RAID

CATO, N.Y. — Federal agents forced open the doors of a snack bar manufacturer and took away dozens of workers in a surprise enforcement action that the plant’s co-owner called “terrifying.”

Video and photos taken at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant Thursday showed numerous law enforcement vehicles outside the plant and workers being escorted from the building to a Border Patrol van. Immigration agents ordered everyone to a lunchroom, where they asked for proof the workers were in the country legally, according to one 24-year-old worker who was briefly detained.

The reason for the enforcement action was unclear. Local law enforcement officials said the operation was led by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, which did not respond to requests for information. Nutrition Bar Confectioners co-owner Lenny Schmidt said he was also in the dark about the purpose of the raid.

“There’s got to be a better way to do it,” Schmidt told the Associated Press on Friday at the family-owned business in Cato, N.Y., about 30 miles west of Syracuse.

The facility’s employees had all been vetted and had legal documentation, Schmidt said, adding that he would have cooperated with law enforcement if he’d been told there were concerns.

“Coming in like they did, it’s frightening for everybody — the Latinos … that work here, and everybody else that works here as well, even myself and my family. It’s terrifying,” he said.

Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck said his deputies were among those on scene Thursday morning after being asked a month ago to assist federal agencies in executing a search warrant “relative to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

He did not detail the nature of the investigation.

The lack of explanation raised questions for state Sen. Rachel May, a Democrat who represents the district.

“It’s not clear to me, if it’s a long-standing criminal investigation, why the workers would have been rounded up,” May said by phone Friday. “I feel like there are things that don’t quite add up.”

Worker describes raid

The 24-year-old worker, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said that after he showed the agents he is a legal U.S. resident, they wrote down his information and photographed him.

“Some of the women started to cry because their kids were at school or at day care. It was very sad to see,” said the worker, who arrived from Guatemala six years ago and became a legal resident two years ago.

He said his partner lacked legal status and was among those taken away.

The two of them started working at the factory about two years ago. He was assigned to the snack bar wrapping department and she to the packing area. He said he couldn’t talk to her before she was led away by agents and didn’t know Friday where she had been detained.

“What they are doing to us is not right. We’re here to work. We are not criminals,” he said.

Schmidt said he believed immigration enforcement agents are singling out any company with “some sort of Hispanic workforce, whether small or large.”

The raid came the same day that immigration authorities detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, at a manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.

Without his missing employees, Schmidt estimated production at the food manufacturer would drop by about half, making it a challenge to meet customer demand. The plant employs close to 230 people.

“We’ll just do what we need to do to move forward to give our customers the product that they need,” he said, “and then slowly recoup, rehire where we need.”

Dozens held

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said the workers detained included parents of “at least a dozen children at risk of returning from school to an empty house.”

“I’ve made it clear: New York will work with the federal government to secure our borders and deport violent criminals, but we will never stand for masked ICE agents separating families and abandoning children,” she said in a statement.

The advocacy group Rural and Migrant Ministry said 50 to 60 people, most of them from Guatemala, were still being held Friday. Among those released late Thursday, after about 11 hours, was a mother of a newborn who needed to nurse her baby, said the group’s chief program officer, Wilmer Jimenez.

The worker who was briefly detained said he has been helping to support his parents and siblings, who grow corn and beans in Guatemala.

He said he took Friday off but plans to get back to work Monday.

“I have to go back because I can’t be without work,” he said.

Hill writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., contributed to this report.

Hundreds of federal agents descended on a sprawling site where Hyundai manufactures electric vehicles in Georgia and detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals.

This is the latest in a long line of workplace raids conducted as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. But the one on Thursday is distinct because of its large size and the fact that it targeted a manufacturing site state officials have long called Georgia’s largest economic development project.

The detainment of South Korean nationals also sets it apart, as they are rarely caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which data show has focused on Latinos.

Video released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday showed a caravan of vehicles driving up to the site and then federal agents directing workers to line up outside. Some detainees were ordered to put their hands up against a bus as they were frisked and then shackled around their hands, ankles and waist. Others had plastic ties around their wrists as they boarded a Georgia inmate-transfer bus.

Here are some things to know about the raid and the people impacted:

The workers detained

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Saturday that more than 300 South Koreans were among the 475 people detained.

Some of them worked for the plant operated by HL-GA Battery Co., a joint venture by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution that is set to open next year, while others were employed by contractors and subcontractors at the construction site, according to Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations.

He said that some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working.

But an immigration attorney representing two of the detained workers said his clients arrived from South Korea under a visa waiver program that allows them to travel for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa.

Attorney Charles Kuck said one of his clients has been in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, while the other has been in the country for about 45 days, adding that they had been planning to return home soon.

The detainees also included a lawful permanent resident who was kept in custody for having a prior record involving firearm and drug offenses, since committing a crime of “moral turpitude” can put their status in jeopardy, said Lindsay Williams, a public affairs officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, on Saturday.

Williams denied reports that U.S. citizens had been detained at the site, since “once citizens have identified themselves, we have no authority.”

Hyundai Motor Co. said in a statement Friday that none of its employees had been detained as far as it knew and that it is reviewing its practices to make sure suppliers and subcontractors follow U.S. employment laws. LG told the Associated Press that it couldn’t immediately confirm how many of its employees or Hyundai workers had been detained.

The South Korean government expressed “concern and regret” over the operation targeting its citizens and is sending diplomats to the site.

“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of U.S. law enforcement,” South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong said in a televised statement from Seoul.

Most of the people detained have been taken to an immigration detention center in Folkston, Ga., near the Florida state line. None of them have been charged with any crimes yet, Schrank said, but the investigation is ongoing.

Family members and friends of the detainees were having a hard time locating them or figuring out how to get in touch with them, James Woo, communications director for the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said Saturday in an email.

Woo added that many of the families were in South Korea because many of the detainees were in the United States only for business purposes.

Raid is the result of a months-long investigation

The raid was the result of a months-long investigation into allegations of illegal hiring at the site, Schrank said.

In a search warrant and related affidavits, agents sought items including employment records for current and former workers, timecards and video and photos of workers.

Court records filed last week indicated that prosecutors do not know who hired what it called “hundreds of illegal aliens.” The identity of the “actual company or contractor hiring the illegal aliens is currently unknown,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a Thursday court filing.

The sprawling manufacturing site

The raid targeted a manufacturing site widely considered one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile.

Hyundai Motor Group started manufacturing EVs at the $7.6-billion plant a year ago. Today, the site employs about 1,200 people in a largely rural area about 25 miles west of Savannah.

Agents homed in on an adjacent plant that is still under construction at which Hyundai has partnered with LG Energy Solution to produce batteries that power EVs.

The Hyundai site is in Bryan County, which saw its population increase by more than a quarter in the early 2020s and stood at almost 47,000 residents in 2023, the most recent year data are available. The county’s Asian population went from 1.5% in 2018 to 2.2% in 2023, and the growth was primarily among people of Indian descent, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Raid was the ‘largest single site enforcement operation’

The Trump administration has targeted an array of businesses in its workplace raids, including farms, construction sites, restaurants, car washes and auto repair shops. But most have been smaller, including a raid the same day as the Georgia one in which federal officers took away dozens of workers from a snack-bar manufacturer in Cato, N.Y.

Other recent high-profile raids have included one in July targeting Glass House Farms, a legal marijuana farm in Camarillo. More than 360 people were arrested in one of the largest raids since Trump took office in January. Another took place at an Omaha meat production plant and involved dozens of workers being taken away.

Schrank described the one in Georgia as the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the agency’s two-decade history.

The majority of the people detained are Koreans. During the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, 2024, 46 Koreans were deported out of more than 270,000 removals for all nationalities, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and other state Republican officials, who had courted Hyundai and celebrated the EV plant’s opening, issued statements Friday saying all employers in the state were expected to follow the law.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta described the raid in a joint statement as “unacceptable.”

“Our communities know the workers targeted at Hyundai are everyday people who are trying to feed their families, build stronger communities, and work toward a better future,” the statement said.

Sammie Rentz opened the Viet Huong Supermarket less than 3 miles from the Hyundai site six months ago and said he worries business may not bounce back after falling off sharply since the raid.

“I’m concerned. Koreans are very proud people, and I bet they’re not appreciating what just happened. I’m worried about them cutting and running, or starting an exit strategy,” he said.

Ellabell resident Tanya Cox, who lives less than a mile from the Hyundai site, said she had no ill feelings toward Korean nationals or other immigrant workers at the site. But few neighbors were employed there, and she felt like more construction jobs at the battery plant should have gone to local residents.

“I don’t see how it’s brought a lot of jobs to our community or nearby communities,” Cox said.

Golden writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mike Schneider in Orlando, Fla., contributed to this report.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Some 475 people were detained during an immigration raid at a sprawling Georgia site where South Korean auto company Hyundai manufactures electric vehicles, according to a Homeland Security official.

Steven Schrank, Special Agent in Charge, Homeland Security Investigations, said at a news briefing Friday that the majority of the people detained were from South Korea.

“This operation underscores our commitment to jobs for Georgians and Americans,” Schrank said.

South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong described the number of detained South Koreans as “large” though he did not provide an exact figure.

He said the detained workers were part of a “network of subcontractors,” and that the employees worked for a variety of different companies on the site.

Thursday’s raid targeted one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile manufacturing sites, touted by the governor and other officials as the largest economic development project in the state’s history. Hyundai Motor Group, South Korea’s biggest automaker, began manufacturing EVs a year ago at the $7.6 billion plant, which employs about 1,200 people, and has partnered with LG Energy Solution to build an adjacent battery plant, slated to open next year.

In a statement to The Associated Press, LG said it was “closely monitoring the situation and gathering all relevant details.” It said it couldn’t immediately confirm how many of its employees or Hyundai workers had been detained.

“Our top priority is always ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees and partners. We will fully cooperate with the relevant authorities,” the company said.

Hyundai’s South Korean office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams confirmed that federal authorities conducted an enforcement operation at the 3,000-acre site west of Savannah, Georgia. He said agents were focused on the construction site for the battery plant.

In a televised statement, Lee said the ministry is taking active measures to address the case, dispatching diplomats from its embassy in Washington and consulate in Atlanta to the site, and planning to form an on-site response team centered on the local mission.

“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of U.S. law enforcement,” Lee said.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that agents executed a search warrant “as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes.”

President Trump’s administration has undertaken sweeping ICE operations as part of a mass deportation agenda. Immigration officers have raided farms, construction sites, restaurants and auto repair shops.

The Pew Research Center, citing preliminary Census Bureau data, says the U.S. labor force lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January through July. That includes people who are in the country illegally as well as legal residents.

Kim and Bynum write for the Associated Press. Bynum reported from Savannah, Ga.

WASHINGTON — President Trump greeted Lee Jae Myung, the new president of South Korea, by asserting that a “Purge or Revolution” was taking place there and threatening to not do business with Seoul as he prepared to host the new leader at the White House later Monday.

Trump elaborated later Monday that he was referring to raids on churches and on a U.S. military base by the new South Korean government, which they “probably shouldn’t have done,” the president argued.

“I heard bad things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday morning. “I don’t know if it’s true or not. I’ll be finding out.”

The warning shot previewed a potentially hostile confrontation later Monday as Lee, the liberal leader and longtime critic of Seoul’s conservative establishment, sits down with Trump to discuss Seoul and Washington’s recent trade agreement and continued defense cooperation. Lee leads a nation that has been in a state of political turmoil for the last several months after its former leader, the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, briefly imposed martial law last December which eventually led to his stunning ouster from office.

Trump did not identify specific raids. But earlier this month, South Korean police conducted a raid on a church led by a conservative activist pastor whom authorities allege is connected to a pro-Yoon protest in January that turned violent, according to Yonhap news agency. A special prosecutor’s team that is investigating corruption allegations against Yoon’s wife, former first lady Kim Keon Hee, also raided the facilities of the Unification Church after allegations that one of its officials gave Kim luxury goods.

Meanwhile, Osan Air Base, which is jointly operated by the United States and South Korea, was also the target of a raid last month by investigators looking into how Yoon’s activation of martial law transpired, according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper. South Korean officials have insisted the raid was in the areas controlled by Seoul.

“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there,” Trump posted on social media Monday morning. “I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”

Yoon, who was elected to a five-year term in 2022, was considered more ideologically aligned with Trump and had even taken up golfing again after the U.S. president was reelected last November to try to forge a bond with him.

The liberal Lee, an outspoken critic of Seoul’s conservative establishment who had narrowly lost to Yoon in that 2022 election, led the South Korean parliament’s efforts to overturn Yoon’s martial law decree while impeaching him. The nation’s Constitutional Court formally dismissed Yoon in April.

Before Trump’s Truth Social post Monday morning, the first in-person meeting between Trump and Lee had been expected to help flesh out details of a July trade deal between the two countries that has Seoul investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. The agreement set tariffs on South Korean goods at 15% after Trump threatened rates as high as 25%.

Trump declared at the time that South Korea would be “completely OPEN TO TRADE” with the U.S. and accept goods such as cars and agricultural products. Automobiles are South Korea’s top export to the U.S.

Seoul has one of the largest trade surpluses among Washington’s NATO and Indo-Pacific allies, and countries where the U.S. holds a trade deficit has drawn particular ire from Trump, who wants to eliminate such trade imbalances.

Lee’s office said in announcing the visit that the two leaders plan to discuss cooperating on key manufacturing sectors such as semiconductors, batteries and shipbuilding. The latter has been a particular area of focus for the U.S. president.

On defense, one potential topic is the continued presence of U.S. troops in South Korea and concerns in Seoul that the U.S. will seek higher payments in return.

Ahead of his visit to Washington, Lee traveled to Tokyo for his first bilateral visit as president in a hugely symbolic trip for the two nations that hold longstanding historical wounds. The summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was interpreted by analysts as a way to show unity and potential leverage as Japan and South Korea face new challenges from the Trump administration.

Lee was the first South Korean president to choose Japan for the inaugural bilateral visit since the two nations normalized ties in 1965.

Elected in June, Lee was a former child laborer with an arm deformity who rose his way through South Korea’s political ranks to lead the liberal Democratic Party and win the presidency after multiple attempts.

Lee faced an assassination attempt in January 2024, when he was stabbed in the neck by a man saying he wanted Lee’s autograph and later told investigators that he intended to kill the politician.

Lee arrived in the U.S. on Sunday and will leave Tuesday. He headlined a dinner Sunday evening with roughly 200 local Korean-Americans in downtown Washington on Sunday night.

Kim writes for the Associated Press.

In downtown Los Angeles, Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a news conference with Democratic leaders when the Border Patrol showed up nearby to conduct a showy immigration raid.

In Washington D.C., hundreds of National Guard troops patrolled the streets, some in armored vehicles, as city officials battled with the White House over whether the federal government can take control of the local police department.

President Trump has long demonized “blue” cities like Los Angeles, Washington and New York, frequently claiming — often contrary to the evidence — that their Democratic leaders have allowed crime and blight to worsen. Trump, for example, cited out-of-control crime as the reason for his Washington D.C. guard deployment, even though data shows crime in the city is down.

But over the last few months, Trump’s rhetoric has given way to searing images of federal power on urban streets that are generating both headlines and increasing alarm in some circles.

While past presidents have occasionally used the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in response to clear, acute crises, the way Trump has deployed troops in Democratic-run cities is unprecedented in American politics. Trump has claimed broader inherent powers and an authority to deploy troops to cities when and where he decides there is an emergency, said Matthew Beckmann, a political science professor at UC Irvine.

“President Trump is testing how far he can push his authority, in no small part to find out who or what can challenge him,” he said.

State and local officials reacted with shock when they learned Border Patrol agents had massed outside Newsom’s news conference Thursday. The governor was preparing to announce the launch of a campaign for a ballot measure, which if approved by voters, would redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats before the 2026 midterms.

Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told a Fox 11 reporter: “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves.” When the reporter noted that Newsom was nearby, Bovino responded, “I don’t know where he’s at.”

However, local law enforcement sources told The Times that the raid was not random and that they had received word from the federal authorities that Little Tokyo was targeted due to its proximity to the governor’s event. The raid, the sources told The Times, was less about making arrests and more of a show of force intended to disrupt Democrats.

Whatever the reason, the raid generated news coverage and at least in the conservative media, overshadowed the announcement of the redistricting plan.

Trump’s second term has been marked by increased use of troops in cities. He authorized the deployment of thousands of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. in June after immigration raids sparked scattered protests. The troops saw little action, and local leaders said the deployment was unnecessary and only served to inflame tensions.

The operation reached a controversial zenith in July when scores of troops on horseback wearing tactical gear and driving armored vehicles, rolled through MacArthur Park. The incident generated much attention, but local police were surprised that the raid was brief and resulted in few arrests.

After the MacArthur Park raid, Mayor Karen Bass complained “there’s no plan other than fear, chaos and politics.”

Beckmann said the situation is a “particularly perilous historical moment because we have a president willing to flout constitutional limits while Congress and the court have been willing to accept pretext as principle.”

UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Eric Schickler, co-director of the university’s Institute of Governmental Studies, said the recent military displays are part of a larger mission to increase the power of the president and weaken other countervailing forces, such as the dismantling of federal agencies and the weakening of universities.

“It all adds up to a picture of really trying to turn the president into the one dominant force in American politics — he is the boss of everything, he controls everything,” Schickler said. “And that’s just not how the American political system has worked for 240 years.”

In some way, Trump’s tactics are an extension of long-held rhetoric. In the 1980s, he regularly railed against crime in New York City, including the rape of a woman in Central Park that captured national headlines. The suspects, known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated after spending years in prison and have filed a defamation suit against Trump.

Trump and his backers say he is simply keeping campaign promises to reduce crime and deport people in the country illegally.

“Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law — not about Gavin Newsom,” said Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

Federal agents “patrol all areas of Los Angeles every day with over 40 teams on the ground to make L.A. safe,” she said.

In Washington D.C., where the federal government has began assuming law enforcement responsibilities, the business of policing the streets of the nation’s capital had radically transformed by Friday. Federal agencies typically tasked with investigating drug kingpins, gunrunners and cybercriminals were conducting traffic stops and helping with other routine policing.

Twenty federal law enforcement teams fanned out across the city Thursday night with more than 1,750 people joining the operation, a White House official told the Associated Press. They made 33 arrests, including 15 people who did not have permanent legal status. Others were arrested on warrants for murder, rape and driving under the influence, the official said.

Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice, said the administration’s actions not only threaten democracy, but they also have real consequences for local leaders and residents. Citizens often can’t distinguish between federal or local officers and don’t know when the two groups are or aren’t working together.

“That breeds a lot of confusion and also breeds a lot of fear,” Johnson said.

Thomas Abt, founding director of University of Maryland’s Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, emphasized that pulling federal agents from their jobs can hurt overall public safety.

“There’s a real threat to politicizing federal law enforcement, and sending them wherever elected officials think there’s a photo opportunity instead of doing the hard work of federal law enforcement,” Abt said.

Already, D.C. residents and public officials have pushed back on federal law enforcement’s presence. When federal officers set up a vehicle checkpoint along the 14th Street Northwest corridor this week, hecklers shouted, “Go home, fascists” and “Get off our streets.”

On Friday, the District of Columbia filed an emergency motion seeking to block the Trump administration’s takeover of the city’s police department.

“This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a statement on Friday. “The Administration’s actions are brazenly unlawful. They go well beyond the bounds of the President’s limited authority and instead seek a hostile takeover of MPD.”

The show of force in L.A. has also left local officials outraged at what they see as deliberate efforts to sow fear and exert power. Hours before agents arrived in Little Tokyo, Bass and other officials held a news conference calling for an end to the continued immigration raids.

Bass said she believes the recent actions violated the temporary restraining order upheld this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals prohibiting agents from targeting people solely based on their race, vocation, language or location.

The number of arrests in Southern California declined in July after a judge issued the order. But in the past two weeks, some higher profile raids have begun to ramp up again.

In one instance, an 18-year-old Los Angeles high school senior was picked up by federal immigration officers while walking his dog in Van Nuys. On Thursday, a man apparently running from agents who showed up at a Home Depot parking lot in Monrovia was hit by a car and killed on the 210 Freeway.

Bass appeared to be seething as she spoke to reporters after Newsom’s press conference on Thursday, calling the raid in Little Tokyo a “provocative act” and “unbelievably disrespectful.”

“They’re talking about disorder in Los Angeles, and they are the source of the disorder in Los Angeles right now,” she said.

“Thank you so much for showing up this morning,” Sharon Nicholls said into a megaphone at 8 a.m. Wednesday outside a Home Depot in Pasadena.

As of Friday afternoon, no federal agents had raided the store on East Walnut Street. But the citizen brigade that stands watch outside and patrols the parking lot in search of ICE agents has not let down its guard—especially not after raids at three other Home Depots in recent days despite federal court rulings limiting sweeps.

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

About two dozen people gathered near the tent that serves as headquarters of the East Pasadena Community Defense Center. Another dozen or so would be arriving over the next half hour, some carrying signs.

“Silence is Violence”

“Migrants Don’t Party With Epstein”

Cynthia Lunine, 70, carried a large sign that read “Break His Dark Spell” and included a sinister image of President Trump. She said she was new to political activism, but added: “You can’t not be an activist. If you’re an American, it’s the only option. The immigration issue is absolutely inhumane, it’s un-Christian, and it’s intolerable.”

Anit-ICE activists march through the Home Depot in Pasadena on Aug. 6.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

There are local supporters, for sure, of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Activists told me there aren’t many days in which they don’t field shouted profanities or pro-Trump cheers from Home Depot shoppers.

But the administration’s blather about a focus on violent offenders led to huge demonstrations in greater Los Angeles beginning in June, and the cause continues to draw people into the streets.

Dayena Campbell, 35, is a volunteer at Community Defense Corner operations in other parts of Pasadena, a movement that followed high-profile raids and was covered in the Colorado Boulevard newspaper and, later, in the New York Times. A fulltime student who works in sales, Campbell was also cruising the parking lot at the Home Depot on the east side of Pasadena in search of federal agents.

She thought this Home Depot needed its own Community Defense Corner, so she started one about a month ago. She and her cohort have more than once spotted agents in the area and alerted day laborers. About half have scattered, she said, and half have held firm despite the risk.

When I asked what motivated Campbell, she said:

“Inhumane, illegal kidnappings. Lack of due process. Actions taken without anyone being held accountable. Seeing people’s lives ripped apart. Seeing families being destroyed in the blink of an eye.”

Anywhere from a handful to a dozen volunteers show up daily to to hand out literature, patrol the parking lot and check in on day laborers, sometimes bringing them food. Once a week, Nicholls helps organize a rally that includes a march through the parking lot and into the store, where the protesters present a letter asking Home Depot management to “say no to ICE in their parking lot and in their store.”

Nicholls is an LAUSD teacher-librarian, and when she asks for support each week, working and retired teachers answer the call.

“I’m yelling my lungs out,” said retired teacher Mary Rose O’Leary, who joined in the chants of “ICE out of Home Depot” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”

Sharon Nicholls gets a hug of support from another protester outside the Home Depot in Pasadena.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

“Immigrants are what make this city what it is … and the path to legal immigration is closed to everybody who doesn’t have what, $5 million or something?” O’Leary said, adding that she was motivated by “the Christian ideal of welcoming the stranger.”

Retired teacher Dan Murphy speaks Spanish and regularly checks in with day laborers.

“One guy said to me, ‘We’re just here to work.’ Some of the guys were like, ‘We’re not criminals … we’re just here … to make money and get by,’” Murphy said. He called the raids a flexing of “the violent arm of what autocracy can bring,” and he resents Trump’s focus on Southern California.

“I take it personally. I’m white, but these are my people. California is my people. And it bothers me what might happen in this country if people don’t stand firm … I just said, ‘I gotta do something.’ I’m doing this now so I don’t hate myself later.”

Nicholls told me she was an activist many years ago, and then turned her focus to work and raising a family. But the combination of wildfires, the cleanup and rebuilding, and the raids, brought her out of activism retirement.

“The first people to come out after the firefighters—the second-responders—were day laborers cleaning the streets,” Nicholls said. “You’d see them in orange shirts all over the city, cleaning up.”

The East Pasadena Home Depot is “an important store,” because it’s a supply center for the rebuilding of Altadena, “and we’re going out there to show our love and solidarity for our neighbors,” Nicholls said. To strike the fear of deportation in the hearts of workers, she said, is “inhumane, and to me, it’s morally wrong.”

Nicholls had a quick response when I asked what she thinks of those who say illegal is illegal, so what’s left to discuss?

“That blocks the complexity of the conversation,” she said, and doesn’t take into account the hunger and violence that drive migration. Her husband, she said, left El Salvador 35 years ago during a war funded in part by the U.S.

Pablo Alvarado, right, co-director of National Day Laborer Organizing Network, speaks to Anti-ICE protesters on Aug. 6.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

They have family members with legal status and some who are undocumented and afraid to leave their homes, Nicholls said. I mentioned that I had written about Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, who was undocumented as a child, and has kept his passport handy since the raids began. In that column, I quoted Gordo’s friend, immigrant-rights leader Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

“Full disclosure,” Nicholls said, “[Alvarado] is my husband.”

It was news to me.

When the raids began, Nicholls said, she told her husband, “I have the summer off, sweetie, but I want to help, and I’m going to call my friends.”

On Wednesday, after Nicholls welcomed demonstrators, Alvarado showed up for a pep talk.

“I have lived in this country since 1990 … and I love it as much as I love the small village where I came from in El Salvador,” Alvarado said. “Some people may say that we are going into fascism, into authoritarianism, and I would say that we are already there.”

He offered details of a raid that morning at a Home Depot in Westlake and said the question is not whether the Pasadena store will be raided, but when. This country readily accepts the labor of immigrants but it does not respect their humanity, Alvarado said.

“When humble people are attacked,” he said, “we are here to bear witness.”

Nicholls led demonstrators through the parking lot and into the store, where she read aloud the letter asking Home Depot to take a stand against raids.

Outside, where it was hot and steamy by mid-morning, several sun-blasted day laborers said they appreciated the support. But they were still fearful, and desperate for work.

Jorge, just shy of 70, practically begged me to take his phone number.

Whatever work I might have, he said, please call.

[email protected]

One of California’s largest legal cannabis companies announced Monday that it would radically revamp its labor practices in the wake of a massive immigration raid at two company facilities last month. The raid led to the death of one worker and the detention of more than 360 people, including, according to government officials, 14 minors.

Glass House Brands announced it had “terminated its relationship” with the two farm labor contractors who had provided workers to the cannabis green house operations in Camarillo and Carpinteria. It also announced that it has “made significant changes to labor practices that are above and beyond legal requirements.”

Those include hiring experts to scrutinize workers’ documents as well as hiring the consulting firm Guidepost Services to advise the company on best practices for determining employment eligibility. The firm is led by Julie Myers Wood, a former ICE director under President George W. Bush.

The company also said it has signed a new “labor peace” agreement with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters.

Glass House officials declined to comment publicly beyond what was in a press release, but a source close to the company said that officials wanted to “make sure we never have a situation that we had on July 10. We can’t have this ever happen again.”

On that day, federal agents in masks and riot gear stormed across Glass House operations in Ventura and Santa Barbara county in the state’s largest ICE workplace raid in recent memory. Agents chased panicked workers through vast green houses and deployed tear gas and less-than-lethal projectiles at protesters and employees.

One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell three stories from the roof of a greenhouse trying to evade capture. Others were bloodied from shards of glass broken or hid for hours on the roofs or beneath the leaves and plastic shrouding. More than 360 people — a mixture of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passerby—were ultimately detained, including at least two American citizens including a U.S. Army veteran.

In the wake of the raid, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Glass House had been targeted because “we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity.”

To date, neither Homeland Security nor the U.S. Department of Justice have announced any legal action regardlng the alleged trafficking and exploitation of juveniles.

In its press release, Glass House said that just nine of its direct employees were detained; all others picked up were either employees of its labor contractors or were “unassociated with the company.”

With regards to the government’s contention that it had found children working in cannabis, the company said: “while the identities of the alleged minors have not been disclosed, the company has been able to determine that, if those reports are true, none of them were Glass House employees.” California labor law allows children as young as 12 to work in agriculture, but workers must be 21 to work in cannabis.

The raid devastated Glass House and its workforce. Numerous workers were detained or disappeared, terrified to return. Those that remained were so distraught the company called in grief counselors.

Across the wider world of legal cannabis, people were also shaken. Glass House, which is backed by wealthy investors and presents a sleek corporate image in the wild world of cannabis in California, has long been known as the “Walmart of Weed.” Many in California’s cannabis industry feared the raid on Glass House was a signal that the federal government’s ceasefire against cannabis —which is legal in California but still not federally—had come to an end.

In the wake of the raid, the United Farm Workers and other organizations warned farm laborers who were not citizens — even those with legal status — to avoid working in cannabis because “cannabis remains criminalized under federal law.”

In its statement, Glass House said the search warrant served on the company the day of the raid was seeking “evidence of possible immigration violations.” A source close to the company said officials have had no further contact with the federal government since the raid.

Some farm labor advocates were unimpressed by the company’s announcement of revamped labor practices, saying it was farm workers who would pay the price.

Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, said Glass House was using farm labor contractors to avoid responsibility “while their workers are torn away from their families in handcuffs.”

“This shows the double standards of our legal system, where corporations can profit from the immigrant workers their businesses depend on, yet wipe their hands clean when it becomes inconvenient,” he said. He added that “many farmworkers are still struggling to navigate this mess of labor contractors and have not been paid for the work they did at Glass House.”

A source close to Glass House said company officials want to make sure everyone who was at work on the day of the raid receives all the wages they are owed.

Company officials authorized all workers to be paid through 11:30 pm on the day of the raid, because workers who had finished their shifts couldn’t get out because immigration agents were blocking the doors. The source said the farm labor contractors had been paid and should have released wages to all the workers.

“We don’t want anyone to be shorted,” the source said.

AN XXL Labubu doll worth more than £100,000 was uncovered by Hong Kong police during a major raid on Tuesday morning.

The gang, suspected of laundering £4 billion, had been under surveillance for two and a half years – but police never expected to find a giant plush toy among their illicit haul.

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According to the South Morning China Post, the seized goods belonged to the Triad syndicate – one of the oldest and most notorious criminal organisations in China.

Hong Kong police launched a large-scale raid on Tuesday, writing in a post on X: “When the time was ripe – the HKPF mounted the territory-wide anti-triad ‘Operation HIDDENARROW’ on July 29, 2025.”

The force seized €780,000 in cash, 11,000 bottles of wine, luxury watches, gold and a 5ft2 Labubu doll.

The figure is said to be rare – one of fifteen of its kind in the world.

A similar piece went under the hammer in Beijing in June for around £113,000.

As many as 82 suspects were reportedly arrested during the operation – 55 men and 27 women, ranging in age from 19 to 78.

Among them was the alleged 44-year-old ringleader.

He is suspected of running the operation and involving friends and family in the money laundering scheme.

Police added on X: “The ringleader manipulated his family & friends as well as the members of his gang into laundering the crime proceeds via calculated means.”

They listed this means as “continuously laundering the illicit funds via a trust company” and “committing #LoanFraud – using some seemingly lawful import trades as fronts.”

The gang’s funds came from prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal gambling, according to police.

Police said they froze assets worth around £115 million.

It’s still unclear whether Triad was banking on a rise in the Labubu doll’s value, were fans of the character or whether the toy might be a fake.

Labubus have taken the internet by storm – with Chinese toymaker Pop Mart’s valuation skyrocketing to £31.6bn.

The cult collectable dolls have been spotted dangling from the designer bags of Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and David Beckham.

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Camarillo — Ever since federal immigration agents raided one of the largest licensed cannabis operators in the state this month, the phones of cannabis industry insiders have been blazing with messages of fear, sadness and confusion.

“It sent shock waves through the community,” said Hirsh Jain, the founder of Ananda Strategy, which advises cannabis businesses. “Everyone is on text threads.”

Glass House Brands, whose cannabis operations have helped make Santa Barbara and Ventura counties the new cannabis capitals of California, has long been among the most prominent companies in the state’s wild frontier of legal cannabis. Some call it the “Walmart of Weed” for its streamlined, low-cost production methods, its gargantuan market share and its phalanx of wealthy investors and powerful lobbyists.

But federal immigration agents stormed onto company property in Camarillo and Carpinteria on July 10 in a cloud of tear gas, as if they were busting a criminal enterprise. Agents in masks and riot gear marched for hours through the company’s vast greenhouses as workers fled and hid in panic. One worker, Jaime Alanís Garcia, died after he fell three stories while trying to evade capture.

For Glass House, the aftermath has been devastating. Its stock, which is traded on the Canadian stock exchange, dropped from more than $7.75 a share the day before the raid to $5.27 on Thursday. Some workers disappeared into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention or bolted, too fearful to return. Others were so traumatized that Glass House brought in grief counselors, according to a source close to the company.

Glass House Brands has long been a prominent company in California’s wild frontier of legal cannabis.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Across the wider world of legal California cannabis — where many growers and entrepreneurs have hoped the Trump administration would legalize the drug — people were also shaken. Did the action against Glass House signal an end to federal law enforcement’s ceasefire against legal cannabis in California and dozens of other states?

And what did it mean for Glass House itself, among the largest cannabis companies in the world? How could this slick corporate entity, founded by an ex-cop and special education teacher and a former tech entrepreneur, be in a position in which federal agents claimed to have apprehended more than a dozen undocumented minors on site?

“This could not come at a worse time,” said Jain, the cannabis consultant, adding that the images and rhetoric that have whipped across social media in the wake of the raid “impedes our ability to legitimize this industry in the eyes of California and the American public.”

He added that “a failure to legitimize a legal cannabis industry enables the proliferation of an illicit industry that is not accountable and engages in far more nefarious practices.”

Working conditions in the cannabis industry are notoriously grim, as documented in a 2022 Times investigation that revealed workers who had their wages stolen, were forced to live in squalid and dangerous conditions and sometimes even died on the job.

Glass House had no such reports of injuries or deaths before the raid and has long touted its working conditions. A source close to the company said it pays workers more than minimum wage, and internet job postings reflect that.

Still, as with almost all farmwork in California, some of those who labored there were undocumented. The company employs some people directly and relies on farm labor contractors to supply the rest of its workforce. A source close to the company said labor contractors certify that the workers satisfy all laws and regulations, including being 21 or older as required to work in cannabis in California.

In the days after the raid, federal officials announced they had detained 361 people, including 14 minors, who by California law cannot work in cannabis. It wasn’t clear how many of those detained were undocumented or how many were even working at the operation or were just nearby. At least two American citizens were caught up in the dragnet — a security guard headed to work at Glass House and a philosophy professor at Cal State Channel Islands who was protesting the raid.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this month that Glass House had been targeted because “we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity.”

Glass House officials declined to comment for this article, but in an earlier statement on X, the company said that it had never employed minors and that it followed all applicable employment laws. A source close to the company said the search warrant federal officials presented to Glass House the day of the raid alleged it was suspected of harboring and unlawfully employing undocumented immigrants — but did not mention child labor.

In the last few years, the company — along with labor contractors — was named in lawsuits by workers alleging they had been sexually harassed, suffered discrimination, and been shorted overtime pay and required meal and rest breaks.

One worker at Glass House — who asked not to be identified because he is undocumented and hid from immigration agents during the raid before escaping — said he was employed to work in Glass House’s cannabis operation through one of its labor contractors and valued the job because it is year round, not seasonal like many agricultural jobs.

But he complained that the contractor had repeatedly paid him late, forcing him to borrow money to make his rent. He also said supervisors put intense pressure on employees to work faster, screaming expletives at workers, refusing to allow breaks, or yelling at them to eat quickly and return to work before their rest periods were done.

A source close to the company said the complaints involved people employed by labor contractors, regarding actions by those contractors and not Glass House directly.

Many of the suits are pending, with Glass House named as a co-defendant. Company officials declined to comment publicly.

A source close to the company said Glass House takes seriously its responsibilities under California labor law and is committed to ensuring that all labor practices within its operations meet the highest standards.

The source added that the raid has shaken a company that has always tried to operate by the book and that, despite its exponential growth in recent years, has sought to maintain a close-knit feel.

“It’s very sad,” the source said.

In the wake of the raids at Glass House, the United Farm Workers union issued a bulletin in English and Spanish warning anyone who is not a U.S. citizen to “avoid working in the cannabis industry, even at state-licensed operations.” The union noted that “because cannabis remains criminalized under federal law, any contact with federal agencies could have serious consequences even for people with legal status.”

TODEC Legal Center, a Coachella Valley-based group that supports immigrants and farmworkers, issued a similar message. TODEC warned noncitizens to avoid working in the marijuana industry and avoid discussing any marijuana use or possession — even if it is legal in California — with federal agents, because it could hurt their status.

Federal agents conduct a raid of Glass House Brands on Laguna Road in Camarillo.

(Julie Leopo / For The Times)

About half the farmworkers in California are undocumented, according to UC Merced researchers. Cannabis industry experts said it is too soon to know whether the raid on Glass House will affect the larger cannabis workforce — or whether more licensed cannabis operations will be raided.

“My best guest would be that this is going to be happening to a lot more cultivation farms,” said Meilad Rafiei, chief executive of the cannabis consulting group We Cann.

Among the undocumented workers at Glass House on the day of the raids was Alanís, 56, who had been a farmworker in California for three decades. Over the last 10 years, Alanís worked in the Ventura area, first in a flower nursery and then, once Glass House converted the massive greenhouse complex there, in cannabis.

On Monday night, his family held an emotional wake for him in Oxnard, where he lived. The Camino del Sol Funeral Home was filled, as many family members held one another tightly and cried. They remembered him as a hardworking, joyful man, who danced at parties and enjoyed every meal he shared with family.

State Sen. Monique Limón (D-Goleta), who led the Senate in adjourning in Alanís’ memory last week, told the chamber how he had climbed onto the roof of a greenhouse to escape federal officers. From 30 feet up, she said, he called his family to tell them what was happening, and to report “how scared he was.”

“Jaime’s life was dedicated to our lands, our crops, and to providing for his family,” Limón said, adding that he “had had no criminal record, he was who our country and our state depended on to provide food on all of our tables.”

She added that “his last moments on Earth were filled with terror.”

They called them the “worst of the worst.” For more than a month and a half, the Trump administration has posted a barrage of mugshots of L.A. undocumented immigrants with long rap sheets.

Officials have spotlighted Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man convicted in 1997 of second–degree murder for his role in slaying two teens at a high school graduation party.

They have shared blurry photos on Instagram of a slew of convicted criminals such as Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted in 1996 of sexual penetration with a foreign object with force and assault with intent to commit a felony. And Eswin Uriel Castro, a Mexican convicted in 2002 of child molestation and in 2021 of assault with a deadly weapon.

But the immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security showcase in X posts and news releases do not represent the majority of immigrants swept up across Los Angeles.

As the number of immigration arrests in the L.A. region quadrupled from 540 in April to 2,185 in June, seven out of 10 immigrants arrested in June had no criminal conviction — a trend that immigrant advocates say belies administration claims that they are targeting “heinous illegal alien criminals” who represent a threat to public safety.

According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of ICE data from the Deportation Data Project, the proportion of immigrants without criminal convictions arrested in seven counties in and around L.A. has skyrocketed from 35% in April, to 46% in May, and to 69% from June 1 to June 26.

Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement, said the Trump administration was not being entirely honest about the criminal status of those they were arresting.

Officials, he said, followed a strategy of focusing on the minority of violent convicted criminals so they could justify enforcement policies that are proving to be less popular.

“I think they know that if they were honest with the American public that they’re arresting people who cook our food, wash dishes in the kitchen, take care of people in nursing homes, people who are just living in part of the community … there’s a large segment of the public, including a large segment of Trump’s own supporters, who would be uncomfortable and might even oppose those kinds of immigration practices.”

In Los Angeles, the raids swept up garment worker Jose Ortiz, who worked 18 years at the Ambiance Apparel clothing warehouse in downtown L.A., before being nabbed in a June 6 raid; car wash worker Jesus Cruz, a 52-year-old father who was snatched on June 8 — just before his daughter’s graduation — from Westchester Hand Wash; and Emma De Paz, a recent widow and tamale vendor from Guatemala who was arrested June 19 outside a Hollywood Home Depot.

Such arrests may be influencing the public’s perception of the raids. Multiple polls show support for Trump’s immigration agenda slipping as masked federal agents increasingly swoop up undocumented immigrants from workplaces and streets.

ICE data shows that about 31% of the immigrants arrested across the L.A. region from June 1 to June 26 had criminal convictions, 11% had pending criminal charges and 58% were classified as “other immigration violator,” which ICE defines as “individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE’s system of record at the time of the enforcement action.”

The L.A. region’s surge in arrests of noncriminals has been more dramatic than the U.S. as a whole: Arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions climbed nationally from 57% in April to 69% in June.

Federal raids here have also been more fiercely contested in Southern California — particularly in L.A. County, where more than 2 million residents are undocumented or living with undocumented family members.

“A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. “But it’s hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you’re going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.”

Trump never said he would arrest only criminals.

Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally.

Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: “That doesn’t mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation’s borders are off the table.”

As White House chief advisor on border policy Tom Homan put it: “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem.”

Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE’s top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record.

Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals.

“There aren’t enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,” Bier said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there’s half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It’s not millions and millions.”

By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants.

“70% of ICE arrests,” the agency said in a news release, “are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.”

But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June.

In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge.

Still, ICE kept insisting it was “putting the worst first.”

As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump’s deportation agenda is falling.

A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump’s handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said “dangerous criminals.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles.

“The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. “They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.”

When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law.

“ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,” Homan told CBS News earlier this month. “We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they’re going to be arrested too.”

Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety.

“It’s a big backtracking from ‘These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,’ to ‘This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,’” Bier said.

The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California.

It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its “sanctuary state” law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson.

Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. “Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, “those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation’s safety and security.”

As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not “What does the data say?”

Instead, we should ask: “How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?”

“I don’t think it’s reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals — or everyone as saints,” Kocher said. “Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.”

The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction.

“If we don’t like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,” Kocher said. “And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.”

In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion’s pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force.

But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole.

A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled “President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won’t.”

The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder.

CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody.

But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose.

“It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

Mayor Karen Bass announced a plan Friday to provide direct cash assistance to people who have been affected by the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration raids.

The aid will be distributed using cash cards with a “couple hundred” dollars on them, which should be available in about a week, Bass said at a news conference.

“You have people who don’t want to leave their homes, who are not going to work, and they are in need of cash,” she said.

Bass spoke about a family she met who needed two incomes to afford their rent. After one of the breadwinners was detained in an immigration raid, she said, the family is concerned they may face eviction.

It was not immediately clear what the qualifications will be needed to receive the cards.

The mayor emphasized that the money will not come from city coffers but from philanthropic partners. The cards will be distributed by immigrants rights groups such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

The city will coordinate between philanthropists and organizations distributing the cards, according to the mayor’s office.

The mayor compared the program to “Angeleno Cards,” created by Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2020 to give financial assistance to people struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The announcement came during a Bass news conference about an executive order she signed Friday directing all city departments to “bolster protocols” and training on how to comply with the city’s sanctuary policy, which states that city employees and city property may not be used to “investigate, cite, arrest, hold, transfer or detain any person” for the purpose of immigration enforcement, except for serious crimes. Departments will have to come up with their plans within two weeks.

The Trump administration sued the city over the sanctuary policy last month, arguing that it discriminates against organizations like ICE.

The executive order also creates a working group that will examine — and possibly update — the LAPD’s policy on responding to immigration enforcement. Since 1979, the LAPD has taken a strong stance against enforcing federal immigration law, prohibiting its officers from initiating contact with anyone for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status.

The executive order also includes a directive to file Freedom of Information Act requests for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to turn over records with the dates and locations of every raid in the city since June 6, as well as the identities of the people detained and the reason for their detention.

The cash cards are one of a slew of announcements — including the executive order — this week by the mayor in response to the federal immigration crackdown in Los Angeles that has entered its second month.

Earlier this week, Bass and the city attorney announced the city’s intention to join a lawsuit calling for an end to the Trump administration’s “unlawful” raids in the city.

Every year, nonprofit organization Chicxs Rockerxs (pronounced cheek-ex roh-kerr-ex) hosts a week-long summer camp in Southeast Los Angeles for girls and gender nonconforming youth to unleash their inner rock stars.

At the camp, which took place from June 30 to July 4 this year, students learn new instruments, attend creative workshops, and perform original songs in bands with their fellow campers. Students ages 8 to 17 qualify for enrollment.

Yet two weeks before camp this summer, amid the citywide uptick in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, organizers heard some students were staying home in fear.

“As we were planning and getting ready for camp in person, that’s sort of when the raids started happening in Southeast L.A., and we saw how intensified they were in the area and how violent [they were] and just really damaging to the community,” said organizer Audrey Silvestre.

To safeguard campers and their families from ICE raids in the region, Chicxs Rockerxs canceled the in-person camp — but not entirely.

Organizers quickly moved the program online. Staffers offered to drop off musical instruments, gift cards for food, and camp supplies to families who were not comfortable going out during the raids. They also made a formal announcement on Instagram, informing supporters about the crucial format change.

“We want to reaffirm that CRSELA stands in solidarity with our Black and Brown immigrant communities. As an organization, we formed in response to the firsthand challenges faced by girls and LGBTQ+ youth in Southeast LA, a predominantly Latinx/e immigrant region,” the post read in part.

“Thank you for thinking of the babies!!!” one person commented on the camp’s post.

“Your SELA community supports you!” another person wrote.

“It didn’t feel safe to be asking our communities to take the risk to leave their homes if they didn’t feel safe to do so,” Silvestre said.

Chicxs Rockerxs previously went virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitated their music camp by having students connect through Zoom to create bands, learn songwriting skills, and come up with an end product they could record together in the video sessions. According to Star, an organizer who asked that their full name not be disclosed for privacy reasons, the virtual model they developed for the pandemic was restructured for this year’s camp, and many changes were made to enhance the experience.

“We wanted them just to have an opportunity to have a safe space to create and to express themselves, and it didn’t necessarily have to result in a song at the end of the week,” Star said. “It was just opportunities to be creative.”

Students still learned new instruments this year, as staffers were able to drop off keyboards, guitars, bass guitars, drum pads and karaoke microphones to campers for daily lessons. Besides music courses, students also participated in smaller breakout rooms called “jam rooms,” which included different themes and creative activities. For example, some jam rooms consisted of karaoke, while others focused on making TikToks and interviewing one another.

“The idea behind these rooms was to keep it fun, because it’s Zoom and it’s not the most exciting for many kiddos who went to school on Zoom,” said Silvestre. “It’s not the most enjoyable way to experience camp, but it’s for them to have fun, bond with their bandmates and just be in community with each other.”

While campers all participated online from home, some staffers operated in person at their campus to stream lunchtime performances and daily assemblies. The organizers created a “DIY television studio,” which they described as similar to public access cable, allowing them to toggle between different cameras from their set to make sessions dynamic and improve the virtual experience for students.

Students like 17-year-old Naima Ramirez, who attended camp for the past four years, said she appreciated what Chicxs Rockerxs did for her and fellow campers.

“I think it was very thoughtful and kind of them to forget all of the scheduling that they had originally done for in-person camp and scramble into doing everything on Zoom,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez said she was initially disappointed to hear that camp was moving online but believed Chicxs Rockerxs did the right thing because of the current environment in Southeast L.A.

“I was bummed because it’s my last year and I was really looking forward to being in person,” Ramirez said. “But I also understood why we had to go online.”

For organizers at Chicxs Rockerxs, the safety and well-being of campers and their families is their top concern. Even though camp took a different approach this year, they said they’re always willing to help campers beyond the creative services they provide.

“One of the things CRSELA prides itself in is that this is meant to be a safe space,” Star said. “I’m really proud that we [were] able to create a safe space in a different way for [camp this year]. It’s a safety precaution for our community, and I think that’s more important at this time.”

The president of the United States, who seems to enjoy nothing more than playing the bully, is picking on Los Angeles. But L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, not known as a public brawler until recently, is ducking punches and throwing her own jabs and uppercuts.

She has accused President Trump of initiating the protests he condemned, and called Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a liar for suggesting L.A. was a city of mayhem.

I had a conversation with her Tuesday about what it’s like to deal with a president like this one, but before we chatted, she stepped to the podium at City Hall, flanked by labor, business and faith leaders, and defended her turf again.

“This is essentially an all-out assault against Los Angeles,” Bass said, denouncing the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing her and the City Council of hindering the battle against “a crisis of illegal immigration.” It’s a political stunt, Bass said several times, denying that the city’s sanctuary city protections are unlawful.

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

“We know that Los Angeles is the test case,” Bass said. “And we will stand strong, and we do so because the people snatched off city streets and chased through parking lots are our neighbors, our family members, and they are Angelenos. Let me be clear. I won’t be intimidated.”

This has not been the best year of Bass’ political career. It began with the destruction of Pacific Palisades by a wildfire that started while Bass was out of town, and continued with the second-guessing of L.A.’s disaster preparedness and questions about who would lead the rebuilding effort.

Throw in the lingering catastrophe of widespread homelessness and wrangling over a city budget deficit, and it was looking as though Bass might be vulnerable in a 2026 reelection bid.

Then came the arrival of federal agents and troops, with raids beginning June 6, and Bass started to find her footing by going against type.

“Her natural instinct is to be a coalition builder — to govern by consensus,” said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University. But that doesn’t work with Trump, “so she’s recalibrating and saying, you know, the only thing this guy understands is confrontation.”

Pomona College politics professor Sara Sadhwani said Trump is attacking “the heart and core of Los Angeles,” and there may be unintended consequences, given the way the president’s actions are unifying many Angelenos. “I think the vast majority of folks in Los Angeles, but also throughout the state, can agree that what’s happening now is not OK and runs counter to our values,” Sadhwani continued. “And Bass is showing incredibly strong leadership.”

President Trump shook hands with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass after a fire briefing in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 24.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

Even a half dozen Republican state legislators have joined the opposition, sending a letter to Trump suggesting he focus on arresting actual criminals rather than going after people who make up an essential component of the economy.

As Sadhwani noted, Republican lawmakers for years have lamented federal overreach and argued in favor of state’s rights and local control. And yet the Trump Administration is set on telling California and Los Angeles how to govern themselves, most recently on sanctuary protections, despite court arguments that they’re protected under the 10th Amendment.

After Tuesday’s press conference, Bass retreated to her office and told me her support for immigrants began with her work as an activist in the 1970s.

“This is fundamentally who I am. But of course, having a blended family” also factors into her politics on immigration. “My ex-husband was a Chicano activist … I have other family members that are married to people from the Philippines, Korea, Japan. I have a Greek side to my family.”

When gathered, she said, her family “looks like the General Assembly of the United Nations.”

And that’s what Los Angeles looks like, with storylines that crisscross the globe and transcend borders.

“I don’t see anybody [here] anywhere calling for deportations, whereas you could imagine in some cities this would be a very divisive issue,” Bass said.

I told her I hear quite often from people asking: “What don’t you understand about the word illegal?” or from people arguing that their relatives waited and immigrated legally.

I understand those perspectives, I told Bass. But I also understand context — namely, the desire of people to seek better opportunities for their children, and the lure of doing so in a United States that relies upon immigrant labor and tacitly allows it while hypocritically condemning it.

While serving in Congress, Bass said, she witnessed the toll wrought by the separation of families along the border. She met people who “carried the trauma throughout their lives, the insecurity, the feeling of abandonment.”

At the very least, the mayor said, federal agents “should identify themselves and they also should have warrants, and they should stop randomly picking people up off the street. The original intent, remember, [was to go after] the hardened criminals. Where are the hardened criminals? They’re chasing them through parking lots at Home Depot? They’re washing cars? I don’t think so.”

U.S. Marines post guard at the Federal Building at the corner of Veteran Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles on June 19.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In fact, the vast majority of arrestees in Los Angeles have no criminal records.

As for the cost of the raids in L.A. — by an administration that made a vow to shrink government — Bass wanted to make a few points.

“You think about the young men and women in the National Guard. They leave their families, work, their school. For what?” she asked. “It’s a misuse of the troops. And the same thing with the Marines. They’re not trained to deal with anything happening on the street. They’re trained to fight to kill the enemy in foreign lands.”

While we were talking, Bass got an urgent call from her daughter, Yvette Lechuga, who works as senior administrative assistant at Mount St. Mary’s University. Lechuga said a woman was apprehended while getting off a shuttle.

“It seems like ICE grabbed our student,” Lechuga said.

Bass said her staff would look into it.

“We were on quasi-lockdown for a while,” Lechuga said.

“Jesus Christ,” said the mayor.

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Mayor Karen Bass fired back at the Department of Justice on Tuesday, calling its lawsuit against her city part of an “all-out assault on Los Angeles” by President Trump.

Bass said she and other city leaders would not be intimidated by the lawsuit, which seeks to invalidate sanctuary policies that prohibit city resources from being used in federal immigration enforcement in most cases.

The mayor, appearing before reporters at City Hall, assailed federal agents for “randomly grabbing people” off the street, “chasing Angelenos through parking lots” and arresting immigrants who showed up at court for annual check-ins. She also took a swipe at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica native widely viewed as the architect of the sweeping immigration crackdown.

“We know that U.S. citizens have been detained, so it’s basically indiscriminate,” Bass said. “It’s a wide net they have cast in order to meet Stephen Miller’s quota of 3,000 people a day being detained around the nation.”

L.A.’s mayor has been at odds with the Trump administration since early June, when federal immigration agents began a series of raids across Southern California, spurring protests in downtown Los Angeles, Paramount and other communities. Her latest remarks came one day after Trump’s Department of Justice sued the city over its sanctuary law, alleging it has hindered the federal government’s ability to combat “a crisis of illegal immigration.”

In the lawsuit, federal prosecutors accused the City Council of seeking to “thwart the will of the American people,” arguing that Trump won his election on a platform of deporting “millions of illegal immigrants.” They also alleged that L.A.’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities had triggered “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism” during the anti-ICE demonstrations.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson pushed back against Bass’ assertions, saying in an email that Bass should “thank President Trump for helping get dangerous criminals off L.A.’s streets.”

“The only ‘assault’ being committed is by Bass’s radical left-wing supporters who are assaulting ICE officers for simply doing their job and enforcing federal immigration law,” Jackson said. “Thanks to inflammatory rhetoric like Bass’s, ICE officers are facing a 500% increase in assaults.”

Elected officials in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Huntington Park and other communities have decried the raids, saying they are tearing families apart, disrupting public life and choking off economic activity. In some communities, July 4 fireworks shows have been canceled for fear of ICE raids destroying the events.

Even some who support Trump have begun to voice concerns. Last week, six Republicans in the state legislature sent Trump a letter urging him to focus on targeting violent criminals during his immigration crackdown, saying the raids are instilling widespread fear and driving workers out of critical industries.

From June 1 to June 10, 722 people were arrested by immigration agents in the Los Angeles region, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law. A Times analysis of the figures found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal conviction, and 58% had never been charged with a crime.

In L.A., the sanctuary ordinance bars city employees from seeking out information about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status unless needed to provide a city service. They also must treat data or information that can be used to trace a person’s citizenship or immigration status as confidential.

Trump has been trying to strike down the state’s sanctuary policies almost since they were enacted — largely without success.

In 2019, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a federal challenge to Senate Bill 54, which barred local police departments from helping federal agencies take custody of immigrants being released from jails. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case the following year.

In a separate case, the 9th Circuit ruled that the Trump administration may not force the city of L.A. to help deport immigrants as a condition of receiving a federal police grant.

City Councilmember Tim McOsker, who worked for several years in the city attorney’s office, said Tuesday that he views the Trump lawsuit as a publicity stunt.

“There are over 100 years of case law that tell us this is a baseless lawsuit,” he said.

Times staff writer Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.

Following a surge in arrests by armed, masked federal immigration agents in unmarked cars, some California Democrats are backing a new bill in Congress that would bar officials from covering their faces while conducting raids.

The No Masks for ICE Act, introduced by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-New York) and co-sponsored by more than a dozen Democrats, would make it illegal for federal agents to cover their faces while conducting immigration enforcement unless the masks were required for their safety or health.

The bill would also require agents to clearly display their name and agency affiliation on their clothes during arrests and enforcement operations.

Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Burbank), who is co-sponsoring the bill, said Tuesday that the legislation would create the same level of accountability for federal agents as for uniformed police in California, who have been required by law for more than three decades to have their name or badge number visible.

“When agents are masked and anonymous, you cannot have accountability,” Friedman said. “That’s not how democracy works. That’s not how our country works.”

The bill would direct the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to set up discipline procedures for officers who did not comply and report annually on those numbers to Congress.

A DHS spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department has previously warned of a spike in threats and harassment against immigration agents.

The mask bill has no Republican co-sponsors, meaning its chances of getting a hearing in the GOP-controlled House are slim.

“I would think that there’s Republicans out there who are probably hearing the same thing that I’m hearing from my constituents: ‘I don’t like the idea of people jumping out of a truck, carrying very large guns with masks over their faces, and I have no idea who they are,’” Friedman said.

Friedman said she hoped that Republicans concerned about governmental overreach and the so-called “deep state” — the idea that there is a secretive, coordinated network inside the government — would support the bill too.

The proposal comes after weeks of immigration raids in Southern California conducted by masked federal agents dressed in street clothes or camouflage fatigues, driving unmarked vehicles and not displaying their names, badge numbers or agency affiliations. Social media sites have been flooded with videos of agents violently detaining people, including dragging a taco stand vendor by her arm and tossing smoke bombs into a crowd of onlookers.

The raids have coincided with an increase in people impersonating federal immigration agents. Last week, police said they arrested a Huntington Park man driving a Dodge Durango SUV equipped with red-and-blue lights and posing as a Border Patrol agent.

In Raleigh, N.C., a 37-year-old man was charged with rape, kidnapping and impersonating a law enforcement officer after police said he broke into a Motel 6, told a woman that he was an immigration officer and that he would have her deported if she didn’t have sex with him.

And in Houston, police arrested a man who they say blocked another driver’s car, pretended to be an ICE agent, conducted a fake traffic stop and stole the man’s identification and money.

Burbank Mayor Nikki Perez said Tuesday that city officials have received questions from residents like, “How can I know if the masked man detaining me is ICE or a kidnapper? And who can protect me if a man with a gun refuses to identify himself?”

Those issues came to a “boiling point” last weekend, Perez said, when a man confronted a woman at the Mystic Museum in Burbank, asked to see her documents and tried to “act as a federal immigration agent.” Staff and patrons stepped in to help, Perez said, but the incident left behind a “newfound sense of fear, an uncertainty.”

“Why is it that we hold our local law enforcement, who put their lives on the line every day, to a much higher standard than federal immigration officers?” Perez said.

The bill in the House follows a similar bill introduced in Sacramento last month by state Sen. Scott Wiener that would bar immigration agents from wearing masks, although it’s unclear whether states can legally dictate the conduct or uniforms of federal agents.

Citing a recent arrest by immigration agents that bloodied a man in the unincorporated area of Valinda, Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said she wants the county to explore a legal counterattack against what she described as the federal government’s “unconstitutional immigration enforcement practices.”

In a statement Saturday, Solis said that she plans to co-sponsor a motion at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting asking the county’s attorney to explore “all legal remedies available to the County to protect the civil rights of our residents and prevent federal law enforcement personnel from engaging in any unconstitutional or unlawful immigration enforcement.”

Such conduct, the motion says, includes the “unlawfully stopping, questioning or detaining individuals without reasonable suspicion, or arresting individuals without probable cause or a valid warrant.”

“As these immigration raids continue to terrorize our communities, I’m deeply disturbed by the forceful detainment of a man in unincorporated Valinda. This incident raises serious concerns about the conduct and legality of these actions, and demonstrates a violation of constitutional rights and due process,” Solis, whose district stretches from Eagle Rock to Pomona, said in a statement.

The Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the motion says, has sown widespread fear throughout the region and emptied out normally bustling public spaces, with people “avoiding going to work or visiting grocery stores and restaurants, skipping medical appointments.”

This has had a “tremendous negative impact” on not only the county’s economy, but also its “ability to provide for the health and welfare of our residents,” according to the motion.

The L.A. City Council introduced a similar motion earlier this month seeking to prohibit federal agents from carrying out unconstitutional stops, searches or arrests of city residents.

Federal officials have said their agents are defending themselves against increasingly hostile crowds, which in some cases are interfering with arrests.

Top officials, such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have argued that the government’s raids are targeting “criminals that have been out on our street far too long.” A recent Times analysis suggested that the majority of those who were arrested in early June were not convicted criminals, however.

For weeks, social media has been flooded with videos of federal agents, their faces often shrouded by masks, violently arresting bystanders who are filming their actions, dragging a taco stand vendor by her arm and tossing smoke bombs into a crowd of angry onlookers. One widely circulated clip showed a military-style vehicle accompanying federal law enforcement officers during an apparent raid at a home in Compton earlier this month — part of what critics have called an alarming escalation in tactics.

Footage reviewed by The Times shows a person in the turret of the vehicle pointing what appears to be a less-lethal projectile launcher downward, but it’s unclear whether any shots were fired.

In her statement, Solis cited another federal operation that was at the center of a viral video.

That footage, shot by a bystander and obtained by ABC 7, shows federal agents in tactical vests and masks smashing the windows of a large white pickup truck before apparently pulling out a man from inside.

Several agents are later seen kneeling on top of the man who is bleeding from an apparent head wound, even as a crowd of onlookers demand that the man be released. In one clip, an agent is shown pushing the man’s face into the pavement.

News anchor Anderson Cooper was warned of an upcoming air strike as he broadcast a news segment from Israel to viewers at home in the US in the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was forced to abandon a live broadcast in Israel as air raid sirens announced a sudden Iranian missile strike. The veteran journalist had been covering the escalating Middle East conflict when the alarms began sounding in Tel Aviv, prompting him and his crew to flee to a bomb shelter on live television.

Cooper was joined by CNN’s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and Jerusalem correspondent Jeremy Diamond on a hotel balcony in Tel Aviv during the early hours of Monday when the attack unfolded.

Ward suddenly interrupted their conversation to tell viewers: “I should just say that we’re now hearing an alert.” Moments later Cooper received an emergency warning on his phone, confirming an incoming missile strike from Iran.

“So these are the alerts that go out on all of our phones when you’re in Israel,” Cooper explained. “It’s a 10 minute warning of incoming missiles or something incoming from Iran.”

He continued: “So now the location we’re in has a verbal alarm telling people to go down into bomb shelters. So we have about a 10 minute window to get down into a bomb shelter.”

Despite the danger, Cooper calmly asked his team if they could carry on broadcasting during their escape. He added: “And we’ll continue to try to broadcast from that, that bomb shelter. And even if we can, on the way down.”

“I think we’re going to head down to the shelters – Chuck, do we have capabilities as we go down?” he asked, to which a crew member replied: “Just checking your microphones. Be ready in a second.”

As the crew evacuated the hotel balcony, a loudspeaker announcement echoed throughout the building saying: “Dear guests, we expect an alarm in the next 10 minutes.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) later confirmed that a missile had been launched towards the country but was successfully intercepted. No injuries were reported.

The dramatic moment came just hours after US President Donald Trump authorised a surprise military strike targeting key Iranian nuclear facilities called Operation Midnight Hammer. He claims that the US carried out a “successful” bombing attack on three of Iran’s nuclear sites on Sunday.

The assault marked a major escalation in the already volatile relationship between Washington and Tehran, and Iranian leaders have vowed to get revenge.

Trump later took to Truth Social to call for a change of government in Iran, writing: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!”

There are growing fears that Tehran may respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz, which is a strategic waterway critical to global oil supply. A move to block the strait could trigger conflict with the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which is stationed nearby to protect international shipping routes.

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