A new report from the city controller’s office questions the effectiveness of the LAPD’s signature crisis response program, saying clinicians trained in de-escalation too often are forced to defer to armed patrol officers.
For years, Los Angeles Police Department officials have touted the success of the Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team, or SMART. But critics say the program, which pairs licensed specialists with officers in unmarked cars, is failing in the crucial initial minutes of encounters when multiple police shootings of mentally ill people have occurred.
Dinah M. Manning, chief of strategic initiatives and senior advisor in the controller’s office, said the report found an “inherent contradiction” in the SMART program.
Even though its purpose is to send in clinicians and tap their expertise to avoid killings, LAPD policy still requires armed patrol officers to clear a scene of any potential threats beforehand.
Traditional police units almost always take charge, even on calls in which no weapon is involved, such as a person threatening to commit suicide, Manning said.
Referring to SMART as a co-response program “is pretty much a misnomer in this case,” she said. “How is it that we’re ending up with so many fatalities?”
An LAPD spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions about the report.
LAPD officers have opened fire 35 times this year; in recent years, department statistics showed at least a third of all police shootings involved someone with obvious signs of emotional distress.
The report pointed to other shortcomings with the SMART program, which is housed within the department’s Mental Health Unit. Officers detailed to the units receive no specialized training, the report said, also finding that the department has failed to properly track uses of force on mental health-related calls.
The department’s existing use of force policy “falls short” of best practices for dealing with people in mental distress, the controller’s report said. The LAPD’s policy, it said, “only makes cursory mention of ‘vulnerable populations’ without expounding on the dynamic realities presented in encounters with people who have a mental health condition or appear to be in a mental health crisis.”
Too often in cases in which SMART responds, the report said, the outcome is that the person in crisis is placed on an involuntary 72-hour hold. Such scenarios do not involve an arrest or criminal charges; instead the person is held under state law that allows for detention if a person poses a threat to themselves or others.
The controller’s report comes amid a continued debate in L.A. and elsewhere about how officials should respond to emergencies involving mental health, homelessness, substance use or minor traffic incidents.
The city has expanded its alternative programs in recent years, but proponents warn that looming cuts in federal spending for social safety net programs under the Trump administration could hinder efforts to scale up and have more impact.
LAPD leaders in the past offered support of such programs, while cautioning that any call has the potential to quickly spiral into violence, necessitating the presence of officers.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and congressional Democrats have announced a sweeping investigation into potential misconduct in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown that has ensnared citizens, made use of racial profiling and terrified communities for months.
Bass and the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), announced that Congress will open up “a broad investigation” into arrests of U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, as well as another investigation into immigration raids overall. The announcement was made Monday at a news conference at L.A. City Hall.
“Donald Trump and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem are terrorizing immigrants, working people, the people of Los Angeles and of our state every single day,” Garcia said. “They violate the law and they violate the constitution.”
Garcia said that his House committee would investigate “every single brutal misconduct” that immigration authorities have committed in Los Angeles as well as across the country.
Simultaneously, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will conduct an investigation into reports of the detention of at least 170 U.S. citizens by immigration authorities, which was reported by ProPublica last week.
“Troublingly, the pattern of U.S. Citizen arrests coincides with an alarming increase in racial profiling — particularly of Latinos — which has been well documented in Los Angeles,” Garcia and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Noem. “In a pattern symptomatic of a disregard for civil rights by DHS, U.S. citizens have faced extended periods of detention.”
For months, agents have roamed the streets of Los Angeles toting guns and chasing down immigrants. The scenes that have played out on the streets — protesters being arrested, immigrants dragged out of their cars — have been repeated in Chicago and other cities with largely Democratic leadership.
Mayor Bass said the arrests of American citizens means that no one in the country is safe.
“This can happen to anyone, to all of us, at any period of time,” she said.
Garcia said that the first hearing of the House committee will be held in Los Angeles and that Angelenos should attend and be heard on immigration enforcement issues.
The congressman did not give a date for the hearing, but said he hoped it would be soon.
In the letter that Garcia and Blumenthal sent to Noem on Monday, the legislators called on the Department of Homeland Security to report the total number of U.S. citizens who have been detained by immigration authorities, as well as how long each individual was detained. They also asked for information regarding the training that CE and Customs and Border Protection agents receive on use of force, among other things.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It’s not my habit to preface my columns with “trigger alerts,” so this is a first:
If talking about circumcision makes you cringe, feel free to move along.
If, on the other hand, you wish to understand what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was talking about during a White House meeting Oct. 9 when he tried to connect circumcision with autism, follow along with me.
The U.S. health disadvantage threatens the country’s global competitiveness and national security, as well as the hopes and prospects of future generations
— Dept. of Health and Human Services
The offhand reference to circumcision’s possible role in autism by Kennedy, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, is part and parcel of Kennedy’s documented assault on science-based medicine.
His campaign encompasses attacks on COVID-19 vaccines, which have been shown over the years to have saved millions of people from death, hospitalization or long-term disability; his firing members of professional advisory boards at his agency and replacing them with anti-vaccine activists; his promotion of unproven “cures” for vaccine-preventable diseases; and his inaction in the face of a nationwide surge in cases of measles, a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.
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Let’s pause for a few words about the broader consequences of the erosion of our public health infrastructure. It not only exposes Americans to more disease and more serious disease, but has profound economic effects.
That’s true worldwide, but especially in the U.S., which spends much more per capita on healthcare than other developed countries, for lower results. Undermining the existing system for partisan ends won’t make the picture look any lovelier.
“The U.S. health disadvantage threatens the country’s global competitiveness and national security, as well as the hopes and prospects of future generations,” according to a 2021 paper from the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that Kennedy now leads.
“U.S. employers depend on a healthy workforce to maximize productivity and minimize healthcare costs,” the paper stated. “Population health also affects the consumer market, whereby the demand for nonessential products and services suffers when families are struggling with illnesses and much of their disposable income is required for medical expenses.”
The chaos imposed on our public health system under the Trump administration only intensifies the damage.
On Friday, hundreds of employees at Kennedy’s agency, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abruptly received layoff notices. Some were hastily informed that their firings were erroneous, but the experience rattled the CDC, an agency tasked with overseeing the national response to seasonal respiratory illnesses at a time when those illnesses typically spike.
“The damage is beyond repair,” Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, over conflicts with Kennedy, told CNN. “Crippling CDC, even as a ploy to create political pressure to end the government shutdown, means America is even less prepared for outbreaks and infectious disease security threats.”
That brings us back to Kennedy’s preoccupation with autism. He has claimed that the autism rate is on the rise due to “environmental toxins” such as childhood vaccinations and the use of Tylenol — or acetaminophen, its generic name — by mothers during pregnancy.
As I’ve reported, however, the roots of the increase in reported autism rates in recent decades are well understood: They have much to do with a broader definition of autism, which is widely described today as “autism spectrum disorder,” and with improved access to screening and diagnostic services by formerly overlooked groups such as Blacks, Hispanics and other nonwhite cohorts.
Kennedy’s comment about circumcision came during a White House Cabinet meeting. At first, he and Trump traded misconceptions they had previously aired about Tylenol use by pregnant women — Trump asserting that “obviously,” the rise in autism rates is “artificially induced” and adding, “I would say don’t take Tylenol if you’re pregnant, and … when the baby is born don’t give it Tylenol.”
That advice dismayed physicians, who say that fevers during pregnancy are a greater risk for the unborn and that acetaminophen is safer than alternative fever-reducing medicines.
Kennedy then injected circumcision into the discussion. “There’s two studies that show children who were circumcised early have double the rate of autism,” he said. “It’s highly likely because they were given Tylenol.”
Unsurprisingly, Kennedy’s remark got extensive play in the news media, prompting him to try walking it back via a tweet on X. Rather than accept responsibility for his confusing words, he responded with Bondi-esque truculence, writing: “As usual, the mainstream media attacks me for something I didn’t say in order to distract from the truth of what I did say.”
In trying to clarify his point, however, Kennedy dug himself a deeper hole. According to his tweet, the two studies he was referring to at the cabinet meeting were a Danish study from 2015 and a non-peer-reviewed preprint posted online in August, which refers to the Danish paper. Kennedy mischaracterizes both.
Contrary to Kennedy’s implication, the Danish study did not address the use of acetaminophen (called “paracetamol” in the paper) in connection with circumcision. The reason, its authors wrote, was that “we had no data available on analgesics or possible local anesthetics used during ritual circumcisions in our cohort, so we were unable to address the paracetamol hypothesis directly.”
They did note, however, that the acetaminophen theory had only “limited empirical support.” In other words, evidence was lacking. Anyway, the Danish study was criticized — in the same journal that had published it — for its reliance on a very small sample of children.
As for the preprint, contrary to Kennedy’s description, it did not identify the Danish paper as offering “the most compelling ‘standalone’ evidence” for an autism-acetaminophen link. That language referred to three studies, one of which was the Danish paper. Of the other papers, one was based on later interviews with parents. The other was a study of the effects of acetaminophen on 10-day-old mice, not human children.
I asked Kennedy’s agency to clarify his claim and to explain the discrepancies between his words and the papers themselves, but received no reply.
To summarize, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top federal healthcare official, conjured up a connection between circumcision and autism via a relationship between circumcision and Tylenol that is unsupported by the research he cited. Indeed, the Danish paper describes the idea that boys undergoing circumcision invariably are given acetaminophen for pain as “a questionable assumption.”
In searching for empirical support for the acetaminophen theory, moreover, the Danish paper cited a 2010 paper funded by NIH that cautioned: “No evidence is presented here that acetaminophen in any way causes autism. … This hypothesis is largely based on multiple lines of often weak evidence.” Anyway, the paper was focused on a possible link between acetaminophen use and asthma, not autism.
Sadly, this sort of mischaracterization of research described as “a rigorous scientific framework” (RFK Jr.’s words) isn’t surprising coming from today’s Department of Health and Human Services. This is the agency, it may be recalled, that in May issued an “assessment” of the health of America’s children that cited at least seven sources that did not exist.
Nothing can stop unwary parents from relying on the judgment of Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make healthcare decisions for their infants and children. But they should be warned: They do so at their own and their offsprings’ risk.
WASHINGTON — Use of solitary confinement in immigration detention is soaring under the Trump administration, according to a report published Wednesday by Physicians for Human Rights using federal data and records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed at least 10,588 people in solitary confinement from April 2024 to May 2025, the report found. Contributors also included experts from Harvard University’s Peeler Immigration Lab and Harvard Law School.
The use of solitary confinement during the first four months of the current Trump administration increased each month, on average, at twice the rate found between 2018 and 2023, researchers found, and more than six times the rate during the last several months of 2024.
“Every month from February through May, which are the full calendar months of the new administration, the number of people placed in solitary in ICE [custody] increased by 6.5%,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, medical advisor for Physicians for Human Rights, and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “That was really dismaying.”
Solitary confinement, in which detainees are held alone for at least 22 hours a day, is used in ICE detention facilities as a form of punishment or to protect certain at-risk immigrants.
In a statement Thursday, assistant Homeland Security secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE prioritizes the safety and security of people in its custody.
Detainees are placed into disciplinary segregation “only after they are found guilty by a disciplinary hearing panel,” she said.
Any detainee scheduled for removal, release, or transfer is also placed into administrative segregation for 24 hours, she added. According to ICE’s National Detention Standards, “such segregation may be ordered for security reasons or for the orderly operation of the facility.”
The United Nations has called solitary confinement longer than 15 consecutive days a form of torture.
ICE defines vulnerable detainees as those with serious medical or mental health conditions, disabilities, and those who are elderly, pregnant or nursing, at risk of harm due to sexual orientation or gender identity, or victims of abuse.
Among those categorized as vulnerable, the report states that solitary confinement lasted twice as long, on average, during the first three months of 2025 compared with the first fiscal quarter of 2022, when the agency started reporting those statistics.
This year, vulnerable detainees spent an average of 38 consecutive days in isolation, compared with 14 days in late 2021, according to the report.
The report notes that use of solitary confinement in immigration detention has risen “at an alarming rate” over the last decade, and that billions of dollars authorized earlier this year by Congress to expand detention will likely exacerbate the issue. It calls on the federal government to end the practice against immigrants who are detained for civil deportation proceedings, and for states and members of Congress to exercise oversight.
Nearly 59,000 immigrants were held in ICE custody as of Sept. 7, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan data research organization.
The researchers at Physicians for Human Rights analyzed individual cases in New England and found “systemic use of solitary confinement for arbitrary and retaliatory purposes,” such as requesting showers, sharing food or reporting sexual assault.
In California, detainees were placed in solitary confinement 2,546 times from September 2018 to September 2023, said Arevik Avedian, a lecturer and director of empirical research services at Harvard Law School.
Last year, ICE changed the way it reports that data. Instead of placements, in which the same person could be counted multiple times for different stints in solitary confinement, ICE now reports the number of individuals.
In California, ICE reported that 596 people were placed in solitary confinement from April 2024 to May 2025, she said.
During the period of 2018-2023, two California facilities ranked in the top five with the highest number of solitary confinement placements, she said — the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, and the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
This year, the data reflect ICE’s investment in Republican-led states. According to the report, facilities with the most solitary confinement stints included Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, Montgomery Processing Center in Texas, Buffalo Service Processing Center in New York, South Texas ICE Processing Center, and Eloy Detention Center in Arizona tied with Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
A previous report by the same authors found that ICE had used solitary confinement more than 14,000 times between 2018 and 2023, including one Otay Mesa detainee who was held for 759 days.
Eight football transfer students from Long Beach Millikan have been declared ineligible in the latest crackdown by the Southern Section, according to the section’s transfer portal.
Last week, Bishop Montgomery had 19 players declared ineligible. Several of those players have moved to Arizona to try to get eligible. The Millikan players received a two-year suspension for violating CIF bylaw 202, which involves providing false information.
Millikan previously announced it had forfeited two games for use of ineligible players. The team is 0-4.
In 2022, Millikan had to forfeit four games for an ineligible player and coach Romeo Pellum was briefly suspended by the school.
The Southern Section has been paying closer attention to transfer students for the last two years since requirements for paperwork went from two items to six, allowing for greater scrutiny.
Isadore Hall, a former state legislator and Compton City Council member, launched a campaign Monday to challenge Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia.
Hall, who is backed by a slew of prominent endorsers, argues that Mejia has been more focused on “social media theatrics” than protecting tax dollars.
He said he would bring common sense leadership and accountability, citing his lengthy track record in elected office and master’s degrees in management and public administration, as well as experience weeding out government waste and fraud in Compton.
Hall, who moved to Los Angeles in 2016 and represented parts of the city in both the Assembly and the state Senate, said he launched his bid after being asked by “some elected officials,” along with several pastors and labor leaders, though he declined to provide specifics.
Hall’s endorsements include L.A. County Supervisors Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger, L.A. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, California Treasurer Fiona Ma, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and five state legislators. If elected, Hall would be the city’s first Black controller; Mejia, who is Filipino American, previously made history as the first Asian American elected to citywide office in L.A.
“It’s one thing to be a great finance person or an auditor or a person who understands numbers … but you also have to have a temperament. You also have to understand the importance of governance,” Hall said, arguing that Mejia’s office is poorly managed and lacks good communication with city department heads and other local leaders.
It’s still unclear whether other candidates will enter the race for controller — a coveted role that is one of three citywide offices, along with mayor and city attorney.
L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez has been rumored to potentially be interested in a bid for either mayor or controller, though she declined to discuss her plans with The Times last week.
Hall and Mejia represent vastly different flanks of the Democratic Party, and the coming race will almost certainly pit L.A. establishment politics against the city’s ascendant left.
Three years ago, despite being heavily outspent, Mejia made political mincemeat of Paul Koretz, who had held elected office since before he was born. Young voters who were previously unaware that L.A. even had a controller were galvanized by Mejia’s unorthodox campaign, which directed an unprecedented spotlight toward L.A.’s chief accounting officer, auditor and paymaster.
Mejia’s successful campaign coincided with a moment where faith in L.A. City Hall was at a nadir amid numerous criminal scandals and an explosive leaked recording of some City Council members frankly discussing politics in sometimes racist terms. The question in 2026 will be whether the civic pendulum has shifted and if the phrase “veteran politician” still doubles as an effective slur. Mejia will also now be running as the incumbent rather than an outsider.
Hall, 52, has spent roughly 15 years in elected office, beginning with the Compton school board in his mid-20s.
Like Mejia, who is now 34, Hall found success in politics relatively young. But his career ascended the old-fashioned way — through incrementally higher offices and with the support of the pastors, labor and community groups who have long powered the Democratic political machine in South L.A. and surrounding cities.
After losing a hard-fought bid for Congress in 2016, Hall was appointed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to the California Agricultural and Labor Relations Board. Hall was originally seen as a shoo-in victor during his congressional campaign, but underdog challenger Nanette Barragán succeeded, in part, by hammering him on his ties to special interests in the oil, alcohol and tobacco industries, according to prior Times reporting.
Mejia first made his name with unsuccessful runs for Congress as a Green Party candidate. He found his stride and exploded as a political pied piper of sorts during the 2022 election, where his energetic TikTok videos, sharp billboards and occasional dances in a Pikachu costume helped fuel the energy of the moment.
Attempts by critics to paint Mejia in 2022 as too “extreme” because of his anti-police positions and past bombastic tweets largely fell flat.
As the race heats up, Mejia will almost certainly attack Hall for a number of controversies involving campaign finance.
During his 2014 campaign for state Senate, rivals attacked Hall for his use of campaign funds to pay for expensive dinners, limousine rentals, luxury suites at concerts and trips — expenses he defended as legitimate campaign costs.
Hall said last week that he hadn’t been an expert in the complex rules of congressional campaign finance but held his accountant accountable for the error and learned from the experience.
Spotify announced Wednesday that Lossless Listening, its newest audio format, is available for premium users in select countries, including the U.S.
Lossless audio files allow for listeners to stream music using the least compressed and highest resolution audio formats can have, the company said.
Previously, when a musician uploaded their work to a streaming platform, the files tended to get compressed and lose some quality due to the encoding process. Spotify says that with Lossless Listening, users will now be able to hear every detail within the audio file.
From the delicate plucking of an electric guitar to the subtle sample of someone speaking, this new feature will allow listeners to get a heightened sense of clarity and quality when playing their favorite tracks, Spotify said. Lossless works by capturing the recording’s original sound waves and putting them together to create an accurate reproduction of its initial quality.
“We’ve taken time to build this feature in a way that prioritizes quality, ease of use, and clarity at every step, so you always know what’s happening under the hood,” Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify’s vice president of subscriptions, said in a statement. “With Lossless, our premium users will now have an even better listening experience.”
Founded in 2006, Spotify has become the world’s most popular audio streaming service, garnering over 696 million users. Last year, the company posted a net income of more than $1.3 billion with revenue of $18.4 billion. That was its first annual net profit since the company started. The streamer, based in Sweden, is available in more than 180 markets and has a library of over 100 million tracks, almost 7 million podcast titles and 350,000 audiobooks.
Lossless Listening is currently only available for music.
This new feature comes several years after streaming competitors first introduced a similar feature. Subscribers to Apple Music and Amazon Music have had the capacity to listen to music in this format since 2021 and 2019, respectively.
On Spotify, the lossless files are larger than the standard formats, meaning the feature can not be used when connected to Bluetooth, as there’s not enough bandwidth to transmit. If attempted with Bluetooth, the file will be compressed and played at regular quality.
To use Lossless Listening on Spotify, premium users must enable it in their settings, and an icon will appear when listening.
It’s currently available for use on mobile, tablet and desktop. Spotify Premium costs $11.99 a month, while the standard version is free for use with ads.
WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that U.S. Border Patrol agents violated the Constitution when they stopped a car on a freeway near San Clemente because its occupants appeared to be “of Mexican ancestry.”
The 4th Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches, the justices said then, and a motorist’s “Mexican appearance” does not justify stopping them to ask about their immigration status.
But the court sounded a decidedly different note on Monday when it ruled for the Trump administration and cleared the way for stopping and questioning Latinos who may be here illegally. By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside a Los Angeles judge’s temporary restraining order that barred agents from stopping people based in part on their race or apparent ethnicity.
“Apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. “However, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors.”
Critics of the ruling said it had opened the door for authorizing racial and ethnic bias.
UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham called it “shocking and appalling. I don’t know of any recent decision like this that authorized racial discrimination.”
Arulanantham noted that Kavanaugh’s writings speak for the justice alone, and that the full court did not explain its ruling on a case that came through its emergency docket.
By contrast, he and others pointed out that the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prohibited the use of race or ethnicity as a factor in college admissions.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote for a 6-3 majority in 2023. That decision struck down the affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
“Today, the Supreme Court took a step in a badly wrong direction,” Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor, wrote on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. “It makes no sense to conclude that racial and ethnic discrimination is generally unconstitutional, yet also that its use is ‘reasonable’ under the 4th Amendment.”
Reports had already emerged before the decision of ICE agents confronting U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents before they have been able to prove their status, compelling many to begin carrying documentation around at all times.
In New York on Monday, one man outside a federal court was pushed by ICE agents before being able to show them his identification. He was let go.
Asked by The Times to respond to increasing concern among U.S. citizens they could be swept up in expanded ICE raids as a result of the ruling, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that individuals should not be worried.
She added that immigration agents conduct targeted operations with the use of law enforcement intelligence.
“The Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s right to stop individuals in Los Angeles to briefly question them regarding their legal status, because the law allows this, and this has been the practice of the federal government for decades,” Leavitt said. “The Immigration and Nationality Act states that immigration officers can briefly stop an individual to question them about their immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States. And reasonable suspicion is not just based on race — it’s based on a totality of the circumstances.”
On X, the House Homeland Security Committee Democrats responded to Leavitt’s comments, writing: “ICE has jailed U.S. citizens. The Trump Admin is defending racial profiling. Nobody is safe when ‘looking Hispanic’ is treated as probable cause.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent pointed out that nearly half of the residents of Greater Los Angeles are Latino and can speak Spanish.
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed because of their looks, their accents, and the fact that they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
At issue in the case was the meaning of “reasonable suspicion.”
For decades, the court has said police and federal agents may stop and question someone if they see something specific that suggests they may be violating the law.
But the two sides disagreed over whether agents may stop people because they appear to be Latinos and work as day laborers, at car washes or other low-wage jobs.
President Trump’s lawyers as well as Kavanaugh said agents may make stops based on the “totality of the circumstances” and that may include where people work as well as their ethnicity. They also pointed to the data that suggests about 10% of the people in the Los Angeles area are illegally in the United States.
Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, said that the legal standard of reasonable suspicion “has a group of factors you must take into consideration,” adding, “racial profiling is not happening at all.”
It is a “false narrative being pushed,” Homan told MSNBC in an interview, praising the Supreme Court decision. “We don’t arrest somebody or detain somebody without reasonable suspicion.”
WASHINGTON — The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet on the planet, capable of waging electronic warfare, of dropping nuclear weapons, of evading the surveillance and missile defenses of America’s most fearsome enemies at supersonic speeds.
It is the latest example of the Trump administration using disproportionate military force to supplement, or substitute for, traditional law enforcement operations — first at home on the streets of U.S. cities and now overseas, where the president has labeled multiple drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has vowed a “tough” response.
On Tuesday, that response began with an inaugural “kinetic strike” targeting a small vessel in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics and 11 members of Tren de Aragua, one of the Venezuelan gangs President Trump has designated a terrorist group. Legally designating a gang or cartel as a terrorist entity ostensibly gives the president greater legal cover to conduct lethal strikes on targets.
The operation follows Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for operations with dubious justifications, as well as threats of similar actions in San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, moves that a federal judge said last week amount to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Trump has referred to both problems — urban crime and drug trafficking — as interlinked and out of control. But U.S. service members have no training in local law or drug enforcement. And experts question a strategy that has been tried before, both by the United States and regional governments, of launching a war against drugs only to drive leaders in the trade to militarize themselves.
U.S. drug policy “has always been semi-militarized,” said Jeremy Adelman, director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. Trump’s latest actions simply make more explicit the erasure of a line “that separates law enforcement from warfare.”
“One side effect of all this is that other countries are watching,” Adelman said. “By turning law enforcement over to the military — as the White House is also doing domestically — what’s to stop other countries from doing the same in international waters?
“Fishermen in the South China Sea should be worried,” he added.
The Trump administration has not provided further details on the 11 people killed in the boat strike. But officials said the departure of a drug vessel from Venezuela makes Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictatorial president labeled by the White House as a top drug kingpin, indirectly responsible.
“Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he’s a fugitive of American justice,” Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and national security advisor, said on a tour of the region Thursday, citing a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City.
(Hector Vivas / Getty Images)
The president’s war on drug cartels will continue, Rubio said, adding that regional governments “will help us find these people and blow them up.”
Maduro has warned the strike indicates that Washington seeks regime change in Caracas. The Venezuelan military flew two aircraft near a U.S. vessel in international waters Thursday night, prompting an angry response from Pentagon officials and Trump to direct his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “do what you want to do” in response.
“Despite how dangerous this performance could be, because of its political consequences, it can’t be taken seriously as a drug policy,” said Lina Britto, an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean at Northwestern University with a focus on the history of the drug trade. “It lacks rigorousness in the analysis of how drug trafficking operates in the hemisphere.”
Most drugs entering the U.S. homeland from South America arrive in shipping containers, submarines and more efficient modes of transportation than speedboats — and primarily come through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, Britto said.
Trump has flirted with military strikes on drug cartels since the start of his second term, working with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to coordinate drone strikes over Mexican territory for surveillance of cartel activity.
But Sheinbaum has ruled out the use of force against cartels, or the deployment of U.S. forces within Mexico to combat them, warning that U.S. military action would violate Mexican sovereignty and upend collaboration between the two close-knit trade and security partners.
In comparison, Venezuela offers Trump a cleaner opportunity to test the use of force against drug cartels, with diplomatic ties between the two governments at a nadir. But a war with Maduro over drugs could create unexpected problems for the Trump administration, setting off a rare military conflict in a placid region and fueling further instability in a country that, over the last decade, already set off the world’s largest refugee crisis.
Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump’s use of foreign terrorist designations changes the rules of engagement in ways that allow for action “where law enforcement solutions failed in the past.”
“What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in real time,” Berg said. “Many of Latin America’s most significant criminal organizations are now designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration is demonstrating that this is not only rhetorical.”
But Paul Gootenberg, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug,” characterized Trump’s military operation as a “simplistic” approach to complex social problems.
“This is more a performative attack on the Venezuelan regime than a serious attempt at drug policy,” Gootenberg said.
“Militarized drug policy is nothing new — it was tried and intensified in various ways from the mid-1980s through 2000s, oftentimes under U.S. Southern Command,” he added. “The whole range and levels of ‘war on drugs’ was a long, unmitigated policy failure, according to the vast, vast majority of drug experts.”
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
Chatbot builder Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors in a landmark copyright settlement that could redefine how artificial intelligence companies compensate creators.
The San Francisco-based startup is ready to pay authors and publishers to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of illegally using their work to train its chatbot.
Anthropic developed an AI assistant named Claude that can generate text, images, code and more. Writers, artists and other creative professionals have raised concerns that Anthropic and other tech companies are using their work to train their AI systems without their permission and not fairly compensating them.
As part of the settlement, which the judge still needs to be approve, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $3,000 per work for an estimated 500,000 books. It’s the largest settlement known for a copyright case, signaling to other tech companies facing copyright infringement allegations that they might have to pay rights holders eventually as well.
Meta and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, have also been sued over alleged copyright infringement. Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures have sued AI company Midjourney, which the studios allege trained its image generation models on their copyrighted materials.
“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, in a statement. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”
Last year, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, alleging that the company committed “large-scale theft” and trained its chatbot on pirated copies of copyrighted books.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco ruled in June that Anthropic’s use of the books to train the AI models constituted “fair use,” so it wasn’t illegal. But the judge also ruled that the startup had improperly downloaded millions of books through online libraries.
Fair use is a legal doctrine in U.S. copyright law that allows for the limited use of copyrighted materials without permission in certain cases, such as teaching, criticism and news reporting. AI companies have pointed to that doctrine as a defense when sued over alleged copyright violations.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees and backed by Amazon, pirated at least 7 million books from Books3, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, online libraries containing unauthorized copies of copyrighted books, to train its software, according to the judge.
It also bought millions of print copies in bulk and stripped the books’ bindings, cut their pages and scanned them into digital and machine-readable forms, which Alsup found to be in the bounds of fair use, according to the judge’s ruling.
In a subsequent order, Alsup pointed to potential damages for the copyright owners of books downloaded from the shadow libraries LibGen and PiLiMi by Anthropic.
Although the award was massive and unprecedented, it could have been much worse, according to some calculations. If Anthropic were charged a maximum penalty for each of the millions of works it used to train its AI, the bill could have been more than $1 trillion, some calculations suggest.
Anthropic disagreed with the ruling and didn’t admit wrongdoing.
“Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims,” said Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel for Anthropic, in a statement. “We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”
The Anthropic dispute with authors is one of many cases where artists and other content creators are challenging the companies behind generative AI to compensate for the use of online content to train their AI systems.
Training involves feeding enormous quantities of data — including social media posts, photos, music, computer code, video and more — to train AI bots to discern patterns of language, images, sound and conversation that they can mimic.
Some tech companies have prevailed in copyright lawsuits filed against them.
In June, a judge dismissed a lawsuit authors filed against Facebook parent company Meta, which also developed an AI assistant, alleging that the company stole their work to train its AI systems. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria noted that the lawsuit was tossed because the plaintiffs “made the wrong arguments,” but the ruling didn’t “stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”
Trade groups representing publishers praised the Anthropic settlement on Friday, noting it sends a big signal to tech companies that are developing powerful artificial intelligence tools.
“Beyond the monetary terms, the proposed settlement provides enormous value in sending the message that Artificial Intelligence companies cannot unlawfully acquire content from shadow libraries or other pirate sources as the building blocks for their models,” said Maria Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers in a statement.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. is purchasing enough doses of a new twice-a-year HIV prevention shot to share with up to 2 million people in poor countries by 2028, the State Department announced Thursday.
Gilead Sciences had already announced it would sell that supply of the protective drug lenacapvir at no profit for use in low- and middle-income countries that are hard-hit by HIV. The question was who would buy and distribute it after the Trump administration slashed foreign aid earlier this year — forcing closures of health clinics and disrupting HIV testing and care in many countries.
Under Thursday’s move, the U.S. will purchase the doses under the PEPFAR program and work with governments in hard-hit countries on how to distribute them. The priority will be to protect pregnant or breastfeeding women, said Jeremy Lewin, a State Department senior official.
Lewin said the program will be a collaboration with the Global Fund, another international program that funds HIV treatment and prevention efforts, but wouldn’t disclose how much the U.S. was investing.
“We’re hoping, with the Global Fund, to help 2 million people get on the medication over the next three years but could potentially see more,” he said.
There are more than 30,000 new HIV infections in the U.S. every year and 1.2 million people are living with the virus. Worldwide there are 1.3 million new infections annually and nearly 40 million people living with the virus.
Many experts say lenacapavir is the most powerful option yet for what’s called PrEP — using preventive medicines to guard against sexually transmitted HIV. Unlike daily pills that people may forget, each lenacapavir shot offers protection for six months. In two groundbreaking studies with people at high risk, it nearly eliminated new infections.
The drug already has been approved for use in the U.S. and Europe.
In March, the head of the U.N. AIDS agency urged the Trump administration and Gilead to make the preventive shots available worldwide for millions.
Gilead has signed agreements with generic drugmakers to produce low-cost versions of the shot for poor countries, mostly in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The doses provided at-cost for up to 2 million people in those countries were intended to be a stopgap until the generics are available.
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court panel has ruled that President Trump cannot use an 18th century wartime law to speed the deportations of people his administration accuses of being in a Venezuelan gang. The decision blocking an administration priority is destined for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Two judges on a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the ruling Tuesday, agreed with immigrant rights lawyers and lower court judges who argued the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was not intended to be used against gangs such as Tren de Aragua, which the Republican president had targeted in March.
Lee Gelernt, who argued the case for the ACLU, said the administration’s use of “a wartime statute during peacetime to regulate immigration was rightly shut down by the court. This is a critically important decision reining in the administration’s view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the majority erred in second-guessing the president.
“The authority to conduct national security operations in defense of the United States and to remove terrorists from the United States rests solely with the President,” Jackson said. “We expect to be vindicated on the merits in this case.”
The administration deported people designated as Tren de Aragua members to a notorious prison in El Salvador and argued that American courts could not order them freed.
In a deal announced in July, more than 250 of the deported migrants returned to Venezuela.
The Alien Enemies Act was only used three times before in U.S. history, all during declared wars — in the War of 1812 and the two world wars.
The administration unsuccessfully argued that courts cannot second-guess the president’s determination that Tren de Aragua was connected to Venezuela’s government and represented a danger to the United States, meriting use of the act.
In a 2-1 ruling, the judges said they granted the preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs because they “found no invasion or predatory incursion” in this case.
The decision bars deportations from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. In the majority were U.S. Circuit Judges Leslie Southwick, who was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush, and Irma Carrillo Ramirez, who was nominated by Democratic President Biden. Andrew Oldham, a Trump nominee, dissented.
The majority opinion said Trump’s allegations about Tren de Aragua did not meet the historical levels of national conflict that Congress intended for the act.
“A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States,” the judges wrote.
In a lengthy dissent, Oldham complained his two colleagues were second-guessing Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs and national security, realms where courts usually give the president great deference.
“The majority’s approach to this case is not only unprecedented — it is contrary to more than 200 years of precedent,” Oldham wrote.
The panel did grant the Trump administration one legal victory, finding the procedures it uses to advise detainees under the Alien Enemies Act of their legal rights were appropriate.
The ruling can be appealed to the full 5th Circuit or directly to the Supreme Court, which is likely to make the ultimate decision on the issue.
The Supreme Court has already gotten involved twice before in the tangled history of the Trump administration’s use of the act. In the initial weeks after Trump’s March declaration, the court ruled that the administration could deport people under the act, but unanimously found that those targeted needed to be given a reasonable chance to argue their case before judges in the areas where they were held.
Then, as the administration moved to rapidly deport more Venezuelans from Texas, the high court stepped in again with an unusual, post-midnight ruling that they couldn’t do so until the 5th Circuit decided whether the administration was providing adequate notice to the immigrants and could weigh in on the broader legal issues of the case. The high court has yet to address whether a gang can be cited as an alien enemy under the act.
Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Merrick Bobb, one of the godfathers of the modern police oversight movement in Los Angeles and beyond, has died. He was 79.
Bobb, whose health had deteriorated in recent years, died Thursday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., his two children, Matthew and Jonathan, confirmed Friday.
A Los Feliz resident for more than 40 years, Bobb had four grandchildren, was fluent in several languages and was respected as one of the earliest champions of civilian oversight of law enforcement.
He had a long career, shining a light on problems within major law enforcement agencies from L.A. to Seattle. And he accomplished his most significant work without the use of his hands or legs, which became effectively paralyzed after he contracted a rare and debilitating autoimmune condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome in 2003.
“He was always a person who was really engaged in the world,” Jonathan said in an interview with him and his brother. “I think that growing up in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights movement and other associated movements was very seminal for him in terms of instilling belief in justice [and] understanding the voices of traditionally underrepresented groups.”
For two decades beginning in 1993, Bobb served as special counsel to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. In that position, he delivered semiannual reports that detailed pervasive issues within the department, from widespread violence in the county’s jails to excessive force, driving a number of reforms in the department.
In 2014, the board created the Office of Inspector General and dismissed Bobb from his role with the county. That decision came in the wake of criticism that he and Michael Gennaco, the then-head of the Office of Independent Review, had not done enough to stop the problems in the jails, which had become a major scandal.
Two years earlier, a federal judge had appointed Bobb to serve as independent monitor of the Seattle Police Department’s consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. He held that position until 2020, when he resigned in protest of the department’s use of force and “powerful and injurious” crowd control weapons against protesters in the months following George Floyd’s killing by a white Minneapolis police officer.
In 2001, he founded the Police Assessment Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides “independent, evidence-based counsel on effective, respectful, and publicly accountable policing,” the center’s then-vice president Matthew Barge wrote in 2015.
Before that, Bobb served as deputy general counsel for the Christopher Commission, which examined use of force within the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the 1991 beating of Rodney King. The commission published a sweeping report that year that called on then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates to step down and found the department had a persistent and pervasive problem with excessive use of force.
Bobb graduated from Dartmouth College in 1968, then received his law degree three years later from UC Berkeley, according to his curriculum vitae. He worked for private law firms between 1973 and 1996. Bobb was named one of the top 50 lawyers in L.A. by the Los Angeles Business Journal that year, when he left a major law firm to focus on his law enforcement oversight work.
But for many people he met, according to his sons, it was Bobb’s kindness that made the strongest impression.
“No matter who it was in his life he was engaging with at that point, he focused in on them and developed a personal connection,” Matthew said. “You never knew if he was going to be having lunch with the former chief of police or his former handyman who came by once a week, and everyone in between.”
Bobb is survived by his children and grandchildren, his ex-wife Aviva Koenigsberg Bobb — a former judge with whom he remained close — his sister Gloria Kern and his longtime assistant and caretaker, Jeffrey Yanson.
Bobb’s funeral will take place at 10 a.m. Sept. 5 at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90068.
Minutes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trumpeted plans to “flood” Washington with National Guard members, a senior U.S. military official took the stand in federal court in California to defend the controversial deployment of troops to Los Angeles.
The move during protests this summer has since become the model for President Trump’s increasing use of the military to police American streets.
But the trial, which opened Monday in San Francisco, turns on the argument by California that troops called up by Trump have been illegally engaged in civilian law enforcement.
“The military in Southern California are so tied in with ICE and other law enforcement agencies that they are practically indistinguishable,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Meghan Strong told the court Tuesday.
“Los Angeles is just the beginning,” the deputy attorney general said. “President Trump has hinted at sending troops even farther, naming Baltimore and even Oakland here in the Bay Area as his next potential targets.”
Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer said in court that Hegseth’s statements Monday could tip the scales in favor of the state, which must show the law is likely to be violated again so long as troops remain.
But the White House hasn’t let the pending case stall its agenda. Nor have Trump officials been fazed by a judge’s order restricting so-called roving patrols used by federal agents to indiscriminately sweep up suspected immigrants.
After Border Patrol agents last week sprang from a Penske moving truck and snatched up workers at a Westlake Home Depot — appearing to openly defy the court’s order — some attorneys warned the rule of law is crumbling in plain sight.
“It is just breathtaking,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition challenging the use of racial profiling by immigration enforcement. “Somewhere there are founding fathers who are turning over in their graves.”
The chaotic immigration arrests that swept through Los Angeles this summer had all but ceased after the original July 11 order, which bars agents from snatching people off the streets without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.
An Aug. 1 ruling in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to assure they could not resume again for weeks, if ever.
For the Department of Justice, the 9th Circuit loss was the latest blow in a protracted judicial beatdown, as many of the administration’s most aggressive moves have been held back by federal judges and tied up in appellate courts.
Trump “is losing consistently in the lower courts, almost nine times out of 10,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.
In the last two weeks alone, the 9th Circuit also found Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship unconstitutional and signaled it would probably rule in favor of a group of University of California researchers hoping to claw back funding from Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Elsewhere in the U.S., the D.C. Circuit Court appeared poised to block Trump’s tariffs, while a federal judge in Miami temporarily stopped construction at the migrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has noted that his Department of Justice had sued the administration nearly 40 times.
But even the breakneck pace of current litigation is glacial compared with the actions of immigration agents and federalized troops.
Federal officials have publicly relished big-footing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have repeatedly warned the city is being used as a “petri dish” for executive force.
On Monday, the White House seemed to vindicate them by sending the National Guard to Washington.
Speaking for more than half an hour, Trump rattled off a list of American cities he characterized as under siege.
Asked whether he would deploy troops to those cities as well, the president said, “We’re just gonna see what happens.”
“We’re going to look at New York. And if we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago,” he said. “Hopefully, L.A. is watching.”
This image taken from video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents jumping out of a Penske box truck during an immigration raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles, on Aug. 6, 2025.
(FOX News/Matt Finn via AP)
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that the same power that allows the president to federalize troops and deploy them on American streets also creates a “Constitutional exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that bars troops from civilian police action.
California lawyers say no such exception exists.
“I’m looking at this case and trying to figure out, is there any limitation to the use of federal forces?” Judge Breyer said.
Even if they keep taking losses, Trump administration officials “don’t have much to lose” by picking fights, said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.
“The base likes it,” Somin said of the Trump’s most controversial moves. “If they lose, they can consider whether they defy the court.”
Other experts agreed.
“The bigger question is whether the courts can actually do anything to enforce the orders that they’re making,” said David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. “There’s no indication to me that [Department of Homeland Security agents] are changing their behavior.”
Some scholars speculated the losses in lower courts might actually be a strategic sacrifice in the war to extend presidential power in the Supreme Court.
“It’s not a strategy whose primary ambition is to win,” said professor Mark Graber of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “They are losing cases right and left in the district court, but consistently having district court orders stayed in the Supreme Court.”
Win or lose in the lower courts, the political allure of targeting California is potent, argued Segall, the law professor who studies the Supreme Court.
“There is an emotional hostility to California that people on the West Coast don’t understand,” Segall said. “California … is deemed a separate country almost.”
A favorable ruling in the Supreme Court could pave the way for deployments across the country, he and others warned.
“We don’t want the military on America’s streets, period, full stop,” Segall said. “I don’t think martial law is off the table.”
Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a day laborer who is one of the plaintiffs in the Southern California case challenging racial profiling by immigration enforcement, has said the case is bigger than him.
He took to the podium outside the American Civil Liberties Union’s downtown offices Aug. 4, his voice trembling as he spoke about the temporary restraining order — upheld days earlier by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — that stood between his fellow Angelenos and unchecked federal authority.
“I don’t want silence to be my story,” he said. “I want justice for me and for every other person whose humanity has been denied.”
When is AI not artificial intelligence? When it refers to ammonia inhalants, aka smelling salts.
When are these AIs in the news? When it was reported that the NFL banned their use, San Francisco 49ers star George Kittle protested, and the NFL walked back the ban a day later. The league’s players association clarified that players can still use AIs as long as teams don’t provide them.
Got it?
The NFLPA sent a memo to players on Wednesday saying that the ban only prohibits team employees from distributing AIs during games.
That must have pleased Kittle, who when under the impression that AIs were banned completely, grabbed a microphone on an NFL Network broadcast to say, “I honestly just came up here to air a grievance. Our team got a memo today that smelling salts and ammonia packets were made illegal in the NFL, and I’ve been distraught all day.”
The five-time All-Pro tight end said he used the substances for an energy boost before every offensive drive and joked that upon learning of the ban he “considered retirement.”
Except that it isn’t a ban. Kittle will just have to bring his own AI stash to ballgames.
“To clarify, this policy does not prohibit player use of these substances, but rather it restricts clubs from providing or supplying them in any form,” the NFLPA memo said. “The NFL has confirmed this to us.”
The use of AIs by NFL players has been under the radar despite apparently being a common practice. Their primary use is to prevent and treat fainting, with the Federal Aviation Administration requiring U.S. airlines to carry them in the event a pilot feels faint.
The ammonia gas irritates the nasal membranes, causing a reflex that increases breathing and heart rate. That can keep a person from fainting, and apparently can also help a person block and tackle.
In short, an AI — which has been described as smelling like cat urine — is a performance-enhancing substance.
The NFL, however, cited a warning from the FDA that AIs can mask symptoms of a concussion and have not been proven to be safe or effective simply to increase energy.
“In 2024, the FDA issued a warning to companies that produce commercially available ammonia inhalants (AIs), as well as to consumers about the purchase and use of AIs, regarding the lack of evidence supporting the safety or efficacy of AIs marketed for improving mental alertness or boosting energy,” the NFL memo to teams stated. “The FDA noted potential negative effects from AI use.
“AIs also have the potential to mask certain neurological signs and symptoms, including some potential signs of concussion. As a result, the NFL Head, Neck, and Spine Committee recommended prohibiting the use of AIs for any purpose during play in the NFL.”
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield — who says he uses AIs — said the logic behind the NFL no longer supplying them is convoluted.
“I think the reasoning was that it masked concussion symptoms,” Mayfield said on “Up and Adams.” “But if you get knocked out, which is the whole purpose of smelling salts — to wake you up — you’re not allowed back in the game.
“I think it was a quick trigger to ban them, just to kind of CYA [cover your ass].”
Maybe NFL officials figure that by no longer supplying AIs and forcing players to bring their own batch to games, their liability in case of concussions or other medical complications is reduced.
“You just got to bring your own juice to the party, got to wake up ready to go,” Mayfield said.
The final season of “Andor” required visual storytellers to craft a stylized tapestry that reflected each episode’s underlying themes while unifying the whole. “We treated every three episodes almost like a movie and gave them their own identity,” says cinematographer Christophe Nuyens, who photographed the first six episodes. In “Harvest,” the challenge was balancing lighting sources and camera movement to link two sharply contrasting storylines: the elaborate wedding of Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma’s daughter and Stormtroopers in search of undocumented workers on Mina-Rau, which climaxes in a surprise death. “It was important visually that everything could fall nicely together, so for the first three episodes, we decided to play in a sunnier environment,” he says. “The Stormtrooper scene was like a jigsaw puzzle. We had to mix a practical location with a staged set and then all the TIE fighter stuff was also shot on a stage.” Adding to the scale was the cinematographer’s use of a large-format camera and Ultra Vista lenses. “It was important to use a big sensor as it gives you the feel and scope almost like in ‘Rogue One,’” says Nuyens. “It was the biggest change we made this season and I think those lenses make it look really nice.”
ATLANTA — It’s been six months since Joe Biden left the Oval Office. Republicans, including President Trump, can’t stop talking about him.
The House has launched investigations asserting that Biden’s closest advisers covered up a physical and mental decline during the 82-year-old Democrat’s presidency. The Senate has started a series of hearings focused on his mental fitness. And Trump’s White House has opened its own investigation into the Biden administration’s use of the presidential autopen, which Trump has called “one of the biggest scandals in the history of our country.”
It all fits with Trump’s practice of blaming his predecessors for the nation’s ills. Just last week, he tried to deflect criticism of his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case by casting blame on others, including Biden.
Turning the spotlight back on the former president carries risks for both parties heading into the 2026 midterms. The more Republicans or Democrats talk about Biden, the less they can make arguments about the impact of Trump’s presidency — positive or negative — especially his sweeping new tax cut and spending law that is reshaping the federal government.
“Most Americans consider Joe Biden to be yesterday’s news,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.
Republicans want Biden’s autopen to become a flashpoint
Seeking to avenge his 2020 loss to Biden, Trump mocked his rival’s age and fitness incessantly in 2024, even after Biden dropped his reelection bid and yielded to then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
He and other Republicans seemed poised to spend the summer touting their new tax, spending and policy package. But Trump, now 79 and facing his own health challenges, has refused to let up on Biden, and his allies in the party have followed suit.
Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin called the Biden White House’s use of the autopen “a massive scandal,” while Republican Rep. Nick Lalota insists his New York constituents “are curious as to what was happening during President Biden’s days.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently confirmed the administration would pursue an investigation of the Biden administration’s use of the presidential autopen. Trump and other Republicans have questioned whether Biden was actually running the country and suggested aides abused a tool that has long been a routine part of signing presidentially approved actions.
“We deserve to get to the bottom of it,” Leavitt said.
Biden has responded to the criticism by issuing a statement saying he was, in fact, making the decisions during his presidency and that any suggestion otherwise “is ridiculous and false.”
Congressional committees investigate
On Capitol Hill, the House Oversight Committee has convened hearings on use of the autopen and Biden’s fitness for office. Van Orden cited the Constitution’s Article II vesting authority solely with the president.
“It doesn’t say chief of staff. It doesn’t say an autopen,” he said.
The House panel subpoenaed Biden’s physician and a top aide to former first lady Jill Biden. Both invoked Fifth Amendment protections that prevent people from being forced to testify against themselves in government proceedings.
“There was no there there,” said Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell of Missouri, a member of the committee who called the effort “an extraordinary waste of time.”
The committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, wants to hear from former White House chiefs of staff Ron Klain and Jeff Zients; former senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn; and other former top aides Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti and Annie Tomasini, among others. Republicans confirmed multiple dates for the sessions through late September, ensuring it will remain in the headlines.
Investigations could crowd out GOP efforts to define Trump positively
That GOP schedule comes as both parties work feverishly to define Trump’s start to his second term.
His so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a mix of tax cuts, border security measures and cuts to safety net programs such as Medicaid, a joint state-federal insurance program for lower-income Americans. Polls suggest some individual measures are popular while others are not and that the GOP faces headwinds on tilting the public in favor of the overall effort.
A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about two-thirds of U.S. adults view the bill as a win for the wealthy and another found that only about one-quarter of U.S. adults felt Trump’s policies have helped them. In the policy survey, he failed to earn majority support on any of the major issues, including the economy, immigration, government spending and health care. Immigration, especially, had been considered a major strength for Trump politically.
It is “rather tone deaf,” said Bell, for Republicans to go after Biden given those circumstances.
“Americans want us to deal with the issues that are plaguing our country now … the high cost of living, cost of food, the cost of housing, health care,” Bell said, as he blasted the GOP for a deliberate “distraction” from what challenges most U.S. households.
The effort also comes with Trump battling his own supporters over the Justice Department’s decision not to publicly release additional records related to the Epstein case.
“The Epstein saga is more important to his base than whatever happened to Joe Biden,” said Ayres, the GOP pollster.
Even Lalota, the New York congressman, acknowledged a balancing act with the Biden inquiries.
“My constituents care most about affordability and public safety,” Lalota said. “But this is an important issue nonetheless.”
Democrats don’t want to talk about Biden
With Republicans protecting a narrow House majority, every hotly contested issue could be seen as determinative in the 2026 midterm elections.
That puts added pressure on Republicans to retain Trump’s expanded 2024 coalition, when he increased support among Black and Hispanic voters, especially men, over the usual Republican levels. But that’s considerably harder without Trump himself on the ballot. That could explain Republican efforts to keep going after Biden given how unpopular he is with Trump’s core supporters.
Democrats, meanwhile, point to their success in the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first presidency, when they reclaimed the House majority on the strength of moderate voters, including disaffected Republicans. They seem confident that Republicans’ aggressiveness about Biden does not appeal to that swath of the electorate.
But even as they praise Biden’s accomplishments as president, Democrats quietly admit they don’t want to spend time talking about a figure who left office with lagging approval ratings and forced his party into a late, difficult change at the top of the ticket.
Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said Biden was productive while acknowledging he “was not at the top of his game because of his age.” He said Democrats want to look forward, most immediately on trying to win control of the House and make gains in the Senate.
“And then who’s our standard bearer in 2028?” Beyer said. “And how do we minimize the Trump damage with what we have right now?”
Barrow and Brown write for the Associated Press. Brown reported from Washington.
Over the past 25 years, the world has grown to love one of Nickelodeon’s most recognizable characters, Dora Márquez. Whether for her conspicuous bowl cut and pink tee, or her singing anthropomorphic backpack, Dora the Explorer has sparked joy in children for generations.
But what happens when that adventurous girl loses the items that have guided and defined her for so long?
Self-discovery is the end goal of Dora’s latest quest in the new live-action film, “Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado,” which debuted July 2 on Paramount+. The film marks the start of a new journey for a girl who has long existed in the minds of viewers as the adventurous 7-year-old protagonist of the original 2000 animated series “Dora the Explorer” — and later in the short-lived 2014 sequel, “Dora and Friends: Into the City!”
Along with her animal-loving cousin Diego (Jacob Rodriguez) and friends, Dora (Samantha Lorraine) must rediscover who she is while trekking through the treacherous Amazonian jungle in search of Sol Dorado: an ancient treasure that grants one magical wish to whoever locates it. Yet her plans go awry when she finds herself losing one of her most valuable tools.
Although most adults would not rank Dora in the same company as the gritty lead adventurers of “Indiana Jones” or “Tomb Raider,” the film features death-defying scenes that deserve a second look — thanks to the use of real fire and critter-riddled caves in the middle of the Colombian jungle.
Authenticity was key for director Alberto Belli (“The Naughty Nine”), who proposed to studio executives that Dora explore her Andean heritage, including the use of the indigenous language of Quechua, which is spoken by approximately 10 million people in South America.
“This is the first time that we hear Dora speaking Quechua, and we went through great lengths to make sure that the pronunciation was right,” says Belli, who also consulted with Incan culture experts on the Andean kinship principle of “ayllu,” along with the use of “quipu,” a recordkeeping device of knotted cords — both elements which are included in the storyline.
“We’ve seen figures like ‘Indiana Jones’ exploring other cultures, but Dora is the only mainstream [adventurer] exploring her own culture,” says Belli. “And she’s celebrating and interested in the history more than the treasure.”
(PABLO ARELLANO SPATARO/NICKELODEON/PARAMOUNT+)
Dora’s innate curiosity is part of what cultivated her popularity among young children since Nickelodeon launched the series. Who can forget the pip-squeak who broke the fourth wall to reel in preschool audiences with problem-solving questions? Even if its repetitive verbiage drove parents a little mad? (You try saying “Swiper, no swiping!” three times fast!)
But for creators Chris Gifford and Valerie Walsh Valdes, the idea of Dora, as the world has come to love, was not so straightforward. Their early brainstorm sessions, along with Eric Weiner, first sprung up concepts of a little boy bunny who would follow a map toward a final destination — tagging along with him was a red-haired girl named Nina and a pocket-sized mouse named Boots.
Nickelodeon’s executive producer Brown Johnson— creator of the network’s preschool block, Nick Jr. — pitched the idea of the main character being Latina after attending an industry conference that underscored the dearth representation of Latinos in the media. According to the 2000 U.S. census, Latino communities were the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group at the time — and 20% of the kindergarten population across eight states, including California, identified as Latino.
The call for Latino characters was so resounding at the time that it caused some advocacy organizations to launch a weeklong boycott in 1999 to protest the dearth of Latino representation — Latinos made up fewer than 2% of TV characters at that time, despite making up 11% of the population in 1999. “ So we said, okay, how do we do it?” says Gifford.
“One thing that we picked up on very early was using the language in a way to solve problems, almost as a superpower,” says Gifford. “I think that was a huge part of the success of Dora.”
Gifford calls Dora’s use of Spanish a “game changer,” and that certainly seems to be the case — in the show, magical passageways remain locked unless the viewer utters the occasional Spanish phrase or word. At the end of every successful mission, Dora belts out her victorious tune: “We did it, lo hicimos!”
Released on August 14, 2000, the first episode of “Dora the Explorer” moved forward in spite of an English-only movement bubbling up in California politics a few years prior; Proposition 227 passed in 1998 by a large margin, effectively curtailing bilingual education in the state.
(PABLO ARELLANO SPATARO/NICKELODEON/PARAMOUNT+)
“It was not the time that [someone] would think to [make Dora a bilingual character], but of course it was exactly the right time for it to happen,” says Gifford.
The release of “Dora the Explorer” could not be more timely. While political angst pushed against the use of Spanish in the classroom, the country was simultaneously experiencing a “Latin Boom,” a pop culture movement propelled by Hispanic musical acts like Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias, who broke ground in the U.S. mainstream with bilingual hit singles like the famed “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and “Bailamos,” respectively. At the same time, actors like Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek and Jennifer Lopez were also making great strides for Latinas in film.
“There was this awareness [that] the Latino talent we have in this country [was] all coming to the forefront,” said Walsh Valdes. “The zeitgeist was there for us.”
But Dora’s appeal did not entirely hinge on her being a Latina character. In fact, she was designed to be ethnically ambiguous for that reason, suggested Carlos Cortés, professor emeritus in history at UC Riverside, who consulted the creative team. “Let’s let everybody be a part of this,” says Walsh Valdes on the choice to write Dora as pan-Latina.
Instead, the focus of the show remained on the missions; whether it was returning a lost baby penguin to the South Pole, or leading aliens back to their purple planet. In its first year, “Dora the Explorer” averaged 1.1 million viewers ages 2 to 5 and 2 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Co. The original show stretched on for almost two decades before closing out on Aug. 9, 2019.
“We saw such excitement from [little kids feeling] empowered by this girl who can go to a place like the city of lost toys… and little kids who can’t tie their own shoes can feel like they’re helping her,” says Gifford.
The Dora world has also expanded into a tween-coded sequel, “Dora and Friends: Into the City!” and the spin-off “Go, Diego, Go!” — the environmental protection and animal rescue show starring Dora’s cousin Diego. Last year, Dora got a reboot on Nickelodeon’s parent company Paramount+, which was a full circle move for Kathleen Herles, who voiced Dora in the original series.
Now, Herles takes on the motherly role of “Mami” in the 2024 animated series, now available to stream on Paramount+. “Talk about going on another adventure,” says Herles in a video call.
Herles still remembers panicking after her audition back in 1998. Gifford, who was in the room, asked to speak to Herles’ mother, a Peruvian immigrant with slim knowledge of the entertainment biz at the time. “Being Latina, at first I [was] like, ‘Oh my God. She’s going to think I got in trouble,’” says Herles.
The opportunity not only changed the course of Herles’ life financially, but it also opened the door for her to travel the world and reenter the realm of entertainment after a brief career in interior design. Coincidentally, at the time of our call, the 34-year-old voice actor was house hunting in Los Angeles, preparing to move from her native New York City so that she can pursue more career opportunities.
“To me that’s really a testament to [the power of] Dora… because Dora’s an explorer, and she gave me the opportunity to explore,” says Herles.
For 18-year old actress Lorraine, who stars as Dora in “Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado,” this marks her first lead role in any film. She fills big shoes; Isabela Merced, who now stars in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” was cast in the first live-action, standalone 2019 film for the franchise, “Dora and the Lost City of Gold.”
“When it comes to Latino representation, [Dora] was a trailblazer for that,” says Lorraine. “Being able to see a Latina woman in charge and taking the lead? We need more of that to this day.”
The Miami-born actor of Cuban descent, who previously starred in the 2023 Netflix movie “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” answers the audio call after having just arrived in New York City, where she entertains the possibility of a Broadway career.
Like many young adults her age, Lorraine grew up enchanted by Dora’s adventures — so much that she admittedly got the same bob haircut. “She’s my role model,” says Lorraine. “Every time we would shoot a scene, I would think to myself, ‘What would little Samantha want to watch?’”
Throughout every Dora series and film, courage is the connective tissue in her story. “Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado” reminds audiences that the true navigational force behind the pint-size girl was always within her.
And with a full rollout of fresh Dora content — including the new third season of the rebooted 2024 series “Dora,” and an hour-long special called “Dora & Diego: Rainforest Rescues” — even 25 years after the Latina explorer first appeared on screen, it’s clear that her legacy is enduring.
“She will always be that girl,” says Lorraine. “[She’s] that girl who yearns for adventure and has that curiosity spark in her, and that thirst for knowledge.”
Spouses experiencing health emergencies alone, because their loved ones are serving on the streets of Los Angeles. Troops fatigued by a mission they weren’t prepared for. Children of active-duty troops left without their parents, who were deployed on U.S. soil.
Such incidents are happening because of the Trump administration’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles, said Brandi Jones, organizing director for the Secure Families Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for military spouses, children and veterans.
“We’ve heard from families who have a concern that what their loved ones have sacrificed and served in protection of the Constitution, and all the rights it guarantees, are really under siege right now in a way they could never have expected,” Jones said Thursday during a virtual news conference.
California National Guard troops stand outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles during a June 14 protest.
(Zurie Pope / Los Angeles Times)
On the eve of Independence Day, veterans, legal scholars and advocates for active-duty troops warned that sending troops to quell protests in California’s largest city threatens democratic norms. Under a 147-year-old law, federal troops are barred from being used for civilian law enforcement.
Dan Maurer, a retired lieutenant colonel who is now a law professor at Ohio Northern University, described this state of affairs during the news conference as “exactly the situation we fought for independence from,” adding that President Trump is “making America militarized again.”
Though 150 National Guard troops were released from protest duty on Tuesday, according to a news release from U.S Northern Command, around 3,950 remain in Los Angeles alongside 700 Marines, who are protecting federal property from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions.
Trump has defended the deployment of troops in Los Angeles, saying on his social media platform that the city “would be burning to the ground right now” if they were not sent. He has suggested doing the same in other U.S. cities, calling the L.A. deployment “the first, perhaps of many,” during an Oval Office news conference.
“The administration has unnecessarily and provocatively deployed the military in a way that reflects the very fears that our founding fathers had,” Maurer said. “Using the military as a police force in all but name.”
“The closer they [the military] act to providing security around a perimeter … the closer they act to detaining individuals, the closer they act to questioning individuals that are suspected of being illegal immigrants, the closer the military is pushed to that Posse Comitatus line,” Maurer said, referring to the law that prohibits use of troops in a law enforcement capacity on American soil. “That is a very dangerous place to be.”
Other speakers argued that the use of troops in Los Angeles jeopardizes service members, placing them in a environment they were never trained for, and pitting them against American citizens.
“Our Marines are our nation’s shock troops, and it’s entirely inappropriate that they’re deployed in the streets of Los Angeles,” said Joe Plenzler, a Marine combat veteran who served as platoon commander, weapons platoon commander and company executive officer for the 2nd Batallion 7th Marines, which is now deployed in downtown L.A.
Plenzler recalled that more than half of the men he served with in 2nd Batallion came from Spanish-speaking families, and some were in this country as legal permanent residents with green cards and had yet to enjoy all the benefits of citizenship.
Members of the California National Guard are deployed at a June 14 protest in downtown L.A.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“Think about what might be going through their heads right now, as they’re being ordered to help ICE arrest and deport hardworking people who look a lot like people they would see at their own family reunions,” Plenzler said.
Plenzler also contrasted the training Marines receive with those of civilian law enforcement.
“We are not cops,” Plenzler said. “Marines aren’t trained in de-escalatory tactics required in community policing. We don’t deploy troops in civilian settings, typically because it increases the risk of excessive force, wrongful deaths and erosion of public trust.”
During the 1992 L.A. riots, Marines responded with the LAPD to a domestic dispute. One officer asked the Marines to cover him, and they, mistakenly believing he was asking them to open fire, fired 200 rounds into the home.
“Our troops are under-prepared, overstretched and overwhelmed,” said Christopher Purdy, founder of the nonprofit veteran advocacy group The Chamberlain Network and a veteran of the Army National Guard.
“Guard units doing these missions are often doing them with minimal preparation,” Purdy said, stating that many units are given a single civil unrest training block a year.
“When I deployed to Iraq, we spent weeks of intense training on cultural competency, local laws and customs, how we should operate in a blend of civil and combat operations,” Purdy said. “If we wouldn’t accept that kind of shortcut for a combat deployment, why are we accepting it now when troops are being put out on the front line in American streets?”
Each speaker reflected on the importance of holding the federal government accountable, not only for its treatment of active-duty troops, but also for how these men and women are being used on American soil.
“I reflect this Fourth of July on both the promise and the responsibility of freedom. Military family readiness is force readiness,” Jones said. “At Secure Families Initiative, we’re hearing from active-duty families: You can’t keep the force if families are stretched thin — or if troops are used against civilians.”
Added Maurer: “The rule of law means absolutely nothing if those that we democratically entrust to enforce it faithfully ignore it at will. And I think that’s where we are.”
California’s fight to rein in President Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles hinges on a 19th century law with a a blood-soaked origin and a name that seems pulled from a Spaghetti Western.
In a pivotal ruling this week, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ordered the federal government to hand over evidence to state authorities seeking to prove that the actions of troops in Southern California violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids soldiers from enforcing civilian laws.
“How President Trump has used and is using the federalized National Guard and the Marines since deploying them at the beginning of June is plainly relevant to the Posse Comitatus Act,” Breyer wrote Wednesday in his order authorizing “limited expedited discovery.”
The Trump administration objected to the move and has already once gotten a sweeping Breyer ruling that would’ve limited White House authority over the troops overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
This time, the Northern District of California judge made clear he would “only allow discovery as to the Posse Comitatus Act” — signaling what could be the state’s last stand battle to prevent Marines and National Guard forces from participating in immigration enforcement.
The Posse Comitatus Act dates back to the aftermath of the Civil War when the American government faced violent resistance to its efforts to rebuild Southern state governments and enforce federal law following the abolition of slavery.
The text of the law itself is slight, its relevant section barely more than 60 words. Yet when it was enacted, it served as the legal epitaph to Reconstruction — and a preface to Jim Crow.
“It has these very ignoble beginnings,” said Mark P. Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University and one of the country’s foremost experts on the statute.
Before the Civil War, the U.S. military was kept small, in part to avoid the kinds of abuses American colonists suffered under the British.
Authorities back then could marshal a crew of civilians, called a posse comitatus, to assist them, as sometimes happened in California during the Gold Rush. States also had militias that could be called up by the president to pad out the army in wartime.
But law enforcement by the U.S. military was rare and deeply unpopular. Historians have said the use of soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — which saw escaped slaves hunted down and returned to the South — helped spark the Civil War.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has used constitutional maneuvers invented to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to justify using troops to round up immigrants. Experts said leaders from the antebellum South demanded similar enforcement of the law.
“The South was all for posse comitatus when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act,” said Josh Dubbert, a historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Ohio.
But by the time Congress sent federal troops to begin Reconstruction in earnest in 1867, the landscape was very different.
After white rioters razed Black neighborhoods in Memphis and mobs of ex-Confederate soldiers massacred Black demonstrators in New Orleans in the spring of 1866, “most of the South [was] turned into military districts,” said Jacob Calhoun, a professor of American history at Wabash College and an expert on Reconstruction.
“Most scholars, let alone the American public, do not understand the scale of racial violence during Reconstruction,” Calhoun said. “They only send these troops in after unimaginable levels of violence.”
At the polls, Black voters were met by white gangs seeking to prevent them from casting ballots.
“For most of American history, the idea of an American army intervening in elections is a nightmare,” Calhoun said. “[Posse Comitatus] is reemphasizing this longstanding belief but for more nefarious purposes.”
The Posse Comitatus language was tucked into an appropriations bill by Southern Democrats after their party won control of Congress in the election of 1876 — “possibly the most violent election in American history,” Calhoun said.
Historians say white lawmakers in the post-war South sought to enshrine their ability to keep Black men from voting by barring federal forces from bolstering the local militias that protected them.
“Once they’re in control of Congress, they want to cut the appropriations for the army,” Dubbert said. “They attach this amendment to [their appropriations bill] which is the Posse Comitatus Act.”
The bill won support from some Republicans, who resented the use of federalized troops to put down the Railroad Strike of 1877 — the first national labor strike in the U.S.
“It is a moment in which white Northern congressmen surrender the South back to ex-Confederates,” Calhoun said. “With the Posse Comitatus Act, racial violence becomes the norm.”
Yet the statute itself largely vanished from memory, little used for most of the next century.
“The Posse Comitatus Act was forgotten for about 75 years, from after Reconstruction to basically the 1950s, when a defense lawyer made a challenge to a piece of evidence that the Army had obtained,” Nevitt said. “The case law is [all] after World War II.”
Those cases have largely turned on troops who arrest, search, seize or detain civilians — “the normal thing the LAPD does on a daily basis,” Nevitt said. The courts have stood by the bedrock principle that military personnel should not be used to enforce the law against civilians, he said, except in times of rebellion or other extreme scenarios.
“Our nation was forged in large part because the British military was violating the civil rights of colonists in New England,” Nevitt said. “I really can’t think of a more important question than the military’s ability to use force against Americans.”
Yet, the law is full of loopholes, scholars said — notably in relation to use of the National Guard.
Department of Justice has argued Posse Comitatus does not apply to the military’s current actions in Southern California — and even if it did, the soldiers deployed there haven’t violated the law. It also claimed the 9th Circuit decision endorsing Trump’s authority to call up troops rendered the Posse Comitatus issue moot.
Some experts feel California’s case is strong.
“You literally have military roaming the streets of Los Angeles with civilian law enforcement,” said Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, “That’s exactly what the [act] is designed to prevent.”
But Nevitt was more doubtful. Even if Breyer ultimately rules that Trump’s troops are violating the law and grants the injunction California is seeking, the 9th Circuit will almost certainly strike it down, he said.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle,” the attorney said. “And if they find a way to get to the Supreme Court, I see the Supreme Court siding with Trump as well.”
