trump administration

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has briefed top lawmakers on a growing national security crisis around the world’s leading chipmaker, Nvidia, after its chief executive, Jensen Huang, admitted over the weekend to an extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials briefed the Gang of Eight — congressional leaders from both parties, and the chairs and vice chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees — on the matter, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Monday.

Congressional Republicans have called on Huang himself to provide an update, warning the incident raised “significant national security concerns” that could have compromised cutting-edge American technology at a critical moment in the race with China for supremacy in artificial intelligence.

Huang admitted Sunday to having an affair with Alice Huang, who was identified as a Chinese intelligence asset by U.S. authorities, after the New York Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had raised concerns within the administration about his potential compromise.

President Trump is scheduled to visit China next week.

“I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Jensen Huang said in a statement Sunday.

“Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports,” he added, “NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.”

Debate over export controls for the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, produced by Nvidia, has raged over the last eight years in Washington, with lawmakers across party lines expressing concern that Chinese access to the chips could strengthen their hand in the development of the most powerful AI models.

Huang has been one of the most vocal opponents of the U.S. export controls, calling them a “mistake” and saying they were hurting American businesses more than they were constricting Chinese government efforts.

The executive was successful in lobbying the Trump administration to ease export restrictions on some of Nvidia’s most advanced chips over the past year.

Jeffries said he would be calling for greater export controls on chips after the incident. The New York congressman is expected to become the next speaker of the House after Democrats swept into power in this month’s midterm elections.

“We’re going to need a full briefing specifically as it relates to the Nvidia issue,” Jeffries said, adding that “real concerns” have arisen from the case that will need to be addressed.

U.S. intelligence unmasked the Chinese intelligence operation after intercepting the communications of Alice Huang, a former journalist with Chinese state media who later became a senior executive at Megaspeed International. The Singaporean data center firm was already under the microscope for allegedly funneling restricted AI chips to Beijing.

Trump was reportedly made aware of the Chinese espionage effort targeting Huang, but chose not to act, according to the New York Times.

Nvidia’s stock dropped more than 4% Monday, after the board said it would open an investigation into its chief executive being the “target of a foreign intelligence effort.”

The company “prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of NVIDIA and its shareholders,” it said in the statement.

“While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board’s inquiry will examine all available information,” it continued. “The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.”

Rubio declined to address questions from reporters on the matter Monday.

“It’s an internal corporate matter for them, so I’m just not going to comment on that topic,” the secretary of State and national security advisor said.

But the administration could face increased calls to investigate Jensen Huang, a Trump ally, who traveled with Trump to Beijing in May and attended a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping in September held at the White House.

Republicans have also formally requested Huang appear before the House on Nov. 18 — when Trump will be in China — to brief them on what happened.

Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, head of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who leads the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the issue of Chinese infiltration and access to cutting-edge U.S. technology “is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress.”

“It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk,” they wrote.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to build a border wall through the scenic and rugged Big Bend sector of west Texas.

The justices on Monday granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that had paused further construction along a 517-mile section of the Rio Grande.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone and without an explanation.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said federal courts did not have the authority to stand in the way and block efforts along the border.

“The balance of the equities also favors the government,” the court said. “Construction in the Big Bend Sector will diminish the [plaintiffs’] ability to use and enjoy the area. But Congress’s enactment of [the special law] — which permits the Secretary to waive the requirements of environmental protection and other conservation laws — reflects a clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms” cited by the opponents.

A broad coalition of environmentalists, cattle ranchers, farmers, river boat guides, outdoor activists and church leaders had gone to court in El Paso seeking to stop the construction.

“The Trump administration and its contractors are hellbent on destroying one of America’s greatest national parks, and the Supreme Court just gave them the green light,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This horrific decision clears the way for contractors to bulldoze pristine desert and dynamite canyon walls before the courts have even decided whether this destruction is legal.”

But Trump’s lawyers pointed to unusual measures adopted by Congress that gave the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to construct border barriers “to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry.” One provision authorized the department’s secretary to “waive all legal requirements” that stood in the way, including environmental protection measures.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it does not plan to build a border wall in the Big Bend National Park, with its steep canyons, but said new patrol roads and vehicle barriers would be added.

However, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued a preliminary injunction on Oct. 2 to halt further work on the border barriers. She said the government’s own evidence showed illegal entries and drug smuggling were much less common in the Big Bend sector.

“For ‘high illegal entry’ to impose any limit, it must at least mean, not ‘the lowest rate of illegal entry,’” she said. “The Bend Sector has the lowest rate of illegal entry along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.”

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed a fast-track appeal at the Supreme Court and urged the justices to set aside her order and to rule on the underlying legal question. He cited evidence that over four years, there were 89,000 apprehensions of illegal migrants in the Big Bend sector which covers nearly one-fourth of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The Sinaloa and Juarez cartels operate south of this sector across the Mexico border and seek to exploit any vulnerabilities in United States border protection to traffic humans, drugs and weapons across the border and infiltrate the United States,” he told the court. “Leaving a 300-plus-mile gap in border defenses would act as a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors to exploit as other routes close off.”

LOS ANGELES — A U.S. deportation flight of Iranian nationals bound for Iran by way of Pakistan was abruptly canceled Sunday morning, according to an attorney who spoke to some of the detainees scheduled for repatriation.

At least eight Iranians were loaded onto a plane Sunday morning in Mesa, Ariz., for a deportation flight headed to the Caucasus nation of Georgia, then on to Pakistan, according to Ali Rahnama, an attorney with the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund who filed emergency motions on behalf of some of the Iranian detainees. The flight was canceled without explanation, he said.

Court documents unsealed days ago in a civil lawsuit filed by the fund showed the Trump administration as recently as mid-October said it had plans to deport the Iranians to Iran, even as the war there drags on, via an unnamed third country. The lawsuit was filed in July and alleges that the U.S. government illegally shared confidential information with Iranian officials about Iranians seeking asylum in the U.S.

There were three deportation flights to Iran between September 2025 and January 2026, with more than 100 Iranian nationals deported. But the administration’s confirmation of the new plans amid the war that began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February highlights its resolve in carrying out its hard-line immigration crackdown, which has involved ramping up removals, including to places that critics say could endanger the lives of the returnees.

Homeland Security response

In response to questions Sunday from the Associated Press, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not comment on “prospective removal operations, including flight schedules, passenger manifests, destinations, or individual case details,” nor would the agency confirm future removal operations.

“As promised, the Trump Administration is employing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history,” the statement said.

The administration did not specify in the October court records when the deportations would be carried out. But in the last week, roughly a dozen Iranian nationals in immigration detention said they were notified that they were scheduled for an upcoming deportation flight to Pakistan and then to Iran, according to numerous attorneys who have since confirmed those plans with Homeland Security.

Iranian government contacts reported

According to Rahnama, the eight detainees who boarded the flight on Sunday were visited by a senior official with the Iranian Interests Section — an Iranian representative office in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington that handles consular affairs — and were told that the Iranian government would transport them from Pakistan to Iran.

In the litigation brought by the Iranian immigrant advocacy group, at least a dozen Iranian detainees have said they’ve been contacted by Iranian officials who had knowledge of sensitive information on their asylum claims.

U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a nominee of President Biden, has not ruled on the claims but ordered the U.S. government to give the court 24-hour notice of any finalized plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country, and five days’ written notice before any such deportation is carried out.

In a court filing Sunday, the defense fund laid out what it had learned about plans for a removal flight Sunday and argued that the administration may have violated the judge’s directive to give advance notice of deportation plans.

Later Sunday, the government filed court documents in the case, but they were sealed and inaccessible to the public.

Group says individuals could face persecution

The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund has called for a halt to the removal flights, saying in a news release that they would “reportedly mark the first deportation of Iranians to Iran since the U.S.-Iran war began.”

The group’s executive director, Yasmine Chubin, said in a statement Sunday that it was difficult to comprehend why the U.S. would forcibly deport Iranians, including asylum seekers, to Iran, amid ongoing military hostilities.

The consequences of removal, Chubin said, “could be irreversible and individuals may face persecution, torture, or death.”

At least one person who had been part of the scuttled flight volunteered to go back to Iran after nearly two years of detention, Rahnama said, out of desperation to leave what he described as inhumane imprisonment. It’s not clear how many other of the deportees may have volunteered to leave.

Riddle writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

Nov. 5, 2026 10 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration held secret talks with Iran on deporting Iranians even as the war there dragged on, court documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

The court documents unsealed Thursday show the Republican administration as recently as mid-October said it had plans to deport the Iranians through an unnamed third country, although it was unclear when it intended to do so. The judge in the case ordered the government to give the court 24-hour notice of any finalized plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country and five days’ written notice before any such deportation is carried out.

The documents show that the administration maintained contacts with Iranian officials during the war over the removals, specifically for submitting travel documents and figuring out “possible avenues for removal.”

“We are at war with a country where the President of the United States has said, as recently as two or three days ago, if not yesterday, that it is essentially lawless … A country that is an enemy of the United States, according to the current president. A country that, according to our president, murdered tens of thousands of protestors,” Judge Ana Reyes said according to the Oct. 15 transcript.

“And what you’re telling me is that the United States of America is going to send individuals back to that region, facing what you and I and everyone who would ever look at this would know would be, at a minimum, a serious threat of certain death.”

“Yes, your honor,” Justice Department attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel said. “The government is executing lawful orders of removal.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The development emerged from an ongoing lawsuit that alleges the Trump administration’s immigration agencies have been sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating national immigration regulations and endangering countless Iranians, court filings argue.

The new court documents show the coordination continued during the war.

The lawsuit depicts a coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran — a marked departure from decades of diplomatic hostility between the two governments and an ongoing war. DHS has denied that it is sharing asylum application records with the Iranian government.

Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials exposed how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be flown back to Iran on three immigration flights in September and December 2025 and January 2026.

Deportations of Iranians back to their home country are historically rare, owing to the lack of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran and the possible persecution they could face if they were sent to Iran.

But under the Trump administration, ICE has aggressively pushed to deport people even from countries that have typically been reluctant to take people back or with whom the U.S. has had icy or no diplomatic relations.

Sometimes that has meant sending people back to their home country but it has also meant deporting people to other countries that they have no connection with.

The Trump administration has deported people, including Iranians, to countries other than their own in an attempt to circumvent diplomatic hurdles with governments that won’t take their people back. During Trump’s second term, countries including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and across Africa have accepted noncitizens from the U.S.

In June, an Iranian woman was among the two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic.

Activists abroad have expressed concern about deportees returning to Iran, whose theocracy has been cracking down on intellectuals and where the government vociferously cracks down on any dissent.

Kunzelman and Santana write for the Associated Press.

Lawmakers from California are poised to lead two of Congress’ most consequential energy and environment committees, putting the Golden State at the forefront of efforts to scrutinize the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to federal climate policy.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) have served as the top Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the House Natural Resources Committee, respectively, since Republicans took control of the chamber in January 2023. With Democrats now set to control the next Congress, both are the likely choice for chair.

The committees oversee major areas of federal science and energy research, public lands, water, wildlife and natural resources policy. While neither directly controls federal agencies, their leaders hold significant authority over oversight and legislation.

Both committees have advanced bipartisan legislation under Republican leadership, such as the Fix Our Forests Act from Natural Resources chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and Calif. Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego). But they have also pursued efforts to reverse Biden-era environmental priorities — such as narrowing the Endangered Species Act — and advance President Trump’s domestic energy agenda, which favors oil and gas production.

Lofgren said the change represents a real opportunity to restore faith in science after two years of policies that have undermined it. The committee under Republican leadership launched a probe into the National Academies of Sciences over a report reaffirming the evidence for climate change.

“We’re not confused that climate change is going on. Neither are most Americans,” Lofgren said. “Ask any farmer in my district, and they’ll tell you climate change is going on.”

It’s also a chance to put California’s embattled environmental ambitions back in the congressional spotlight. The White House has challenged the state’s climate goals, slashing $1.2 billion in funding for its nascent hydrogen hub, moving to restart oil drilling off the coast and striking deals with offshore wind developers to abandon their projects and invest instead in fossil fuels.

“Much of what the administration has done the past two years has moved forward simply because there was no congressional check and balance,” Huffman said, pointing to a long list of executive orders, no-bid contracts and spontaneous announcements from the president. “I think you’re going to see a dramatic shift when we begin to have a check in the form of Congress that does its job.”

Though committees cannot prevent the president from issuing executive orders, they can hold hearings, subpoena documents, investigate whether agencies are complying with existing laws, and draft legislation to protect specific programs or funding.

This might not have prevented some of the administration’s most consequential actions — such as the payouts to offshore wind developers, which effectively killed three of the five projects off the coast of California — but would have brought greater public scrutiny and accountability to the process.

The same is true of the administration’s use of the Defense Production Act to restart oil pumping operations at the Sable Platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, which the White House said is a matter of national security.

“We are awash in oil and gas production,” Huffman said, adding that the president has “relied on fake emergency declarations that no one has questioned or challenged.”

Lofgren said she would look into the administration’s dismantling of scientific agencies and cancellation of research grants. The U.S. Department of Energy — whose research and development programs fall under the Science Committee’s purview — recently acknowledged in court documents that the termination of $7.6 billion in funding for clean energy projects was targeted at blue states.

On the legislative side, Huffman said he would pursue a Democratic permitting reform proposal aimed at addressing soaring energy costs. Lofgren said she would push to reauthorize the Energy Act of 2020 and renew federal programs established by the CHIPS and Science Act, which together boosted spending for emerging technologies, clean energy and supply chains.

She would also advance laws supporting fusion research, quantum computing, next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies, along with greater guardrails around artificial intelligence. The Science Committee’s current chair, Republican Rep. Brian Babin of Texas, has also supported some of these emerging technologies, including fusion and quantum research.

In fact, Lofgren was optimistic that cross-party cooperation would prevail. Nearly all of the committee’s bills adopted this year passed unanimously, or close to it, although many never made it to the House floor, she said.

“I’m not going to compromise on oversight, and I know that the Republicans may not agree with us on some of the oversight issues,” she said. “But when it comes to legislation, we have a long history of bipartisan collaboration, which I anticipate would continue.”

In other election news

Energy affordability was top of mind for voters on Tuesday, with soaring electricity bills at the center of many high-profile national races. Residential electric rates in the U.S. are averaging 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, up from 15.9 cents when Trump resumed office in January 2025, according to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Many Californians pay much more than that.

This turned out to be a formidable weapon for Democrats, many of whom made energy costs central to their campaigns. An analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Power found that more than $475 million was spent on political ads about utility and energy bills in the first 10 months of this year. In the most competitive races, 32% of all recent Democratic ad spending went to ads mentioning energy affordability issues, compared with 12% from Republicans.

Data centers were perhaps the biggest bogeyman of all. In Michigan’s high-stakes Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed called for a pause on new data centers until stronger federal guidelines are adopted, and argued that they must pay to cover their own energy demand and not pass down costs to ratepayers.

His opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, was criticized for investments into tech companies that could benefit from the data center boom, and subsequently backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan and said guardrails should be put in place to protect against utility price hikes.

The candidates did not agree on the reasons for high prices, however. El-Sayed touted 100% renewable energy as the best path forward, while Rogers said renewables are driving up Michigan’s energy and utility costs. El-Sayed won the state race Tuesday night.

In other climate news

Record hot ocean temperatures, higher-than-normal tides and powerful storms could converge amid a potentially historic El Niño. That’s a recipe for more coastal flooding, erosion and large waves in California this winter. My colleagues Rong-Gong Lin II and Sean Greene took a look at how this “worst-case scenario” for El Niño could play out.

But the news isn’t all bad. After a couple with a plot of land above Santa Clarita marketed it as a potential “glamping” site, they decided instead to sell it back to the local tribe that originally lived there. Read Noah Haggerty’s joyful story about how this 51-acre piece of land along the Pacific Crest Trail will go back to the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians.

And finally, the annual United National Climate Change Conference, COP31, will kick off next week in Turkey. It comes only weeks after U.N. officials reported that the world will not be able to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — a goal established during the 2015 conference in Paris. This year’s conference is expected to focus on implementing existing climate commitments, reducing emissions and accelerating the clean energy transition, among other topics.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

On the Boiling Point Podcast this week, hear how Hollywood’s approach to climate themes is changing.

The Justice Department sent a last-minute surge of election monitors into Los Angeles Tuesday morning, hours after losing the latest legal tug-of-war over California’s 20,000 contested ballots.

In a pair of decisions late Monday night, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals published and then quickly rescinded a decision that would have allowed the Trump administration to prosecute election workers who processed contested ballots, even after their demands to segregate them were struck down by the Supreme Court.

Then, as dawn broke on Election Day, the Justice Department announced it was sending out “1,000 election monitors and observers” across the U.S. in what it called “the largest monitoring effort in DOJ history.”

Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Detroit were among the dozens of jurisdictions where monitors were sent under the auspices of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — legislation the President Trump has worked tirelessly to gut across both his administrations.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the federal monitors “will be at polling locations,” but that the department is not “giving out precinct details.”

The move was widely seen as an intimidation tactic.

“They’re not doing this to make sure that there are free and fair elections,” said Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the Supreme Court. “They’re doing this for nakedly partisan reasons, and the federal government shouldn’t be allowed do that.”

California officials were quick to hit back.

“We’ll have our observers on site keeping an eye on your monitors to ensure the integrity of California’s free, fair, safe, secure, accurate, and reliable elections,” Bonta vowed on social media as the spat escalated early Tuesday morning.

The Justice Department said it would also send monitors to San Diego, Sacramento and Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The sudden influx of election monitors and the dramatic about-face in appellate court are the latest wild swings in the Golden State’s protracted midterm brawl with the federal government — a fight that has captured national attention amid growing concerns of election interference by the Trump administration.

“On the eve of Election Day, Defendants insist they must be free to use their prosecutorial powers to do what they could not through their applications for injunctions in this court and the Supreme Court,” 9th Circuit Chief Judge Mary Helen Murguia wrote in her dissent to the initial 2-1 ruling, which appeared just after 8 p.m. Monday night.

“The district court properly attempted to put a stop to Defendants’ efforts to intimidate election workers into abandoning lawful state election procedures through spurious threats of prosecution,” Murguia wrote.

By 11 p.m. the decision had been reversed, with the court setting aside its previous ruling while it reviewed the case with a larger en banc panel.

It was the latest legal blow for the administration in what had been a months long effort to claw back ballots it claims may have been issued to noncitizens, while publicly threatening to prosecute election workers who process them when its efforts were rebuffed in court.

Last week, the Justice Department sent criminal grand jury subpoenas to election workers in Los Angeles seeking reams of data related to efforts to comply with its demands.

Unions and voting rights groups sued in federal court, saying the efforts amounted to “a coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce” civil servants into holding back legitimate ballots.

On Friday, after the 9th Circuit had ruled for California in the ballot claw-back case, U.S. District Court Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco issued a blistering order blocking the Justice Department from dangling criminal liability over elections workers or demanding voters be stripped from the rolls.

“In the lead-up to the election, high-ranking DOJ and DHS officials have engaged in a campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees who are engaged in administering the ongoing midterm 2026 election,” Thompson wrote.

“Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” the judge wrote.

Then, on Monday afternoon, mere minutes after it was asked to consider the question, the Supreme Court returned an unsigned decision in California’s favor, appearing, at least briefly, to foreclose further efforts to stop those ballots being counted.

“This latest decision should put an end to the Administration’s attempt to disrupt California’s elections through emergency court orders,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in response to the Supreme Court decision Monday.

But it didn’t.

Instead, the late-breaking 9th Circuit decision spurred a flurry of confusion and conjecture just hours before polls were set to open in the country’s most populous state.

In the wake of the court rulings, Segall and others said the Trump administration’s move to deploy election monitors was part of a troubling pattern. The law professor worried the Supreme Court could weaponize what remains of the Voting Rights Act to benefit the president and his party.

“So far they’ve said we’re going to cut the legs off [the Act] so as not to help Democrats, but the next iteration of this will be to use the Voting Rights Act to help the Republican Party,” he said.

Nearly two-thirds of California voters are worried that the Trump administration may try to halt the vote count early, stoking disquieting levels of election anxiety on the eve of the midterms, a new poll shows.

Those fears arise as the Justice Department continues its aggressive efforts to challenge or wrest control over state voting processes, including threatening to prosecute uncooperative elections officials in California, after years of baseless claims of widespread election fraud by the Republican president.

Among California voters, 63% worry that the federal government may attempt to stop the counting of votes in California and other states in the days following Tuesday’s election, according to the poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times. Around half of voters — 49% — are not confident that the state’s election will be free of federal interference, the survey found.

“Both of the items, together, I think should raise alarms for threats against democracy in California,” said Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

California voters also have grievances with the state’s ballot propositions, a slate of 14 measures that include new taxes on billionaires and funding for cancer research. More than 8 in 10 of the state’s likely voters said that this year’s propositions were worded in a way that made them hard to understand and that special interests groups have too much influence over which propositions appear on the ballot.

Those concerns were shared across partisan lines, unlike how Californians felt about the threats posed to integrity of elections by the Trump administration. The high level of fear in the state reflects the fact that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 in California.

While 58% of Democrats are not confident the election will be free of federal interference, 27% of Republicans feel the same way, according to the poll. Similarly, 85% of Democrats are worried about the vote count being halted, compared with 22% of Republicans. A majority of California voters not affiliated with either party also expressed fears of interference by the Trump administration.

“I think voters are reflecting the reality,” Barreto said. “For the past month, the president and the Department of Justice have been attempting to directly interfere and take over California elections and voters are aware of that.”

The Department of Justice has sued California requesting the state set aside some 20,000 ballots the federal government has flagged as being potentially from noncitizens. Federal prosecutors have threatened criminal actions against election officials who refuse to comply. On Monday, the Trump administration escalated its effort to discount the flagged California ballots to the Supreme Court, which rejected its request to set aside the ballots.

Over the weekend, Newsom sent a letter to U.S. District Court judges across California sharing his “grave concerns federal agents will seek search warrants to seize ballots and ballot materials before the election results are certified” and urging judges not to comply.

Newsom wrote that President Trump’s history of weaponizing the Department of Justice to carry out his partisan agenda supports “legitimate concerns about further attempts to disenfranchise voters and undermine election integrity.” Newsom said this could include an attempt to prevent the certification of California’s election.

Concerns have also been raised about the presence of immigration agents around voting centers and performing door knocks and street stops to try to identify voter fraud.

Court rulings have recently dealt a series of blows to the Trump administrations efforts to intervene in the state’s voting process. Nonetheless, distress over election integrity remains extremely high, according to the poll.

Fears of federal meddling in the election are slightly higher among voters of color; 64% of Black voters and 54% of Latino voters said they are not confident the election will be free of interference, compared with 44% of white non-Hispanic voters, according to the poll.

Voters of color tend to lean more liberal, but the historic and ongoing efforts to disenfranchise minorities probably also contribute to this disparity, Barreto said.

Black voters have been a target of voter suppression efforts from the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said. More recently, the Trump administration has singled out Latino Californians, accusing them of being noncitizens and voting illegally.

Professor Eric Schickler, co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, described the level of alarm over election integrity in California and across the nation as without precedent.

He noted that both parties are distrustful about different things, with Republicans focused on allegations of fraudulent voting and Democrats fearful that the federal government may attempt to overturn results.

The last time America saw extreme political polarization paired with widespread claims of illegitimacy over election outcomes was during the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, when there were widespread accusations of voter suppression in the South and of people voting illegally in the North, he said.

“That hasn’t happened really in the United States for well over a century now,” Schickler said, “so what we’re seeing now is really unusual, especially for a modern and long-lived democracy.”

Schickler said his highest level of concern with possible federal efforts to halt California’s vote count would be with congressional races. A handful of California races could play a pivotal role in deciding which party takes control of the U.S. House of Representatives. However, he said current polling data do not indicate that a Democratic path to victory in the lower house will rely on Golden State voters.

Trump in the past has criticized California for being one of the slowest states in the nation to finish tabulating its election results due to its large population and high number of voters who mail in their ballots. He’s also complained about late arriving ballots. Votes processed after election day in California typically contain a higher proportion of Democratic ballots than those processed on election night.

In addition, to highlight the unprecedented anxiety many California voters are feeling, the poll also shines a light on frustrations voters have with the state’s ballot propositions. Among likely voters, 82% agree that the wording of this year’s propositions made them hard to understand and 82% also agree that special interest groups have largely taken over which initiatives qualify.

In addition, 62% of likely voters feel that there are too many propositions on this year’s ballot. There are 14 statewide propositions, with many voters also seeing additional initiatives at a county and city level.

“The initiative is meant to be an outlet for voters when special interest groups lead legislators to fail to respond to their concerns,” Schickler said. “But now most voters believe the initiative process is itself too beholden to special interests.”

In the last 20 years, California’s ballot initiative campaigns have become increasingly controlled by large corporations or union groups. Part of this is due to the fact that it takes at least $50 million to run an effective campaign capable of reaching the state’s 23 million registered voters, making it challenging, but not impossible, to run a grassroots campaign, Barreto said.

The poll surveyed 2,787 registered voters in California from Oct. 19 to 25 in English and Spanish and has an overall estimated margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Among likely voters, the estimated margin of error is about 3 percentage points in either direction.

Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

Top officials in California are bracing for unprecedented election interference from the Trump administration in coming days, including potential ballot seizures.

They are warning the public about such actions in striking messages casting President Trump and U.S. Department of Justice officials as threats to the vote and to American democracy. They have begged federal judges to reject warrant requests and hold the line against lawless probes. They have deployed armies of election lawyers and volunteer monitors, particularly to areas where congressional races could be close.

“California is dead serious about the security of [Tuesday’s] midterm elections. If Trump tries to meddle with California’s ballots, you can be sure as hell that we’ll prosecute those who help him,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday. “Californians deserve a free and fair election, and that is exactly what we’ll deliver.”

Those efforts, echoing others from Democrats in Congress and liberal officials in other political battlegrounds, are like nothing seen before in the U.S., and in response to an equally extraordinary campaign by the Trump administration to intervene in state-run elections based on claims — espoused by Trump for years — that voting in places such as California has been corrupted by widespread fraud.

On Monday, Justice Department officials redoubled their effort to block about 20,000 California ballots from voters who they allege may be noncitizens by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, after lower courts rejected the request — and as another judge in a separate challenge barred them Monday from demanding California officials segregate the same ballots. The Supreme Court denied the request.

They and local partners also rolled out criminal charges against seven noncitizens accused of illegally voting or registering — bringing the total number of lawful permanent residents recently charged with election-related offenses in the state to 35.

Beyond California, the Trump administration is trying to preemptively negate any win by the Democrat in the Alaska Senate race, based on claims that the presence on ballots of a third candidate with the same name as incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) is confusing voters.

The incumbent senator is identified as such on the ballot, and Alaska courts have already rejected similar challenges. A federal judge dismissed the administration’s suit Sunday.

The White House and the Justice Department have said they are simply trying to ensure American citizens’ votes aren’t diluted by illegitimate votes from noncitizens, and that Democrats aren’t able to steal the Alaska race by intentionally confusing voters.

But Democratic leaders have alleged that the lawsuits are part of a broader Trump administration effort to establish a “pretext” to challenge the outcome of Tuesday’s midterm elections if they don’t like the results.

On Saturday, Newsom wrote to federal district court judges across the state, urging them to deny any Trump administration requests for judicial warrants that would allow them “to seize ballots, election records, or certified voting technology while an election is underway and before the results are certified.”

Newsom wrote that he has “grave concerns” that federal agents will “quickly pivot” to making such requests in criminal courts given their mounting losses on other fronts.

The state’s “strict chain of custody, documentation, and retention laws related to ballots and ballot materials ensure any evidence of alleged wrongdoing tied to ballots or ballot materials is preserved and appropriately supervised by a court, so there is no legitimate law enforcement reason to seize ballots, ballot materials, and equipment needed to process and tabulate ballots,” Newsom wrote.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — whose office has been fighting the Trump administration in court — has also been increasingly vocal about his belief that Trump will take increasingly drastic steps to try to control the election results.

“He’s intent on pulling out all the stops, engaging in whatever type of lying, cheating, and stealing is necessary to get the outcome he wants. He starts with the outcome and he backs it out from there, and will do anything seemingly necessary to try to get to the outcome that he wants — instead of letting the facts, and the law, and the votes determine what the outcome is,” Bonta said in an interview on MS NOW that he posted Sunday.

Elections experts point to the administration’s many losses in court as evidence that its efforts are not working, and said most voters won’t experience any problems with casting their ballots.

They said they do have concerns about future efforts by the administration to intervene, including through dramatic steps such as ballot seizures, but whether it takes such steps may hinge on whether the balance of power in the House or Senate depends on the outcome of a small enough number of close races.

If the expected “blue wave” is large and races are not particularly close, it will be more difficult for the Trump administration to sway the outcome in its favor and less likely it will even try to do so — even if Trump publicly rejects the outcome as illegitimate.

In announcing the latest charges, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, and San Luis Obispo County Dist. Atty. Dan Dow said the fight is not partisan. Six of the charges were federal; the seventh was brought by Dow locally.

Dow, the county’s district attorney since 2014 who has denied previous claims that he harbors anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments, last week announced that he was investigating a subset of “63 suspected non-citizens registered to vote” in the county from the broader federal list of 20,000 names statewide. On Monday, he appeared alongside Essayli to announce the one person charged in his county — and said more such cases could be coming.

He said California’s system, which requires registering voters to attest to the fact that they are citizens, is an “honor system” that doesn’t work.

One of those charged federally was Moria Dahan, 35, an Israeli national living in West Hills. Dahan was charged with making false statements on her naturalization application to become a U.S. citizen. Prosecutors alleged she illegally registered to vote, voted in person in 2024, and later falsely stated on naturalization papers, under penalty of perjury, that she had never claimed to be a U.S. citizen or registered to vote in a U.S. election.

Tiffany Feder, Dahan’s attorney, described the issue as a mix-up, and said her client never intended to illegally participate in voting. She said Dahan “was targeted through a very extensive scheme to induce her to register and vote,” and like other green card holders with limited English skills, believed the forms she was filling out were official and required.

“The truth is that the moment we discovered this, at her interview, we promptly withdrew her application for naturalization,” Feder said.

California has more than 23.4 million registered voters — meaning the 20,000 flagged individuals would account for less than one-tenth of 1% of all voters in the state, and the 35 charged a tiny sliver of that. State officials and election experts have pointed to the small numbers of arrests, despite a sweeping probe to find such voters by Essayli and others, as proof such fraud is rare.

Essayli argued the exact opposite Monday — saying the charges were just a “sampling” from the broader list of 20,000 individuals, and part of an effort to force state officials to take that list seriously by moving forward with local law enforcement partners such as Dow instead of waiting on the courts.

“Our goal is not to charge all 20,000 people,” Essayli said. “Our goal is to get California to not count the votes of noncitizens.”

The Trump administration’s online accounts are circulating images of a pumpkin carved with a sombrero design and a fake Halloween-themed background around a Black man apparently accused of food assistance fraud, in social media posts slammed by critics as racially inflammatory rhetoric.

Only days before the midterm elections, the posts coincide with the government’s sweeping campaign to show its aggressive immigration enforcement, and highlight efforts it says are needed to crack down on fraud to save taxpayers money — as rising healthcare costs and other economic stressors have made affordability a top voter concern.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted Saturday on X a photo of the Black man standing in front of stacks of what appear to be U.S. currency with the headline SNAP FRAUDSTER, an apparent reference to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. He is holding aloft what appears to be a bill set aflame.

“Some costumes come with a price tag. This one comes with a prison sentence,” it says against the backdrop of fake Spirit Halloween costume packaging.

Another photo posted by the White House on X on Thursday showed a pumpkin with the shape of a sombrero carved across it and the words “Spooky szn is here.”

The post by Rollins appears to be taken from an Instagram post from September 2025 by an account under the name Shawty Dred.

Earlier this month, Mercedes Reshard New, identified by the Justice Department as a social media personality also known as “Shawty Dred,” was arrested on federal charges for fraudulently obtaining more than $4 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits in Georgia.

It’s not the first time the White House has been accused of posting inflammatory images on official government social media accounts.

Just over a year ago during the government shutdown, the White House revived a deepfake video posted by Trump of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries in a fake mustache and sombrero to accuse the Democrats of acting on behalf of illegal immigrants instead of U.S. citizens. Jeffries described the meme as bigoted. Administration officials played it on repeat in the White House briefing room, and Vice President JD Vance promised that the “sombrero memes will stop” when Democrats agreed to end the shutdown.

The NAACP did not respond to an email seeking comment, nor did the White House or Rollins.

The Trump administration in recent weeks has ratcheted up its anti-immigrant rhetoric and accusations of fraud, including against U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whose Washington, D.C., home was searched by federal agents earlier this month. Federal authorities are investigating potential fraud in her family’s immigration paperwork. Omar, who was born in Somalia, is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

It also has taken a series of punitive steps linked to allegations of fraud in mostly Democratic-led states, including California and Minnesota, whose governors accused the federal government of targeting their states for political reasons.

Federal prosecutors said in a news release Oct. 21 that the influencer New controlled more than 350 fraudulent SNAP accounts under stolen identities between January 2020 and July 2026. He allegedly applied for his company, Shawty Dred LLC, to become an authorized SNAP retailer and used EBT debit cards to extract about $4 million from the accounts.

New’s Instagram account, which has more than 2 million followers, has flaunted his extravagant lifestyle, federal prosecutors said. Posts depict him flying on private jets, posing with Rolls-Royce vehicles in front of his “super mansion” and handling massive stacks of cash.

“Instead of this money feeding families in need, New, the social media personality known as ‘Shawty Dred,’ allegedly used the cash to bankroll a life of luxury,” Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta Marlo Graham said in the release.

New was indicted by a federal grand jury Oct. 7 on dozens of counts of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft, and one count each of SNAP fraud and illegal transactions with access devices. He was arrested Oct. 13 and remains in federal custody.

According to Fulton County, Ga., jail records, New has been arrested multiple times on suspicion of crimes including identity theft, insurance fraud, financial transaction card fraud, forgery and simple assault.

A federal defender listed in court records as representing New, Joseph Austin, did not return a phone message.

In a cascade of rulings in the days before Tuesday’s elections, federal judges have rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to wrest control over state voting processes, pressure state and local elections officials into complying with their demands and turn the midterm vote into another opportunity for immigration enforcement.

In Northern California late Friday, U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson granted labor unions representing California poll workers a sweeping order barring the Trump administration from an array of election-related actions, including demanding that those workers set aside ballots from voters whose eligibility the administration has questioned, and threatening them with criminal sanctions if they refuse to do so.

“Election Day is around the corner. Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots,” Thompson wrote. “Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”

A Justice Department spokesperson criticized Thompson for ruling “without even waiting to hear from the United States,” and said her decision was part of a “two-track system of justice” in which other federal judges have delayed the Trump administration’s “own urgent election claims” until after election day.

“The Department is reviewing the order and evaluating all options,” the spokesperson said.

The ruling followed three others — one in district court in Los Angeles and two in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — in which federal judges blocked the administration’s effort to force California elections officials to immediately set aside the ballots of 20,000 voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens, instead setting a schedule for more fact-finding in the case after polls close.

It followed a ruling in a separate case in Washington, D.C., in which a federal judge demanded that the Trump administration turn over its list of alleged noncitizen voters to advocacy groups, including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Data analysts from the UCLA Voting Rights Project wrote in court Saturday that their review of the provided list found it “contains extensive errors” and includes citizens and thousands of others who are not on California’s voter list.

And it came about the same time as a decision late Friday by the full 9th Circuit not to reconsider a ruling by a smaller three-judge panel upholding an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin in Oakland. She had barred federal immigration agents looking for noncitizen voters from conducting door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states.

The administration’s losses — in cases with broad scope and real implications in an election that will determine control of Congress — are the result of legal challenges from a coalition of liberal states such as California, localities such as Los Angeles County, and immigration, voting rights and labor groups.

But they are also the product of a bipartisan stable of federal judges — including appointees of President Trump — who have described the administration’s efforts as unconstitutional and a threat to one of the most core functions of American democracy.

Those judges weighed that threat against the alleged threats to election integrity from noncitizen voters that the Trump administration claimed, and found the former to be greater than the latter.

“To be sure, there are countervailing public interests at stake. There is a public interest in maintaining the integrity of elections. But as discussed, the district court found that the risks that noncitizens are voting are, at best, uncertain, and also tempered by California’s established voter-eligibility procedures,” wrote the 9th Circuit majority — one Trump appointee, one President Biden appointee — that refused to block the 20,000 votes. “In contrast, there is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County’s entire election.”

Those in the coalition resisting the administration’s efforts celebrated the rulings and praised the courts.

“The judicial smack down on Trump’s unlawful efforts to undermine our elections continues,” wrote California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office has litigated several of the cases, in response to Thompson’s Friday night ruling in favor of the labor unions. “Trump is racking up loss after loss as he enters the final death throes of this election and desperately and wildly lashes out against the will of the voters.”

“4 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION DAY. Remember: Your vote matters. Don’t be intimidated. Keep voting as normal,” wrote Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), in response to the same ruling. “The courts are upholding the rule of law, and states — not Donald Trump — run our elections.”

“We said we would not let the Trump administration bully election workers, and today we won a critical court order blocking those threats,” SEIU International President April Verrett said. “This ruling is a victory for the workers who make our elections possible and the communities they serve.”

The flurry of rulings has been prompted in part by the administration itself, as Justice Department officials have worked to push the cases through the courts at breakneck speed in search of relief ahead of election day.

The 9th Circuit has already ruled twice in the case over the 20,000 California ballots, for instance, because Justice Department lawyers appealed the matter before the district court ever ruled, on the notion that U.S. District Judge David O. Carter was taking too long to make a decision.

When the 9th Circuit rejected that effort and kicked the case back down to Carter, he issued one of the most striking rulings of the week.

“Constitutional rights and our democracy are at stake. The public interest favors their protection. Individuals who have met the requirements of California’s voter registration laws must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors,” Carter wrote. “The public interest also favors the protection of election staff, who are working diligently to ensure that all citizens can cast their votes.”

When the Trump administration appealed that ruling once more to the 9th Circuit, the same panel majority — Trump appointee Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel P. Sanchez — slapped it back again. They wrote that the administration’s arguments were legally flawed in multiple ways, not least in that they sought clearly unconstitutional executive authority to intervene in an election.

“We decline the United States’s invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” they wrote.

The Trump administration’s immediate response was striking — in that there was none.

After weeks of denouncing California officials for continuing to tabulate ballots and stressing to the courts that such counting constituted an emergency from which it required immediate relief, rapidly appealing adverse rulings and arguing over the merits of each twist with California officials on social media, the administration was silent.

The administration missed a deadline for requesting that the three-judge panel’s ruling be revisited by the full appellate court. It made no immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A. who argued the case before Carter and has vociferously defended the case on social media, was silent. Neither the Justice Department nor Essayli’s office responded to requests for comment on the ruling.

CHANDLER, Ariz. — At balloon-adorned tables in red, white and blue, a handful of voters inside a church gymnasium listened as Medina Moore explained what to do if federal agents show up at the polls.

Call a hotline, she told volunteers, where attorneys will be ready to respond. Take videos, report what you see and remove yourself from any situation that becomes intense, she advised.

It was one of Moore’s final poll monitor trainings in the Phoenix area before election day, preparing a few new “peacekeepers” to join the ranks of about 200 she has recruited from local faith groups in the Phoenix area to greet voters, answer questions and keep an eye out for issues at voting sites on Tuesday.

“It feels very urgent this year,” said Moore, the voting rights organizer for the Arizona Faith Network, a coalition of religious groups. “We’re in an era of information overload. Being able to educate voters on what’s true and what’s not is very important.”

As lawyers nationwide prepare defenses against possible election interference by the Trump administration and election officials train for worst-case scenarios, ordinary citizens across the country are also readying to help. Through nonpartisan groups, parents are training to be poll monitors, law students are staffing legal hotlines, veterans are holding voting events and business owners are signing pledges to back local election officials.

The grassroots efforts, underpinned by various voting and democracy nonprofits, amount to a striking push by American voters to help uphold the nation’s election system in the face of possible threats from its own government. More than 21,000 people nationwide have been trained as nonpartisan poll monitors through the Election Protection coalition, the program that Moore used, along with thousands of others through other nonprofit and partisan efforts.

The effort is aimed at helping ensure voter turnout at a time when Trump’s rhetoric has eroded public trust in the system and many GOP-led states have enacted new ballot rules for voters to navigate. Worry among voters about whether their ballots will be counted has accelerated, according to organizers; in a recent AP-NORC poll, just under half of American voters expressed confidence that midterm votes will be counted accurately.

“People who vote occasionally or it’s their first time voting or they haven’t voted in a while, they all have questions on ‘If I vote, will my vote count?’” said Rebekah Caruthers, president of the Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group that is working with college students to monitor voting on campuses. The best way to combat those fears, she said, is for as many people as possible to “show up and exercise their right.”

Since returning to office, Trump has undertaken a sweeping effort to exert control over and cast doubt on U.S. elections, and the administration has intensified its efforts as the midterms draw closer.

In recent days, the Justice Department has sued California, arrested residents and threatened to prosecute election officials over an unsubstantiated government claim of 20,000 “likely noncitizen” voters; moved to block certification of Alaska’s election results if the Republican candidate for Senate there loses narrowly; and began notifying counties of its plan to send federal monitors to polling places in every state.

“Be careful of the voter fraud,” Trump said at a Texas rally Tuesday. “We’re going to watch that voter fraud.”

Glendale Mayor Jerry P. Weiers, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Andy Biggs, Cindy Biggs and Sam Darmo, co-chair of the Assyrian-American Republican coalition and president of Assyrians for Justice, stand for the national anthem at an event in Glendale, Ariz., on Oct. 24, 2026.

(Rebecca Noble / Getty Images)

This week, Trump offered $1 million to anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to a conviction, the latest in a string of incentives he has floated related to the midterms and another suggestion of rampant election fraud.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche last week said the Justice Department did not intend to interfere with elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) committed to a peaceful transfer of power if Democrats win a majority, saying, “We’re going to follow the Constitution,” but predicted there would be no transfer because Republicans would win the majority. Trump told reporters Tuesday that he would respect the election results “if they’re honest elections.”

Preparations by lawyers, nonprofits and Democratic lawmakers to anticipate how the Trump administration could try to interfere with the midterms have been underway for months. Courts have already blocked many of the administration’s steps, including attempts to access state voter rolls, restrict voting by mail and demand states change some election rules.

The grassroots effort has grown out of existing programs — the Election Protection coalition has been operating since 2000 — but interest from volunteers is particularly high this year, organizers from several groups said.

“Voters are responding to the moment that we’re in right now,” said Saige Draeger, a senior policy associate at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that advises states on the use of voting technology and is part of the Election Protection coalition. “I think they feel like it’s incumbent upon everybody to make sure this election goes smoothly.”

In Arizona, an epicenter of Republican efforts to deny the 2020 election results, partisan tensions have long been high, and residents cite concerns about potential political violence surrounding the election.

Now, election denialism is on the ballot: The Republican nominees for governor, secretary of state and attorney general each played a role in Trump’s denial of the 2020 results. Alex Kolodin, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, filed lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results.

The outcome of the race could be consequential for the 2028 election, because secretaries of state play a key role in certifying their states’ results, and presidential elections can come down to a single swing state. Along with the Arizona race, those in Nevada, Michigan and Georgia are being closely watched by pro-democracy groups.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signs a commemorative bill before a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers at Chase Field on Sept. 3, 2025, in Phoenix.

(Norm Hall / Getty Images)

On street corners, the campaign signs for Kolodin and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, the Democratic incumbent, duel: “Protect every vote,” say Kolodin’s. “Protect your vote,” Fontes’ read.

Organizers focused on election protection efforts stress that the goal is to ensure every voter casts their vote and the person who gets the most votes is declared the winner — all regardless of political party.

“With the level of polarization that we have nationally right now, people might mistake and think that calling for a free, fair, democratic election is somehow partisan,” said Hardy Merriman, an organizer with the Hold the Line project, which has recruited about 650 volunteers to ask their local leaders to sign on to a pledge affirming they back free and fair elections. “It’s really important for actors to get off the sidelines … and say, no, actually it’s not.”

The mission of the poll monitors is to answer voters’ procedural questions, ensure no one is incorrectly turned away from voting and provide a friendly nonpartisan face — “be a peaceful presence,” Moore said. They can help voters navigate state laws — in Arizona, for instance, a requirement to show an approved form of identification when voting.

The monitors are also trained to call the attorney-staffed hotline to report anything out of the ordinary: long lines that may deter people from voting, people being turned away from the polls, aggressive electioneering from partisans outside the polling place or law enforcement showing up at voting locations.

Monitors trained through the Election Protection coalition will be stationed in 40 states and the District of Columbia, while about 3,000 legal professionals will be staffing the hotline, said Camille Wimbish, national director of campaigns and field programs for the Election Protection coalition, which is a project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“It gives voters reassurance that there is someone who has their back at voting locations,” Wimbish said. “It also just shows our determination as a community to stand up and say that we care about our elections, we want election day to be a joyful, peaceful, celebratory experience for all of us.”

PJ Boone-Edgerton Longoni, 70, who attended Moore’s mid-October training in Chandler at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, said the idea of poll monitoring made her a little nervous, but she believes there is a “high-stakes need” for citizens to show up.

“I want to be a support,” she said. “All this misinformation gets people not to trust anything, and that lack of trust causes things to fall apart — because democracy is based on trust.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Friday that it has approved a proposed $2.1-billion sale of Patriot air defense interceptors for Ukraine after Kyiv had accused the Pentagon of delaying delivery of the vital munition needed to stop Russian ballistic missiles.

The State Department said that 500 Patriot missiles are being purchased for Ukraine with donations from Canada, Germany and Norway through a U.S. program and that no American funds were involved.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a partner country that is a force for political and economic stability in Europe,” the department said in a news release.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned this month that his country had nearly run out of the vital military munition it needs to combat Moscow’s attacks as tensions with President Trump’s administration escalated.

The Ukrainian leader had accused the Pentagon of delaying the delivery of the missiles that other countries have purchased for Ukraine. He also said U.S. intelligence that warns of incoming Russian attacks had been interrupted and the Starlink satellite internet service had been throttled. Ukraine says Starlink speeds and intelligence have been restored.

Devin Elle Kurtz makes her opinion on generative AI known. For the last few years, the 29-year-old Pasadena artist says she’s been frustrated when strangers tell her that her art style looks AI-generated.

They have it backward, she insists. Kurtz, who has been sharing her art on the internet since she was a teenager, suspects that her viral art may have been used to train AI models. Her Instagram bio reads, “NO AI,” alongside a circle-backslash emoji.

Her feelings on the subject made what she discovered Thursday morning all the more painful, the artist said. Kurtz woke up to multiple emails from fans telling her that the Trump administration’s Department of Education had posted a meme on X that looked eerily similar to one of her works — fan art inspired by one of her favorite scenes from the animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” In the work, Aang and Zuko are shown practicing fire-bending moves as two dragons move around them.

The Department of Education’s post includes an image of the two characters in seemingly identical stances, outfits and color scheme. “There’s magic in learning,” reads text added over the image. “Make education great again.”

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

Kurtz soon took to social media to condemn the Trump administration. She wrote on the platform: “I did not and would never consent to this administration running my fanart through AI and posting it. Can’t even believe I’m saying these words.” Her response had 150,000 likes as of late Thursday night.

“It definitely made me angry,” Kurtz told The Times on Thursday. “Seeing something that I made appropriated with a Make America Great Again-adjacent slogan on it made me quite upset. I knew I wanted to make it really clear that this was not something that I co-signed.”

Kurtz said she made the artwork in 2023 to share her love of the series with its creators and with other fans.

“Fandom at its core is supposed to be humans loving something together,” Kurtz said. “I want to live in a world where the things that I see around me are made by people. That is what being a human being is all about. Not just output for the sake of output.”

Kurtz said several tells led her to conclude that AI was likely used to alter her work. In the version shared by the Trump administration, the dragons have been removed, and the platform the duo is standing on has oddly sized bricks.

Since her fan art is based on existing intellectual property, she doesn’t intend to pursue legal action.

“It would be fantastic if the government didn’t take artists’ work and run it through AI and post it,” Kurtz said.

Kurtz joins a laundry list of artists who have accused the Trump administration of using their work without their knowledge, including singer Olivia Rodrigo and Japanese artist Hiroshi Nagai.

In December, singer Sabrina Carpenter was angered when her song “Juno” was used in the soundtrack for a Department of Homeland Security promotional video featuring clips of officers tackling and handcuffing people.

“[T]his video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter replied. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.” The Department of Homeland Security has since deleted that video.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is attempting to prosecute James Comey for what it calls a decade-old leak of classified information, an effort the former FBI director’s lawyers immediately dismissed as legally invalid and outside the legal time limit for when the Justice Department can file a criminal indictment.

The allegations from the Justice Department were revealed Monday in newly unsealed court documents that shed light on a closed-door fight that represents an unmistakable escalation in the administration’s targeting of Comey, a longtime critic and foe of President Trump who has faced two other criminal cases since the Republican returned to the White House last year.

The effort to prosecute Comey is also part of a series of politically charged investigative actions the department has undertaken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections.

“Well, they’re back — again,” Comey said in a video statement Monday. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice — one that we cannot become numb to. Nothing’s changed with me; I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid of these people — and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary.”

The Justice Department said it had filed what’s known as a “criminal information” to extend the statute of limitations for charges in the case.

“Filing a criminal information to toll the statute of limitations is a widely recognized practice in federal court and has been approved by multiple Circuit Courts of Appeals. This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and we will not comment further,” a department spokesperson said.

Asked about the Comey case, Trump told reporters upon arriving back to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland late Monday following his rally in Mississippi that “I don’t know much about it. I just heard about it.”

He added, “He’s a dirty cop, James Comey. But I know nothing about it.”

An information can be filed without the approval of a judge or a grand jury’s finding of probable cause to a court. Comey’s lawyers made clear that they intend to fight the charges as invalid because the Justice Department did not file an indictment, which must be voted on by a grand jury, inside the 10-year statute of limitations required under the law.

“For the third time in little more than one year, the Department of Justice has attempted to charge Mr. Comey with a federal crime. Mr. Comey steadfastly maintains his innocence,” his attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said in a statement.

The allegation was previously investigated

The latest allegation concerns an October 2016 New York Times story related to a secret court order that required Yahoo to scan emails for messages potentially linked to a foreign terrorist organization. The story cited two government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the order from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Yahoo was barred from publicly disclosing.

Federal authorities, including prosecutor John Durham, began investigating the disclosure in early 2017. Durham, who later investigated the FBI’s conduct as it scrutinized potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, wrote a classified memo in December 2018 recommending no criminal charges against anyone in connection with the disclosure, Comey’s attorneys said in a recent court filing.

In January 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia opened a second investigation of the same matter under the code name “Tropical Vortex.” But that investigation was closed without any charges filed in February 2020.

“Both times the Government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone. Now, ten years after the article was published, the Government filed an “Information” against Mr. Comey that was not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury. It purports to charge Mr. Comey with crimes that he did not commit,” Fitzgerald said.

Prosecutors in a newly unsealed filing said investigators found evidence that Comey “sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before” that New York Times story was published, directed his staff to speak to a journalist at the newspaper related to accuracy concerns “and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”

The criminal information was filed under seal on Oct. 5, 10 years after the 2016 story was published. “But,” Comey’s lawyers said, “the applicable statute of limitations explicitly demands an indictment within 10 years of the offense; an information does not suffice.”

They have asked a judge to dismiss the information, a request that is still pending.

Trump and Comey have a long and uneasy history

The first criminal case against Comey, filed in federal court in Virginia, accused him of having lied to Congress in 2020 but was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges the former FBI director with threatening Trump through an Instagram photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47,” a case Comey has sought to dismiss.

The prosecutions are part of a Trump retribution campaign that has even extended to Comey’s daughter, Maurene, who was fired from her job as a Justice Department prosecutor in New York last year in a termination that a federal judge on Monday ruled was illegal.

Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s Republican administration.

But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president — an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign. That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, found that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration.

The two men have been bitterly at odds ever since Comey’s firing.

Comey in 2018 published a memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” that painted Trump in deeply unflattering ways, likening him to a mafia don and characterizing him as “untethered to truth.” Trump, for his part, has repeatedly claimed that Comey should face charges for “treason” — an accusation Comey dismissed as “dumb lies” — and called him an “untruthful slime ball.”

The Justice Department has made a series of splashy moves in recent weeks , including a criminal complaint last Friday charging two former FBI officials with lying to Congress about their participation in investigations concerning Hunter Biden, and the search by federal agents of the Washington home of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Tucker, Richer and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. AP writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — An immigrant detainee died Saturday morning at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, marking the 61st such death under the Trump administration.

In an emailed statement, an unnamed spokesperson with CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based private prison company that operates the facility, confirmed the death. Per the spokesperson, a staff member at the Otay Mesa facility called in a medical emergency around 11:36 a.m. Saturday after finding an unresponsive person in their assigned living area.

Medical staff arrived quickly, began lifesaving measures and called for emergency medical services, the spokesperson said. EMS arrived and continued those efforts, but the person was pronounced dead at the facility.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of anyone in our care,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was immediately notified.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment. CoreCivic did not provide information about the person’s identity.

The death was first reported by Daylight San Diego.

San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, in a statement Tuesday, wrote that ICE and CoreCivic must quickly reach the person’s family, cooperate with a thorough investigation and share what they find with the public. Aguirre said she asked the county public health officer to determine what kind of follow-up is possible under a state law that allows local public health authorities to inspect ICE facilities.

“Somewhere, a family is waiting for a phone call, and my heart is with them,” she wrote.

This is the seventh person to die while in ICE custody in California under this administration, and the first to die at the Otay Mesa facility since 2023.

Deaths have increased as the Trump administration detained record numbers of people, with the population at one point ballooning past 70,000 nationwide.

The most recent death reported by ICE was that of Luis Sandoval, 48, a Salvadoran immigrant who died of apparent suicide Friday. Staff at the Folkston D. Ray ICE Processing Center in Georgia found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck, according to an ICE news release.

ICE policy is to notify the public and Congress within two business days of a detainee’s death. More extensive reports about each death, which were typically three pages, must be released within 90 days, though those have been reduced to a few paragraphs.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge agreed Monday to extend an order blocking the Trump administration’s renovation plans for a century-old public golf course in the nation’s capital.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily bars the government from removing or damaging any additional trees on the East Potomac Golf Course. The administration must give 10 days’ notice in writing before making any “irreparable modification” to any “forms or features” of the course while the lawsuit is active.

“The Court earlier stated, ‘I am not the Lorax. I do not speak for the trees.’ The Court still does not speak for the trees. It speaks only for the rule of law,” Reyes wrote.

Reyes expressed astonishment that the government has asked her to “not to believe the sitting President” and disregard Trump’s statements about his plans for the golf course renovations.

“This started as a case about golf. That good walk spoiled. But it has become much more,” Reyes wrote. “It now forces the Court to reconcile assertions by President Donald J. Trump with the sworn testimony of multiple government employees and the argument of senior Department of Justice attorneys.”

On Oct. 18, Trump announced plans on social media to close the golf course for 15 months, starting Nov. 15, and redevelop the 106-year-old park and course despite a court challenge by the D.C. Preservation League and two golfers. A day later, Trump posted that the work would start immediately.

Reyes, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Biden, previously ordered the administration to suspend work on the project until at least Oct. 26.

Trump was asked about the case late Monday night as he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland following a rally in Mississippi and indicated that work on the golf course will proceed as planned.

“It has the go-ahead. The judge feels that she would like to approve it as it goes along. And I didn’t know she was an architectural critic of golf courses,” Trump said sarcastically.

He added of the judge: “She knows nothing about that, so we’ll appeal that” while also calling his planned overhaul a “beautiful project for Washington, D.C.”

Trump later in a social media post reiterated a statement he made Oct. 18 that the course would close for 15 months. “We are closing the East Potomac Golf Course Site as scheduled on November 15th in order to renovate and rebuild for Competitive (with other such projects!), Safety, Modernization, and Aesthetic reasons,” he wrote.

The plaintiffs challenging the project, DC Preservation League and two golfers, claim the work is inflicting irreversible damage. At a hearing, the judge excoriated the government after workers cut down at least 400 trees over a holiday weekend with little notice to the plaintiffs.

The course renovation project is part of the Republican president’s aggressive campaign to leave his personal imprint on Washington’s historic landscape. Those plans include construction of a huge ballroom at the White House, a massive arch and the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes in West Potomac Park. DC Preservation League is part of a coalition of organizations, including the Cultural Landscape Foundation and one D.C. resident, who have filed lawsuit challenging those plans.

Reyes rejected the administration’s request for her to recuse herself from the case. The government questioned her impartiality and accused her of engaging in “egregious” behavior from the bench during an emergency hearing in the case.

In Monday’s ruling Reyes stressed that she had hoped the parties could have resolved their dispute without judicial intervention. She noted that she had denied plaintiffs’ previous requests.

“The Court would much prefer not to have to resolve Lorax v. Once‑ler redux. Indeed, for months, the Court declined to intervene,” she wrote.

But she said the government forced her hand by bulldozing hundreds of trees without any notice, doing “what it assured all it would not do.”

Reyes quoted from a golf-related opinion written by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon, in stressing the temporary nature of her own decision.

“Here, golf and government have again clashed,” Reyes wrote. “By issuing this preliminary injunction, the Court does not end the round: it simply marks the ball until the parties can fully and fairly litigate this case.

Democracy Forward President & CEO Skye Perryman, whose organization is co-counsel representing the plaintiffs, called the ruling “a big win that will rightly protect East Potomac Park from further irreparable harm.” She added, in an email, that the move will stop activities “while the case continues, and we are eager to argue the case in court.”

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Gary Fields and Will Weissert contributed to this report.

A federal appeals court Monday denied an emergency request from the U.S. Justice Department to step in and block California election officials from counting about 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship the Trump administration has questioned.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two judges appointed by President Trump and one by President Biden — ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the request, given that a lower district court has not yet made a ruling on it.

But two of the three judges also wrote separately to make clear they also would have denied the Trump administration’s request on other grounds, if they did have jurisdiction.

In an unsigned order — joined by Judge Mark J. Bennett, one of the Trump appointees, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — the court granted a request from Los Angeles County to dismiss the appeal, writing that the Trump administration “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” its request for a temporary restraining order barring the ballots from being counted before filing its unusual appeal to the appellate panel.

The court found that the “emergency” the Trump administration asserted was in part a “self-constructed one” and that delays in the district court were partly attributable to its “own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.”

Both Bennett and Sanchez also each wrote a concurring opinion — in which they made clear that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request even if they did have jurisdiction, too.

Sanchez wrote that federal law would bar the court from issuing such a demand on state elections officials so close to an election.

“The United States seeks to have a federal court dictate to California the manner in which it must administer its own electoral process by segregating mail-in ballots and undertaking a citizenship verification process the State has never done before,” Sanchez wrote. “The proposed injunction would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway and would cause widespread confusion among voters and election officials, divert election administration resources, and ‘usher in electoral chaos.’”

Bennett wrote that he would have denied the Trump administration’s emergency request for several reasons beyond jurisdiction, including that it would be likely unconstitutional under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which he wrote “confers broad authority only on Congress and the States, not the Executive,” and Congress has not acted to say that California’s existing laws for ensuring only U.S. citizens vote are problematic.

“Thus, under the Elections Clause, the legislature’s statutory scheme remains as the only method to do so,” Bennett wrote.

Bennett wrote that there are existing California laws to deal with the harm the Trump administration claims it is suffering, but that granting its request to intervene could “result in immense hardship” to the state “and harm the public by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy.”

Bennett wrote that the Trump administration “offered no workable plan of any kind as to how the remedy it seeks could be accomplished in practice without potential catastrophic consequences to California’s ongoing election.”

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee, dissented — arguing the Trump administration was well within its legal rights to intervene, and the appellate court did have jurisdiction to grant its request and bar the state “from accepting and processing ballots likely cast by aliens until their citizenship could be verified.”

“The question — does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote. “Simply, the federal government has a sovereign interest in safeguarding federal elections and ensuring that the votes of noncitizens do not undermine our electoral results.”

The ruling clears the way for the lower court to proceed with a hearing scheduled Tuesday afternoon before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Los Angeles.

Carter, an appointee of President Clinton, previously rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to obtain California’s full voter rolls, calling that demand unlawful and a threat to democracy in January. Other federal judges made similar rulings in dozens of states across the country.

The question at issue Tuesday — and hashed over by the appellate court during oral arguments Sunday — is whether the courts should bar the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan from processing and tabulating the flagged ballots until they can provide to the Trump administration proof that those individuals are citizens.

The Trump administration has argued in court filings that the federal government is suffering irreparable harm each day such counting is allowed to continue, as once California ballots are removed from their mail envelopes or cast in person, there is “no way to associate the voter with the ballot” or resegregate those ballots from others.

More than 3 million ballots have already been cast in the upcoming Nov. 3 midterm elections statewide, and more than 500,000 have already been cast in L.A. County.

Attorneys for California, Weber and Logan have argued in court filings that the administration’s demands to segregate 20,000 ballots and vet those voters for citizenship with just days to go before the election are impossible to comply with and would cause catastrophic disruptions if elections officials across the state were forced to try.

They have also said the demands are clearly unconstitutional, illegal under state and federal law, and based on federal immigration and third-party data sets that have been shown to be deeply flawed, inaccurate and inclusive of legitimate voters.

While the appellate court’s formal ruling Monday adhered closely to the technical issue of jurisdiction, its conversation Sunday did not — with both Bennett and Sanchez expressing substantial doubts about the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s request, just as they did in their separate concurrences.

Bennett grilled Matthew Donnelly, the attorney for the Justice Department, on how the executive branch’s demands squared with the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives states the power to set laws regarding the time, place and manner of elections and Congress — not the executive branch — oversight over those laws.

Bennett said that while the Trump administration is “unhappy” with how California law ensures voters are citizens — namely by requiring that they attest to their citizenship upon registration — the state has the right to determine its election laws under the Elections Clause of the Constitution, and Congress has not challenged its process.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law the California Legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett said. “How can we do that?”

Bennett and Sanchez both questioned how the appellate court could step in and adjudicate whether to grant the Trump administration’s request to intervene in the state’s election when it is not a fact-finding body, and the district court was never given a chance to develop a record of facts — including around the dueling and contradicting claims about the origins and reliability of the federal government’s list of “likely” noncitizen voters and the state’s claims that an order forcing them to segregate out the votes at this late stage in the election would cause catastrophic harm to the election process.

Carter is sure to pick those issues back up on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — President Trump offered $1 million Monday to anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to an arrest and conviction, escalating his efforts to cast doubt on the midterms as Republicans risk losing control of Congress.

“Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The offer comes as the Trump administration has moved more aggressively to intervene in the midterms, including an effort in Alaska to invalidate a potential Democratic victory in a U.S. Senate race and a push in California to segregate ballots from voters the administration considers likely non-citizens.

Trump did not say how the tips should be submitted to the federal government or who would decide whether a claim qualifies for a reward. The White House declined to comment beyond Trump’s social media post.

Last week, the administration launched a separate program that is meant to pay people for providing information to the administration to combat fraud. When announcing it, Trump said he would personally decide who gets paid.

“I will be the arbitrator of all of these decisions,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “In other words, I’ll determine whether or not the person is deserving, and I’ll determine, and I will be very generous.”

It is unclear whether Trump, who has spread false claims about the nation’s voting systems and routinely questions the integrity of the elections, intends to play a similar role over the voter fraud tipping system.

In the lead up to the midterms, Trump has tried to assert more control over the elections, calling on Republicans to “nationalize” voting and pushing for restrictions on mail-in ballots. Trump has also cast doubt over the integrity of California’s primary election, claiming without evidence that Democrat cheated — an allegation that was investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, which is run by a Trump loyalist.

Even as Trump says he wants “honesty in our elections,” the president told supporters at the Republican Party convention in Dallas in September to “cheat like hell, like they do.”

Trump’s efforts to cast doubt over voting come as polls show Republicans facing headwinds heading into the Nov. 3 election as Trump’s popularity sags amid voter concerns over the economy.

As Trump has tried to rally supporters in red states, he has also vowed to give every American adult $5,000 if Republican retain control of Congress. The promise drew bipartisan criticism, with some even calling the idea a potential bribe.

Oct. 26, 2026 9:23 AM PT

NEW YORK — The Trump administration last year illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, from her job as a federal prosecutor in New York, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Maurene Comey, who was an assistant U.S. attorney for a decade, was illegally fired in July 2025 despite her work on some of the nation’s highest-profile cases and consistently receiving “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike,” Judge Jesse M. Furman found.

After her firing, Comey sued the Justice Department and others, saying her termination violated the constitutional separation of powers, the 1st Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment.

She asserted that she was fired because she was the daughter of James Comey, whom President Trump has long viewed as an enemy, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, the judge noted.

Furman rejected the government’s claim that Comey could be fired because federal prosecutors exercise the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers.

He said the government’s claim that Congress is barred from regulating the removal of federal prosecutors “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.”

Furman added: “Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”

The firing violated the separation of powers, the Administrative Procedure Act and her 5th Amendment due process and statutory rights, the judge ruled.

Furman reserved judgment on Comey’s 1st Amendment claim pending further arguments to be submitted by each side, though he said he was inclined to dismiss the claim because it was largely moot since she is now in private practice and no longer seeks actual reinstatement.

The judge granted Comey retroactive reinstatement and back pay from the date of her firing through Dec. 20 to “make her whole” and ensure that she doesn’t suffer adverse employment consequences for the “unlawful termination.”

Comey’s lawyers, Ellen Blain, Nicole Gueron, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret Donovan, lauded the ruling.

“This hard-earned victory belongs to Ms. Comey, to all civil servants, and to all fighting for the rule of law,” they said in a statement. “As the Court correctly held, to accept the government’s argument about unlimited executive power ‘would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.’ This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law.”

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The Justice Department during the Trump administration has fired scores of career employees, including prosecutors and FBI agents, who participated in investigations of President Trump or who were perceived as opposed to the administration’s agenda. Some of those firings have also resulted in federal lawsuits.

The firing of Maurene Comey was seen as particularly personal, given her father’s longtime adversarial relationship with Trump.

The president fired James Comey as FBI director in May 2017 as the bureau was investigating ties between Russia and the Republican’s successful 2016 campaign for the White House. Trump in the years since has repeatedly called for Comey to be jailed, and his Justice Department has worked with mixed success to make that happen.

An earlier criminal case accusing James Comey of having lied to Congress in 2020 was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the prosecutor who filed the charges was illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges the former FBI director with threatening Trump through an Instagram photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47,” a case he has sought to dismiss that some legal experts have greeted with skepticism.

Sisak, Tucker, Durkin Richer and Neumeister write for the Associated Press. Tucker and Durkin Richer reported from Washington.

In a rare Sunday hearing, a federal appeals court judge appointed by President Trump questioned how the Trump administration’s request to intervene in California’s ongoing midterm election in order to force state officials to set aside 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship it questions squares with the U.S. Constitution.

Judge Mark J. Bennett said that while the executive branch is “unhappy” with what California law requires for ensuring voters are citizens, the state has the right to determine the manner of its elections under the Elections Clause of the Constitution and Congress has not challenged that process, despite having the ability to do so.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law the California legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett said. “How can we do that?”

Matthew Donnelly, a Justice Department attorney, said the Trump administration has good reason to believe those ballots are from ineligible noncitizen voters, and has the legal right under seperate federal criminal law to challenge their tabulation until state officials can prove otherwise.

Donnelly said both federal criminal law and state election law bar noncitizen voters from casting ballots, but “the problem is that California isn’t interested in enforcing that provision.”

The exchange came during an hour-long hearing before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, over the Justice Department’s unprecedented emergency request that the court order California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan to immediately stop counting ballots from the 20,000 flagged voters until they can definitively prove those voters are U.S. citizens.

The appellate panel — on which Bennett was joined by circuit Judges Patrick J. Bumatay, another Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, an appointee of President Biden — did not issue a ruling, though a decision is expected soon given the emergency nature of the appeal.

How it will rule is unclear, though both Bennett and Sanchez hammered Donnelly with questions about how the Trump administration’s position squared with the law.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Sunday that the court seemed “very likely to reject” the Trump administration’s appeal, with Bennett and Sanchez having “expressed great skepticism on both jurisdiction and the merits.”

In addition to questioning its constitutionality, Bennett also questioned how the appellate court even had jurisdiction over the case, given that the Trump administration appealed the matter to the appellate court before the lower district court had a chance to assess the facts in the case or issue an order.

“How do we have jurisdiction when the district court has said it’s going to rule expeditiously?” Bennett said. “I don’t see how we have jurisdiction.”

Bennett also questioned why the appellate court should ignore the claims of state elections officials that having to comply with the Trump administration’s demands in the few remaining days before the Nov. 3 election would be catastrophically disruptive to the election, given that the lower court has had no chance to assess those claims.

“Isn’t that sufficient to give us pause as to whether we should do exactly what [a state expert] avers is going to cause a catastrophe?” Bennett asked.

Bennett’s questions evoked many of the arguments made by the state in its own filings in the matter, which were repeated by California Deputy Solicitor Gen. Samuel P. Siegel during the hearing.

Siegel said there was “nothing” for the appellate court to review, given there has been no fact finding and no order out of the lower court, and that the administration’s demands were unconstitutional and illegal. He said the court did not have to wrestle with many of the arguments being put forward by the Trump administration, because it should simply reject the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and send the matter back down to the lower court.

Bumatay appeared most interested of the three judges in the damage done when noncitizens do vote, and the underlying question of how the state should handle objections to alleged noncitizen voters when they arise.

Siegel and Seth Waxman, an attorney for Logan, said there are existing processes for that — which require the challenger to present extraordinary proof, which they said the Trump administration has not done for the 20,000 voters it has flagged.

Sanchez repeatedly questioned the provenance of the administration’s list, asking which third parties were involved in providing the data. Donnelly could not answer, which Sanchez said raised questions about the reliability of the list.

The Justice Department appealed the case after a lower district court judge declined to immediately rule last week on its request for a temporary restraining order barring California officials from tabulating the flagged ballots.

In court filings, the administration argued that once mail ballots are removed from their envelopes in California, or a ballot has been cast in person, there is “no way to associate the voter with the ballot” or resegregate it from other cast ballots.

Attorneys for California, Weber and Logan have argued the demands are illegal, impossible to comply with before the Nov. 3 election and based on deeply flawed federal immigration and third-party data sets shown to be inaccurate and inclusive of legitimate voters.

In court filings, they have argued that the Trump administration’s argument “rests on mere suspicion, aroused by suspect data,” and that its lawsuit is at best “a reckless political stunt” and at worst “threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”

Independent elections experts have said the Justice Department’s efforts break with longstanding department policy of not wading into election-related issues within 90 days of an election, to avoid disenfranchising legitimate voters.

They also have said the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizen voters and its authority to intervene are both questionable, including because the U.S. Constitution empowers states to run elections with oversight from Congress, not the executive branch.

The Justice Department sued California, Weber and Logan on Oct. 15, two days after Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote to Weber and Logan giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots for the 20,000 flagged voters — whom McCotter claimed were “likely noncitizens.”

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A., has claimed federal authorities have “overwhelming evidence” that tens of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, and has defended the methods used to identify those voters. He and other federal prosecutors in the state also recently charged 28 legal permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, including illegally registering to vote.

On Friday, the Justice Department sent letters to county elections offices statewide with demands that they segregate ballots from voters the Trump administration believes are noncitizens, drawing from the same list of 20,000 at issue in the case against Weber and Logan. In those letters, the Justice Department gave the county officials 48 hours to comply, and threatened them with criminal punishment if they refuse.

State officials have said neither Essayli nor other Trump administration officials have provided proof to back up their claims, and that their list of 20,000 voters is clearly inaccurate. Logan said a preliminary review of a subset of those voters found many were born in the U.S., weren’t registered and had never voted.

More than 3 million people have already cast ballots in California — and more than 500,000 have already done so in Los Angeles County.

The challenge to the 20,000 ballots in California is just the latest Trump administration attempt to intervene in state-run elections ahead of the midterms.

Federal judges in dozens of states have rejected Justice Department lawsuits demanding the states turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. Federal judges also have rejected multiple Trump executive orders trying to institute national voter ID and citizenship checks, and his administration’s attempt to empower the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots.

Other cases — including over the Trump administration using unproven and inaccurate federal data sets to question the citizenship of state voters — are pending.

Democrats and voting rights groups are also bracing for fresh litigation from the Trump administration to challenge the outcome of pivotal election results the president doesn’t like — and are already defending against a lawsuit the Justice Department brought at Trump’s urging in Alaska, preemptively challenging a Democratic win in the Senate race there based on a third candidate sharing a similar name as the Republican incumbent.

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s lawsuit to block certification of Alaska’s Senate results if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses the race, arguing that the legal challenge was a necessary step to avoid confusing voters in the closely watched midterm race.

Some election experts have said the move is another attempt by the Trump administration to meddle in the Nov. 3 midterm elections in the event Republicans don’t fare well. Democrats as well as some Republicans have criticized it.

Blanche, however, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Trump — who said Friday in reference to the lawsuit that he was “the one that said do it” — is not trying to overturn state election results “in any way, shape or form.”

“We wish that we didn’t have to do this. We hope for a resolution that works,” Blanche said.

Republicans fear that a second candidate on the ballot who is named Dan Sullivan — a retired teacher and school administrator from the tiny fishing community of Petersburg — could siphon away votes from the GOP senator and tip the outcome in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman. Because Alaska has ranked-choice voting, there are more than two candidates on the general election ballot.

A day after the lawsuit was filed Thursday, Peltola called it “just flagrant, flagrant corruption, in my opinion,” and a diversion tactic by Republicans. Alaska’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, also criticized the lawsuit in a social media post.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he believed the ballot was illegal because it was unfair and that Sen. Sullivan should be identified to voters as the sitting senator. Courts, however, have ruled otherwise, upholding both Sullivans’ spots on the ballot.

“At least let him use the name Sen. Dan Sullivan as opposed to incumbent, because a lot of people don’t know what incumbent means,” Trump said.

Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent” on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” is listed without party affiliation.

Blanche represented Trump as a personal attorney — including the case in which Trump was convicted of felony fraud — before the Republican president appointed him to lead the Department of Justice, which filed the lawsuit in Alaska. Blanche defended Trump in his election inference case before voters elected Trump to a second White House term, effectively ending the criminal prosecution.

Blanche told CNN host Dana Bash that it was “crazy” for her to ask him if Trump was trying to lay the groundwork for the same sort of election challenges that occurred before a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the source of the election interference case, in which Trump was indicted on felony charges, and for which he was impeached.

“We are not doing anything improper. We’re not doing anything we’re not allowed to do. And we have to let the process play out,” Blanche said. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — [and] President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way shape or form.”

The lawsuit, Blanche said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” is meant to “put guardrails in place” to preserve possible evidence of voter confusion at the polls.

“It’s not saying, ‘Don’t certify.’ It’s saying, ‘If a court ultimately determines that it was decided because of confusion and not the will of the voters, then we do not think the states should certify.’ And that’s consistent with federal law and consistent with even Alaskan law, if that happens,” he said.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

BLAINE, Wash. — The Trump administration’s top border official defended plans to build a wall and other infrastructure in Texas’ Big Bend region despite mounting opposition against the project and a court-ordered pause on construction, saying his goal of fortifying the country’s borders was “non-negotiable.”

In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott argued that the $46-billion wall project was justified despite a bipartisan coalition of landowners, local businesses and environmentalists who view it as a waste of taxpayer money that could be destructive to a region with historically low migrant crossings.

“Our No. 1 goal right out the gate is we have to know who and what is coming into the United States,” Scott said on Thursday. If the Big Bend region were left without a wall or other border infrastructure while other areas along the border get those fortifications, he said, “I am 100% convinced it will be completely overrun and destroyed.”

The fight over Big Bend has become a major test for how far the Republican administration is willing to go for the border wall, President Trump’s signature infrastructure project.

Scott, a former Border Patrol agent, was tapped by Trump to complete it.

His agency is responsible for executing a plan funded last summer by Republicans in Congress to line the roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico with a mixture of 30-foot-tall steel walls, vehicle barriers, new roads and surveillance technology to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling.

The Trump administration says it is building about 12 miles a week. Scott, who gets daily progress updates, said it will be complete by the end of Trump’s second term. The primary border wall — some areas also get a secondary layer — will be done by the end of December 2027.

“We’re actually ahead of schedule,” Scott said.

1

2

1. Charlie Angell stands on an overlook of the Rio Grande river 2. Pamela Priddy, center, holds up signs with others during a weekly protest against barriers along the border in the Big Bend region, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, in Study Butte, Texas. (John Locher / Ap Photo/john Locher)

Big Bend is a test for the Trump administration’s plans for the wall

The wall plan has run into resistance in places like Big Bend. The Trump administration was dealt a major setback earlier this month when a judge ordered a pause on border wall construction in the region, citing what could be a likelihood that plaintiffs “will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction.” The administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the order.

The ruling included any construction in Big Bend National Park, an area that has seen a loud bipartisan outcry, including from some Republican lawmakers.

After bulldozers were spotted in the park tearing up ground in August, Scott ordered a pause on all construction-related activity there while he went to talk to people in the region. He said the agency is making other outreach to locals to discuss how to build projects so they don’t mar the park.

“We’re talking through and figuring out what is the right solution for that area,” he said.

Scott said he can’t get into specific details on what the agency’s plans are for the park because of the numerous ongoing lawsuits, but he reiterated that the project won’t include tall steel walls.

He also said that the agency’s stated goal of protecting the country and knowing what’s coming in and going out is “non-negotiable.”

He said the region’s formidable natural barriers were not enough to prevent people from entering the country illegally through other more navigable points. And he expressed concern that cartels that control smuggling from Mexico into the U.S. would exploit any opening.

CBP has come under fire for immigration enforcement tactics

Scott leads an agency of 67,000 employees responsible for controlling who and what comes into the country through official border crossings like airports or seaports and stopping illegal smuggling and migration outside those official border crossing points.

The agency came under heavy scrutiny last year when its officers were sent into cities deep inside the country to help carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Agents with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement patrol in a neighborhood after apprehending a person on Jan. 31 in St. Paul, Minn.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

As protests against an operation rocked Minneapolis, a Border Patrol officer and a CBP officer both fired shots in an encounter that killed a U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti. The shooting eventually prompted the Trump administration to wind down high-profile city-based crackdowns. A CBP officer who was the face of the missions, Gregory Bovino, who led a helicopter raid at a large apartment building and used chemical agents to confront demonstrators, retired earlier this year.

Scott said while CBP still helps ICE, it’s now less involved in immigration enforcement far from the country’s borders because ICE has since hired more officers to its ranks. Scott wouldn’t comment on the investigation into the Pretti killing, saying that it was being handled by the FBI and was ongoing. And when asked about Bovino’s tactics, he said the officer didn’t report to him during the operations.

Scott spoke to the AP just outside the border with Canada, where he met with border security representatives from other countries to share information about threats and trends. During his trip, he visited an operations center where he said Canadian and American law enforcement work together.

That border has far fewer threats than the U.S. border with Mexico. Scott said cartels in Mexico are increasingly sending drones into the United States to move contraband and keep tabs on Border Patrol agents. In Mexico, the cartels have been using drones to attack each other or Mexican law enforcement.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, recently announced temporary flight restrictions targeting unauthorized drone activity in a zone extending a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border as a way to counter cartels.

“We want to make sure,” Scott said, “that threat does not come into the United States.”

Santana writes for the Associated Press.