state law

NEW YORK — President Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.

The lawyers filed their written arguments with the state’s mid-level appeals court just before midnight Monday.

In June, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to move the case to federal court, where the Republican president can challenge the conviction on presidential immunity grounds. The appeals court has not yet ruled.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of the four criminal cases against him to go to trial.

Trump was sentenced in January to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment.

Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, will have a chance to respond to the appeals arguments in court papers. A message seeking comment was left with the office Tuesday.

At trial, prosecutors said Trump mislabeled payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to conceal that he was actually reimbursing the $130,000 that Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet in the final weeks of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run.

At the time, Daniels was considering going public with a claim that she and the married Trump had a 2006 sexual encounter that Trump has consistently denied.

In their arguments to the New York state appeals court, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the prosecution of Trump was “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”

They said Trump was the victim of a Democratic district attorney in Manhattan who “concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory” during a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate.

They wrote that federal law preempts the “misdemeanor-turned-felony charges” because the charges rely on an alleged violation of federal campaign regulations that states cannot enforce.

They said the trial was also spoiled when prosecutors introduced official presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a U.S. president.

“Beyond these fatal flaws, the evidence was clearly insufficient to convict,” the lawyers wrote.

The lawyers also attacked the conviction on the grounds that “pure, evidence-free speculation” was behind the effort by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Trump was thinking about the 2020 election when he allegedly decided to reimburse Cohen.

Neumeister writes for the Associated Press.

Brooke Knowles knew she wanted the black puppy posted on the Facebook page of a self-described home breeder of Coton De Tulears. He looked like he’d have an outgoing personality.

She put down a nonrefundable deposit and drove to Temecula to pick him up. She paid about $2,000 and named him Ted.

Before she even left for home, Ted vomited and had diarrhea on the grass outside. He was lethargic, his chest soaked with drool.

A closer look later at the paperwork provided by the seller revealed something else unsettling: Ted wasn’t bred in California. He had been imported from a kennel in Utah.

“I thought that I was getting a dog that had been bred at his home,” Knowles said in a series of interviews with The Times. “This poor puppy, he was so traumatized.”

On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of animal welfare bills into state law that will restrict puppy sales and strengthen protections for buyers like Knowles. The bills were introduced as a result of a Times investigation last year that detailed how designer dogs are trucked into California from out-of-state commercial breeders and resold by people saying they were small, local operators.

The three bills Newsom signed into law are:

• Assembly Bill 519 by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) bans online marketplaces where dogs are sold by brokers, which is defined as any person or business that sells or transports a dog bred by someone else for profit. That includes major national pet retailers, including PuppySpot, as well as California-based operations that resell puppies bred elsewhere. The law applies to dogs, cats and rabbits under a year old. It does not apply to police dogs or service animals and provides an exemption for shelters, rescues and 4H clubs.
• AB 506 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) voids pet purchase contracts involving California buyers if the seller requires a nonrefundable deposit. The law also makes the pet seller liable if they fail to disclose breeder details and medical history.
• Senate Bill 312 by state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange) requires pet sellers to share health certificates with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which would then make them available without redactions to the public.

The bills were supported by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said they are “an important step in shutting down deceptive sales tactics of these puppy brokers.”

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and it’s time to shine a light on puppy mills,” Newsom said in a statement. “Greater transparency in pet purchases will bring to light abusive practices that take advantage of pets in order to exploit hopeful pet owners. Today’s legislation protects both animals and Californians by addressing fraudulent pet breeding and selling practices.”

Lawmakers said new laws close loopholes that emerged after California in 2019 banned the sale of commercially bred dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores. That retail ban did not apply to online sales, which surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Times’ investigation found that in the years after the retail ban took effect, a network of resellers stepped in to replace pet stores, often posing as local breeders and masking where puppies were actually bred. Some buyers later discovered they had purchased dogs from sellers using fake names or disposable phone numbers after their pets became ill or died.

Times reporters analyzed the movement of more than 71,000 dogs coming into California since 2019 by requesting certificates of veterinary inspection, which are issued by a federally accredited veterinarian listing where the animal came from, its destination and verification that it is healthy enough to travel.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture has long received those health certificates from other states by mistake — the records are supposed to go to county public health departments — and, in recent years, made it a practice to immediately destroy them. Dog importers who were supposed to submit the records to counties largely failed to do so.

The Times obtained the records by requesting the documents from every other state. In the days following the story’s publication, lawmakers and animal advocates called on the state’s Food and Agriculture Department to stop “destroying evidence” of the deceptive practices by purging the records. The department began preserving the records thereafter, but released them with significant redactions.

In one instance, the state redacted the name and address of a person with numerous shipments of puppies from Ohio. The Times obtained the same travel certificates without redactions from the Ohio Department of Agriculture. The address listed on the records is for a Home Depot in Milpitas. The phone number on some of those travel certificates belongs to Randy Kadee Vo.

The Times’ reporting last year found Vo’s name and various Bay Area addresses, including a warehouse, were listed as the destination for 1,900 dogs imported into California since 2019. At the time, he disputed that number but declined to say how many he had imported. People who bought puppies from Vo told The Times that they were told they were buying puppies that were locally bred.

Shortly after The Times questioned Vo about the imports, a different name, along with the Home Depot address, began appearing on health certificates with his phone number. Vo did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times identified hundreds of records detailing other sellers with names that appear to be fake or addresses that go to unaffiliated businesses, shopping centers and commercial mailbox offices.

While the new laws were championed by animal welfare groups, some have questioned how adequately the laws will be enforced by state officials — particularly when it comes to policing out-of-state facilities selling online and then shipping puppies directly California buyers.

“Enforcement will now fall on nonprofits like ours to monitor and report issues that we see, in hopes that the agencies act,” said Mindi Callison, head of the Iowa-based anti-puppy-mill nonprofit Bailing Out Benji.

Callison said lawmakers should next turn their focus to requiring California breeders to be licensed, similar to standards in Iowa, Missouri and other states. California does not have a statewide licensing program, instead relying on local jurisdictions for oversight. While some cities and counties require breeders to be licensed and inspected, little information is available online to help consumers vet them.

“There is a higher risk of dogs being kept in inhumane conditions in states where there are no regulations to follow and have no eyes on them,” Callison said.

Opponents of the legislation argued that California’s previous attempts to cut off the supply from puppy mills by banning pet store sales only fueled an unregulated marketplace — and warned banning brokers will do the same.

“Eliminating these brokers will not reduce demand for pets; it will simply force more Californians into unregulated, riskier marketplaces,” said Alyssa Miller-Hurley of the Pet Advocacy Network, which represents breeders, retailers and pet owners, in a letter opposing the legislation.

For consumers like Knowles, the lack of transparency when buying her puppy Ted has been long-lasting and costly. More than a year after Knowles took the puppy to her home in Long Beach, he developed stomach issues that got so bad he wound up in the emergency room. She also had doubts that her puppy was a purebred Coton De Tulear as advertised.

She said a pet DNA test confirmed those suspicions and connected her with other people whose dogs were purchased from the same seller. The test results said one of the dogs share the same amount of DNA as people do with their full siblings – and that they’re mutts.

“We call him the most expensive rescue dog we’ve ever had,” Knowles said of Ted, who is now on a restrictive diet. “Our group started to call our dogs ‘Fauxtons,’ since they weren’t Cotons.”

Knowles sued the seller, Tweed Fox of Carlsbad Cotons, over the test results showing Ted was not a purebred puppy, but said she lost.

“Really the core issue is … masquerading to be something you’re not,” she said.

Fox told The Times that he began sourcing from a Utah company during the Covid pandemic, when the demand for puppies spiked beyond the number he was able to breed at home.

He thought the Utah puppies were purebreds because they came with the proper registration paperwork, but said that “turned out not to be the case.” He said he did not mislead customers because he was in fact a home breeder, and only advertised the out-of-state puppies as Coton de Tulears, “which is what I thought I was purchasing.”

“You only can breed so many in a home,” he said. “I thought I was providing equal quality puppies at the time, and apparently, I wasn’t at that point, except for my own home bred.”

Fox said he has since moved to Dallas, where he breeds and sells Cotons. While the California broker law won’t impact him now that he’s left the state, he said he refuses to buy anyone else’s puppies for resale.

“I only sell my own,” he said. “I’m not in the business to cheat people out of anything.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices on Tuesday heard a free-speech challenge to state laws against “conversion therapy” and sounded likely to rule the measures violate the 1st Amendment.

California and more than 20 other states have adopted laws to forbid licensed counselors from urging or encouraging gay or transgender teens to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.

They were adopted in reaction to a history of dangerous and discredited practices, including treatments that induced nausea and vomiting or administered electric shocks.

Lawmakers and medical experts said these efforts to “cure” LGBTQ+ teens were cruel and ineffective and caused lasting harm.

But these “talk therapy” laws have been challenged by a number of Christian counselors who believe they can help young people who want to talk about their feelings and their sexual identity.

The court on Tuesday heard an appeal from Kaley Chiles, a counselor from Colorado Springs, Colo. She says she is an evangelical Christian, but does not seek to “cure” young people of a same-sex attraction or change their gender identity.

But she sued, alleging the state law seeks to “censor” her conversations and threatens her with punishment.

She lost before a federal judge and a U.S. appeals court, both of whom said the state has the authority to regulate the practice of medicine and to prevent substandard healthcare.

But the justices, both conservative and liberal, said the Colorado law appeared to violate the 1st Amendment.

“What’s being regulated here is pure speech,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Moreover, he said, the state law enforces a double standard. It would punish a licensed counselor who agrees to talk to a teenage client who wants to “overcome same-sex attractions,” but not if she encourages the teen to accept or affirm those attractions.

Justice Elena Kagan said she too saw a potential 1st Amendment violation. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor said there was less evidence that talk therapy alone has caused real harm.

In defense of the law, Colorado state solicitor Shannon Stevenson said the law applies only to licensed counselors. It does not extend to others, including religious ministers.

The practice of medical care “is a heavily regulated area. A doctor doesn’t have a 1st Amendment right to give wrong advice to patients,” she said.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett and others suggested counselors could still face a medical malpractice lawsuit, even if the court rules the state law violates the 1st Amendment.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court opens its new term on Monday and is scheduled to hear arguments in 33 cases this fall.

The justices will hear challenges to transgender rights, voting rights and Trump tariffs and will reconsider a 90-year-old precedent that protects officials of independent agencies from being fired by the president.

Here are the major cases set for argument:

Conversion therapy and free speech: Does a licensed mental health counselor have a 1st Amendment right to talk to patients under age 18 about changing their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if doing so is prohibited by state law?

California in 2012 was first state to ban “conversion therapy,” believing it was harmful to minors and leads to depression and suicide. Other states followed, relying on their authority to regulate the practice of medicine and to prohibit substandard care.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group, sued on behalf of a Colorado counselor and argued that the state is “censoring” her speech. (Chiles vs. Salazar, to be argued on Tuesday.)

Supreme Court Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., left, Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. attend inauguration ceremonies for Donald Trump in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20 in Washington.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Voting rights and Black majority districts: Does a state violate the Constitution if it redraws its congressional districts to create one with a Black majority?

In the past, the court has said racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional. But citing the Voting Rights Act, it also has ruled states must sometimes create an electoral district where a Black or Latino candidate has a good chance to win.

Otherwise, these minorities may be shut out from political representation in Congress, state legislatures or county boards.

But Justice Clarence Thomas has argued for outlawing all use of race in drawing district lines, and the court may adopt his view in a pending dispute over a second Black majority district in Louisiana. (Louisiana vs. Callais, to be argued Oct. 15.)

Trump and tariffs: Does President Trump have legal authority acting on his own to impose large import taxes on products coming from otherwise friendly countries?

Trump is relying on a 1977 law that empowers the president to act when faced with an “unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad. The measure does not mention tariffs or taxes.

In a pair of cases, lower courts ruled the tariffs were illegal but kept them in place for now. Trump administration lawyers argue the justices should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. (Learning Resources vs. Trump, to be argued Nov. 5.)

The high court will look at whether transgender athletes can compete in certain sports. Above, a 100-meter hurdles event during a track meet in Riverside in April.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Transgender athletes and school sports: Can a state prevent a transgender student whose “biological sex at birth” was male from competing on a girls sports team?

West Virginia and Idaho adopted such laws but they were struck down by judges who said they violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of laws and the federal Title IX law that bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges.

Trump voiced support for “keeping men out of women’s sports” — a characterization deemed false by transgender women and their advocates, among others. If the Supreme Court agrees, this rule is likely to be enforced nationwide under Title IX. (West Virginia vs. B.P.J. is due to be heard in December.)

Trump and independent agencies: May the president fire officials of independent agencies who were appointed with fixed terms set by Congress?

Since 1887, Congress has created semi-independent boards, commissions and agencies with regulatory duties. While their officials are appointed by the president, their fixed terms keep them in office when a new president takes over.

The Supreme Court upheld their independence from direct presidential control in the 1935 case of Humphreys Executor vs. U.S., but Trump has fired several such officials.

The current court has sided with Trump in two such cases and will hear arguments on whether to overturn the 90-year-old precedent. (Trump vs. Slaughter is due to be argued in December.)

The California Supreme Court sided with environmental groups in a Thursday ruling, saying that state lawyers were wrong in their claim that the Public Utilities Commission’s decision to slash rooftop solar incentives could not be challenged.

The unanimous decision sends the case brought by the three groups back to the appeals court.

The groups argue the utilities commission violated state law in 2022 when it cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending their unused power to the electric grid by as much as 80%. The rules apply to Californians installing the panels after April 14, 2023.

The Supreme Court justices said the appeals court erred in January 2024 when it ruled against the environmental groups. In that decision, the appeals court said that courts must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters.

“This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission’s work,” the appeals court had concluded then in its opinion.

The environmental groups argued the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission’s decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies.

“The California Supreme Court has ruled in our favor that the CPUC is not above the law,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, after Thursday’s decision was published. The other groups filing the case are the Center for Biological Diversity and The Protect Our Communities Foundation.

The utilities commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling.

More than 2 million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal, set by a 2018 law, of using only carbon-free energy by 2045.

The utilities commission has said that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in “a cost shift” of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This has raised electric bills, especially hurting low-income electric customers, the commission says.

The credits for energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid had been valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commission has voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested.

The state’s three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — have sided with commission in the case.

The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid.

For decades, the utilities have worked to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities’ sale of electricity.

California and a coalition of other liberal-led states sued the Trump administration Friday over efforts to end gender-affirming care for transgender, intersex and nonbinary children and young adults nationwide — calling them an unconstitutional attack on LGBTQ+ patients, healthcare providers and states’ rights.

The lawsuit was brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and officials from 15 other states and the District of Columbia. It challenges a Jan. 28 executive order by President Trump that denounced gender-affirming care as “mutilation” and called on U.S. Justice Department officials to effectively enforce a ban, including by launching investigations into healthcare providers.

The lawsuit notes the Justice Department last month sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that have provided such care nationwide, with justice officials suggesting they may face criminal prosecution.

Bonta’s office, in a statement, said such efforts “have no legal basis and are intended to discourage providers from offering lifesaving healthcare that is lawful under state law.” The lawsuit asks a federal court in Massachusetts to vacate Trump’s order in its entirety for exceeding federal authority and undermining state laws that guarantee equal access to healthcare.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Trump made reining in transgender rights a key promise of his presidential campaign. Upon taking office, he moved swiftly to do so through executive orders, funding cuts and litigation. And in many ways, it has worked — particularly when it comes gender-affirming care for minors.

Clinics across the country that had provided such care have closed their doors in response to the threats and funding cuts. That includes the renowned Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the largest and oldest pediatric gender clinics in the U.S.

The clinic told thousands of its patients and their families that it was shuttering last month. Other clinics have similarly closed nationwide, radically reducing the availability of such care in the U.S.

Republicans and other Trump supporters have cheered the closures as a major win, and they praised the president for protecting impressionable and confused children from so-called woke medical professionals pushing what they allege to be dangerous and irreversible treatments.

Bonta said in the Friday statement that Trump and his administration’s “relentless attacks” on such care were “cruel and irresponsible” and endangered “already vulnerable adolescents whose health and well-being are at risk.”

“These actions have created a chilling effect in which providers are pressured to scale back on their care for fear of prosecution, leaving countless individuals without the critical care they need and are entitled to under law,” Bonta said.

Mainstream U.S. medical associations have supported gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria for years. They and LGBTQ+ rights organizations have accused Trump and his supporters of mischaracterizing that care, which includes therapy, counseling and support for social transitioning, and can include puberty blockers, hormone treatment and, in rarer circumstances, mastectomies.

Queer advocates, many patients and their families say such care is life-saving, alleviating intense distress — and suicidal thoughts — in transgender and other gender-nonconforming youth. They and many mainstream medical experts acknowledge that gender-affirming care for young people is still a developing field, but say it is also based on decades of solid research by medical professionals who are far better equipped than politicians to help families make difficult medical decisions.

However, as the number of children who identify as transgender or nonbinary has rapidly increased in recent years, that argument has failed to take hold in many parts of the country. Conservatives and Republican leaders have grown increasingly alarmed by such care, pointing to young people who changed their minds about transitioning and now regret the care they received.

“Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding,” Trump’s executive order stated.

Trump and others have escalated tensions further by spreading misinformation about kids being whisked away from school to have their gentials mutilated without their parents’ knowledge — which is not happening.

The battle has played out in the courts, in part as a state’s rights issue. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that conservative states may ban puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender teens, with the court’s conservative majority finding that states are generally free to set their own standards of medical care.

The Trump administration, however, has not taken the same view. Instead, it has aggressively tried to eradicate gender-affirming care nationwide, regardless of state laws — like those in California — that protect it.

Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” claimed that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”

It defined children as anyone under the age of 19, and said that moving forward, the U.S. wouldn’t “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” but would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

The states’ lawsuit focuses on one particular section of that order, which directed Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to convene state attorneys general and other law enforcement officials nationwide to begin investigating gender-affirming care providers and other groups that “may be misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation.”

The section suggested those investigations could be based on laws against “female genital mutilation,” or even around a 1938 law known as the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which authorizes the Food and Drug Administration to regulate food, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics.

On July 9, Bondi announced the Justice Department’s subpoenas to healthcare providers, saying doctors and hospitals “that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable.”

On July 25, The Times reported that Bill Essayli, the Trump administration’s controversial pick for U.S. attorney in L.A., had floated the idea of criminally charging doctors and hospitals for providing gender-affirming care, according to two federal law enforcement sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

The targeting of gender-affirming care is part of a wider effort by the administration to eliminate transgender rights more broadly, in part on the premise that transgender people do not exist. On his first day in office, Trump issued another executive order declaring there are only two sexes and denouncing what he called the “gender ideology” of the left.

His administration has sought to limit the options transgender people have to get passports that reflect their identities, and the Justice Department has sued California over its policies allowing transgender girls to compete against other girls in youth sports. Many transgender Americans are looking for ways to flee the country.

Still, many in the LGBTQ+ community fear the attacks are only going to get worse. Among those who are most scared are the parents and families of transgender kids — including those who believe their health records may have been collected under the Justice Department’s subpoenas.

One mother of a Children’s Hospital patient told The Times last month that she is terrified the Justice Department is “going to come after parents and use the female genital mutilation law … to prosecute parents and separate me from my child.”

Bonta is leading the lawsuit along with the attorneys general of Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. Joining them are Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

DENVER — Colorado’s Democratic attorney general on Tuesday sued a sheriff’s deputy for allegedly helping federal immigration agents find and arrest a college student who had an expired visa.

Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser also disclosed that his office is investigating whether other law enforcement officers on a regional drug task force the deputy worked on have been sharing information to help federal agents make immigration arrests in violation of state law limiting cooperation in immigration enforcement. The federal government has sued Colorado over such laws.

On June 5, Mesa County Deputy Alexander Zwinck allegedly shared the driver’s license, vehicle registration and insurance information of the 19-year-old nursing student in a Signal chat used by task force members, according to the lawsuit. The task force includes officers who work for federal Homeland Security Investigations, which can enforce immigration laws, the lawsuit said.

After federal immigration officers told him in the chat that the student did not have a criminal history but had an expired visa, Zwinck allegedly provided them with their location and told her to wait with him in his patrol car for about five minutes, asking about her accent and where she was born. He let her go with a warning and gave federal agents a description of her vehicle and told which direction she was headed so they could arrest her, the lawsuit said.

When Zwinck was told of the arrest, the lawsuit said he congratulated the federal agents, saying “rgr, nice work.” The following day, one federal immigration agent praised Zwinck’s work in the chat, saying he should be named ”interdictor of the year” for the removal division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Zwinck is also accused of violating the law again on June 10 by providing immigration officers with the photo of the license of another driver who had overstayed his visa, information about the person’s vehicle and directions to help them arrest the driver. After being told that immigration officers “would want him,” Zwinck replied that “We better get some bitchin (sic) Christmas baskets from you guys,” the lawsuit said.

The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the lawsuit. Spokesperson Molly Casey said the office is about a week away from finishing its internal investigation into the student’s traffic stop and plans to issue a statement after it is finished.

A working telephone number could not be found for Zwinck, who was placed on paid leave during the sheriff’s office’s investigation. Casey declined to provide the name of an attorney who might be able to speak on his behalf.

The sheriff’s office previously announced that all its employees have been removed from the Signal group chat.

Weiser said he was acting under a new state law that bars employees of local governments from sharing identifying information about people with federal immigration officials, a recent expansion of state laws limiting cooperation in immigration cases. Previously, the ban on sharing personal identifying information only applied to state agencies, but state lawmakers voted to expand that to local government agencies earlier this year.

“One of our goals in enforcing this law is to make clear that this law is not optional. This is a requirement and it’s one that we take seriously,” he said.

The law allows violators to be fined but Weiser’s lawsuit only seeks a judge’s order declaring that Zwinck’s actions violated the law and barring him from such actions in the future.

Slevin writes for the Associated Press.

Abraham Márquez, a reporter with the nonprofit investigative news startup Southlander, was filming a tense standoff between Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and immigrant rights protesters in Paramount on Saturday night when he saw a deputy aim a “less-lethal” launcher in his direction.

Sensing a confrontation, Márquez said, he raised his press credential and “kept yelling press, press, press,” even as he turned and began running in the opposite direction. He barely made it a few feet before he felt a stinging pain as first one foam round, then another slammed into his buttocks and his back.

“They just unloaded,” he said of the deputies.

He was nearly struck again a short time later, when deputies riding by in an armored vehicle sprayed foam rounds into a gas station parking lot where Márquez and a KTLA-TV news crew had sought cover, he said. He was shaken, but said that he felt compelled to keep reporting.

“I got hit and whatnot but I’m glad I was there to document it,” he said.

The incident was one of dozens in which journalists have been shot with less-lethal police rounds, tear-gassed, shoved and detained while chronicling the ongoing civil unrest and military intervention in the nation’s second-largest city, according to interviews and video footage reviewed by The Times.

The police actions have drawn angry condemnation from public officials and 1st Amendment advocates. There have been multiple reported instances of reporters not only being struck by projectiles, but also having their bags searched, being threatened with arrest and getting blocked from areas where they had a right under state law to observe police activity.

Among those hit by police projectiles were several Times reporters in the course of covering protests in downtown L.A. over the past few days.

The LAPD and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department have faced criticism and lawsuits over their treatment of news media during past crises, but some covering the recent events say the situation has only gotten worse with the inflammatory anti-media messaging coming from the Trump White House.

“The price for free speech should not be this high,” said Arturo Carmona, president and publisher of Caló News, a news site that covers issues that matter to English-speaking Latinos. “Several of our reporters, several of whom are women of color, have been harassed and attacked by law enforcement.”

In one high-profile case, a CNN reporter was briefly detained by officers while doing a live on-air segment.

In another, Australian TV news reporter Lauren Tomasi was shot in the leg by a less-lethal round by an riot gear-clad officer moments after she wrapped up a live on-air segment. The incident became an international affair, with Australian Prime Minister Tony Albanese calling it “horrific.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said it “sends a terrible message,” and several city councilmembers referenced it while grilling LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell on Tuesday about his department’s response to the protests.

In a statement, the Sheriff’s Department said it was reviewing video footage from several incidents involving the news media to determine whether any of its deputies were involved.

The department said it is “committed to maintaining an open and transparent relationship with the media and ensuring that journalists can safely perform their duties, especially during protests, acts of civil disobedience, and public gatherings.”

“Our goal is to support press freedom while upholding public safety and operational integrity,” the statement said.

LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Rimkunas said that two of the roughly 15 complaints the department was investigating as of Tuesday involved possible mistreatment of journalists — a number that is expected to grow in the coming days and weeks.

Rimkunas said the department decided to launch an investigation of the Tomasi incident on its own, but has since been in contact with the Australian consulate.

A coalition of 27 press and civil liberties advocacy groups wrote to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday “to express alarm that federal officers may have violated the First Amendment rights of journalists covering recent protests and unrest related to immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area.”

Multiple journalists who covered the protests told The Times that officers and deputies used physical force or the threat of arrest to remove them from areas where they have a right to be.

In doing so, the journalists said, police were ignoring protections established by state law for journalists covering protests, as well as their own departments’ policies adopted after mass protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and over the clearance of a homeless encampment in Echo Park in 2021.

On Saturday, journalist Ben Camacho was documenting the scene in Paramount, where images of people vandalizing and burning cars dominated the nightly newscasts. Wearing his press pass and with a camera hanging around his neck, he watched in shock as law enforcement opened fire on the crowd with less-lethal munitions, striking Nick Stern, a British news photographer, who crumbled to the ground in front of him.

After helping carry Stern to safety, Camacho said he too was struck by a round in the kneecap.

“I start to screaming pretty much at the top of my lungs,” he said. “It was like a sledgehammer.”

He noted that many people are working on freelance contracts that don’t offer medical insurance, and said officers sometimes brush aside reporters with credentials from smaller independent outlets, which have an important role in monitoring events on the ground.

Some police officials — who were not authorized to speak publicly — said officers try their best to accommodate reporters, but the situation on the street involves split-second decisions in a chaotic environment where they find themselves being attacked. They also contend that journalists from newer outlets or those who primarily post on social media act in adversarial or confrontational ways toward officers.

Los Angeles Press Club Press Rights Chair Adam Rose said he has been collecting examples of officers from local, state and federal agencies violating the rights of journalists — seemingly ignoring the lessons learned and promises made the wake of past protests.

Rose said many of the incidents were documented in videos that journalists themselves posted on social media. As of Wednesday morning, the tally was 43 and counting.

The mistreatment of journalists at the recent protests are part of a “history of ugly treatment by police,” Rose said, which included the 1970 killing of one of the city’s leading Latino media voices, Ruben Salazar, who had been covering a Chicano rights protest when he was struck by a tear-gas canister fired by a sheriff’s deputy.

Even in cases where police abuses are well-documented on video, discipline of the offending officers is rare, Rose said.

With plunging revenues leading to the downsizing of many legacy newsrooms, a new generation of citizen journalists has taken a vital role in covering communities across the country — their reporting is as protected as their mainstream counterparts, he said.

“The reality is police are not the ones who’re allowed to decide who is press,” he said.

Some larger news companies have taken to hiring protective details for their reporters in the field, largely in response to aggressive crowds.

On Saturday, L.A. Daily News reporter Ryanne Mena was struck in the head by a projectile fired by law enforcement during a demonstration in Paramount.

She wasn’t sure whether it was a tear gas canister or less-lethal munition, but said she later sought medical treatment and was diagnosed with a concussion. The day before she was hit in the thigh by another projectile while reporting downtown outside the jail, she said.

Covering a few prior protests had taught her to always be mindful of her surroundings and to “never have my back toward anyone with a weapon.”

“It’s still kind of unbelievable that that happened,” she said of her concussion. “It’s unacceptable that that happened that other journalists were targeted.”

Times staff writers Connor Sheets and David Zahniser contributed to this report.

After losing last month in Orange County Superior Court, the state of California is asking a state appellate court to overturn a Huntington Beach measure that could require voters to present photo identification to cast ballots in local elections.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, the state’s top elections official, have been tangling with Huntington Beach in court for more than a year over Measure A, which amends the city charter to say that local officials “may” require photo ID for municipal elections starting in 2026.

In April, Orange County Superior Court Judge Nico Dourbetas said the state had not shown that “a voter identification requirement compromises the integrity of a municipal election.” Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns called the ruling a “huge victory.”

Bonta appealed Wednesday to the 4th Appellate District, where the state hopes for a more favorable hearing. In February, a three-judge panel from the 4th District said that Huntington Beach’s assertion of a “constitutional right to regulate its own municipal elections free from state interference” was “problematic,” but kicked the case back down to Orange County Superior Court.

More than 53% of Huntington Beach voters supported the charter amendment in the March 2024 election.

The amendment also requires that Huntington Beach provide 20 in-person polling places and to monitor ballot drop boxes. The city has not shared plans on how the law could be implemented in next year’s elections.

A representative for Huntington Beach didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday. The city’s lawyers have argued that the city charter gives local officials autonomy to oversee municipal issues, including local elections.

Bonta and Weber contend that while California’s 121 “charter cities” can govern their own municipal affairs, local laws can’t conflict with state laws on issues of “statewide concern,” including the integrity of California elections and the constitutional right to vote.

The voter ID law is one of several fronts in the ongoing battle that conservative officials in Huntington Beach have waged against California since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city has used similar arguments about its charter city status in fights over state housing laws, education policies for transgender students and “sanctuary state” immigration laws.

The issue of voter ID has become a flashpoint with conservative politicians, including President Trump, who in January demanded that California enact a voter ID law in order to receive aid for the devastating Los Angeles area wildfires.

California voters are required to verify their identities when they register to vote, and the state imposes criminal penalties for fraudulent registration. California does not require photo identification at the polls but does require that voters provide their names and addresses.

The photo ID measure may also be invalidated by Senate Bill 1174, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last fall, which bars local election officials from requiring photo identification in elections.