SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday rejected a request to extradite a California physician accused of providing abortion medication to a Louisiana patient, marking the latest clash between states with sharply different abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
“Louisiana’s request is denied,” Newsom said in a statement. “My position on this has been clear since 2022: We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services. Not today. Not ever.”
The extradition request stems from criminal charges filed in Louisiana against Dr. Rémy Coeytaux, a California-based physician accused of prescribing and mailing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident in 2023 through a telemedicine service. Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill announced the indictment Tuesday, and Gov. Jeff Landry said he would sign an extradition order.
“It’s appalling to see the California Governor and Attorney General openly admitting that they will protect an individual from being held accountable for illegal, medically unethical, and dangerous conduct that led to a woman being coerced into terminating the life of her unborn child,” Murrill said in response to California’s actions.
Since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, a growing number of states have moved to criminalize reproductive care. About 16 states, including Texas and Louisiana, now ban abortion almost entirely, with some allowing criminal penalties or civil lawsuits against providers.
Those laws have heightened concerns among physicians about potential legal exposure when traveling to or practicing across state lines — even when their home states explicitly protect reproductive and gender-affirming care.
Newsom’s office said federal and state law give the governor discretion to decline extradition requests when the alleged conduct occurred in California. The governor pointed to an executive order he issued shortly after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, as well as subsequent legislation, designed to shield California providers and patients from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions.
The case underscores a widening legal standoff between states with near-total abortion bans and those that have enacted so-called shield laws to protect providers who offer abortion care, including medication abortions, to patients from restrictive states. California is among at least eight states with such protections.
Newsom cast his decision to reject the extradition as part of a broader push by California to protect reproductive rights as Republican-led states move to restrict abortion access.
“We will never be complicit with Trump’s war on women,” Newsom said.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The next U.S. census is four years away, but two lawsuits playing out this year could affect how it will be done and who will be counted.
Allies of President Trump are behind the federal lawsuits challenging various aspects of the once-a-decade count by the U.S. Census Bureau, which is used to determine congressional representation and how much federal aid flows to the states.
The challenges align with parts of Trump’s agenda even as the Republican administration must defend the agency in court.
A Democratic law firm is representing efforts to intervene in both cases because of concerns over whether the U.S. Justice Department will defend the bureau vigorously. There have been no indications so far that government attorneys are doing otherwise, and department lawyers have asked that one of the cases be dismissed.
As the challenges work their way through the courts, the Census Bureau is pushing ahead with its planning for the 2030 count and intends to conduct practice runs in six locations this year.
The legal challenges
America First Legal, co-founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, is leading one of the lawsuits, filed in Florida. It contests methods the bureau has used to protect participants’ privacy and to ensure that people in group-living facilities such as dorms and nursing homes will be counted.
The lawsuit’s intent is to prevent those methods from being used in the 2030 census and to have 2020 figures revised.
“This case is about stopping illegal methods that undermine equal representation and ensuring the next census complies with the Constitution,” Gene Hamilton, president of America First Legal, said in a statement.
The other lawsuit was filed in federal court in Louisiana by four Republican state attorneys general and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes illegal immigration and supports reduced legal immigration. The lawsuit seeks to exclude people who are in the United States illegally from being counted in the numbers for redrawing congressional districts.
In both cases, outside groups represented by the Democratic-aligned Elias Law Group have sought to intervene over concerns that the Justice Department would reach friendly settlements with the challengers.
In the Florida case, a judge allowed a retirees’ association and two university students to join the defense as intervenors. Justice Department lawyers have asked that the case be dismissed.
In the Louisiana lawsuit, government lawyers said three League of Women Voters chapters and Santa Clara County in California had not shown any proof that department attorneys would do anything other than robustly defend the Census Bureau. A judge has yet to rule on their request to join the case.
A spokesman for the Elias Law Group, Blake McCarren, referred in an email to its motion to dismiss the Florida case, warning of “a needlessly chaotic and disruptive effect upon the electoral process” if the conservative legal group were to prevail and all 50 states had to redraw their political districts.
Aligning with Trump’s agenda
The goals of the lawsuits, particularly the Louisiana case, align with core parts of Trump’s agenda, although the 2030 census will be conducted under a different president because his second term will end in January 2029.
During his first term, for the 2020 census, Trump tried to prevent those who are in the U.S. illegally from being used in the apportionment numbers, which determine how many congressional representatives and Electoral College votes each state receives. He also sought to have citizenship data collected through administrative records.
A Republican redistricting expert had written that using only the citizen voting-age population, rather than the total population, for the purpose of redrawing congressional and state legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Both Trump orders were rescinded when Democratic President Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released by the Census Bureau. The first Trump administration also attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, a move that was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In August, Trump instructed the U.S. Commerce Department to change the way the Census Bureau collects data, seeking to exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Neither officials at the White House nor the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, explained what actions were being taken in response to the president’s social media post.
Congressional Republicans have introduced legislation to exclude noncitizens from the apportionment process. That could shrink the head count in both red and blue states because the states with the most people in the U.S. illegally include California, Texas, Florida and New York, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment. The numbers also guide the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal dollars to the states for roads, healthcare and other programs.
Defending the Census Bureau
The Louisiana lawsuit was filed at the end of the Biden administration and put on hold in March at the request of the Commerce Department. Justice Department lawyers representing the Cabinet agency said they needed time to consider the position of the new leadership in the second Trump administration. The state attorneys general in December asked for that hold to be lifted.
So far, in the court record, there is nothing to suggest that those government attorneys have done anything to undermine the Census Bureau’s defense in both cases, despite the intervenors’ concerns.
In the Louisiana case, Justice Department lawyers argued against lifting the hold, saying the Census Bureau was in the middle of planning for the 2030 census: “At this stage of such preparations, lifting the stay is not appropriate.”
HOUMA, La. — For nearly 50 years, James Blanchard has made his living in the Gulf of Mexico, pulling shrimp from the sea.
It’s all he ever wanted to do, since he was around 12 years old and accompanied his father, a mailman and part-time shrimper, as he spent weekends trawling the marshy waters off Louisiana. Blanchard loved the adventure and splendid isolation.
He made a good living, even as the industry collapsed around him. He and his wife, Cheri, bought a comfortable home in a tidy subdivision here in the heart of Bayou Country. They helped put three kids through college.
But eventually Blanchard began to contemplate his forced retirement, selling his 63-foot boat and hanging up his wall of big green fishing nets once he turns 65 in February.
“The amount of shrimp was not a problem,” said Blanchard, a fourth-generation shrimper who routinely hauls in north of 30,000 flash-frozen pounds on a two-week trip. “It’s making a profit, because the prices were so low.”
Blanchard is a lifelong Republican, but wasn’t initially a big Trump fan.
In April, Trump slapped a 10% fee on shrimp imports, which grew to 50% for India, America’s largest overseas source of shrimp. Further levies were imposed on Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia, which are other major U.S. suppliers.
But for Blanchard, those tariffs have been a lifeline. He’s seen a significant uptick in prices, from as low as 87 cents a pound for wild-caught shrimp to $1.50 or more. That’s nowhere near the $4.50 a pound, adjusted for inflation, that U.S shrimpers earned back in the roaring 1980s, when shrimp was less common in home kitchens and something of a luxury item.
It’s enough, however, for Blanchard to shelve his retirement plans and for that — and Trump — he’s appreciative.
“Writing all the bills in the world is great,” he said of efforts by congressional lawmakers to prop up the country’s dwindling shrimp fishermen. “But it don’t get nothing done.”
Wild-caught domestic shrimp make up less than 10% of the market. It’s not a matter of quality, or overfishing. A flood of imports — farmed on a mass scale, lightly regulated by developing countries and thus cheaper to produce — has decimated the market for American shrimpers.
In the Gulf and South Atlantic, warm water shrimp landings — the term the industry uses — had an average annual value of more than $460 million between 1975 and 2022, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group. (Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation.)
A boat moves up a canal in Chauvin, La.
Over the last two years, the value of the commercial shrimp fishery has fallen to $269 million in 2023 and $256 million in 2024.
As the country’s leading shrimp producer, Louisiana has been particularly hard hit. “It’s getting to the point that we are on our knees,” Acy Cooper, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Assn., recently told New Orleans television station WVUE.
In the 1980s, there were more than 6,000 licensed shrimpers working in Louisiana. Today, there are fewer than 1,500.
Blanchard can see the ripple effects in Houma — in the shuttered businesses, the depleted job market and the high incidence of drug overdoses.
Latrevien Moultrie, 14, fishes in Houma, La.
“It’s affected everybody,” he said. “It’s not only the boats, the infrastructure, the packing plants. It’s the hardware stores. The fuel docks. The grocery stores.”
Two of the Blanchardses’ three children have moved away, seeking opportunity elsewhere. One daughter is a university law professor. Their son works in logistics for a trucking company in Georgia. Their other daughter, who lives near the couple, applies her advanced degree in school psychology as a stay-at-home mother of five.
(Cheri Blanchard, 64 and retired from the state labor department, keeps the books for her husband.)
It turns out the federal government is at least partly responsible for the shrinking of the domestic shrimp industry. In recent years, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized overseas shrimp farming to the tune of at least $195 million in development aid.
Seated at their dining room table, near a Christmas tree and other remnants of the holidays, Blanchard read from a set of scribbled notes — a Bible close at hand — as he and his wife decried the lax safety standards,labor abuses and environmental degradation associated with overseas shrimp farming.
James Blanchard and his wife, Cheri, like Trump’s policies. His personality is another thing.
The fact their taxes help support those practices is particularly galling.
“A slap in the face,” Blanchard called it.
::
Donald Trump grew slowly on the Blanchards.
The two are lifelong Republicans, but they voted for Trump in 2016 only because they considered him less bad than Hillary Clinton.
Once he took office, they were pleasantly surprised.
Republican National Committee reading material sits on the counter of James Blanchard’s kitchen.
Still, there are things that irk Blanchard. He doesn’t much care for Trump’s brash persona and can’t stand all the childish name-calling. For a long time, he couldn’t bear listening to Trump’s speeches.
“You didn’t ever really listen to many of Obama’s speeches,” Cheri interjected, and James allowed as how that was true.
“I liked his personality,” Blanchard said of the former Democratic president. “I liked his character. But I didn’t like his policies.”
It’s the opposite with Trump.
Unlike most politicians, Blanchard said, when Trump says he’ll do something he generally follows through.
“I have no issue at all with immigrants,” he said, as his wife nodded alongside. “I have an issue with illegal immigrants.” (She echoed Trump in blaming Renee Good for her death last week at the hands of an ICE agent.)
“I have sympathy for them as families,” Blanchard went on, but crossing the border doesn’t make someone a U.S. citizen. “If I go down the highway 70 miles an hour in that 30-mile-an-hour zone, guess what? I’m getting a ticket. … Or if I get in that car and I’m drinking, guess what? They’re bringing me to jail. So what’s the difference?”
Between the two there isn’t much — apart from Trump’s “trolling,” as Cheri called it — they find fault with.
Blanchard hailed the lightning-strike capture and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as another example of Trump doing and meaning exactly what he says.
“When Biden was in office, they had a $25-million bounty on [Maduro’s] head,” Blanchard said. “But apparently it was done knowing that it was never going to be enforced.”
More empty talk, he suggested.
Just like all those years of unfulfilled promises from politicians vowing to rein in foreign competition and revive America’s suffering shrimping industry.
James Blanchard aboard his boat, which he docks in Bayou Little Caillou.
Trump and his tariffs have given Blanchard back his livelihood and for that alone he’s grateful.
There’s maintenance and repair work to be done on his boat — named Waymaker, to honor the Lord — before Blanchard musters his two-man crew and sets out from Bayou Little Caillou.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, left, is deploying up to 350 Louisiana National Guard members to New Orleans through February to ensure safety and assist the Trump administration’s federal immigration law enforcement efforts there. File Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 25 (UPI) — Up to 350 Louisiana National Guard members began deploying this week in New Orleans and will stay through February to help maintain peace and safety during New Year’s and special events.
The deployment also comes amid efforts to locate and deport those who illegally are in the United States.
“These National Guard troops will support federal law enforcement partners, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, as they enforce federal law and counter high rates of violent crime in New Orleans and other metropolitan areas in Louisiana,” Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell said in a prepared statement on Tuesday.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry maintains his command and control of the state’s National Guard, whose mission is to enhance safety.
He said the troops will be fully deployed ahead of New Year’s Eve and will stay in New Orleans at least through February.
The deployment was announced after the Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the Illinois National Guard in Chicago over the protests of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The troops will be tasked with ensuring safety in the French Quarter during New Year’s celebrations and during the Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras.
“We know how to make cities safe, and the National Guard complements cities that are experiencing high crime,” Landry said during an appearance on The Will Cain Show.
He cited President Donald Trump’s National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C., as an example of how the troops can make cities safer for residents and visitors.
“When he wanted to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., Louisiana was one of the first to raise its hand and say our troops will go there,” Landry said. “And the city is so much better.”
Dec. 16 (UPI) — A suspect identified as Micah James Legnon has been arrested by agents from the FBI’s New Iberia office for allegedly planning an attack on federal agents.
Legnon, 29, was a member of the Turtle Island Liberation Front and had communicated with four members who were charged with allegedly planning a series of New Year’s Eve terrorist attacks in the Greater Los Angeles area on Monday, WDSU reported.
He is a resident of New Iberia and was arrested on Friday while driving to New Orleans after FBI agents saw him loading a military-style rifle and body armor into his vehicle and telling others in a Signal chat group that he was traveling to New Orleans.
New Iberia is located about 120 miles west of New Orleans, and Legnon allegedly shared a video that showed multiple firearms, gas canisters and body armor before leaving on Friday.
In that post, Legnon said he was “On my way to NOLA now, be there in about two hours,” but the FBI arrested him while driving east on U.S. Highway 90, according to WWL-TV.
In a Dec. 4 post, Legnon shared a Facebook post showing Customs and Border Protection agents arresting someone and said he wanted to “recreate Waco, Texas,” on the federal officers while referencing the 1993 federal siege on the Branch Davidians compound there.
He is a former Marine who was trained in combat and a self-professed satanist who used the alias “Black Witch” in group chats with four suspects accused of targeting locations throughout California.
Federal prosecutors filed a federal complaint against Legnon and asked the magistrate judge to seal it and related records due to an ongoing investigation.
They asked that it be unsealed on Tuesday, which is a day after the four suspects accused of planning the California terror attacks were charged with related crimes.
The FBI said Legnon had been communicating with the four suspects in California before the arrests were made and charges filed in the respective cases.
The Turtle Island Liberation Front is a far-left, anti-government, anti-capitalist and pro-Palestinian group, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
