly strained.
McDonnell, some argue, has made himself available only to news outlets that provide favorable coverage of the department.
In more ways than one, McDonnell seems out of step with modern expectations around government transparency by a public that is increasingly wary of public institutions, said Adam Rose, a deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Rose said he often disagreed with McDonnnell’s predecessor, Michel Moore, but that the former chief at least made himself accessible. Moore used to opine on national issues and occasionally tried to get in front of brewing controversies, Rose said, but he was also willing to hear out concerns about the treatment of journalists.
McDonnell, he said, hasn’t even bothered to give out his cellphone number.
“[Moore] had at least the courtesy and dignity to address groups speaking on behalf of journalists who while trying to cover the department were injured,” Rose said.
Last November, McDonnell abruptly ousted the department’s former top civilian spokesperson, Jennifer Forkish. Some of her duties were reportedly absorbed by Robert Port, a veteran documentary filmmaker with no PR experience whose own hiring was shrouded in secrecy. Port’s job proposal suggested that he was sought to use his Hollywood connections to help burnish the department’s battered public image.
Port told the news outlet L.A. Material that he was working on a reality show that promises to take viewers behind the scenes of patrolling the city’s streets. The department has sought $15,000 from the City Council to hire an outside law firm to represent the city with negotiations with a company called 44 Blue Productions LLC.
Forkish, the former spokesperson, told The Times that she has heard from journalists “here in Los Angeles and around the world who say they’re struggling to get responses to media inquiries and public records requests.”
“As an Angeleno, that concerns me,” she wrote in a text message. “Responding to the press is part of being accountable to the public, and transparency is essential to maintaining public trust.”
Attorneys who have sued the department, either on behalf of aggrieved officers or members of the public, argue that maintaining secrecy allows the LAPD to dismiss criticism on the grounds that outsiders don’t understand what’s happening.
“The LAPD has now evolved into an inward-facing organization.” said Jorja Leap, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “It’s a pivotal moment. I still see people within the department working on community relations — I don’t want this to be a lost opportunity.”
Voters in the city of Los Angeles will consider eight ballot measures covering everything from taxes and fire resources to governance of airports and the port and the quality of parks.
L.A. City Measure FD
The basics
Measure FD would increase sales taxes by 0.5% to provide additional funding for the city Fire Department. The measure would raise an estimated $345 million annually. Under the plan, the city’s retail sales tax would increase from 10.25 cents per dollar spent to 10.75 cents per dollar spent.
Impact
The ballot initiative was spearheaded by the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, the union representing rank-and-file firefighters, which has long argued that the department is underfunded. It claims decades of neglect have left the department understaffed and under-resourced.
Critics point out that this would be the third sales tax hike since 2024, following L.A. County hikes for homelessness (Measure A in 2024) and healthcare (Measure ER in the June 2 primary). The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. estimates that Measure FD will cost an average of $86 per person and $345 for a family of four in additional sales taxes each year.
Read more:
Proposition TE
The basics
Proposition TE would carve out a five-year exemption from L.A.’s “mansion tax” for Pacific Palisades homes damaged or destroyed in the 2025 wildfire, sparing sellers six-figure transfer bills on high-end properties. The mansion tax levies a 4% transfer tax on all L.A. property sales above $5.4 million and a 5.5% tax on sales above $10.9 million. At the current level, if a Pacific Palisades resident who lost their home in the fire sold the vacant lot for, say, $6 million, they would owe $240,000 in transfer taxes.
The impact
Supporters say fire survivors shouldn’t owe hefty taxes when selling burned-out lots, arguing the break offers basic fairness for families facing insurance shortfalls and steep rebuilding costs. Opponents warn the exemption covers wealthy landlords and investors as well as homeowners, creating a “loophole for the ultrawealthy” and stripping millions annually from the mansion tax’s homeless and affordable housing programs.
Charter Amendment LA
The basics:
Charter Amendment LA would change the way public works are administered in Los Angeles, allow the city to lease its underused land to tenants and open the door to greater city involvement in business enterprises. It also would ease some competitive bidding rules.
The impact
The proposed changes to the Los Angeles City Charter are intended to more efficiently deliver basic city services and speed repairs to deteriorating infrastructure such as streets in need of repaving, unsafe sidewalks and broken streetlights.
Charter Amendment PL
The basics
Charter Amendment PL would tweak L.A.’s Planning Department, promising faster decisions, clearer rules and more consistent oversight of development citywide. Seven volunteer Area Planning Commissions would be replaced by a single Neighborhood Appeals Board, cutting costs and standardizing rulings on liquor licenses, hillside homes and small-business projects.
The measure would let the City Council raise building height limits, set strict timelines on planning votes and automatically approve some amendments, opening the door to taller towers and speedier permitting.
The impact
Homeowners, developers and businesses have complained that navigating the Planning Department can be complicated and confusing. These changes aim to streamline how permits and projects move through the department.
Charter Amendment EE
The basics
Charter Amendment EE would cut the number of required L.A. City Council meetings from three to one weekly while reshaping ethics rules, watchdog powers and referendum signature thresholds.
The impact
Supporters call three weekly meetings inefficient and costly, arguing fewer full sessions would free council members to work in their districts and steer more detailed public debate into committee hearings. Opponents warn EE would shrink public access, rush deliberations and effectively neuter referendums, casting the ethics and oversight tweaks as modest cover for a deeper retreat from transparency.
Charter Amendment PRK
The basics
Charter Amendment PRK would double the minimum budget allocation set aside for the Department of Recreation and Parks, which oversees the upkeep of green spaces, playing fields and senior centers. It is not a new tax or bond.
The impact
Supporters say that the change will allow the city to give Angelenos the park and recreation services they deserve. Critics contend it will tie the hands of the city’s elected officials, forcing them to cut other services to make room for additional park funding.
Charter Amendment PRT
The basics
Charter Amendment PRT would change the composition of the Los Angeles World Airport’s board of commissioners, which oversees Van Nuys and Los Angeles International airports. It would require that two of the seven board members live in Van Nuys and three live around LAX — a footprint that the amendment does not define. As for the Port of Los Angeles, the amendment would require the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners to annually allocate a portion of the harbor’s operating income to investments in waterfront public access projects. It also would broaden public insight into how lease agreements with the port affect the local workforce by adding employment reporting requirements for any leaseholder extending a lease or any lease applicant.
The impact
The measure was developed through a reform effort started after a series of scandals. Backers say it will boost public accountability. There was initial pushback among some terminal leaseholders at the Port of Los Angeles.
Charter Amendment SC
The basics
Charter Amendment SC aims to clarify campaign finance rules for candidates running for a seat on the L.A. Unified Board of Education, which overseas the school district and around 350,000 students.
The impact
Repetitive language in the Los Angeles City Charter would be deleted and the charter would make clear that the same campaign finance rules apply to both mayoral candidates and Board of Education candidates, except in certain instances, the measure says. Among those requirements are rules governing campaign contribution limits, filing deadlines, public disclosures and fundraising windows.
Two experienced leaders of the largest law enforcement agency in the country face off, four years after their first showdown, to once again helm the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Here’s what you need to know about:
The candidates
Incumbent Robert Luna is a former Long Beach police chief who came out of retirement to run for sheriff in 2021 and unseated Alex Villanueva in the November 2022 election. Luna has presided over declines in homicides and violent crime as well as establishing a period of relative calm after Villanueva’s tenure, which was marked by controversy and scandal. Luna’s office, however, has come under scrutiny, including when a grenade accidentally exploded in a department parking lot, killing three deputies.
Villanueva switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in the first two years of his leadership and was a regular on Fox News vilifying “woke” culture and criticizing Democrats. Villanueva launched, then walked back, a criminal-leak investigation of a Los Angeles Times reporter, and he was ordered to testify after sheriff’s deputies took and shared pictures at the site of Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash.
State of the race
In the primary election, Luna received 44.2% of the vote versus Villanueva’s 21.7%. Luna also has raised more money for his campaign. From Jan. 1 to Sept. 19, he had raised more than $1.3 million; Villanueva had raised a little more than $320,000.
Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva speaks to constituents Sept. 12 at a campaign stop at the Burbank Assn. of Realtors.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Issues
Staffing and retention
Under Luna, the number of new deputies who graduated from the sheriff’s academy rose by nearly a third from 2024 to 2025, with more than 400 graduates last year, the department said. Recent data also show that retention rates have risen under Luna after a steep decline toward the end of Villanueva’s tenure.
Villanueva claims that he keeps up with the department he once ran, and that deputies frequently complain to him about understaffing and low morale.
Crime trends
Under Luna, violent crime has fallen every year since he took office. Between 2023, his first full year in office, and 2025, homicides fell by more than 25%. Data show that property crimes were broadly down from 2022.
Villanueva again maintains that deputies he has stayed in touch with feel that crime has run rampant since he left office.
2028 Olympics
Villanueva argues that Luna is ill-prepared to handle the next four years, including assisting with the Olympics.
Luna refuted the claim by pointing to the role his department played in the multi-agency law enforcement effort to maintain public safety during the World Cup this year.
A federal judge in California on Friday barred the Justice Department from threatening or coercing election workers to stop processing ballots.
The order issued by U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson in the Northern District of California was in response to a suit filed earlier Friday by labor unions seeking to bar the Justice Department from intimidating election workers.
Notably, the emergency order was issued without the Department of Justice weighing in on the case.
“Election Day is around the corner,” wrote Thompson, who was nominated by former President Biden. “Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots. Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”
It also bars the Justice Department from demanding local election officials segregate or not count ballots that the federal government deems may have been cast by ineligible voters.
“This ruling is a victory for the workers who make our elections possible and the communities they serve,” April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement Friday night.
The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, has warned that “any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.”
On Thursday, the Associated Press obtained subpoenas issued to election officials in Los Angeles County. The subpoenas request any documents and communications related to letters sent in July and October by federal officials to state election officials outlining the allegations about noncitizen voters. They also seek any information about efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted. At least three L.A. County election officials have been asked to appear before a grand jury the day after the election.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department intends to bring criminal charges against anyone. The department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.
Outside groups win access to the disputed list
In another Friday ruling, another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to share the disputed list of names with lawyers for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. They want to examine who is on the list and assess its impact on eligible voters.
It will be the first time that a nongovernmental organization will have the opportunity to evaluate the merits of the list of some 20,000 names. The federal government promptly appealed the decision on Friday evening.
The Democratic candidate for California governor, Xavier Becerra, is an advisor to the UCLA Voting Rights Project.
The two groups sued the Homeland Security Department in early October to prevent it from using federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls. The lawsuit cited examples in other states where the federal government’s data have been proven to mistakenly include thousands of citizens. It argued that the data-matching methods risk disenfranchising or deterring citizens from voting. On top of that, plaintiffs argued, the lists could disproportionately target naturalized citizens who are legally entitled to vote.
The Justice Department argues that there is just as much to lose if the ballots aren’t separated.
“Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen,” Kiersten V. Pels, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email. “The Department makes no apology for protecting those votes.”
In a separate but related 9th Circuit Court decision on Friday, a panel of judges ruled that federal investigations into illegal voting by noncitizens will remain on hold in nine states until after election day.
The judges, all nominated by Democratic presidents, found that the aggressive and public investigations led some citizens to decide not to engage in election-related activities out of fear of being wrongly targeted.
The judges said the investigations, which are looking into alleged illegal voting in past elections, can resume after the midterms wrap up Tuesday.
Riddle, Mulvihill and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP writer Swenson reported from New York; Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J.
Your ballot is overflowing with decisions you need to make. Some you’ve probably heard about — Karen Bass vs. Nithya Raman for L.A. mayor, Xavier Becerra vs. Steve Hilton for California governor, the controversial billionaire tax.
But there are also some more obscure races on the L.A. County ballot that are important as well. Here are seven to keep an eye out for.
Los Angeles County sheriff
This is a rematch between rivals for the job of running the Sheriff’s Department, which also oversees county jails.
Robert Luna is the sitting sheriff. The former Long Beach police chief, Luna came out of retirement to run for sheriff in 2022, arguing that incumbent Alex Villanueva had taken the department in the wrong direction. Luna points out that violent crime has fallen every year since he took office. Between 2023, his first full year in office, and 2025, homicides fell by more than 25%.
Alex Villanueva was elected sheriff in 2018 in an upset victory. His tenure was marked by controversy and scandal, and he became a fixture on Fox News, where he appeared repeatedly to vilify “woke” culture and criticize Democrats. He faults Luna, claiming the department has issues with recruitment and retention. He also says the department does not have the resources it needs.
L.A. County Charter Amendment A
This measure deals with labor negotiations for key public safety personnel in L.A. County.
Basics
Measure A is a charter amendment that would require binding arbitration between county government and negotiators representing sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, lifeguards and other public safety workers if contract talks reach an impasse and no compromise can be reached. It would alter the current last step, in which county supervisors can impose a final offer that these employees must accept — by law, public safety personnel cannot strike.
Impact
The initial phase of contract talks still would have union and county representatives seeking to hammer out a mutually beneficial deal, with a presumption that both sides would negotiate in good faith. But if a gap remains and an impasse ultimately is declared, the supervisors no longer would dictate the final offer. Instead, a three-member arbitration panel would be formed. The county and union each would select one member, with the sides together choosing the third person, who would serve as chair. If they can’t agree on the final panelist, a state entity could provide a list of qualified arbitrators to choose from. The arbitrators would focus on key employment elements such as wages and hours and would hold hearings and receive evidence from the parties. At the end of the process, a binding result would be issued and made public.
Read more:
L.A. County Charter Amendment E
This is a highly complicated measure that involves jail financing and seeks to clean up some bureaucratic muddles.
Basics
Jails: In 2020, 57% of county voters approved Measure J. This mandated that at least 10% of locally generated, unrestricted revenue be allocated to incarceration alternatives. The problem? Voters later approved the county reform effort Measure G, which had the unintended effect of repealing Measure J. Measure E would ensure that Measure J remains in effect.
Governance: Measure G also created, among other things, a county ethics commission and an ethics compliance office. Officials determined that for true independence, the commission and the compliance office must be permanently enshrined in the county charter.
Impact
Backers say Measure E would clean up those messy governmental issues.
L.A. County Superior Court judges
Voters will decide runoffs for four open judge seats:
Maria Ghobadi and Rhonda Haymon are competing for the Superior Court Judge Office 64 seat.
Justin Allen Clayton and Anna Slotky Reitano are competing for the Superior Court Judge Office 65 seat.
Anthony “A.J.” Bayne and David DeJute are competing for the Superior Court Judge Office 87 seat.
Donna Tryfman and David Ross are competing for the Superior Court Judge Office 131 seat.
Devin Elle Kurtz makes her opinion on generative AI known. For the last few years, the 29-year-old Pasadena artist says she’s been frustrated when strangers tell her that her art style looks AI-generated.
They have it backward, she insists. Kurtz, who has been sharing her art on the internet since she was a teenager, suspects that her viral art may have been used to train AI models. Her Instagram bio reads, “NO AI,” alongside a circle-backslash emoji.
Her feelings on the subject made what she discovered Thursday morning all the more painful, the artist said. Kurtz woke up to multiple emails from fans telling her that the Trump administration’s Department of Education had posted a meme on X that looked eerily similar to one of her works — fan art inspired by one of her favorite scenes from the animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” In the work, Aang and Zuko are shown practicing fire-bending moves as two dragons move around them.
There’s Magic in Learning 🪄 https://t.co/hJdp0Y2qho
The Department of Education’s post includes an image of the two characters in seemingly identical stances, outfits and color scheme. “There’s magic in learning,” reads text added over the image. “Make education great again.”
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.
Kurtz soon took to social media to condemn the Trump administration. She wrote on the platform: “I did not and would never consent to this administration running my fanart through AI and posting it. Can’t even believe I’m saying these words.” Her response had 150,000 likes as of late Thursday night.
“It definitely made me angry,” Kurtz told The Times on Thursday. “Seeing something that I made appropriated with a Make America Great Again-adjacent slogan on it made me quite upset. I knew I wanted to make it really clear that this was not something that I co-signed.”
Kurtz said she made the artwork in 2023 to share her love of the series with its creators and with other fans.
“Fandom at its core is supposed to be humans loving something together,” Kurtz said. “I want to live in a world where the things that I see around me are made by people. That is what being a human being is all about. Not just output for the sake of output.”
Kurtz said several tells led her to conclude that AI was likely used to alter her work. In the version shared by the Trump administration, the dragons have been removed, and the platform the duo is standing on has oddly sized bricks.
Since her fan art is based on existing intellectual property, she doesn’t intend to pursue legal action.
“It would be fantastic if the government didn’t take artists’ work and run it through AI and post it,” Kurtz said.
In December, singer Sabrina Carpenter was angered when her song “Juno” was used in the soundtrack for a Department of Homeland Security promotional video featuring clips of officers tackling and handcuffing people.
“[T]his video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter replied. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.” The Department of Homeland Security has since deleted that video.
Democrats, election officials and voting rights groups have long wondered whether President Trump, upon his return to the Oval Office, would again attempt to overturn an election when his party is trailing.
It’s no longer hypothetical.
Late last week, the president directed his Department of Justice to preemptively contest a potential Republican loss in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska. The department is demanding a court hold up certification of a possible Democratic win until it’s determined whether voters were confused by having two candidates with the same name on the ballot.
Trump followed that by calling for the prosecution of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, based on a New York Times report that her campaign helped recruit someone named Dan Sullivan to siphon away votes from the Republican incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan. The governor has ordered an investigation.
Academics believe the lawsuit is the first time since the Civil Rights era that the federal government has sued to halt certification of an election, a duty the Constitution places in the hands of states.
Trump, for years, has claimed elections are rigged when he or his party loses, and this time is no exception. He has used his midterm rallies to say Democrats cheat, criticize election officials by name and call the ranked choice voting system in Alaska, which might hold the key to Senate control, a scam.
But the certification lawsuit elevates Trump’s crusade beyond mere rhetoric, indicating that he is preparing to use the power of the presidency to try to reverse a possible loss as his party struggles to hold its control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections.
Earlier this week, the president also announced a $1 million bounty for anyone who provides proof of prior or current voter fraud in the country. It wasn’t clear whether or how he planned to follow through.
“For at least the last year and a half, they’ve been laying that groundwork,” said Theresa Lee, a senior attorney with the ACLU. “We’ve been preparing for just as long, if not longer.”
Trump says he’ll accept results if the election is ‘honest’
Trump told reporters this week that he would accept the election results, but with his typical caveat: “If they’re honest elections,” he said.
That follows a pattern. Trump has preemptively claimed that upcoming elections will be rigged and labeled elections he’s lost as stolen. It started with the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, when he came in second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa,” Trump said at the time. “He stole it.”
Democrats and other groups that oppose Trump have been concerned that his words would turn into directives to have his administration interfere in the midterms. They have been running exercises for months and have lawsuits pre-written. They also plan to have tens of thousands of people monitoring the polls on Election Day.
So far, early voting has been quiet, with about 35 million people already casting ballots without any notable disruption.
In that respect, this year’s election so far resembles 2025’s off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and a handful of other states. Democrats braced for possible Trump action then, but the election proceeded with no major issues. But the Justice Department’s more aggressive actions this month already make 2026 different from any election in recent memory.
It has sued California to block it from counting ballots after it alleged the state had 20,000 noncitizens on its rolls and made a similar demand of Washington related to about 400 voters in that state. Both states said the demands came too close to the election to fulfill, and a federal judge Wednesday rejected the federal government’s California demands.
Earlier, the Justice Department seized ballots and election records related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s Fulton County, and the administration launched a sweeping investigation of that vote, though it has yet to turn up evidence supporting Trump’s false claims of fraud.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department does not want to intervene in elections, but had no choice in Alaska.
“We are not doing anything improper,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — (and) President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way, shape or form.”
After the lawsuit was filed, Trump told reporters he was the one who pushed for it: “I’m the one that said do it,” the president said.
Lawsuits seem more ‘impulsive’ than strategic
Though the Trump administration claimed to be acting on behalf of Alaska’s voters in its lawsuit to hold up certification, the president’s Republican allies in the state didn’t appear happy.
Sen. Sullivan would not say whether he supported the lawsuit. Alaska’s Republican-controlled state government filed court papers to try to have it dismissed. The state’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, said the administration “should never have filed” it.
While controversial, the situation in Alaska is not that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on the ballot to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.
Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote that the Alaska lawsuit’s legal argument was “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.” He said that should reassure the public that Trump won’t be able to change election outcomes.
“The notion that there’s going to be something systemic that’s going to thwart the will of the voters seems much more speculative,” he said. “A lot of the conduct seems impulsive rather than strategic and planned.”
The courts have repeatedly rebuffed the administration, in many cases because the Constitution gives the president no direct power over how elections are run. Courts put on hold two Trump executive orders seeking to change voting procedures. The administration also has lost more than two dozen cases trying to get detailed voter information from the states.
That resembles 2020, when Trump and his allies tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and in the process lost dozens of lawsuits.
Can the institutions hold?
Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor of North Carolina, is part of Right Count, a group of conservatives pushing back against election conspiracy theories and intervention in local elections. He said he’s confident the system will hold.
“The only thing that protects us from anarchy is this thin piece of paper called the Constitution,” McCrory said. “That thin piece of paper is, to me, a cement wall.”
It’s one that many analysts expect will continue to stymie Trump in the courts.
“The courts are likely to throw most, if not all, of these charges out,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “But this is a way of intensifying the signal to Trump’s supporters that the elections are rigged.”
The Justice Department in 2020 refused to join Trump’s allies in litigation. In his second term, Trump has pushed out career staff and stocked his administration with people who helped him challenge the 2020 election. That’s led to mounting concern he could deploy immigration agents, the FBI or even the military to the polls or seize ballots or voting machines, although multiple administration officialshave denied they have such plans.
All of that could happen before courts even have a chance to weigh in, said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist.
“The threat is that he’ll take actions that can’t be undone,” Nyhan said.
Riccardi and Swenson write for the Associated Press.
The US Secretary of State hosted far-right Machado in March. (EFE)
Caracas, October 27, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Trump administration has announced plans to back electoral reforms in Venezuela and push for presidential elections.
In a press briefing with international journalists on Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Venezuela’s electoral infrastructure “designed to rig elections” and argued it must be replaced quickly to ensure a valid vote.
Rubio, who has been the Trump administration’s chief architect of US policy toward Venezuela, said talks between Acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s government and opposition sectors led by Dinorah Figuera were moving toward the appointment of a new Supreme Court (TSJ) before the end of the year, followed shortly afterward by the renewal of the National Electoral Council (CNE).
“Obviously, we need to use our influence with the interim [Venezuelan] authorities, to ensure that the process moves forward responsibly (…) Our goal is to have an election,” Rubio said. He welcomed what he described as “serious progress in that direction” and warned that “if anyone tries to derail the process, they will seriously harm Venezuela.”
In a separate press briefing, a senior State Department official added that, once both institutions have been reconstituted, the Venezuelan presidency will be declared permanently vacant, triggering a six-month constitutional deadline for presidential elections to be held “under competitive conditions.”
The anonymous official stressed that the process would also require political guarantees and regulations on access to the press. The official also defended the inclusion of pro-government sectors in a “transition,” arguing that peaceful democratic processes often require cooperation from outgoing factions, citing Spain and Portugal as precedents.
Asked about a specific election date, Rubio said the Rodríguez administration had complied with US timetables so far.
“Are we going to wait two years [for an election]? That’s not going to happen. At best, I have two years and two months left in this position,” he added.
His remarks coincide with statements by Dinorah Figuera, who heads the opposition delegation in talks with government representatives and forecast presidential elections to take place in late 2027 or early 2028.
Meanwhile, the third round of political dialogue in Venezuela agreed to review four laws governing political participation, pluralism, and the autonomy of political organizations, including the Law on Political Parties, Public Meetings, and Demonstrations. The discussions also addressed disqualifications from holding public office and the review of legal frameworks related to political rights.
In parallel, Venezuela’s National Assembly formally launched the process to renew the 32 justices of the Supreme Court (TSJ). Applications from legal professionals seeking to join the court will be accepted from Wednesday, October 28, through Wednesday, November 11. The fourth round of dialogue is scheduled for November 11–15.
Rodríguez and other Venezuelan high-ranking officials have not commented on the State Department announcements.
The White House’s claims relating to Venezuelan reforms and elections coincided with the return of opposition leader María Corina Machado to the country on Sunday. The far-right politician had spent more than a year abroad and her supporters have called for her inclusion in the ongoing negotiations.
Asked about Machado’s return, Rubio said he had told the Rodríguez government “weeks ago” that Machado should be able to come back without obstacles. The secretary of state denied that Washington had obstructed Machado’s return, stating only that she was advised against traveling immediately after the June 24 double earthquake.
Rodríguez, for her part, said the opposition politician could have avoided the “show” of appearing at a church in Lara state before traveling 400 kilometers to Caracas at the head of a motorcade, amid chants of “freedom” and calls for immediate presidential elections.
“The airports are there. Let’s move away from the show (…) Many people who have benefited from the amnesty law and this process, which seeks peaceful coexistence, have been able to enter through the airport’s new transitional structures,” Rodríguez said.
The acting president declined to clarify which route Machado had taken to reenter Venezuela. Machado left the country in December 2024 for Oslo, where she received the Nobel Peace Prize before gifting it to Trump. She and her party maintain that the government prevented her from returning on seven previous occasions, a claim the authorities deny.
Asked whether the justice system would take action against Machado, Rodríguez replied that she hoped there would be “repentance and a change of course” from the opposition figure and that the opposition leader would be able to “contribute something to the country.” In recent years, Machado endorsed economic sanctions and a foreign military attack against Venezuela.
The dueling campaigns over a Pasadena ballot measure that would levy a special tax on property owners for fire department funding are heating up in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election.
In a press release, the city of Pasadena last month encouraged neighborhood associations, homeowner groups and other organizations to host informational sessions on Measure PFD, featuring presentations from Fire Chief Chad Augustin and other city staff.
But if you ask opponents of the measure, these events are actually campaign stops.
The presentations focus on “everything that supposedly won’t happen” if the measure fails, according to a press release from the No on Measure PFD Campaign.
“The city has turned the fire department into the grassroots campaign arm for Yes on PFD,” said Matt Klink, a consultant for the No campaign.
Augustin disputed that characterization of the presentations and said he’s provided only factual information about the measure so residents can understand the choices before them. “That, in my mind, is education, not advocacy,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Yes on Measure PFD Campaign has accused the No campaign of running a digital ad and using website language suggesting that local firefighters don’t support the measure.
“None of the Pasadena firefighters support a no on Measure PFD,” said Raffy Bitchakdjian, president of the Pasadena Firefighters Assn. 809. “So for them to use our name, our likeness, and actually go say that is very deceptive.”
NEW YORK — Democrats and outside watchdogs are planning a massive presence at the polls on Election Day driven by concerns that President Trump will further leverage the vast resources of the federal government to interfere with a midterm that could hobble his final two years in office.
They won’t be the only ones there. A sprawling election protection effort on the left that is expected to deploy tens of thousands of monitors will be met by the largest-ever monitoring program by the Justice Department and still more observers from Republican-aligned groups. The result could be unlike anything seen at the polls in modern times.
The effort among Democratic and nonprofit groups includes training volunteers to stand watch outside polling places and report activities they consider concerning. The network includes traditional government watchdogs such as Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union plus a flood of volunteers assembled by state Democratic parties, congressional leaders, national activist groups and organizations focused on protecting democracy.
The Democratic National Committee created a first-of-its-kind cybersecurity unit staffed by former CIA and FBI officials to monitor and report online misinformation, including artificial intelligence deepfakes, said Jane Kleeb, vice chair of the DNC.
That’s as Democratic mayors, attorneys general and secretaries of state host tabletop exercises simulating worst-case scenarios, such as a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at voting locations or the seizure of ballots and voting equipment.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders have assembled a legal team that rivals that of any presidential campaign.
“We’ve never done this before,” Kleeb said of the party’s sweeping efforts. But “we’ve never had to deal with the president of the United States saying that he may seize ballots, put ICE agents outside polling locations and other kinds of very clear direct threats to the voting process.”
The Department of Justice has already filed lawsuits in California and Alaska that could affect ballot counting or certification.
While Trump continues to make baseless allegations of cheating in the election, administration and military officials have said they have no plans to deploy immigration agents or troops to polling sites.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis blamed “radical Democrats” for creating fears about election security by refusing to enact voter ID requirements and other Republican-backed measures.
“President Trump has done more than any other president to ensure we have free and fair elections,” Bis said.
Tens of thousands of volunteers trained to observe
State Democratic parties have trained an estimated 10,000 volunteers to observe polling places and report anything potentially concerning they might see from federal agents. Common Cause has trained roughly 16,000 more volunteers to stand watch at voting precincts, said Suzanne Almeida, vice president of states for the group.
She said a broader Election Protection coalition involving 300 other groups has trained tens of thousands more.
Smaller pockets of volunteers from other groups also are preparing to show up, including roughly 100 organized by Senate Democrats and hundreds more from a Democratic-allied group called Save America, which is training clergy members, veterans, teachers and other local community members. National groups such as Indivisible and MoveOn are activating their own expansive networks.
There are so many organizations working to protect the voting process — including many that cannot legally coordinate with each other — that some officials involved worry about unintentionally creating chaos outside polling locations.
Almeida said Election Day confusion is possible in some precincts but the nature of the threat requires a collective effort.
“It will actually take all of us if some of the threats we are most worried about come to pass,” she said.
Trump administration sends its own team
Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, was asked on CBS’ “60 Minutes” whether the Republican administration is planning to send ICE agents to polling places.
“There is no plan to do that,” she responded.
Still, the Justice Department is planning its largest-ever election monitoring effort, with about 1,000 department staff expected to observe voting and ensure federal laws are being followed, spokesperson Kiersten Pels said. That comes after a primary season in which the department said it deployed more than 100 election monitors across hundreds of polling locations.
At least one of those placements sparked tensions with local officials. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, said the behavior of two monitors during that state’s primary was “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.” A Laramie County clerk said the Justice Department monitors arrived at the polls intending to interview voters, but her office didn’t allow it.
The department disagrees that the monitors did anything improper, Pels said. She added that the monitors are trained to comply with federal law governing conduct at polling places and won’t “interfere with the voting process.”
Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates have raised concerns that the Trump administration’s monitors could intimidate voters or abandon the duty they’ve had for decades to protect against civil rights violations.
The department plans to send them to every state, focusing on high-population areas, jurisdictions that have had problems in the past and districts with close elections, according to a senior department official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
The Republican National Committee said its operation involves deploying “election integrity deputy state directors” in 22 states, among them Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina.
Those workers are the “eyes and the ears of the RNC in the field” who recruit volunteers and organize trainings, said Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director. Their mission is to surface anything that seems unlawful.
At the same time, the RNC has enlisted nearly 22,000 poll workers and is recruiting poll-watching volunteers for competitive districts. The poll watchers will “observe the process and help ensure election rules are followed in accordance with the law,” Triolo said.
Local election officials prepare for increased attention
While federal monitors have quietly observed elections for decades, largely without incident, some election officials are taking precautions.
Chris Swope, the city clerk in Lansing, Michigan, said he preemptively contacted law enforcement and his attorney in case federal monitors violate election law, although he expects them to abide by the rules.
The Democratic Mayors Association issued guidance to local Democratic officials with detailed instructions about what to do if federal agents appear at polling locations.
It notes that federal law prohibits the presence of federal immigration agents, the FBI or other investigative personnel. It also issued a reminder that federal agents are not allowed to be armed at the polls, nor are they allowed to interact with voters or handle ballots or election equipment.
Justice Department officials have said their monitors won’t be armed and will not interfere with voting. Asked about department monitors being sent to Georgia, Trump told a reporter recently: “They’re not going to do anything other than watch.”
Some of the poll observations have already begun. Mary Corcoran, Save America’s executive director, said her group’s volunteers have been monitoring precincts during early voting in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio to help give voters a sense of security.
“The fear is the point, and we must do something about it,” she said. “Left unanswered, fear does the work of keeping people home without a single agent setting foot at a polling place.”
Peoples and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP writers Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Mich., Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Jessica Hill in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
My fellow Californians, let us begin with an intelligence test.
Our great state has been voting since early October. Folks have been mailing in their ballots, dropping them off at collection sites and even showing up at in-person centers.
So raise your hand if you know — or even just assume — elections officials have been doing something with those ballots as they arrive, other than just throwing them in a pile.
Congratulations, hand-raisers. You are now officially smarter than the entire U.S. Department of Justice. Or at least more honest.
On Sunday, the lawyers for the DOJ managed to get a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to convene a rare emergency hearing because, OMG, people are actually voting and California is processing ballots!
Who could have possibly known?
Even though it’s literally law that counties count ballots in a timely manner; even though it’s happened in every other election; even though the daily tallies of how many ballots are received are posted online by the secretary of State; even though there are live camera feeds of ballots being processed in Los Angeles — somehow the U.S. government didn’t know this normal election procedure was happening, it claimed.
It wasn’t until late Friday, when DOJ lawyers read a filing by California DOJ lawyers laying out that L.A. is, like, actually opening mail-in ballots, that the U.S. DOJ realized that ballots are being opened. About 600,000 so far in L.A.
Armed with this previously unknowable information, Trump’s lawyers were begging the appeals court to take their flimsy, constitutionally questionable case away from the judge who had already promised to rule on their requests on Tuesday and immediately give them an injunction to further their election conspiracy claims.
Most folks are aware of the background of this drama, but here’s the quick recap.
President Trump for years has falsely but incessantly claimed that Democrats are colluding with undocumented people to help them sneak into the country in exchange for illegally voting in mass numbers for Democrats. This is not happening, but the president is obsessed with this conspiracy, so much so that he is weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack states, California in particular, in a bid to prove his delusions correct, and perhaps as a bonus, undermine democracy.
A few months ago, the DOJ came to the state of California and claimed it had a list of 190,000 people it believed were illegally registered to vote. That list has since dropped to 20,000. But with all the investigative power of the government hard at work on this, only 28 people in California have been indicted by the feds during this no-holds-barred effort, and it looks as though not all of those cases will hold up.
Undeterred, Trump lawyers tried to get a California judge to order the state (and Los Angeles) to set aside ballots that it claims to have doubts about. They asked the judge in that case for a temporary restraining order forcing L.A. County to do that, and the judge agreed to rule on that request early next week, in an already-expedited fashion.
But then the Trump lawyers learned about all that ballot processing and demanded the judge instead rule by Saturday afternoon — though the reasoning here seems iffy. When the federal judge assigned to the case didn’t rule by Saturday, an absurd ask that didn’t even allow enough time for lawyers to file briefs, the feds ran to the 9th Circuit, claiming that failing to rule on Saturday was a de facto denial of their request.
Basically, it seems the Trump lawyers were arguing two things. First, that once ballots are counted, they can’t be uncounted, and if there are illegal ballots, that hurts all voters. Sure, OK.
But again, there is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion, and the lists of potential vote scofflaws compiled by the government have been shown to be error-ridden. They may also involve the use of a mysterious non-government “third party” to gather the information that not even the Trump lawyers could identify Sunday.
DOJ lawyers also claimed they had just learned that once a ballot is taken out of the envelope, there was no way to reconnect that ballot to the voter who cast it — because our votes are anonymous. Therefore, the 20,000 ballots had to be grabbed before they were separated from the documents inside.
The lawyers did not explain why they needed to know how a person voted to confirm they illegally voted. The envelopes are retained by county elections officials, but apparently the Trump lawyers feel it’s critical to tie them to particular votes.
But here’s the thing — there are simply not enough illegal voters to sway a Los Angeles election, or a California one for that matter. We have a system to ferrets out problematic ballots right now, and a separate criminal system that can hold illegal voters accountable. Two weeks before an election isn’t a time to demand ballots be withheld — unless you’re trying to undermine trust.
The appellate judges did not seem impressed by the federal laywers’ arguments, questioning more than once if the 9th Circuit even had jurisdiction since states are in charge of elections, not the federal government. There was even some reading of the 10th Amendment. You know, the one the don’t-tread-on-me types love that reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States.”
We should expect a ruling sooner rather than later, but the real question remains, why the emergency? The DOJ is involved in another voting lawsuit in Washington, D.C., where the plaintiffs, led by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, have asked for a restraining order of their own stopping the government from creating national lists of who it thinks should vote, and using janky, secretive information gathering to do it.
It’s also true that the original case was reassigned from a Trump-appointed judge to one appointed by Bill Clinton. There has been speculation the switch may have been viewed unfavorably by the feds, though the Clinton-appointed judge, David O. Carter, was given the case because of his experience in the subject matter.
The D.C. restraining order could be decided in the next few days. I’m not saying the cases are related, or that the judge should or does matter, but the Trump DOJ’s argument in California is basically that its list of 20,000 is really solid, reliable information.
If the D.C. federal judge rules first that the government information gathering is potentially both an overreach and sloppy, it makes it that much harder for another judge, or the appellate court for that matter, to rule that the list is so critical that they must step in.
ANCHORAGE — A little more than one week before the midterm elections, the leading candidates in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race are trying to rally support from Alaska Native voters, a key constituency.
Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola both spoke at last week’s Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage.
The organization previously endorsed Peltola, who is Yup’ik, during her House races in 2022 and 2024, but it did not issue endorsements this year.
Both candidates have highlighted support from Native organizations and leaders ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Sealaska Corp., a regional Native corporation in southeast Alaska, has endorsed both of them, calling it a way to “honor their contributions and commitment to our communities, and to honor the diverse positions of our shareholders.”
The race is among the most closely watched nationally, with control of the Senate at stake. On Friday, President Trump — who held a rally in support of Sullivan earlier this month — said he told the Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the race if the incumbent loses. The lawsuit cites potential confusion with another candidate who is listed on the ranked-choice ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.
Sen. Sullivan is listed as a Republican and the incumbent, while Sullivan Jr. is listed without a party designation. U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche wrote on social media that the lawsuit is necessary to make sure officials “have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or [misled].”
Many voting rights advocates and Democrats have pointed the lawsuit as an improper political use of the Justice Department and an example of Trump’s interference in the upcoming election, following up on his threats to assert federal control over the vote.
Alaskan Natives represent about one-fifth of the state’s population, but they can face challenges to voting in remote communities. Advocates have raised concerns in recent years with polling locations in some villages opening late or ballots not arriving on time to be fully counted due to mail delays.
There’s also cynicism about whether participating in elections will make a difference.
“There’s legitimate hesitations about whether whoever they vote for is actually going to impact them,” said actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth, who is Bdewakantunwan Dakota and Dine and came to Alaska to encourage conference attendees to vote. “And our job is to say, hey, whether that matters or not, there’s an opportunity for you to make sure that your voice is counted. And I want to encourage people just to take the opportunity as much as possible.”
Sheri Buretta, who chairs the board of Chugach Alaska Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, introduced Sullivan to the conference Thursday as “one of our strongest champions.”
Sullivan, speaking as part of a congressional delegation update, said he’s learned important lessons from Native leaders. He cited work he’s done on issues such as pushing to ensure that Alaska Native Vietnam War-era veterans have access to land allotments.
Peltola, during a candidate forum Friday, became emotional speaking about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people and said additional law enforcement resources are needed. She also expressed support for fisheries. Subsistence fishing is critical in many Native communities.
“I will always fight to restore our fisheries. I feel like working on fish issues is my life’s work,” she said.
Energy is also a crucial issue in Alaska, including within Native communities.
Peltola recently said Alaskan Native people were being “absolutely crushed” by high costs from the ongoing war with Iran, which Sullivan has supported. Many rural communities rely on diesel for electricity and to heat their homes.
Sullivan has argued the war against Iran is temporary and that the “forever war is the Democrats’ war against Alaskan energy.”
Many Native leaders on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope see oil drilling as crucial to their region’s economy, and they believed their voices weren’t heard while President Biden was in office. His administration sought to restrict drilling in places like the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but Trump and the Republican-led Congress have rolled those efforts back.
Peltola has said she supports expanded oil and gas drilling and would work with Trump to accomplish that. But Sullivan and his allies have tried to align her with what they refer to as “Lower 48 liberals” who oppose more drilling.
Bohrer and Daley write for the Associated Press. Bohrer reported from Juneau.
A Michigan man and former studio engineer is facing the music for his theft of rapper Eminem’s unreleased works.
Joseph Strange, a 48-year-old Michigan resident, pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement and will be sentenced to prison in January, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. He faces up to five years in prison. Federal prosecutors accused Strange in March 2025 of stealing and selling unreleased work by Eminem (legal name Marshall Mathers III).
An attorney for Strange did not immediately respond Friday to The Times’ request for comment, but told Variety in a statement that his client is a “good” man and his “children have suffered greatly in all of this.” The attorney said the case is “far more complicated and nuanced matter” beyond the theft.
“Nevertheless, my client has taken accountability for what he has done, has tremendous remorse for what has happened to his family,” the attorney reportedly added, “and has great faith, as do I, in the judges of our district to see this case for what it is.”
A spokesperson for 15-time Grammy winner, maker of hits “The Monster” and “Lose Yourself,” did not comment.
Strange was charged in 2025 with copyright infringement and interstate transportation of stolen goods, federal prosecutors announced. Investigators said at the time that more than 25 songs had been played or distributed online without permission from Eminem or the group that owns his music, Capitol Labels Group. Investigators discovered the music on password-protected hard drives stored in a safe at Eminem’s studio in Ferndale, Mich., an FBI affidavit said. At the time, an attorney for Strange denied the “untested allegations.”
The charges against Strange arose after studio employees alerted the FBI of the theft in January 2025, alleging the unfinished releases were shared to a number of online platforms. Files from a hard drive in a safe were transferred to an external hard drive in October 2019 and January 2020, around the time when Strange was working at the studio.
A Canadian resident informed investigators that he purchased 25 unreleased Eminem songs from Strange for about $50,000 in Bitcoin and that he raised the funds through the support of a group of Eminem fans. He also claimed Strange also put some of Eminem’s handwritten lyrics up for sale.
The affidavit says a federal search of Strange’s home in January 2025 led to the discovery of numerous lyric sheets and notes handwritten by Eminem, a VHS tape of an unreleased video and hard drives with about 12,000 audio files.
“Joseph Strange abused a position of trust to unlawfully copy and sell unreleased music belonging to Eminem, profiting from works that were not yet authorized for public distribution,” said A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Criminal Division. “His conduct undermined both legal and artistic rights.”
WASHINGTON — Two former FBI intelligence officials who specialized in foreign election interference were charged on Friday with making false statements to Congress about their roles in investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides surrendered Friday and made their first appearance in federal court in Washington, where their lawyers pressed for a speedy hearing at which they could contest the allegations against them.
The Department of Justice says Floris and Benavides lied to Congress in 2023 about the involvement of a specialized foreign-influence task force in investigations into Biden as well as their knowledge of the laptop.
Floris’ attorneys called her “a patriot” and said she has “served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years.”
“Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts,” her attorneys said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
The case was filed 10 days before the Nov. 3 elections and marks the latest in a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions the Department of Justice has undertaken in the run-up to the midterm contests.
The prosecution, a rare Department of Justice criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled and peculiar saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race. It also comes amid a broader, backward-looking effort by FBI Director Kash Patel, who before taking over the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was a harsh critic of it, to scrutinize high-profile episodes from the bureau’s recent past that for years have animated President Trump’s conservative base.
“Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” Patel said in a statement posted on X.
The revelation of the laptop’s existence in October 2020 injected a thorny storyline in the race between Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Hunter Biden’s father, Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger, who went on to win the race.
The laptop’s contents were publicized by the New York Post, which said it had obtained from Trump ally Rudy Giuliani a hard drive of a computer dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop. The laptop contained emails that appeared to show discussions of the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings.
The peculiar circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian disinformation, particularly when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community was assessing that Russia was attempting to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the election and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.
Hunter Biden was subsequently charged with, and convicted of, gun and tax offenses during his father’s administration. President Biden pardoned him in his final weeks in office.
The Justice Department historically looks to avoid public and overt investigative acts in the direct lead-up to an election that involve candidates or that risk influencing an outcome. But officials in the last two weeks have made a series of bold moves in cases with political undertones, including a search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house in an immigration fraud investigation and a corruption indictment unsealed Thursday against powerful Democratic Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.
Floris and Benavides, two experienced intelligence officials, led the FBI’s since-disbanded Foreign Intelligence Task Force, or FITF, when the laptop was discovered. They are accused by the Justice Department of making false statements in Congress in 2023 by saying that the FITF was not involved in investigations related to Hunter Biden when contemporaneous messages proved otherwise, according to a criminal complaint filed against them.
The case brings renewed attention to the work of the task force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation. The task force became a magnet of congressional Republican criticism during the Biden investigation and was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in one of her first acts on the job.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit to block certification of the Senate race in Alaska if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses the contest while another candidate with the same name is on the ballot, kicking off what many have feared could become a lengthy battle between the U.S. government and states over certifying an election where the president’s party is struggling.
Many in both parties believe the fight could come down to Alaska, where Sullivan faces Democrat Mary Peltola. Also on the Alaska ballot is a Daniel J. Sullivan from the tiny fishing community of Petersburg. He has said he decided to run on his own, but Republicans have contended he’s a Democratic plant to siphon votes away from their candidate.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court in Alaska demanding that the state be blocked from certifying a Peltola win if the other Sullivan remains on the ballot. “The United States accordingly brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska,” the lawsuit alleges, contending that federal law requires states to protect the integrity of federal elections.
The Alaska Supreme Court rejected previous Republican efforts to remove the other Sullivan from the ballot, and the state’s Republican officials made the decisions about how to list him on the ballot. The other Sullivan will appear without a party designation next to his name, while the senator will be listed as the Republican incumbent. Alaska’s ranked choice voting system also will allow voters to select both of the men if confused.
The Trump Department of Justice has increasingly been used to bolster the president’s political operation, targeting his enemies and filing lawsuits against Democratic-controlled states in the run up to the election. Democrats and many voting rights advocates have long feared the Trump administration will try to block certification of elections the president’s party loses much as Trump unsuccessfully tried to do when he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Earlier Thursday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche told reporters that was unlikely outside of extreme circumstances. “It is not DOJ’s intention to and it’s never our intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process,” the attorney general told reporters in Virginia.
Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame University, said the lawsuit will likely only kick in if Republicans narrowly lose the Alaska Senate race and that it does not seem to have legal merit. “The statute simply doesn’t let the Department of Justice enjoin certification,” he said.
RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats, was charged Thursday with leading what authorities alleged was a wide-ranging criminal enterprise that acquired and distributed large quantities of marijuana and laundered the proceeds.
Lucas, who has been in elected office for decades, used her political power to insulate the operation from scrutiny, according to an indictment charging her and six other defendants, including several of her relatives. She “put her own financial interests before the people she was elected to serve,” said U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, who spoke at a news conference with FBI Director Kash Patel.
Lucas surrendered, the Justice Department said. She made a brief appearance in federal court on Thursday afternoon, where she was released on her own recognizance, according to court records. She left the court without addressing media gathered outside and went straight into a waiting vehicle.
The charges, including drug trafficking and money laundering, came after the FBI searched Lucas’ hometown office and a cannabis shop in which she has a stake in May. At the time of the search, Lucas — who has been a vocal critic of Republican President Trump’s administration — characterized it as an attempt to intimidate her.
“This is the circus we always expected it to be,” said Brian Woolfolk, chief counsel for the L. Louise Lucas Legal Defense Fund.
Lucas says she won’t be bullied by the federal government
A statement attributed to Lucas posted on her social media account did not directly address the substance of the charges but said Thursday’s actions amounted to the federal government wielding its “full weight” against a great-grandmother.
“I will not be intimidated. I will not be bullied. And I will not back down,” Lucas said in the statement.
The brash 82-year-old lawmaker has spent decades ascending the ranks of Virginia politics and has served since 1992 in the state Senate, where she’s the president pro tempore, overseeing the chamber in the lieutenant governor’s absence. More significantly, she leads the powerful Senate finance committee, through which all legislation with any budget impact must flow. She’s used the position to kill legislation she opposes.
Justice Department denies politics played a role
The indictment comes as Trump’s Justice Department has faced intense scrutiny over investigations and prosecutions against foes of the president that critics have called politically motivated.
Blanche rejected any suggestion politics played a role in Lucas’ case, noting the investigation began well before the second Trump administration started in January 2025.
“We don’t do political paybacks,” Blanche told reporters.
A person familiar with the May search told the Associated Press at the time that the probe was opened during Democratic President Biden’s administration. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing criminal investigation.
FBI alleges a ‘criminal marijuana enterprise’
Patel said in a statement that “Lucas and a close-knit group of family members and associates orchestrated a multi-year scheme to enrich their own criminal marijuana enterprise, ‘the Lucas Enterprise’ — using Lucas’ position as Chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee to insulate the enterprise from criminal scrutiny and influencing legislation to financially benefit themselves.”
The indictment describes Lucas as the “leader of the enterprise” who “approved and directed criminal activities,” including arranging for the acquisition and distribution of marijuana and supervising the laundering of the proceeds.
The indictment alleges Lucas worked this year with another of the defendants to use her political position to obtain a recreational marijuana license for him, with the understanding that the proceeds from sales under the license would be shared with her to support the “enterprise.”
Since 2021, marijuana has been legal to possess in Virginia, and many shops across the state have sold cannabis-derived products. But full recreational sales are not yet underway; legislation enacted earlier this year will allow them beginning in July 2027.
Law enforcement made multiple controlled purchases of marijuana from Lucas’ shop, which purported to sell hemp products, in 2024 and 2025, the indictment said.
In addition to drug and money laundering charges, Lucas faces a charge of racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and maintaining a drug-involved premises. An arraignment is scheduled for next month.
Among the other defendants who face a mix of those and other charges are two daughters of Lucas and a grandson. It was unclear if they had obtained legal representation. They were also scheduled to make an initial court appearance Thursday afternoon.
Virginia officials react
A forceful advocate of legalizing marijuana, Lucas partnered in opening the shop, The Cannabis Outlet, in 2021. She has publicly spoken about her ownership stake as recently as June, though her most recent financial disclosure forms do not list the business by name.
At the time of the search — when marijuana was recovered at The Cannabis Outlet, according to the indictment — many Democrats spoke up to defend Lucas.
On Thursday, Scott Surovell, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, said in a statement that the indictment contained “serious allegations” but emphasized that “Senator Lucas has the right to defend herself, and she has my full support as she does so.” Atty. Gen. Jay Jones, a Democrat who is close with Lucas, said the allegations against her must be tested in a “full and fair” legal process.
House Speaker Don Scott, Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger, all Democrats, echoed those sentiments, with Spanberger adding that the timing of the indictment so close to the midterm election would “further erode” Americans’ trust in the Justice Department. Lucas herself is not on the ballot this year.
Ryan McDougle, the Senate Republican leader, said he would not comment while the court proceedings play out.
The senator draws comparisons to Trump
Lucas, who represents a district that includes her hometown of coastal Portsmouth, operates with a sometimes-profane, unapologetic style that’s drawn comparisons to Trump.
She amassed a six-figure following on X and national attention, using the social media platform to advocate forcefully for her priorities and to bash her critics, including former GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin. She’s also occasionally blasted members of her own party, including Spanberger, with whom she’s had disagreements.
Earlier this year, Lucas helped lead Democrats’ ultimately unsuccessful plan to gerrymander the blue-leaning state’s congressional districts into a map intended to elect 10 Democrats and only one Republican. Along the way, she posted quips about four GOP members the intended map sought to oust, joking that they soon would be working at McDonald’s. She and other Democrats defended the maps as a reasonable response to Trump-backed efforts to boost the GOP’s midterm advantage in other states.
Lucas has been in politics for decades
Lucas has notched several historic firsts in her career. According to a biography from the state library, in 1971 she became the Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s first female shipfitter, a physically demanding job that involves working on metal assemblies for vessels.
She launched her political career in 1984, when, the biography said, she became the first Black woman elected to the Portsmouth City Council.
In the state Senate, Lucas has been a staunch advocate for abortion rights and increased public school funding and a leading voice on issues of racial justice and civil rights.
In 2019, after Democrats flipped control of the chamber, her peers elected her to serve as president pro tempore. And in 2024, she was tapped to lead the chamber’s budget committee, gaining enormous sway over any legislation tied to the state budget.
Richer and Rankin write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Washington and Rankin reported from Richmond, Va. AP journalists Eric Tucker in Washington and Steve Helber in Norfolk, Va., contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration is on track to deport about 660,000 people over the past year, a new report released Thursday shows, as arrests ramp up across the country fueled by billions of dollars meant to supercharge his immigration agenda.
The report by the Migration Policy Institute shows deportations increased from 620,000 during the first year of Trump’s second administration. The numbers fall short of previous highs in the early 2000s and fail to meet the Trump administration’s promise, made when it received the billions from Congress, that the money would allow for 1 million deportations annually.
The report, based on publicly available data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, comes after the Trump administration in January 2025 stopped publicly releasing similar figures compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump, a Republican, returned to power last year promising to stanch crossings at the southern border and crack down on immigration. His administration has pushed through restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration and launched high-profile arrest operations in its bid to force migrants out.
More people being deported, but not at all-time highs
The analysis found that the Department of Homeland Security carried out 980,000 deportations during the first 18 months of the second Trump administration.
During the last fiscal year — when the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement mechanisms were shifting into high gear — an estimated 660,000 people were deported.
According to MPI’s analysis, that’s a 26% increase from the yearly average from 2021 to 2024 during the administration of President Biden, a Democrat, but well below the 1.86 million deportations recorded in 2000, under President Clinton, another Democrat.
Despite the surging arrests, the report details some of the challenges to the Trump administration reaching its deportation targets.
Historically, many immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization were from Mexico and didn’t often seek asylum. But in recent years, migrants have come to the U.S. from a wide range of countries, which can make it more complicated to deport them. And immigration courts, which ultimately decide whether someone can be removed from the country, face more significant case backlogs.
Voluntary departures are increasing as are interior arrests
The report said voluntary departures — when people give up their cases in immigration court and agree to leave the country — were at an “all-time high,” with 170,000 choosing to do so since Trump returned to office in January 2025. People who choose voluntary departure could one day return to the U.S. But some immigrant advocates and lawyers say that people give up their court fight and agree to leave simply to get out of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention.
The Trump administration was also increasingly deporting people it arrested in the country’s interior, the report said, reflecting how it was stepping up enforcement against migrants who have been in the country for a long time. In 2025, about 28% of the people deported were arrested inside the country, but by July of this year that had risen to 39%.
Migrants arrested at the southern border still make up a large number of deportations, the report said — 69% of all deportations between Jan. 20, 2025, and July 31, 2026, were of people initially intercepted at the border.
People in the country longer may have more opportunities to contest their removal while the government typically has greater authority to fast-track deportations for people arrested at the border.
The analysis said most people deported have never been convicted of a crime, despite the Trump administration claiming to be targeting the “worst of the worst.” Previous data has showed the same.
In response to the MPI report, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said: “President Trump has delivered the largest reduction in illegal immigration in modern history.”
Trump administration no longer regularly releases immigration data
Homeland Security stopped releasing similar data when Trump took office, making it difficult to track one of his key campaign promises. Figures the Trump administration has released are inconsistent and unverifiable.
The administration says it is transparent. On Tuesday, it released some of its own figures as part of a document boasting of its achievements on immigration, including that 1.2 million migrants have been deported or removed during Trump’s second term. The discrepancy could not immediately be reconciled.
In the absence of regular data, analysts and activists interested in immigration trends have relied on information obtained through lawsuits or limited and sporadic information released by federal agencies to track deportation data.
Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.
Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.
State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.
Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.
“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”
State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”
“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”
Shifting claims
For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”
When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.
In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.
“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.
The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”
McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.
“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.
McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.
How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.
U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”
Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information,” but required “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.”
Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”
Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.
In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.
She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.
McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.
What’s ahead
Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.
Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.
“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”
McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”
He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”
In the race to become L.A.’s next mayor, the city’s top cop — LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell — has become a lightning rod for debate.
The two candidates — incumbent Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman — have staked out differing positions about how the Los Angeles Police Department has performed under McDonnell.
Raman has vowed to replace McDonnell, saying he has not “met the moment” given the department’s response to federal immigration raids. Bass has publicly backed the chief she hired two years ago, saying the LAPD could be thrown into disarray if McDonnell is removed before the 2028 Olympic Games.
Raman’s potential ouster of McDonnell and desire to push reforms on the LAPD has pitted her against the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the powerful union for rank-and-file officers that campaigned against Bass during her first election but is now backing her. The union has poured millions of dollars into attack ads against Raman, who has said she declined contributions from the organization in the past.
In an op-ed published in the Protective League’s monthly magazine earlier this year, union president Richard Mendoza called the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Raman, an “imminent threat to our members.”
Last week, Raman faced criticism for an Instagram video in which she appeared to slam McDonnell and the mayor, saying at one point “only you can stop fascist liars.” She later denied that she was referring to Bass or McDonnell, saying her remarks were improperly edited — and that she had the video pulled.
The Raman campaign did not respond to numerous requests for an interview about her vision for the LAPD.
Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner, has sought to burnish her credentials as a political outsider by publicly calling for a change in LAPD leadership — but she hasn’t given a clear timeline on when she would replace McDonnell.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell greets Mayor Karen Bass during a ceremony at police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles on May 27.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Last week, Raman told ABC7 she expected to replace McDonnell in 2030, after he has finished his first five-year term. Hours later, she pulled back a bit, issuing a statement saying she expects to replace him prior to the end of his term, which concludes in late 2029.
“Chief McDonnell is Mayor Bass’s police chief,” her statement said. “I have made it clear that I would seek a chief who can keep Angelenos safe and restore trust with our immigrant communities.”
Her comments at a mayoral debate this week threw further uncertainty about who will run the LAPD if she gets the top job.
Raman sidestepped a question about whether she would replace McDonnell before the Olympics.
“I believe he’s lost the trust of Angelenos, especially in light of the ICE raids,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure that she could make a “unilateral decision” to fire McDonnell outright. Bass pounced on the comment, saying that the fact that Raman didn’t know the mayor has that authority to get rid of a police chief shows she is unfit for the office.
The LAPD didn’t immediately respond to a request Thursday for an interview with McDonnell.
Asked about Raman’s remarks during his regular appearance on Fox 11 Los Angeles on Wednesday, McDonnell said he found it “problematic” to hear criticism of the LAPD’s response to civil unrest from someone “who wasn’t there.”
He defended the department’s protest response, saying his officers acted appropriately when confronted by unruly demonstrators hurling bottles, bricks, Molotov cocktails and commercial-grade fireworks. Fifty-two officers suffered injuries, ranging from concussions to hearing loss, he said. Such “riotous situations” necessitated the use of tear gas against crowds, he said, something the department hadn’t done in decades.
“It was getting to a point where it could become a deadly force situation, which we were trying to avoid at all costs,” he said. “I don’t think it could’ve been done differently that could’ve had a better outcome.”
City Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks during a debate with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass on Oct. 13.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Conventional wisdom holds that new mayors will eventually select their own chief, a decision that is considered as important as any in defining a city leader’s legacy. Some have waited longer than others to do it. Bass, for instance, oversaw the reappointment of McDonnell’s predecessor, Michel Moore, shortly after her election and stood by him for a year before Moore’s abrupt resignation in early 2024.
Mayors in other big cities have faced similar dilemmas.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist whom Raman is sometimes compared to, recently announced that he intends to retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, in a move that was decried by his progressive base. Mamdani told local media that he believed that Tisch was right for the job, based on a proven track record of rooting out corruption and had overseen a crime drop as commissioner, which is the equivalent of a police chief in L.A.
Bass selected McDonnell to lead the LAPD in November 2024 after a lengthy nationwide search.
His appointment was viewed with surprise in local political circles, where some questioned why a progressive mayor like Bass, with a background in community organizing, would hitch her fortunes to a law-and-order chief. Others argued that McDonnell was an appealing choice: An LAPD veteran who offered experience and respect after serving as the chief in Long Beach and later as L.A. County sheriff.
After numerous scandals under Moore, McDonnell was seen as offering stability while the city prepared for the massive security challenges of the World Cup and Olympic Games. In McDonnell, his supporters say, the mayor has an honest and principled leader who has managed to steady a department beset by low morale, dwindling staffing levels and aging facilities. Violent crime has fallen to historic lows under his watch, as it has it many other U.S. cities.
McDonnell, however, has faced withering scrutiny over a dramatic rise in police shootings last year and for the department’s use of hard foam projectiles, tear gas, horse-mounted officers and other tactics against protesters. Within the LAPD, some have also criticized McDonnell for taking a detached approach to running the department and ceding control to underlings, such as Assistant Chief Dominic Choi.
During Tuesday’s debate, Raman suggested that under McDonnell the LAPD has drifted back to being a more opaque, closed-off agency that no longer publishes basic information such as neighborhood-level crime statistics.
In a recent interview with The Times, Bass signaled her frustration with the slow pace of change within the LAPD.
Without singling out McDonnell by name, Bass said she was concerned about the lack of progress on revamping LAPD’s much-maligned disciplinary system, which the chief oversees and which — depending on who you ask — either punishes officers too harshly or fails to hold them accountable.
Bass said that when she toured police station houses after being elected, the number one complaint she heard was about the perception that lower-ranking officers are punished more severely than command staff.
“They feel that command gets away with a lot of things that the rank and file does not,” she said. “So I feel like the reform of the disciplinary system has not gone fast enough, and I am concerned about that.”
Bass has also vowed to make a priority of addressing police shootings of civilians, particularly those involving people experiencing mental health crises. Last month, she signed an executive directive calling for an outside review of the LAPD’s policies and training, which she referred to as “woefully inadequate.”
Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell speaks at a news conference at the Hall of Justice on Aug. 6.
(Arwen Clemans / Los Angeles Times)
If McDonnell has any doubts about his future, he hasn’t hinted at them during recent public appearances, often talking about the department’s role in the Olympics.
Bass told The Times that a push to replace McDonnell right before the 2028 Olympic Games would leave the LAPD with a leadership vacuum just as its leaders are supposed to be focused on security plans for that event. The last time city leaders recruited a new chief, the search process was nationwide, lasting more than 10 months, she said.
“I think that [Raman] is naive on what it means to do that,” Bass said. “I think she’s naive, and not understanding the instability to the department when leadership is in flux. And so if it took her the same amount of time, that means we’d have a new police chief about seven to eight months before one of the most high-profile security events in U.S. history.”
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell with his wife Kathy, right, is introduced as the 59th chief of the Los Angeles Police Department with Dr. Erroll Southers, then the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, left, and Mayor Karen Bass on Nov. 14, 2024.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
In some ways, Raman and Bass are not as far apart on public safety as they previously were. Both candidates have been critical of the license plate reader company Flock Safety, advocated for investing in alternatives to policing and have recently indicated that they are committed to keeping the LAPD from shrinking any further. And since launching her mayoral bid, Raman’s campaign has publicly distanced itself from the “defund the police” movement that Bass has consistently rebuffed.
Where the two candidates diverge most sharply was over a package of police raises negotiated by Bass in 2023 that Raman said has deepened the city’s financial problems. Sold as a way to boost recruitment, the pay increases are among the reasons the police union has endorsed Bass’ reelection. The next mayor will be asked to negotiate a new police contract, which is set to expire next year.
Matt Klink, an L.A.-based Republican political consultant, said that law enforcement groups, such as the Protective League, were skeptical of Bass when she first took office but now back her because she has “shown through her first term in office that she has consistently supported the police.” He said that Raman, on the other hand, has played to the far left by villainizing McDonnell and downplaying concerns about safety.
“Mayor Bass has a stronger record of supporting the police,” he said. “She backed our contracts and our budgets — she has generally supported public safety.”
UCLA professor David Turner said despite his wariness of Bass’ centrist drift, he and other progressives are equally skeptical of Raman, who, has repeatedly voted to increase the LAPD budget without any meaningful efforts to rein in police misconduct.
“That money was proposed by Mayor Bass and voted and approved by Councilmember Nithya Raman,” said Turner, who runs Million Dollar Hoods, which seeks to map the impact of mass incarceration. Still, he said, he hopes that Raman’s tough talk about McDonnell will translate into more accountability for the LAPD.
“What I’m looking for and what L.A. progressives are looking for is a certain level of boldness and a willingness not to capitulate to the [Protective League] and their whims,” he said.
Times staff writers David Zahniser and James Queally contributed to this report.
With less than two years until the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, serious questions remain about funding and coordination for the Cultural Olympiad, the arts and culture program accompanying the Games.
The Cultural Olympiad is a measure of a host city’s commitment to the creative arts and can have a lasting impact on a region’s artistic legacy. The 2024 Olympics in Paris featured more than 2,500 projects over a period of three years. And while Los Angeles arts organizations and neighboring cities are already commissioning work and developing neighborhood celebrations, critics say a more formal and cohesive plan has failed to materialize.
At a legislative hearing Wednesday at the California Science Center, lawmakers pressed organizers for answers to a basic question: How much money will there be to support the Cultural Olympiad, and when will that money reach the artists and communities expected to bring it to life?
Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, criticized the failure to mobilize cultural planning earlier. Los Angeles was awarded the Games in September 2017, giving it nearly 11 years to prepare.
“I’m not trying to point a finger here, but it just didn’t happen,” he said.
The delay had consequences, he warned: major artists book engagements years in advance, limiting what organizers can now arrange.
“So that’s the kind of thing that we lose. But that doesn’t mean that the Cultural Olympiad is a flop.”
Yaroslavsky also described the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival as a catalyst for Los Angeles’ cultural growth. “It allowed us to think much bigger,” he said.
“The urgency to share what our local communities can expect has been pressing, and many local cities and nonprofits could no longer wait for outside direction,” said Sofia Klatzker, Santa Monica’s cultural affairs manager.
She outlined Santa Monica’s proposed cultural framework, “Land and Water Here and Now,” encompassing performances, exhibitions, public art and international cultural exchanges.
The joint hearing of the Senate’s Special Committee on International Sporting Events and the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Arts brought together about 100 city and county officials, LA28 Cultural Olympiad leaders and arts advocates. Their presentations revealed a patchwork of efforts, with municipalities and organizations moving ahead while seeking clearer coordination and financial commitments.
Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica), who chairs both committees, convened the hearing.
A September report from City Administrative Officer Matthew W. Szabo and Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon M. Tso puts LA28’s Olympic and Paralympic Games budget at $7.263 billion.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Dwayne Jones, LA28’s senior vice president for the Cultural Olympiad and stakeholder events, did not disclose a precise cultural budget or how much funding had been secured. He described a fundraising ambition in the tens of millions of dollars, with conversations underway with philanthropic donors and LA28 partners.
The Olympic cauldron is lit at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ahead of the launch for ticket registration to the 2028 Summer Olympic Games Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles) repeatedly questioned how those resources would reach artists and community organizations. After the hearing, she conceded that “there are a lot of unanswered questions.”
LA28 Cultural Olympiad Executive Director Nora Halpern and Jones provided updates on plans first outlined in May, including an official Cultural Olympiad mark recognizing participating programs and a digital calendar and mapping platform. They also said programming spanning fashion, film, food, music, performing and visual art, will be announced in 2027.
Applications for the mark are expected to open in early 2027. The calendar and mapping platform is scheduled to launch in January 2028.
Separately, Halpern said artists had been selected to create 16 official posters — eight Olympic and eight Paralympic — through a process involving nominations from regional curators. The posters will be unveiled in July 2027.
Jones also described free community film screenings paired with local food and musical performances, as well as plans for dance, theater and spoken-word programming. Further announcements will come in 2027, he said.
City and county cultural affairs officials presented complementary efforts. Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs general manager Daniel Tarica said $15 million from its existing budget has been committed to its core program.
The department reported completing 19 programs and events this year, citing World Cup celebrations that combined sports screenings with art-making and dancing. The department is continuing exchanges between local and international artists and testing neighborhood programming ahead of an official summer 2027 launch. Additional initiatives, including 15 new Olympic and Paralympic murals and disability arts celebrations, depend on further funding.
Los Angeles County’s Department of Arts and Culture is building its 2028 effort around existing grants, youth programs, public art and neighborhood partnerships, Director Kristin Sakoda said. Plans include a Year of Creative Youth, an Olympic arts education curriculum being developed with the Olympic Museum in Switzerland, and outreach through parks, libraries and cultural venues.
Arts administrators from Long Beach and West Hollywood described local initiatives. Long Beach Cultural Affairs Officer Griselda Suarez reported investing $135,000 in 12 groups to pilot cultural projects, while Rebecca Ehemann, arts manager, City of West Hollywood, said the city was completing its first year of implementing a multiyear creative plan.
Arts for LA CEO Gustavo Herrera presented Mosaic LA, a community-led initiative intended to coordinate neighborhood cultural programming and sustain investment beyond 2028. Its proposals include a pooled fund, technical assistance and shared promotion, alongside exploration of a new county-level arts funding mechanism. Cultural districts would anchor the effort.
Its financing remains unresolved. “There are budgets that have been laid out, but no resources that have been allocated to it yet,” Herrera said.
The discussion also touched on the federal government’s role. Congress has appropriated $1 billion through FEMA’s State Homeland Security Grant Program for Olympics-related security, planning and other costs, and $94.3 million for Games-related transportation assistance. Those commitments are separate from the cultural fundraising described at the hearing.
Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward (D-San Diego) called for federal financial support and “a little bit of a better attitude,” saying recent political rhetoric was unhelpful to attracting visitors to California.
Earlier this month, President Trump drew criticism for remarks at a Nebraska rally about Iran potentially striking Los Angeles and San Diego. He subsequently said his comments had been misinterpreted.
The potential benefits of the Games are not automatic, UCLA professor of history Dr. Tawny Paul cautioned. Her research found that large Olympic visitor numbers do not necessarily translate into higher museum attendance, underscoring the importance of local audiences and programming before and beyond the competitions.
For Smallwood-Cuevas, securing additional state support requires a clearer account of the needs.
“At the end of the day, we need a concise, coordinated and clear ask,” she said after the hearing. “That’s rooted in some real facts.”
