immigrant

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), a prolific lawmaker who has reshaped California policy on a host of fronts — from housing to transgender rights — will succeed House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s representative in Congress after San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan called Wiener on Wednesday to concede, her campaign confirmed.

Wiener, 56, who is gay and reviled by some on the far right for his progressive policies and staunch LGBTQ+ advocacy work, overcame Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan in the much-watched race between Democrats, and will be the first out LGBTQ+ person to represent the bright-blue city in the House.

“In Washington I’ll bring the same determination I showed in Sacramento every single day,” Wiener said in a statement. “It’s time to deliver a better tomorrow for our city and our country.”

Wiener’s win hands Pelosi — known for her deft political instinct and sweeping influence over the Democratic Party and donor base — a rare defeat in her home city just as her nearly 40-year career in the House concludes.

The Associated Press had yet to call the race in Wiener’s favor as of late Wednesday.

But Chan, a progressive backed by labor, announced she was conceding the race in a statement, writing, “After reviewing the results and the ballots remaining to be counted, while we expect the margin to narrow significantly, we do not have a clear path to victory. I congratulate Scott Wiener on his election and wish him success in serving San Francisco.”

Chan said she was “deeply grateful” to Pelosi “for her trust and for four decades of extraordinary service that have strengthened San Francisco and our country.”

Pelosi in her own statement said Chan “brought courage, conviction and a deep love for San Francisco” to the campaign.

“As a working mom, a public servant, and an immigrant, she gave voice to families whose struggles she knows firsthand,” Pelosi said. “I was proud to support her, and I am so proud of the campaign she ran.”

Pelosi also congratulated Wiener. “Representing San Francisco is an extraordinary honor and a profound responsibility. My office stands ready to assist in the transition, and I wish him success in service for the people of our city,” she said.

Wiener thanked Chan for a “spirited and hard-fought campaign,” his campaign team, volunteers, supporters and donors for their hard work, and Pelosi — whom he hailed as “the greatest Speaker in modern American history” — saying he is “humbled to carry forward the powerful legacy of this seat.”

He also thanked San Franciscans for placing their trust in him — and making history by sending their first queer representative to Congress, something he said he never could have imagined when he first arrived in the city’s Castro neighborhood as a young man and “fell head over heels for this city.”

“San Franciscans voted for results, and we have so much work ahead: Building the millions of homes we need; moving toward true universal health care; investing in clean energy, public transit, and high-speed rail; standing up for science, education, and immigrants; making sure people — not massive corporations — decide what works for this country, including on AI; and ensuring the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President,” he said.

He said it “won’t be easy” but that voters nationwide had “delivered a powerful mandate for Democrats in Congress” to get it done.

The race, which ratcheted up when Pelosi bypassed Wiener to endorse Chan in May, just before the June primary, had divided the Democratic Party.

Chan — who immigrated to the city from Hong Kong at age 13 and has deep ties to its large Chinese and immigrant communities — was a community and legislative aide for years, including for then-Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2020. She has served as budget chair since 2023.

In addition to Pelosi’s imprimatur, Chan had received endorsements from major labor groups including the California Federation of Labor Unions and the California Teachers Assn.; a host of Congress members, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.); various progressive organizations; fellow and former supervisors; former mayor and S.F. power broker Willie Brown; and Saikat Chakrabarti, the third-place finisher in the primary.

Wiener, a former deputy city attorney and local Democratic Party chair before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2010 and to the state Senate in 2016, was endorsed by the state and local Democratic parties; state leaders including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, state Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister); various queer organizations; labor groups including AFSCME; more than half the city’s supervisors; and various members of Congress.

Many of Wiener’s supporters cited his legislative effectiveness — he’s the author of more than 100 laws, including some of the state’s most progressive laws on LGBTQ+ rights — and his willingness to fight hard battles, which they said is needed with President Trump in the White House.

Wiener has pushed progressive laws backing safe injection sites, extending bar hours until 4 a.m., decriminalizing psychedelic drugs, and limits on federal immigration agents in California. He has pushed for housing deregulation and development near transit hubs statewide to solve the housing and affordability crises, and pushed for artificial intelligence regulation while seeking buy-in from wealthy tech leaders — some of whom backed his campaign.

He also has passed laws protecting net neutrality, capping prescription drug costs and mandating mental health parity, ending mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, and requiring that corporations disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Wiener ran on his experience as a lawmaker who would be able “to fight in a smart way, and to fight in an aggressive way, to defeat Donald Trump and to lower the cost of living.”

“This is a race to succeed the most effective and operational member of Congress in modern American history,” Wiener told The Times in September. “San Francisco should send someone who actually has a track record, a proven track record, of being able to deliver.”

In backing Chan, Pelosi made a point of noting that she had spent much of her political career backing fellow women in office, and said she believed Chan — an immigrant woman — would make a mark in Congress, particularly given the political atmosphere under the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Pelosi cheered the election of other women across the country — even if not her own chosen successor.

“When I came to Congress in 1987, there were only twelve Democratic women. We made it our mission to change that. Today, we celebrate the election of more than 100 Democratic women to the House — a tremendous joy and source of pride,” Pelosi wrote on X. “When women succeed, America succeeds!”

WASHINGTON — People heading into the Affordable Care Act open enrollment period with plans to sign up for insurance should expect a variety of changes in 2027, including higher premiums and fewer coverage options.

The sign-up window for the marketplace, also known as Obamacare, started Sunday in most states and runs through Jan. 15.

Big changes to the exchange include expiring financial assistance, rising rates, potential delays in working with a broker, new restrictions on immigrants, and stricter enrollment checks.

Financial help, including premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions, is now restricted for many groups of people who were previously eligible.

Across the board, healthcare experts predict less coverage and higher prices, with the average price of health insurance purchased through the marketplaces expected to rise by 13% in 2027, according to analysis of new CMS data by the healthcare research nonprofit KFF.

Increases are driven by multiple factors

Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at KFF, said the increase is primarily driven by rising healthcare costs, hospital market concentration, and potential factors such as the No Surprises Act, which took effect in 2022 and bans surprise billing, or the rising availability of GLP-1 drugs.

The people who will be most affected by the new increases are those who do not qualify for a subsidy.

“They may or may not be able to afford to continue to keep their coverage into next year,” Cox said, adding that “a lot of them have already moved into bronze plans, which are the cheapest plans.”

A CMS fact sheet about open enrollment that was distributed Friday says, “Americans using HealthCare.gov will have robust access to low-cost plans.”

The price of ACA insurance has skyrocketed for many people during President Trump’s second term after Republicans opposed extending COVID-era subsidies that had helped offset the costs of health insurance for most enrollees during the Biden administration.

That resulted in 1.2 million fewer people signing up for coverage in the exchanges.

Falling number of enrollees

As of February, roughly 19.2 million people in the United States were actively enrolled in ACA marketplace health plans, according to the Department of Health and Human Services website. The number of enrollees grew during the COVID-19 pandemic when enhanced subsidies became available through the American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act, both signed into law by President Biden.

New regulations starting in 2027 will also limit tax credits for certain lawfully present immigrants, which could result in an additional 1 million uninsured individuals over time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been removing ACA enrollees from the program as part of the ongoing campaign against what it characterizes as waste, fraud and abuse.

In September, Vice President JD Vance and other officials in the Republican administration announced plans to remove 760,000 ACA enrollees from public healthcare exchanges, alleging the individuals were fraudulently enrolled in the program or simply did not exist.

Vance said the discovery and canceled subsidy payments for hundreds of thousands of people from the exchanges, part of an administration-wide crackdown on alleged fraud, would result in $2.2 billion in cost savings.

It’s unclear how many more people will drop off of ACA coverage in 2027, Cox said. But with higher premiums, immigration eligibility changes and the anti-fraud efforts, “I think there’s going to be fewer people enrolled in this market, but it’s going to be harder to understand why.”

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.

How would the late Anthony Bourdain have responded to our political climate in the United States with less than a week before the midterm elections of Donald Trump’s second term?

This speculative thought bubble emerged for me as I watched the last of two Los Angeles episodes Bourdain did through 12 seasons of his CNN food and travel series “Parts Unknown.” It aired just over a year before his death by suicide in France on June 8, 2018.

Set in our Pacific immigrant metropolis, the program predicts Season 2 of Trumpism, if you will. In another way, Bourdain’s ode to L.A. suggests a framework on how to think about the state of our nation as we head to the polls on Tuesday.

The universal glee of getting tacos

Customers line up at Ave 26 Tacos stand in a parking lot next to the Little Tokyo Galleria in 2024.

(Silvia Razgova)

Picture the moment when a taquero hands you a warm paper plate heaping with warm tortillas and meats on a street in Los Angeles. Do you also get that giddy, kid-like feeling for half a second? There’s nothing like it, right?

Halfway through the Season 9 opener of “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain experiences just that. In a moment you might miss without looking closely, that familiar look flashes on his face, an unbridled glee, as a taquero in downtown L.A. hands him tacos. In that moment he’s not some mythical man known to his best friends as “Tony.” He’s just a guy getting tacos. It’s super cute.

I came upon this episode recently, and it struck me as potently relevant for today, just before the midterm elections. Bourdain’s taco happiness reminded me that even when some sectors of U.S. society are calling for an effective de-browning of this country, everyone everywhere still really loves Mexican food.

Trump does. ICE agents likely do. Even the white ethnonationlists in the government and those cheering on the ICE surge happening right now across L.A. and California, all love to eat tacos, the unofficial culinary emblem of Los Angeles.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m not a Bourdain superfan. I’ve not seen every episode of TV he made. I didn’t read “Kitchen Confidential” until this year. But lately I’ve been studying him. In the past month I finally watched the biopic “Tony” about his coming of age, and I’ve started reading the entertaining memoir “Care and Feeding” by Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s former long-term assistant and co-author.

I’m catching up on Bourdain because I’ve noticed that as we pass eight years since his death, the author’s cultural influence upon chefs, cooks and food lovers in general does not seem to be waning. It might even be growing.

“He taught me that being a rebel lets you enjoy life,” said Evil Cooks chef and co-owner Alex Garcia, who has an image of Anthony Bourdain tattooed on his leg.

(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)

A multitude of chefs or cooks in L.A. have a depiction of Bourdain hanging somewhere in their restaurants, kitchens or homes. Some even on their skin. At least six portraits of Bourdain are on display along the black-clad walls of restaurant Evil Cooks in El Sereno, for example. Chef Alex Garcia has a Bourdain tattoo on his lower leg.

“I love Anthony Bourdain for his rebellious way of being, but also for his love for Mexicanos because he worked for many years with people from Puebla,” Garcia told me after I had dinner there Tuesday night. “He taught me that being a rebel lets you enjoy life, because the end of the day, being yourself, being happy, is the purpose of this journey that we call life.”

This enduring passion for Bourdain also springs from what so much of his television and writing do: Demonstrate an unflagging empathy for almost anyone he met anywhere in the world. Well, almost anyone — he said pretty clearly he’d never share a meal with Donald Trump.

His 2017 episode “Los Angeles” (currently streaming on HBO Max) proves it more than most. It was filmed in 2016, just before the election that took Trump to the White House. It is worth a rewatch before you cast your ballot anywhere.

The program delves into cultural identity, racism, police abuse and corruption and gentrification. Its whole thesis points to the fallacy of being anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican in 21st century America. “Los Angeles, like much of California, used to be part of Mexico,” Bourdain says in the intro. “Now, Mexico, or a whole lot of Mexicans, are a vital part of … us.”

The episode follows Bourdain dining at Indigenous mole specialists Gish Bac with UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda; going for mulitas with photographer Estevan Oriol and tattoo artist Mister Cartoon at the former diner La Reyna (which later became Guerrilla Tacos) on 7th Street downtown; tasting the taquitos at Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street with comedian Al Madrigal and Times columnist Gustavo Arellano; visiting Danny Trejo at Trejo’s Tacos; going to Mariscos El Chente in Inglewood with the Stockton-raised Diaz brothers, and sharing in street tacos with runners from the Boyle Heights Run Club.

“This show will air long after the election,” Bourdain tells Hinojosa-Ojeda at Gish Bac. “There is actually a national conversation now, unthinkable in my lifetime, where the notion of rounding up however many millions of undocumented workers in this country all at once … and then kicking them out. I mean, it seems unthinkable. But, you know, they said that in Europe in the ‘30s.”

In his characteristic tone, grumpy yet hopeful, Bourdain showed he believed in a shared human dignity that superceded all ethnic, national, religious or ideological boundaries.

Listening to him, the prospect of total MAGA Republican rule in all branches of government becomes something like a nightmare that we’ve seen play out in real life. It is a long list of gross constitutional violations targeting immigrants and brown-skinned people, and their supporters like slain U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti of Minneapolis, on a daily basis in this country.

People gather at a memorial for Alex Pretti and Renée Good, both shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

(Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)

Loving immigrants

On Tuesday, voters nationwide are expected to be thinking first of their pocketbooks and of corruption in Washington when they vote. On another level, this election along with the 2016 and 2024 results are also about litigating by the ballot box what it means to “be” an American.

Sandra Zweig, one of the executive producers on the show, told me Bourdain set out to highlight Latino Los Angeles from the very beginning in 2016. In March of that year, she recalled in an interview, he sent producers the initial list of the cities he was thinking of for Season 9, to start the production conversation.

From that first brainstorming session, Zweig found these notes about a second episode in L.A.: “All-Mexico edition.”

“This time we pretend nobody lives in L.A. who isn’t Latino,” the notes continued. “We live, play in that world without leaving it, we will explore Mexican and Central American immigration, how vital this population is to the SoCal economy.”

Those notes show Bourdain wanted to avoid a recycling of the pastoral mainstream modern narrative on L.A., which isn’t inaccurate but can sometimes feel stale: hyping its multicultural, polycentric, polyethnic etcetera identity. No. This time would be all brown.

“He worked in kitchens and restaurants for so long, he knew as well as anyone that a huge portion of that work staff were immigrants from Mexico and Central America,” Zweig told me. “He also knew that being an immigrant wasn’t a bad thing, to use the word pejoratively was just anathema to him.”

Pop figures like Bourdain and Trejo, despite his recent stumble (he was cast in a film by alt-right extremist Ben Shapiro’s film company), have arguably done a lot more to shape Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and Mexicans than any political leader.

“He would always say, ‘Travel allows you to see people, where they live, and understand where they’re coming from, and reducing that fear for the other.’ For the audience, you’re opening up a world that they may not be able to travel to yourself,” Zweig said. “In 2016, there were things being said about immigrants and immigration that he felt strongly about, and this was one way to discuss that.”

Zweig added: “I can’t predict exactly what he’d say, but it’s clear to me that’d be appalled by the whole sort of immigration enforcement and ICE tactics that’s happening now. That’s not a leap to assume that.”

When I look at the audacity and cruelty of the MAGA right’s stance on immigration, the killings of citizens and immigrants at the hands of ICE agents, I always turn back and remind myself how out-of-step with the nation it is to be anti-immigrant.

Alfonso Lira, 61, a dishwasher and busser from Michoacan, Mexico, sweeps the entrance at Chapter One restaurant in downtown Santa Ana during a double shift in 2024.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Gallup polling is a reliable benchmark on weighing Americans’ views on immigration. At its highest point just last year, the trend line showed 79% of Americans believe immigration is a good thing overall to the country by far. Currently that figure is 73%. Only 21% of Americans believe immigration is a bad thing, its second lowest point since 2002.

Polls and sentiments vary widely from there on how to reform and manage the immigration system — although certainly most people in the U.S. are against current ICE raids, roughly by 2-to-1 — but the basic truth is sitting there before us: The country loves and appreciates immigrants. For most of us, it’s always been about welcoming the stranger, honoring hard work, and contributing to the pursuit of social harmony.

Most of us believe anyone can join the party. There just has to be a better process for it. Political leaders therefore must offer a clear plan not for “mass deportations” but for normalizing people who are here and contributing to society, the economy and the tax base. And more than anything, offer as many people as possible a pathway to citizenship.

If anyone ever tells you they are opposed to any version of this notion, remind them that they are in the minority. Americans favor immigrants by 7-out-of-10, Gallup says. And remind them that as his last love letter to L.A. shows, Anthony Bourdain would have tried to snap them out of it if he’d ever gotten the chance.

WASHINGTON — An immigrant detainee died Saturday morning at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, marking the 61st such death under the Trump administration.

In an emailed statement, an unnamed spokesperson with CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based private prison company that operates the facility, confirmed the death. Per the spokesperson, a staff member at the Otay Mesa facility called in a medical emergency around 11:36 a.m. Saturday after finding an unresponsive person in their assigned living area.

Medical staff arrived quickly, began lifesaving measures and called for emergency medical services, the spokesperson said. EMS arrived and continued those efforts, but the person was pronounced dead at the facility.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of anyone in our care,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was immediately notified.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment. CoreCivic did not provide information about the person’s identity.

The death was first reported by Daylight San Diego.

San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, in a statement Tuesday, wrote that ICE and CoreCivic must quickly reach the person’s family, cooperate with a thorough investigation and share what they find with the public. Aguirre said she asked the county public health officer to determine what kind of follow-up is possible under a state law that allows local public health authorities to inspect ICE facilities.

“Somewhere, a family is waiting for a phone call, and my heart is with them,” she wrote.

This is the seventh person to die while in ICE custody in California under this administration, and the first to die at the Otay Mesa facility since 2023.

Deaths have increased as the Trump administration detained record numbers of people, with the population at one point ballooning past 70,000 nationwide.

The most recent death reported by ICE was that of Luis Sandoval, 48, a Salvadoran immigrant who died of apparent suicide Friday. Staff at the Folkston D. Ray ICE Processing Center in Georgia found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck, according to an ICE news release.

ICE policy is to notify the public and Congress within two business days of a detainee’s death. More extensive reports about each death, which were typically three pages, must be released within 90 days, though those have been reduced to a few paragraphs.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has alleged that elections, public benefit programs and federal grants to nonprofits are rife with fraud. Now, he is increasingly focusing on fraud in his effort to detain and deport more immigrants.

Recent, high-profile flash points include 28 lawful permanent residents accused this week of illegally voting in California and the federal investigation into Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The broader crusade takes many forms, including allegations of fraud in immigration applications, illegal voting by noncitizens and misuse of federal benefits by immigrants who don’t qualify.

“This administration has purposefully mischaracterized immigrants and asylum seekers as fraudsters,” said Royce Murray, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. That, she said, “serves a narrative that immigrants are not to be trusted and are here to take something rather than contribute, with an end goal of trying to make Americans less welcoming and more comfortable with a mass deportation agenda.”

On Tuesday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance announced a $25-million program under the Justice Department to encourage the public to report suspected fraud in the U.S. government.

The White House said the first check, for $10,000, will go to right-wing influencer Nick Shirley, who posted a video last year alleging that Somali residents in Minnesota were running fake child-care centers to collect federal subsidies. Dozens of people were convicted in connection with a sprawling, $250-million children’s food assistance scheme that predated this administration, though more charges have been announced in recent months.

Also Tuesday, administration officials launched another nationwide anti-fraud crackdown, this time targeting immigrants who they allege have illegally collected SNAP benefits. Homeland Security highlighted the arrests of five people, calling them “the opening salvo in a sustained, large-scale ICE operation.”

“From day one of my administration, we’ve waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and will not let our country be looted and plundered by thieves and pirates and foreign fraudsters and basically scum,” Trump said during a news conference announcing the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program.

Earlier this year, the White House created a task force to eliminate fraud and the Department of Justice created a fraud enforcement division, in part, to target immigration-related offenses. Prosecutors have put aside thousands of other cases to zero in on immigration enforcement.

The focus on fraud has noticeably accelerated in the weeks leading up to the election.

In California, some of the green card holders arrested this week over voter fraud said they didn’t remember registering to vote. The daughter of one defendant, Omar Muñoz, 72, of Belize, said she wondered whether her father had been confused with his U.S.-born son of the same name, who is a registered voter.

California officials pounced on the small number of people alleged to have cast illegal ballots. Illegal voting by immigrants “is so rare that the Trump admin is parading around town about .0001% of California voters,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office wrote on X.

In the last seven weeks alone, the State Department said, 112 noncitizens across 20 states have been charged with illegal voting and registration offenses. Overall, since Trump returned to the White House, 155 people have been charged with voting fraud-related offenses.

Mullin and Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said earlier this month that Homeland Security agents had secured 10 convictions and detained 100 others for civil immigration violations since August.

During the Biden administration, voter fraud charges were brought in just 13 cases, Blanche added.

Studies and audits of state voter rolls have repeatedly found that voting by noncitizens is rare and hasn’t swayed any elections.

Ballot machines at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder in Norwalk this week. Early voting has started for the 2026 midterm election.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Last week, with mail-in voting already underway, the Justice Department sued California, asking a federal court to bar the state from counting the ballots of 20,000 voters who were flagged by federal officials as “likely noncitizens.” Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 of those voter registrations and found that nearly 40% indicated they were born in the U.S.

That number of flagged ballots — 20,000 — is a substantial reduction from the 190,000 noncitizens the administration alleged were on state voter rolls earlier this year, though federal authorities this week said they had found a “separate batch of 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens.”

California leaders pointed to other states, such as Nevada, where similar accusations have proved meritless.

Murray, the former Homeland Security official, said she believes the administration is “trying to sow the seeds of doubt that the midterm outcomes will be trustworthy, so that if the Republican Party loses as badly as they’re predicted to, they can characterize it as due to fraud.”

Murray said the Trump administration has largely misconstrued what it means to commit fraud.

“Fraud is a very specific thing — it’s essentially lying,” she said. “Because you don’t get asylum does not mean you committed fraud, it just means you were ineligible.”

In September, a Homeland Security whistleblower told Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that hundreds of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees had been tasked with quickly reviewing the voter information of thousands of people in search of suspected noncitizen voters, and were given a quota of investigating 40 subjects per day.

On Wednesday, a federal judge restricted Homeland Security agents from carrying out sweeping field operations aimed at rooting out voter fraud in nine states, including California.

It is against federal law for immigrants who are not naturalized citizens to vote or register to do so. Penalties can include fines, jail time and even deportation, though authorities rarely pursued that option.

Eric Balliet, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative arm of ICE, said he takes no issue with investigating fraud, but the timing of this operation and significant resources dedicated show it is “highly politically charged.”

Balliet worked for various administrations, including Trump’s first, before retiring in 2024. Homeland Security Investigations agents typically focused on transnational criminal investigations such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Instead of initiating investigations based on tips or specific information, agents are now taking aggregated data and using algorithms to produce suspect lists, Balliet said. That’s not how law enforcement should operate, he said, calling it a massive privacy overreach against millions of law-abiding citizens.

“It’s the epitome of Big Brother,” he said.

Beyond the allegations of voter fraud, the Trump administration has also increasingly targeted immigrants on suspicion of lying to obtain a visa, green card or citizenship.

Omar’s family fled civil war in Somalia and immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 when she was 12. After agents searched her residence this month looking for evidence that her immigration paperwork contained falsehoods, she called the allegations baseless.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Muillin suggested the outcome of the investigation could be deportation. Years ago, the agency declined to move forward with a probe based on similar allegations against Omar, according to the Washington Post.

The congresswoman is not alone.

Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, 56, who died of unknown causes last week at an ICE facility in Texas, was arrested because the agency alleged he had fraudulently obtained his green card. ICE sought to deport him, saying he had failed to disclose a 2004 arrest for theft, but his daughter told the Texas Tribune that he did bring up his criminal record during the application process for his permanent residency.

Immigration lawyers say their clients are facing more intense scrutiny and that some have battled false accusations of fraud after applying for a green card or citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler blamed the Biden administration for lax vetting that allowed bad actors to exploit immigration programs.

“These abuses are not harmless,” he wrote in a statement. “Meritless claims clog the system, drain limited resources, and delay relief for legitimate victims of crime. USCIS is taking aggressive action to identify, expose, and eliminate fraud.”

Erin O’Neil, an attorney based in Connecticut, said some of her clients are now in deportation proceedings triggered by allegations of fraud over minor inconsistencies that have no bearing on the case. In one case that resulted in a denial based on fraud, she said, the allegation was simply that her client failed to disclose a two-week work assignment in another state.

“In the past, the worst that would happen is your citizenship application would be denied,” O’Neil said. “Now we have seen through several of my clients that, not only is the citizenship application denied, but they are placed into removal proceedings.”

When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote, they invited friendly media outlets to document the early morning arrest of one suspect.

At a news conference in Los Angeles this week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli intoned that the defendants’ alleged crimes proved President Trump’s long-held conspiracy theory that voter fraud threatens democracy and that noncitizens are voting by the boatload. Mug shots of the accused — lawful permanent residents, some of whom said they didn’t recall registering to vote — were displayed as if they were part of a Mafia-like conspiracy.

It all felt staged for maximum humiliation.

So what happened to a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and attempted to cast ballots for it in two elections?

There was no perp walk for Laura Lee Yourex, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. No melodramatic news conference from Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer.

Nah, Spitzer dismissed Yourex’s case after she paid $1,500 for four electronic billboards along the 22 and 55 freeways. They feature a photo of her late boxer Maya Jean sporting an “I Voted” sticker alongside a warning — “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime” — and the district attorney’s election fraud hotline number.

Yourex’s attorney has said she was trying to expose flaws in the state’s voter registration system by showing that even a dog could cast a ballot, a gimmick for which Spitzer had little sympathy.

He’s usually the modern-day equivalent of a hanging judge, the type of hard ass who wants his prosecutors to not only throw the book at defendants but also to bury them with a library. In an email, he told me that his office has successfully prosecuted two other voter fraud cases during his eight years in office and is pursuing three current ones. But as serious as voter fraud is, Spitzer has never preened in these cases the way Essayli has.

The Republican stalwart declined to comment on Essayli’s approach, saying he’s “not privy to any of the evidence in those cases.” When I asked why he chose a chuckle-inducing billboard as Yourex’s punishment, he argued that it successfully “address[ed] the harm that is done when engaging in this type of criminal behavior.”

Leave it to the Trump administration to make Spitzer — whose campaign slogan for his 2022 reelection was “#NoLAinOC” — come off as a big ol’ liberal softy. But when it comes to voter fraud, at least he’s meting out penalties that fit the crime, while Essayli is once again making Trump his North Star, not the Constitution.

The defendants charged with voter fraud deserve punishment, if they are indeed guilty. But as my colleagues Brittny Mejia and Kevin Rector reported, citing election experts, cases of noncitizens registering to vote are often a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of immigrants, for example, if they accidentally check a box at the DMV.

Essayli’s record as Trump’s top lawman in Southern California — he can’t even call himself the region’s U.S. attorney, since he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate — is so laughable that I wouldn’t believe him if he claimed that water is wet.

His prosecutors have gone after activists involved in protests against Trump’s masked deportation goons with shoddy charges that were dropped, rejected by grand juries, ridiculed as “amateur hour” by a federal judge or resulted in not guilty verdicts. He’s a lackey who silently stood and watched last year as FBI agents tackled Alex Padilla during a news conference in Los Angeles just because the U.S. senator dared to challenge then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ludicrous defense of mass immigration raids. He’s a coward who regularly declines to talk to press outlets — including The Times — that don’t think Trump is the greatest president in history.

Unsurprisingly, my request to interview Essayli — or at least receive emailed answers to questions including whether every felony defendant gets arrested with a phalanx of armed officers surrounding their home, whether that’s occurred in other voter fraud cases and whether his office regularly releases mug shots of felony defendants — went unanswered.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said his office is pursuing three voter fraud cases.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Mejia and Rector spoke to some of the accused immigrants and their families swept up by “Operation Protect the Vote,” who were bewildered as to what they had done wrong and why the U.S. Justice Department was swinging such a heavy hammer against them. They shouldn’t be.

What Essayli is doing in the name of rooting out voter fraud isn’t about upholding the law. It’s about validating Trump’s xenophobia. The show trials the defendants will probably face are not about getting rid the worst of the worst, as Trump long claimed. It’s about casting suspicion on all immigrants, legal and not.

What’s especially ironic — no, disgusting — about Essayli’s claims that immigrants who wrongly register to vote are disenfranchising American citizens is that the portrait of this country’s biggest election scofflaw hangs in every federal courthouse. It was Trump who wanted Congress to stop the electoral college from formalizing his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, claiming that Democrats stole the White House from him, and provoked a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.

But facts have never stopped Essayli from making a pendejo out of himself. His pathetic, dangerous charade reminds me of an infamous voter fraud case from 30 years ago. I wrote about it this summer when Trump first announced he was going to sic the Justice Department on noncitizens who were supposedly voting en masse.

Back then, Loretta Sanchez forever changed O.C. politics when she beat Republican Rep. Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Like Trump, Dornan claimed he lost because of immigrants who illegally voted. Like today’s GOP, sympathetic prosecutors and lawmakers at the local and federal levels spent way too much time and taxpayer money looking into the baseless allegations.

Just as Operation Protect the Vote has already shown this year, with only 28 charged out of about 23 million registered voters in California, Sanchez’s 1996 victory was not achieved through a vast immigrant voting conspiracy.

At least in the Dornan fiasco, Republicans finally dropped their investigation and moved on. The few immigrants who did vote improperly had their ballots tossed but otherwise faced no legal problems.

I doubt Trump and Essayli will give up so easily. That would require humility, mercy and the ability to admit they’re wrong.

But hey, if a dog can cast a vote in California, I guess anything’s possible.

Top Democrats in Congress have joined a California immigrant and the Nevada State Democratic Party in suing the Trump administration over its unprecedented voter fraud probes in both states and broader efforts to meddle in state-run elections nationwide — alleging they are a “pretext to seize control over elections.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., late Tuesday, accuses President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and the agencies they lead of using “shoddily compiled lists of supposed noncitizens” and “coercive threats of legal retaliation against state officials” to assert federal control over the Nov. 3 midterms.

In addition to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and several national Democratic groups, the plaintiffs include Erick Jose Jimenez, an “active California voter” and naturalized U.S. citizen since 2006 who now “fears that he will be unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse)” given the Trump administration’s track record of misidentifying naturalized citizens as noncitizens.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that while “Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive lawful action to protect our elections,” including by “prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion.”

“Anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable,” Bis said.

A Justice Department spokesperson said “election integrity is a top priority” and that the department’s actions are “grounded in the law and being litigated in open court.” A Homeland Security spokesperson said it is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

Officials from both agencies have asserted that California and other states have ineffective policies for ensuring noncitizens do not vote — relying in part on voters attesting to being citizens — and staunchly defended their own processes for identifying noncitizens on state rolls.

Democrats and leading elections experts say isolated voter fraud does occur and should be taken seriously, but that there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

Tuesday’s lawsuit cites Trump administration claims of thousands of potential noncitizens on Nevada voter rolls crumbling amid state scrutiny. It also cites an administration list of 20,000 “likely noncitizens” allegedly on California rolls being “proven remarkably slapdash” and inaccurate in recent litigation between the administration and California.

The lawsuit alleges a coordinated effort between Trump and other administration officials — in violation of the 10th Amendment and other federal law — to intimidate state and local elections officials nationwide into removing voters from rolls, denying ballots to legally registered voters and segregating the ballots of others “based on spurious and unreliable claims that they are not citizens.”

It says the president is pushing the above efforts not “in a vacuum,” but in the face of repeated steps by Congress and the courts to block his election agenda.

The lawsuit, backed by prominent Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias, follows another filed in the same court last month by attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo.

That ongoing lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege registered California voters are not citizens, which it says risks misidentifying eligible voters and has left naturalized citizens frightened — the same argument made by Jimenez.

Jimenez, who could not be reached for comment, has “eagerly and consistently exercised his right to vote” since becoming a citizen two decades ago, and plans to vote in the Nov. 3 election but fears being misidentified as a noncitizen and targeted, Tuesday’s lawsuit says.

Administration officials have defended the accuracy of their lists, including in the lawsuit the Justice Department filed against California last week. In that case, the Trump administration has asked the court to force California to set aside the ballots of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” it flagged until their citizenship is confirmed.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A., has said that list was compiled using public California voter registration records and third-party and law enforcement data, and that federal authorities have “overwhelming evidence” that those voters are ineligible.

On Monday, federal authorities filed fraudulent registration and other election-related charges against 28 lawful permanent residents in California, which Essayli said “prove our list is accurate and that noncitizens are actually voting.”

However, other administration officials have acknowledged the lists may not be entirely accurate. Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter said Monday that “there may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” A Homeland Security official said in a court filing Monday that “discrepancies” have been found in about 189 of the records.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office — both named defendants in the California case — have accused the Trump administration of illegally interfering in state elections and trying to purge voters in the immediate lead up to an election in violation of federal law using inaccurate data.

Logan’s office said Tuesday that a preliminary analysis of a subset of the administration’s list found many were born in the U.S., weren’t registered or had never voted.

New restrictions have stripped Medicaid coverage from certain legal immigrants, including refugees and victims of human trafficking, as part of broader federal changes to the health insurance program that are expected to force millions off their coverage.

The change effective Oct. 1 cut from Medicaid what is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of people who legally immigrated to the United States, many of whom work and pay taxes, in the latest Trump administration policy to target foreigners.

The move is part of sweeping changes to Medicaid under President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax cut and policy law, with many set to take effect early next year. The Medicaid changes are projected to result in 7.5 million fewer people with health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2025 estimate.

Advocates say that without Medicaid, people will not be able to afford private insurance and will either delay care or end up in emergency rooms, adding pressure to a strained health system. For immigrants, the cuts could be felt more acutely, compounding the effects of other administration efforts to restrict their access to public assistance as part of a broader immigration crackdown.

“This is about telling every immigrant in the United States that they are not welcome here and that they should leave,” said Ben D’Avanzo, a senior strategist at the National Immigration Law Center, which has pursued litigation against the Republican administration over its immigration agenda.

Refugees, asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking and domestic violence are among those who have lost coverage. Green-card holders were not impacted.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that “immigrants must be able to support themselves without taking from overburdened benefits programs paid for by hard-working American taxpayers.”

D’Avanzo said many people who have lost coverage will likely only realize when they need medical care. But for some, the change has been felt immediately.

Dwindling supplies of lifesaving medication

In Tucson, Arizona, María Chacon has been caring for her son Jesus for almost five years since a car accident at 17 left him unable to breathe on his own. He requires a ventilator, a feeding tube and daily medication, and must be turned once every two hours to stop sores from forming. Chacon said he sometimes opens his eyes.

The family is originally from Mexico and entered the U.S. on a T visa, offered to victims of human trafficking, in 2018.

Chacon said Medicaid has helped cover almost $25,000 per month of care for her son, which includes a small stipend for her and her husband as compensation for being long-term caregivers. She said doctors have explained that even if they both worked 24 hours a day, they would not be able to cover the cost of his care.

“Since that day I haven’t been able to sleep. We haven’t been able to eat or anything. We’re wondering what we’re going to do?” Chacon said.

Jesus takes medication that Chacon estimates costs $7,000 a month. The supply runs out in mid-October. Without coverage, she does not know how her son is going to survive.

Chacon found out just days before the cuts that she was losing care. She called the state’s Medicaid offices to appeal. Although she is in the process of obtaining a green card, Medicaid coverage would only kick in five years after she is approved.

Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks less immigration, said the administration “is trying to nibble around the edges” with the Oct. 1 cuts, finding piecemeal ways to curb immigration into the U.S.

Camarota believes the government should screen legal immigrants for income potential and education, reducing the number who might rely on public benefits once they cross the border.

“You need immigrants who are unlikely to need welfare,” he said, or those with high educational attainment.

The administration recently revived a federal rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits that could include food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers and others.

Chacon believes the cuts to Medicaid coverage are part of the administration’s clampdown on immigrants. She said her son is in no condition to travel.

“I know that’s what he’s doing, but, as my son is, I couldn’t go to Mexico,” Chacon said.

Millions more will be dropped from Medicaid

Medicaid, jointly funded by states and the federal government, has become a political focal point during Trump’s second term. The president has pushed to root out what he describes as fraud in the program. In July, the administration deferred over $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, claiming there was suspected fraud; critics argued the move targeted Democratic-led states.

As more people are cut from Medicaid, the federal government is predicted to reduce program spending by $911 billion, according to healthcare research nonprofit KFF.

In Arizona, officials said 29,000 legal immigrants were cut from Medicaid rolls on Oct. 1. In Florida, estimates are closer to 177,000. Overall, more than 281,000 immigrants from nine states and the District of Columbia are estimated to lose Medicaid coverage, according to KFF.

As more states implement various restrictions to coverage, 7.5 million people are expected to lose coverage by 2034, according to analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Without coverage, people will turn to emergency rooms for care. When people delay seeing a doctor, conditions can worsen and become even more expensive to treat.

“At the end of the day, it does raise the cost for the states because once you get these people in for something that could have been prevented, they could not go to the doctor because they were uninsured; they most likely will end up at a hospital in an emergency room,” said Carmen Feliciano, the vice president of policy and advocacy at UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organization.

UnidosUS partners with community organizations to help provide medical care, but Feliciano said they already are overwhelmed and would not be able to support the number of people who are going to lose medical coverage in the coming months.

“We are not going to have the capacity to serve all the people who need it,” Feliciano said.

Schuettler and Hussein write for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Over the last week, gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has created the exact kind of media kerfuffle he loves best by attacking his rival Xavier Becerra for Becerra’s description of his parents as “immigrants.”

Although Becerra’s mother, Maria, was born in Mexico, his father, Manuel, came into the world in Sacramento, in 1928. Soon after, Becerra’s grandparents moved their young family back to Mexico, where Manuel was raised until he returned to the U.S. as a young man to work.

As my colleague Gustavo Arellano said in a must-read column, this border back-and-forth has been more the norm than the exception for California’s Mexican American population for decades, if not centuries. Manuel Becerra’s luck at being born on U.S. soil may have given him an advantage, but it didn’t make him any less of an immigrant, Arellano explained, especially in an era when Sacramento’s Mexican population was below 2,500 and racism remained openly practiced and disturbingly accepted.

Hilton, however, has seized on Manuel Becerra’s U.S. citizenship to brand the younger Becerra a liar, allegedly falsely framing himself as the son of immigrants to gain identity-politics points in a state of immigrants. Whether one or both of Becerra’s parents qualifies as an immigrant might seem like minutiae to most voters, but Hilton’s accusation has thumped on the nerves on both the left and right — including my own, as the daughter of a South Asian immigrant.

Dog-whistle politics

Scratch the surface of Hilton’s attack and it becomes about something far more than Manuel Becerra’s citizenship — it’s a thinly veiled dog whistle about how a “good” immigrant behaves and how we should handle the “bad” ones. Here’s where all that gets messy for me: I agree with Hilton that being born in the U.S. is a big deal, and being a citizen is a point of pride. It does matter. I also agree with Arellano that Hilton’s attack is despicable.

Somewhere between those points are truths about immigration in America at this fraught and ugly moment, and just how different California is from the rest of the country when it comes to understanding the issue — and why that matters.

California’s Latinos, through numbers, history and hard work, have built political and social power on a scale that few, if any, other immigrant groups anywhere in the U.S. have managed. That unique position in the Golden State has allowed for what I call the magical realism of immigration myths to flourish, a wonderful gift to generations past and present that does not have the same widespread acceptance in other parts of this great country.

I firmly believe there is no such thing as a “true” immigration story.

Many, if not most, immigrants are leaving something painful behind — maybe it’s family, maybe it’s war or abuse. But carrying that burden forward with nothing more than hope to balance it, passing it on to future generations, explaining it to strangers, is too much. So immigration stories get softened over time, with trauma turning into adventure and hard facts blurred into entertaining myths.

That doesn’t make the tellers liars. It makes them human.

In the case of my father’s myth, he would have told you that his journey to America started with Humphrey Bogart. As a teen, he’d cut school to watch black-and-white movies like “Casablanca” in a theater in Ahmedabad in northern India, so long ago that there was an intermission to change the film reels. Enamored of white tuxedos and cool blondes, he started applying to scholarships for college in America — eventually winning a full-ride at a Utah school for his skiing acumen, a sport for which he claimed great skill but in reality had never tried.

My aunts and uncles variously dispute or embrace this tale, which my father loved to tell. I don’t know how true it is, but I do know this. My father’s journey to the U.S. did not begin with Bogart. It began in the city of Karachi, which was in India until the British drew a line on the map and created Pakistan. War broke out, with Hindus killing Muslims and Muslims killing Hindus. My father, a kid, got lost in a crowd with his grandfather. He watched as a mob killed his grandpa, then escaped by himself walking hundreds of miles to safety. He was eventually reunited with his family in a refugee camp, but his India was gone forever.

In its place, he dreamed of Bogart’s America. And when he finally got here, he buried his past under the Utah snow, became such a good skier he was on ski patrol, and didn’t mention his grandpa for nearly 35 years.

Like nearly every child of an immigrant, I love both the truth and the myth of my dad because combined they are the story of my family and of America. But my father was Indian and eventually settled in Ohio, much different than California. There was no larger Indian community back then (though it’s grown significantly, including dozens of family members who followed my father), and little tolerance for anything but assimilation. That was fine by my father. He wanted nothing more than to be American — though he would remain a green card holder for decades, until fear under the first Trump administration pushed him to get citizenship.

Hilton’s audience

Just like for Becerra’s dad, being an immigrant was a state of mind for mine, an experience, not an official status. Had my dad been in California, maybe he would have kept more of his Indian identity. Had Becerra’s dad been in Ohio, maybe he would have kept less of his past.

Neither viewpoint made either man more or less American — but the different myths these two men told about who they were define the difference between California and the rest of the country.

Hilton’s attack on Becerra’s dad was never meant for a California audience, where the Latino experience of fluidity in geography and identity holds center stage. It was always meant for places such as Ohio, and Fox News, where the expectation of assimilation still reigns supreme (just ask the Haitians of Springfield) and where Hilton’s media audience — and his future — resides after he loses in November, which he almost certainly will. Hilton, after all, was the host of his own conservative television show for years.

What seems like an out-of-touch attack by Hilton on brown immigrants in California is actually thoughtful pandering to his people — the right-wing Americans who prefer “good,” deferential, grateful immigrants (like Hilton himself) over the confident California Latinos who take pride in every part of their identity.

Sorry, California Latinos, but this MAGA moment in immigration has nothing to do with criminal records or even legal status. It’s all about attitude, and MAGA hates that you have so much of it. Hilton’s attack hits the target with his right-wing crowd because, to them, not centering his father’s U.S. citizenship is a rejection of the United States, a treachery they not-so-secretly fear all immigrants share.

And here’s the twist — MAGA is right, immigrants are complicated.

My dad may have been one of the “good” immigrants, embracing all things American and quiet about his past. But he always held deep pride in his family and his origins, and he passed that on — as do so many of the other “good” immigrants.

It’s possible, common even, to fully embrace being American while also valuing the myths and truths of immigration. It’s possible to to love this country while also keeping another one in your heart, loudly or quietly. There is no one immigrant experience, no one way to be a real American. Hilton, an immigrant and the son of immigrants, surely knows this.

But where immigrants see complexity, MAGA followers see only perfidy, disloyalty, and that makes them afraid and angry — and ripe for the exploitation of those emotions by someone who can sugarcoat it, twist it, just enough to seem reasonable.

And Hilton is excellent at seeming reasonable.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: California wine glut sends premium bottles to Costco, Aldi and Kroger at bargain prices
The California angle: Denise Brown recalls her sister Nicole’s abuse by O.J. Simpson: ‘We were there’
The L.A. Times Special: The LAPD busted a secret network of brothels — but hasn’t arrested the owner
Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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SACRAMENTO — A private prison company is challenging a new California law requiring detention centers to provide medical care, privacy and other civil rights to people detained by federal immigration authorities.

GEO Group, a for-profit prison company, filed a complaint in federal court over Senate Bill 942, also called the Civil Detainees’ Bill of Rights Act of 2026. It mandates that immigrant and other detainees are afforded privacy, safety, hygienic living conditions and other rights.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law last week as part of a package of bills to push back on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, which the Democratic governor described as “Orwellian.” GEO Group filed its complaint the day after Newsom signed the law.

SB 942 declares that detainees at state, local and privately run facilities have the right to medical, dental and mental health care; physical exercise; clean drinking water and functioning toilets; and other rights. It allows the attorney general to bring civil action against private and public entities that allegedly violate those rights.

GEO Group attorneys argue in the federal complaint that while California elected officials “may disagree with federal immigration policy,” the state “may not impose its preferred immigration-detention standards on federal detention operations, whether those standards would tighten, loosen, supplement, or otherwise alter the federal framework.”

According to its website, the company operates six detention facilities in California, four of which are housing detainees under contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That includes a shuttered state prison that began holding ICE detainees earlier this year.

GEO Group has had some previous success challenging laws seeking to undermine the private prison industry’s role in federal immigration enforcement. A federal court struck down a 2019 law that attempted to bar any “private detention facility within the state” after the company filed suit.

Representatives for GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for Newsom, Atty Gen. Rob Bonta and state Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), who authored the bill, did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

My maternal grandmother, Marcela Miranda, was born in Arizona’s copper country in 1914 and lived in the United States until she was about 7.

She was part of a generation whose parents were from the rancho of El Cargadero, Zacatecas, and started families in el Norte while waiting out the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s. Many returned to their home village when things calmed down.

After growing up in Mexico, my grandmother moved to California with my grandfather and their children in the 1960s. Only the American government considered her a native-born U.S. citizen, while society dismissed her as a Mexican. We grandchildren always considered our Mama Chela a doña — a grand Mexican dame who never wore pants and frequently covered her hair with a veil out of modesty. All she remembered from her early childhood in Arizona were snippets of the nursery rhymes “Did You Ever See a Lassie?” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”

The El Cargadero diaspora, which mostly settled in Anaheim, saw our forebears’ American birth as a stroke of provenance allowing them to legally enter the U.S. and give their progeny a head start that other Mexicans could only dream of. It’s a story I’ve repeatedly told over my decades-long journalism career, and no one has yet challenged my description of my grandmother as an immigrant.

If they did, I’d think they had too much time on their hands, or maybe that they were a wackjob contrarian.

Cue Steve Hilton.

The Republican candidate for California governor is trying to make a scandal out of his Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra, portraying himself as the son of Mexican immigrants. Twice last week during their CNN debate, Becerra said his parents came to California “with $12.” In previous interviews during his decades in the political spotlight, Becerra has shared that his father, Manuel, was born in Sacramento in 1928 and moved to Mexico as a child during the Great Depression, eventually returning to the land of his birth.

Hilton, who has been endorsed by President Trump, has as much a chance of becoming the Golden State’s next governor as Stephen Miller. But he and his supporters have latched on to Becerra’s statement like it was the borderlands version of stolen valor. Critics combed through Becerra’s family genealogy like Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail, then posted their findings online — Becerra’s dad grew up in Tijuana before coming back to California, then married in Guadalajara before returning in the 1950s to Sacramento, where Xavier was born — to claim that Becerra is one giant, pandering fraudster.

“Unlike Xavier Becerra, I am an immigrant,” the British-born son of Hungarian refugees harrumphed on social media. He followed up by declaring that Becerra is “LYING” about his family’s American experience “in order to score identity points.”

What more proof do California voters need that Hilton is laughably out of touch with how we live? Many Mexican Americans, including my cousins and me, consider family members raised in Mexico to be immigrants, even if they were born in the U.S. Growing up down south forever shapes your language, work ethic, appreciation for how hard life can be and so much more. When they return to the U.S., such people often find themselves ostracized as paisa — country — and must learn the mores of American life, just like those born abroad.

To argue that calling them immigrants is technically wrong is like getting angry at people who don’t pronounce Los Feliz the Spanish way. For Becerra’s critics to claim he’s stretching his immigrant roots to appeal to Latino voters is an insult to Latinos. We know a cultural faker when we see one, and the Becerra family story isn’t an anomaly; it’s our lives.

Gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton addresses patrons at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood in September.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s a weird gotcha,” said Cal State Fullerton Chicano studies professor Alexandro José Gradilla, whose wife’s grandmother was born in California and raised in Mexico, then bounced between the two countries for the rest of her life. “What’s the dis? Where’s the dunk? It’s so normative, especially of that generation. We cannot have the 2026 definition of immigration, the border and policy apply to a completely different landscape.”

Becerra’s critics subscribe to “this very American bias that an immigrant only moves once to the U.S., the land of opportunity, of hope — all that mythology,” Gradilla continued. During the Ellis Island era, he noted, European immigrants returned to their home countries with their U.S.-born children, and then those children faced many of the same hardships as first-time arrivals when they came back to the U.S. as adults.

“‘We don’t call those people expats or returnees — ‘immigrant’ is the only intelligible label we understand,” the profe concluded. “Until we come up with a better label, Becerra’s dad is an immigrant.”

There are many legitimate reasons to bash Becerra, from his refusal to participate in more debates to his paltry number of public rallies to a platform that sounds like more of what created California’s current woes. His family history isn’t it.

Hilton’s fixation on Becerra’s immigrant bona fides shows how desperate he is to gain some traction, any traction, with Latino voters. He at least has picked up on Latinos’ regard for immigrant success stories. But after bragging about being the candidate of legal immigrants, for Hilton to hold being born here against someone who went back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico is a weak salsa pendejada.

Hilton would have been better off with his conservative base if he had labeled Becerra the son of an anchor baby.

At a press conference with elected officials to oppose Proposition 39, which would mandate voter identification, my colleague Nicole Nixon asked Becerra about Hilton’s attacks on his dad. Becerra finally unlocked the inner cholo so many of us have been waiting to see, instead of the Chicano Ned Flanders he’s been projecting for decades.

“So this is what happens when people who don’t understand immigration start to pontificate,” he responded, summarizing his family story once again and pointing out the discrimination his father faced as someone of Mexican heritage, birthright citizenship be damned.

“Steve Hilton may not know that [Mexican American history] because he’s not from the U.S.,” Becerra said. “Steve Hilton may not know that because even though he’s an immigrant, he hasn’t taken the time to research.”

Wow, the brown Democratic candidate calling the white Republican candidate a dumb immigrant — California politics sure have changed!

But Becerra’s smackdown had a point. Conservatives deeply misunderstand what it is to be Mexican American. We’ve never fit into the American assimilation story and so have created our own narrative, one that people like Hilton refuse to accept at their own peril.

Hilton needs to take a Chicano studies class, where discussions about the fluidity of Mexican identity inevitably come up.

And, wouldn’t you know it, Gradilla planned to bring up that very subject with his students this week — he didn’t even know about Hilton’s attacks against Becerra until I told him.

The profe has had to update his lectures about the forced removal of upward of a million Mexican Americans south of the border during the Great Depression. He relates that history to the present, when many undocumented Latinos are returning to the countries of their birth with their U.S.-born children, either because they’ve been deported or to avoid being arrested and locked up under Trump’s hellfire immigration enforcement regime.

“For Hilton, anyone of Mexican heritage in this country needs to be grateful, you need to be loyal, and you need to be here,” Gradilla said. “Who would ever want to leave the U.S.? Well, some people have to.”