Aaron Donald did not attend a Rams fan event Thursday night, but the crowd at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood featured many people wearing No. 99 jerseys. One waved a large printed cutout of the three-time NFL defensive player of the year’s face.
The Rams are waiting for Donald to decide whether he will come out of a two-year retirement and join a star-studded Rams team that is favored to win the Super Bowl, which will be played in February at SoFi Stadium.
“I think it’s real clear where we can start the GoFundMe to bring Aaron back,” team president Kevin Demoff joked to a raucous crowd that was cheering ‘AD, AD, AD.”
The Rams open training camp Saturday at Loyola Marymount. Donald, 35, helped the Rams win Super Bowl LVI at SoFi Stadium to cap the 2021 season. He has indicated that he is considering a return to a defense that features end Myles Garrett, the reigning defensive player of the year, and All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie.
“We don’t have a ring, or a Lombardi Trophy or a banner if it’s not for Aaron Donald,” Demoff told the crowd, adding that if Donald wants to return, “We will wait with open arms.”
Tony Pastoors, the Rams chief operating officer, said the Rams want Donald to go “through his process” before making a decision.
“Whenever he’s ready, we’ll be ready,” Pastoors told the crowd. “And, ultimately, I would rather have Aaron Donald when we’re playing actual football games than in July.
“So, we’ll all be patient, and if it happens, we’ll be ready.”
Demoff echoed Pastoors.
“The last 10 years don’t happen without Aaron Donald, and if he wants to come help kick off the next 10 years, by all means we’re ready.”
WASHINGTON — Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has turned repeatedly to the Supreme Court for clearance on its sweeping immigration enforcement plans. While the administration lost its bid this week to do away with birthright citizenship by executive order, its strategy has, in large part, been a success.
In a White House news release listing 60 actions the administration has taken as part of its America First agenda to restrict immigration, the first four actions were decisions by the Supreme Court.
After the court ruled in June that President Trump can, without judicial review, end temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, his administration celebrated the ruling as a “major victory for American sovereignty.”
The list of accomplishments also noted that the high court had granted immigration officers greater leeway to remove green card holders who are accused but not convicted of crimes; allowed the administration to limit how many people can apply for asylum; and gave it the green light to continue deporting immigrants to third-party countries where they have no connection.
The decisions raise significant consequences for immigrants who have made their lives in the U.S., and stand to reshape public views over the country’s historic position as a place of refuge. The administration has not only tried to restrict illegal immigration, it has also targeted people residing in the country legally and stepped up efforts to drive them out.
The court’s term that ended last week is the most robust judicial affirmation of executive power over immigration in the court’s history, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Chishti said the rulings signify that future presidents could continue to change immigration policies at their discretion.
“The biggest impact is that we have now fully understood the power of the presidency, especially in immigration matters,” Chishti said. “Where there is any discretion left to the president or the executive, this Supreme Court has widened the limits of that authority.”
One of Trump’s earliest wins since returning to the White House came last September, when the Supreme Court affirmed that immigration agents can stop anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally on the basis of their perceived race and ethnicity, job or the language they speak.
Afterward, federal officials launched enforcement operations in Chicago, North Carolina and Minneapolis, using increasingly aggressive tactics until two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents in January and the administration shifted course.
The Supreme Court’s rulings have landed with particular force in South Florida, which is home to the largest share of Venezuelan immigrants in the country.
The end of Temporary Protected Status — a program intended to protect people in the event of a natural disaster — heightened concerns about deportation to a country that is reeling after twin earthquakes from June 24. More than 100 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. hours before the disaster are among those missing.
Some Florida Republicans called on the administration to renew the legal protections for Venezuelans in the U.S.
“Congress specifically included earthquakes in the TPS statute for moments exactly like this,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.). “I urge the Administration to redesignate TPS for Venezuelans already in the United States because sending them back after this catastrophe is simply not the right thing to do.”
The White House did not respond to a request seeking comment on whether Trump would authorize humanitarian relief for Venezuelan immigrants.
Immigrants from El Salvador are now holding their breath for an upcoming decision on their TPS designation, which is set to expire Sept. 9.
About 1.3 million people from 17 countries were enrolled in the program when Trump took office last year. The administration has already terminated TPS for many of them, and the Supreme Court’s decision last week, which concerned Haitians and Syrians, clears the way for federal officials to continue.
“The implication of this is that at least most of the claims that have been litigated to challenge this administration’s illegal war on TPS are now foreclosed,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, who presented arguments for the Syria case.
The concern among advocates took on greater urgency after The New York Times and other outlets reported on Thursdaythat immigration officials, seeking to reach a goal of 2,000 arrests per day, had detained more than 10,000 people in less than a week.
Arnulfo De La Cruz, who leads a California union representing thousands of home care workers with temporary protected status, said he is alarmed by the Supreme Court’s many immigration rulings.
“We’re getting into really dangerous territory with, in some ways, the Supreme Court almost legislating the priorities of the administration,” said De La Cruz, who is president of SEIU California and SEIU Local 2015. “That’s the responsibility of Congress.”
In a blow to a centerpiece of the administration’s immigration agenda, the divided Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship — that, with few exceptions, a person born in U.S. soil is citizen.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired Cornell University immigration law professor, called the ruling one setback among Trump’s largely successful restructuring of how the U.S. treats immigrants. He pointed to a tracker led by a Stanford University law professor that lists more than 700 immigration policy actions by the Trump administration so far.
“Despite this seemingly historic loss, the Trump administration is winning its war on immigrants,” Yale-Loehr said.
And now some Republicans, including Trump, are saying Congress should lead the attack on birthright citizenship.
“You can’t have the kinds of immigration programs other countries have when you can just have a baby here, and now that child is an American citizen,” said Stephen Miller, a Trump aide who is behind much of his immigration agenda.
But Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, said in reality, “Congress can’t do anything — it was left powerless by the Supreme Court.”
Other conservatives called on the administration to lean on the considerable authority it already has.
Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a hard-line restrictionist group, said the birthright decision “makes it all the more urgent to step up enforcement to the maximum possible extent.”
Democrats, meanwhile, cheered the win while acknowledging that their fight against the administration’s immigration policies continues.
“We cannot rest,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). “Because this is certainly not the end of Trump’s attacks on our Constitution, our democracy, and the notion of what it means to be American.”
More immigration-related cases are among those in the Supreme Court’s docket starting in October and could offer further expansions of executive power.
One case concerns more than 50,000 petitions filed in federal courts in hopes of obtaining the release of detained immigrants. Those petitions ballooned after the administration began limiting the ability of many immigrants to seek release through bond hearings in immigration court.
The administration is expected to put up a fierce defense.
In 1913, Antonino Alati left southern Italy to find a better life in a land where many people regarded him as little better than scum.
He joined millions of his fellow countrymen in the United States, where the press vilified Italians as poor, dirty, violent Catholics who had too many babies, refused to assimilate and could never possibly be considered “white.”
Politicians were already working to shut the door on them. A congressional report released two years before Alati’s arrival cited southern Italians as evidence that “the new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old.” They came to the U.S., the report asserted, “with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country.”
Alati wouldn’t let bigotry win. He soon sent for his wife and children, including his infant son Salvatore. Alati turned to Alito, Salvatore became Samuel. A generation later, the family had a Supreme Court justice in Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the second Italian American, after Antonin Scalia, to sit on the highest court in the land.
During his 2005 confirmation hearings, Alito praised his father as an “extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties” to ensure a better life for him and his sister. By then, Italian Americans were established as an essential part of this country’s fabric, from music to politics to food.
If there’s one constant in this country besides death and taxes, it’s how quickly descendants of immigrants, and sometimes immigrants themselves, forget how loathed their ethnic group was and how they proved the haters wrong. Too many become uncharitable to the policies that helped them and the immigrants who followed.
But Alito’s stance against birthright citizenship goes beyond just forgetting his roots. His 39-page opinion describes the supposed impact of undocumented migrants on the U.S., using words — “overran,” “soared,” “exploded,” “massive,” “a stream,” “huge” — that read like the same invective used against Italians in his grandfather and father’s time.
The justice channels anti-Italian conspiracies of the past by casting doubt on the national allegiances of the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants — the same patriotism test that Italian Americans faced generations ago when xenophobes questioned their Catholicism. Alito claims without evidence that millions of agricultural workers were able to apply for American citizenship after President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty “at least in part because of fraud” — a charge also leveled against Italians who sought to naturalize back in the day.
And so it goes, each passage a jumbled argument dressed up in judicial interpretations largely rejected by his fellow Catholic Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Coney Barrett signed on to the majority opinion that Roberts wrote, and Kavanaugh concurred.
Rev. William Barber II speaks during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1 while justices heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
I know how quickly families forget their own immigrant histories. Yet I look at people like Alito and wonder how they ended up thinking the way they do, because I could never imagine doing the same.
Like Alito’s paisanes, my Mexican family was also demonized for supposedly being insufficiently American and posing a threat to national unity. They also sacrificed their own dreams so their children and grandchildren could achieve theirs.
And just like Alito, some members of my family have forgotten our history and support Trump or favor some of his immigration policies, dismissing new arrivals as criminals or lazy. That’s why I will always side with undocumented people and welcome anyone who gives birth in this country with the hope that their newborn finds a better life.
It seems from his dissent that Alito somewhat agrees with me. He posits that millions of Americans who were born in this country to parents without papers “have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the land where they grew up.” Congress “can and should address their situation,” he writes.
The justice blasts birth tourism, where women from China and other countries travel to the U.S. to have a baby, then return home, benefiting from our generosity and offering nothing in return.
I agree that’s a mockery of what being an American should be and ruins it for people who want to contribute to building a better nation. But Alito throws out the baby with the bathwater by failing to recognize that Trump’s attempt to erase birthright citizenship via executive order is presidential overreach based on bigotry, not rule of law. He’d rather cut up the Constitution to spite something he doesn’t like. Thank God his side lost, yet it’s sad that Trump’s pathetic attempt to define who can be an American went as far as it did.
Alito concludes by stating that the court’s decision to uphold the 14th Amendment is “a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”
What new immigrants might inflict on this country is the perpetual worry of immigration restrictionists — and yet history keeps proving them wrong. Alito’s family did; so did mine. Only in these United States can the progeny of people once portrayed as parasites and invaders side with those making the same argument about the latest batch of newcomers.
History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never wanted them here in the first place.
There’s nothing like taking a cool dip after a hot day, especially in L.A. summer weather. As peak swimming season kicks off, the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center pool in Lake View Terrace reopened Memorial Day on weekends after being closed for the season. It will be open daily for swim and play starting Saturday.
The popular San Fernando Valley aquatic center spans 40 acres that include a massive 1.5-acre pool lined with sand like a beach. There’s also a nine-acre lake used for fishing and nonmotorized boat activities.
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1.Jaylia Martinez, 5, left, is splashed with water by Elijah Santillana, 6.2.The height chart for the water slide at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.3.Visitors enjoy the pool at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“As one of the largest pools in the U.S., capacity [being] 3,500, we get so many people from all over the city, all over the county, people coming from out of state to this place,” Edwin Realegeno, aquatic facility manager of the center, said.
Along the pool’s sandy shores, individuals can use the volleyball courts and teqball table. There are also different levels of shallow water for young swimmers and toddlers.
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Paty Santillana, a Van Nuys resident, has visited the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center for the last 15 years. “It’s perfect for little kids. I have a 5-year-old and also a 21-year-old, who we used to come here with,” Santillana said. She adds that her grandchildren are ecstatic every time she mentions a visit to the pool.
Idalia Fraga, a 12-year-old swimmer who has been to the pool twice since its reopening on Memorial Day weekend, said she enjoys the pool for its affordability.
“Prices are very cheap … it really helps those families who struggle,” Fraga said.
After some renovations to its large water slide that will be reopening Saturday, the pool is open to swimmers for an admission fee of $4 for adults and children 17 and under for $1. The center takes cash only.
The recreational lake is open year-round and is restocked with fish from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Christopher Lopez relaxes by regularly fishing at the Hansen Dam Recreation Lake on the weekends.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Along the lake, people enjoy walking the surrounding grassy pathway and fishing. Christopher Lopez, a Pacoima resident, who also goes by the nickname Squid, goes to the lake for the latter.
Lopez started fishing nearly two months ago with his longtime friend from elementary school. “[It’s about] getting out of the house and having something to do on the weekends and being able to enjoy the day,” he said. “Spending our time out here I think is just a great addition.”
For Lopez, catching bass or trout and enjoying the occasional breeze is a perfect day to absorb the beauty of nature.
Lifeguards Israel Orozco, left, and Ian Zabel, right, watch the pool as visitors cool off at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The recreational center is hosting fundraising 1K and 5K runs on Sunday followed by a party with free access to the pool. Realegeno said the fundraiser is to help fund public pool centers across L.A. County and to promote swimming safety lessons.
The idea grew as organically as the purple cauliflower at Erewhon. One day, I walked from my place in Los Feliz to the beach. I stopped at two Erewhon locations on the way to refuel. I made a reel about my journey and posted it to Instagram. My friend Fish saw it and said, “You should walk to all the Erewhons.”
I thought: I don’t have time to do that. I’m a very serious person who needs to write her novel.
But later I found myself mapping out an 89-mile hike in my Notes App, starting in Pasadena and ending in Calabasas, stopping at all 10 Erewhon locations on the way. (My route did not include the Palisades, which is closed because of the fires; nor did it include LACMA or the new Glendale locale.)
“I need to write my novel” is a thought I have a lot. I usually heed this thought and sit at the desk like a soldier, imagining the wonderful day when I’ll sell said novel — for an amount that would probably be comparable to a fraction of an Erewhon employee’s yearly salary.
Erewhon Trail map illustration by Swan Huntley.
(Erewhon Trail map illustration by Swan Huntley. )
I really wasn’t in the mood to write the novel, though. When I imagined myself pecking away at the keyboard, I felt bad. When I imagined myself walking around L.A. in my Home Depot gardening hat, I felt good. So, I put on my hat, got into an Uber headed for Pasadena, and texted my sister, “Carpe diem, bitch.” Or at least that was my intention. What I actually sent was, “Carpet diem hitch.”
Over the summer, I hiked a little bit of the Pacific Crest Trail. A few years ago, I biked the Camino in Spain. I’ve walked from Los Feliz to the beach a handful of times. I’ve traversed the length of Manhattan thrice. Before that, when I was a teenager, I used to trek from La Jolla to Del Mar while drinking beer (I carried a cooler; yes, I’m sober now) and listening to Sarah McLachlan on my Discman. I’ve always been drawn to activities that many people find tedious. Like walking forever. Or writing a novel.
Starting in the fourth century, pilgrimages were served up by the church as a way for Christians to pay penance for their sins. They were hard and dangerous and a lot of people died. Fast-forward to now: Such treks have taken on an “Eat, Pray, Love” aura. Or a “Wild “ aura. They live in the realm of self-help and of sport. They’re a way to create friction in an increasingly frictionless world. By walking from Mexico to Canada, or from Erewhon to Erewhon, I wonder whether we’re trying to get back to the part of ourselves that wants to try harder.
Or we just want to become more valuable dinner party guests.
What do you do?
I do really long walks.
I ordered a Goddess Smoothie in Pasadena, and then I repeated this tradition at every store thereafter. The smoothie costs $19, tastes like heaven, and it’s green, which my brain reads as “good for me.”
It took me a little over three hours to walk 11 miles to Silver Lake. I got a Vegan Avocado Sandwich for lunch, took an Uber home and posted a reel on Instagram about my first day on the trail. A lot of people liked it. Some of them called me a genius.
In the last 10 years, I’ve published four novels and two illustrated books for adults. I was naïve and just totally blindly happy about the publishing process in the beginning. People wanted to buy my work? Other people wanted to read it? Cool.
The first book, “We Could Be Beautiful,” did well because the publisher put real money into the marketing of it. Then that stopped happening. At a certain point, I realized that expecting too much was unwise. It was up to me to market my books myself. Which meant: social media.
They say you have to see a book cover six times before you buy the book — or consider buying it. There are a lot of book covers on Instagram. Actually, there’s a lot of everything on Instagram, and out of all the everything, is a book cover that exciting?
No.
My second reel, which depicted my journey from Silver Lake to Studio City, went a little bit viral. To date, almost 10,000 people have shared it with their friends. Why? I think the answer has something to do with a desire for levity.
If the atmosphere of the world could be depicted by an Erewhon beverage, it wouldn’t be a vibrant, cheerful one, like the bright magenta Pitaya Smoothie. It would be the dark and brooding Germ Warfare Shot. I find it perplexing that people talk about the apocalypse as if it’s happening later. It’s happening now. If we were really thinking about how climate change is affecting us, we’d be out in the streets screaming. All the time. But we’re not doing that. We’re carrying on with our usual lives. Apparently, for me, that includes walking to Erewhons.
Any long-distance trek is as much an internal journey as it is external. As I continued the trail, I started to think that maybe my endeavor was a reaction to my feeling of total powerlessness. I can’t save the polar bears. I can’t force the president to go to therapy. But I can add some levity to the brooding atmosphere.
Recently, someone commented on one of the reels, “Transplants make LA locals look bad.” This person, and many others, hear the name Erewhon and assume I’m poking fun at it. Erewhon has become a joke about L.A. — a joke that was amplified after Hailey Bieber invented her smoothie in 2022 that Erewhon dubs the “Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie.” I’ve never had it, but I can tell you that it looks like a sky full of strawberry clouds. According to an Erewhon employee I spoke to, this smoothie was a turning point. It aligned the brand with wealth and power. Now, Erewhon evokes the image of smooth-skinned, health-conscious Angelenos with money to burn.
The Erewhon Trail, then, inevitably becomes a conversation about privilege, my own included. Instagram hid my two favorite comments, because it was worried they’d be too rude to show, but I think they’re the funniest ones.
This is what white people do on Prozac.
This is what happens when a liberal arts teacher gets fired.
To both of these comments, I say: Yes.
I’m not on Prozac yet, but maybe after I get fired, I will be.
In order to get fired, though, I’d have to get an actual job, which might never happen.
The most intense leg of the trail was from Santa Monica to Calabasas. My friend Fish joined me. Google said it would take 27 miles. After marching through the mountains, I decided to use my own intelligence to make the route shorter. This cut out four miles, bringing the total to 23. For long stretches, Fish and I walked in the bike lane, or in the bramble by the side of the road. That’s the penalty for straying from Google. Your sidewalks disappear and your chances of getting hit by a car go way up.
My legs were noodles by the time we got to Calabasas. I crawled across the parking lot to show my viewers how weak they’d become. The employee at the door smiled at me and handed me a basket, and I thought about the pain of my legs, which no one could see, and about all the secret battles people are fighting all the time, and I wished that we cared about each other as much as Erewhon cares about us. Multiple employees were perfecting the already-perfect plateaus of bell peppers and apples in the produce section. Their thoughtfulness was the opposite of the vibe I encounter in most public restrooms, which is that the strangers who were there before me didn’t have many thoughts about my experience. As lame as the fact that an Erewhon smoothie costs $19 is that so many of us need to be paid to be nice to each other.
When I tell people about my love for Erewhon, they either say, “Duh, I know,” or something along the lines of, “That place is ridiculous, right?” This is almost always followed by the mention of a food item and some amount of money. Like, “Doesn’t a carrot cost $12,000?”
Actually, I tell them, no. Although sometimes, yes. There is a Japanese strawberry that’s famously expensive ($20), but that’s avoidable. I then explain that contrary to popular thought, there is a way to shop at Erewhon on a budget. A jar of soup, for example, costs $15.50. If you return the bottle, you get $3 back. In my opinion, the soup can be two meals, so that’s $6.25 per meal. A lot of the produce is either the same price or only a little bit more expensive than at other health food stores, and it’s in consistently better shape. The most important piece of making Erewhon more affordable, though, is becoming a member. You get 10% off, a free drink of the month and discounts on a bunch of items.
You might be wondering: How many Erewhon memberships has she personally sold?
She’s lost count.
The other reason to go to Erewhon is the environment. It’s visually appealing and the employee-to-customer ratio is notable, and the result is that you feel like you’re at a resort. And frankly, these simple things — a nice environment, high quality food — should be available to everyone.
Back to the question of whether or not Erewhon is ridiculous — yes, of course it is. If you sit at any of the locations and listen to the conversations around you, you’ll probably feel like you’re an extra in a satirical movie. At Studio City, I overheard two moms in white pants and cashmere sweaters talking about how, based on their Instagram recon, they figured out that so-and-so was sitting next to so-and-so at a benefit dinner. Another snippet I overheard in Studio City: “You gotta make music from the heart, man, and the label will feel it.”
It didn’t occur to me to ask for free merch until after I’d finished the trail. Armando at the Santa Monica location was the lucky recipient of my request. I explained my uniquely heroic feat to him, and then wondered aloud if perhaps I could get a sweatshirt, or at least a hat.
Sadly, Armando was unauthorized to give me merch, but he did offer me a gift card in a tiny envelope. I was very grateful. I assumed the card was worth $50 at least.
After we parted ways, I opened the envelope.
Ten dollars.
Enough to put a down payment on a smoothie.
My dreams now are so different from when I was younger. Back in grad school, I imagined that maybe I’d write a bestselling novel, and maybe it would be adapted for the screen, and maybe my tombstone would read: She contributed very serious literature to civilization.
What I never accounted for was, of course, the unknown. Maybe one day, over a decade after school ended, I’d get a lot of attention for making performance art about walking to grocery stores.
Huntley’s novels include “I Want You More,” “Getting Clean With Stevie Green,” “The Goddesses” and “We Could Be Beautiful.” She’s also the writer/illustrator of the darkly humorous “The Bad Mood Book” and “You’re Grounded: An Anti-Self-Help Book to Calm You the F— Down.” She lives in Los Angeles.
