New York City’s mayoral candidates are making a final push Monday to get voters to the polls, as the race to lead America’s biggest city nears its finale.
Ahead of Election Day on Tuesday, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa have all spent the race’s final stretch campaigning at a frenetic pace across the city’s five boroughs as they make their case to succeed outgoing Mayor Eric Adams.
In recent days, Mamdani went dancing with seniors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Cuomo dined in the Eastern European enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Sliwa went to a mosque in the Bronx.
Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, jolted the political world when he defeated Cuomo in the primary with an energetic campaign focused on making the city a more affordable place to live.
As the race approaches the finish line, he’s continued to post viral social media videos and run a relentless ground game, while warning his progressive fan base not to become complacent and to send as many supporters to the polls as possible.
Cuomo is trying to make his return to political office after resigning as governor four years ago following a barrage of sexual harassment accusations that he denies. Now running as an independent, the 67-year-old has in recent days shifted to wooing Republican voters to bolster his centrist base, pitching himself as the only candidate who can stop Mamdani.
Sliwa, the creator of the Guardian Angels crime patrol group and a longtime fixture on New York’s airwaves, seeks to spoil both Democrats’ chances. He’s been heavily canvassing the streets and subways in his signature red beret to spread his message of public safety.
Early voting in the city ended Sunday, and election officials say more than 735,000 ballots were cast.
In last year’s general election, there were 1,089,328 early, in-person votes cast. But in the 2021 mayoral general election, only 169,879 in-person early voting ballots were cast.
So Jimmy Kimmel is coming back, fast enough that there are still folks out there who didn’t know he was gone.
Hallelujah? Praise be to ABC? Free speech triumphs?
It all depends on Tuesday night, when we see if Kimmel returns undaunted, or if he has been subdued. Of all the consequential, crazy, frightening events that have taken place in recent days, Kimmel’s return should be a moment we all watch — a real-time, late-night look at how successful our president is at forcing us to censor ourselves through fear.
Please, Jimmy, don’t back down.
If Kimmel tempers his comedy now, pulls his punches on making fun of power, he sends the message that we should all be afraid, that we should all bend. Maybe he didn’t sign up for this, but here he is — a person in a position of influence being forced to make a risky choice between safety and country.
That sounds terribly dramatic, I know, but self-censorship is the heart of authoritarianism. When people of power are too scared to even crack a joke, what does that mean for the average person?
If Kimmel, with his celebrity, clout and wealth, cannot stand up to this president, what chance do the rest of us have?
Patriotism used to be a simple thing. A bit of apple pie, a flag on the Fourth of July, maybe even a twinge of pride when the national anthem plays and all the words pop into your mind even though you can’t find your car keys or remember what day it is.
It’s just something there, running in the background — an unspoken acknowledgment that being American is a pretty terrific thing to be.
Now, of course, patriotism is the most loaded of words. It’s been masticated and barfed out by the MAGA movement into a specific gruel — a white, Western-centric dogma that demands a narrow and angry Christianity dominate civic life.
The one that put a knot in my stomach was the speech by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, speaking, without humor, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk.
That’s disturbing, but actually mild compared with what he said next, a now-familiar Christian nationalist rant.
“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller said. “Our ancestors built the cities they produced, the art and architecture they built. The industry.”
Who’s going to tell him about Sally Hemings? But he continued with an attack on the “yous” who don’t agree with this worldview, the “yous,” like Kimmel, one presumes (though Kimmel’s name did not come up) who oppose this cruel version of America.
“You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing,” Miller said. “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”
Humor, of course, ain’t nothing, which is why this administration can’t stand it.
Humor builds camaraderie. It produces dopamine and serotonin, the glue of human bonding. It drains away fear, and creates hope.
Which is why autocrats always go after comedians pretty early on. It’s not thin skin, though Trump seems to have that. It’s effective management of dissent.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew it. In 1939, after his party had set up a Chamber of Culture that required all performers to adhere to certain rules, he banned five German comedians — Werner Finck, Peter Sachse, Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi — for making political jokes that didn’t support the regime. He basically ended their careers for daring satire against Nazi leaders, claiming people didn’t find it funny.
“(I)n their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades,” the New York Times reported the German government claiming at the time.
Sounds familiar.
Kimmel, of course, is not the only comedian speaking out. Jon Stewart has hit back on “The Daily Show,” pretending to be scared into submission, perhaps a hat tip to Finck, who famously joked, “I am not saying anything. And even that I am not saying.”
And there are plenty of others pushing back. Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to all-caps rebuttals. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whom Trump called “nothing,” is also vocal in his opposition, especially of National Guard troops in Chicago.
The collective power of the powerful is no joke. It means something.
But all the sober talk in the world can’t rival one spot-on dig when it comes to kicking the clay feet of would-be dictators. Mark Twain said it best: Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. Which is what makes Kimmel so relevant in this moment.
Can he come back with a laugh — proving we have nothing to fear but fear itself — or are we seriously in trouble?
Like most Americans, including White House reporters apparently, I’ve tuned out Donald Trump’s incessant Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election — “by a lot.” That means his nonsense about rigged voting and Democrats’ cheating goes mostly unchallenged, and he continues to undermine faith in U.S. elections. After all, it’s not like anyone can shut him up.
Still, it’s time to quit tuning out. Whether a reporter on the beat or a citizen in conversation anywhere, pay attention and push back against Trump’s un-American blather. Because in recent days the power-drunk president has in various ways telegraphed that his Big Lie isn’t just about a past election but a pretext for what he could do to disrupt the next one, the 2026 midterm elections for Congress.
Other 2020 election liars are paying a big price, literally. Just this week, right-wing Newsmax agreed to pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems, on top of $40 million in March to Smartmatic, to settle defamation lawsuits based on Newsmax’s false reporting (echoing Trump) that the companies rigged voting machines for Joe Biden. Newsmax’s penalty is of course dwarfed by the $787 million that Fox News paid to Dominion in 2023; in a pending trial, Smartmatic seeks $2.7 billion from Fox.
All the while, the president of the United States continues to spout the same slop, all but immune to legal action, as he sets the stage for 2026.
On Friday, after Trump’s bro-fest summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, Trump happily recounted to Fox’s Sean Hannity in Alaska that the two presidents digressed to discuss the 2020 U.S. election and — what do you know? — Putin, the KGB-trained master manipulator and well-known arbiter of honest elections (not) supposedly assured Trump that, yes, he actually won big but the election was rigged against him.
As an aside here, recall that Hannity and other Fox network stars privately trashed Trump’s 2020 election lie, according to filings in the Dominion lawsuit, and that Hannity testified under oath: “I did not believe it for one second.” Yet in Anchorage, Hannity nodded along as Trump told him that Putin said Trump won in 2020 “by so much,“ but “your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”
Assuming Putin said what Trump claims, the Russian was playing to Trump’s longstanding, groundless gripes not only against the 2020 election but against voting by mail, which Democratic voters use much more than Republicans do. And Trump, ever the Kremlin’s useful idiot, took his cue: First thing on Monday morning, he declared in a long, error-filled and much-capitalized social media diatribe that he’d “lead a movement” to ban mail ballots and voting machines.
Trump repeated Putin’s falsehood that the United States is “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” But in fact, dozens of countries use mail ballots and, as with other forms of voting, research, along with the courts, has found that fraud is vanishingly rare.
The president’s stance on mail ballots is like his position on a ceasefire in Ukraine: He was for it before he was against it (and he was for both things before getting ensnared in Putin’s web on Friday). In 2024, bending to Republican officials’ pleadings that he drop his opposition to mail ballots, Trump urged supporters to vote by mail — as he typically, and hypocritically, does — and even recorded a video promotion.
Now that Trump is back to opposing mail ballots, in Monday morning’s social media rant he yet again contradicted the plain words of the Constitution to claim powers he doesn’t have, that he can order states to get rid of mail ballots and voting machines. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”
Here’s the Constitution on that: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
It’s just more proof that both times Trump took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution and “see that the laws are faithfully executed,” he lied then, too.
The president has since repeated that he, with Republican allies, will “do everything possible” to end mail ballots. And he’s saying the quiet part out loud: Without mail-in voting, he told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, “you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting.”
There you have it. Trump’s “movement” against mail ballots, along with his push for red states to redraw congressional district lines to elect more Republicans, is all part of how he’s trying rig elections in 2026, in what is expected to be a bad year for his party given his unpopularity. And it’s all predicated on the Big Lie about nonexistent Democratic election cheating.
There are other warning signs: Trump’s military takeover of the District of Columbia. (Every day brings another announcement of a Republican governor sending National Guard troops.) His occupation of Los Angeles. Repeated threats to send troops to other big, blue cities. All on specious grounds and over the objections of elected local and state leaders.
It’s wholly imaginable, then, that on trumped-up claims (pun absolutely intended) about potential election fraud, Trump would militarize Democratic vote-heavy cities in time for next year’s elections. At a minimum, that would surely intimidate some would-be voters. At worst, well, I don’t even want to speculate about the worst.
When Trump entered presidential politics a decade ago, it took a while for journalists to get comfortable applying the L-word: Liar. But he earned it. Now he’s all but inviting us to expand the nomenclature to include autocrat, dictator or even the F-bomb, fascist.
Bad Bunny is booked and busy. (Now try saying that twice.)
On Tuesday night, the Grammy-winning Puerto Rican singer will make two back-to-back appearances on late-night television shows: “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on CBS and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC.
For the record:
11:19 a.m. July 22, 2025An earlier version of this article stated that
The 31-year-old artist is in the midst of his historic No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan. The 30-night concert series is expected to generate $200 million to the local economy, according to the island’s promotional agency, Discover Puerto Rico.
Bad Bunny, who moonlights as an actor, is also promoting the long-awaited “Happy Gilmore 2,” a sequel to the 1996 Adam Sandler comedy, which will premiere July 25 on Netflix. He will play a golf caddy to Happy Gilmore (played by Sandler), an aggro-ex-hockey player turned golf phenom. Both Sandler and Bad Bunny are expected to appear on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
It’s an unusual move by the two competing networks to book the same guest on a single night, but as evening newscasts clash with fast-paced content on social media sites like YouTube or TikTok, perhaps the rules can be relaxed for a superstar.
Camaraderie across the TV aisle has grown in recent days, with multiple late-night hosts decrying the cancellation of Colbert’s program for what CBS has cited as financial reasons. News of this cancellation came days after Colbert criticized CBS’ parent company, Paramount, over the $16-million settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.
“And now for the next 10 months, the gloves are off,” said Colbert on Sunday night. His decade-long show will end May 2026.
Earlier this year, Bad Bunny co-hosted “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to promote his hit album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which remains on the Billboard 200 chart since its January debut. During the program, the two disguised themselves while busking in a New York Subway station, first performing a cover of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” then Bad Bunny’s single “Nuevayol.”
Bad Bunny will first appear as a guest on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on CBS at 8:35 p.m. PST, followed by “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC at 12:35 a.m. ET/PT.
She was attending her first protest, driven to be seen with thousands of others at a “No Kings” demonstration Saturday morning in El Segundo, eager to make a statement.
But she was there for her father, as well.
The sign she held aloft as car horns honked in support said: “I’m speaking for those who can’t.”
Her father would have loved to join her, Jennifer told me. But with ICE raids in Los Angeles and arrests by the hundreds in recent days, her 55-year-old undocumented dad couldn’t afford to take the risk.
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.
Jennifer is 29. I hadn’t seen her in nearly 20 years, when I wrote about her father and visited her home in Inglewood to deliver $2,000 donated by readers who read his story.
Here’s the back story:
In December of 2005 I got a tip about a shooting in the front yard of an Inglewood home. Two men approached a landscaper and demanded money. He resisted, and in the tussle that ensued, a shot was fired.
Paramedics rushed the man to the emergency room at UCLA, where doctors determined that a bullet had just missed his heart and was lodged in his chest. Although doctors recommended he stay at least overnight for observation, he insisted he felt fine and needed to get back to work.
The landscaper, whom I referred to as Ray, insisted on leaving immediately. As he later explained to me, the Inglewood job was for a client who hired him to re-landscape the yard as a Christmas gift to his wife.
Ray was shot on Dec. 23.
Demonstrators at a “No Kings” event at Main Street and Imperial Highway in El Segundo on Saturday.
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
He finished the job by Christmas.
I’ve been thinking about Ray since ICE agents began the crackdown ordered by President Trump, whose administration said its goal was to deport 3,000 people a day. Hundreds have been arrested in the Fashion District, at car washes and at building supply stores across Los Angeles.
That’s led to clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators, and to peaceful protests like the one along Imperial Highway and Main Street on Saturday in El Segundo.
I thought of Ray because Trump generally speaks of undocumented immigrants as monsters, and no doubt there are criminals among them.
But over the years, nearly all my encounters have been with the likes of Ray, who are an essential part of the workforce.
Yes, there are costs associated with undocumented immigrants, but benefits as well — they’ve been an essential part of the California economy for years. And among those eager to hire them — in the fields, in the hospitality industry, in slaughterhouses, in healthcare — are avid Trump supporters.
On Friday, I called Ray to see how he was doing.
“I’m worried about it,” he said, even though he has some protection.
Demonstrators at the “No Kings” event in El Segundo raise their signs, including one that read, “Real men don’t need parades.”
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
Several years ago, an immigration attorney helped him get a permit to work, but the Trump administration has vowed to end temporary protected legal status for certain groups of immigrants.
“I see and hear about a lot of cases where they’re not respecting documents. People look Latino, and they get arrested,” said Ray, who is in the midst of a years-long process to upgrade his status.
Ray is still loading tools onto his truck and driving to landscaping, tree-trimming and irrigation jobs across L.A., as he’s done for more than 30 years. But he said he’s being extra careful.
A protester at a “No Kings” event in El Segundo prepares a sign on Saturday.
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
“You know, like keeping an eye out everywhere and checking my telephone to see where checkpoints are,” he said.
Ray’s ex-wife has legal status, and all three of their children were born here and are U.S. citizens. The marriage ended and Ray has remarried, but he remains close to the three kids I met in the spring of 2006, when they were 9, 10 and 11.
The younger son, who is disabled, lives with Ray. His older son, a graphic designer, lives nearby. Jennifer, a job recruiter, lives next door and has been on edge in recent days.
“Even though he has permission to be here … it’s scary, and I wasn’t even letting him go to work,” Jennifer said. “On Monday I was getting into the shower and heard him loading up the truck.”
She ran outside to stop him, but he was already gone, so she called him and said, “Oh my God, you shouldn’t be going to work right now. It’s not safe.”
“No Kings” was the theme of the day during a demonstration in El Segundo on Saturday.
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
Jennifer works from home but couldn’t concentrate that day. She used an app to track her father’s location and checked the latest information on ICE raids. So far, Ray has made it home safely each day, although Jennifer is hoping he slows down for a while.
Twenty years ago, when I wrote about Ray getting shot and his insistence on going back to work immediately, one of the readers who donated money — $1,000 — to him was one of his landscaping clients, Rohelle Erde. When I checked in with her this week to update her on Ray’s situation, she said her entire family came to the U.S. as immigrants to work hard and build a better life, and Ray did the same.
“He has been working and making money and helping people beautify their homes, creating beauty and order, and this must be so distressing,” Erde said. “The ugliness and disorder are exactly the opposite of what he represents.”
The evening before Saturday’s rally in El Segundo, Jennifer told me why she wanted to demonstrate:
“To show my face for those who can’t speak and to say we’re not all criminals, we’re all sticking together, we have each other’s backs,” she said. “The girl who takes care of my kids is undocumented and she’s scared to leave the house. I have a lot of friends and family in the same boat.”
Jennifer attended with her son, who’s 9 and told me he’s afraid his grandfather will be arrested and sent back to Mexico.
“He’s the age I was when you met me,” Jennifer said of her son.
She took in the crowd and said it was uplifting to see such a huge and diverse throng of people stand up, in peaceful protest, against authoritarianism and the militarization of the country.
Mother and son stood together, flashing their signs for passing motorists.
His said, “Families belong together.”
Jennifer told me that her father still has the bullet in his chest.
Giovanni Garcia pulled up to a dusty intersection in South Gate and scoped the scene. It was quiet, just folks walking home from work, but Garcia was among several people drawn there in hopes of bearing witness to one of the federal raids that have unfolded across Los Angeles County in recent days.
Just minutes before, several Instagram accounts had posted alerts warning that white pickup trucks with green U.S. Customs and Border Protection markings had been seen near the intersection.
With friends loaded into his white Grand Cherokee and a large Mexican flag flying out of the sunroof, this was the sixth day in a row that Garcia, 28, had spent up to 10 hours following such alerts through South L.A.’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
Fueled by sodas and snacks he picked up at a Northgate Market, Garcia’s goal, he said, was to catch Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other immigration agents in the act of detaining people on the street.
So far, it had been a fruitless chase.
“I’ve been doing this for six days. It sucks because I get these alerts and go, but I never make it in time,” said Garcia, a Mexican American U.S. citizen who lives in South Central.
Monitoring ICE activity has become a grim pastime for some Angelenos. Apps dedicated to the purpose have popped up, which combine with Citizen, Nextdoor, X and other platforms to create a firehose of unverified, user-generated information about federal movements and operations.
Trying to keep up in real time can prove equally exhausting and frustrating. The reports sometimes turn out to be false, and immigration enforcers seem to strike and depart with swift precision, leaving the public little opportunity to respond.
It’s impossible to determine how many people are engaged in this Sisyphean chase. But they have become a frequent sight in recent days, as anger has grown in response to viral videos of swift and violent apprehensions. A Times reporter and photographer crisscrossed the southern half of L.A. County, encountering Garcia and other ICE chasers in hot pursuit of federal agents who constantly seemed one step ahead.
Giovanni Garcia, 28, drives through South Gate with a Mexican flag. He spent six days trying to witness an ICE raid with little luck.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
A new notification popped up on Garcia’s Instagram feed Thursday afternoon: ICE agents had been spotted in a nondescript residential area of South Gate, a city of about 90,000 people, of which more than 40% are foreign-born, according to the U.S. census. So Garcia put his SUV in gear and sped over.
He and his crew were late again. They arrived on a corner about 15 minutes after witnesses say immigration agents with green bulletproof vests and gaiters over their faces had jumped out of vehicles, handcuffed and taken away a man who had sold flowers in front of a ranch-style house there for years.
“I keep doing this because they’re messing with my people,” Garcia said. “It’s no longer about immigration. Trump’s no longer targeting criminals; he’s targeting Hispanics.”
It was one of many such raids in South L.A. in recent days at homes, parks and businesses ranging from a car wash to grocery stores.
The people whisked away in incidents captured in photos and videos that bystanders shared online ran the gamut: One man plucked out of a diverse crowd for no discernible reason while walking in South Gate Park. Another handcuffed on the curb outside a Ross clothing store in Bell Gardens. Two men in Rosemead snatched from the parking lot of a bakery.
Workers at a Fashion Nova clothing warehouse in Vernon told The Times that ICE trucks had been spotted in the area and that they had heard agents planned to confront employees during a shift change.
From senior citizens to children, nobody was safe from the federal enforcement effort.
Jasmyn Vasillio, 35, said she first became concerned when she saw on social media that ICE agents had raided a car wash in South Gate, then an hour later saw a post about the flower seller’s apprehension.
“I knew that flower guy is always there and I live nearby so I drove right over,” she said as she stood on the corner where he had been standing 20 minutes earlier. “I think they’re just picking people up and leaving.”
“I’m just another frustrated person in L.A. that wants to see an end to this. Not all of us are criminals,” said Manolo, who runs a candle-making business in Vernon.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
A 20-year-old Latino man who declined to provide his name out of fear of reprisal said that he has been doing everything he can to spread awareness of what immigration enforcement agents are doing in his South Gate neighborhood and across South L.A.
“I’m a U.S. citizen, so I’m good. I’m worried about other people. It’s been heartbreaking,” he said as he streamed live from a street in South Gate where CBP agents had been spotted minutes before, according to posts he had seen on Instagram.
“They’re here to work and being torn apart from their families,” he said. “It’s sad. They came here for the American dream and this is what happens.”
Teenagers Emmanuel Segura and Jessy Villa said they have spent hours over the past week scrolling through social media and despairing at the seemingly endless stream of videos of people being aggressively detained. They felt helpless in the face of the crackdown, so they planned a protest in the heart of their own community.
On Thursday, they took to Atlantic Avenue and Firestone Boulevard in South Gate, where Villa waved a flag pole with both American and Mexican flags affixed to it. They were joined by more than 30 other protesters who chanted slogans and hoisted anti-ICE posters. Drivers honked in support as they passed by.
Jessy Villa, 14, protests the recent ICE raids in the Southland at Atlantic Avenue and Firestone Boulevard in South Gate.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s kind of scary. They’re taking anyone at this point. I just saw that ICE went to a car wash and took two people. And those are hard-working people — they are not criminals,” Segura, a 15-year-old South Gate resident, said. “So we planned the protest to go against ICE, Trump and his administration.”
Villa, 14, lives in nearby Lynwood, where he says everyone he knows is terrified they or someone they care about will be the next person swept up in an ICE raid.
“The streets are empty. Nobody wants to come outside. And kids don’t want to go to school, especially kids who migrated here,” Villa said. “They’re scared going to school in the morning, and worried they’ll come home and find out their parents were deported.”
Five miles away in Vernon, Manolo stood Thursday morning on the loading dock of the candle-making business he owns as employees loaded boxes of candles into the back of a black SUV. He said he has been following news and rumors of the raids online, and that the fear generated by them and the protests in response have been devastating for his company and other small businesses.
“Everybody’s worried about it,” Manolo said, recounting how he had heard that earlier that day ICE had raided a business two doors over from his. His company received zero calls for orders Thursday morning, down from the 50 to 60 it typically receives per day. If the immigration raids and protests haven’t wound down by the end of the month, he said he might have to shut down his business.
Family members of STG Logistics employees wait to hear word of their relatives’ whereabouts after an ICE raid at the company’s facility in Compton.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“This whole snatching people on the street — they have you on the floor in handcuffs, traumatize you, why? It makes me nervous, of course,” said Manolo, a U.S. citizen who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala 33 years ago and declined to give his last name out of fear he and his company could be targeted by law enforcement.
“And it’s not just that, it’s affecting businesses, it’s affecting people’s lives. It affects the economy, law enforcement. It affects your daily routine. When’s it going to end?”
WASHINGTON — Immigration agents have arrested 330 immigrants in Los Angeles and surrounding regions of Southern California since Friday, the White House confirmed Wednesday.
The numbers came from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who also slammed Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, saying they — President Trump — “fanned the flames” of violence in Los Angeles.
The “area of responsibility” for the Los Angeles field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the Central Coast, as well as Orange County to the south, Riverside County to the east and up the coast to San Luis Obispo County.
During a press briefing, Leavitt said 157 people have also been arrested on assault and obstruction-related charges. That includes a man charged Wednesday with the attempted murder of a police officer for throwing a Molotov cocktail. Overall, Leavitt said that 113, or about a third, of those detained had prior criminal convictions.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security have touted the arrests of specific individuals in recent days, including people from Vietnam, Mexico and the Philippines who had previously been convicted of crimes, such as second-degree murder, rape and child molestation.
Leavitt condemned the protests in Los Angeles against raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“These attacks were aimed not just at law enforcement, but at American culture and society itself,” she said. “Rioters burned American flags, chanted death to ICE and spray-painted anti-American slogans on buildings.”
Echoing sentiments Trump has relayed, Leavitt criticized Newsom and Bass, branding them as radical Democrats.
Bass, she said, “embarked on one of the most outrageous campaigns of lies this country has ever seen from an elected official, blaming President Trump and brave law enforcement officers for the violence.”
“The mob violence is being stomped out,” she said. “Criminals responsible will be swiftly brought to justice, and the Trump administration’s operations to arrest illegal aliens are continuing unabated.”
But Trump’s top border policy advisor, Tom Homan, told NBC on Tuesday that the protests in Los Angeles are making immigration enforcement “difficult” and more “dangerous.”
Leavitt issued a stark warning to protesters in other cities.
“Let this be an unequivocal message to left-wing radicals in other parts of the country who are thinking about copycatting the violence in an effort to stop this administration’s mass deportation efforts: You will not succeed,” she said.
PHOENIX — Former President Biden’s time in office is behind him, but his age and mental acuity have become an issue for the next leaders in his party.
Audio was published Friday from portions of interviews Biden gave to federal prosecutors in 2023, the latest in a stream of reports putting questions about Biden’s health back in the spotlight. Months after former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, a new book alleges that White House aides covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline.
Several potential Democratic contenders for the 2028 nomination have been asked in recent days whether they believe Biden was declining in office or whether he should have sought reelection before a disastrous debate performance led to his withdrawal.
Many Democrats would prefer to focus on President Trump’s second term and his sagging poll numbers. Trump has done his best to prevent that — mentioning Biden’s name an average of six times per day during his first 100 days in office, according to an NBC News analysis — and Republicans have followed his lead, betting that voters frustrated by Trump’s policy moves will still prefer him over memories of another unpopular presidency.
In the race for Virginia governor, one of this year’s highest-profile contests, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears is running a pair of digital ads tying Democratic former Rep. Abigail Spanberger to Biden, with images of the two hugging and the former president calling her a friend.
“The stench of Joe Biden still lingers on the Democratic Party,” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett said. “We have to do the hard work of fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told Politico this week that “there’s no doubt” that Biden, now 82, experienced cognitive decline as president.
Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden’s Transportation secretary, wasn’t as blunt but stopped short of defending Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection. He responded “maybe” when asked Tuesday whether the Democratic Party would have been better off if Biden hadn’t declared a bid for a second term.
“Right now, with the advantage of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that’s the case,” Buttigieg told reporters during a stop in Iowa.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he didn’t see signs of mental or physical decline in his meetings with Biden.
“I saw him a few times,” he told CNN this week. “I certainly went to the White House whenever there was an opportunity for me to make the case for something for people in my state. And I never had the experience of anything other than a guy who brought to the table a lot of good ideas about how to solve problems.”
The book “Original Sin,” by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, revives a core controversy of Biden’s presidency: his decision to run for a second term despite voters, including Democrats, telling pollsters that he should not. Biden would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won in November.
A spokesperson for Biden did not respond to a request for comment.
“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job,” the spokesperson has told many media outlets in response to the book.
Late Friday, Axios published portions from audio recordings of Biden’s six hours of interviews with prosecutors investigating his handling of classified documents after his term as vice president ended in 2017, for which he was not charged.
The Biden administration had already released transcripts of the interviews, but the recordings shed light on special counsel Robert Hur’s characterization of Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and appeared to validate his claim that the then-president struggled to recall key dates, including the year his son Beau died of cancer — 2015.
Biden and his aides fiercely objected to Hur’s report, which they characterized as a partisan hit. Biden at that time — early 2024 — was still planning to run for a second term and fending off accusations that he was too old for another four years in the job.
The recordings released by Axios include Biden’s discussion of his son’s death. His responses to some of the prosecutors’ questions are punctuated by long pauses, and his lawyers at times stepped in to help him recall dates and timelines.
Before he dropped his reelection bid last summer, Biden faced widespread doubts within his own party, even as Democratic leaders dismissed a series of verbal flubs and Republican allegations about his declining acuity.
In January 2022, a year into Biden’s first term, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that only 48% of Democrats wanted him to seek reelection. That fell to 37% of Democrats in an AP-NORC poll in February 2023. Three-quarters of Americans — and 69% of Democrats — said in August 2023 that they believed Biden was too old to serve as president for another four-year term.
And shortly after his debate flop, nearly two-thirds of Democrats said Biden should withdraw from the race.
Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden appeared on ABC’s “The View” on May 8 in a preemptive defense of his health and decision-making before the first excerpts of “Original Sin” were published.
The former president said he’s responsible for Trump’s victory but attributed Harris’ loss, at least in part, to sexism and racism. He maintained that he would have won had he remained the Democratic nominee. Both Bidens rejected concerns about his cognitive decline.
Patricia McEnerney, a 74-year-old Democrat in Goodyear, Ariz., said Biden should not have tried to run again.
“I think it’s sad the way it ended,” she said.
She compared him to Douglas MacArthur, the World War II and Korean War general famously dismissed by President Truman.
“I think he needs to stop giving interviews. I think that would help,” McEnerney said. “Like MacArthur said, generals just fade away.”
Janet Stumps, a 66-year-old Democrat also from Goodyear, a Phoenix suburb, had a different view.
“I don’t think it’s going to hurt the Democrats,” Stumps said. “I feel badly that he feels he has to defend himself. I don’t think he has to. Everybody ages. And the fact that he did what he did at his age, I think he should be commended for it.”
Hackett, the Democratic strategist, predicted Biden won’t be a major factor in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential primaries. But he said Democrats who want voters to trust them would be well-served “by telling the truth about the mistakes that our party made in the run-up to 2024.”
“Those mistakes were largely driven by Joe Biden, and I think any Democrat not willing to say that is not really prepared to face the voters, who want the truth and they want authenticity,” Hackett said.
Rick Wilson, a former GOP strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, said Republicans want to talk about Biden to avoid defending Trump. But he said the strategy is folly.
Besides “political nerds,” he said, “no one else cares.”
Cooper writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Thomas Beaumont in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, contributed to this report.
