Halls

A judge temporarily blocked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s attempt to take over Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls on Friday, finding that despite evidence of a “systemic failure” to improve poor conditions, Bonta had not met the legal grounds necessary to strip away local control.

After years of scandals — including frequent drug overdoses and incidents of staff violence against youths — Bonta filed a motion in July to place the county’s juvenile halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed monitor would manage the facilities, set their budgets and oversee the hiring and firing of staff. An ongoing staffing crisis previously led a state oversight body to deem two of L.A. County’s halls unfit to house children.

L.A. County entered into a settlement with the California Department of Justice in 2021 to mandate improvements, but oversight bodies and a Times investigation earlier this year found the Probation Department was falling far short of fixing many issues, as required by the agreement.

On Friday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Hernandez chastised Bonta for failing to clearly lay out tasks for the Probation Department to abide by in the 2021 settlement. Hernandez said the attorney general’s office’s filings failed to show that a state takeover would lead to “a transformation of the juvenile halls.”

The steps the Probation Department needs to take to meet the terms of the settlement have been articulated in court filings and reports published by the L.A. County Office of the Inspector General for several years. Hernandez was only assigned to oversee the settlement in recent months and spent much of Friday’s hearing complaining about a lack of “clarity” in the case.

Hernandez wrote that Bonta’s motion had set off alarm bells about the Probation Department’s management of the halls.

“Going forward, the court expects all parties to have an ‘all-hands’ mentality,” the judge wrote in a tentative ruling earlier this week, which he adopted Friday morning.

Hernandez said he would not rule out the possibility of a receivership in the future, but wanted more direct testimony from parties, including Probation Department Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa and the court-appointed monitor over the settlement, Michael Dempsey. A hearing was set for Oct. 24.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The Department remains fully committed to making the necessary changes to bring our juvenile institutions to where they need to be,” Vicky Waters, the Probation Department’s chief spokesperson, said in a statement. “However, to achieve that goal, we must have both the authority and support to remove barriers that hinder progress rather than perpetuate no-win situations.”

The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper educational and therapeutic programming and detaining youths in solitary confinement for far too long.

Bonta said in July that the county has failed to improve “75%” of what they were mandated to change in the 2021 settlement.

A 2022 Times investigation revealed a massive staffing shortage was leading to significant injuries for both youths and probation officers. By May of 2023, the California Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar shuttered due to unsafe conditions. That same month, an 18-year-old died of an overdose while in custody.

The county soon reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, but the facility quickly became the site of a riot, an escape attempt and more drug overdoses. Last year, the California attorney general’s office won indictments against 30 officers who either orchestrated or allowed youths to engage in “gladiator fights.” That investigation was sparked by video of officers allowing eight youths to pummel another teen inside Los Padrinos, which has also been deemed unfit to house youths by a state commission.

In court Friday, Laura Fair, an attorney from the attorney general’s office, said that while she understood Hernandez’s position, she expressed concern that teens are still in danger while in the Probation Department’s custody.

“The youth in the halls continue to be in grave danger and continue to suffer irreparable harm every day,” she said.

Fair told the court that several youths transferred out of Los Padrinos under a separate court order in recent weeks showed up at Nidorf Juvenile Hall with broken jaws and arms.

She declined to comment further outside the courtroom. Waters, the Probation Department’s spokesperson, said she was unaware of the situation Fair was describing but would look into it.

Despite the litany of fiascoes over the last few years, probation leaders still argued in court filings that Bonta had gone too far.

“The County remains open to exploring any path that will lead to better outcomes. But it strongly opposes the DOJ’s ill-conceived proposal, which will only harm the youth in the County’s care by sowing chaos and inconsistency,” county lawyers wrote in an opposition motion submitted last month. “The DOJ’s request is almost literally without precedent. No state judge in California history has ever placed a correctional institution into receivership.”

Under the leadership of Viera Rosa, who took office in 2023, the Probation Department has made improvements to its efforts to keep drugs out of the hall, rectify staffing issues and hold its own officers accountable for misconduct, the county argued.

The department has placed “airport-grade” body scanners and drug-sniffing dogs at the entrances to both Nidorf and Los Padrinos in order to stymie the influx of narcotics into the halls, according to Robert Dugdale, an attorney representing the county.

Dugdale also touted the department’s hiring of Robert Arcos, a former high-ranking member of the Los Angeles Police Department and L.A. County district attorney’s office, to oversee security in the facilities.

The motion claimed it was the Probation Department that first uncovered the evidence that led to the gladiator fight prosecutions. Bonta said in March that his office launched its investigation after it reviewed leaked footage of one of the incidents.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Wednesday he will ask a judge to allow the state to take control of L.A. County’s juvenile halls.

The move comes after years of failure to comply with court-ordered reforms that have been marked by riots, drug overdoses, allegations of child abuse and the death of a teenager.

In a statement, Bonta said he will ask a judge to place the county’s halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed official would take over “management and operations of the juvenile halls” from the L.A. County Probation Department, including setting budgets and hiring and firing staff.

Bonta is expected to discuss the move at a news conference in downtown L.A. around 9:45 a.m. A probation department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The scandal-plagued halls have failed to see significant improvement under the probation department’s management. Two facilities were shut down in 2023 after repeatedly failing to meet basic standards to house youth under California law. That same year, 18-year-old Bryan Diaz died of a drug overdose at the Secure Youth Treatment Facility and reports of Xanax and opiate overdoses among youths in the halls have become a regular occurrence in recent months.

Nearly three dozen probation officers have been charged with crimes related to on-duty conduct in the past few years, including 30 indicted earlier this year by Bonta for staging or allowing so-called “gladiator fights” between juveniles in custody. Officers also routinely refuse to come to work, leaving each hall critically short-staffed.

“This drastic step to divest Los Angeles County of control over its juvenile halls is a last resort — and the only option left to ensure the safety and well-being of the youth currently in its care,” Bonta’s statement Wednesday said. “For four-and-a-half years, we’ve moved aggressively to bring the County into compliance with our judgment — and we’ve been met with glacial progress that has too often looked like one step forward and two steps back. Enough is enough. These young people deserve better, and my office will not stop until they get it.”

Bonta first suggested he might seek receivership in May, in response to questions for a Times investigation on the probation department’s years of defiance of state oversight.

The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper programming, and detaining youths in solitary confinement in their rooms for far too long. A 2021 court settlement between L.A. County and the state attorney general’s office was aimed at improving conditions for youth and tamping down on use of force.

But the situation has seemingly only gotten worse in the last four years. Incidents in which staff use force against youths have increased over the life of the settlement, records show. The L.A. County inspector general’s office has published six reports showing the department has failed to meet the terms of the state oversight agreement. Oversight officials have caught several probation officers lying about violent incidents in the halls after reviewing video footage that contradicted written reports.

After the state shut down the county’s other two major detention centers, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey was reopened but quickly became a haven for chaos. In its first month of operation, there was a riot and an escape attempt and someone brought a gun inside the youth hall.

Late last year, California’s Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Los Padrinos closed too after it failed repeated inspections, but Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa ignored the order, leading some to call on Bonta to intervene. Eventually, an L.A. County judge ordered the probation department to begin emptying Los Padrinos until it came back into compliance with state standards.

The two-dimensional version of President Obama wearing a red and green Santa hat in California Rep. Grace Napolitano’s office draws a crowd.

Random visitors, and occasionally members of Congress, filtered past the door wrapped like a present, to snap a selfie with the commander-in-cardboard.

Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Norwalk) shows off Christmas decorations in her office. She said staff and visitors stop in to have their photo taken with the cutout of President Obama in a Santa hat.

(Sarah D. Wire)

Rep. Grace Napolitano shows off Christmas decorations in her office. (Sarah D. Wire/Los Angeles Times)

“They just decide they want to come in and stand next to him and get a picture taken,” Napolitano said, laughing.

At the White House Christmas party one year, the nine-term Democrat from Norwalk just had to let the president know how much action his doppelganger was getting in her office.

Napolitano said she showed Obama a photo of her staff posing with the cutout. The president pulled it out of her hands and showed it off to other attendees.

Her office on the sixth floor of the Longworth House Office Building is bustling around the holidays, a little cheer that helped as Congress bickered in the final days of the year on spending and world problems.

Decorations appear around the Capitol and House and Senate office buildings in December — Capitol police have a small tree, some office doors hold wreaths or feature entryway stockings — but Napolitano’s is one of the more elaborate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc7PtrltNeY

“It makes it nice to walk into an office and see the cheerfulness,” Napolitano said.

Each door to her office suite is covered in shiny red or green colored wrapping paper and in the hallway, lit candy cane lawn ornaments lead visitors to the office. Lights shaped like chili peppers frame a mirror in the entryway and tinsel or garland line nearly every available surface. Chinese lanterns hang from the ceiling while Santa, reindeer and angel figurines peek out from shelves.

Napolitano began decorating the space when she took office in 1999, but it gained steam in 2011 when she received some of the 3,000 ornaments made by California children that had adorned the 63-foot-tall Capitol Christmas tree from Stanislaus National Forest.

Many of those ornaments still hang from the branches of an artificial pine reaching 6-feet high, not far from framed citations and awards for her public service. Napolitano said that next year, she plans to ask schools in her district to send new ornaments for the tree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAimBoSGeIY

The wood-paneled office is traditionally more sedate, decorated with pictures from events in California or of her family and maps of the district. Brochures for tourist activities in Washington line a shelf.

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Staff have to wait all month to find out what’s inside the wrapped boxes at the foot of the tree next to the picture of a fireplace decorated with lights. Eventually she’ll buy a faux fireplace with fake crackling flames to replace the photo, said Napolitano, who pays for the decorations herself.

Feels like family

Staff members do the decorating the week of Thanksgiving, she said, as a way to make Washington seem more like home during the hectic final weeks Congress is in session.

“It’s part of the family feeling” in the office, Napolitano said.

She tries to maintain the sentiment year-round.

Staff cook in the office weekly, practicing Napolitano’s recipes for dishes like enchiladas or migas — a mixture of scrambled eggs, vegetables and strips of corn tortillas.

Male staffers sport holiday ties she buys them and joke about the amount of food they eat at work. A staff member opened a cabinet to show off the seven bags of avocados ripening in preparation for “thank you” guacamole that Napolitano will make for staff who worked on the federal highway funding bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ust3nhq32PE

In recent years, Napolitano’s office has hosted a “hall party” for other members and staff.

Her Longworth neighbor, Rep. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego), said he loves having the decorations next door. He tries to spread his own holiday joy.

“I walk in there now every time I go by … and I sing a little Christmas song with them and they all laugh, but I love it,” Vargas said. Then he belted out the lyrics for “Holly, Jolly Christmas.”

The decorations inspired him.

“They put us in the Christmas spirit, so much so that I went out and got a tree myself, carried it down the street and put it in my office,” he said. “If you go into my office you’ll see a real tree with the real smells. It’s terrific.”

What’s it like to have Christmas cheer the next office over?

“Honestly, I don’t know if she is going to like this, but it’s like having my mom down the hall,” Vargas said. “If I really need anything I can go to her. She’s as helpful as anybody I’ve ever met, she’s as kind and nice and sweet as anyone I’ve ever met, and she always wants to help, but I’ve gained a few pounds because of her.”

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For more, go to latimes.com/politics.

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The juxtaposition at the weekend was apt: one big, ugly bill in Washington and one big, garish wedding in Venice.

This is what days of Senate debate over President Trump and Republicans’ nearly 1,000-page legislation had in common with the days of revelry at the $50-million nuptials of the world’s-third-richest-man, Jeff Bezos, and ever-couture-corseted Lauren Sánchez: an exhibit of excess for a new Gilded Age, encapsulating the gulf between the have-nots and the have-yachts. (Venice’s “yacht ports” were reportedly all booked for the wedding, though not by Bezos’ own 417-foot-long “Koru.”)

The president was invited, natch, but he was a no-show. Consider his legislation his gift to the happy couple. Sánchez and Bezos have much to love in Trump’s absurdly titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” making its way through the Republican-run Congress. But Bezos’ Amazon employees and many of his cut-rate-shopping customers? Not so much.

This may be the most inequitable and overtly reverse-Robin Hood budget behemoth ever. It would make permanent and expand upon the deep Trump tax cuts of 2017 that disproportionately benefited the rich. The multitrillion-dollar cost would be offset by about $1 trillion in healthcare cuts, mostly to the Medicaid program that serves more than 70 million people. Other cuts would end clean-energy projects (costing jobs and ceding the alternative-energy future to China) and slash nutrition programs for the needy. Meanwhile, spending would increase roughly 15-fold for immigration enforcement, paying for purposely cruel detention centers such as Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Bottom line: about $3.5 trillion in additional debt over just the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This monstrosity would exacerbate what is already record income inequality in the United States. It would reverse the past decade’s decline, under Obamacare, in the number of Americans without health insurance, causing about 17 million people to lose coverage, according to the health-policy nonprofit KFF. More rural hospitals, reliant on Medicaid, would close. Forget the “minutiae of Medicaid policy,” tweeted Vice President JD Vance, supposed elegist of hillbillies and other downtrodden Americans — it’s the extra immigration crackdown cash that counts.

Healthcare threats loom even as two research papers recently reported that Obamacare and its Medicaid expansion have saved the lives of many low-income adults. One study last month found that the proposed cuts could increase preventable deaths by nearly 17,000 annually. The other, in May, concluded that as much as 20% of the well-documented disparity in the lifespans of low- and high-income Americans, with the latter living longer, is attributable to the lack of health insurance among those with lower incomes.

In other words, the supposed One Big Beautiful Bill Act would be a killer.

That, of course, would be the worst of it. But other descriptors are so damning that only Trump’s death grip on fellow Republicans can explain why they’d vote for this politically suicidal package. With polls this bad, the 2026 midterm elections can’t come soon enough to eject Republicans’ rubberstamping majority in Congress and check Trump’s madness.

“The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history,” said the Atlantic of the bill’s particulars. “The biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever,” according to budget guru Bobby Kogan at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “The most expensive piece of legislation probably since the 1960s,” said analyst Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute, “… piling trillions of new borrowing on top of deficits that are already leaping.”

That pile-up couldn’t happen at a worse time.

For decades, budget experts have warned of a coming fiscal tsunami by the 2020s that would swamp the economy as retiring boomers drew from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while federal revenues were drained by tax cuts. Yet Republican presidents and Congresses kept cutting taxes and, in league with Democrats, failed to make necessary and relatively painless adjustments to the so-called entitlement benefit programs.

And now here we are, knifing Medicaid not to make it and the overall budget more fiscally sound, but to offset the cost of more tax cuts favoring the wealthy, driving up debt.

Trump, plainly peeved at talk that he’ll break his first-term record of the most debt in a presidential term ($8.4 trillion), on Wednesday whined in a post, “Nobody wants to talk about GROWTH.”

Americans are on to this fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves. Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump 1.0 all slashed tax rates disproportionately for the rich and corporations, claiming that economic growth would help reduce deficits. They were wrong. For Trump to do it again and expect a different result, is, as the saying goes, the definition of insanity. The only recent Republican president who helped reduce deficits was George H.W. Bush because he raised taxes as part of a balanced, bipartisan package of spending cuts and tax increases — shared sacrifice, something Trump knows nothing about.

Just as the Senate was ending its vote to pass Trump’s bill on Tuesday, sending it back to the House, Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, was heard shouting to Republican senators as he exited, “Shame on you guys.”

Doesn’t he know by now that Trump and his party minions have no shame?

In Venice, Bezos the billionaire groom came in for some razzing too. A huge banner carpeted the famed Piazza San Marco before his three-day bacchanalia: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”

Bezos could, but he won’t. We’ve gone beyond trickle-down tax politics. It’s bottoms up for Bezos, other billionaires and all the mere millionaires. We’ll all suffer the hangover, however, and none more than the most needy among us.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes