WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a Trump administration appeal and decide if “criminal aliens” may be held indefinitely while they fight deportation.
The case to be heard in the fall could give the administration more power to arrest and hold immigrants, including green card holders, who have criminal records.
The government’s lawyers say immigration laws call for deporting non-citizens with “aggravated felonies” on their records. And in such cases, they say these people may be held for months or even years while their claims are before the immigration courts.
Judges have been split on whether non-citizens fighting deportation have a right to a bond hearing and a chance to go free if they pose no risk to public safety.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled for a pair of green card holders who faced deportation to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Both had been convicted of assaults that were characterized as aggravated felonies under the immigration laws.
However, the appeals court said their “prolonged detention” was unconstitutional if they were given no bond hearing and no chance to go free.
They were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers urged the court to turn down the appeal.
“For the first time in this litigation, the government argues that civil detention ‘does not implicate any fundamental rights’ and so the Due Process Clause affords the detained men no protections—substantive or procedural,” they wrote.
In the past, they said the Supreme Court had accepted the “bedrock principle” that detained persons may have a right to seek their release on bond.
One of the two men had left this country and returned to Jamaica, the ACLU lawyers said. But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer urged the court to rule on the issue.
The detained men “have no procedural due-process right to a bond hearing on whether they are a flight risk or danger to the community,” he told the court. “Individualized findings about flight risk and danger are irrelevant” under the immigration laws which called for “mandatory detention based on their aggravated-felony convictions alone.”
Golf legend Phil Mickelson is refuting an accusation that he inappropriately touched a female employee at a prestigious golf club in Southern California a few months ago.
According to Golf Digest, Mickelson allegedly approached the worker at Farms Golf Club in Rancho Santa Fe and made “nonconsensual and inappropriate physical contact.” After she rejected him, she reported to her supervisors and accused him of sexual misconduct.
Mickelson hired Tom Clare, a top defamation attorney, who said video evidence contradicted the allegations.
“There is a great deal of misinformation circulating and, while Phil’s full attention is devoted to a private family health matter, he has retained defamation counsel and is determined to hold accountable any publication or individual trafficking in speculation or false rumors,” Clare said in a statement to Golf Digest.
Clare did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office said it investigated but found no evidence of an assault. However, the allegation resulted in the immediate removal of Mickelson from the golf grounds and revocation of his longtime membership at the club.
Farms Golf Club said in a statement to the golf magazine that it conducted a thorough investigation before confronting Mickelson and stood by its decision to end his membership. Farms also said no video cameras were in the area where the alleged misconduct occurred.
“Following a staff member report of member misconduct, the club provided immediate and ongoing support to the staff member, conducted a thorough independent investigation of the incident and took decisive action,” the statement read. “This individual is no longer a member of The Farms Golf Club.
“To protect the safety and privacy of our staff and member, we are unable to speak further on the matter.”
Mickelson, who turns 56 next week, withdrew from professional golf this year because of family health reasons, last playing at the LIV Golf South Africa in March. A married father of three, Mickelson won six major tournaments on the PGA Tour — three Masters, two PGA Championships and one British Open — before he left the tour in 2022 for the upstart LIV Golf League, which will lose the financial backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund this fall.
His estimated career earnings exceed $1 billion, including $97 million in PGA Tour prize money, a reported $200 million signing bonus to join LIV Golf and an estimated $800 million from endorsements and business ventures.
Mickelson was one of the most popular players on the PGA Tour before his controversial move to LIV and comments about his Saudi backers, and his career survived some unsavory headlines, several of which pertained to gambling.
The Detroit News obtained federal court records that claimed a mob-connected bookie handled bets for Mickelson and was accused of cheating the golfer out of $500,000 in 2007.
Mickelson was accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016 of getting an insider trading tip and buying $931,000 of stock from sports gambler Billy Walters. Mickelson was not charged and agreed to pay back the amount.
New surveillance footage and other evidence from Southern California Edison confirms that a century-old, idle transmission line that the utility failed to remove ignited last year’s deadly Eaton wildfire, lawyers for insurers said in a court filing.
Video obtained from a surveillance camera at Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club in Pasadena shows two bright flashes occurring in the location of the tower holding the idle line at 6:11 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025.
The flashes correspond to the time that Edison recorded two faults, three seconds apart, on another transmission line more than five miles away, the lawyers said in the filing, citing new data provided by the utility.
Soon after the faults, residents nearby recorded videos of a fire burning at the base of the tower, which is known as M16T1.
“Southern California Edison has spent the last sixteen months attempting to forestall the inevitable legal consequences of razing a large swath of the communities of Altadena and Pasadena to the ground,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
“The Eaton Fire could not have occurred if SCE had simply disassembled and removed Structure M16T1,” the lawyers added.
The lawyers filing the May 18 motion represent property insurers that paid tens of millions of dollars to residents who lost their homes. Their motion asks the judge to order a judgment in the insurers’ favor that would make Edison liable for the damage under inverse condemnation, a legal doctrine in the state constitution.
Courts have ruled that the doctrine requires private utilities such as Edison to pay for property they destroy, even if they haven’t been found to have acted negligently.
Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said the company did not learn about the existence of the swim club video until the lawyers submitted it in court with their filing.
“It’s very disappointing and inappropriate that this video was not produced in discovery,” she said. “We hope that video has been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”
Dunleavy said the company believes the lawyers’ motion “is wrong on the facts and the law.”
“We’ll respond more fully in our own court filing,” she said.
Attorneys for the insurers did not respond to requests for comment.
In a February 2025 letter to state regulators, Edison said it had detected a single fault on a line more than five miles away from Altadena about 6:11 p.m. on the night the fire ignited. It said the fault caused a brief surge of electricity on its four live transmission lines in Eaton Canyon.
The company said in the letter that it was looking into whether the power surge could have caused electricity to jump to the idle line that runs parallel to the live wires through a process called induction.
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, later said that a leading theory of the fire’s ignition was that the idle line became energized briefly through induction, sparking the fire.
At the same time, the company has not accepted blame for the fire, saying repeatedly that its own confidential investigation into the cause, as well as a separate inquiry by Los Angeles County and state fire officials, is continuing.
According to the court filing, evidence obtained by the lawyers shows that the company stopped using the transmission line in 1971 and designated it as “out-of-service.”
“The declaration of Out of Service shall only be used when the line … or piece of equipment is expected to remain permanently out of service,” Edison stated in an internal document known as a system operating bulletin, according to the filing.
Edison executives told The Times last year that they left the line in place because they believed it might be needed in the future.
“We have these inactive lines still available because there is a reasonable chance we’re going to use them in the future,” Shinjini Menon, Edison’s senior vice president of system planning and engineering, said then.
Dunleavy said Friday that the idle lines are kept in place for a variety of reasons, including to preserve the right of way Edison had obtained to construct them and to support future needs for more electricity as the state aims to meet its clean energy goals.
Last year, The Times reported that state regulators, knowing old electric lines posed hazards, proposed a rule in 2001 that would have forced Edison and other utilities to remove idle lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.
Under pressure from Edison and the other companies, the rule was weakened to allow utilities to keep the unused lines in place until executives decided they were “permanently abandoned.”
In their May 18 filing, the lawyers said Edison executives had known about the risk of induction for more than 100 years. They cited a 1923 contract between Edison and Pacific Electric Railway Co. that said that “leakage of electricity or induction from or between” conductors was an inherent risk of operating multiple electrical circuits in proximity.
“That’s why SCE grounds idle lines and inspects them,” Dunleavy said of the risk.
Copies of Edison’s fault records from that night, its operating bulletin and thousands of other documents, including depositions, are sealed from public view under a protective order that Edison and lawyers for the victims asked the judge to approve last year.
The company said last week that it had so far received more than 3,500 claims from about 10,000 people. It said it had extended nearly 1,900 offers to those people, totaling more than $650 million.
The law shields utilities from the damages of fires sparked by their equipment as long as they follow certain requirements, including submitting a plan to state regulators for reducing the risk that their equipment sparks fires. Regulators review the plan and track whether the utilities are making progress in reducing the fire risk.
In the last 10 years, Edison’s rates increased by 101%, according to an April report by the public advocates office at the California Public Utilities Commission.
Despite the spending, Edison’s electric lines sparked more fires in 2024 than in 2019. The company blamed the increase on erratic weather that created more dried vegetation.
An acclaimed biopic about Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, who has dedicated her life to representing Palestinian defendants charged by Israeli authorities, has been shortlisted for an Oscar.
“Advocate” is one of 15 films shortlisted in the Documentary Feature category, out of an original 159 submissions. The final five contenders will be announced next month.
The award-winning documentary, co-directed by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche, has been vociferously attacked by right-wing Israeli groups and Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev.
When “Advocate” won Best Picture at the DocAviv festival in Tel Aviv, Regev condemned “the choice to make a movie focusing on a lawyer who represents, supports and speaks in the name of many who undermine the State of Israel’s existence, [and] use terrorism against its soldiers and people”.
In awarding the film, DocAviv judges wrote that “Advocate” is “a thought-provoking project that addresses an important subject and demonstrates impressive cinematic skills, especially the innovative and intelligent use of animation… [It] sketches out a complex portrait of a strong and inspiring woman who believes in the justness of her path with all her heart.”
The award was greeted with outrage, and following an organised campaign, Israel’s state lottery company subsequently announced “it would be pulling its funding for future grants given to best picture winners at Tel Aviv’s documentary film festival”.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist who has said Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store 30 years ago, lied during the course of civil litigation against the Republican president, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person who confirmed the existence of the investigation was not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors’ office in Chicago, and acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche has had no involvement because of his prior work as Trump’s personal attorney, the person said.
Lawyers for Carroll did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press on Thursday.
It’s the latest in a series of investigations the Trump administration Justice Department has opened into perceived adversaries of the president. The actions, including securing an indictment last month against former FBI Director James Comey, have raised alarm from Democrats and former officials that an institution meant to make prosecutorial decisions independent of the White House is being weaponized.
Carroll has said a flirtatious, chance encounter with Trump in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan ended violently. She said Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her. Trump has called the allegations a “made-up scam,” and he has attacked her motivations, saying they were politically driven or arose from a desire to promote her memoir.
A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, awarding her $5 million. The following year, another jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case related to Trump’s social media attacks on her.
The Justice Department is scrutinizing a statement Carroll made in the course of the civil litigation that no one else was paying her legal fees. It later became public that a Chicago-based organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped fund Carroll’s case. Trump’s lawyers in the civil case accused Carroll of concealing that information, which they said called into question whether the case was politically motivated.
A court entry earlier this month said Trump won’t have to pay the award until the U.S. Supreme Court gets a chance to review the case or reject an appeal. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to a request by one of Trump’s lawyers that it let the president delay the payment to Carroll, though it required that he post a $7.4 million bond to cover any additional interest costs, a request Carroll’s attorney had made.
The Carroll investigation was first reported by CNN.
Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs has been released from a Wisconsin jail a day after being arrested in relation to an alleged incident over the weekend. He still faces the possibility of being charged with several crimes, including some related to domestic abuse, pending further investigation.
“After reviewing the available evidence in this case, the Brown County District Attorney’s Office is not yet prepared to make a formal charging decision,” Dist. Atty. David Lasee said Wednesday in a news release. “Our office has requested additional investigation, as there is reason to believe that additional evidence may exist that would impact whether criminal charges are appropriate, and what charges would be issued.
“Mr. Jacobs will be released from custody at this time, and a final charging decision will be made by our office at a later date.”
Jail records show that Jacobs, 28, was released at 12:20 p.m.
Jacobs’ lawyers — David Chesnoff, Richard Schonfeld, and Clarence Duchac — said in a joint statement Wednesday that they remain confident their client ultimately will not be charged in the matter.
“We are extremely pleased that Josh has been released from custody and that no criminal charges have been filed against him,” they said. “As we previously stated, we encourage everyone to keep an open mind while the matter is fully reviewed. We remain confident that, once all of the evidence is gathered and evaluated, it will confirm that no charges should be brought against Josh in the future.”
According to the Hobart/Lawrence Police Department, officers were dispatched to a complaint involving Jacobs on Saturday at 8:37 a.m. He was arrested Tuesday on allegations that included strangulation and suffocation, battery-domestic abuse, criminal damage to property-domestic abuse, disorderly conduct-domestic abuse and intimidation of a victim.
Jacobs’ lawyers said in a statement Tuesday that he “vehemently denies the allegations.”
A three-time Pro Bowl selection, Jacobs spent the first five years of his NFL career with the Raiders, leading the league with 1,653 rushing yards in 2022, and the previous two seasons with the Packers.
“We are aware of the matter involving Josh Jacobs,” a Packers spokesman said Tuesday. “As it is an ongoing legal situation, we will withhold further comment.”
Speaking to reporters Wednesday at the team’s voluntary workouts, Coach Matt LaFleur said, “I know there’s going to be a lot of questions about Josh. I’m going to stick with the statement that we put out as an organization and just let the process play out.”
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tuesday that the league is “aware of the report and have been in contact with the club.”
WASHINGTON — A Justice Department indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center is part of a “top-down” campaign of retribution against President Trump’s perceived political enemies and constitutes a vindictive prosecution that must be dismissed, lawyers for the nonprofit argued Tuesday in urging a judge to toss out the case.
The Alabama-based nonprofit was indicted in April on fraud and money laundering charges that accuse it of misleading donors by paying informants inside white supremacist and other extremist organizations to obtain inside information about their activities.
Lawyers for the SPLC already argued that law enforcement agencies have long known that the nonprofit paid informants to report on the movements of hate groups. They also said acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche made a false statement at a news conference and in interviews when he said the organization had not shared with law enforcement information it learned from informants. Blanche later appeared to walk back that claim in a television interview, saying it was true that the SPLC “selectively” shared information with law enforcement over the years.
The attorneys for the center expanded on those arguments Tuesday, saying in a motion to dismiss the case that the prosecution was the “culmination of a top-down, retributive campaign” in which Trump pushed the Justice Department “to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.”
The motion was filed against the backdrop of other politically charged prosecutions that have raised concerns that the Justice Department is operating as a weapon to target Trump’s opponents. It aims to draw a parallel between the SPLC indictment and the human smuggling prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which was dismissed Friday on similar vindictive prosecution grounds by a judge who called the case an “abuse of prosecuting power.”
The SPLC has said its now-defunct program of paying informants to infiltrate hate groups was developed to glean key insights into their activities so that potential victims could be protected. An earlier federal investigation into the practice was closed without charges, but the motion paints the current Justice Department as pursuing the case with renewed — and rushed — vigor.
The department decided to pursue the indictment without interviewing any current SPLC employees and did not seek any documents from the group until after it told defense lawyers that criminal charges were coming, the defense motion states. During a meeting requested by defense lawyers who hoped to avert to indictment, Justice Department officials informed them that the decision already had been made to pursue charges, according to the motion.
“These procedural irregularities show that the charges against the SPLC were a foregone conclusion based on prosecutorial vindictiveness — driven by the White House and FBI leadership’s retribution campaign — rather than the result of a good faith examination of the evidence,” the motion states, saying the indictment was “premised on conclusory accusations but devoid of provable facts or a proper statement of the law.”
The motion also cites whistleblower accounts that accused top Justice Department officials of rushing forward with an indictment despite internal concerns about the merits of the case and the strength of the evidence.
“For weeks, we have been arguing against these false allegations levied against the SPLC — an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multiracial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” Bryan Fair, the interim president and chief executive officer of SPLC, said in a statement. “The government can’t prosecute the SPLC as payback for its protected speech — it violates basic constitutional rights.”
The administration has painted SPLC as partisan
Founded in 1971 as a civil rights organization, the SPLC over the decades has used litigation to fight white supremacist groups. It also tracks the activities and locations of domestic extremists. But its work has made it a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The center, for instance, received fresh attention last year after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk because the SPLC had included a section on the group that Kirk founded and led, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced in October that the bureau would be severing its relationship with the SPLC, saying it had turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged antigovernment and hate groups inside the United States.
The defense motion says “animus” from senior levels of the administration helped shape the indictment.
It cites, among other comments, a statement from Trump deriding the SPLC as “a total scam run by the Democrats,” as well as a news media interview in which Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, said the indictment was “personal” to her because she had “a lot of journalist friends … and groups that I’ve represented who have been targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
WASHINGTON — Last June 16, armed immigration agents broke the locks to forcibly enter an Oxnard auto body shop. Juan Carlos Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, filmed as they arrested his father.
Then the agents pepper-sprayed Ramirez, slammed him onto the hoods of two vehicles, punched his face and kneed him in the side, according to a legal claim he later filed against the federal government.
Local attorney Vanessa Valdez denounced Ramirez’s arrest at an Oxnard City Council meeting the next day. The following month, Valdez found herself in a similar situation when agents raided the cannabis company Glass House Farms.
Despite identifying herself as a legal observer, she said, agents — or possibly National Guard — deployed tear gas and shot her six times with rubber bullets. She ran and then, unable to see, crawled on all fours to escape.
Vanessa Valdez, a Ventura-based attorney, has filed a claim against the federal government, alleging she was hit with tear gas and six rubber bullets during the Glass House Farms raid last July.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“They were just shooting aimlessly, it seemed like,” she said. “I thought maybe they had fractured a rib because that’s how painful it was. I couldn’t sleep face down for three weeks.”
Ramirez and Valdez are among the dozens of U.S. citizens and immigrants who are seeking financial compensation for damages they say they suffered during President Trump’s immigration dragnet. For Valdez, that includes the cost of hospital visits, lost wages as she recovered, anxiety medication and seeing a therapist.
After reviewing public accounts and legal documents and interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and immigrants, The Times found that claimants from across the country are seeking at least $260 million.
In a statement, Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis wrote that ICE officers are held to the highest professional standard and receive regular training. Bis said that when agents are faced with danger, they use their training to protect themselves and the public.
“The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force. It’s a pattern of violent agitators attacking our law enforcement,” she wrote.
Asked about Valdez, Bis said law enforcement deployed chemical irritants including pepper balls, but not rubber bullets, after agitators attempted to breach the perimeter at Glass House Farms. She said Ramirez refused officer’s commands and physically attacked them, so they pepper-sprayed him in self-defense.
Lawyers who are experts in tort claims said the bureaucratic process is lengthy and complex, and any damage award would likely be lower than what a claimant is seeking.
Still, seeking redress through the Federal Tort Claims Act is one of the few legal remedies available for those seeking financial compensation for deaths, physical injuries, emotional trauma, unlawful detention or property damage caused by federal employees.
The number of claims is expected to rise.
Federal agents, some wearing street clothes and some wearing uniforms and protective gear, form a defensive line against hundreds of protesters outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 30.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
In recent months, advocacy organizations have prepared practice advisories for attorneys interested in filing tort claims, and law groups across the country have begun holding training sessions on the process.
“There is no question in my mind that a lot of people — hundreds, thousands — have been harmed significantly and will be legally entitled to large damages payouts, which are going to come from the federal government,” said Jonathan Feinberg, a Philadelphia-based attorney.
Feinberg, who specializes in cases involving excessive use of force by police and abuses of detained immigrants, is president of the board of directors for the National Police Accountability Project, which focuses on law enforcement misconduct.
“We’re going to be talking about Minneapolis in 2030,” he added.
Before they can sue in federal court, individuals must first request a review by the agency that they say is responsible, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection. The agency has six months to respond and deny the claim or offer a settlement.
If the agency doesn’t respond or denies a claim, the claimant can then file suit.
Unlike civil rights lawsuits, in which juries decide the verdict, in tort cases, judges make that call. Only the agencies are named as defendants, not individuals.
The Times reviewed the claims of nearly 80 people filed since the start of 2025. The vast majority remain in the review stage. Lawyers anticipate most will not be settled, unleashing a flood of lawsuits starting this summer.
Federal law since 1871 has established that people can sue state and local officials for violating their constitutional rights. But the law left out federal actors.
One hundred years later, the Supreme Court allowed for damages lawsuits against federal officials who violate a person’s civil rights, though decisions in recent years have substantially narrowed that ability.
Democrats in California are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for residents to seek financial damages for constitutional violations committed by federal agents. Similar laws were already enacted in Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut, though the Trump administration has sued to block the latter two.
But there is a different route — tort claims.
Tort cases can be difficult to win, in part because the government can claim a “discretionary function exception,” which shields the agency from liability when the situation involves a policy-driven judgment call.
“So that’s what a lot of plaintiff’s lawyers are really anxious about, that the Trump administration is going to say, ‘Well, we’ve got our own immigration policies. Of course a lot of people disagree with them, but the statute is designed to give us the right to make those policy judgments,’” said Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham University law professor who studies torts.
“Now, if I were the plaintiff’s lawyer, I would say, ‘Yeah, but shooting somebody in cold blood because you’re just mad about their political views, and they’re not really threatening your life at all — that’s not a policy judgment,’” he said.
The law office of John Burris, an Oakland-based attorney who represented Rodney King after he was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, has taken on damages clients in Minnesota. He said he anticipates filing around 80 tort claims stemming from the immigration enforcement actions there.
A memorial for Renee Good at the location where she was fatally shot in Minneapolis.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Burris said the experience has given him flashbacks to the period before King’s beating and the subsequent protests over police brutality, when officers felt they could act with impunity.
“There’s 1779798656 a more fundamental understanding that bad stuff does happen,” he said. “Everyday people are not as willing as they once were to just accept a police officer’s perspective.”
Public disapproval over immigration enforcement rose after federal immigration agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two 37-year-old U.S. citizens, Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in separate incidents.
Other deaths took place before the Minnesota operation: 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, who was killed by an ICE agent in Texas who fired repeatedly through the open window of his car; Keith Porter, 43, who was killed in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE agent after shooting his gun into the air on New Year’s Eve; and Jaime Alanis Garcia, 57, who fell 30 feet from atop a greenhouse while fleeing agents at the Glass House Farms site in Camarillo.
Lawyers for the families of Good, Martinez and Garcia confirmed they are pursuing tort claims. Lawyers for the other families did not respond to requests for comment.
Additional highly publicized cases have also resulted in tort claims: Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago; Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days detained after the administration labeled him a national security threat; Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman on her way to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis who blacked out at a detention facility after ICE agents detained her.
New claims appear to be filed weekly. Seventeen men, women and children who were detained in a military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex filed claims this month seeking about $5 million each.
In many of the cases, Bis said, the claimants impeded or assaulted agents. Pretti’s death remains under investigation, she said.
Willy Wender Aceituno stands in the parking lot where he was arrested last November by ICE agents in Charlotte, N.C.
(Jesse Barber / For The Times)
Willy Wender Aceituno was already a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina challenging the policy allowing warrantless immigration arrests after he was stopped twice in a span of minutes by immigration agents last November. In March, he also submitted a tort claim.
Aceituno is a Honduran-born U.S. citizen who voted for Trump. On the day he was arrested, a group of masked agents checked his identification and left. Aceituno then filmed as a second group surrounded his red truck.
“If you break it, you will pay for it,” he tells them in Spanish seconds before one agent smashes the window with a baton. “Why did you do that, sir?”
Aceituno suffered cuts when agents threw him to the ground, which was covered in shattered glass. They placed him in an SUV with other detainees and drove him around Charlotte, N.C., before releasing him, still bleeding, more than 2 miles from his vehicle.
The moment brought back Aceituno’s childhood memory of watching his father be arrested by the Honduran military and disappeared.
“I remember they broke down the door, entered, put him in handcuffs and threw him to the ground,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s happening again.’ To see the other Hispanics in the car made it feel like this is racial persecution. This is about skin, not criminality.”
Bis, the Homeland Security spokesperson, said Aceituno acted erratically, escalated the situation and refused to comply with officers’ commands.
Lawyers said many people, especially immigrants, who have viable claims have chosen not to pursue them out of fear of being targeted for deportation. Some were deported before they could sue.
“Even now, our clients wake up some days thinking, ‘What am I doing suing the federal government?’” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Lawyers for Civil Rights. “You have to have a lot of courage to be able to stand up against an administration that has put a bull’s-eye on you and that has targeted you based on your identity.”
Others have turned to mutual aid or online fundraisers to pay for medical bills or to repair property damage. On the website GoFundMe, donation campaigns describe shattered car windows, broken limbs, head trauma and mounting bills.
Some damage can’t be fully recompensated, Espinoza-Madrigal added.
Members of the Haitian community hold signs in support for the extension of Temporary Protected Status during a rally last month in Miami.
(Carl Juste / Miami Herald / Getty Images)
One of the organization’s clients is Jose Pineda, a Salvadoran man with Temporary Protected Status. A year ago, Pineda was stopped by ICE officers on his way to work in East Boston as a landscaper. They wouldn’t accept his Social Security and work authorization cards as proof enough that he was not deportable, and detained him without explanation, according to his tort claim.
So Pineda spent nearly two days in a holding cell at the ICE Boston Field Office with around 50 other people. He couldn’t sit or sleep and received minimal water and food.
Bis said agents “briefly questioned” Pineda because he matched the description of the subject of an operation, and that he was released after being identified.
When he was released, the claim alleges, his documents were returned but $600 in cash that he was saving to pay rent was not. The incident left him with frequent headaches, anxiety and memory loss, and exacerbated his gastritis. His absence from work resulted in a demotion from lead foreman to an assistant role.
“Whenever I drive, if someone stays behind me for three, four or five minutes, I start to imagine that it’s them again,” he said in an interview.
Pineda’s arrest also caused recurring nightmares that leave him shouting and thrashing around in bed. Out of fear that he could inadvertently harm his wife, they now sleep in separate beds.
Although the Supreme Court, in general, and conservative appellate courts, in particular, have bowed and granted President Trump permission to do pretty much anything he wants, they haven’t thoroughly capitulated to his endless grasping for ever more power. (The way invertebrate congressional Republicans have.)
And it’s not just the fears of a lot of shaggy-thinking liberals.
“The nation is strong as is its commitment to the rule of law,” said one appellate judge, a Republican appointee. “The current president presents the greatest threat in decades.”
The survey was conducted by Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan academic group that monitors the health and resilience of American democracy, in conjunction with the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s School of Law.
Conducted between mid-February and early March, the poll anonymously surveyed 21 federal judges, 113 lawyers, 193 law professors, 652 political scientists and a nationally representative sample of 2,750 Americans.
What leapt out to UCLA’s Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, was that “across the ideological spectrum and across judges, lawyers and law professors, there was considerable agreement that the rule of law in the U.S. is under tremendous stress.” That consensus, he said, suggests “a real risk to democracy.”
Most legal experts agreed that Trump is using executive power excessively, with a majority doubting the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would handle cases involving the Trump administration impartially. The experts also expressed concern about politicized law enforcement — Trump seeking to persecute his perceived enemies — executive branch overreach, and the failure of Congress or the Supreme Court to do more to rein in the rogue president.
Talk about contempt of court — not to mention our vital system of checks and balances.
There was, unsurprisingly, a split among conservatives and liberals who took part in the survey. (The study defined legal conservatives as those saying the Supreme Court should base rulings on its understanding of what the Constitution meant as originally written. Liberals, who made up most of the respondents, were defined as those saying the court should base its rulings on what the Constitution means in current times.)
There were also differences between legal experts — those most intimately involved in the judicial system — and the public at large. The experts were more concerned about Trump’s excesses and threats to the rule of law, which, Hasen said, stands to reason.
The legal system is not something most people encounter daily in the same way they do, say, gasoline prices or the cost of groceries. “Yet,” Hasen said, “it’s one of these background things that really matters.”
Why?
Hasen put it this way: “Imagine that a person had a dispute with their neighbor and it ended up in small claims court before a judge and the judge made the decision not based on the merits of the case but based on whether he was friends with one of the parties, or didn’t like people who were similar to one of the parties.”
If, for instance, “people know that the government can successfully seek retribution from people who criticize it, people will be less likely to criticize the government,” Hasen said, leaving the country worse off by muzzling those who would hold their elected leaders to account.
Happily — and who couldn’t use a bit of good cheer right about now — all is not lost.
People “can demand that their elected representatives take steps to assure that the rule of law will be followed,” Hasen said, and can insist “that the government [not] play favorites or seek retribution against perceived enemies.”
That’s the power people have, come election time. That’s why voting matters.
There are lots of things riding on the outcome in November, not least the sanctity and integrity of our legal system.
NEW YORK — Former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court on Friday declined to reconsider a decision that put the government a step closer to deporting him, the pro-Palestinian activist’s lawyers said.
Judges on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia voted 6-5 against having the court’s full complement of judges review the ruling. In January, a three-judge 3rd Circuit panel found that a federal judge in New Jersey who had sided with Khalil and ordered his release last year from immigration detention didn’t have jurisdiction to decide the matter.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in representing Khalil, said his lawyers will ask the 3rd Circuit for an order preventing the decision from taking effect — and barring Khalil from being detained or deported — while it asks the Supreme Court to take up the case.
An appeal to the high court is expected in the coming months, possibly in late summer.
“Today’s decision is not the final word, and we still strongly believe in our arguments going forward,” ACLU senior counsel Brett Max Kaufman said in a statement.
In its January ruling, the 3rd Circuit found that Khalil’s lawsuit challenging his detention and U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz’s subsequent rulings in the case were premature because federal law requires that such challenges first move through the separate immigration court system. That system is part of the Justice Department, not the judicial branch.
The decision didn’t decide the key issue in Khalil’s case: whether the Trump administration’s effort to throw Khalil out of the U.S. over his campus activism and criticism of Israel is unconstitutional.
Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, who had voted for the 3rd Circuit to review the decision, wrote in a dissent that the court was “abdicating our duty to meaningfully review Khalil’s constitutional claims. The Judicial Branch, she wrote, cannot fulfill its role as a check on the other branches of government, “if we write ourselves out of relevance and leave the Executive Branch to check itself.”
Khalil, 31, has also appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana, where he was detained, after the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld his removal order.
Through his lawyers, Khalil argued that the immigration judge who issued the order failed to consider relevant evidence and wrongly upheld a charge that he had misrepresented information on his application for legal permanent resident status. That charge, Khalil’s lawyers said, was brought in retaliation for his protest activity.
The immigration judge suggested Khalil could be deported to Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative, or Syria, where he was born in a refugee camp to a Palestinian family. Khalil’s lawyers have said he would face mortal danger if forced to return to either country.
An outspoken leader of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia, Khalil was arrested in March 2025. He then spent three months detained in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his child.
Federal officials have accused Khalil of leading activities “aligned to Hamas,” though they have not presented evidence to support the claim and have not accused him of criminal conduct. They also accused Khalil of failing to disclose information on his green card application.
Khalil has dismissed the allegations as “baseless and ridiculous,” framing his arrest and detention as a “direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
The government justified the arrest under a seldom-used statute that allows for the expulsion of noncitizens whose beliefs are deemed to pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. In June 2025, Farbiarz ruled that justification would likely be declared unconstitutional and ordered Khalil released.
President Trump’s administration appealed that ruling, arguing the deportation decision should fall to an immigration judge, rather than a federal court. The 3rd Circuit ruled 2-1 in the administration’s favor.
Judge Emil Bove, who was involved in investigating student protesters while a top Justice Department official, did not participate in the 3rd Circuit vote on whether to review the decision. He later issued an order denying a request by Khalil’s lawyers that he step aside from the matter, calling it moot.
Sisak writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Colombian woman back to the U.S. from Congo, after she was deported to the African nation that had refused to accept her.
The deportation of Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata “was likely illegal,” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled Wednesday.
Zapata, 55, who has diabetes and a thyroid condition, “has been sent to a country that refused to accept her because they cannot provide sufficient medical care,” the ruling said. “As a result, she faces a daily risk of medical complications, up to and including death.”
Black spots began to grow on Zapata’s back and foot while she was in detention, her skin started to peel and her nails blackened, according to a declaration that Zapata submitted in court, and which was provided to the AP by her lawyer.
“She’s not doing well and does worry that she’s going to die,” her lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, said.
Zapata entered the U.S. from Mexico in August 2024 and was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Since being deported, she has lived in a hotel in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. The hotel gates are locked, O’Neal said. Zapata and other deportees are rarely allowed out, and only with supervision, she said.
Zapata was among thousands of immigrants living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they were suddenly issued deportation decrees that ordered them expelled to countries where most had no connections.
More than 15,000 third-country deportation orders were issued in the White House push for ever more immigrant expulsions, advocacy groups say, though only a fraction of the orders have been carried out.
Few details are known about the agreements to accept these deportees, though the U.S. has signed them with a range of countries, including Ecuador, Honduras, Uganda, Cameroon and Congo. Advocacy groups estimate only a couple of hundred third-country deportations, at most, have been carried out.
ATLANTA — The Department of Justice is seeking the names of every person who worked in the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that Donald Trump has long accused of widespread voter fraud he falsely says cost him victory against Joe Biden in the state that year.
Lawyers for the county filed a motion on Monday night to quash a grand jury subpoena that asks for the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. This latest action comes after the FBI in January went to a Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots and other documents from the 2020 election, which Georgia’s certified totals showed Trump lost in the state to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. Trump, a Republican, still insists the election was stolen from him even though judges and his own attorney general concluded otherwise.
Monday’s court filing says the subpoena is meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.” The request is “grossly overbroad and untethered to any reasonable need,” the county’s lawyers argue. It “cannot yield any evidence that could result in a criminal prosecution,” they wrote, arguing that the statute of limitations on any federal crime related to the 2020 election has already expired.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts, in an emailed statement, called the subpoena “yet another act of outrageous federal overreach designed to intimidate and chill participation in elections.”
“Let me be crystal clear. Fulton County will not be intimidated,” said Pitts, a Democrat who’s running for reelection.
Since the 2020 election, Trump “has obsessively propagated the debunked conspiracy theory that Fulton County ‘stole’ the 2020 election from him,” the county’s lawyers wrote. “And he has made it clear that he seeks retribution against those who refuse to indulge his baseless claims.”
Trump has already targeted individual poll workers like Ruby Freeman, who was attacked by him and his supporters after the election. Freeman, who’s Black, has said she was forced to flee her home after false claims of election fraud against her led to racist threats and strangers showing up at her home.
The grand jury subpoena, dated April 17, was served on the county’s director of elections on April 20, the county’s court filing says. It seeks the “name, position/function, residential and email addresses, and personal telephone number(s)” for thousands of election workers “ranging from county employees who assisted on election day, to bus drivers who operated a mobile voting location, to volunteers and temporary poll workers,” the filing says.
The subpoena “is a chilling escalation in the campaign to terrorize Fulton County election workers,” the county’s lawyers wrote, adding that threats arising from the current political environment have caused election workers to “fear for their physical safety.” That and other stresses “including the likelihood of being scapegoated by public officials” are causing election workers to leave their jobs “in unprecedented numbers,” they wrote.
The county’s lawyers note that the subpoena directs the county to provide the records not to the grand jury but to an out-of-state Justice Department lawyer or to the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit used for the seizure of the county’s 2020 ballots in January.
The January seizure of the ballots and other records from Fulton County was one in a string of moves by Trump’s administration to obtain past election records from critical swing states. The FBI in March used a subpoena to get records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona. And the Justice Department in April demanded that Michigan’s Wayne County turn over its ballots from the 2024 election, which Trump won against Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
The Justice Department is also fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.
WASHINGTON — President Clinton consulted congressional leaders Wednesday on his policy toward Bosnia but continued to avoid a firm commitment to seek congressional approval before deciding to send American forces there.
The 1973 War Powers Act requires the President to notify Congress in most cases before sending troops into areas of potential hostilities and requires that the troops be withdrawn within 60 days if Congress does not authorize their presence.
The law was enacted over President Richard Nixon’s veto. Each successive Administration has argued that it represents an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s powers as commander in chief.
During the last 12 years of Republican administrations, Democrats in Congress have made a major issue of support for the War Powers Act. That puts Clinton and his aides in a potentially difficult situation, which they have tried to avoid by evading questions about precisely where they stand.
Clinton continued that approach Wednesday. “Ask my lawyer, I don’t play lawyer,” he said when asked at a White House photo session whether he believes the law is constitutional. “I think it’s worked reasonably well.”
Later, White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos said: “The President is reviewing the War Powers Act at this time. That is under review by the National Security Council and the counsel’s office.”
White House aides have fallen back on carefully worded pledges to consult with Congress in a manner that is “consistent with” the war powers law but not necessarily “pursuant to” it. Once Clinton decides on a course of action, he “will go to the Congress if it is required,” Stephanopoulos said.
President George Bush followed a somewhat similar path before the Persian Gulf War. Bush argued that he did not need congressional authorization before sending troops to the Gulf but urged Congress to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq before the actual war began. Bush insisted, however, that he had the power to go ahead with the attack if Congress voted against him.
Clinton’s less clear-cut position appears to be acceptable to congressional leaders.
Although members of Congress have often touted the War Powers Act as an important safeguard against unbridled executive power, few over the last 20 years have relished the prospect of using it.
One indication of the weakness of the law came in the House on Wednesday when it finally got around to approving a resolution authorizing the sending of U.S. troops to Somalia. The authorization came five months after the troops were dispatched and the day after U.S. forces turned over control of the relief effort to the United Nations.
At a ceremony at the White House to honor troops returning from the African nation, Clinton linked their experiences with the events that may soon unfold in the former Yugoslav republics.
“Your successful return reminds us that other missions lie ahead for our nation,” he said. “You have proved again that our involvement in multilateral operations need not be open-ended or ill-defined, that we can go abroad and accomplish some distinct objectives and then come home again when the mission is accomplished.”
At a later White House ceremony, where he talked about the importance of rapid action on health care reform, Clinton defended his Administration against the charge that monitoring developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina has interfered with his other activities and that it has tried to do too many things at once.
“One of the most challenging things we have to do in this city at this time is to break a mind-set that we have one problem at a time and we’ll get on it and we’ll only think about that,” Clinton said.
The actress has a brand new ‘collab’ – playing a solicitor in Jeff Pope’s hard-hitting factual drama about the horrific sex attacks of John Worboys
Philippa has a. new role which is a world away from hilarious Anne(Image: BBC/Merman)
She’s best known for her role as smiley Anne in Amandaland – but Philippa Dunne is taking an altogether more serious role in ITV’s new true crime drama about black cab rapist John Worboys.
Believe Me tells the story of how the victims of one of the most prolific sex attackers in British history fought back after being failed by the system. And Philippa, 44, plays the solicitor who represents three of the women, who decide to sue the Metropolitan Police under the Human Rights Act for their failure to properly conduct investigations into their allegations of sexual assault.
Worboys, played by Daniel Mays, preyed on women under the cover of being a “respectable” licensed taxi-cab driver. He would target solo women to pick up, claim he’d had a win at a casino or on the lottery, then offer them a drug-laced glass of champagne to help him celebrate – which would knock them out. The women often had little or no memory of what had happened to them.
The drama, to air on ITV next month, focuses on Sarah (Aimée-Ffion Edwards) and Laila (Aasiya Shah), who reported sexual assaults by Worboys but felt they had not been believed by the police.
Phillipa plays Harriet Wistrich who joins forces with the women and with barrister Phillippa Kaufmann QC to sue the police over the handling of their complaints, claiming it led to them being subjected to degrading treatment and contributing to their distress. Not only did they win, they won twice after the Met appealed that judgment all the way to the Supreme Court.
Irish comedy star Philippa she had not previously worked with writer Jeff Pope, whose credits include Little Boy Blue, Philomena and See No Evil. “I just did a couple of auditions over Zoom – auditioning is still a big part of any actor’s life,” she explained. “And it was the most dialogue I’ve ever had to learn in my life so I was glad it was on Zoom because I had post-it notes everywhere.”
Once she’d landed the role, she continued to write down some of her more complicated lines. “Because of how jargon-heavy all the legal stuff is, I had a lot of it written on the paper in front of me,” she laughed. “So if you see me doing this at any stage, I am literally reading my script in front of the camera.”
Worboys, 68, was first convicted on 19 offences in 2009 and has since been found guilty of further sexual assaults. His next parole hearing is due to be held in public in June.
Speaking about writing the drama Pope – who will next tackle Sarah Everard’s story for the BBC – said he chooses his subjects carefully. “The first thing is – does something get you angry?” he explained. “Or really affect you? With this one I spent six months of my life being angry as I was pulling it together. Then there’s a long process of meeting the people involved, particularly the three main survivors – not to use the word victims. We spent a lot of time with them – as a man I had to understand a lot of personal, difficult, unpleasant stuff that they were telling me. And just listening and listening.”
He said that what had surprised him the most was hearing from the many women in his life about what they’d had to put up with from men over the years. “I realised early in the process that there’s a whole world, and one half of the population really don’t know much about it and the other half live with it. Stuff like what women put up with just on a night out. Talking to my wife, my daughters-in-law, my sister and understanding what women go through in a normal day, it was such an education for me. I hope one half of the audience are going to go ‘yes, that’s what happens’ and the other half are going to go ‘what?’”
The drama will also feature Miriam Petche playing Carrie Symonds, now the wife of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was targeted by Worboys in her youth but had a narrow escape. When he was first being considered for parole, she was working in the Conservative Party press team and put her career on the line to spearhead a campaign pushing for a judicial review of the Parole Board’s decision.
Philippa will also return as much-loved Anne in the second series of BBC1’s Amandaland from May 6. Speaking about the new run, the actress said: “Anne is still in SoHa, juggling her high-powered job while raising her kids, attending all of Darius’s soccer matches, volunteering for activities at school while also being at the beck and call of her best pal Amanda.”
Both she and Lucy Punch, who plays Amanda, have been nominated for Best Comedy Actress at the Bafta TV Awards alonside Jennifer Saunders, who appeared in the Christmas special. Amandaland – which this time has a guest role for Call the Midwife actress Pam Ferris – has also been nominated for the Best Scripted Comedy category.
After last year’s disastrous Eaton fire, Southern California Edison executives vowed to be transparent about what caused the inferno that killed at least 19 people and left thousands of families homeless in Altadena.
“As we better understand exactly what happened on Jan. 7, we do so with a commitment to remain transparent,” Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the utility’s parent company, said in a published statement after the fire.
In court, however, Edison is keeping crucial documents of the cause of the Eaton fire secret, a legal strategy it has used to shield what happened in at least seven earlier wildfires it was blamed for igniting, according to a Times review.
Edison’s stance has caused mounting frustration with attorneys representing fire victims who are seeking compensation for their losses.
“The Eaton Fire cases should be decided on their merits, not on what information that SCE has been able to withhold,” lawyers for the victims wrote in a recent court filing.
State regulators have repeatedly criticized Edison for its secrecy in previous fires, saying it violated safety regulations and stopped officials from learning the root cause so that similar disasters could be prevented.
For more than a year, Edison employees have been gathering detailed information about what ignited the fire in an investigation the company is required to perform under state utility regulations.
But most of that information is being withheld by Edison’s claim of attorney-client privilege, as well as a protective order that it asked a judge to approve soon after the fire.
Protective orders are commonly used in civil lawsuits, but most cases do not have the broad ramifications to the public as the Eaton fire.
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, at the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington on April 14.
(Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg)
Because of the secrecy, it’s not possible to know just what Edison has found, attorneys for Eaton fire victims said in a filing.
In past fires, regulators have requested from the company — and been denied — photographs, notes, text messages and other records generated by the Edison crew that was first to arrive at the site where the blaze ignited. The company has argued its attorney directed the crew, making the evidence privileged.
The victims’ lawyers say Edison shouldn’t be able to withhold from them most evidence from its investigation into the blaze by claiming that the findings and related documents are covered by attorney-client privilege and therefore confidential.
Sealed Eaton fire documents
Lawyers for victims say that documents sealed by a protective order show evidence of where Southern California Edison’s safety measures fell short before the deadly fire.
Poor inspection and repair of the idle transmission line suspected of igniting the fire
Tower holding the idle line was “virtually unattended for decades”
Dried vegetation removed under electrified wires but not beneath the idle line
Problems with contractors inspecting the line
In a recent interview with The Times, Pizarro disagreed that the company was keeping information on the cause of the Eaton fire secret.
“We believe we’ve been transparent,” Pizarro said. “Facts are not privileged, and so we provided facts as we have known them.”
He said the company’s investigation was continuing. “We still, to this day, don’t fully understand what happened,” he said.
Pizarro said the protective order was needed to keep many things confidential, including some not related to the fire’s cause. For example, he said, it protects maps of the electrical system, which can’t be revealed because of terrorism concerns.
Signs blaming Southern California Edison for the Eaton fire are seen near cleared lots in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County on Jan. 5.
(Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images)
He pointed to several company disclosures, including two letters it sent to regulators soon after the Eaton fire that said it was evaluating whether a century-old transmission line, which hadn’t carried power since 1971, “could have become energized” and helped lead to the fire.
Pizarro said last year that the possible reenergization of that old line is a leading theory of the fire’s cause.
The company has said little else about the fire’s cause, other than it safely maintained and inspected the idle line, just like it did its energized lines.
Edison faces thousands of lawsuits from victims of the fire, which burned 14,021 acres and leveled a wide swath of Altadena. The lawsuits allege, in part, that the company was negligent for failing to safely maintain its transmission lines and for leaving the idle line in place when it knew it could become energized. Edison denies the claims of the lawsuits, which have been consolidated in L.A. County Superior Court.
Some documents that Edison says are not privileged and agreed to provide to the victims’ lawyers are sealed by a protective order that the company and the plaintiffs’ lawyers requested.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys often agree to such protective orders on the theory that doing so would allow the utility to more freely share information that could help their case.
Power lines hang from towers carrying power from the Southern California Edison Gould Station.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Two months after the fire, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Laura Seigle signed the protective order — which covers documents that both sides provide in discovery — including business information deemed proprietary and personal customer data.
According to the protective order, if the case is settled, the lawyers will decide whether the sealed documents should be returned to Edison or destroyed.
If the case proceeds to trial, some of the evidence could become public.
Yet even with the protective order in place, plantiffs’ attorneys say Edison has refused to provide them with evidence from its investigation into the fire, saying it’s protected by attorney-client privilege.
The state-required investigations “are not private inquiries undertaken for SCE’s benefit and legal protection,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in a filing last year. “Those investigations are regulated activities that exist to protect the public and enhance public safety by preventing future fires.”
To begin those investigations, Edison’s crews often get to the ignition site before government officials. In the 2019 Saddleridge fire in Sylmar, an investigator from the Los Angeles Fire Department found the yellow police tape at the road leading to where the blaze started on the ground and an Edison truck leaving the site, according to his report.
California utility regulators have said the earliest observations at the scene are critical in determining what happened.
L.A. Fire Justice attorney Mikal Watts presents findings on the cause of the Eaton fire at transmission tower 3 at a January 2025 news conference in Pasadena.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Loretta Lynch, former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the electric companies, said she believed Edison was wrongly using attorney-client privilege and protective orders “as a sword to prevent justice.”
Lynch said the confidentiality could keep evidence of Edison’s possible negligence from being used at a future state hearing that will look at whether the company acted safely and prudently before the Eaton fire.
In that hearing, if the commission finds the company acted prudently, all damage costs will be covered by a state wildfire fund and Edison customers. The company and its shareholders would pay nothing.
“It’s time to stop this game of allowing utilities to be negligent and then walk away with their customers paying for it,” Lynch said.
Kathleen Dunleavy, an Edison spokeswoman, said the company’s “assertions of privilege in civil court have nothing to do” with the future state hearing on whether the company acted prudently.
Dunleavy added that the company has been cooperating with government fire investigators and the plaintiff lawyers, responding to their requests for data.
The government’s investigation into the cause of the fire has not yet been released.
Asked about the company’s withholding of documents in court, Pizarro pointed to a 2024 California Appeals Court decision that found that Edison’s assertion of attorney-client privilege to keep evidence sealed in litigation over the 2017 Creek fire was appropriate under the law. The court said that protecting the documents generated in the internal investigation from public disclosure allowed the company’s attorneys “to investigate not only the favorable but the unfavorable aspects” of their client’s situation.
Lawyers for victims of the Creek fire, which destroyed more than 100 homes and structures near Sylmar, say Edison failed to provide evidence that showed its line was a likely cause of the blaze, leading government investigators to initially wrongly blame electrical equipment owned by the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Edison continues to deny it caused the fire.
A fire truck makes its way past a portion of the Creek fire along Wheatland Avenue in Sylmar on Dec. 5, 2017.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In the Eaton fire case, a few details of what’s in the confidential documents have been revealed in court, showing they could be significant when the first trial begins next year.
In February, plaintiff lawyers filed 13 sealed exhibits for only the judge to review, saying they showed how Edison had neglected inspections, maintenance and repair of the idle line. The records are subject to the protective order, shielding them from public view.
“There is ample evidence in this case that SCE performed more frequent and higher quality inspections and maintenance on its live equipment than it did on its inactive facilities,” they wrote.
“From all indications, SCE left Tower 208 virtually unattended for decades,” they added, referring to the pylon that held the idle line and was found to be the location of the fire’s first flames.
The plaintiff lawyers also said the protective order prevents them from disclosing photos to the public that show Edison left vegetation growing under the idle line while removing it from beneath the live wires running parallel to it, according to the court filing. Utility regulations require vegetation to be removed from under and around electric lines to reduce the risk of fire.
The lawyers added that the sealed documents showed that Edison was having problems with an outside contractor it had hired to inspect its transmission lines.
Asked about the filing, Pizarro said the claims were assertions by the plaintiff attorneys that would be debated in court.
Some legal experts have criticized the use of protective orders for keeping the public in the dark about dangerous corporate actions or products.
Lynch said protective orders and confidential settlements in wildfire litigation are preventing the public from learning information that could stop future deadly fires. She said California should consider legislation to ban the use of the secrecy tactics in wildfire lawsuits.
Firefighters work to contain the Saddleridge fire on Oct. 10, 2019, in the Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles.
(Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
The Times found protective orders in lawsuits against Edison for the 2017 Thomas fire and mudslides, which killed 23; the 2018 Woolsey fire, which killed three; the 2019 Saddleridge fire, which killed one; and the 2022 Fairview fire, which killed two. Those fires together caused billions of dollars in damages and destroyed thousands of homes.
Lawyers for the Eaton fire victims told the judge in February that the protective order, as well as similar secrecy orders in lawsuits over other fires, had kept them from speaking publicly about certain subjects in the courtroom, including what they knew about Edison’s line inspections.
“This is a significant case, against one of the world’s largest providers of electricity, which has, through the use of Confidentiality Protective Orders in other cases, impaired the Plaintiffs’ ability to fully inform the Court,” they wrote.
Late last month, Judge Seigle ordered Edison to give the victims’ lawyers more of the documents they had requested. The protective order limits the public’s access to them.
Defence lawyers had asked for case to be thrown out, claiming Maduro’s rights were violated following US abduction.
Published On 25 Apr 202625 Apr 2026
The United States has agreed to ease certain sanctions on Venezuela in order to allow the country’s government to cover the legal fees for ex-president Nicolas Maduro, who is on federal trial in New York City for drug trafficking charges after being abducted by US forces in January.
Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, had asked the Manhattan-based US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to toss out the case in February, arguing that a prohibition on the government in Caracas paying the legal fees constituted a violation of Maduro’s legal right to the counsel of his choice.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
In a court filing, US Department of Justice lawyers agreed to modify US sanctions so that the Venezuelan government could pay Maduro’s defence lawyer. They said the change makes the defence’s motion to throw out the case “moot”.
The pivot is the latest update in a closely watched trial that has raised a series of legal questions based on Maduro’s status as a former head of state and how he was taken into US custody.
Critics have condemned the proceedings as fundamentally illegitimate, pointing to the extraordinary US military operation to abduct Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Venezuela. Legal experts have called the raid a blatant violation of international law.
The Trump administration has maintained that the abduction was a law enforcement operation supported by the military. It has argued that Washington does not recognise Maduro as the legitimate leader of Venezuela following several contested elections.
Under the international law concept of “head of state immunity”, sitting world leaders are typically granted immunity from foreign national courts.
After being spirited to the US, Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty and remain jailed in Brooklyn, New York. Maduro has rejected the US charges as a false pretext for seizing control of the South American country’s natural resources.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire for foreign companies to access Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
During a hearing on March 26, Judge Hellerstein did not signal that he would throw out the trial, but did question whether the sanctions preventing the Venezuelan government from covering Maduro’s legal fees were a violation of constitutional rights.
All criminal defendants in the US have constitutional rights, regardless of whether or not they are US citizens.
Prosecutors, at the time, argued that the sanctions were based on national security interests and asserted that the executive branch, rather than the judiciary, oversees foreign policy.
They further argued that Maduro and Flores could use personal funds to pay for a lawyer of their choice.
“The defendant is here, Flores is here. They present no further national security threat,” said Hellerstein.
“The right that’s implicated, paramount over other rights, is the right to constitutional counsel.”
WASHINGTON — Lawyers for President Trump are engaged in talks with the IRS to resolve a $10-billion lawsuit the president filed against his own tax collection agency over the leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
In a federal court filing Friday, Trump asks a judge to pause the case for 90 days while the two sides work to reach a settlement or resolution.
“This limited pause will neither prejudice the parties nor delay ultimate resolution,” the filing says. “Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
Tax and ethics experts say the lawsuit raises a plethora of legal and ethical questions, including the propriety of the leader of the executive branch pursuing scorched-earth litigation against the very government he oversees.
Earlier this year, Trump filed a lawsuit in a Florida federal court, alleging that a previous leak of his and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are also plaintiffs in the suit.
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, of Washington — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about President Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The outlets were not named in the charging documents, but the description and time frame align with stories about Trump’s tax returns in the New York Times and reporting about wealthy Americans’ taxes in the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica. The 2020 New York Times report found Trump paid $750 in federal income tax the year he first entered the White House, and no income tax at all some years, thanks to reported colossal losses.
When asked in February how he would handle any potential damages from the case, Trump said, “I think what we’ll do is do something for charity.”
“We could make it a substantial amount,” he said at the time. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
Several ethics watchdog groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs challenging the president’s lawsuit.
The watchdog group Democracy Forward’s February filing states that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public fisc in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”
ORLANDO, Fla. — Guards severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees at a state-run immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades this month, according to a lawyer for two detainees.
The guards targeted Katherine Blankenship’s clients and other detainees at the facility after they complained about not having phone access on April 2, Blankenship said in a court declaration.
The phones, which weren’t functioning, are the primary way for detainees to communicate with family and their attorneys while in the detention center. The guards began taunting the detainees, who were in a cell, then became “more aggressive and were yelling and threatening to enter the cage,” Blankenship wrote.
When one detainee approached a guard, he was punched in the face. The guards then started beating other detainees in the cell. One of Blankenship’s clients was punched in the right eye, thrown to the floor and beaten by several guards. He was kicked in the head and his shoulder and arm were injured. A guard put his knee on the detainee’s neck while restraining him, according to the attorney’s declaration, which included a photo made during a video call almost a week later showing the detainee with a bruised eye.
“The officers beat several people during this incident and broke another detained individual’s wrist,” Blankenship wrote. The detainee whose wrist was broken is not one of her clients.
Phone service was restored the next day without any explanation for why it was cut off.
The Florida Department of Emergency Management didn’t respond to questions emailed Wednesday about the incident.
Blankenship’s declaration was included in a court filing accusing state and federal officials of failing to comply with a federal judge’s preliminary injunction last month ordering detention center officials to provide access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored and unrecorded outgoing legal calls. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell in Fort Myers, Florida also said facility officials must provide at least one operable telephone for every 25 people held in the facility.
The judge’s order came in a response to a lawsuit that claimed detainees’ First Amendment rights were being violated.
State officials have denied restricting detainees’ access to their attorneys and cited security and staffing reasons for any challenges. Federal officials who also are defendants denied that detainees’ First Amendment rights were violated. State officials last week filed a notice that they plan to appeal the judge’s order.
The Everglades facility was built last summer at a remote airstrip by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to support President Trump’s immigration policies. Florida also has built a second immigration detention center in north Florida.
During a visit last week to the detention center, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said she wasn’t given the chance to talk to detainees. She described conditions at the detention center as “inhumane.”
“The way the detainees are housed is cruel and unnecessary,” she said.
Schneider writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
