L.A. County prosecutors plan to file additional corruption charges this week against City Councilman Curren Price, who is already facing multiple counts of grand theft and perjury for allegedly voting in favor of projects his wife had a financial interest in, multiple sources told The Times.
The charges were expected to be made public Thursday during a pretrial hearing in downtown L.A., according to three people with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about an ongoing criminal case.
In June 2023, Price was charged with 10 counts of grand theft by embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest. Prosecutors said Price’s wife — Del Richardson, founder of the consulting company Del Richardson & Associates — received “payments totaling more than $150,000 between 2019 and 2021 from developers before [Price] voted to approve projects.”
The perjury charges stem from a claim that Price didn’t list his wife’s income on disclosure forms. Prosecutors also accused Price of theft by embezzlement for bilking the city out of tens of thousands of dollars by placing Richardson on his city-issued healthcare plan between 2013 and 2017, before they were legally married.
Price’s attorney, Michael Schafler, called the new charges “nothing more than an attempt to pile on to a weak case.”
“They have gone back as much as 6 years, combing through thousands and thousands of votes, to find a couple more allegedly conflicted votes, hoping that the public will overlook the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Councilmember Price was aware of the alleged conflicts when he voted for the agenda items,” Schafler said in a statement.
The original criminal complaint was filed roughly four years after a Times investigation found Price had repeatedly cast votes that affected housing developers and other firms listed as clients of his wife’s consulting company.
The new charges relate to similar conduct related to votes that Price cast, according to two of the sources. One of the sources said the votes related to contracts for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city’s housing authority.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said a press release would be issued later on Tuesday.
In an October 2023 motion seeking to dismiss the charges, Price’s legal team argued prosecutors failed to show the payments to Richardson had any influence on the councilman’s votes. Many of the votes described in the criminal complaint were also approved by an overwhelming majority of the council, meaning Price did not swing any one decision that could financially benefit Richardson.
Schafler also argued the embezzlement charges are invalid because Price did not have control over the funds used to pay for Richardson’s healthcare, which is a required element of the crime under California law. Price’s conduct might meet the definition of grand theft, Schafler wrote in 2023, but the statute of limitations for that crime had long expired.
A judge rejected Schafler’s motion. Price is expected to face a preliminary hearing later this year.
Price, who was first elected in 2013, must leave office due to term limits at the end of 2026. Several candidates have already launched campaigns to replace him in a district that stretches from the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown to 95th Street in South L.A.
Times Staff Writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A Bad Bunny fan who was visiting Puerto Rico for the hip-hop star’s concert residency was fatally shot early Sunday in La Perla, a popular seaside shantytown in the capital, police said.
The victim was identified as Kevin Mares, a 25-year-old who lived in New York, according to a police statement.
The shooting happened in the predawn hours at a nightspot called Shelter for Mistreated Men in La Perla, a coastal community of San Juan that has struggled to shed its dark reputation.
Homicide detective Sgt. Arnaldo Ruiz said in a phone interview that the shooting took place when several people near Mares began arguing and one pulled out a gun and shot at least three people, including Mares. Two other men, who live in La Perla, were injured and remain hospitalized.
Ruiz said Mares was an innocent bystander. He was with three other friends who told police they were in Puerto Rico for one of Bad Bunny’s 30 concerts, which have attracted tens of thousands of visitors to the U.S. territory, where the artist was born.
Mares was shot on the left side of his abdomen and was taken to Puerto Rico’s largest public hospital, where he died, authorities said.
Ruiz said police don’t yet know what the people were arguing about and don’t have a description of the shooter. “We have very little information,” he said.
Ruiz added that Mares’ three friends also were from New York. He didn’t know their hometowns.
La Perla is on the outskirts of a historic district popular with tourists known as Old San Juan. A couple hundred people live in the shantytown, which once served as Puerto Rico’s biggest distribution point for heroin and was known for its violence.
Police used to avoid the community, which used to have a sign proclaiming, “Not open to visitors. Do not enter.”
But violence eased when hundreds of federal agents raided the slum in 2011 and arrested dozens of people, including a well-known community leader who was later convicted.
The neighborhood became even safer and more welcoming after Puerto Rican singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee featured it in their hit “Despacito.”
But isolated violence persists.
In February 2023, three tourists were stabbed after police said a person told them to stop filming inside the community.
In April of last year, a 24-year-old tourist from Delaware was killed and his body set on fire after police said he and a friend were attacked after a drug purchase. Police said the victims were trying to take pictures of La Perla after being warned not to do so.
The island of 3.2 million people has reported 277 killings so far this year, compared with 325 killings in the same period last year.
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — An Ohio city whose Haitian migrants were disparaged by a Donald Trump falsehood last year as he pitched voters on his plans for an immigration crackdown is now bracing to defend the community against possible deportation.
A group of about 100 community members, clergy and Haitian leaders in Springfield gathered this week for several days of training sessions as they prepare to defend potential deportees and provide them refuge.
“We feel that this is something that our faith requires, that people of faith are typically law-abiding people — that’s who we want to be — but if there are laws that are unjust, if there are laws that don’t respect human dignity, we feel that our commitment to Christ requires that we put ourselves in places where we may face some of the same threats,” said Carl Ruby, senior pastor of Central Christian Church.
Ruby said the ultimate goal of the group is to persuade the Trump administration to reverse its decision to terminate legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
“One way of standing with the Haitians is getting out the message of how much value they bring to the city of Springfield,” he said. “It would be an absolute disaster if we lost 10,000 of our best workers overnight because their TPS ends and they can no longer work.”
In lieu of that, Ruby said, participants in the effort are learning how to help Haitians in other ways. That includes building relationships, accompanying migrants to appointments with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and providing their families with physical shelter.
A speaker addresses a training session July 29, 2025, at Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, which advised community and church leaders on how to support and shelter immigrants facing deportation.
(Obed Lamy / Associated Press)
A city in the crosshairs
Springfield found itself in an unwelcome spotlight last year after Trump amplified false rumors during a presidential debate that members of the mid-size city’s burgeoning Haitian population were abducting and eating cats and dogs. It was the type of inflammatory and anti-immigrant rhetoric he promoted throughout his campaign.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced in June that it would terminate TPS as soon as Sept. 2 for about 500,000 Haitians who are already in the United States, some of whom have lived here for more than a decade. The department said conditions in the island nation have improved adequately to allow their safe return. The United Nations contradicts that assertion, saying that the economic and humanitarian crisis in Haiti has only worsened with the Trump administration’s cuts in foreign aid.
The announcement came three months after the administration revoked legal protections for thousands of Haitians who arrived legally in the United States under a humanitarian parole program as part of a series of measures implemented to curb immigration. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal judge’s order preventing the administration from revoking the parole program.
Last month, a federal judge in New York blocked the administration from accelerating an end to Haitians’ TPS protections, which the Biden administration had extended through at least Feb. 3, 2026, citing gang violence, political unrest, a major earthquake in 2021 and other factors.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said at the time that the Trump administration would eventually prevail and that its predecessors treated TPS like a “de facto asylum program.” In the meantime, the government has set the expiration date back to early February.
TPS allows people already in the United States to stay and work legally if their homelands are deemed unsafe. Immigrants from 17 countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan and Lebanon, were receiving those protections before Trump took office for his second term in January.
Participants hold a discussion in a breakout session during a training hosted by the group Undivided at Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, aimed at teaching community and church leaders how to support and shelter immigrants facing deportation July 29, 2025.
(Obed Lamy / Associated Press)
Residents ponder next steps
Charla Weiss, a founding member of Undivided, the group that hosted the Springfield workshop, said participants were asked the question of how far they would go to help Haitian residents avoid deportation.
“The question that I know was before me is, how far am I willing to go to support my passion about the unlawful detainment and deportation of Haitians, in particular here in Springfield?” she said.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a longtime supporter of the Haitian community, was briefed by Springfield leaders during a visit to the city Friday. He told reporters that the state is bracing for the potential of mass layoffs in the region as a result of the TPS policy change, a negative for the workers and the companies that employ them.
“It’s not going to be good,” he said.
Lamy and Smyth write for the Associated Press and reported from Springfield and Columbus, Ohio, respectively.
Twelve years after a breakup that didn’t stick — and one year shy of the 20th anniversary of its biggest album — My Chemical Romance is on the road this summer playing 2006’s “The Black Parade” from beginning to end.
The tour, which stopped Saturday night at Dodger Stadium for the first of two concerts, doesn’t finally manifest the long-anticipated reunion of one of emo’s most influential bands; My Chem reconvened in 2019 and has been performing, pandemic-related delays aside, fairly consistently since then (including five nights at Inglewood’s Kia Forum in 2022 and two headlining appearances at Las Vegas’ When We Were Young festival).
Yet only now is the group visiting sold-out baseball parks — and without even the loss leader of new music to help drum up interest in its show.
“Thank you for being here tonight,” Gerard Way, My Chem’s 48-year-old frontman, told the crowd of tens of thousands at Saturday’s gig. “This is our first stadium tour, which is a wild thing to say.” To mark the occasion, he pointed out, his younger brother Mikey was playing a bass guitar inscribed with the Dodgers’ logo.
So how did this darkly witty, highly theatrical punk band reach a new peak so deep into its comeback? Certainly it’s benefiting from an overall resurgence of rock after years dominated by pop and hip-hop; My Chem’s Dodger Stadium run coincides this weekend with the return of the once-annual Warped Tour in Long Beach after a six-year dormancy.
Then again, Linkin Park — to name another rock group huge in the early 2000s — recently moved a planned Dodger Stadium date to Inglewood’s much smaller Intuit Dome, presumably as a result of lower-than-expected ticket sales.
The endurance of My Chemical Romance, which formed in New Jersey before eventually relocating to Los Angeles, feels rooted more specifically in its obsession with comic books and in Gerard Way’s frank lyrics about depression and his flexible portrayal of gender and sexuality. (“GERARD WAY TRANSED MY GENDER,” read a homemade-looking T-shirt worn Saturday by one fan.) Looking back now, it’s clear the band’s blend of drama and emotion — of world-building and bloodletting — set a crucial template for a generation or two of subsequent acts, from bands like Twenty One Pilots to rappers like the late Juice Wrld to a gloomy pop singer like Sombr, whose viral hit “Back to Friends” luxuriates in a kind of glamorous misery.
Gerard Way, from left, Mikey Way and Ray Toro perform as My Chemical Romance.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
For much of its audience, My Chem’s proudly sentimental music contains the stuff of identity — one reason thousands showed up to Dodger Stadium wearing elaborate outfits inspired by the band’s detailed iconography.
In 2006, the quadruple-platinum “Black Parade” LP arrived as a concept album about a dying cancer patient; Way and his bandmates dressed in military garb that made them look like members of Satan’s marching band. Nearly two decades later, the wardrobe remained the same as the band muscled through the album’s 14 tracks, though the narrative had transformed into a semi-coherent Trump-era satire of political authoritarianism: My Chemical Romance, in this telling a band from the fictional nation of Draag, was performing for the delectation of the country’s vain and ruthless dictator, who sat stony-faced on a throne near the pitcher’s mound flanked by a pair of soldiers.
The theater of it all was fun — important (if a bit crude), you could even say, given how young much of the band’s audience is and how carefully so many modern pop stars avoid taking political stands that could threaten to alienate some number of their fans. After “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a bearded guy playing a government apparatchik handed out Dodger Dogs to the band and to the dictator; Way waited to find out whether the dictator approved of the hot dog before he decided he liked it too.
Fans react as My Chemical Romance performs.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Yet what really mattered was how great the songs still are: the deranged rockabilly stomp of “Teenagers,” the Eastern European oom-pah of “Mama,” the eruption of “Welcome to the Black Parade” from fist-pumping glam-rock processional to breakneck thrash-punk tantrum.
Indeed, the better part of Saturday’s show came after the complete “Black Parade” performance when My Chem — the Way brothers along with guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, drummer Jarrod Alexander and keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac — reappeared sans costumes on a smaller secondary stage to “play some jams,” as Gerard Way put it, from elsewhere in the band’s catalog. (Its most recent studio album came out in 2010, though it’s since issued a smattering of archived material.)
Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance performs.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
“I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” was blistering atomic pop, while “Summertime” thrummed with nervy energy; “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” was as delightfully snotty as its title suggests. The band reached back for what Way called his favorite My Chem song — “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” from the group’s 2002 debut — and performed, evidently for the first time, a chugging power ballad called “War Beneath the Rain,” which Way recalled cutting in a North Hollywood studio “before the band broke up” as My Chem tried to make a record that never came out.
The group closed, as it often does, with its old hit “Helena,” a bleak yet turbo-charged meditation on what the living owe the dead, and as he belted the chorus, Way dropped to his knees in an apparent mix of exhaustion, despair, gratitude — maybe a bit of befuddlement too. He was leaving no feeling unfelt.
TURNBERRY, Scotland — It may not be typical golf attire, but one of the most ubiquitous outfits seen on President Trump’s golf course Friday ahead of his visit was the reflective yellow vest worn by Scottish police.
The standard issue garb that is far removed from the traditional Turnberry tartan was highly visible on the dunes, the beaches and the grass as thousands of officers secured the course in advance of protests planned during the president’s visit to two of his Scottish golf resorts.
Trump was expected to arrive Friday evening to a mix of respect and ridicule.
His visit requires a major police operation that will cost Scottish taxpayers millions of pounds as protests are planned over the weekend. The union representing officers is concerned they are already overworked and will be diverted from their normal duties, and some residents are not happy about the cost.
“Why isn’t he paying for it himself? He’s coming for golf, isn’t he?” said Merle Fertuson, a solo protester in Edinburgh holding a hand-drawn cardboard sign that featured a foolishly grinning Trump likeness in a tuxedo. “It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with public money, either U.S. or U.K.”
Policing for Trump’s four-day visit to the U.K. in 2018 cost more than $19 million, according to Freedom of Information figures. That included more than $4 million spent for his two-day golf trip to Turnberry, the historic course and hotel in southwest Scotland that he bought in 2014.
Police Scotland would not discuss how many officers were being deployed for operational reasons and only said the costs would be “considerable.”
“The visit will require a significant police operation using local, national and specialist resources from across Police Scotland, supported by colleagues from other U.K. police forces as part of mutual aid arrangements,” Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond said.
Scottish First Minister John Swinney said the visit would not be detrimental to policing.
“It’s nonsensical to say it won’t impact it,” said David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, the officers’ union.
Kennedy said he expects about 5,000 officers to take part in the operation.
He said a force reduction in recent years has police working 12-hour shifts. Communities that are understaffed will be left behind with even fewer officers during Trump’s visit.
“We want the president of the United States to be able to come to Scotland. That’s not what this is about,” Kennedy said. “It’s the current state of the police service and the numbers we have causes great difficulty.”
The Stop Trump Scotland group has planned demonstrations Saturday in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dumfries. The group encouraged people to “show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.”
Trump should receive a much warmer welcome from U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to meet with him during the visit. Swinney, the left-leaning head of Scottish government and former Trump critic, also plans to meet with the president.
Ha and Melley write for the Associated Press. Melley reported from London. Will Weissert contributed to this report from Edinburgh.
Broad economic sanctions, most of which are imposed by the U.S. government, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year — disproportionately children. This week the Lancet Global Health journal published an article that estimated that number at about 564,000 annually over a decade. This is comparable to the annual deaths around the world from armed conflict.
Sanctions are becoming the preferred weapon of the United States and some allies — not because they are less destructive than military action, but more likely because the toll is less visible. They can devastate food systems and hospitals and silently kill people without the gruesome videos of body parts in tent camps and cafes bombed from the air. They offer policymakers something that can deliver the deadly impact of war, even against civilians, without the political cost.
The above estimate of 564,000 annual deaths from sanctions is based on an analysis of data from 152 countries over 10 years. The study was by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and myself.
It’s a horrifying finding, but not surprising to economists, statisticians and other researchers who have investigated these impacts of economic sanctions. These are measures that target the entire economy, or a part of it that most of the rest of the economy depends on, such as the financial sector or a predominant export, for example in oil-exporting economies.
The sanctions can block access to essential imports such as medicine and food and the necessary infrastructure and spare parts to maintain drinkable water, including electrical systems.
Damage to the economy can sometimes be even more deadly than just the blocking of critical, life-sustaining imports. Venezuela is an example of a country that suffered all of these impacts, and the case is far more well-documented than for most of the now 25% of countries under sanctions (up from 8% in the 1960s). In Venezuela, the first year of sanctions under the first Trump administration took tens of thousands of lives. Then things got even worse, as the U.S. cut off the country from the international financial system and oil exports, froze billions of dollars of assets and imposed “secondary sanctions” on countries that tried to do business with Venezuela.
Venezuela experienced the worst depression, without a war, in world history. This was from 2012 to 2020, with the economy contracting by 71% — more than three times the severity of the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s. Most of this was found to be the result of the sanctions.
Our study found that a majority of people who died as a result of sanctions in all countries were children under 5. This atrocity is consistent with prior research. Medical studies have found that children in this age group become much more susceptible to death from childhood diseases such as diarrhea, pneumonia and measles when they become malnourished.
These results are also consistent with statistical studies by the Bank of International Settlements and other statisticians and economists who find that recessions in developing countries substantially increase death rates. Of course, the destruction caused by sanctions, as above, can be many times worse than the average recession.
In 2021, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) wrote a letter to then-President Biden, asking him to “lift all secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the Trump Administration.” The impact of these sanctions, he said, “is indiscriminate, and purposely so. … Economic pain is the means by which the sanctions are supposed to work. But it is not Venezuelan officials who suffer the costs. It is the Venezuelan people.”
This is why U.S. sanctions are illegal under treaties the United States has signed, including the Charter of the Organization of American States. They are also prohibited during wartime under the Geneva and Hague conventions, as collective punishment of civilians. U.N. experts have argued, quite persuasively, that something that is a war crime when people are bombing and shooting each other should also be a crime when there is no such war.
These sanctions also violate U.S. law. In ordering the sanctions, the president is required by U.S. law to declare that the sanctioned country is causing a “national emergency” for the United States and poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. But this has almost never been true.
Given the deterioration of the rule of law in the United States, and the lack of regard for human rights in America’s foreign policy — and increasingly at home — it’s easy to be pessimistic about the prospects for ending this economic violence. But it will end.
We have seen victories against much more formidable adversaries and entrenched policies, including wars — most recently against the U.S. participation in the war in Yemen. Organized opposition got Congress to pass a related war powers resolution in 2019. This forced an end to at least some of the U.S. military support and blockade that had put millions of people at emergency levels of hunger, thereby saving thousands of lives.
The CIA’s formal post-9/11 torture program, which included waterboarding, was ended by executive order in 2009, after public exposure and considerable opposition.
The biggest advantage of sanctions, for the policymakers who use them, is the invisibility of their toll. But that is also their Achilles’ heel. When the economic violence of broad sanctions becomes widely known, they will be indefensible and no longer politically sustainable.
One of the physicians who supplied ketamine to “Friends” star Matthew Perry appeared in a Los Angeles federal court Wednesday morning to plead guilty to multiple drug charges connected to the actor’s death.
Dr. Salvador Plasencia, known to Perry as “Dr. P.,” according to prosecutors, pleaded guilty to four felony counts of ketamine distribution. Plasencia, 43, supplied the drug to Perry through his live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, one of three defendants who pleaded guilty last year to their own connected charges.
“While Dr. Plasencia was not treating Mr. Perry at the time of his death, he hopes his case serves as a warning to other medical professionals and leads to stricter oversight and clear protocols for the rapidly growing at-home ketamine industry in order to prevent future tragedies like this one,” his lawyer, Karen L. Goldstein, said in a statement.
Goldstein said her client was “profoundly remorseful” for his role in supplying ketamine to Perry, who was vulnerable due to his history of addiction.
The doctor agreed in addition to the plea deal signed last month to give up his medical license within the next 30 to 45 days.
Plasencia faces up to 40 years in prison along with $2 million in fines. His voice was quiet during the hearing Wednesday, with Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett asking him to speak up as he relinquished his right to a jury trial.
Perry, 54, who was found in his Pacific Palisades home’s hot tub in October 2023, died from the acute effects of ketamine. Authorities allege the actor’s final dose, injected by Iwamasa, was sourced from the “Ketamine Queen” Jasveen Sangha, who pleaded not guilty and has a trial date set for Aug. 19.
Plasencia dabbed his face repeatedly with a cloth as prosecutors read out the charges, detailing how he sold the drug to Perry for thousands of dollars, sometimes administering it in the back of cars in parking lots.
Plasencia will remain out on bail until his sentencing on Dec. 3 on request from his defense lawyer, who argued that he is one of the primary caretakers of a 2-year-old son.
His Calabasas urgent care clinic, which remains open, requires patients to sign waivers that explain the charges against him.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says bases in Indiana and New Jersey can house detained immigrants without affecting military readiness — a step toward potentially detaining thousands of people on bases on U.S. soil.
Hegseth notified members of Congress from both states this week of the proposal to temporarily house detained immigrants at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey.
President Trump has moved to aggressively detain and deport people in the country illegally, a push that has swept up large numbers of immigrants, including many with no prior criminal records, and forced federal authorities to find places to house them.
Hegseth said the presence of the detainees would not negatively affect the bases’ operations or training. Officials have not said when detainees could begin arriving at the facilities or if other military bases are under consideration.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump’s border chief, Tom Homan, said there are about 60,000 beds available for detained immigrants and the goal is to expand to 100,000.
“We’re looking for any available bed space we can get that meets the detention standards we’re accustomed to,” Homan said Friday. “The faster we get the beds, the more people we can take off the street.”
Democratic lawmakers from both states and civil rights advocates condemned the idea of housing immigrants at the bases, questioning the effect on military resources and the justification for so many detentions.
“Using our country’s military to detain and hold undocumented immigrants jeopardizes military preparedness and paves the way for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in every New Jersey community,” New Jersey’s Democratic delegation said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Andre Carson of Indiana said his questions about detainee conditions have gone unanswered by the Trump administration.
He cited concerns raised about conditions at other facilities and said, “The fact that ICE has detained so many individuals that they now need to expand detention space in Indiana is disturbing.”
Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said in a statement that housing immigrants in military facilities sets a dangerous precedent “and is contrary to the values embedded in our Constitution.”
Both of the bases identified by Hegseth have housed Afghan or Ukrainian refugees in recent years.
During Trump’s first administration, he authorized the use of military bases to detain immigrant children — including Army installations at Ft. Bliss and Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas.
In 2014, President Obama temporarily relied on military bases to detain immigrant children while ramping up privately operated family detention centers to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American families who crossed the border.
Klepper and Freking write for the Associated Press. AP writers Christine Fernando and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
On a palm tree-lined bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, thousands of people rallied against the Trump administration in one of many “No Kings Day” protests around the country last month.
Here in Santa Monica, the well-heeled and beachy protesters also had a localized message: America, we’re sorry.
“Santa Monica apologies for Stephen Miller,” a bearded man in a straw hat proclaimed via hand-scrawled poster board.
“Stephen Miller, who raised you?” another protester inquired in purple puff paint. Others paired the White House deputy chief of staff’s name with expletives.
Amid the false accusations and acrid clashes of President Trump’s inner circle, few acolytes have survived longer than Miller.
The 39-year-old has remained essential through Trump’s second term, piloting an immigration platform that has sowed fear across wide swaths of the country — nowhere more so than greater Los Angeles, where federal agents have mounted a relentless assault on immigrants, sweeping up thousands in deportation raids.
In the long shadow of his policies, local and national observers alike are paying renewed attention to Miller’s upbringing in the famously liberal enclave once dubbed “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.”
“I think people are sad that the words ‘Santa Monica’ and ‘Stephen Miller’ are synonymous, because no one wants that connection,” said Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete.
Though often seen as a liberal enclave, Santa Monica is also where conservative strategist Stephen Miller grew up.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
How did the same 8.3-square-mile city that helped pioneer curbside recycling and strict rent control laws produce a man responsible for Trump’s most draconian policies?
Some are also questioning whether the administration’s focus on Los Angeles is a form of revenge on Miller’s spurned hometown.
When rumors of ICE agents seizing nannies at a Santa Monica park frantically flashed across social networks, Justin Gordon, who went to Hebrew school and high school with Miller, immediately thought his classmate must have personally directed the raid on their local park.
The reports proved spurious, but Gordon still saw an emotional truth.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve always thought, ‘This is Stephen Miller getting back at the city of Los Angeles,’ ” Gordon said.
In the eight years since Miller rose to fame and became an outsized antagonist on the American left, his Santa Monica villain origin story has been exhaustively documented, picked over and reanalyzed.
At the far edge of the American west, a brash adolescent came of age in a coastal community where the establishment prided itself on being antiestablishment. What choice would a young reactionary iconoclast have but to veer right?
Santa Monica was a town in flux when Miller was in high school at the turn of the millennium: a Berkeley meets Beverly Hills where haughty affluence was rapidly eclipsing the Birkenstocks and counterculture bumper stickers. It was also a tale of two cities, with moguls and the upper middle class north of Montana, and pockets of poverty and gang violence in the southern end of town.
Nowhere was this more evident than at Santa Monica High School, where the academics were nationally renowned, the student body resembled a United Colors of Benetton ad and a ’90s strain of “Free to Be … You and Me” liberalism reigned supreme.
The parade of cultural affinity clubs, diversity events and policies that sought to make the school more equitable nauseated Miller.
And the teenage provocateur made no secret of that revulsion, loudly belittling his fellow students. His bitter shtick offered a prescient preview of the grievance politics that would fuel his future boss into power.
Miller has said his years in high school were the hardest of his life, filled with pushback for his “vitriolic viewpoints,” according to Jean Guerrero, a former Times columnist and author of the 2020 Miller biography “Hatemonger.”
“And for whatever reason, he’s had this grievance about that ever since, and he’s been trying through various means, to have what I see as a form of revenge on the communities that rejected him in Los Angeles,” Guerrero said.
Stephen Miller when he was a student at Santa Monica High.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Through the White House, Miller did not respond to a request for comment. But anecdotes of Miller’s trollish high school antics have been exhaustively chronicled in the media.
There was the fight to restore the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance on his bleeding heart campus. His frequent railing against “rampant political correctness,” multiculturalism and the perceived failings of his Latino classmates. Allegedly dumping his middle school best friend for being Latino.
Perhaps most infamous is a campaign speech, seared into the brains of thousands of Samohi classmates, in which he seemingly absolved students of their responsibility to clean up after themselves.
“I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do,” Miller told the crowd, according to a video obtained by Univision. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
Students jeered and booed as Miller was escorted off the stage, according to several attendees. He lost that student government election.
“The only compliment I think I’ve ever come up with for Stephen is that there are plenty of conservatives and far-right wing conspiracy theorists and hate mongers that spout what he spouted from behind a computer screen. I have not in my life before or after seen someone do it in an amphitheater full of their high school colleagues,” said Miller’s classmate Kesha Ram Hinsdale, now majority leader of the Vermont state Senate.
Santa Monica High was a hothouse of political engagement, where students — the children of entertainment executives, bankers and lawyers, as well as nannies, day laborers and wait staff — were finding their footing as activists.
Students arrive for a summer school session at Santa Monica High School in 2011.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
They had watched Proposition 187 pass in their early childhoods, stoking divisions and energizing a wave of Latino activists. (The 1994 ballot measure, which aimed to block undocumented immigrants from accessing public education and other state services, was ultimately blocked by the courts.)
They marched with labor leader Dolores Huerta in support of workers at a neighborhood hotel and protested against the growing threat of war in Iraq.
Despite the kumbaya vibes, Santa Monica High was hardly a post-racial utopia. Students often self-segregated, and the school’s academic sheen was riven by racial division.
Puckish, clad in a suit and preternaturally confident, a teenage Miller was a regular presence at school board meetings. He argued for an English-only school district, decried the board’s focus on equity and generally sought to puncture progressive ideals and push buttons.
“We all knew who he was, and knew him by name,” said Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village), a Santa Monica-Malibu school board member from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by Jewish Democrats several generations removed from their own asylum-seeking immigrant story. He enjoyed a comfortable childhood north of Montana, until the family real estate company faltered in the early ’90s and the Millers eventually relocated to a smaller rental on Santa Monica’s shabbier southern end.
Reactionary conservatism didn’t become a defining aspect of Miller’s persona until he started high school, according to Jason Islas, one of his best friends in middle school.
The friendship dissolved the summer before they started at Samohi when, in Islas’ telling, Miller called and announced that they would no longer be hanging out.
Miller delivered the news brusquely, citing Islas’ lack of confidence, his teenage acne and his Latino heritage in a “businesslike tone.”
“It was pretty cruel, even for a teenager,” Islas recalled.
Through a spokesperson, Miller denied this account in 2017. But his derision toward Latino classmates is well-documented — in his own words.
“There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school,” a 16-year-old Miller wrote in a 2002 letter to a local paper.
The letter denounced the fact that school announcements were made in English and Spanish, “preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own” and making “a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment.”
Captivated by right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, Miller was a frequent guest on Elder’s show as a teenager, complaining about other perceived liberal excesses of his high school.
After graduating in 2003, Miller went to Duke University before landing on Capitol Hill, where he threaded his way up the far-right thicket with then-Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Many of his grievance-fueled Samohi talking points found their way into the first Trump campaign, where Miller had a mind-meld of sorts with the future leader of the free world.
In Trump’s second term, Miller has moved faster and gone further than during the first term, when he advocated unsuccessfully for using the military to push immigration enforcement. This time around, the administration has deployed troops to an American city in a staggering show of force, with masked agents raiding businesses and public spaces.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who also attended Santa Monica High, said Miller has always had a keen eye for picking fights that would generate maximum hate, outrage and attention. It’s the through line connecting his youthful theatrics with the current assault on Los Angeles, Rosmarin said.
“He knows L.A. — knows that it’s home to both a super, super diverse and beautiful immigrant community, but also home to tons of media, cultural capital, financial capital,” Rosmarin said. “I think in those ways, it’s a particularly attractive site for a battle if your goal is not just a policy outcome, but a political and cultural attack.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for the Trump administration to lay off tens of thousands of federal employees and downsize their agencies without seeking the approval of Congress.
In an 8-1 vote, the justices lifted an order from a federal judge in San Francisco who blocked mass layoffs at more than 20 departments and agencies.
The court has sided regularly with President Trump and his broad view of executive power on matters involving federal agencies.
In a brief order, the court said “the Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful,” referring to the plans to reduce staffing. But it said it was not ruling on specific layoffs.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred with the decision on the grounds that it was narrow and temporary.
Dissenting alone, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court should not have intervened.
“Under our Constitution, Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions,” she wrote.
Since mid-April, the court has handed down a series of temporary orders that cleared the way for Trump’s planned cutbacks in funding and staffing at federal agencies.
Litigation will continue in the lower courts, but the justices are not likely to reverse course and rule next year that they made a mistake in allowing the staffing cutbacks to proceed.
The layoff case posed the question of whether Congress or the president had the authority to downsize agencies.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said Congress, not the president, creates federal agencies and decides on their size and their duties.
“Agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a president may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress,” she said on May 22.
Her order barred more than 20 departments and agencies from carrying out mass layoffs in response to an executive order from Trump.
They included the departments of Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Treasury, Transportation and Veterans Affairs as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration and the National Science Foundation.
She said the planned layoffs are large. The Health and Human Services department plans to cut 8,000 to 10,000 employees and the Energy Department 8,500. The Veterans Administration had planned to lay off 83,000 employees but said recently it will reduce that number to about 30,000.
Labor unions had sued to stop the layoffs as illegal.
Illson agreed that the agencies were not acting on their own to trim their staffs. Rather, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget under Russ Vought was leading the reorganization and restructuring of dozen of agencies. She said only Congress can reorganize agencies.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 vote, turned down the administration’s appeal of the judge’s order.
Appealing to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers insisted the president had the full authority to fire tens of thousands of employees.
“The Constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said in his appeal, “and the President does not need special permission from Congress.”
He said federal law allows agencies to reduce their staffs.
“Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has ever intended to make federal bureaucrats a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not,” Sauer wrote.
WASHINGTON — It was a surprising statement from Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi as the Trump administration promises to release more files from its sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein: The FBI, she said, was reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” of the wealthy financier “with children or child porn.”
The comment, made to reporters at the White House days after a similar remark to a stranger with a hidden camera, raised the stakes for President Trump’s administration to prove it has in its possession previously unseen compelling evidence. That task is all the more pressing after an earlier document dump that Bondi hyped angered elements of Trump’s base by failing to deliver new bombshells and as administration officials who had promised to unlock supposed secrets of the so-called government “deep state” struggle to fulfill that pledge.
Yet weeks after Bondi’s remarks, it remains unclear what she was referring to.
The Associated Press spoke with lawyers and law enforcement officials in criminal cases of Epstein and socialite former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell who said they hadn’t seen and didn’t know of a trove of recordings like what Bondi described. Indictments and detention memos do not reference the existence of videos of Epstein with children, and neither was charged with possession of child sex abuse material even though that offense would have been much easier to prove than the sex trafficking counts they faced.
One potential clue may lie in a little-noticed 2023 court filing — among hundreds of documents reviewed by the AP — in which Epstein’s estate was revealed to have located an unspecified number of videos and photos that it said might contain child sex abuse material. But even that remains shrouded in secrecy with lawyers involved in that civil case saying a protective order prevents them from discussing it.
The filing suggests a discovery of recordings after the criminal cases had concluded, but if that’s what Bondi was referencing, the Justice Department has not said.
The department declined repeated requests from the AP to speak with officials overseeing the Epstein review. Spokespeople did not answer a list of questions about Bondi’s comments, including when and where the recordings were procured, what they depict and whether they were newly discovered as authorities dug through their evidence collection or were known for some time to have been in the government’s possession.
“Outside sources who make assertions about materials included in the DOJ’s review cannot speak to what materials are included in the DOJ’s review,” spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said in a statement.
Bondi has faced pressure after first release fell short of expectations
Epstein’s crimes, high-profile connections and jailhouse suicide have made the case a magnet for conspiracy theorists and online sleuths seeking proof of a cover-up. Elon Musk entered the frenzy during his acrimonious fallout with Trump when he said without evidence in a since-deleted social media post that the reason the Epstein files have yet to be released is that the Republican president is featured in them.
During a Fox News Channel interview in February, Bondi suggested an alleged Epstein “client list” was sitting on her desk. The next day, the Justice Department distributed binders marked “declassified” to far-right influencers at the White House, but it quickly became clear much of the information had long been in the public domain. No “client list” was disclosed, and there’s no evidence such a document exists.
The flop left conservatives fuming and failed to extinguish conspiracy theories that for years have spiraled around Epstein’s case. Right wing-personality Laura Loomer called on Bondi to resign, branding her a “total liar.”
Afterward, Bondi said an FBI “source” informed her of the existence of thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents and ordered the bureau to provide the “full and complete Epstein files,” including any videos. Employees since then have logged hours reviewing records to prepare them for release. It’s unclear when that might happen.
In April, Bondi was approached in a restaurant by a woman with a hidden camera who asked about the status of the Epstein files release. Bondi replied that there were tens of thousands of videos “and it’s all with little kids,” so she said the FBI had to go through each one.
After conservative activist James O’Keefe, who obtained and later publicized the hidden-camera video, alerted the Justice Department to the encounter, Bondi told reporters at the White House: “There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”
The comments tapped into long-held suspicions that, despite the release over the years of thousands of records documenting Epstein’s activities, damaging details about him or other prominent figures remain concealed.
The situation was further muddied by recent comments from FBI Director Kash Patel to podcaster Joe Rogan that did not repeat Bondi’s account about tens of thousands of videos.
Though not asked explicitly about Bondi, Patel dismissed the possibility of incriminating videos of powerful Epstein friends, saying, “If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I’m in charge, don’t you think you’d see it?” Asked whether the narrative “might not be accurate that there’s video of these guys doing this,” he replied, “Exactly.”
Epstein took his own life before he could stand trial
Epstein’s suicide in August 2019, weeks after his arrest, prevented a trial in New York and cut short the discovery process in which evidence is shared among lawyers.
But even in a subsequent prosecution of Maxwell, in which such evidence would presumably have been relevant given the nature of the accusations against an alleged co-conspirator, salacious videos of Epstein with children never surfaced nor were part of the case, said one of her lawyers.
“We were never provided with any of those materials. I suspect if they existed, we would have seen them, and I’ve never seen them, so I have no idea what [Bondi is] talking about,” said Jeffrey Pagliuca, who represented Maxwell in a 2021 trial in which she was convicted of luring teenage girls to be molested by Epstein.
To be sure, photographs of nude or seminude girls have long been known to be part of the case. Investigators recovered possibly thousands of such pictures while searching Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, and a videorecorded walk-through by law enforcement of his Palm Beach, Fla., home revealed sexually suggestive photographs displayed inside, court records show.
Accounts from more than one accuser of feeling watched or seeing cameras or surveillance equipment in Epstein’s properties have contributed to public expectations of sexual recordings. A 2020 Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report on the handling of an earlier Epstein investigation hinted at that possibility, saying police who searched his Palm Beach home in 2005 found computer keyboards, monitors and disconnected surveillance cameras, but the equipment — including video recordings and other electronic items — was missing.
There’s no indication prosecutors obtained any missing equipment during the later federal investigation, and the indictment against him included no recording allegations.
An AP review of hundreds of documents in the Maxwell and Epstein criminal cases identified no reference to tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with underage girls.
“I don’t recall personally ever having that kind of discussion,” said one Epstein lawyer, Marc Fernich, who couldn’t rule out such evidence wasn’t located later. “It’s not something I ever heard about.”
In one nonspecific reference to video evidence, prosecutors said in a 2020 filing that they would produce to Maxwell’s lawyers thousands of images and videos from Epstein’s electronic devices in response to a warrant.
But Pagliuca said his recollection was those videos consisted largely of recordings in which Epstein was “musing” into a recording device — “Epstein talking to Epstein,” he said.
A revelation from the Epstein estate
Complicating efforts to assess the Epstein evidence is the volume of accusers, court cases and districts where legal wrangling has occurred, including after Epstein’s suicide and Maxwell’s conviction.
The cases include 2022 lawsuits in Manhattan’s federal court from an accuser identified as Jane Doe 1 and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home, alleging that financial services giant JPMorgan Chase failed to heed red flags about him being a “high-risk” customer.
Lawyers issued a subpoena for any video recordings or photos that could bolster their case.
They told a judge months later the Epstein estate had alerted them that it had found content that “might contain child sex abuse imagery” while responding to the subpoena and requested a protocol for handling “videorecorded material and photographs.” The judge ordered representatives of Epstein’s estate to review the materials before producing them to lawyers and to alert the FBI to possible child sexual abuse imagery.
Court filings don’t detail the evidence or say how many videos or images were found, and it’s unclear whether the recordings Bondi referenced were the same ones.
The estate’s disclosure was later included by a plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, in a complaint to the FBI and the Justice Department asserting that investigators had failed over the years to adequately collect potential evidence of child sex abuse material.
Freeman cited Bondi’s comments in a new lawsuit on behalf of an Epstein accuser who alleges the financier assaulted her in 1996. In an interview, Freeman said she had not seen recordings and had no direct knowledge but wanted to understand what Bondi meant.
“I want to know what she’s addressing, what is she talking about — I’d like to know that,” she said.
Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP journalist Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
A feeling of tension and anxiety has settled over the greater Los Angeles area since June 6, when Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents targeting immigrants for sudden deportation touched down in the region.
L.A. restaurant owners are also scrambling to protect their staff and customers, with strategies ranging from informational events to train managers on what to say in the event of an ICE raid to the launch of rapid-response networks.
Amid present circumstances, restaurateurs are still contending with the ongoing issues that make running a restaurant in this city challenging, including rising rents and the compounded financial loss from January wildfires and 2024 entertainment industry strikes.
That makes it all the more important for diners to support their local food scene in whatever ways possible, from grabbing tacos at a favorite street vendor to making a reservation for a newly opened restaurant. This month presents opportunities to dine at a stylish new destination for Caribbean cuisine, a freshly reopened Korean barbecue stalwart and an iconic California-inspired wine bar that’s scheduled to close on Aug. 1.
Sports offer an escape, an oasis, a relief from the anxiety and troubles of day-to-day living. There’s the competition, of course. There’s also a reassuring certainty.
Clear-cut winners and losers. Scores meticulously kept. Rules and boundaries that are officiated and maintained as firmly and precisely as a chalked third base line.
In short, none of the compromise or messy ambiguities of daily life, which is part of the appeal and also part of the fantasy.
And it is fantasy to try to divorce sports from the times we live in and the events that unfold, sometimes frightfully, beyond the comfortable confines of the stadium and arena.
“Sports are political through and through,” said Jules Boykoff, a former pro soccer player-turned-political scientist. “and to deny it is to deny reality.”
Amy Bass, a professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University and the author of numerous works on the subject, agreed.
“Sport is part of our cultural, political, social and economic landscape,” Bass said. “It is an industry that pays people. It is an industry that entertains people. It is an industry that expresses some of our greatest moments and our most tragic moments.
“There is nothing,” she said, “that you can’t talk about through the lens of sport.”
Or shout about and argue over, as the case may be.
The Dodgers’ gesture struck many as too little, too late; an unforced error, if you will.
“That’s the best way to describe how the Boys in Blue have acted,” my columnizing colleague Gustavo Arellano wrote, “as the city emblazoned on their hats and road jerseys battles Donald Trump’s toxic alphabet soup of federal agencies that have conducted immigration sweeps across Los Angeles over the past two weeks.”
The Dodgers were studiously vague in last week’s capitulation, er, announcement of $1 million in good will payments. No mention, much less condemnation, of the brutality that ICE has employed in some of its enforcement actions. No reference to the parents separated from their children. No acknowledgment of the innocents — including U.S. citizens — swept up in some of the Trump administration’s indiscriminate raids.
“What’s happening in Los Angeles has reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people,” said Stan Kasten, the team president, in a masterwork of opacity and euphemism. “We believe that by committing resources and taking action, we will continue to support and uplift the communities of Greater Los Angeles.”
But, really, is it any surprise the team would first duck, then seek cover in such platitudes?
Lest we forget, the Dodgers are first and foremost a business, just like every other professional sports franchise. Michael Jordan may or may not have uttered the quote famously attributed to him — “Republicans buy sneakers, too” — as a reason for pro athletes and their teams to steer clear of politics. But it speaks resoundingly to a bottom-line truism of the sporting world.
Put another way, yes, the Dodgers have a substantial and remunerative following in the Latino community, which is very much under siege. But Trump devotees also fill a lot of seats and buy a lot of Dodger Dogs.
If we’re being honest, how many of those who root for the Dodgers — or any sports franchise, for that matter — would be more than willing to yield the moral high ground if it means a winning season and championship? Righteousness, after all, isn’t reflected in the standings.
So what’s a cross-pressured, community-grounded, profit-seeking sports organization to do?
Events, spiraling downward by the day, may have left the Dodgers little choice.
“The more people are affected, maybe I shouldn’t say affected but traumatized, by what’s happening on the streets of L.A. and the neighborhoods of L.A. … this left the Dodgers with much less room in which to try to shimmy through without saying anything,” said Boykoff, who teaches political science at Oregon’s Pacific University. “The circumstances in a lot of ways forced their hand.”
So the organization weighed in — belatedly, tepidly — leaving very few people happy or satisfied.
Little surprise there.
If we’re looking for a bright side, perhaps it’s this: Maybe instead of pretending sports exist in a pristine, politics-free vacuum, we can acknowledge their centrality to our daily lives and find, if not commonality, at least a common ground for discussion and debate.
“We can talk about history, we can talk about economics, we can talk about social change,” Bass said. “We can talk about how sport actually move political needles.”
Not, of course, on the playing field. But in the stands, in sports bars, at tailgate parties, on talk radio, wherever fans of various cloth gather.
“The more we recognize it,” Bass said, “the more that we can see that sport can actually provide this landscape for having very difficult conversations through a place that brings a lot of different kinds of people into the same space.”
It may seem far-fetched at a time of such deep and abiding divisions. But what are sports about if not hope and aspiration?
This past week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump spoke at a rally. Trump’s speech seemed familiar: Disparage Los Angeles (“trash heap”). Criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass (“incompetent, and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists”). Restate grievances about the 2020 election (“rigged and stolen”). Chide the crowd to support the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (“You better push your favorite congressmen”).
But this speech was different from his others. The location was Ft. Bragg in North Carolina — and the audience was mostly soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, the “All Americans.” Internal unit communications revealed soldiers at the rally were screened based on political leanings and physical appearance. “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration,” the guidance advised, “and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out.”
So what followed was to be expected. A sea of young soldiers in uniform — selected for their preference for the president — cheering and clapping for partisan commentary. This obviously violates Defense Department regulations. Heck, it’s even spelled out in a handy Pentagon FAQ:
Q. Can I ever wear my uniform when I attend political events?
A. No; military members must refrain from participating in political activity while in military uniform in accordance with both DoDD 1344.10 and DoDI 1344.01. This prohibition applies to all Armed Forces members.
But what happened during Trump’s appearance at the Army base is worse than breaking regs. The commander in chief forced an important unit to choose sides. He broke the All Americans in two. In essence, his statement to the troops there was: “Those who like me and my politics, come to my rally. The rest of you — beat it.” (Maybe we should start calling them the “Some Americans.”)
Imagine what it was like the day after. The soldiers who chose not to attend wondered how their next rating would go. Some lieutenant from California worried if his commander now has a problem with where he’s from — and is checking whether he was at the rally. Maybe it’s better if he wasn’t, and he instead chose to abide by Defense regulations?
No matter which way you lean, that speech injected partisan acid into the 82nd Airborne. And it will drip down and corrode from the stars at the top to the lowest-ranking private.
Militaries require extraordinary cohesion to function in combat. For those of us who’ve chosen this profession, one thing is burned into our brains from that very first day our hair’s shorn off: We’re all we’ve got. There’s nobody else. When you are hundreds and thousands of miles away from everyone else you’ve ever known, and you’re there for weeks and months and a year, you realize just how important the person next to you is, regardless of where they’ve come from, who their parents are, or whether their community votes red or blue.
Fighting units are like five separate fingers that form a fist. Partisan acid burns and weakens our fist.
Then there are the indirect effects. This speech damaged the military’s standing with a large swath of America. The image of soldiers cheering the partisan applause lines of a commander in chief who just sent thousands of troops to Los Angeles over the state’s objections? Not a good look.
These optics risk ruining the military’s trust with roughly half of America. The military is the last remaining federal institution that a majority of Americans trust “a great deal.” But it’s been slipping since the last Trump administration and may fall under 50%. Yet the military requires firm trust to fund and fill critical needs.
That’s important because not everyone wants to serve in the military. Many would prefer not to think about the expected self-sacrifice, or the daily discomforts of military discipline. Moreover, not everyone is even able to serve in the military. Roughly three-quarters of young Americans can’t qualify.
What if someone who would have been the next Mike Mullen — Los Angeles native, Navy admiral and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs — gets turned off by this rally and opts against the Naval Academy?
Then zoom out a little. What if much of California takes offense at this speech, not to mention at the soldiers and Marines so recently forced upon the local and state governments?
California hosts more active-duty troops than any other state — by a wide margin. It’s also the biggest donor state in the country, contributing $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives. The bases and other strategic locations up and down the Pacific Coast are beyond value. California is America’s strong right arm.
To sever California’s support for the military is simply unthinkable. It just can’t happen. We’ve got to fix this.
The first fix is simple. Hold troops to the accepted standards. Hegseth’s most recent book argued that the Defense Department has “an integrity and accountability problem.” Here’s the secretary’s chance to show America he stands for standards.
But we know mistakes happen, and this could become a powerful teachable moment: When the commander in chief orders troops to such an event, the only acceptable demeanor is the stone cold silence the generals and admirals of the Joint Chiefs display at the State of the Union, regardless of their politics and regardless of what the president is saying. Just a few years ago, two Marines in a similarly awful situation did just this right thing.
A further fix calls for more individuals to act: The roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals in America need to speak up. The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point. They know the old military saying: When you spot something substandard, and you fail to correct it, then you’ve just set a new standard.
The reason many of these retired senior officers often don’t speak out is their fear that defending neutrality risks having a political impact. Yet their continued silence carries a grave institutional effect — the slow-motion suicide of the profession that gave them their stars.
The president mentioned Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in his speech, and it’s too bad his speechwriter didn’t include a certain anecdote that would’ve fit the occasion. When the Civil War was over and terms were being agreed upon at Appomattox Court House, Lee noticed Col. Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca man serving on Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s staff. Lee quipped, “I am glad to see one real American here.”
To which Parker replied, “We are all Americans.” Since that very moment, we’ve been one country and one Army, All Americans, indivisible and inseparable from society.
If only we can keep it.
ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” @MLCavanaugh
Los Angeles is now a mere 12 months away from serving as primary host of the World Cup soccer championships, and three years away from taking the world stage as host of both the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.
Athletes and tourists by the tens of thousands will pour into the region from around the world, and I’m reminded of the classic film “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Gloria Swanson proclaimed, “I’m ready for my close-up.”
Will L.A. be ready for its close-up?
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.
That’s a question I intend to explore on a semi-regular basis, and you’re invited to worry and wonder along with me by sending your comments and questions to [email protected].
To let you know where I’m coming from, I’m a sports fan who watches the Olympics on television despite the politics, the doping scandals and the corporatization of the Games. But I’m also a professional skeptic, and my questions extend far beyond whether we’re ready for our close-up.
Here are just a few:
Will the benefits of hosting outweigh the burdens?
Will the average Southern Californian get anything out of the years-long buildup and staging of the Games?
And, will basic services and infrastructure near Olympic venues get upgrades at the expense of long-overdue improvements in other areas?
The answer to that question is a big “yes,” says L.A. Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who represents the northeastern San Fernando Valley.
“What I’ve seen in [the latest] budget is that those areas that will be hosting some of the Olympic events will be prioritized,” she said, and that means her district is off the radar.
It’s worth noting that the city of Los Angeles is not running these Olympics (that’s the job of LA28, a private nonprofit working in conjunction with the International Olympic Committee), nor is it hosting all the events. Olympic sites will be scattered well beyond Los Angeles proper, with volleyball in Anaheim, for instance, cricket in Pomona, cycling in Carson and swimming in Long Beach. Softball and canoe slalom competitions will be held in Oklahoma City.
Competitors dive into the Seine river at the start of the men’s 10km, marathon swimming, at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris.
(David Goldman / Associated Press)
But as lead host and a partner in the staging of mega-events that will draw an international spotlight, the reputation of the city of Los Angeles is on the line.
One financial advantage the 2028 Games will enjoy over previous Olympics is that there’s no need to erect any massive, ridiculously expensive new stadiums or arenas. There’ll be soccer at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, track and field at the L.A. Coliseum and baseball at Dodger Stadium, for instance. All of which will keep the overall cost of the Games down.
But playing the part of primary Olympic host carries as many risks as opportunities.
“The Games have a history of damaging the cities and societies that host them,” according to an analysis last year in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, which cited “broken budgets that burden the public purse … the militarization of public spaces … and the expulsion of residents through sweeps, gentrifications and evictions.”
Even without all that, L.A. has a raft of problems on its hands, and the close-up at the moment is not a pretty portrait.
Tens of thousands of people are homeless, and the agency overseeing homelessness is in turmoil amid damning financial audits, so unless there’s a quick turnaround, the city will be draped in blue tarps for all the world to see. Meanwhile, planned transportation improvements are behind schedule, skyrocketing liability claim settlements are expected to cost $300 million this year, and on top of all that, it suddenly dawned on local leaders several weeks ago that the city was broke.
“Our budget situation is critical,” Mayor Karen Bass wrote in an April letter to the City Council, outlining a nearly $1-billion deficit and proposing numerous program cuts and layoffs.
The City Council restored some of those trims, but the outlook is still grim, with several hundred workers losing their jobs. Bass and other local leaders maintain that playing host to mega-events will help restock the treasury. But the opposite could be true, and if the $7-billion Games don’t break even, the already-strapped city will get slapped with a $270-million bailout tab.
For all the hand-wringing at City Hall, it’s not as if the current budget deficit should have come as a surprise. Revenue is down, the response to homelessness devours a big chunk of the budget (without transformational progress to show for the investment), and the bills keep coming due on the City Hall tradition of awarding public employee pay raises it can’t afford.
That’s why there’s a 10-year wait to get a ruptured sidewalk fixed (although the city is much quicker to pay millions in trip-and-fall cases), and there’s an estimated $2 billion in deferred maintenance at recreation and parks department facilities. At TorchedLA, journalist Alissa Walker reports that in an annual ranking of park systems in the largest 100 cities, L.A. has dropped to 90th, which she fairly called “a bad look for a city set to host the largest sporting events in the world.”
Babe Didrikson, right, clears the first hurdle on her way to winning the first heat of the women’s 80-meter hurdles during the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games at the Coliseum.
(Associated Press)
Michael Schneider, founder of the nonprofit Streets for All, said L.A.’s budget crisis “is coming at the worst possible time.” Not that the delivery of basic infrastructure needs should be tied to major sporting events, but he had hoped the Olympics would trigger a substantial investment in “bus rapid transit, a network of bike lanes, sidewalks that aren’t broken, curb ramps. Just the nuts and bolts of infrastructure.”
Jules Boykoff, a Pacific University professor and former professional soccer player who has studied the social and economic impacts of several recent Olympics, is not wowed by L.A.’s record so far.
“I thought Los Angeles was going to be in a lot better shape,” Boykoff said. “I’ve been taken aback by the problems that exist and how little has been done.”
The real goal isn’t just to host the Olympics, Boykoff said, but to do so in a way that delivers long-lasting improvements.
“Any smart city” uses the Games “to get gains for everybody in the city. Athens in 2004 got a subway system,” he said, Rio de Janeiro in 2016 got a transit link, and last year’s host, Paris, got a system of bike lanes.
L.A. had gold-medal aspirations, and the city has made some transit improvements. It’s also got a wealth of signature natural wonders to show off, from the mountains to the sea, just as the Paris Games featured the Eiffel Tower and the magical evening skyline.
But three big hurdles now stand in the way of making it to the podium:
The budget limitations (which could get worse between now and 2028), the diversion of resources to the Palisades wildfire recovery, and the uncertainty of desperately needed federal financial support from President Trump, who would probably not put Los Angeles on his list of favorite cities.
Races are sometimes won by runners making a move from the back of the pack, and L.A. could still find its stride, show some pride, and avoid embarrassing itself.
That’s what I’m rooting for.
But just one year away from the World Cup and three from the Olympics, the clock is ticking, and it’s almost too late to be playing catchup.
ISLAMABAD — Afghans who worked for the U.S. during its war against the Taliban urged President Trump on Thursday to exempt them from a travel ban that could lead to them being deported to Afghanistan, where they say they will face persecution.
Their appeal came hours after Trump announced a U.S. entry ban on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan.
It affects thousands of Afghans who fled Taliban rule and had been approved for resettlement through a U.S. program assisting people at risk due to their work with the American government, media organizations, and humanitarian groups. But Trump suspended that program in January, leaving Afghans stranded in several locations, including Pakistan and Qatar.
Pakistan, meanwhile, has been deporting foreigners it says are living in the country illegally, mostly Afghan, adding to the refugees’ sense of peril.
“This is heartbreaking and sad news,” said one Afghan, who worked closely with U.S. agencies before the Taliban returned to power in 2021. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue, fearing Taliban reprisals and potential arrest by Pakistani authorities.
He said the travel ban on an estimated 20,000 Afghans in Pakistan could encourage the government to begin deporting Afghans awaiting resettlement in the U.S. “President Trump has shattered hopes,” he told the Associated Press.
He said his life would be at risk if he returned to Afghanistan with his family because he previously worked for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on public awareness campaigns promoting education.
“You know the Taliban are against the education of girls. America has the right to shape its immigration policy, but it should not abandon those who stood with it, risked their life, and who were promised a good future.”
Another Afghan, Khalid Khan, said the new restrictions could expose him and thousands of others to arrest in Pakistan.
He said police had previously left him and his family alone at the request of the U.S. Embassy. “I worked for the U.S. military for eight years, and I feel abandoned. Every month, Trump is making a new rule,” said Khan. He fled to Pakistan three years ago.
“I don’t know what to say. Returning to Afghanistan will jeopardize my daughter’s education. You know the Taliban have banned girls from attending school beyond sixth grade. My daughter will remain uneducated if we return.”
He said it no longer mattered whether people spoke out against Trump’s policies.
“So long as Trump is there, we are nowhere. I have left all of my matters to Allah.”
There was no immediate comment on the travel ban from the Taliban-run government.
Pakistan previously said it was working with host countries to resettle Afghans. Nobody was available to comment on Trump’s latest executive order.
On May 21, as they left the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were fatally shot, and because they were employees of the Israeli Embassy and the suspect was associated with pro-Palestinian politics, the story was reported in the familiar mode of Middle East politics.
The questions that reporters and pundits have been asking are: “Was this antisemitic?” “Was this killing a direct result of Israel’s starving of Palestinians in Gaza?” “Was this another act of pro-Palestinian terrorism?” “Is this the direct result of ‘globalizing the intifada’?” While these are valid questions, they miss a central part of the story.
Only in the eighth paragraph of the New York Times report are we told that the night before the shooting, according to officials, the suspect “had checked a gun with his baggage when he flew from Chicago to the Washington area for a work conference” and, further, that officials said “The gun used in the killings had been purchased legally in Illinois.” (TheLos Angeles Times article does not mention these facts.) This tragic shooting, however, is not unique.
In November 2023, a Burlington, Vt., man was arrested and charged with shooting three Palestinian college students without saying a word to them. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
This brief and very incomplete list of the literallyhundreds of thousands of people who have been killed by guns in the U.S. in the last decade does not include the racist mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.; the mass shooting at thePulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.; or thedeadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017. This macabre list also leaves out thethousands of people who have been shot and killed by law enforcement.
The elephant in the room — so fundamentally accepted that it largely goes unmentioned — is the deeply ingrained culture of violence in the United States. Gun ownership, police violence and abuse, and mass shootings are symptoms of that culture. However, the militaristic approach to international conflict (from Vietnam to Ukraine) and the disdain for nonviolent solutions are also grounded in this culture, as are the manosphere and the cruelty of predatory capitalism. Now we have a presidential administration that embodies this culture.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, personifies this ethos of cruelty and violence when she is photographed in front of a cage full of humans in a Salvadoran jail known for torturous treatment of inmates or writing casually about killing her dog. Noem is a key player in the theater of cruelty, but she is not the only one, and the unparalleled star is of course President Trump.
Trump’s policy agenda is based on vengeance. He revels in the theatricality of violence of the world of mixed martial arts, and he signs executive orders that aim to destroy individuals, law firms and universities that have not bent the knee, and the economics of his “Big Beautiful” budget moves money from those in need to those who need for naught.
Now, the presidentwants a military parade on his birthday that will include tanks, helicopters and soldiers. Although Trump himself evaded the draft, and he reportedly called American soldiers who were killed in war suckers and losers, he likes the strongman aesthetic of an army that is at his beck and call. He exulted in the fact that “we train our boys to be killing machines.”
Although some want to draw a dubious line from pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations to the killings of Lischinsky and Milgrim, the direct line that should be drawn is the one that everyone seems to have agreed to ignore: a culture of violence coupled with the widespread availability and ownership of guns inevitably leads to more death.
The only way we get out of this cycle of violence is by addressing the elephant in the room.
Aryeh Cohen is a rabbi and a professor at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. @irmiklat.bsky.social
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that U.S. gun violence stems from a normalized culture of violence reinforced by militaristic foreign policies, lax gun laws, and political leadership celebrating brutality[2]. This culture manifests through 46,728 annual gun deaths (79% of all murders) and suicides comprising 55% of firearm-related fatalities[1].
Systemic gun accessibility is highlighted as a critical factor, with 29.4 gun deaths per 100,000 residents in Mississippi – the highest rate nationally – contrasting sharply with Massachusetts’ 3.7 rate, demonstrating how variable state gun laws impact outcomes[2][3].
Political complicity is emphasized through examples like Secretary Kristi Noem’s public displays with detained migrants and President Trump’s “killing machine” rhetoric, which the author contends institutionalize cruelty[2]. The administration’s policies allegedly redirect resources from social programs to militaristic projects.
Different views on the topic
Second Amendment proponents argue that 74% of Republicans prioritize protecting gun ownership rights over restrictions, viewing firearms as essential for self-defense and a constitutional safeguard against government overreach[2]. States with permitless carry laws like Mississippi and Alabama see this as upholding individual freedoms despite higher violence rates[3].
Critics counter that focusing on cultural factors distracts from addressing mental health crises and improving law enforcement efficacy, noting that 55% of gun deaths being suicides suggests separate public health priorities beyond legislative reforms[1][2].
Some policymakers advocate for targeted interventions like enhanced background checks and red flag laws rather than broad cultural critiques, pointing to Massachusetts’ low gun violence rate as proof that regulatory measures can succeed without infringing on rights[2][3].
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass won’t be called as a witness in a multiday federal court hearing that could determine whether the city’s homelessness programs are placed in receivership.
Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, told U.S. District Judge David O. Carter on Tuesday that he and his legal team were withdrawing subpoenas issued in recent weeks to Bass and City Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park. Battling over the appearances, which were opposed by the city, would have delayed the proceedings for several months, he said.
The alliance, which sued the city in 2020 over its response to the homelessness crisis, originally sought testimony from the three politicians as part of an evidentiary hearing focused on whether the city failed to comply with the terms of a settlement agreement on homelessness programs.
The agreement, reached in 2022 between the city and the alliance, requires the city to provide 12,915 beds for its unhoused population by June 2027. The alliance contends that the city already is failing to meet the milestones of the agreement and has no clear path to that goal. City officials say they fully intend to comply by the deadline.
The possibility that Bass could testify in Carter’s courtroom provided a rare source of drama for the past week of hearings, which have focused on such granular issues as the definition of a homeless encampment.
Umhofer, in an interview, said he dropped Bass and the others because the city’s lawyers had threatened to pursue an appeal to block the three politicians from testifying, which would have triggered a delay of at least two to three months.
“I think it’s cowardly for the mayor to not testify,” he said. “She’s come in to court on multiple occasions and and shared talking points, but has never undergone cross-examination. For her to resist a subpoena is the definition of avoiding accountability and transparency.”
Umhofer argued that the testimony provided over the last week is already enough to show that the city’s homelessness programs should be overseen by a third-party receivership appointed by the court.
A Bass spokesperson did not immediately respond to Umhofer’s remarks. Theane Evangelis, an attorney for the city, said Umhofer’s description of Bass as cowardly — made in front of the judge during Tuesday’s hearing — was “uncalled for.”
“The Alliance lawyers apparently recognized that there was no legal basis for their subpoenas,” Evangelis said later in a statement. “They should never have issued them in the first place. The City is complying with the agreement settling a 2020 lawsuit, and it is indisputable that thousands of new housing units have been built and homelessness is down in LA for the first time in years.”
Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness in 2022, on her first day in office, securing additional power to award contracts and sign off on lease agreements for interim housing and other facilities. That same year, she launched Inside Safe, which has been moving thousands of unhoused Angelenos into hotels, motels and other interim housing. She also created a program to accelerate the approval of certain types of affordable housing.
The alliance has portrayed the city’s homelessness response programs as irrevocably broken, arguing that the only recourse is for the judge to turn them over to a third-party receiver. During six days of testimony, lawyers for the alliance repeatedly highlighted the findings of a consulting firm that the programs lack adequate data systems and financial controls, leaving them vulnerable to fraud.
Lawyers for the alliance also pointed out that the city has repeatedly missed the quarterly milestones established in its settlement agreement.
Over the last week, lawyers for the city argued that their client has made “best efforts” to comply with the settlement agreement. They also contended that the milestones are not mandatory. And they said the alliance is the party that’s “flat-out ignoring” the terms of the agreement.
Evangelis said the agreement allows for the city’s obligations to be paused, and the terms to be renegotiated, if an emergency takes place. The Palisades fire broke out in January, destroying thousands of homes.
“Instead of recognizing the enormous stress that our city is under and honoring its promise to meet and confer … the alliance ran to court the month after those fires and sought sanctions against the city’s supposed breaches,” Evangelis told the court last week.
The alliance placed Bass on its witness list last month, saying she has “unique knowledge” of the facts — and had put herself at the center of the debate by promising to lead on homelessness.
Lawyers for the city argued that putting Bass and the two council members on the stand would place “an undue burden” on them as elected officials. They instead presented as witnesses City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo, who is the city’s top budget official, and Deputy Mayor Etsemaye Agonafer, calling them the most knowledgeable about the settlement agreement.
Last week, Carter delayed ruling on whether Bass and the council members should testify, saying he first wanted to hear from Szabo and Agonafer, who handles homelessness issues for Bass.
Agonafer testified for about four hours Thursday. Szabo, who has overseen the city’s compliance with the settlement agreement, was questioned off and on during four hearing days. In multiple exchanges, he said he was confident the city would comply with the terms of the settlement by June 2027.
The two council members sought as witnesses by the alliance have been highly critical of the city’s homelessness programs.
Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, frequently uses the phrase “merry-go-round from hell” to describe the city’s struggle to get accurate data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency.
Park, who represents part of the Westside, said during the council’s budget deliberations last month that the city had wasted billions of dollars on homeless programs. Before casting her vote, she also said the city is “unable to manage” its own homeless affairs.
Federal agencies must do more to house struggling victims from January’s Eaton Fires, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) and advocacy groups argued Tuesday.
Chu hosted a roundtable at the Altadena Library with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and other agencies, where a dozen organizations assisting fire survivors pleaded for more assistance.
Even with the availability of federal vouchers and other housing aid, thousands of people remain bouncing between hotel rooms, living out of their cars or in other unstable housing situations, advocates said.
“Survivors of the Eaton Fire are slipping through the cracks,” Chu said at a press conference following the event.
Chu is urging FEMA to authorize a housing program called Direct Lease where FEMA directly rents apartments for disaster survivors who cannot find somewhere to live on their own. The Times reported this month that FEMA hasn’t implemented Direct Lease in Los Angeles even though it’s commonly made available after natural disasters nationwide, including the 2023 wildfires in Maui.
FEMA and CalOES officials have said that their data shows thousands of rental units available across L.A. County, making the program unnecessary.
“We know from anecdotal evidence that that cannot be true,” Chu said. “It is far from the truth.”
Fire survivors have faced numerous barriers to finding permanent housing while they decide on rebuilding their homes, advocates said. Landlords’ income requirements are too high. Potential tenants’ credit scores are too low. Some landlords aren’t accepting the vouchers FEMA is providing survivors. And the agency is including apartments in the Antelope Valley and other areas far from Altadena in its assessment of L.A.’s rental market.
By not taking these factors into account, FEMA officials are ignoring needs on the ground, advocates said.
“There is a huge gap between availability and vacancy and accessibility,” said Jasmin Shupper, president of Greenline Housing Foundation, a local nonprofit.
Chu said that FEMA already has provided $132 million in assistance, including $40 million for help with housing.
She said that money for Direct Lease was available through the existing federal disaster allocation following January’s wildfires. She noted that she supported the state’s request to Trump and Congress for $40 billion for long-term recovery efforts.
FEMA and CalOES didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Chu’s request. After Times reporting earlier this month, state emergency officials said they were reevaluating an earlier decision not to advocate for Direct Lease.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Liu Jia-yen had been living in Taiwan for more than two decades when she received notice that she was suddenly at risk of being deported.
In April, the National Immigration Agency told Liu, a 51-year-old Chinese immigrant, she had three months to provide evidence that she gave up her household registration — an official record of residence that grants benefits such as healthcare and education — in Guangxi, China. If she couldn’t find the right documents, she’d have to leave.
Liu thought she’d submitted the files long ago and called her 26-year-old daughter, Ariel Ko, in tears.
Ko, who was born and raised in Taiwan, called the immigration agency dozens of times over the next few days, unable to reach an operator. Meanwhile in China, Liu’s 80-year-old grandfather began visiting his local police station in search of old records, and her brother scoured his government contacts for anyone who could help.
Taiwanese military cadets holding Taiwan flags pose for selfies after attending the New Year’s Day flag-raising ceremony outside the Presidential Palace in Taipei, Taiwan, on Jan. 1. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has warned that no one can prevent China’s reunification with Taiwan.
(Daniel Ceng / Anadolu via Getty Images)
There are tens of thousands of Chinese-born people in Taiwan, which has been increasing scrutiny of them over the past year, citing concerns about infiltration and espionage. The immigration agency says the vast majority of Chinese living in Taiwan have filed the appropriate paperwork showing that they have canceled household registration in China, but about 12,000 people are facing a scramble — similar to Liu’s — for documents.
“I understand that the government has its policies, and we can respect that,” Ko said. “But what makes us upset is that we’re just ordinary citizens. If you’re going to ask us to do something this difficult, have you considered things from our perspective?”
China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and has threatened to take it by force, stepping up simulated attacks in recent years. Beijing has taken a particularly harsh stance against President Lai Ching-te, whom Chinese officials have called a “dangerous separatist” because he has promoted Taiwanese independence.
Concerns about spying in Taiwan and China date back to the Chinese civil war, after which the defeated Chinese Nationalist Party, or the Kuomintang, fled to Taiwan in 1949. Eventually, tensions began to ease as the two governments slowly resumed dialogue and cooperation over the next several decades. But in recent years, both China and Taiwan have been taking unprecedented actions in the name of national security.
Last year, China said it would ratchet up the punishment for advocates of Taiwanese independence, including imposing the death penalty. Lai, who took office a year ago and has called China a “foreign hostile force,” has proposed reinstating military trials for some espionage cases, criminalizing expressions of loyalty to China within the armed forces and tightening oversight of people traveling between China and Taiwan.
In March, three members of the Taiwanese presidential security team were convicted of spying for China. Taiwan also deported three Chinese immigrants for voicing their support online for unification through military action. Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency said this is the first time that spouses of Taiwanese citizens have had their residency revoked for such reasons. More than 140,000 Chinese immigrants hold residency in Taiwan because they are married to Taiwanese citizens.
Chinese influencer YAYA (Liu Zhenya) with a white hat and members of a NGO assisting her case hold a news conference, as she complies with Taiwan’s order to leave Taiwan after her residency was revoked for posting videos advocating “One China” and “Unification with China by Force” at Songshan Airport in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 25, 2025.
(Daniel Ceng / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said the records requirement has existed since 2004, and the recent notices were sent to ensure that those who want to stay in Taiwan can do so. But critics say that the sudden enforcement is unfair.
“It’s like our government has been asleep, like Sleeping Beauty, for 21 years. And now, all of a sudden, it wakes up and demands that Chinese spouses who’ve been living in Taiwan for so many years provide an important document from two decades ago,” said Chang Chi-kai, an opposition party legislator who is urging the administration to give Chinese spouses and their children more time.
After the public backlash, Taiwan announced additional exemptions for individuals with extenuating circumstances such as financial hardship, medical needs or safety concerns about traveling to China to search for records.
In Taiwan, people born in China are subject to different immigration laws than other nationalities. Milo Hsieh, founder of the consulting firm Safe Spaces in Taipei, says that distinction makes them more susceptible to discriminatory legal treatment, particularly in times of extreme political polarization.
“It resembles what I’m observing in the U.S. right now in Trump’s immigration crackdown, particularly on international students,” said Hsieh, referring to the hundreds of student protesters who have had their visas revoked. “They are deliberately targeting this class of individuals that are associated with a national security threat.”
Some frustrated residents say the bureaucratic bind is emblematic of long-standing discrimination.
Ko, who was born and raised in Taiwan, still remembers how her classmates used to tease her for having a mother from China, and would tell her to go back to the mainland. On social media, some were sympathetic to her mother’s struggle, while others told her to “save your fake tears,” or “if you want to be Taiwanese then follow our rules.”
Taiwan’s government has said that, according to its own polls conducted in March, more than 70% of respondents in Taiwan want officials to more thoroughly investigate whether Chinese immigrants here still hold residency or household registration in China, especially those who work in the military or public sector.
In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office in July 2022, Tsai Ing-wen, president at the time, is seen through glass on board a ship during military exercises.
(Shioro Lee / Associated Press)
“If China decides to start a war, then Taiwan needs to determine what to do in that situation,” said Fan Hsin-yu, an associate professor at National Taiwan University who specializes in immigration law. “First, it has to clarify who belongs to which side, who is the enemy, and who is one of us. That’s why this process is something they feel must be finalized soon.”
Fan said legal experts are divided on whether the government is justified in its recent documentation demands. She added that the measures may even be counterproductive, since China could simply issue certification to its spies or collaborators, while those who support Taiwanese sovereignty could put themselves at risk by going to China, or otherwise be forced to leave.
“The issue is not about legality, it’s about whether this is a smart move,” she said.
Chang and his family in China
(Courtesy of Chang Chih-yuan)
Chang Chih-yuan moved to Taichung, a city in central Taiwan, at age 4 and served in Taiwan’s military. He needs to secure documents to remain here but said he feels uneasy about providing all of his personal information — including his household registration history, physical ID card and travel permit — to the police station in Guangdong, China, where his family once lived.
Ultimately, he decided that he didn’t have much choice. His Chinese mother had received the immigration notice in April, and after many sleepless nights, she decided to take a month off from her cleaning job to obtain the certificate. When Chang, 34, inquired about his own paperwork, the immigration agency told him he would probably get a similar notice later this year.
“It just made me feel like I’m still not considered a real Taiwanese person,” he said.
A man walks past a hoisted Taiwanese flag at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on Oct. 15, 2024. The day before, China insisted it would never renounce the “use of force” to take control of Taiwan, after ending a day of military drills around the island.
(I-Hwa Cheng / AFP via Getty Images)
Another resident who immigrated from China as a child said he has been considering emigrating to Singapore since he received his notice. His father traveled to China’s Fujian province to seek household documentation on his behalf, but he still worries that his mainland roots could put his status at risk again in the future.
“The situation now feels like they assume if you were born in China, you’re an ally of the Chinese Communist Party and you have to prove your innocence,” the 33-year-old said, requesting anonymity for fear that speaking publicly could affect his case. “I feel like I’ve been completely betrayed by my country.”
Times staff writer Yang and special correspondent Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan.
