Eaton

There were no stars in the October sky. No moon that 64-year-old Masuma Khan could see from the narrow window of the California City Immigration Processing Center.

“No planes,” she said, recalling her confinement.

Once a prison, the facility in the Mojave Desert, located 67 miles east of Bakersfield, reopened in April to hold people in removal proceedings, including Khan.

It was not the kind of place where she imagined ending up — not after living in the country for 28 years, caring for her daughter and surviving one of California’s deadliest wildfires, the Eaton fire.

Khan was fortunate not to have lost her west Altadena home to the Jan. 7 fire, which destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 19 people.

But in the months that followed, Khan faced another threat — deportation.

As fire recovery efforts were underway in Los Angeles, the Trump administration launched immigration raids in the city, hampering recovery efforts and creating more distress for immigrants after the fires.

Although Trump said the mass deportations would target criminals, news reports and court filings show the roundups ensnared immigrants with no criminal history, green card applicants, even American citizens.

Khan worried. She was in the process of adjusting her immigration status and was required to check in every year with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

An immigration attorney reassured her that there was no cause for concern: Her husband and daughter were citizens, she had no criminal record, and her case was still under review.

And so, on Oct. 6, Khan drove to downtown Los Angeles for her routine immigration check-in and found herself caught up in Trump’s deportation surge.

Eaton fire survivor Masuma Khan, 64, right, with her daughter Riya Khan and husband Isteak Khan after bring released in December.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Khan was taken into custody by ICE agents and kept in a cold room for almost an entire day. She said agents denied her access to a lawyer and a phone until she signed deportation papers. Khan resisted but later signed.

She was placed in a van with other detainees and driven three hours north to the detention center in California City. She said there was no air conditioning in the van and she became nauseous and started to experience hypertension symptoms.

At the facility she was denied access to medications for high blood pressure, asthma, peripheral arterial disease, general anxiety and hypothyroidism, she said.

Khan, who is also prediabetic, said she struggled to maintain her health at the facility. Her blood pressure spiked and she began to experience stroke-like symptoms. Her legs swelled up and she became weak.

She said the facility was so cold that people often became ill, including staff. She and other women used socks as scarves, sleeves and mittens but were threatened with fines if they continued to misuse the garments.

She said she became sick and her vision got blurry without her prescribed eye drops. Her Halal meals shifted to a medical diet that included pork, which she cannot eat because she is Muslim.

Khan’s experience at the facility was similar to that of other detainees who filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. They alleged inhumane conditions at the facility that included inadequate food, water and medical care, frigid cells and lack of access to medications and lawyers.

The California City Immigration Processing Center in Kern County, where Masuma Khan was held.

(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)

In an email response, Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said any claims about “subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities are false.”

“All detainees are provided with proper meals, certified by dietitians, medical treatment and have the opportunities to communicate with lawyers and family members.”

Khan said she spent most days in her cell crying.

“I missed my family, I missed everything,” she said “I was frustrated.”

She often thought of home: her husband and daughter, her small garden and the birds she fed daily with seeds and oranges from her balcony.

It would be weeks before she could see her family again, before she could gaze at the mountains and hear the symphony of wildlife.

‘Like an inferno’

The Eaton fire had been raging for hours in west Altadena when Khan and her husband were awakened by evacuation alerts on their phones at 3:30 a.m.

Khan got out of bed and from her bedroom window could see flames raging in the mountains.

Khan hadn’t seen anything like it. Four years before she arrived, the Kinneloa fire, sparked by a campfire, erupted in the same mountains. It fed on dry and flammable vegetation and was driven by Santa Ana winds. It was a destructive fire.

But the Eaton fire was different. Hurricane-force winds helped spread the embers and flames deep into the town’s heart — destroying homes, schools and countless structures.

A business and vehicle are a total loss as the Eaton fire rages along Lake Avenue in Altadena on January 8, 2025.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Khan and her husband, Isteak, didn’t have time to grab much before fleeing in their car that evening.

“It was like an inferno,” Isteak Khan, 66, recalled. “You could see the embers flying everywhere. It was very chaotic.”

The couple drove about three miles south to a supermarket in Pasadena. For a month they lived at a hotel until they were allowed to return home.

When they got back the surrounding neighborhoods were in ruins: Trees were charred, cars were stripped down to metal frames and homes were gutted or left in ash.

The couple’s apartment still was standing but had suffered smoke damage and there was no electricity, no safe water to use. The couple depended on water bottles and showered at the homes of relatives.

Khan never thought she would experience such a disaster in the U.S. Then again, she didn’t journey here for her own reasons. She came to save her daughter.

‘Incredibly traumatized’

In August 1997, Khan was living in Bangladesh with her husband and their 9-year-old daughter, Riya. That month Riya had traveled with her grandparents to the U.S. to see relatives when she fell seriously ill. Doctors determined she was suffering from kidney failure and needed ongoing treatment including chemotherapy and peritoneal dialysis.

Khan traveled to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa to be with Riya. For more than a decade her daughter received treatment at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

Khan became her daughter’s primary caretaker and did not return to Bangladesh as her visa was expiring. Her husband joined her in 1999 after obtaining a visa. He and Riya eventually received green cards and became citizens.

The following year, as Khan looked for legal ways to adjust her immigration status, she met a man at a Bangladeshi grocery store who befriended her and offered to help her obtain a green card, according to court records. Little did Khan know that this man — who spoke her language and was well known in the Bangladeshi community — was a scammer, one of many who prey on South Asians migrating to the U.S.

At the time Khan did not speak, read or write English well, and this man told her he could file an asylum application on her behalf, for a fee amounting to several thousand dollars.

But Khan was unaware this man had filed the application for her using a false name and listed his own address for future correspondence from immigration authorities, according to court documents.

All this came to light when she showed up for an asylum hearing in Anaheim in 1999 and responded to the questions of an asylum officer who noticed the information did not match what was in the application.

The officer denied the application, and later she was unaware of a notice to appear before an immigration court, since it had been sent to the scammer’s address.

Her absence at the hearing prompted an immigration judge to order her to be deported. Khan did not find out about the court’s action until 2015, when her husband petitioned to adjust her status so she could obtain a green card.

After the petition was denied and her case was closed because of the deportation order, Khan hired an immigration attorney who sought to reopen the case. But a judge denied it, and her appeal also was rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In February 2020, Khan was detained by ICE but released and required to check in with immigration officials. That year she hired an immigration attorney who submitted paperwork to let her stay in the U.S. The application was pending when ICE took her into custody on Oct. 6.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said there was no reason for the government to reconsider her case, since Khan had a final removal order since 1999 and had exhausted all appeals.

“She has no legal right to be in our country,” McLaughlin said. “DHS law enforcement lawfully arrested her on Oct. 6.”

Yet Khan caught a break in early November when a federal judge ordered her released. The judge ruled the government cannot detain Khan without giving her a hearing and explaining why it needs to detain her.

It was a victory for her legal team, made up of a law firm and two nonprofit groups — the South Asian Network and Public Counsel and Hoq Law APC.

Laboni Hoq, a chief attorney on the case, said the goal is to keep Khan out of detention while the team seeks to adjust her status.

“We’re feeling like she has a shot to pursue that process … given her long history in the country and that she is law-abiding and has met all the requirements to deal with her case through the court system and immigration system,” Hoq said.

Khan’s predicament has drawn the attention of numerous Southern California politicians, including U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff. Much of it had to do with Khan’s 38-year-old daughter, Riya, who reached out to the lawmakers and also took to social media to bring her mother’s case to the public’s attention.

Still, it is unclear what will happen next.

As Khan’s legal fight proceeds, she must check in regularly with immigration authorities, as she did in downtown L.A. on Dec. 19, accompanied by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra), who also became aware of her case from Riya’s efforts.

“She’s incredibly traumatized by what’s happened to her,” Pérez said of Khan. “She’s scared to even participate in the community events that we have during the holidays … it’s painful, it makes me angry, it makes me sad and I just wanted to be here with her.”

At their Altadena home one recent evening, the Khans sat in their living room. Riya said the hope was that the case will be reopened so her mother can obtain a green card.

“We’re going to stay together,” Isteak said.

Not far from Masuma, old “welcome home” balloons hovered. As she sat next to her daughter, she could express only two things: “I cannot leave this country. This is my home.”

The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.

The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.

Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip.

Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said.

She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred.

“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.

The mayor’s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to “The Fifth Column’s” YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version — one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.

The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast’s YouTube channel.

Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can’t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.

“We’re not going to be talking about any of that right now,” he told The Times before hanging up.

Bass’ team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. “The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said Tuesday in an email.

In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.

“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said on the original 66-minute video. “I’m responsible for everything.”

Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a “casual conversation” — a situation she called “unfortunate.” Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response “numerous times.”

In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.

“The city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,” she told The Times.

Bass was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.

Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire have created an opening for Bass’ rivals. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor — and has been a harsh critic of her performance.

Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor’s use of the word “botched” a “stunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor” on “the biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.”

“She’s admitting that she failed her constituents,” Beutner said.

Bass isn’t the first L.A. elected official to use the word “botched” in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass’ office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.

“Let’s be honest,” she told one of the mayor’s staffers. “You guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.”

Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.

“It’s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there’s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,” she said.

Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions on “Naked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.” She also went on “Big Boy’s Off Air Leadership Series” to discuss the Palisades fire and several other issues.

On “Big Boy’s Off Air,” Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February, she cited the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.

Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters “were sent home and they shouldn’t have been.”

She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later, causing the Palisades fire, “shocking.” The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn’t fully extinguished.

Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn’t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana.

Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: “At the end of the day, I’m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.”

On “The Fifth Column,” Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles and the effort to rewrite the City Charter to improve the city’s overall governmental structure. She also described the “overwhelming trauma” experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.

“To lose your home, it’s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,” she said. “You lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it’s overwhelming grief and it’s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.”

In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.

“Right,” Bass responded.

Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”

“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”

The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”

A coalition of Eaton fire survivors and community groups called on Southern California Edison on Tuesday to provide immediate housing assistance to the thousands of people who lost their homes in the Jan. 7 wildfire.

The coalition says an increasing number of Altadena residents are running out of insurance coverage that had been paying for their housing since they were displaced by the fire. Thousands of other residents had no insurance.

“When a company’s fire destroys or contaminates homes, that company has a responsibility to keep families housed until they can get back home,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, one of the coalition members asking Edison for emergency assistance of up to $200,000 for each family.

At the coalition’s press conference, Altadena residents spoke of trying to find a place to live after the Jan. 7 fire that killed at least 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes, apartments and other structures. Thousands of other homes were damaged by smoke and ash.

Gabriel Gonzalez, center, an Eaton Fire survivor, shown with Joy Chen, Executive Director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network (EFSN), left, and other survivors at a press conference in Altadena. They urged Southern California Edison to provide urgent housing relief to keep Eaton Fire families housed this winter.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

Gabriel Gonzalez said he had been living in his car for most of the last year.

Before the fire, Gonzalez had a successful plumbing company with six employees, he said. He had moved into an apartment in Altadena just a month before the fire and lost $80,000 worth of tools when the building was destroyed.

His insurance did not cover the loss, Gonzalez said, and he lost his business.

Edison is now offering to directly pay fire victims for their losses if they give up their right to file a lawsuit against the utility.

But members of the coalition say Edison’s program is forcing victims who are most desperate for financial support to give up their legal right to fair compensation.

Andrew Wessels, Strategy Director for the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, speaks about Edison’s Wildfire Recovery Compensation Plan (WRCP).

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

“If families are pushed to give up what they are owed just to survive, the recovery will never have the funds required to rebuild homes, restore livelihoods or stabilize the community,” said Andrew Wessels. He said he and his family had lived in 12 different places since the fire left ash contaminated with lead on and in their home.

In an interview Tuesday, Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the utility’s parent company, said the company would not provide money to victims without them agreeing to drop any litigation against the company for the fire.

“I can’t even pretend to understand the challenges victims are going through,” Pizarro said.

He said the company created its Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program to get money to victims much faster than if they filed a lawsuit and waited for a settlement.

“We want to help the community rebuild as quickly as possible,” he said.

Pizarro said Edison made its first payment to a victim within 45 days of the compensation program launching on Oct. 29. So far, he said, the company has received more than 1,500 claims.

Edison created the compensation program even though the official investigation into the cause of the fire hasn’t been released.

The company has said a leading theory is that its century-old transmission line in Eaton Canyon, which it last used in 1971, briefly became energized from the live lines running parallel to it, sparking the fire.

The program offers to reimburse victims for their losses and provides additional sums for pain and suffering. It also gives victims a bonus for agreeing to settle their claim outside of court.

Pizarro said the program is voluntary and if victims don’t like the offer they receive from Edison, they can continue their claims in court.

Edison has told its investors that it believes it will be reimbursed for all of its payments to victims and lawsuit settlements by $1 billion in customer-paid insurance and a $21 billion state wildfire fund.

Zaire Calvin, of Altadena, a survivor who has lost his home and other properties, speaks.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers created the wildfire fund in 2019 to protect utilities from bankruptcy if their electric wires cause a disastrous wildfire.

State officials say the fund could be wiped out by Eaton fire damages. While the first $21 billion was contributed half by customers of the state’s three biggest for-profit utilities and half by the companies’ shareholders, any additional damage claims from the Jan. 7 fire will be paid by Edison customers, according to legislation passed in September.

Some Altadena residents say Edison’s compensation program doesn’t pay them fully for their losses.

Damon Blount said that he and his wife had just renovated their home before it was destroyed in the fire. They don’t believe Edison’s offer would be enough to cover that work.

Blount said he “felt betrayed” by the utility.

“They literally took everything away from us,” Blount said. “Do the right thing, Edison. We want to be home.”

At the press conference, fire victims pointed out that Edison reported nearly $1.3 billion in profits last year, up from $1.2 billion in 2023.

Last week, Edison International said it was increasing the dividend it pays to its shareholders by 6% because of its strong financial performance.

“Their stock is rising,” said Zaire Calvin, one of the Altadena residents calling on Edison for emergency relief. Calvin lost his home and his sister died in the fire. “They will not pay a penny when this is over.”