AUSTIN, Texas — A Democratic Texas lawmaker opted to spend the night in the state House chamber and remain there Tuesday rather than allow a law enforcement officer to shadow her while Republicans try to prevent further delays to redrawing U.S. House maps.
Rep. Nicole Collier overnight stay stemmed from Republicans in the Texas House requiring returning Democrats to sign what the Democrats called “permission slips,” agreeing to around-the-clock surveillance by state Department of Public Safety officers to leave the floor. Collier, of Fort Worth, refused and remained on the House floor Monday night.
A message seeking comment was sent Tuesday to the Department of Public Safety.
The Democrats’ return to Texas puts the Republican-run Legislature in position to satisfy Trump’s demands, possibly later this week, as California Democrats advance new congressional boundaries in retaliation.
Lawmakers had officers posted outside their Capitol offices, and suburban Dallas Rep. Mihaela Plesa said one tailed her on her Monday evening drive back to her apartment in Austin after spending much of the day on a couch in her office. She said he went with her for a staff lunch and even down the hallway with her for restroom breaks.
“We were kind of laughing about it, to be honest, but this is really serious stuff,” Plesa said in a telephone interview. “This is a waste of taxpayer dollars and really performative theater.”
Collier, who represents a minority-majority district, said she would not “sign away my dignity” and allow Republicans to “control my movements and monitor me.”
“I know these maps will harm my constituents,” she said in a statement. “I won’t just go along quietly with their intimidation or their discrimination.”
2 states at the center of an expanding fight
The tit-for-tat puts the nation’s two most populous states at the center of an expanding fight over control of Congress ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The battle has rallied Democrats nationally following infighting and frustrations among the party’s voters since Republicans took total control of the federal government in January.
Dozens of Texas Democratic lawmakers left for Illinois and elsewhere on Aug. 3, denying their Republican colleagues the attendance necessary to vote on redrawn maps intended to send five more Texas Republicans to Washington. Republicans now hold 25 of Texas’ 38 U.S. House seats.
They declared victory Friday, pointing to California’s proposal intended to increase Democrats’ U.S. House advantage by five seats. Many absent Democrats left Chicago early Monday and landed hours later at a private airfield in Austin, where several boarded a charter bus to the Capitol. Cheering supporters greeted them inside.
Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows did not mention redistricting on the floor but promised swift action on the Legislature’s agenda.
“We aren’t playing around,” Republican state Rep. Matt Shaheen, whose district includes part of the Dallas area, said in a post on the X social media platform.
Democrats promise to keep fighting
Even as they declared victory, Democrats acknowledged Republicans can now approve redrawn districts. Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu said Democrats would challenge the new designs in court.
Lawmakers did not take up any bills Monday and were not scheduled to return until Wednesday.
Trump has pressured other Republican-run states to consider redistricting, as well, while Democratic governors in multiple statehouses have indicated they would follow California’s lead in response. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said his state will hold a Nov. 4 special referendum on the redrawn districts.
The president wants to shore up Republicans’ narrow House majority and avoid a repeat of the midterms during his first presidency. After gaining House control in 2018, Democrats used their majority to stymie his agenda and twice impeach him.
Nationally, the partisan makeup of existing district lines puts Democrats within three seats of a majority. Of the 435 total House seats, only several dozen districts are competitive. So even slight changes in a few states could affect which party wins control.
Redistricting typically occurs once at the beginning of each decade after the census. Many states, including Texas, give legislators the power to draw maps. California is among those that empower independent commissions, giving Newsom an additional hurdle.
California Democrats start redrawing process
Democratic legislators introduced new California maps Monday. It was the first official move toward the fall referendum asking voters to override the independent commission’s work after the 2020 census. The proposed boundaries would replace current ones through 2030. Democrats said they will return the mapmaking power to the commission after that.
State Republicans promised lawsuits.
Democrats hold 43 out of California’s 52 U.S. House seats. The proposal would try to expand that advantage by targeting battleground districts in Northern California, San Diego and Orange counties, and the Central Valley. Some Democratic incumbents also get more left-leaning voters in their districts.
“We don’t want this fight, but with our democracy on the line, we cannot run away from this fight,” said Democrat Marc Berman, a California Assembly member who previously chaired the elections committee.
Republicans expressed opposition in terms that echoed Democrats in Austin, accusing the majority of abusing power. Sacramento Republicans said they will introduce legislation advocating independent redistricting commissions in all states.
Texas’ governor jumped to the president’s aid
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott launched the expanding battle when he heeded Trump’s wishes and added redistricting to an initial special session agenda that included multiple issues, including a package responding to devastating floods that killed more than 130 people last month.
Abbott has blamed Democrats’ absence for delaying action on those measures. Democrats have answered that Abbott is responsible because he effectively linked the hyper-partisan matter to nonpartisan flood relief.
Abbott, Burrows and other Republicans tried various threats and legal maneuvers to pressure Democrats’ return, including the governor arguing that Texas judges should remove absent lawmakers from office.
As long as they were out of state, lawmakers were beyond the reach of the civil arrest warrants that Burrows issued. The Democrats who returned Monday did so without being detained by law enforcement.
The lawmakers who left face fines of up to $500 for each legislative day they missed. Burrows has insisted Democratic lawmakers also will pay pick up the tab for law enforcement who attempted to corral them during the walkout.
Barrow, Nguyen, Figueroa and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Barrow reported from Atlanta. Nguyen reported from Sacramento. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.
FAIRVIEW, N.C. — Jamie Ager has spent much of the past year rebuilding his farm in the foothills of western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene tore through the region, cutting power, destroying fences and scattering livestock.
Then, earlier this year, Ager lost his beef contract with local schools, a casualty of billions of dollars in cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Trump administration.
Now, the fifth-generation farmer is running for Congress — part of a new crop of Democratic candidates the party is turning to as it tries to compete in the tough, often rural districts it may need to flip to retake the U.S. House in 2026.
Democrats say these new recruits are uniquely suited to break through in districts where President Trump’s popularity dominates. Many, like Ager, are already a well-known presence in their communities. And in parts of North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan and elsewhere, the party is betting local credibility can cut through skepticism where the Democratic brand has fallen.
Ager says he sees national Democrats as out of touch with rural life: too “academic” and “politically correct and scripted.”
“That’s just not what people are interested in,” he says. “The ideas of helping poor people, being neighborly, the ideal of doing those things, I think, are worthy, good ideas that are actually popular. But the execution of a lot of those ideas has been gummed up, you know, not well executed.”
A shifting House map
Heading into next year’s midterms, Democrats believe momentum is on their side. Historically, the president’s party loses ground in the midterms. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Democrats flipped 41 seats to take control of the House. Republicans currently control the House by such a slim margin, Democrats need to pick up only a few seats to break the GOP’s hold on Washington.
The Republican-led tax break and spending cut bill has added to Democrats’ optimism. About two-thirds of U.S. adults expect the new law will help the rich, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About half say it’ll do more harm than good for middle-class people and people like them.
Still, Republicans remain confident. They point to having fewer vulnerable seats than Democrats have this cycle. Only three Republicans hold House districts Democrat Kamala Harris won last year, while 13 Democrats represent districts Trump won.
They also note Democrats’ low opinion of their own party after last year’s losses. In a July AP-NORC poll, Democrats were likelier to describe their own party negatively than Republicans, with many Democrats calling it weak or ineffective.
In places where local dynamics may give Democrats a shot, it means finding the right candidates is especially important, party leaders say.
“Recruitment matters in these years when the environment is going to be competitive,” Democratic pollster John Anzalone said.
Democrats hope a farmer in western North Carolina can regain trust
With power, water and telecommunications down due to last year’s hurricane, Ager’s Hickory Nut Gap farm became a hub for the community — hosting cookouts and using propane to grill food for neighbors.
Statewide, the storm caused nearly $60 billion in damage and killed more than 100 people. Little federal aid has reached the hardest-hit parts of western North Carolina.
“Helene hitting definitely put an exclamation point on, like, ‘Whoa, we need help and support,’” Ager said.
Democrats see Ager as a high-risk, high-reward candidate who could be successful in a district where Democrats have struggled.
No Democrat has won North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District since it was redrawn by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A court-ordered redistricting ahead of the 2020 election made it slightly more favorable to Democrats, encompassing Asheville and much of western North Carolina. Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards still won by nearly 14 percentage points last year and is expected to seek reelection.
Grayson Barnette, a Democratic strategist who helped recruit Ager, said in some districts it’s a risk to run a candidate who hasn’t held elected office before.
“But I would argue that’s a good thing, especially when the Democrats just took the big hit we did,” Barnette said. “We have to look in the mirror and say, ‘Let’s try something new.’”
In a district where nearly 62% of residents live in very low-density areas, Barnette believes Ager’s identity — as a business owner, coach and father with deep local roots — could cut through. His unpolished, direct style, he says, may resonate more than a polished political résumé.
In the video launching his campaign, Ager shows flooding on the farm and is seen on the porch of his home, feeding chickens, driving a tractor and spending time with his wife and three sons.
“I’m not flashy, but I’m honest,” he says in the video.
Ager doesn’t call himself a Democrat in the roughly two-minute video and rarely used the word during a three-hour interview. Still, his ties to the party run deep: His brother serves in the state House, following in the footsteps of their father. His grandfather served six years in the U.S. House.
Asked whether that might be a liability in the district, Ager shrugged: “Then don’t vote for me.”
Trump’s big bill could reshape a conservative district in Michigan
In western Michigan, state Sen. Sean McCann is a different kind of candidate from Ager. He’s buttoned-up and soft-spoken, with a long resume in elected office and deep roots in Kalamazoo, having served for a decade on the city commission before winning a seat in the state House in 2010.
In a district anchored by conservative and religious values, Democrats see McCann as the kind of steady, experienced figure who can make inroads — especially as backlash builds to Trump’s tax bill, which includes deep spending cuts.
At a recent meeting at Kalamazoo’s Family Health Center, where nearly 65% of patients rely on Medicaid, the center’s president warned the proposed Medicaid cuts would be devastating.
“It’s about being home in the community and listening to our community’s values — and carrying those to Washington,” McCann said.
The district is represented by Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga, who won reelection by nearly 12 percentage points in 2022. But Huizenga hasn’t said whether he’ll seek another term, and Trump carried the district by only 5.5 percentage points in 2024.
Democrats hope strong ties help elsewhere
Across the country, Democrats are watching similar races in places like Iowa and Kentucky, where local candidates with strong community ties are running. In Iowa’s 2nd District, state Rep. Lindsay James — a fourth-term lawmaker and Presbyterian pastor — is weighing a run in the northeast part of the state. In Kentucky’s 6th, which includes Lexington and Richmond, former federal prosecutor Zach Dembo is running his first campaign, describing himself as a political outsider.
It’s a mix of profiles: Ager, the farmer-turned-candidate feeding neighbors after a hurricane. McCann, the public servant meeting with health workers in his hometown. And others like them trying to reconnect a skeptical electorate.
“Yes, the Democratic Party has some taint to it,” Ager said. “But when I go talk to Republicans who are friends that I’ve known forever, there’s genuine admiration and mutual respect for each other. And that comes from being in this community forever.”
Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Maya Sweedler in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of West Virginia National Guard members will deploy across the nation’s capital as part of the Trump administration’s assumption of control over policing in the District of Columbia in what it says is part of a nationwide crackdown on crime on homelessness.
The move comes as federal agents and National Guard troops have begun to appear across the heavily Democratic city after Trump’s executive order on Monday federalizing local police forces and activating about 800 D.C. National Guard troops.
By adding outside troops to join the existing National Guard deployment and federal law enforcement officers temporarily assigned to Washington, President Trump is exercising even tighter control over the city. It’s a power play that the president has justified as an emergency response to crime and homelessness, even though district officials have noted that violent crime is lower than it was during Trump’s first term in office.
A protest against Trump’s intervention drew scores to Washington’s Dupont Circle on Saturday afternoon before a march to the White House, about a mile and a half away. Demonstrators assembled behind a banner that said, “No fascist takeover of D.C.,” and some in the crowd held signs that said, “No military occupation.” Trump was at his Virginia golf club after Friday’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, announced Saturday that he was sending a contingent of 300 to 400 National Guard members.
“West Virginia is proud to stand with President Trump in his effort to restore pride and beauty to our nation’s capital,” Morrisey said.
Morgan Taylor, one of the organizers of Saturday’s protest, said demonstrators who turned out on a hot summer day were hoping to spark enough backlash to Trump’s actions that the administration would be forced to pull back.
“It’s hot, but I’m glad to be here. It’s good to see all these people out here,” she said. “I can’t believe that this is happening in this country at this time.”
Protesters said they are concerned about what they view as Trump’s overreach, arguing that he had used crime as a pretext to impose his will on Washington.
John Finnigan, 55, was taking an afternoon bike ride when he ran into the protest in downtown Washington. A real estate construction manager who has lived in the capital for 27 years, he said that Trump’s moves were “ridiculous” because “crime is at a 30-year low here.”
“Hopefully some of the mayors and some of the residents will get out in front of it and try and make it harder for it to happen in other cities,” Finnigan said.
Jamie Dickstein, a 24-year-old teacher, said she was “very uncomfortable and worried” for the safety of her students given the “unmarked officers of all types” now roaming Washington and detaining people.
Dickstein said she turned out to protest with friends and relatives to “prevent a continuous domino effect going forward with other cities.”
The West Virginia National Guard activation suggests the administration sees the need for additional manpower, after Trump played down the need for Washington to hire more police officers.
Maj. Gen. James Seward, West Virginia’s adjutant general — a chief aide to the governor and commanding general of the National Guard — said in a statement that members of the Guard “stand ready to support our partners in the National Capital Region” and that the Guard’s “unique capabilities and preparedness make it an invaluable partner in this important undertaking.”
Federal agents have appeared in some of the city’s most highly trafficked neighborhoods, garnering a mix of praise, resistance and alarm from local residents and leaders across the country.
City leaders, who are obligated to cooperate with the president’s order under the federal laws that direct the district’s local governance, have sought to work with the administration, though they have bristled at the scope of the president’s takeover.
On Friday, the administration reversed course on an order that aimed to place the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration as an “emergency police commissioner” after the district’s top lawyer sued to contest. After a court hearing, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a memo that directed D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement regardless of any city law.
District officials say they are evaluating how to best comply.
In his order Monday, Trump declared an emergency, citing the “city government’s failure to maintain public order.” He said that impeded the “federal government’s ability to operate efficiently to address the nation’s broader interests without fear of our workers being subjected to rampant violence.”
In a letter to city residents, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, wrote that “our limited self-government has never faced the type of test we are facing right now.”
She added that if Washingtonians stick together, “we will show the entire nation what it looks like to fight for American democracy — even when we don’t have full access to it.”
Brown and Pesoli write for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, with assists from Julia Wick, Seema Mehta and David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.
Days after the Trump administration’s mass immigration raids came to Los Angeles, City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado started looking for money to help the city’s undocumented residents.
In a June 10 motion, she asked City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo to detail options for finding at least $1 million for RepresentLA, which provides legal services for undocumented Angelenos facing deportation.
A week later, an official from Szabo’s office said they were “unable to identify eligible funding sources” for the $1 million, which would come on top of $1 million the city has already allocated to RepresentLA.
This summer in L.A., an immigration crisis is colliding with a budget crisis, leaving some councilmembers frustrated that the city cannot do more, as federal agents whisk thousands of immigrants away to detention centers and potential deportation.
The city has been active in court, joining an ACLU lawsuit that temporarily blocked federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests. Mayor Karen Bass also announced a program to provide immigrants with gift cards, funded by private philanthropy, when many were afraid to go to work.
But coming up with another $1 million for immigrant legal defense, after city officials closed a nearly $1-billion deficit through cuts and slated layoffs, has proved a slog.
“Why is it that we can’t find the money for this?” asked Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez during a Civil Rights, Equity, Immigration, Aging and Disability Committee meeting on Aug. 1. “It appears that level of urgency is not being transmitted through this report, because when we’re in other situations, we find the money.”
Jurado piggybacked off her colleague.
“This is an immigration legal crisis,” she said, adding that she felt “disappointment, frustration and, frankly, anger with the outcome here that we can’t find a single dollar to support immigrant communities and this legal defense fund.”
“I find it really hard to believe that the CAO couldn’t find any money for it,” she said in an interview.
RepresentLA, which is a public-private partnership with the county, the city, the California Community Foundation and the Weingart Foundation, has seen a surge in demand for legal services since the immigration raids began in June, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, which manages RepresentLA.
“The need is higher than the needs being met,” Cabrera said.
The city has contributed funding for RepresentLA since its inception in 2021 — initially $2 million each fiscal year before dropping to $1 million in 2024-2025 and $1 million this year out of a total budget of $6.5 million, with the other $5.5 million coming from L.A. County.
RepresentLA, which has served nearly 10,000 people, provides free legal representation for undocumented immigrants facing removal proceedings, as well as other services such as help with asylum applications. Some attorneys are on staff, while others are outside counsel.
In April, Bass said in her State of the City speech that the city would “protect every Angeleno, no matter where you are from, no matter when you arrived in L.A … because we know how much immigrants contribute to our city in so many ways. We will always stand strong with you.”
But behind the scenes, the city’s financial struggles put even the initial $1 million for RepresentLA in jeopardy, with the mayor proposing to slash it to zero for this fiscal year.
“Getting the initial $1 million back was quite a battle,” said Angelica Salas, CHIRLA’s executive director. “It had been zeroed out. We were able to get just the money enough to continue the program for those who are currently in the program.”
The City Council managed to claw back the $1 million during budget negotiations by slowing down hiring at the LAPD, as well as “ending duplicative spending,” said Naomi Villagomez-Roochnik, a spokesperson for Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who sits on the budget committee. (The mayor and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson have since said they are looking for money to reverse the hiring slowdown.)
“It’s a crumb when you compare it to the rest of the city budget,” Hernandez said.
RepresentLA has 23 attorneys working on deportation hearings, and Salas said each represents about 35 clients at any given time. An additional $1 million “would allow us to expand our capacity for the new people — the thousands of people who have now been picked up in this new sweep,” she said.
At the committee hearing earlier this month, Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said the City Council should find savings in other areas to help pay for important programs like RepresentLA.
“Next time the city attorney comes asking us for outside counsel money, you could say ‘No’ and redirect those resources. … When the mayor comes for Inside Safe, for additional discretionary money that she is unaccountable for, you could say, ‘No, we’re taking $1 million and putting it for RepresentLA,’” she said. “Let’s effing go.”
The committee called on the city administrative officer’s staff to research options for funding RepresentLA, including grants or reallocating money from elsewhere.
Szabo confirmed to The Times that things will be different at the next committee meeting.
“Our next report will provide options to fund RepresentLA at the level requested,” he said in a text message.
Newsletter
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
Sign up to make sense of the often unexplained world of L.A. politics.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
State of play
BALLOT ROYALE: Labor unions and business groups have been locked in a heated battle of ballot measures for the last three months, after the City Council hiked the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers. Each side is trying to get measures on the ballot that would have far-reaching effects, including one that would put the minimum wage increase to a citywide vote. Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel and restaurant workers, has proposed four ballot measures that, according to critics, would wreak havoc on the city’s economy. Business leaders, in turn, have filed a ballot petition to repeal the city’s $800-million business tax — a move denounced by city officials, who say it would gut funding for police and other essential services.
— SAGE ADVICE: The Jurado staffer who was arrested during an anti-ICE demonstration in June gave a heads-up to her boss that she planned to take part, according to text messages obtained by The Times through a public records request.
“Going to the protest at [City Hall] fyi,” Luz Aguilar wrote to Chief of Staff Lauren Hodgins.
Hodgins responded with words of caution.
“To reiterate what we spoke about a few mins ago, if you choose to take part in any community action, please ensure that you approach the event with peace and care for those around you and stay safe,” Hodgins wrote. “This is not a city-sanctioned activity and you are participating on your own accord so want to ensure your safety along with the safety of those around you.”
Aguilar did not text back. She was later arrested at the demonstration and ultimately charged with resisting arrest after allegedly assaulting a police officer.
— BACK TO COURT: Prosecutors filed two new corruption charges against City Councilmember Curren Price this week. The charges were connected to two votes he cast on funding for the city housing authority and the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, both of which were paying Price’s wife, Del Richardson. Price’s attorney called the new charges “nothing more than an attempt to pile on to a weak case.”
Sources told The Times this week that prosecutors tried to get Richardson to testify in front of a grand jury as part of Price’s case. She did not ultimately do so.
— IT’S FUN TO STAY AT THE YMCA: Bass, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath and City Councilmember Traci Park were all in the Palisades Thursday morning at a ceremony where Horvath pledged $10 million from her discretionary funds toward rebuilding the Palisades-Malibu YMCA.
— GIFT ECONOMY: Our public records request for all the gifts Bass received in the last year and a half came back, with the list largely composed of ceremonial gift exchanges with her foreign counterparts (chopsticks and a teacup from the mayor of Sejong, South Korea, estimated cost $32; a scarf and a hat from Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, estimated cost $45).
There were a few interesting tidbits: Bass received flowers (~$72) from race and gender scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality. There were also fancy Dodgers tickets and food (~$590, but marked as “paid down”) from her longtime lawyers at Kaufman Legal Group, along with flights and travel for two speaking engagements.
— NOT RULING IT OUT: When Bass appeared on the podcast “Lovett or Leave It,” host Jon Lovett gave her a “crazy pitch”: What if the city of Los Angeles broke off from the county, forming its own city-county? Bass said it “wasn’t that crazy” and asked (jokingly) whether Lovett would be taking on the messy ballot initiative … before reverting back to her standard line on the need for intergovernmental cooperation. Bass also told Lovett that the city is still looking at ways to carve out an exemption to Measure ULA taxes for Palisades fire survivors selling their lots. And, she said, the city is in the process of hiring its long-promised film liaison “as we speak.”
— HOT SEAT: Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers launched a special election campaign on Thursday, urging California voters to approve new congressional districts to shrink the state’s Republican delegation, as Texas Republicans fight to redraw their own maps to favor the GOP. If the plan moves forward through the many hoops ahead, another district could be created in southeast Los Angeles County, which would undoubtedly kickstart frantic maneuvering ahead of 2026. (L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis’ name is already getting thrown around as a potential candidate, though her office didn’t respond to a half-dozen queries.)
— DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL: City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto came out swinging against SB 79, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s latest housing density bill, back in May. Now, both proponents and opponents are clamoring to know whether Bass will take a position on the controversial bill. The Times has been asking too, but so far the mayor and her team have not responded to questions.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program did not carry out any new operations this week. Her Shine LA initiative, which aims to clean up city streets and sidewalks, will be back Aug. 21.
On the docket for next week: The Charter Reform Commission will meet at City Hall twice — yes, twice — to discuss planning and infrastructure on Monday and “government structure” on Friday.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s capital challenged President Trump’s takeover of its police department in court on Friday, hours after his administration stepped up its crackdown on policing by naming a federal official as the new emergency head of the department, with all the powers of a police chief.
District of Columbia Atty. Gen. Brian Schwalb said in a new lawsuit that Trump is going far beyond his power under the law. Schwalb asked a judge to find that control of the department remains in district hands and sought an emergency restraining order.
“The administration’s unlawful actions are an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the 700,000 Americans who call D.C. home. This is the gravest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” Schwalb said.
The lawsuit comes after Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday night that Drug Enforcement Administration boss Terry Cole will assume “powers and duties vested in the District of Columbia Chief of Police.” The Metropolitan Police Department “must receive approval from Commissioner Cole” before issuing any orders, Bondi said. It was unclear where the move left the city’s current police chief, Pamela Smith, who works for the mayor.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back, writing on social media that “there is no statute that conveys the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”
Justice Department and White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on the district’s lawsuit Friday morning.
Chief had agreed to share immigration information
Schwalb had said late Thursday that Bondi’s directive was “unlawful,” arguing it could not be followed by the city’s police force. He wrote in a memo to Smith that “members of MPD must continue to follow your orders and not the orders of any official not appointed by the Mayor,” setting up the legal clash between the heavily Democratic district and the Republican administration.
Bondi’s directive came even after Smith had told MPD officers hours earlier to share information with immigration agencies regarding people not in custody, such as someone involved in a traffic stop or checkpoint. The Justice Department said Bondi disagreed with the police chief’s directive because it allowed for continued enforcement of “sanctuary policies,” which generally limit cooperation by local law enforcement with federal immigration officers.
Bondi said she was rescinding that order as well as other MPD policies limiting inquires into immigration status and preventing arrests based solely on federal immigration warrants. All new directives must now receive approval from Cole, the attorney general said.
The police takeover is the latest move by Trump to test the limits of his legal authorities to carry out his agenda, relying on obscure statutes and a supposed state of emergency to bolster his tough-on-crime message and his plans to speed up the mass deportation of people in the U.S. illegally.
It also marks one of the most sweeping assertions of federal authority over a local government in modern times. While Washington has grappled with spikes in violence and visible homelessness, the city’s homicide rate ranks below those of several other major U.S. cities and the capital is not in the throes of the public safety collapse the administration has portrayed.
Residents are seeing a significant show of force
A population already tense from days of ramp-up has begun seeing more significant shows of force across the city. National Guard troops watched over some of the world’s most renowned landmarks and Humvees took position in front of the busy main train station. Volunteers helped homeless people leave long-standing encampments — to where was often unclear.
Department of Homeland Security police stood outside Nationals Park during a game Thursday between the Washington Nationals and the Philadelphia Phillies. DEA agents patrolled The Wharf, a popular nightlife area, while Secret Service officers were seen in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
Bowser, walking a tightrope between the Republican White House and the constituency of her largely Democratic city, was out of town Thursday for a family commitment in Martha’s Vineyard but would be back Friday, her office said.
The uptick in visibility of federal forces around the city, including in many high-traffic areas, has been striking to residents going about their lives. Trump has the power to take over federal law enforcement for 30 days before his actions must be reviewed by Congress, though he has said he’ll re-evaluate as that deadline approaches.
Officers set up a checkpoint in one of D.C.’s popular nightlife areas, drawing protests. Troops were stationed outside the Union Station transportation hub as the 800 Guard members who have been activated by Trump started in on missions that include monument security, community safety patrols and beautification efforts, the Pentagon said.
Troops will assist law enforcement in a variety of roles, including traffic control posts and crowd control, National Guard Major Micah Maxwell said. The Guard members have been trained in de-escalation tactics and crowd control equipment, Maxwell said.
National Guard troops are a semi-regular presence in D.C., typically being used during mass public events like the annual July 4 celebration. They have regularly been used in the past for crowd control in and around Metro stations.
Whitehurst, Khalil and Richer write for the Associated Press.
This stunning village has been named by The Times as one of the most picturesque destinations in the UK perfect for a mini getaway – and it’s just a short car ride from Cheshire
One of the most prominent features of Ashford is the medieval Sheepwash Bridge(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A charming Peak District village just a stone’s throw from Cheshire has earned recognition as one of Britain’s finest destinations for a mini break. The Times has compiled a list of 25 of the most stunning locations ideal for a quick getaway, featuring everything from quaint hamlets to vibrant boutique shopping streets.
Featured on the list is Ashford-in-the-Water in the Peak District – barely more than thirty minutes from Macclesfield – which sits astride the River Wye, reports Cheshire Live. The Times declares: “For peak village perfection in the Peak District head to Ashford, which lies on the banks of the River Wye.
“Envy-inducing aspects include the medieval Sheepwash bridge, a church that dates from the 12th century and a thriving cricket club that plays on the village green, as well as a collection of very charming limestone cottages with carefully tended gardens.
Ashford is a quintessential chocolate box village(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Derbyshire Live recently highlighted the village’s attractions, saying: “For a small village, Ashford-in-the-Water is surprisingly well-equipped for a delightful day in the countryside, boasting a range of independent businesses. At the heart of the village, Ashford General Store provides a delectable array of Bradwell’s ice cream flavours and an assortment of freshly baked treats like brownies, Bakewell slices, and sausage rolls.
“Those looking to quench their thirst might fancy a crisp pint at the renowned Bull’s Head pub; conversely, if a hot beverage appeals even on a sunny day, the Aisseford Tea Room has earned excellent acclaim from both residents and visitors alike. Should you desire a longer stay in Ashford-in-the-Water, there’s no shortage of B&Bs, including the charming Riverside House Hotel.”
It added: “Nestled just two miles north-west of Bakewell, Ashford-in-the-Water advises visitors that parking can be rather limited. It’s recommended to park further out and enjoy a scenic stroll into the village, thereby taking full advantage of the breath-taking views en-route through the stunning Peak District.”
Ashford-in-the-Water is truly a chocolate-box village – a term used to describe particularly picturesque cottages resembling those that used to front the iconic Cadbury boxes. Ashford is full of pretty limestone cottages and narrows lanes commonly associated with English charm.
The Peak District National Park is full of tremendous walking and hiking trails(Image: Daniel_Kay via Getty Images)
The local area is peppered with places to take in the area’s natural beauty, including a number of walking trails. While some trails are better for more seasoned hikers, many are perfectly primed for the entire family.
The Ashford-in-the-Water to Monsal Dale Circular Walk crosses through fields, woodlands, and open countryside while the Bakewell and Ashford-in-the-Water Circular offers scenic views of the River Wye, rolling hills, and many of Ashford’s notable historic sites, including the famous Sheepwash Bridge.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic lawmakers and their allies on Thursday launched a special-election campaign to ask California voters to approve new congressional districts to decrease the size of the state’s Republican delegation — a move that could determine control of Congress next year and stymie President Trump’s agenda.
The effort is a response to GOP-led states, notably Texas, attempting to redraw their congressional maps to decrease Democratic ranks in the narrowly-divided U.S. House of Representatives at Trump’s behest.
Share via
Newsom, speaking to a fired-up partisan crowd at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, said the effort by Republicans represented a desperate effort by a failed president to hold on to power by keeping Congress under Republican control.
“He doesn’t play by a different set of rules. He doesn’t believe in the rules,” Newsom said. “And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we have got to meet fire with fire.”
The governor was joined by Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff; Rep. Pete Aguilar, (D-San Bernardino), the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and union leaders essential to providing the funding and volunteers to convince Californians to vote for the “Election Rigging Response Act.” The proposed California ballot measure would temporarily toss out the congressional districts enacted by the state’s voter-approved, independent redistricting commission.
“Our union stands in full support of this ballot initiative. We are ready to do whatever it takes to stop this power grab and fight back against any and all attacks on our democracy, on our students and on public education,” said Erica Jones, the secretary treasurer of the California Teachers Assn., which represents 310,000 public school teachers.
She said school children have suffered because of the Trump administration’s immigration raids, as well as cuts to healthcare funding, after school programs and teacher trainings.
“Our students deserve better,” she said. “The majority of Americans are not with him on these vicious attacks. So what does Trump want to do? Rig the next election and steal our right to fair representation? He wants to stack the deck to keep slashing public services to pad the pockets of his billionaire donors.”
Outside the political rally, Border Patrol agents gathered and arrested at least one person. Newsom told the crowd inside that he doubted it was a coincidence.
Supporters of the independent commission that currently draws California’s congressional maps criticized Democrats’ efforts to conduct a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting plan. For Newsom’s plant to work, the Democratic-led state Legislature must vote in favor of placing the measure on the ballot in a special election in November, and then the final decision will be up to California voters.
“Two wrongs do not make a right, and California shouldn’t stoop to the same tactics as Texas. Instead, we should push other states to adopt our independent, non-partisan commission model across the country,” said Amy Thoma, spokesperson for the Voters First Coalition, which includes Charles Munger Jr., the son of a billionaire who bankrolled the ballot measure that created the independent commission.
Munger will vigorously oppose any proposal to circumvent the independent commission, she said.
Since voters approved independent congressional redistricting in 2010, California’s districts have been drawn once per decade, following the U.S. Census, by a panel split between registered Democrats, registered Republicans and voters without a party preference.
The commission is not allowed to consider the partisan makeup of the districts, nor protecting incumbents, but instead looks at “communities of interest,” logical geographical boundaries and the Voting Rights Act.
The current map was drawn in 2021 and went into effect for the 2022 election.
Newsom is pushing to suspend those district lines and put a new map tailored to favor Democrats in front of voters on Nov. 4. That plan, he has said, would have a “trigger,” meaning a redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas or another GOP-led state moved forward with its own.
Sara Sadhwani, who served on the redistricting commission that approved the current congressional district boundaries, said that while she is deeply proud of the work she and her colleagues completed, she approved of Newsom’s effort to temporarily put the commission’s work aside because of the unprecedented threats to American democracy.
“These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” said Sadhwani, citing the immigration raids, the encouragement of political violence and the use of National Guard troops in American cities. “And if that wasn’t enough, we are watching executive overreach that no doubt is making our founding fathers turn in their graves, and we have to take action. These are the hallmarks of a democracy in peril.”
If voters approved the ballot measure, the new maps would be in effect until the independent commission redraws the congressional boundaries in 2031.
To meet Newsom’s ambitious deadline, the state Legislature would need to pass the ballot language by a two-thirds majority and send it to Newsom’s desk by Aug. 22. The governor’s office and legislative leaders are confident in their ability to meet this threshold in the state Assembly and state Senate, where Democrats have a supermajority.
Newsom first mentioned the idea in mid July, meaning the whole process could be done in about five weeks. Generally, redrawing the state’s electoral lines and certifying a measure to appear before voters on the ballot are processes that take months, if not more than a year.
Trump’s prodding of Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional maps to create five new GOP seats has kicked off redistricting battles across the nation.
That includes Florida, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri, where Republicans control the statehouse, and New York, Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, where Democrats are in power.
Democratic lawmakers in Texas fled the state to block the Republican-led legislature from approving a new map that would gerrymander congressional districts to favor of the GOP. The Democrats maneuver worked, since it prevented the legislature from have a quorum necessary to approve the measure. A second special session is expected to begin Friday. The absent lawmakers are facing threats of fines, civil arrest warrants and calls for being removed from office; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to call repeated special sessions until the map is approved.
In California, the gerrymandering plan taking shape behind closed doors would increase the Democratic Party’s dominance in the state by making five House districts more favorable to Democrats, according to a draft map reviewed by The Times.
Those changes could reduce by more than half the number of Republicans representing California in Congress. The state has the nation’s largest congressional delegation, with 52 members. Nine are Republicans.
A Northern California district represented by Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) could shift to the south, shedding rural, conservative voters near the Oregon border and picking up left-leaning cities in Sonoma County. Sacramento-area Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) would see his district shift toward the bluer center of the city.
The plan would also add more Democrats to the Central Valley district represented by Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford), who has been a perennial target for Democrats.
Southern California would see some of the biggest changes: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) would see his safely Republican district in San Diego County become more purple through the addition of liberal Palm Springs. And Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) and Ken Calvert (R-Corona) would be drawn into the same district, which could force the lawmakers to run against each other.
The plan would also shore up Democrats who represent swing districts, such as Reps. Dave Min (D-Irvine) and Derek Tran (D-Orange).
It could also add another district in southeast Los Angeles County, in the area that elected the first Latino member of Congress from California in modern history. A similar seat was eliminated during the 2021 redistricting.
Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report from Sacramento.
NEW YORK — As National Guard troops deploy across her city as part of President Trump’s efforts to clamp down on crime, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is responding with relative restraint.
She’s called Trump’s takeover of the city’s police department and his decision to activate 800 members of the guard “unsettling and unprecedented” and gone as far as to cast his efforts as part of an “authoritarian push.”
But Bowser has so far avoided the kind of biting rhetoric and personal attacks typical of other high-profile Democratic leaders, despite the unprecedented incursion into her city.
“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” Bowser told reporters at a news conference responding to the efforts. She even suggested the surge in resources might benefit the city and noted that limited home rule allows the federal government “to intrude on our autonomy in many ways.”
“My tenor will be appropriate for what I think is important for the District,” said Bowser, who is in her third term as mayor. “And what’s important for the District is that we can take care of our citizens.”
The approach underscores the reality of Washington’s precarious position under the thumb of the federal government. Trump has repeatedly threatened an outright takeover of the overwhelmingly Democratic city, which is granted autonomy through a limited home rule agreement passed in 1973 that could be repealed by Congress. Republicans, who control both chambers, have already frozen more than $1 billion in local spending, slashing the city’s budget.
That puts her in a very different position from figures such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Democrats whose states depend on the federal government for disaster relief and other funding, but who have nonetheless relentlessly attacked the current administration as they lay the groundwork for potential 2028 presidential runs. Those efforts come amid deep frustrations from Democratic voters that their party has not been nearly aggressive enough in its efforts to counter Trump’s actions.
“Unfortunately she is in a very vulnerable position,” said Democratic strategist Nina Smith. “This is the sort of thing that can happen when you don’t have the powers that come with being a state. So that’s what we’re seeing right now, the mayor trying to navigate a very tough administration. Because this administration has shown no restraint when it comes to any kind of constitutional barriers or norms.”
A change from Trump’s first term
Bowser’s approach marks a departure from Trump’s first term, when she was far more antagonistic toward the president.
Then she routinely clashed with the administration, including having city workers paint giant yellow letters spelling out “Black Lives Matter” on a street near the White House during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
This time around, Bowser took a different tact from the start. She flew to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after he won the election and has worked to avoid conflict and downplay points of contention, including tearing up the “Black Lives Matter” letters after he returned to Washington in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
The change reflects the new political dynamics at play, with Republicans in control of Congress and an emboldened Trump who has made clear he is willing to exert maximum power and push boundaries in unprecedented ways.
D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson said she understands Bowser’s position, and largely agrees with her conclusion that a legal challenge to Trump’s moves would be a long shot. Trump invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in his executive order, declaring a “crime emergency” so his administration could take over the city’s police force. The statute limits that control to 30 days unless he gets approval from Congress.
“The challenge would be on the question of ‘Is this actually an emergency?’” said Henderson, a former congressional staffer. “That’s really the only part you could challenge.”
Henderson believes the city would face dim prospects in a court fight, but thinks the D.C. government should challenge anyway, “just on the basis of precedent.”
Trump told reporters Wednesday that he believes he can extend the 30-day deadline by declaring a national emergency, but said “we expect to be before Congress very quickly.”
“We’re gonna be asking for extensions on that, long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days,” he said. “We’re gonna do this very quickly. But we’re gonna want extensions. I don’t want to call a national emergency. If I have to, I will.”
Limited legal options
Bowser’s response is a reflection of the reality of the situation, according to a person familiar with her thinking. As mayor of the District of Columbia, Bowser has a very different relationship with the president and federal government than other mayors or governors. The city is home to thousands of federal workers, and the mass layoffs under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have already had a major impact on the city’s economy.
Her strategy has been to focus on finding areas where she and the new administration can work together on shared priorities.
For now, Bowser appears set to stick with her approach, saying Wednesday that she is focused on “making sure the federal surge is useful to us.”
During a morning interview with Fox 5, she and the city’s police chief argued an influx of federal agents linked to Trump’s takeover would improve public safety, with more officers on patrol.
Police Chief Pamela Smith said the city’s police department is short almost 800 officers, so the extra police presence “is clearly going to impact us in a positive way.”
But Nina Smith, the Democratic strategist, said she believes Bowser needs a course correction.
“How many times is it going to take before she realizes this is not someone who has got the best interests of the city at heart?” she asked. “I think there may need to be time for her to get tough and push back.”
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police show violent crime has dropped in Washington since a post-pandemic peak in 2023. A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35% since 2023, reaching its lowest rate in 30 years.
Colvin writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Ashraf Khalil and Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.
Los Angeles public schools are opening Thursday for the new academic year confronting an intense and historically unique moment: They will be operating in opposition to the federal government’s immigration raids and have set in motion aggressive moves to protect children and their immigrant parents.
School police and officers from several municipal forces will patrol near some 100 schools, setting up “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods, with a special concentration at high schools where older Latino students are walking to campus. Bus routes are being changed to better serve areas with immigrant families so children can get to school with less exposure to immigration agents.
Community volunteers will join district staff and contractors to serve as scouts — alerting campuses of nearby enforcement actions so schools can be locked down as warranted and parents and others in the school community can be quickly notified via email and text.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass spoke about “how profound this moment is in U.S. history” during a Monday news conference with local officials.
“Here you have an entire array of elected officials, appointed officials, education leaders, people committed to our children, and we are gathered here today to talk about protecting our children from the federal government,” Bass said.
L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said recently that the nation’s second-largest school system will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children. We are standing on the right side of the Constitution, and years from now, I guarantee you, we will have stood on the right side of history. We know that.”
High school boy mistakenly handcuffed
The worries among school officials and parents are not without cause.
On Monday federal agents reportedly drew their guns on a 15-year-old boy and handcuffed him outside Arleta High School. The confrontation ended with de-escalation. Family members persuaded federal agents that the boy — who is disabled — was not the person they were looking for, Carvalho said.
The situation was largely resolved by the time the school principal realized what was going on and rushed out to assist. School police also arrived and scooped up unspent bullets dropped on the ground by the agents, Carvalho said.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday that Arleta High was not being targeted. Instead agents were conducting “a targeted operation” on a “criminal illegal alien,” they described as “a Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 pledge with prior criminal convictions in the broader vicinity of Arleta.”
At a Tuesday White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, responded to a question that referenced the L.A. Times reporting about the incident.
“I’ll have to look into the veracity of that report,” Leavitt said. “I read the L.A. Times almost every single day, and they are notorious for misleading the public… This administration wants to ensure that all school children across the country, in every city, from Los Angeles to D.C., can go to school safely.”
LAUSD will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children,” said Supt. Alberto Carvalho recently.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
School communities in fear
The incident outside Arleta High is among the ongoing confrontations across the region that have provoked public protests and prompted the Trump administration in June to deploy troops to Los Angeles. Enforcement actions have included masked agents arresting people at parking lots, in parks, on sidewalks and next to bus stops.
Trump administration policy is that no location — including a school — is off limits for enforcement actions in his drive to deport at least 1 million immigrants a year.
“A big part of it is to create the sense of fear so people will self-deport,” said Jimmy Gomez, a Trump critic and Democratic member of Congress representing Los Angeles.
The ripple effect is that school communities are experiencing fear and trauma, worried that agents will descend on or near campuses.
Most in the state’s public school systems, including in L.A. Unified have embraced a counter mission, protecting the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education. That right to an education is, so far, protected by past U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
For most school officials up and down the state, a necessary corollary to that right is safeguarding students’ guardians and close relatives.
On Tuesday, 30 school board members from L.A. County — which has 80 school districts — convened in Hawthorne to emphasize their own focus on protecting immigrant families.
“We’re about to welcome students back to schools, but we’re very concerned that these fears and anxieties may potentially have an impact for students not wanting to come back,” said Lynwood Unified school board member Alma Castro, an organizer of the event.
She called her district a “safe haven.” Among other measures, her district has trained staff to “restrict the sharing of any student files, any student information, and there’s been some work with thinking about our facilities to ensure that we have campuses that are closed off, that people can’t just walk in.”
L.A. Unified, along with other school districts, has embraced a mission to protect the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Protecting immigrant families
L.A. Unified, with about 400,000 students, has been layering on protections for months, recently working to incorporate ideas advocated by the teachers union and immigrant-rights groups.
A major ongoing effort is building safe-passage networks one, two and three blocks out from a campus. Participants include paid outside groups, district employees and volunteer activists. School police — though diminished in numbers due to staffing cuts — are to patrol sensitive areas and are on call to move quickly to where situations arise. Some anti-police activists want the protective mission accomplished without any role for school police.
A safe-passage presence has expanded from 40 schools last year to at least 100 this year, among about 1,000 campuses total, Carvalho said.
“It is virtually impossible, considering the size of our community, to ensure that we have one caring, compassionate individual in every street corner in every street,” Carvalho said. “But we are deploying resources at a level never before seen in our district.”
Other various efforts include:
Starting a task force to coordinate safe passage zones with local cities
Setting up a donor-supported compassion fund to help families with legal and other costs
Coordinating food aid for families in hiding
Providing legal referrals
Contacting more than 10,000 families to encourage them to send children to schools
Providing information about online schooling options
Distributing a “family preparedness” guide
Carvalho and leaders of other school districts reiterated that K-12 campuses and anything related to schooling, such as a school bus or a graduation ceremony, will be off limits to immigration agents unless they have a valid judicial warrant for a specific individual — which has been rare.
“We do not know what the enrollment will be like,” Carvalho said. “We know many parents may have already left our community. They may have self-deported… We hope that through our communication efforts, our awareness efforts, information and the direct counseling with students and parents, that we’ll be able to provide stable attendance for kids in our community.”
Reason to be afraid
Mary, a Los Angeles mother of three without legal status, was terrified, but more or less knew what to do when immigration agents came to her door twice in May for a “wellness check” on her children: She did not let them in to her home. She did not step outside.
And, eventually, the agents — at least eight of them who arrived with at least three vehicles — left.
Mary had learned about what to do in this situation from her Los Angeles public school.
Mary, who requested that her full name not be used, has three children, one of whom attends an Alliance College-Ready charter school, a network of 26 privately operated public schools.
Like L.A. Unified, Alliance has trained staff on the legal rights of immigrants and also trained parents about how to handle encounters with immigration agents and where to go for help.
Alliance largely serves low-income, Latino communities and the immigration raids affected attendance in the school last year. Normally, attendance runs about 90% at the end of their school year. This June, average daily attendance at 14 Alliance high schools had dipped below 80%. Six fell below 70% and one dropped as low as 57.5%.
Alliance also attempted to gather deportation data. Nine families responded in a school network that enrolls about 13,000. In two cases, students were deported; three other students had family members deported; one student and a sibling were in a family that self-deported; one student was detained; two families reported facing deportation proceedings.
While these numbers are small, the reports are more than enough to heighten fear within the community. And some families may have declined to be candid about their circumstances.
“What’s happening now is that no one is safe anywhere, not even in your home, at work, outside, taking a stroll,” L.A. school board member Rocio Rivas said in an interview.
Still, Rivas is encouraging families to send children to school, which she considers safer than other places.
Alliance is focusing heavily on mental-health support and also arranging carpools to and from school — in which the driver is a U.S. citizen, said Omar Reyes, a superintendent of instruction at the Alliance charter group.
Carvalho, a onetime undocumented immigrant himself, said that students deserve a traditional and joyous first day followed by a school year without trauma.
Children, he said, “inherently deserve dignity, humanity, love, empathy, compassion and great education.
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.
‘Do you think I’m going to be cold?” asks my friend Ellie as we navigate the winding roads of Mosedale, on the north-eastern reaches of the Lake District, while rain batters against the windscreen. It’s a fair question. Both the Met Office and Mountain Weather Information Service are clear – being in the Lakeland hills will not be pleasant this Friday night, due to a sudden cold and wet snap. But there’s another reason she’s asking. I’m taking her to stay in her first bothy – that’s a mountain shelter left open, year-round, for walkers, climbers and outdoor enthusiasts to use, free of charge, with no way to book.
Unlike mountain huts in other parts of Europe and the world, they weren’t built for this purpose. They are old buildings left to ruin in wild places – former coastguard lookouts, gamekeepers’ cottages, remote Highland schoolrooms – before the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA) began to maintain them, offering shelter in a storm. And during this particular storm, shelter is definitely needed.
Fording a nearby stream. Photograph: Phoebe Smith
Before we left, Ellie was worried about what to pack, and well she might be. Despite a bothy having four walls, a roof, windows and a front door (they range from tiny, one-room affairs to sprawling, multi-bedroom structures), they are still very basic. There is no running water (there’s usually a stream nearby for this), no toilet (each has a bothy spade so you can dig your own) and no electricity (tealights and a headtorch are a must), and the one we are heading to, Great Lingy Hut, doesn’t even have the usual bothy stove for warmth.
Yet it’s precisely for these reasons that I’ve chosen it to be Ellie’s first. I know that because of the bad weather it’s unlikely we’ll have to share with anyone else. We park at the base of Carrock Fell, where the River Caldew is now a raging torrent. It is past dusk; the rain has eased to a mere mizzle and we can just make out the shape of the building on the skyline. With backpacks shouldered we begin uphill, keeping our eyes open for signs of walkers who may have potentially beaten us to it.
“Visitor numbers have definitely gone up in recent years,” the chair of the MBA, Simon Birch, tells me when I speak to him the night before. “Of course, back in the day they were kept a secret – some old documents I was going through have ‘confidential’ written across them. But people can’t keep secrets like this.”
Phoebe (left) and Ellie keeping warm in the unheated bothy.
It was in 2009 that the MBA decided to publish grid references to its 100-strong network on its website – despite some internal protests. After that, the “cat was out of the bag”, says Birch. When the MBA celebrated its 50-year anniversary in 2015, I asked and was granted permission to write the first guidebook about bothies – as a love letter to them, rather than a definitive guide. There was a lot of pushback, though. When The Book of the Bothy was published, I experienced online trolling (from MBA members and others), abusive emails, complaints to my publisher and even threats. But at the same time, one of the MBA’s co-founders, Betty Heath, told me how much she loved my passion; Birch told me that younger members began to sign up (when there was a real danger of membership ageing out); and now there is even a female thirtysomething trustee.
Out of the 105 bothies they currently look after, only two are owned by the MBA. All the others are on leases. “Ultimately, we could lose all our bothies, if the owners decided to take them back,” says Birch – which proves just how special the network and ethos of bothies is.
The hut we head to in the Lakes was originally used by miners at the nearby and now disused Carrock Mine (which dates back to the 16th century). It was relocated to its higher location on the moor as a shooting box. During the 1960s it was leased to the “Friends” Quaker boarding school in Wigton as an outdoor base and was fitted with a sleeping platform. When that school closed in 1984, it became an open shelter, and eventually the Lake District national park took responsibility for its maintenance before handing it over to the MBA in 2017.
We were at peace, away from the madness of our day-to-day lives. Photograph: Phoebe Smith
We pass the mine workings under a starry sky, so they appear only as silhouettes. We ford the stream with the help of walking poles and mutual words of encouragement. Finally, we reach the door and experience the anticipatory few seconds that anyone who’s ever stayed in a bothy will know – when after hours of walking you knock on the door with mild trepidation, to discover if anyone else has beaten you to it. The door swings open. It’s empty. We have it to ourselves.
“The biggest change has been the impact that the growing popularity of long-distance trails has had on the bothies,” Simon tells me. “Some of the spots are incredibly well used, and we now have a sanitation officer in the MBA.”
I give Ellie a brief rundown of bothy etiquette. Put candles and the camping stove in the designated area so as not to cause a fire risk. Use the spade for the toilet – well away from the building and any watercourses. Set up a bag for waste. As a countryside girl, she has a good idea of the code – but Birch says a problem the MBA is facing in its 60th year is that content creators are showing people the bothies on social media but not teaching good practice. As such, in a very modern move, the MBA is seeking creators to collaborate with it, to demonstrate responsible bothying.
We settle in, heating a pre-made tagine and making hot chocolates to keep us warm. I also fill hot-water bottles. We chat for hours, me regaling Ellie with stories of previous bothy visits – including the time I inadvertently crashed a stag party in Scotland.
The wind whistles through the cables that hold Great Lingy Hut down, but despite this, as mothers of young children, we both sleep well away from the madness of our day-to-day lives.
Recent figures put the MBA membership at 3,800 – with many more users who don’t pay the annual £25 donation to join. We’re staying at one of the newer buildings in the network, but Birch tells me there are no plans to take on any more.
We enjoy our breakfast beside the window, where a lifting fog offers tantalising views down this little-visited valley.
As we leave, I feel hopeful for the next 60 years of bothies in Britain. We pack not only our own rubbish but empty packets and used candle holders left by others. “I love it,” says Ellie, “leaving it better than we arrived.” She may have begun this adventure worried about feeling cold but, thanks to the magic of bothies, is leaving as many do, warmed by the whole wild and wonderful experience.
WASHINGTON — President Trump is promising new steps to tackle homelessness and crime in Washington, prompting the city’s mayor to voice concerns about the potential use of the National Guard to patrol the streets in the nation’s capital.
Trump wrote in a social media post that he would hold a White House news conference on Monday to discuss his plans to make the District of Columbia “safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.”
Ahead of that news conference, Trump said Monday on social media that the nation’s capital would be “LIBERATED today!” He said he would end the “days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people.”
For Trump, the effort to take over public safety in Washington reflects a next step in his law enforcement agenda after his aggressive push to stop illegal border crossings. But the move involves at least 500 federal law enforcement officials, raising fundamental questions about how an increasingly emboldened federal government will interact with its state and local counterparts.
Combating crime
The president has used his social media and White House megaphones to message that his administration is tough on crime, yet his ability to shape policy might be limited outside of Washington, which has a unique status as a congressionally established federal district. Nor is it clear how his push would address the root causes of homelessness and crime.
About 500 federal law enforcement officers are being tasked with deploying throughout the nation’s capital as part of the Trump administration’s effort to combat crime, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Monday.
More than 100 FBI agents and about 40 agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are among federal law enforcement personnel being assigned to patrols in Washington, the person briefed on the plans said. The Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Marshals Service are also contributing officers.
The person was not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. The Justice Department didn’t immediately have a comment Monday morning.
Focusing on homelessness
Trump in a Sunday social media post had emphasized the removal of Washington’s homeless population, though it was unclear where the thousands of people would go.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote Sunday. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”
Last week, the Republican president directed federal law enforcement agencies to increase their presence in Washington for seven days, with the option “to extend as needed.”
On Friday night, federal agencies including the Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service assigned more than 120 officers and agents to assist in Washington.
Trump said last week that he was considering ways for the federal government to seize control of Washington, asserting that crime was “ridiculous” and the city was “unsafe,” after the recent assault of a high-profile member of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The National Guard
The moves Trump said he was considering included bringing in the D.C. National Guard.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, questioned the effectiveness of using the Guard to enforce city laws and said the federal government could be far more helpful by funding more prosecutors or filling the 15 vacancies on the D.C. Superior Court, some of which have been open for years.
Bowser cannot activate the National Guard herself, but she can submit a request to the Pentagon.
“I just think that’s not the most efficient use of our Guard,” she said Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” acknowledging it is “the president’s call about how to deploy the Guard.”
Bowser was making her first public comments since Trump started posting about crime in Washington last week. She noted that violent crime in Washington has decreased since a rise in 2023. Trump’s weekend posts depicted the district as “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World.”
For Bowser, “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false.”
Crime statistics
Police statistics show homicides, robberies and burglaries are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26% compared with this time a year ago.
Trump offered no details in Truth Social posts over the weekend about possible new actions to address crime levels he argues are dangerous for citizens, tourists and workers alike. The White House declined to offer additional details about Monday’s announcement.
The police department and the mayor’s office did not respond to questions about what Trump might do next.
The president criticized the district as full of “tents, squalor, filth, and Crime,” and he seems to have been set off by the attack on Edward Coristine, among the most visible figures of the bureaucracy-cutting effort known as DOGE. Police arrested two 15-year-olds in the attempted carjacking and said they were looking for others.
“This has to be the best run place in the country, not the worst run place in the country,” Trump said Wednesday.
He called Bowser “a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances.”
Trump has repeatedly suggested that the rule of Washington could be returned to federal authorities. Doing so would require a repeal of the Home Rule Act of 1973 in Congress, a step Trump said lawyers are examining. It could face steep pushback.
Bowser acknowledged that the law allows the president to take more control over the city’s police, but only if certain conditions are met.
“None of those conditions exist in our city right now,” she said. “We are not experiencing a spike in crime. In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
Klepper writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Ashraf Khalil, Alanna Durkin Richer and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Around 2 a.m., noisy revelers emerging from clubs and bars packed the sidewalks of U Street in Washington, many of them seeking a late-night slice or falafel. A robust but not unusual contingent of city police cruisers lingered around the edges of the crowds. At other late-night hot spots, nearly identical scenes unfolded.
What wasn’t apparent in Friday’s earliest hours: any sort of security lockdown by a multiagency flood of uniformed federal law enforcement officers. That’s what President Trump had promised Thursday, starting at midnight, in the administration’s latest move to impose its will on the nation’s capital.
In short, that law enforcement surge to take control of the District of Columbia’s streets did not appear to unfold on schedule. A two-hour city tour, starting around 1 a.m. Friday, revealed no overt or visible law enforcement presence other than members of the Metropolitan Police Department, the city’s police force.
That might change in the coming evenings as Trump puts into action his long-standing plans to “take over” a capital city he has repeatedly slammed as unsafe, filthy and badly run. According to his declaration last week, the security lockdown will run for seven days, “with the option to extend as needed.” In an online post Saturday, the Republican president said the Democratic-led city would soon be one of the country’s safest and he announced a White House news conference for Monday, though he offered no details.
On Friday night, a White House official said Thursday night’s operations included arrests for possession of two stolen firearms, suspected fentanyl and marijuana. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said more than 120 members of various federal agencies — the Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service — were to be on duty Friday night, upping the complement of federal officers involved.
“This is the first step in stopping the violent crime that has been plaguing the streets of Washington, D.C.,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, who publicly faced off against Trump in 2020 when he called in a massive federal law enforcement response to disperse crowds of protesters denouncing police brutality and racial profiling, has not said a public word since Trump’s declaration. The Metropolitan Police Department has gone similarly silent.
A crackdown came after an assault
The catalyst for this latest round of takeover drama was an assault Aug. 3 during an attempted carjacking on a high-profile member of the White House’s government-slashing team known as the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly headed by Elon Musk.
Police arrested two 15-year-olds and were seeking others. Trump quickly renewed his calls for the federal government to seize control.
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site.
He later told reporters he was considering a range of alternatives, including repealing Washington’s limited “home rule” autonomy and “bringing in the National Guard, maybe very quickly,” as he did in Los Angeles in response to protests over his administration’s immigration crackdown.
The threats come at a time when Bowser’s government can tout a reduction in the number of homicides and carjackings, both of which surged in 2023. The number of carjackings overall dropped significantly in 2024, from 957 to just under 500, and is on track to decline again this year, with fewer than 200 recorded so far.
The proportion of juveniles arrested on suspicion of carjacking, though, has remained above 50%, and Bowser’s government has taken steps to rein in a recent phenomenon of rowdy teenagers causing disarray and disturbances in public spaces.
Emergency legislation passed by the D.C. Council this summer imposed tighter youth curfew restrictions and empowered Police Chief Pamela Smith to declare temporary juvenile curfew zones for four days at a time. In those areas, a gathering of nine or more people younger than 18 is unlawful after 8 p.m.
Within presidential authority
Trump is within his powers in deploying federal law enforcement assets on D.C. streets. He could deploy the National Guard, although that is not one of the dozen participating agencies listed in his declaration. The first Trump administration called in the National Guard during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and again on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters overran the Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn his election defeat.
Further steps, including taking over the Police Department, would require a declaration of emergency. Legal experts believe that would most likely be challenged in court. Such an approach would fit the general pattern of Trump’s second term in office, when he has declared states of emergency on issues ranging from border protection to economic tariffs. In many cases, he moved forward while the courts sorted it out.
Imposing a full federal takeover of Washington would require a congressional repeal of the Home Rule Act of 1973. It’s a step that Trump said his administration’s lawyers are examining.
That law was specific to Washington, not other communities in the United States that have their own home rule powers but generally retain representation in their state legislatures, said Monica Hopkins, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia.
Signed into law by President Nixon, the measure allowed D.C. residents to elect their own mayor, council and local commissioners. The district had been previously run by federally appointed commissioners and members of Congress, some of whom balked at having to deal with potholes and other details of running a city of 700,000 residents.
So far, Trump’s criticisms of Washington can be felt most directly in the actions of the National Park Service, which controls large pieces of land throughout the capital. In Trump’s current administration, the agency has stepped up its clearing of homeless encampments on Park Service land and recently carried out a series of arrests of people smoking marijuana in public parks.
The agency said last week that a statue of a Confederate military leader that was toppled by protesters in 2020 would be restored and replaced, in line with an executive order.
Khalil and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mike Pesoli, Michael Kunzelman and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
It was billed as a bargain-basement deal: L.A. County would buy the Gas Company Tower for $200 million — a third of what the downtown skyscraper cost before the pandemic sent office prices plummeting.
Nine months after the sale closed, some of the supervisors say they have sticker shock.
The sore point: a looming $230-million contract for “voluntary seismic upgrades” to the newly purchased tower, soon to become the county’s new headquarters.
“I never heard that it would double the cost of the purchase,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn, who cast a ‘hell no’ vote against buying the building. “I’m holding out hope that smarter minds will prevail, and we can stop any more investment in this building.”
On Tuesday, Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsey Horvath will introduce a motion to “immediately suspend” all seismic work.
Newsletter
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
Sign up to make sense of the often unexplained world of L.A. politics.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
“Given that we are in the budget constraints that we are in, I was surprised to know that that work was still being contemplated,” said Horvath.
The county’s financial future has never looked so grim. Federal cuts will force the county to slash health services and potentially shutter a hospital, Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport warned the board this week. The county soon will start making payments for its historically large $4-billion sex abuse settlement. Newly negotiated raises for county employees could cost the county $2 billion.
Before the purchase, the supervisors were given ballpark figures as to just how much it would cost to bring the Gas Company Tower into tiptop shape vs. rehabbing the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, the county’s current headquarters, which is widely viewed by county employees as a death trap during the next major earthquake.
To earthquake-proof the hall — by far the riskiest of the two buildings — it could cost $700 million, according to estimates provided to the board last fall. To do the same for the newer Gas Company Tower, the county Chief Executive Office estimated it could potentially cost about $400 million. (As of now, the county is planning to spend less than that with a bid amount of $234.5 million.)
The Gas Company Tower came out looking the better deal by about a billion dollars, according to the Chief Executive Office, once it took into account other costs needed to upgrade the Hall of Administration — including more than a billion dollars in deferred maintenance and improvements.
Hahn’s not swayed.
“I think the bureaucrats had a plan and they made their numbers fit to sell this ill-conceived project,” she continued, adding she believed similar doubt was starting to creep in among her colleagues.
“I’ve heard some of them have some buyer’s remorse,” she said.
Horvath says she doesn’t regret buying the building — but she is skeptical that the county needs to pour millions more into the tower.
“I still maintain that the purchase of the building was the right thing to do,” she said. “If retrofitting is not needed, then I want to understand why we would [retrofit] at a time such as this, when we are making a very clear case about the difficult financial position we’re in.”
Lennie LaGuire, a spokesperson for the Chief Executive Office, previously told The Times that the tower is already safe and the upgrades are “proactive.”
“The County is choosing to perform this work proactively with an eye to the future, to ensure that the building performs optimally in the decades ahead,” LaGuire said.
During brutal labor negotiations over the last year, the purchase of the skyscraper became a touchy subject. Labor condemned it as an unnecessary splurge. The county insisted it was an obvious money saver.
The hard feelings haven’t gone away, with some unions saying they were kept in the dark about the tower’s true cost.
“The priority should be those facilities the public relies upon for emergencies and daily needs, like sheriff’s stations, fire stations, medical facilities, etc.” said Richard Pippin, president of the sheriff‘s deputies union. “Look, we get it — with the near doubling of the Board of Supervisors and an elected County Executive Officer, everyone wants an office with a better view, but is that what’s best for the public we serve?”
The motion Tuesday also requests a report on where the money to finance the retrofit is coming from and which departments will be moving into the tower.
“The purpose of this acquisition was to realize substantial savings for the County of Los Angeles by consolidating operations and avoiding leased spaces,” the motion states. “However, there has been little to no transparency into what progress, if any, the County has made in occupying spaces in the Gas Company Tower after eight months of ownership.”
According to the Chief Executive Office, some employees have started to move into the building, but the entire move is expected to take three years.
State of play
— OLYMPIC JITTERS: Councilmember Imelda Padilla, a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on the 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games, called President Trump’s announcement that he would head a federal Olympic task force a “real curveball” for the city and raised concerns about what a mercurial president would mean for the Olympics. “We are a little nervous to see what they’re going to ask for,” Padilla said during the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon on Thursday referring to the Trump administration’s involvement in the Olympics. She also called Trump’s assertion that Bass was not very competent “completely false.”
—TUNNEL TROUBLE: The city spent $25,800, using 10 contracted workers, to paint over graffiti in the 2nd Street Tunnel — only for taggers to immediately paint the walls again within 24 hours. “It’s infuriating that these selfish vandals are wasting tax dollars aimed at improving the city for all Angelenos,” said Steve King, president of the Board of Public Works.
— SILVER LININGS: L.A. County supervisors say they’re open to the idea of a receiver taking control of the beleaguered juvenile halls. But for it to happen, a majority on the board says the receiver will need to take on union agreements and civil service rules, which they say keep problem employees on the payroll.
—PLEA TO THE FEDS: A prominent law firm suing L.A. County over childhood sexual abuse is asking for a federal investigation into how so many children were harmed while in county custody. In a letter addressed to U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, attorney John Manly wrote that he wanted to see the U.S. attorney’s office conduct an “immediate investigation” into any federal crimes committed by staff within the county’s Probation Department.
—COOLING OFF: L.A. County will soon require landlords in unincorporated areas to provide a way for tenants to keep their rental units 82 degrees or below. The supervisors say the law is necessary to combat heat-related deaths fueled by climate change.
—A HIGH-PRICED HALF-MONTH: A law firm representing the city of Los Angeles in a high-profile homelessness case submitted a $1.8-million invoice for two weeks of work in May. The costs comes as the city faces significant financial burdens from rising legal payouts.
— VENUE VOTE: The hotel workers union turned in a ballot proposal to require that voters approve of “event centers” for the 2028 Olympics, including sports facilities and concert halls. Former City Councilmember Paul Krekorian, who heads Mayor Karen Bass’ Office of Special Events, said the measure “would make vital projects essential for our city and these Games potentially impossible to complete.”
—TEMPORARY LEAVE: As of next week, Deputy Mayor Randall Winston — who also serves as a judge advocate in the U.S. Army National Guard Reserve — will be on a leave of absence from the Mayor’s office for military training. Winston was originally supposed to go on leave in January but deferred to help support wildfire response and recovery efforts. Andrea Greene, Executive Officer of the Office of Infrastructure, will be filling his role until he returns in mid-December, according to the Mayor’s office.
QUICK HITS
On the docket for next week: The county supervisors are asking the sheriff’s department to report on their use-of-force policies as they relate to journalists covering the ongoing ICE raids.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
California Democrats and Texas Republicans are in an old-fashioned standoff, threatening to redraw their congressional maps in an attempt to sway the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections.
Caught in the middle are a handful of California Republicans, from relative newcomers to seasoned veterans, who represent pockets of the state from the U.S.-Mexico border to the remote forests in the northeast corner.
The Texas GOP is pushing, at the behest of President Trump, to net five additional seats for congressional Republicans, who hold the U.S. House of Representatives by a razor-thin margin. In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California will push back with a map that would increase the number of Democrats the state sends to Washington.
“The idea that the president of the United States says he’s entitled to five seats should sicken everybody,” Newsom said at a news conference Thursday. “There’s nothing normal about that and anyone who says it’s not surprising is normalizing it. That’s shocking.”
The California gerrymandering plan taking shape behind closed doors would increase the Democratic Party’s dominance in the Golden State, adding as many as five congressional districts favorable to Democrats, according to a draft map reviewed by The Times. If the Democrats succeed, those changes could leave Republicans with four of the state’s 52 House seats — down from the current roster of nine.
California’s districts are typically drawn once per decade by an independent commission. Newsom is pushing to put a new map tailored to favor Democrats in front of voters Nov. 4, which would require the Legislature to approve the plan shortly after members return to Sacramento from their summer recess.
Newsom has said California’s redistricting plan will have a “trigger,” meaning a redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas moved forward with its own.
“We want to do it in the most transparent way,” Newsom said. “That’s a process that will unfold over the course of the next few weeks. But we want to see the maps on the ballot. I want folks to know what they’re voting on. That’s what separates what we’re doing from what others are doing.”
The proposed boundaries of the new congressional districts continue to shift, but the goal for California Democrats remains the same: Funnel the state’s Republican voters into fewer seats, boost vulnerable Democrats and turn some GOP-dominant districts into narrowly divided toss-ups.
Here are the Republicans who could face major changes.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin)
Kiley represents a sprawling district that runs along the Nevada border from Northern California to Death Valley, cutting through Mammoth and Lake Tahoe and the cities of Roseville, Rocklin and Folsom.
Republicans have a 6-percentage-point voter registration advantage in Kiley’s district. The district’s footprint could shrink and shift closer to Sacramento, adding more registered Democrats and trimming off some conservative and rural areas.
Kiley introduced a bill this week to nullify any newly drawn congressional boundaries adopted by states before the next U.S. census, in 2030, which would apply to both Texas and California. He said the bill would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”
Newsom, Kiley said, is “trying to subvert the will of voters and do lasting damage to democracy in California.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale)
LaMalfa represents a safe Republican district that stretches through a vast territory of Northern California that borders Oregon and Nevada. The district includes Chico, Redding and Yuba City.
LaMalfa said in an interview that he had seen one map that shifted his district south to include parts of Sonoma County wine country and shifted some conservative rural areas in the north in another lawmaker’s district. Those changes, he said, would put towns near the Oregon border and Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, in the same district.
“The Democrats are really way over the line on this,” LaMalfa said. “I hope the weight of how bad this looks collapses on them before we even have to go through these gyrations, and millions and millions of dollars.”
He said he was certain that Republicans would litigate the new map if Democrats push ahead. He said other groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, have also voiced concerns.
“I’m not even stressed,” said La Malfa, a fourth-generation rice farmer. “If they throw me in some wine country district or some coastal district, and that throws me out, then I can go over here and finish cutting apart this tree that fell on my fence last night.”
Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford)
The proposed plans could add more registered Democrats to Valadao’s predominately Latino district in the Central Valley.
Democrats have tried for years to unseat Valadao, who represents a district that has a strong Democratic voter registration advantage on paper, but where turnout among blue voters is lackluster.
Even before the redistrict dustup, Valadao was once again a top target for Democrats. Valadao represents the California district with the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients, many of whom may lose coverage because of legislation approved by the Republican-led Congress and signed by Trump. Valadao previously lost his congressional seat in 2018 after voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
A representative for Valadao didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills)
The plan being considered could force two Republican members of the House into the same district: Kim and Calvert.
Calvert was first elected to Congress in 1992 and is the longest-serving member of California’s Republican delegation. He represents a Riverside County district that includes Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Palm Springs and his home base of Corona. The district, which leans Republican, has been a prime, but unsuccessful, target for Democrats in the last two elections.
Kim, who was first elected to Congress in 2020, represents a Republican district, mostly in Orange County, that includes Mission Viejo, Orange, Lake Forest, Anaheim and Tustin.
Calvert said he strongly opposes “the scheme being orchestrated behind closed doors by Sacramento politicians” to replace maps drawn by the redistricting commission “with a process that would allow legislators to draw district maps that are gerrymandered to benefit themselves and their political allies.”
Deviating from the independent redistricting process “disenfranchises voters and degrades trust in our political system,” Kim said in a statement. She said Newsom should, “for once, focus on addressing the pressing issues making life harder for Californians under his watch instead of trying to position himself for a presidential run.”
Newsom this week said he was pleased to see Republican members coming out in support of independent redistricting.
“That’s an encouraging sign,” Newsom said. “So already, perhaps, people are waking up to the reality of California entering into this conversation. We’re not a small state. Again, we punch above our weight. It will have profound national implications if we move forward.”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall)
Under the tentative plans, Issa, who has served in Congress for more than two decades, would see his safely Republican district become purple. That could include absorbing Palm Springs, a liberal area that is currently in Calvert’s district and has become a hub of fundraising and political activity for Democrats.
A spokesman for Issa declined to comment but referred to a statement from the state’s nine-member Republican delegation, which said that Trump won 38% of the presidential vote in California last year, but Republicans hold fewer than 1 in 5 of the state’s 52 House seats.
Newsom, the delegation said, is trying to wrest power from the independent redistricting commission and “place it back into the hands of Sacramento politicians to further his left-wing political agenda.”
“A partisan political gerrymander is not what the voters of California want,” the statement said.
Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.
NEW YORK — On a sweltering summer day, children leap between rocks along the Bronx River while cyclists pedal on newly paved paths. Kayaks rest on what was once an industrial dumping ground, now transformed into a bustling promenade along the city’s only freshwater river.
The Bronx River Greenway, a series of stitched-together waterfront parks built atop once largely abandoned and polluted wasteland, is a hard-fought victory for the country’s poorest congressional district — one that locals call a “beacon of environmental justice” built by federal dollars and water-pollution settlements from the borough’s wealthier neighbors.
Now, like thousands of nonprofits around the country, this organization’s future is in jeopardy. The Trump administration’s sweeping federal grant cuts have left nonprofits nationwide and the communities they serve in precarious straits. But few places face as stark a reckoning as the Bronx, where federal funding has proved indispensable for revitalizing green spaces, protecting survivors of domestic violence, and preventing youth violence.
Over 84% of the 342 nonprofits based in the Bronx rely on federal grants now at risk, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. It’s a significant increase from the 70% of groups vulnerable to government defunding statewide.
In all but two of the country’s 437 congressional districts, the typical nonprofit could not cover its expenses without government grants. Nonprofits have increasingly served as contractors for government services — like operating homeless shelters — since the 1960s.
In the Bronx, if such grants were to disappear entirely, the borough’s nonprofits could face a collective deficit of nearly 30% — cuts that have begun to force layoffs and austerity on dozens of groups connecting Bronxites to low-cost health care, food assistance, and preschool slots.
“When America sneezes, the Bronx gets the flu,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Democrat who represents the district. “I think we in the Bronx feel we have been and will continue to be the hardest hit by the impact of a Trump presidency.”
From revival to reversal
Nestled in a corner of parkland atop the site of an abandoned amusement park, the headquarters of the Bronx River Alliance is among the borough’s greenest buildings, boasting nature classrooms, samples of the river’s flora and fauna, and a storage space teeming with kayaks and canoes.
In March, the group received formal notice that it would lose $1.5 million in federal grants promised under the Inflation Reduction Act last year for improving water quality and climate-resilience projects. After years of rising momentum, cubicles now sit empty. Leaders held off on hiring in anticipation of cuts, and now they don’t know if they’ll be able to fill those roles.
“I’ve met some of the folks who were pulling cars out of the river in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Daniel Ranells, the group’s deputy director of programs. Back then, the area was a “dumping ground” so inundated with industrial waste, tires, abandoned cars, ovens, and microwaves that “folks didn’t really understand there was a river there.”
That has shifted dramatically in recent years thanks in part to decades of federal investment. Just south of its headquarters, the organization restored salt marshes along the riverbanks of a shuttered concrete plant.
In 2007, the first beaver appeared on the Bronx River in over 200 years — named “José the Beaver” in honor of former Congressman José E. Serrano, who helped direct millions in federal funds to groups dedicated to the river’s restoration.
“The Bronx River is a shining light of environmental justice,” Ranells said, and millions in federal funding over the years has helped “make it a destination” after years of neglect.
Progress frozen
Now staffers at the Bronx River Alliance describe a sense of “whiplash” in seeing hard-fought funds dry up and grant language scrubbed of any allusions to racial or environmental justice.
The Bronx River Alliance has joined other nonprofits in suing the Trump administration to unfreeze funds, but the uncertainty has already disrupted years of planning, a reality that has rippled across the neighborhood, leaving few organizations untouched.
Up the street from the Alliance, the office of the Osborne Association, a group that has worked to prevent youth violence for nearly a century, has grown quieter. In April, an email from the Bureau of Justice Assistance stated the remaining $666,000 of a $2 million grant “no longer effectuates department priorities.”
The cut thrust the nonprofit into “triage mode,” said Osborne president Jonathan Monsalve, who was forced to lay off three staffers and reduce the number of participants in a diversion program offering young adults facing gun charges an alternative to jail time.
“It’s a lifeline for young people, and it’s no longer there for 25 more of them,” Monsalve said. “Without another alternative, it’s 25 young people that will see prison or jail time, and that’s incredibly frustrating.”
Why the Bronx bears the brunt
The Department of Justice has canceled over $810 million in similar grants to nonprofits working in violence prevention. The Environmental Protection Agency attempted to cancel $2 billion in grants for environmental justice work.
Nonprofit leaders say the cuts hit hardest in the places that can afford them the least. In the Bronx, almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty, the vast majority of whom are Black or Latino, and nearly one in six schoolchildren experience homelessness every year.
“We’ve had decades of disinvestment in these communities, and we had been starting to see some meaningful investment and community-based solutions that were actually working,” said Monsalve. “And then all of a sudden that support just gets yanked away.”
The federal government, he said, is essentially telling these communities: “You aren’t a priority anymore. You don’t fit the plan.”
For decades, a million-dollar federal grant allowed the victim-service organization Safe Horizon to operate a program that stationed domestic violence advocates in the borough’s criminal court.
When the grant came up for renewal this year, it came with new restrictions that CEO Liz Roberts described as “so extreme, so broad, so radical” that the organization chose to walk away rather than accept conditions which would have prohibited supporting transgender survivors or treating domestic violence as a systemic issue.
It was an agonizing decision given the volume of domestic violence in the Bronx, Roberts said.
It means that hundreds of survivors “may not have the opportunity to talk to an advocate about their options, about their rights, or about their safety,” she said.
Filling the void
Roberts said she’s bracing for more cuts — federal funds make up about 24% of the group’s budget — that could force the closure of shelters or reductions to a citywide hotline.
As nonprofits nationwide grapple with similar losses, Roberts said private philanthropy and local governments will need to “make some smart and thoughtful and principled decisions about where they can help to fill those gaps.”
In places like the Bronx, finding alternative funding is especially challenging. “The not-for-profit sector is often fragile, and nowhere more so than the Bronx,” Torres said of the district he represents, where organizations tend to be more dependent on government funding than wealthier enclaves.
“Organizations spent hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to apply for a contract and hired staff and made all these plans only to see the written contract disappear,” Torres said. “It’s deeply destabilizing.”
Sara Herschander is a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This article was provided to the Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content.
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Julia Wick, with an assist from David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.
Several millennia ago during the Trojan War, an army of Greeks built a massive wooden horse, feigned departure and left it as a “gift” outside the walled city of Troy.
The Trojans brought the offering — filled, unbeknownst to them, with Greek soldiers — into their fortified city and unwittingly wrought their own downfall. At least that’s how the legend goes.
Newsletter
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
Sign up to make sense of the often unexplained world of L.A. politics.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
So if an attack disguised as a gift is a Trojan horse, what do you call a gift disguised as an attack?
One could argue that the attempted recall of MayorKaren Bass inadvertently fits the bill.
Back in early March, Silicon Valley philanthropist and former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running mateNicole Shanahanlaunched an effort to recall Bass. At the time, Bass was still on her back foot — an incumbent, first-term mayor who’d become a national target for her initial response to the Palisades fire.
It’s notoriously difficult to gather enough signatures to trigger a recall. But Shanahan’s extremely deep pockets (her ex-husband co-founded Google) made anything possible. With the mayor already wounded and Angelenos feeling angry and frustrated, a well-funded recall effort could have been the spark that torched Bass’ reelection chances.
That did not come to pass.
Proponents didn’t even finish the paperwork necessary to begin gathering signatures, then tweeted in June that a recall would “no longer be our vehicle for change” and that they would instead focus on holding elected officials accountable at the ballot box in 2026. Their spokesperson has not responded to several emails from The Times.
But the short-lived recall effort had one effect its proponents likely did not anticipate. During a tenuous moment for Bass, they may have unintentionally handed her an extremely useful tool: the ability to form an opposition committee unencumbered by limits on the size of the donations she collects.
The threat from Shanahan’s group allowed Bass to form her own anti-recall campaign committee — separate from her general reelection account, which cannot collect more than $1,800 from each donor. Now, she could raise more money from her existing supporters, in far larger amounts.
Flash forward to this week, when the latest tranche of campaign finance numbers were released, revealing how much was raised and spent from the beginning of the year through the end of June. While Bass’ official reelection campaign took in an anemic $179,589, her anti-recall coffers hoovered up more than four times that amount.
The nearly $750,000 collected by the anti-recall campaign included two major donations at the end of March that we previously reported on: $250,000 from the Bass-affiliated Sea Change PAC and $200,000 from former assembly speaker and Actum managing partner Fabian Núñez’sleftover campaign cash.
Along with Núñez and Sea Change, the largest donors were philanthropists Jon Croel and William Resnick ($25,000 each), businessman Baron Farwell ($25,000) and former City Councilmember Cindy Miscikowski ($15,000). Several others gave $10,000 a piece, including pomegranate billionaire and power donor Lynda Resnick.
It’s far easier to rally donations when you’re dealing with an impending threat. (“Save the mayor from a right-wing recall!” is much catchier than asking for reelection dollars when a serious challenger has yet to jump into the race.) And it’s infinitely faster to stockpile cash when you aren’t limited to $1,800 increments.
“After the fires and what had happened, anything was possible, and we had to mobilize, and that’s what the mayor did,” said Bass campaign strategist Doug Herman. “But the people of the city didn’t want to have a recall in the midst of what they thought were more serious problems.”
Shanahan declined to comment.
When the recall effort officially times out on Aug. 4, the Bass camp will no longer be able to raise unlimited sums to fight it (with a few exceptions, such as expenses related to winding down the committee or settling debt). But the anti-recall committee will still have quite the extra arsenal to fire off in her favor.
Sometimes your loudest enemies are really friends in disguise.
State of play
—WHITHER CARUSO? Brentwood resident and former Vice President Kamala Harris announced this week that she would not be running for governor, intensifying questions about whether former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso might jump into the gubernatorial race … or potentially challenge Bass again for mayor. Through a spokesperson, Caruso declined to comment.
— RACE FOR THE 8TH FLOOR: City Attorney candidate Marissa Roy outraised incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto during the latest fundraising period, delivering a major warning shot about the seriousness of her campaign. For now, Feldstein Soto still has more cash on hand than Roy, who is challenging her from the left.
— COASTAL CASH: In the race for a Westside council district, public interest lawyer Faizah Malik raised a hefty $127,360, but her stash pales in comparison to the $343,020 that incumbent Councilmember Traci Park brought in during the most recent filing period. That’s far more than any other city candidate running in the June 2026 election.
— AHEAD OF THE PACK: Council staffer Jose Ugarte, who’s hoping to succeed his boss, termed out Councilmember Curren Price, in a crowded South L.A. race, raised a whopping $211,206, far outpacing his rivals.
— VIEW FROM THE VALLEY: During this filing cycle, Tim Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan both brought in real money in the race to succeed outgoing Councilmember Bob Blumenfield in the West Valley. Girvan outraised Gaspar during the past half-year, but Gaspar entered the race earlier and still has substantially more cash on hand.
— WHERE’S MONICA? One incumbent who didn’t report any fundraising is Valley Councilmember Monica Rodriguez. When reached Friday, Rodriguez said she is still planning to run for reelection and was in the process of changing treasurers. She did not answer when asked whether she was also considering a potential mayoral bid, as has been rumored.
— WHAT ABOUT KENNETH? City Controller Kenneth Mejia does not have any campaign finance numbers listed because he qualified his reelection committee after the June 30 fundraising deadline. He’ll be required to share fundraising numbers for the next filing period.
— LOWER LAYOFFS: The number of employee layoffs planned for the 2025-26 fiscal year continued to decline this week, falling to 394, according to a report released Friday by City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo. Bass’ budget had proposed 1,600 earlier this year. Szabo attributed much of the decrease to the transfer of employees to vacant positions that are not targeted for layoff.
— TOKENS OF APPRECIATION: According to her disclosure forms, Bass’ reelection committee spent more than $1,100 on gifts “of appreciation,” including flowers sent to Mayer Brown lawyers Edgar Khalatian, Dario Frommer and Phil Recht; Fabian Núñez; lawyer Byron McLain; longtime supporters Wendy and Barry Meyer; author Gil Robertson; former Amazon exec Latasha Gillespie; L.A. Labor Fed head honcho Yvonne Wheeler; lobbyist Arnie Berghoff; Faye Geyen; and LA Women’s Collective co-founder Hannah Linkenhoker. The most expensive bouquet ($163.17, from Ode à la Rose) went to Lynda Resnick.
— PIZZA INTEL: Bass has not, to my knowledge, publicly shared the names of her reelection finance committee. But her forms list a $198.37 charge at Triple Beam Pizza for food for a “finance committee meeting” with Cathy Unger, Victoria Moran, Ron Stone, Kellie Hawkins, Todd Hawkins, Cookie Parker, Stephanie Graves, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, George Pla, Wendy Greuel, Byron McLain, Chris Pak, Travis Kiyota, Areva Martin and Kevin Pickett. Bass’ consultant did not immediately respond when asked if that list constituted her finance committee, and if anyone was missing.
— FAMILY-FRIENDLY PROGRAMMING? Speakers at Los Angeles City Council meetings will be banned from using the N-word and the C-word, the council decided Wednesday. But my colleague Noah Goldberg reports that the council’s decision to ban the words could be challenged in court, with some legal scholars saying it could violate speakers’ 1st Amendment free speech rights to curse out their elected officials.
— ZINE O’ THE TIMES: City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield finally named his pick for the city’s Charter Reform Commission: Dennis Zine, who served on the council for 12 years, representing the same West Valley district as Blumenfield. Zine spent more than three decades as an officer with the LAPD while also serving on the board of the Police Protective League, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, and should not be confused with progressive former Santa Monica mayor Denny Zane.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program went to an encampment next to the 405 Freeway in Van Nuys, moving an estimated 30 people indoors. The operation drew protests from activists who said the mayor was destroying the belongings of homeless people and forcing them into “jail like conditions.” Bass, who was at the encampment, lashed out at the activists, telling reporters: “How dare they sleep in a comfortable bed at night, come here and advocate for people to stay in these kind of conditions. We’re not going to stand for it.”
On the docket for next week: The City Council’s personnel committee holds a special meeting Wednesday on the plan for laying off hundreds of city workers.
A political-ish poem to start your Saturday morning: “The book burnings” by Bertolt Brecht, translated from the German by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
CANTON, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance used a speech in his home state on Monday to promote the GOP’s sweeping tax-and-border bill as a small group of protesters outside a northeast Ohio steel plant brandished signs critical of the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
Vance spoke to a crowd of steel workers in neon green, orange, yellow and red hard hats and safety glasses gathered inside a rolling mill at Metallus Inc. in Canton, about 60 miles from Cleveland. It was his second trip this month as chief promoter of the hodgepodge of conservative priorities that Republicans have dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Echoing themes expressed at an industrial machine shop in West Pittston, Pa., Vance said American workers should be able to keep more of their pay in their pockets and U.S. companies should be rewarded when they grow. He highlighted the law’s new tax deductions on overtime and its breaks on tipped income.
Vance decried Democrats — including U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, whose competitive House district he was visiting — for opposing the bill that keeps the current tax rates, which would have otherwise expired later this year.
The legislation cleared the GOP-controlled Congress by the narrowest of margins, with Vance breaking a tie vote in the Senate for the package that also sets aside hundreds of billions of dollars for Trump’s immigration agenda while slashing Medicaid and food stamps.
The vice president is also stepping up his public relations blitz on the bill as the White House tries to deflect attention from the growing controversy over Jeffrey Epstein.
The disgraced financier killed himself, authorities say, in a New York jail cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Trump and his top allies stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death before Trump returned to the White House and are now reckoning with the consequences of a Justice Department announcement earlier this month that Epstein did indeed die by suicide and that no further documents about the case would be released.
Vance insisted that the administration of President Trump isn’t trying to cover up information from the investigation that’s in the public interest.
Vance said Trump asked Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to release all “credible information” but that the process “takes time.” The Justice Department has asked for grand jury transcripts to be made public, but a judge in Florida has rejected that bid while requests remain pending in New York.
Vance said Trump, who was an acquaintance of Epstein before they had a falling out, wants “full transparency” in the case and alleged that prior administrations went “easy on this guy.” A few heads could be seen nodding amid the crowd.
Questions about the case continued to dog Trump in Scotland, where he on Sunday announced a framework trade deal with the European Union.
Asked about the timing of the trade announcement and the Epstein case and whether it was correlated, Trump responded: “You got to be kidding with that.”
“No, had nothing to do with it,” Trump told the reporter. “Only you would think that.”
The White House sees the new law as a political boon, sending Vance to promote it in swing congressional districts that will determine whether Republicans retain their House majority next year.
In a navy jacket and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, Vance leaned into folksy word choices and characterized the administration’s immigration crackdown as an effort to keep gangs trafficking deadly fentanyl out of the country.
Vance’s decision to visit Sykes’ district comes as the National Republican Congressional Committee has named her narrowly split district as a top target this cycle. His northeastern Pennsylvania stop was in the district represented by Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, a first-term lawmaker who knocked off a six-time Democratic incumbent last fall.
A spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called his visit “another desperate attempt to lie to Ohioans about the devastating impact the Big, Ugly Law will have on working families,” in a statement.
In the statement, Katie Smith said Sykes “fought tooth and nail against this disastrous law.”
Polls before the bill’s passage showed that it largely remained unpopular, although the public approves of some individual provisions such as increasing the child tax credit and allowing workers to deduct more of their tips on taxes.
WASHINGTON — Congressional redistricting usually happens after the once-a-decade population count by the U.S. Census Bureau or in response to a court ruling. Now, Texas Republicans want to break that tradition — and California and other states could follow suit.
President Trump has asked the Texas Legislature to create districts, in time for next year’s midterm elections, that could send five more Republicans to Washington and make it harder for Democrats to regain the House majority and blunt his agenda.
Texas has 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after the death of Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner in March.
“There’s been a lot more efforts by the parties and political actors to push the boundaries — literally and figuratively — to reconfigure what the game is,” said Doug Spencer, the Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. chair in constitutional law at the University of Colorado.
Other states, including California, are waiting to see what Texas does and whether to follow suit.
The rules of redistricting can be vague and variable; each state has its own set of rules and procedures. Politicians are gauging what voters will tolerate when it comes to politically motivated mapmaking.
Here’s what to know about the rules of congressional redistricting:
When does redistricting normally happen?
Every decade, the Census Bureau collects population data used to divide the 435 House seats among the 50 states based on the updated head count.
It’s a process known as reapportionment. States that grew relative to others might gain a seat or two at the expense of those whose populations stagnated or declined.
States use their own procedures to draw lines for the assigned number of districts. The smallest states receive just one representative, which means the entire state is a single congressional district.
Some state constitutions require independent commissions to devise the political boundaries or to advise the legislature. When legislatures take the lead, lawmakers can risk drawing lines that end up challenged in court, usually on claims of violating the Voting Rights Act. Mapmakers can get another chance and resubmit new maps. Sometimes, judges draw the maps on their own.
Is midcycle redistricting allowed?
By the first midterm elections after the latest population count, each state is ready with its maps, but those districts do not always stick. Courts can find that the political lines are unconstitutional.
There is no national impediment to a state trying to redraw districts in the middle of the decade and to do it for political reasons, such as increasing representation by the party in power.
“The laws about redistricting just say you have to redistrict after every census,” Spencer said. “And then some state legislatures got a little clever and said, ‘Well, it doesn’t say we can’t do it more.’”
Some states have laws that would prevent midcycle redistricting or make it difficult to do so in a way that benefits one party.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to retaliate against the GOP push in Texas by drawing more favorable Democratic seats in his state. That goal, however, is complicated by a constitutional amendment — approved by state voters — that requires an independent commission to lead the process.
Is Texas’ effort unprecedented?
Texas has done it before.
When the Legislature failed to agree on a redistricting plan after the 2000 census, a federal court stepped in with its own map.
Republican Tom DeLay of Texas, who was then the U.S. House majority leader, thought his state should have five more districts friendly to his party. “I’m the majority leader and we want more seats,′′ he said at the time.
Statehouse Democrats protested by fleeing to Oklahoma, depriving the Legislature of enough votes to officially conduct any business. But DeLay eventually got his way, and Republicans replaced Democrats in five districts in the 2004 general election.
What do the courts say about gerrymandering?
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts should not get involved in debates over political gerrymandering, the practice of drawing districts for partisan gain. In that decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said redistricting is “highly partisan by any measure.”
But courts may demand new maps if they believe the congressional boundaries dilute the votes of a racial minority group, in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Other states’ plans
Washington state Rep. Suzan DelBene, who leads House Democrats’ campaign arm, indicated at a Christian Science Monitor event that if Texas follows through on passing new maps, Democratic-led states would look at their own political lines.
“If they go down this path, absolutely folks are going to respond across the country,” DelBene said. “We’re not going to be sitting back with one hand tied behind our back while Republicans try to undermine voices of the American people.”
In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul recently joined Newsom in expressing openness to taking up mid-decade redistricting. But state laws mandating independent commissions or blunting the ability to gerrymander would come into play.
Among Republican-led states, Ohio could try to further expand the 10-5 edge that the GOP holds in the House delegation; a quirk in state law requires Ohio to redraw its maps before the 2026 midterms.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was considering early redistricting and “working through what that would look like.”
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Julia Wick, giving you the latest on city and county government.
Here you thought charter reform would be boring.
A 13-member citizens commission is just getting started on the painstaking, generally unsexy work of poring through the Los Angeles City Charter, the city’s governing document, and coming up with strategies for improving it. Yet already, the commission has had a leadership battle, heard allegations of shady dealings and fielded questions about whether it’s been set up to fail.
But first, let’s back up.
Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and former Council President Paul Krekorian chose a collection of volunteers to serve on the Charter Reform Commission, which is charged with exploring big and small changes to the City Charter.
Newsletter
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
Sign up to make sense of the often unexplained world of L.A. politics.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
The commission is part of a much larger push for reform sparked by the city’s 2022 audio leak scandal and a string of corruption cases involving L.A. officials. The list of potential policy challenges the commission faces is significant.
Good government types want the new commission to endorse ranked-choice voting, with Angelenos selecting their elected officials by ranking candidates in numerical order. Advocacy groups want to see a much larger City Council. Some at City Hall want clarity on what to do with elected officials who are accused of wrongdoing but have not been convicted.
“You are not one of those commissions that shows up every few years to fix a few things here or there,” said Raphael Sonenshein, who served nearly 30 years ago as executive director of the city’s appointed Charter Reform Commission, while addressing the new commission last week. “You actually have a bigger responsibility than that.”
The real work began on July 16, when the commission took up the question of who should be in charge. Many thought the leadership post would immediately go to Raymond Meza, who had already been serving as the interim chair.
Instead, the panel found itself deadlocked.
Meza is a high-level staffer at Service Employees International Union Local 721, the powerful public employee union that represents thousands of city workers and has been a big-money spender in support of Bass and many other elected city officials.
Meza, who was appointed by Bass earlier this year, picked up five votes. But so did Ted Stein, a real estate developer who has served on an array of city commissions — planning, airport, harbor — but hadn’t been on a volunteer city panel in nearly 15 years. Faced with a stalemate, charter commissioners decided to try again a few days later, when they were joined by two additional members.
By then, some reform advocates were up in arms over Stein, arguing that he was bringing a record of scandal to the commission. They sent the commissioners news articles pointing out that Stein had, among other things, resigned from the airport commission in 2004 amid two grand jury investigations into whether city officials had tied the awarding of airport contracts to campaign contributions.
Stein denied those allegations in 2004, calling them “false, defamatory and unsubstantiated.” Last week, before the second leadership vote, he shot back at his critics, noting that two law enforcement agencies — the U.S. attorney’s office and the L.A. County district attorney’s office — declined to pursue charges against him. The Ethics Commission also did not bring a case over his airport commission activities.
“I was forced to protect my good name by having to hire an attorney and having to spend over $200,000 in legal fees [over] something where I had done nothing wrong,” he told his fellow commissioners. The city reimbursed Stein for the vast majority of those legal costs.
Stein accused Meza of orchestrating some of the outside criticism — which Meza later denied. And Stein spent so much time defending his record that he had little time to say why he should be elected.
Still, the vote was close, with Meza securing seven votes and Stein picking up five.
Meza called the showdown “unfortunate.” L.A. voters, he said, “want to see the baton passed to a new generation of people.” The 40-year-old Montecito Heights resident made clear that he supports an array of City Charter changes.
In an interview, Meza said he’s “definitely in favor” of ranked-choice voting, arguing that it would increase voter turnout. He also supports an increase in the number of City Council members but wouldn’t say how many. And he wants to ensure that vacant positions are filled more quickly at City Hall, calling it an issue that “absolutely needs to be addressed.”
That last item has long been a concern for SEIU Local 721, where Meza works as deputy chief of staff. Nevertheless, Meza said he would, to an extent, set aside the wishes of his union during the commission’s deliberations.
“On the commission, I am an individual resident of the city,” he said.
Stein, for his part, told The Times that he only ran for the leadership post out of concern over the commission’s tight timeline. The commission must submit its proposal to the council next spring — a much more aggressive schedule than the one required of two charter reform commissions nearly 30 years ago.
Getting through so many complex issues in such a brief period calls for an experienced hand, said Stein, who is 76 and lives in Encino.
Stein declined to say where he stands on council expansion and ranked-choice voting. He said he’s already moved on from the leadership vote and is ready to dig into the commission’s work.
Meza, for his part, said he has heard the concerns about the aggressive schedule. But he remains confident the commission will be successful.
“I don’t think we have the best conditions,” he said. “But I do not believe we’ve been set up to fail. I’m very confident the commissioners will do what’s needed to turn in a good product.”
State of play
— STRICTLY BUSINESS: A group of L.A. business leaders launched a ballot proposal to repeal the city’s much-maligned gross receipts tax, saying it would boost the city’s economy and lower prices for Angelenos. The mayor and several other officials immediately panned the idea, saying it would deprive the city’s yearly budget of $800 million, forcing cuts to police, firefighters and other services.
— INCHING FORWARD: Meanwhile, another ballot proposal from the business community — this one backed by airlines and the hotel industry — nudged closer to reality. Interim City Clerk Petty Santos announced that the proposed referendum on the $30-per-hour tourism minimum wage had “proceeded to the next step,” with officials now examining and verifying petition signatures to determine their validity.
— GRIM GPS: The Los Angeles County Fire Department had only one truck stationed west of Lake Avenue in Altadena at a critical moment during the hugely destructive Eaton fire, according to vehicle tracking data analyzed by The Times. By contrast, the agency had dozens of trucks positioned east of Lake. All but one of the deaths attributed to the Eaton fire took place west of Lake.
— CHANGE OF PLANS: On Monday, Bass nominated consultant and Community Coalition board member Mary Lee to serve on the five-member Board of Police Commissioners. Two days later, in a brief email, Lee withdrew from consideration. Reached by The Times, Lee cited “personal reasons” for her decision but did not elaborate. (The mayor’s office had nothing to add.) Lee would have replaced former commissioner Maria “Lou” Calanche, who is running against Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez in the June 2026 election.
— SEMPER GOODBYE: The Pentagon announced Monday that the roughly 700 Marines who have been deployed to the city since early June would be withdrawing, a move cheered by Bass and other local leaders who have criticized the military deployment that followed protests over federal immigration raids. About 2,000 National Guard troops remain in the region.
— HALTING HEALTHCARE: L.A. County’s public health system, which provides care to the region’s neediest residents, could soon face brutal budget cuts. The “Big Beautiful Bill,” enacted by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, is on track to carve $750 million per year out of the Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and roughly two dozen clinics. At the Department of Public Health, which is facing its own $200-million cut, top executive Barbara Ferrer said: “I’ve never actually seen this much disdain for public health.”
— HOMELESS HIRE: The commission that oversees the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority selected Gita O’Neill, a career lawyer in the city attorney’s office, to serve as the agency’s interim CEO. O’Neill will replace Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who stepped down Friday after more than two years in her post.
— THE JURY SPEAKS: The city has been ordered by a jury to pay $48.8 million to a man who has been in a coma since he was hit by a sanitation truck while crossing a street in Encino. The verdict comes as the city struggles with escalating legal payouts — and was larger than any single payout by the city in the last two fiscal years, according to data provided by the city attorney’s office.
— LOOKING FOR A LIAISON: Back in May, while signing an executive directive to support local film and TV production, L.A.’s mayor was asked whether she planned to appoint a film liaison as the City Hall point person for productions. “Absolutely,” Bass said during the news conference, adding that she planned to do so within a few days.
That was two months ago. Asked this week about the status of that position, Bass spokesperson Clara Karger touted the executive directive and said the position was “being hired in conjunction with industry leaders.” She did not provide a timeline.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program did not carry out any new operations this week. However, her Shine LA initiative, which aims to clean up city streets and sidewalks, is heading out this weekend to Wilmington, Harbor Gateway and a stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard in South L.A.
On the docket for next week: A bunch of stuff! The City Council returns from its summer recess, holding its first meeting in nearly a month. The Charter Reform Commission heads to the Baldwin Hills library to study planning and infrastructure. Meanwhile, county supervisors are scheduled to take up a proposal to bar law enforcement officers from concealing their identities in the county’s unincorporated areas, including East L.A., Lennox and Altadena.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat who represents a slice of the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, won his last congressional election by just over 5,000 votes.
That makes him a tempting target for Republicans, who are poised to redraw the state’s congressional maps this week and devise five new winnable seats for the GOP that would help the party avoid losing House control in next year’s midterm elections. Adjusting the lines of Gonzalez’s district to bring in a few thousand more Republican voters, while shifting some Democratic ones out, could flip his seat.
Gonzalez said he is not worried. Those Democratic voters will have to end up in one of the Republican districts that flank Gonzalez’s current one, making those districts more competitive — possibly enough so it could flip the seats to Democrats.
“Get ready for some pickup opportunities,” Gonzalez said, adding that his party is already recruiting challengers to Republicans whose districts they expect to be destabilized by the process. “We’re talking to some veterans, we’re talking to some former law enforcement.”
Texas has 38 seats in the House. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, died in March.
Gonzalez’s district — and what happens to the neighboring GOP-held ones — is at the crux of President Trump’s high-risk, high-reward push to get Texas Republicans to redraw their political map. Trump is seeking to avoid the traditional midterm letdown that most incumbent presidents endure and hold onto the House, which the GOP narrowly controls.
Trump’s push comes as there are numerous political danger signs for his presidency, both in the recent turmoil over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and in new polling. Surveys from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show most U.S. adults think that his policies have not helped them and that his tax cut and spending bill will only help the wealthy.
‘Dummymander’
The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers — in most states, it’s the party that controls the Legislature — must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents.
That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party’s own seats at risk: a “dummymander.”
The Texas GOP knows the risk. In the 2010s, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew political lines that helped pad the GOP’s House majority. That lasted until 2018, when a backlash against Trump in his first term led Democrats to flip two seats in Texas that Republicans had thought safe.
In 2021, with Republicans still comfortably in charge of the Texas Legislature, the party was cautious, opting for a map that mainly shored up their incumbents rather than targeted Democrats.
Still, plenty of Republicans believe their Texas counterparts can safely go on offense.
“Smart map-drawing can yield pickup opportunities while not putting our incumbents in jeopardy,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which helps coordinate mapmaking for the party nationally.
Democrats threaten walkout
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the Legislature, which starts Monday, to comply with Trump’s request to redraw the congressional maps and to address the flooding in Texas Hill Country that killed at least 135 people this month.
Democratic state lawmakers are talking about staying away from the Capitol to deny the Legislature the minimum number needed to convene. Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton posted that any Democrats who did that should be arrested.
Lawmakers can be fined up to $500 a day for breaking a quorum after the House changed its rules when Democrats initiated a walkout in 2021. Despite the new penalties, Democratic state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who led the walkout in 2021, left open the possibility of another.
“I don’t think anybody should underestimate the will of Texas Democrats,” he said.
Texas is not the only Republican state engaged in mid-decade redistricting. After staving off a ballot measure to expand the power of a mapmaking commission last election, Ohio Republicans hope to redraw their congressional map from a 10-5 one favoring the GOP to one as lopsided as 13 to 2, in a state Trump won last year with 55% of the vote.
GOP sees momentum
Some Democratic leaders have suggested that states where their party is in control should counter the expected redraw in Texas. “We have to be absolutely ruthless about getting back in power,” former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke said Sunday on CNN.
But Democrats have fewer options. More of the states their party controls do not allow elected partisans to draw maps and entrust independent commissions to draw fair lines.
Among them is California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has floated the long-shot idea of working around the state’s commission.
The few Democratic-controlled states that do allow elected officials to draw the lines, such as Illinois, have already seen Democrats max out their advantages.
Trump and his allies have been rallying Texas Republicans to ignore whatever fears they may have and to go big.
On Tuesday, the president posted on his social media site a reminder of his record in the state in the November election: “Won by one and a half million Votes, and almost 14%. Also, won all of the Border Counties along Mexico, something which has never happened before. I keep hearing about Texas ‘going Blue,’ but it is just another Democrat LIE.”
Texas has long been eyed as a state trending Democratic because of its growing nonwhite population. But those communities swung right last year and helped Trump expand his margin to nearly 14 percentage points, a significant improvement on his 5½-point win in 2020.
Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime watcher of the state at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said there’s no way to know whether that trend will continue in next year’s elections or whether the state will shift back toward Democrats.
“Anyone who can tell you what the politics of Texas looks like for the balance of the decade has a better crystal ball than I do,” Li said.
Legal risks
One region of the state where Republican gains have been steady is the Rio Grande Valley, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico along much of the state’s southern border. The heavily Latino region, where many Border Patrol officers live, has rallied around Trump’s anti-immigration message and policies.
As a result, Gonzalez and the area’s other Democratic congressman, Henry Cuellar, have seen their reelection campaigns get steadily tighter. They are widely speculated to be the two top targets of the new map.
The GOP is expected to look to the state’s three biggest cities to find its other Democratic targets. If mapmakers scatter Democratic voters from districts in the Houston, Dallas and Austin areas, they could get to five additional seats.
But in doing so, Republicans face a legal risk on top of their electoral one: that they break up districts required by the Voting Rights Act to have a critical amount of certain minority groups. The goal of the federal law is to enable those communities to elect representatives of their choosing.
The Texas GOP already is facing a lawsuit from civil rights groups alleging its initial 2021 map did this. If this year’s redistricting is too aggressive, it could trigger a second complaint.
“It’s politically and legally risky,” Li said of the redistricting strategy. “It’s throwing caution to the winds.”
Riccardi and Lathan write for the Associated Press and reported from Denver and Austin, respectively.
