The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.

Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.

The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through partnerships with DoorDash and Uber Eats.

Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.

Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.

Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.

“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”

Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.

“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”

The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.

The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .

Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.

Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.

The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.

There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.

“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”

The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.

Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.

With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.

Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.

The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.

Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.

“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.

Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.

The Venice Beach-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.

Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.

The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.

Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.

“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”

Metro has announced it will open three new stations connecting downtown Los Angeles to Beverly Hills in May.

The new stations mark the first phase of a rail extension project on the Metro D line, also known as the Purple Line, beneath Wilshire Boulevard. The extension will open to the public on May 8.

It’s part of a broader plan to enhance the region’s transit infrastructure in time for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The new stations will take riders west, past the existing Wilshire/Western station in Koreatown, stopping along the Miracle Mile before arriving at Beverly Hills. The 3.92-mile addition winds through Hancock Park, Windsor Square, the Fairfax District and Carthay Circle. The stations will be located at Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax and Wilshire/La Cienega.

This is the first of three phases in the D Line extension project. The completion of the this phase, budgeted at $3.7 billion, comes months later than earlier projections. Metro said in 2025 it expected to wrap up the phase by the end of the year.

The route between downtown Los Angeles and Koreatown is one of Metro’s most heavily used rail lines, with an average of about 65,000 daily boardings. The Purple Line extension project — with the goal of adding seven stations and expanding service on the line to Hancock Park, Century City, Beverly Hills and Westwood — broke ground more than a decade ago. Metro’s goal is to finish by the 2028 Summer Olympics.

In a news release on Thursday, Metro described its D Line expansion as “one of the highest-priority” transit projects in its portfolio and “a historic milestone.”

“Traveling through Mid-Wilshire to experience the culture, cuisine and commerce across diverse neighborhoods will be easier, faster and more accessible,” said Fernando Dutra, Metro board chair and Whittier City Council member, in the release. “That connectivity from Downtown LA to the westside will serve as a lasting legacy for all Angelenos.”

The D line was closed for more than two months last year for construction under Wilshire Boulevard, contributing to a 13.5% drop in ridership that was exacerbated by immigration raids in the area.

“I can’t wait for everyone to enjoy and discover the vibrance of mid-Wilshire without the traffic,” Metro Chief Executive Stephanie Wiggins said in a statement.

An independent expenditure committee backed by Silicon Valley executives spent $4.8 million on television ads supporting San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s gubernatorial bid that will begin airing Thursday.

The two 30-second ads highlight the Democrat’s life story — being raised in a working-class family and working on a grounds crew and as a middle school teacher — and his accomplishments leading the state’s third-largest city.

Mahan’s parents “taught him the difference between nice to have and need to have,” a narrator says in one of the ads. “So as mayor of San Jose, Matt focused on the basics and delivered results on the things that matter most. The safest big city in America, a sharp drop in street homelessness and thousands of homes built. As governor, Matt Mahan will focus on results Californians need to have, like affordable homes, safe neighborhoods and good schools.”

The ads, which will air statewide on broadcast and cable TV, were paid for by an independent-expenditure committee called California Back to Basics Supporting Matt Mahan for Governor 2026.

The group has not yet filed any fundraising reports with the secretary of state’s office, but the ads’ disclosure says the top donors are billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, luxury sleepwear company founder Ashley Merrill and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Seibel.

Billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, who considered running for governor or mayor of Los Angeles but ultimately decided against seeking either post, is involved in the effort, according to a strategist working for the committee who requested anonymity to speak about it.

The committee legally cannot coordinate with Mahan’s campaign, which he launched four weeks ago. Although Mahan lacks the name recognition of several other candidates in the crowded field running to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, his fundraising prowess, notably among tech industry leaders, is notable. He has raised nearly $9.2 million in large donations since entering the gubernatorial race.

SAN LEANDRO — A start-up recycling company has a message for its potential, environmentally conscious customers: Don’t send your problem garbage to the landfill; put it on your front porch.

The company is Ridwell, and if you drive the residential streets of the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, you’re likely to see the company’s signature white metal boxes on porches.

The boxes are for empty tortilla chip and plastic produce bags, used clothing, light bulbs and batteries. In some locations, polystyrene peanuts. All the things you’re not supposed to put in the blue recycle bin, but wish you could.

The Seattle-based waste service is geared toward people who worry their waste will end up in the landfill, or get exported to a developing country in Asia. They sort their waste into colorfully labeled canvas bags the company provides, and wait for a Ridwell pickup.

“Sorting is our special sauce,” said Gerrine Pan, the company’s vice president of partnerships. Part of the reason the company is successful at finding markets — or buyers — for its waste, she said, is that it’s sorted and pretty clean (unlike the food-contaminated jumble of waste that gets stuffed in many blue bins).

The company promises to distribute all that waste to specialty recyclers, manufacturers, even thrift shops.

But critics say the boutique waste hauler is not accomplishing anything environmentally useful and is selling the public a myth: that these plastics — multilayer plastic film, plastic bags, polystyrene — can be taken care of responsibly. The service would be benign, they say, if it stuck to the delivery of materials, such as light bulbs and batteries, that can be recycled.

Most local waste haulers don’t accept batteries and light bulbs because they can pose a hazard to workers and equipment.

The base Ridwell membership is $20 a month. For that, a driver will come by every two weeks and take the presorted bags to a warehouse where they’re emptied, the contents stacked and collected, until there’s enough to deliver to a facility that will take it.

Company lore is that founder Ryan Metzger and his son were frustrated that so many things weren’t accepted by their local hauler for recycling. The two sat down and researched where to take the stuff, then decided to scale up and serve their neighbors.

The company has since expanded to Vancouver, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Denver; Austin, Texas; Minneapolis and Atlanta. It now boasts more than 130,000 customers nationwide.

Most of the waste is delivered locally. But some of it travels hundreds, if not thousands of miles.

For instance, multilayer plastic bags — those that hold snack chips, candy and coffee beans — are the scourge of municipal garbage haulers because they cannot be recycled, and if put in the blue bins, can damage mechanical sorting machines. Ridwell, however, found Hydroblox, a company that melts the multilayer films into hard, plastic bricks that can be used for drainage projects in landscaping and road construction.

But this arrangement highlights some of the limitations of the nascent industry. Hydroblox owner Ed Greiser said he can take only so many chip bags. The company is growing, but it’s still pretty small, and he’s typically maxed out on the bags.

“This article is going to be a nightmare for me,” he told a Times reporter, because it’s likely to attract a parade of unsolicited garbage trucks looking to dump their bags. “I’m not the solution.”

In addition, Greiser’s two facilities are in Pennsylvania, more than 2,700 miles from most West Coast pickup points, a steep transportation cost for a plastic bag that could instead go 20 miles to a local landfill.

Ridwell also has recently expanded to serve customers outside its pickup cities. It sends special plastic bags to these far-flung subscribers so they can sort their waste and ship it back.

Again, critics say the company’s decision to operate a service that is dependent on plastic bags and requires extensive transport undermines their environmental bona fides. And they worry that a narrative suggesting all waste can be dealt with responsibly is false and misleading. That misconception, they say, contributes to the glut of plastic piling up in our rivers and oceans, and inside our bodies.

“There is typically a reason why a given product isn’t being recycled through curbside collection, and it usually isn’t for lack of effort by cities and counties,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “Most of the material being collected by boutique collection services like Ridwell are either very difficult to manage or lack strong recycling markets.”

Manufacturers of plastic packaging, not consumers, should pay for recycling products and packaging at the end of their life, he said. For regular people, “having to pay an extra fee to handle the unrecyclable plastic packaging that is thrust upon us every day is antithetical to every concept of producer responsibility.”

Earlier this month, the anti-plastic group Beyond Plastics published a disparaging report on boutique waste haulers, including Ridwell, accusing them of providing cover for plastic and packaging manufacturers who want people to believe their waste is being recycled.

Ridwell offered a visitor a tour of its Bay Area warehouse in San Leandro. The spacious facility behind a Home Depot and Walmart was crowded with steel drums filled with alternating layers of batteries and fire-retardant pellets, boxes of light bulbs and piles of used clothes, all destined for recyclers, upcyclers and thrift stores.

While the public may think of recycling as a largely physical process, it’s actually a market: a function of how well a material can be profitably turned into something else.

Metzger, Ridwell’s chief executive, said some of the material his company collects can be sold. Some of it is given away, “and some we pay to have responsibly processed.” The more technically challenging the plastic, the more likely Ridwell will have to pay to deal with it, he said.

He said the company vets all the places it sends its waste, giving preference to those that use items a second time over those that melt them down or shred them to make them into something else. It also gives preference to partners that are local.

He said his company is “careful not to present plastic recycling as a cure-all,” and it turns away some materials, for example vinyl shower curtains, “because we don’t have a downstream partner we can stand behind.”

And while Metzger agrees with many of Beyond Plastic’s concerns, he has observed that “when customers actively sort and see which items require special handling, it often increases their awareness of where plastic waste is coming from in their own lives … [leading] them to change purchasing habits and avoid certain packaging altogether.”

The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to strike down the majority of tariffs imposed by President Trump could provide some relief to L.A.’s trade-reliant economy — but only if they are not reimposed again through other means.

The court’s 6-3 ruling that Trump didn’t have the authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act rolled back levies that have upended international trade.

“We’ve seen that the tariffs have a significant impact on our supply chain, on our manufacturers and especially on our port logistics and trade sector,” said Stephen Cheung, chief executive of the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

“I think this decision will have a significant impact on the Los Angeles economy. However, it’s going to take a long time to unravel, so we’ll see specifically how everything is going to pan out,” he said.

The tariffs dealt a blow to a large swath of businesses in Southern California and across the state, including farmers, automakers, home builders, tech companies and apparel retailers.

MGA Entertainment, the Chatsworth maker of Bratz dolls, said a little more than half of its products are made in China, while hardware and lumber seller Anawalt in Malibu said the majority of its lumber comes from Canada and nearly all of its steel products are made in China.

During a news conference Friday following the decision, Trump said that under other legal authorities he would impose a 10% global tariff and pursue additional levies, including a possible 30% tariff on foreign cars. Later in the day he signed an order imposing the 10% tax, which takes effect Feb. 24.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I’m ashamed of certain members of the court — absolutely ashamed,” Trump said. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

Friday’s high-court decision affects up to $170 billion in tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, including 10% to 50% duties and penalties on China, Canada and Mexico.

Whether importers who paid the tax can seek refunds was left to a lower court to decide. It’s estimated some $100 billion in tariffs were not affected by the decision.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — which handle nearly a third of the nation’s containerized cargo and are the primary trade gateway to Asia — saw a surge of traffic the first half of last year as importers sought to get ahead of the tariffs, largely imposed in April.

However, traffic tailed off the second half of the year, with the L.A. port expecting a single-digit decline in volume this year before Friday’s decision.

The twin facilities form the largest ports complex in North America, supporting more than 200,000 jobs and contributing $28 billion to the regional economy in 2022, according to a California Center for Jobs & the Economy report.

The uncertainty surrounding the tariffs derives from the complexity of the tariffs themselves — as well as the other legal options Trump has to impose them again.

Mike Jacob, president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn., which represents ocean carriers, marine terminal operators and others in the industry, said the tendency is to think of the tariffs as uniform.

“It was different rates for different countries. That was compounded by different rates for different commodities. And there’s a lot of changes that have occurred with specific commodities,” he said. “So it’s almost impossible to take a broad brush and say, here’s what we expect to happen — except to say that it’s still a pretty unsettled space.”

In imposing a 10% global tariff, Trump would be relying on a provision of the Trade Act of 1974, while his ability to pursue additional levies would rely on other law.

Economist Jock O’Connell, international trade advisor at L.A.’s Beacon Economics, said that Trump may have authority to impose the 10% global tariffs, but additional levies would involve trade authorities.

“That would be a cumbersome process. The tariffs have to be more specifically framed and the subject of an investigation,” he said.

Also complicating the process are trade deals the U.S. has been negotiating with foreign countries based on the tariffs. O’Connell expects they will seek to renegotiate them.

“They’re likely to come back to the table and say, ‘Well, you don’t have the authority to impose these,’” he said.

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said importers are facing tough decisions right now, given that any ocean carrier leaving an Asian port today would not be subject to the tariffs that were struck down.

“That executive is asking: ‘Are my commodities now exempt from this tariff?’ If the answer is yes, ‘Can I buy more of that product and get it shipped while there are no tariffs?’” he said.

Those decisions would revolve around such factors as the availability of space on the vessel and local warehouses, as well as trucking services, he said.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the decision should be good news for the larger U.S. economy and businesses on the “front line” of the trade wars, such as transportation, distribution, agriculture and retail.

“If the president lets the Supreme Court decision stand and doesn’t try to replace the tariffs, that’s a plus for the economy — but that’s not what’s going to happen,” he said.

Last spring, victims of the Los Angeles wildfires complained loudly and en masse over how State Farm General was handling their insurance claims, especially for smoke damage.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara urged them to lodge formal complaints with the department.

“That’s how we track and how we monitor, and we make sure that we follow through … make sure that those claims are being addressed,” he told several hundred fire victims in a Zoom forum in May.

Nearly a year later, however, many homeowners and their representatives say the promise was hollow. They voice mounting frustration over how the California Department of Insurance investigated their complaints about State Farm.

More than a dozen homeowners and their representatives told The Times that the department did little to resolve a wide range of complaints, or prevent new problems, in State Farm’s handling of their claims.

“Seventy percent of insured Eaton and Palisades fire survivors are facing delays and denials that are impeding their recovery,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, citing a survey by the nonprofit Department of Angels. “That is evidence of the failure of this department to do its job.”

Policyholders shared complaints lodged against State Farm over denials to pay for the cleanup of fire toxins, rebuild estimates well below actual construction costs and delayed checks for living expenses. To the state they cited frequent turnover in adjusters and demands to sign legal papers agreeing to forego future reimbursement for personal items without itemized receipts.

Now, they said, State Farm is cutting off prepaid rentals and leases for fire victims who aren’t close to returning home.

Most of the fire victims said they were left in the dark about their cases, and were told to stop trying to communicate with their complaint handlers. Some said their cases were closed before their insurance disputes were settled.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s an actual, legitimate organization that’s meant to protect consumers,” said Len Kendall, who lost his home to the Pacific Palisades fire.

Kendall initially complained to the state about State Farm in July, citing delays in handling his total loss claim, dealing with multiple adjusters and struggles to get reimbursed for living expenses. Later he said he was told to stop communicating with the state and to send his records “directly and solely” to State Farm.

“We’re told that they’re tracking information and speaking to the insurers, but we have no idea what is happening,” Kendall said. “ When it comes to the [insurance department], we’re all totally in the dark.”

A spokesperson for State Farm declined to address complaints from L.A. fire victims.

A representative for the state insurance department declined to comment on its handling of complaints against State Farm.

The agency did say it had “recovered” more than $210 million for fire victims “through its intervention and aggressive advocacy on these complaints.”

“We do our best to approach every wildfire survivor with empathy and understanding,” Michael Soller, spokesman for the insurance department, said late Wednesday. “Our goal is helping people recover fully, fairly, and quickly. We hold ourselves to the highest standards.”

He encouraged those with insurance disputes to contact the department. “We will do our best to expedite their claims,” he said.

The mistrust between fire victims and the department has been deepened by newly released records showing the department disciplined one of its senior complaint handlers after she criticized State Farm over its claims handling, according to personnel records reviewed by The Times.

In a July letter to a State Farm case manager, Coleen Vandepas — a 32-year-veteran of the department who had previously been commended for her work on behalf of policyholders — accused the insurer of “shoddy” and “shameful” handling of an L.A. fire claim, including claiming it did not have test results within the insurer’s possession. She demanded the company apologize to its policyholder. In another policyholder’s case, she said State Farm engaged in a “pattern and practice” of delay.

Records show that days later, a State Farm lawyer called a top-level executive at the insurance department to complain about Vandepas’ statements.

Vandepas’ State Farm caseload was subsequently reassigned and she was docked 10% of her pay, according to personnel records. Her supervisors said Vandepas had made “accusatory” and “improper” remarks about State Farm, and cited a LinkedIn post State Farm had called attention to, in which she characterized insurance company threats to leave California as “wailing” by companies that wanted to “make huge amounts off the backs of the citizens of California.”

A state personnel board law judge reviewing the discipline called Vandepas’ remarks “rude and disparaging” and the full board this month rejected her appeal. A new appeal has been filed with the California Public Employee Relations Board, noting Vandepas was also protected as a union steward and was in part punished for raising internal workload issues.

The workplace action has angered advocates for wildfire victims.

“This sends a message to every single person who works at [the California Department of Insurance]: ‘You may be next,” said Chen, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.

Through its corporate media office in Illinois, State Farm declined to comment on the sanctions against Vandepas.

“We are not a party to the case in question,” the Illinois-based insurer said in a statement. “We have ongoing relationships with state regulators so we can best meet the needs of our customers.”

Investigations into State Farm

State Farm was in the midst of dropping some 72,000 policies in California, and seeking a $1.3-billion rate hike, when the Jan. 7, 2025, firestorm ravaged Los Angeles. The disaster killed 31, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and left many others unable to return to their homes. As of November, the insurance department reported more than 42,000 home and commercial insurance claims.

By far, the largest share of those claims are with State Farm General, the California subsidiary of State Farm Mutual. A survey of about 2,300 five victims by the Department of Angels noted State Farm policyholders reported higher rates of claim denials, low estimates and other complaints than customers of other insurers.

Los Angeles County in November opened its own investigation into State Farm’s claims handling, demanding the insurer turn over reams of information, including company policy guides, training materials for handling fire and smoke claims, among other documents.

In June, Lara launched what he called an expedited market conduct exam of State Farm. The findings have yet to be released.

Lara rejected pressure from wildfire victim advocates to delay an interim 17% emergency hike until State Farm’s claims practices could be examined. He said they would be taken up in the full rate review. There has been no public hearings on the full hike. The case could be settled by the end of the month, state lawyers told a judge this week.

The insurance giant has a history of pushing strongly against regulators.

The company has refused to provide financial records sought by California actuaries attempting to judge the merit of its pending rate hike, including plans to drop another 11,000 policies, according to public rate filing records obtained by The Times.

The insurance department tracks complaints by disaster, as well as by insurer, but has rejected public record requests for that data. Its consumer complaint group has just 34 employees and hasn’t changed staffing levels despite the surge in wildfire claims in 2025, according to California payroll records.

Internal agency emails show a State Farm executive in May 2025 told Lara the insurer had received less than 310 policyholder complaints among 10,359 Los Angeles fire claims at the time. (Most of the cases reviewed by The Times were filed later.)

“SFG is not an outlier with respect to the number of complaints received in relation to the number of claims from the January 2025 wildfires,” State Farm General CEO Dan Krause wrote to Lara.

Insurance companies have 21 days to respond when a complaint is filed, and then state compliance officers can review the record for adherence with insurance law. They cannot make a determination of fault, or the size of an award. In a process kept confidential, they can challenge insurers with questions, asking them to explain their decisions. If they see violations, they cannot take action against an insurer. And they cannot tell the policyholder.

The insurance department contends the complaint process has resulted in the reversal of claim denials, increased payouts and agreements in individual cases to test for the toxic residues of wildfire smoke.

But interviews and records reviewed by The Times revealed inconsistencies in how wildfire disaster complaints were handled.

Some compliance officers told policyholders to stop sharing correspondence with their insurance companies or adjusters, saying they would read the claim files for themselves. Policyholders frustrated by the silence sought to file new complaints or have their cases reassigned, only to be refused.

After five months of sending protests about a “non-responsive” compliance officer, one fire victim was told by a bureau supervisor that she had two other alternatives to resolve her insurance dispute: seek a lawyer or file a lawsuit.

Three officers attempted to close policyholder cases even though the insurance claim remained in dispute. In one instance, a compliance officer referenced the wrong insurance company and the wrong issue being contested, letters shared with The Times show.

Andrew Wessels said State Farm prematurely closed this case after he challenged the insurers initial refusal to address toxic residues in his house left standing among the rubble of the Eaton fire, or its failure to pay living expenses.

For months, Wessels repeatedly wrote to alert his compliance officer that State Farm was making false claims. The state reviewer wrote back once to acknowledge receipt of further complaints he would add to the case file. Then in October the case officer tried to close the still-disputed State Farm claim, calling it “in stable condition.”

“The Department would find its task of regulating the insurance industry much more difficult without the help of consumers like you,” the closure letter said.

Wessels protested and his case was reopened. He continues to wrestle with State Farm over safety tests, delayed living expenses and ever-changing adjusters. He emails updates to his state insurance compliance officer.

“I just periodically send an email into oblivion, basically,” he said.

Standing in front of Snap’s Santa Monica offices, parents clutched photos of their children who died from taking fentanyl-laced pills facilitated through the disappearing messages of the Snapchat app.

They rolled white paint onto the ground, spelling out the names of 108 children who died from alleged social media harms.

“Snapchat: Protect kids not predators,” a banner read.

Yellow signs with images of dead children accused the company of being an “accomplice” to “murder,” videos and photos of the demonstration showed.

More than 40 parents attended Thursday’s protest, an event organized by Heat Initiative, an advocacy group that focuses on holding tech companies accountable if they fail to protect kids online.

“For years, families have watched their children die from fentanyl poisoning and sexual exploitation facilitated by Snapchat’s design—and for years, Snapchat has fought to avoid any meaningful accountability,” Sarah Gardner, chief executive of Heat Initiative, said in a statement.

The demonstration highlighted the mounting pressure social media companies such as Snap continue to face as a landmark trial in Los Angeles over whether tech companies such as Instagram and YouTube can be held liable for allegedly promoting a harmful product and addicting users to their platforms continues in Los Angeles.

TikTok and Snap, the parent company of messaging app Snapchat, settled for undisclosed sums to avoid the trial.

Parents who allege the Santa Monica company is responsible for drug sales facilitated through the app have also sued Snap. Parents who attended this week’s protest urged the company to do more to safeguard young people from predators and called for Snap to disable its AI chatbot.

Social media companies have faced allegations for years that their platforms are designed to be addictive and make it easy for predators and drug dealers to target and harm young people. Parents who have lost their children have also pushed for more legislation, including in California, to make social media platforms safer.

The rise of artificial intelligence chatbots, which are also incorporated within apps such as Snapchat and Instagram, have also raised more safety concerns because young people who have died by suicide have spilled some of their darkest thoughts online.

Snap said in a statement that the company has invested in online safety, including efforts to combat illegal drug sales on its platform. The company pointed to the technology it uses to detect illegal drug content, its work with law enforcement and education initiatives. This week, Snap was among the companies that agreed to get evaluated on their child safety efforts.

“Snap unequivocally condemns the criminal conduct of the drug dealers whose actions led to these tragedies. Addressing the fentanyl crisis demands a united front, bringing together law enforcement, government officials, medical professionals, parents, educators, tech companies, and advocacy organizations,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

Amy Neville, an Orange County mom who lost her 14-year-old son Alexander Neville from fentanyl poisoning after he obtained drugs through Snapchat, said in a statement that parents have testified before Congress, held rallies and brought the deaths to Snap’s doorsteps for years.

“We are painting our children’s names in the street and bringing this memorial to his doorstep because Evan Spiegel won’t acknowledge what his platform has taken from us,” she said in a statement.

Spiegel is the chief executive and co-founder of Snap.

On Friday, parents also gathered at the Gloria Molina Grand Park in Los Angeles to honor children who they say died because of social media harms. They unveiled the “Lost Screen Memorial,” displaying large smartphones with the images of 50 dead children.

“Their faces serve as a constant reminder of what has been lost. The responsibility to keep children safe online should not lie with parents alone,” the website for the memorial said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week that state oil and gas regulators have permanently closed one of the most infamous drill sites in Los Angeles, bringing an end to a decades-long community campaign to prevent dangerous gas leaks and spills from rundown extraction equipment.

A state contractor plugged all 21 oil wells at the AllenCo Energy drill site in University Park, preventing the release of noxious gases and chemical vapors into the densely populated South Los Angeles neighborhood. The two-acre site, owned by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, is located across the street from several multifamily apartment buildings and less than 1,000 feet from St. Vincent School.

For years, residents and students had repeatedly complained about acrid odors from the site, with many suffering chronic headaches and nosebleeds. The health concerns prompted a community-driven campaign to shut down the site, with some residents even pleading (unsuccessfully) with the late Pope Francis to intervene.

AllenCo, the site’s operator since 2009, repeatedly flouted environmental regulations and defied state orders to permanently seal its wells.

This month, the California Department of Conservation’s Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) finished capping the remaining unplugged wells with help from Biden-era federal funding.

“This is a monumental achievement for the community who have endured an array of health issues and corporate stalling tactics for far too long,” Newsom said in a statement Wednesday. “I applaud the tireless work of community activists who partnered with local and state agencies to finish the job and improve the health and safety of this community. This is a win for all Californians.”

The land was donated to the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1950s by descendants of one of the city’s early oil barons. Over the decades, the archdiocese leased the land to several oil companies including Standard Oil of California.

Much of the community outcry over the site’s management occurred after AllenCo took over the site in 2009. The company drastically boosted oil production, but failed to properly maintain its equipment, resulting in oil spills and gas leaks.

In 2013, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials became sick while inspecting the site. The federal investigators encountered puddles of crude oil on the facility grounds, as well as caustic fumes emanating from the facility, resulting in violations for air quality and other environmental infractions.

In 2020, CalGEM ordered AllenCo to plug the wells after if determined the company had essentially deserted the site, leaving the wells unplugged and in an unsafe condition. AllenCo ignored the order.

In perhaps the most remarkable events in the site’s history, CalGEM officials in 2022 arrived on the site with a court order and used bolt cutters to enter the site to depressurize the poorly maintained oil wells.

The AllenCo wells were prioritized and plugged this week as part of a CalGEM program to identify and permanently cap high-risk oil and gas wells. Tens of thousands of unproductive and unplugged oil wells have been abandoned across California — many of which continue to leak potentially explosive methane or toxic benzene.

Environmental advocates have long fought for regulators to require oil and gas companies to plug these wells to protect nearby communities and the environment.

However, as oil production declines and fossil fuel companies increasingly become insolvent, California regulators worry taxpayers may have to assume the costs to plug these wells. Federal and state officials have put aside funding to deal with some of these so-called “orphaned” wells, but environmental advocates say it’s not enough. They say oil and gas companies still need to be held to account, so that the same communities that were subjected to decades of pollution won’t have to foot the bill for expensive cleanups.

“This is welcome news that the surrounding community deserves, but there is much more work to be done at a much faster pace,” said Cooper Kass, attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “There are still thousands of unplugged and hazardous idle wells threatening communities across the state, and our legislators and regulators should force polluters, not taxpayers, to pay to clean up these dangerous sites.”

Major League Baseball is making streaming options available for fans to watch in-market games of 20 teams, including the Dodgers, Los Angeles Angels, San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres — a significant shift to respond to the fast-changing TV landscape.

The Angels on Tuesday announced its arrangement with the league to make its games more widely available. The club said the option — Angels.TV — would be available for purchase for $99.99 for the full season or $19.99 per month through the MLB app.

“We are excited to partner with Major League Baseball to bring Angels games to their streaming platform,” Angels President John Carpino said in a statement. “Our priority is making it as easy as possible for fans to watch Angels Baseball and MLB’s industry-leading app provides another great option to stay connected to the team.”

The league separately announced the move, which provides options for fans of other teams, through its MLB app. In-market games for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Guardians, Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, Tampa Bay Rays and Washington Nationals will be provided through the app.

Games will still be available to traditional pay-TV subscribers.

Spectrum, owned by cable giant Charter Communications, which distributes the Dodgers’ SportsNet LA, had previously made available Dodger games as a streaming option through a separate app.

On Tuesday, ESPN announced that it would become the new streaming home of MLB.TV, bringing out-of-market live games to the ESPN App and ESPN.com.

“With MLB.TV now available through ESPN, we’re taking a significant step forward in reinforcing ESPN as the home of the MLB regular season while deepening the value proposition of the ESPN Unlimited plan — giving fans even more flexibility in how and where they watch all season long,” Rosalyn Durant, executive vice president, ESPN Programming & Acquisitions, said in a statement.

The move comes as traditional regional sports networks struggle amid the exodus of pay-TV customers. Regional sports networks once were viewed as cash cows for teams and TV programming companies that owned them, but, in recent years, at least one regional sports network owner has filed for bankruptcy. That prompted the MLB to step in to fill the gap.

The league said it also was taking over the television production of games for 14 teams, including the Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.

When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it.

He took his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.

“My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said. “My mom was like, excited.”

While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He has been chasing it ever since.

He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.

Through middle school, high school, and college in California, he continued to build online businesses, launching an AI business in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th.

His hard hustle in his young years is paying off more than he could have imagined. The success has given him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has been featured in the news and gets recognized by people in the business.

But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibility he has to shoulder.

“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said. “That kind of summarizes it.”

Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts — coders, lawyers, doctors, professors and financial analysts — to gather expert information that is fed to AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI’s output, making it more accurate.

Micro1 is one of the key suppliers of that kind of expert human assistance for AI, alongside California competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.

Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that’s a meteoric rise.

Forbes estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing funding conversations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.

Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut and a meticulously maintained beard. He’s fast with his fingers, usually responding immediately to text despite all he is juggling. He has the confidence of someone older, though his frequent use of the word “like” in conversation marks him as Gen Z.

His startup is based in Palo Alto and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills — minutes away from his family, high school and the memories of his many teenage side hustles.

“This area is my entire childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.

Ansari’s family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before the move, they had a comfortable life in a small beach town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants moved to the U.S to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the moniker Tehrangeles.

The family of four shared a single room at a relative’s house for the first year. His mother took a job at Target for a short time. The transition was rough for Ansari, who wasn’t fluent in English and often got in trouble for fooling around in school.

“Teachers would call my mom, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, your son’s making like, cow noises again’ or something,” he said.

At 14, he started reselling textbooks because they were easier to carry in his backpack. He figured out that procuring a steady supply of books through garage sales was hard, so he developed Cash Books Now, a website for college students to sell their textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.

Buying and selling textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections: “not listed” and “listed” to track inventory. By 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 in books.

“I would focus on this way more than school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”

In high school, he started a tutoring business that he later sold. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at UC Berkeley and started a software agency to build websites for small businesses.

Recruiting engineers to build the websites was taking up too much of his time, so he built an AI screening tool to help him with interviews. This later became Micro1, and his screening tool was used to track down, weed out and test all kinds of experts for training AI.

Still, the road to success was not without its rough patches. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari had a panic attack during a trip to visit his team in India.

“I kept kind of repeating this idea in my head, which was, like, some people have decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have this duty to really do something good with it.”

He got through it with the help of his family and reading, and has matured enough now to manage anxiety and lead with confidence.

“I am more composed than ever, and I frankly feel less anxious than ever,” he said.

Micro1’s annualized revenues surged more than 30-fold last year to $150 million. In early 2026, it crossed $200 million.

It has built a global workforce of contractors with various skills: from coders and comedians, to doctors and lawyers, to teach their skills to AI.

Ansari says leading such a fast-growing company at the heart of the hottest tech sector feels like being in a constant battle trying to meet demand, raise money and “punch back” against competitors trying to poach his employees.

He says he doesn’t have any hobbies besides work. He doesn’t watch television or movies but he devours business podcasts and personal stories of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk.

Ansari is still adapting to the newfound fame and responsibilities. As the company’s valuation has climbed, Ansari bought his family a house in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help with family and professional matters.

“I’m constantly choosing what I spend my time on, and it’s become the most difficult thing,” he said.

For future growth, Ansari is betting that demand for human training data will grow. He recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting roughly 1,000 people across 60 countries to record footage of themselves performing household tasks. The footage will be used to train robotic systems.

Ansari predicts that in the long run, human data will become a $1-trillion market — a projection he derives from the assumption that roughly 5% of all human labor will eventually be redirected toward training AI systems.

On a recent visit home, his father told him he should diversify into robots. When Ansari told him Micro1 had already started doing that, his father complained.

The man whose loafer launched an empire wanted a piece of the action this time.

“You stole my idea,” his father joked. “You got to give me equity.”

The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift more than just his family.

“I might [become] the youngest Persian billionaire in the world,” he said. “I think I’ll inspire a lot of other Iranians, which kind of feels weird to say.”

Two dozen people who sued the owners and tenants of a Carson-based warehouse responsible for a putrid smell emanating from the Dominguez Channel waterway, which led to hospital visits and headaches, won a multimillion-dollar verdict Friday.

Those plaintiffs were awarded $6 million in punitive damages along with $2.89 million in compensatory damages in a mass tort lawsuit that dates back to 2021.

“Carson is a working-class community of janitors, barbers, bus drivers and longshoremen,” said attorney Gary Praglin of the Santa Monica-based law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. “The defendants forced us to trial because they didn’t want to pay these people and this is recognition of their suffering.”

The punitive damages will be split equally among 24 Carson-area residents, amounting to $250,000 for each. The compensatory damages for medical claims ranged between $40,000 and $240,000 per client.

What remains to be seen is what happens to 13,750 additional plaintiffs who are also seeking compensation.

The court will determine the next steps, whether that’s additional trial proceedings or settlements. But should the remaining plaintiffs ultimately receive similar compensation, “we’re talking about the largest recovery for breathing toxic fumes in the history of California,” Praglin said.

On the hook for damages are San Francisco-based logistics company Prologis and its subsidiary Liberty Property LP, which owned the warehouse next to the Dominguez Channel in Carson. Prologis did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday.

Also included among the defendants are the Nourollah brothers of Los Angeles, who owned two businesses — Virgin Scent and Day to Day Imports — that operated out of that warehouse.

A call to an attorney for the Nourollahs was not immediately returned Friday.

The lawsuit is one of a few court cases against the same group of defendants, including one filed by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

The roots of the legal action date back to Sept. 30, 2021, when a large fire engulfed the warehouse and distribution center of the cosmetics corporation Virgin Scent. The blaze lasted multiple days and required the services of 200 firefighters to extinguish.

The warehouse and surrounding storage areas were filled with stacks of pallets and cardboard boxes containing highly flammable ethanol-based hand sanitizer, according to court documents.

The fire took place days before the Food and Drug Administration released a warning that some Virgin Scent hand sanitizers contained unacceptable levels of benzene, acetal and acetaldehyde, each of which are hazardous and potentially carcinogenic.

Though the fire was eventually put out, large amounts of soggy, charred debris and hand sanitizer remained all around the warehouse, according to court documents.

That debris eventually found its way into storm drains that flow into the Dominguez Channel, which manages water runoff from surrounding communities.

These toxic elements sat in the channel’s then-stagnant water, which led to a die-off of all vegetation and the emission of foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide.

Residents began to complain of an “unbearable” stench that they said caused headaches, nausea, and eye, ear and nose irritation. The Carson City Council eventually declared a public health nuisance in October 2021.

Within a month, at least 3,000 residents left Carson for out-of-area hotels provided by Los Angeles County. Thousands of others opted for air purifiers.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District responded to more than 4,700 odor complaints within the first month from residents in Carson, Gardena, Long Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance and Wilmington.

The agency eventually issued five notices of violation to Virgin Scent for a variety of infractions, including for discharging “such quantities of air contaminants to cause injury, detriment, nuisance or annoyance to a considerable number of persons.”

A contract security guard was hospitalized Monday afternoon after he drove onto an airport taxiway and sped past planes, authorities said.

On Dec. 8 around 1:12 p.m., the guard assigned to a security checkpoint “drove a vehicle into an airport taxiway at a high rate of speed,” according to a statement from John Wayne Airport spokesperson AnnaSophia Servin.

Video shared with ABC7 showed a white sedan speeding down the taxiway near planes. The news outlet reported that an air traffic controller advised a Southwest plane to “hold position.”

“There’s a high-speed chase on the taxiway,” the controller said.

Orange County sheriff’s deputies detained the driver shortly thereafter and requested a medical assessment from the Orange County Fire Authority, the statement said.

“The individual was evaluated on scene and determined to be experiencing a possible medical emergency,” Servin said.

He was subsequently hospitalized and suspended from his job, according to the statement. Airport operations continued on schedule.

High school principals across California and nationwide say raids by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement have provoked a “climate of distress” among immigrant students who have been bullied on campus and whose attendance has dropped, according to a study released Tuesday.

Seventy percent of public high school principals surveyed said students from immigrant families expressed fears for themselves or their families because of ICE crackdowns or political rhetoric related to immigrants, according to the report by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside.

The findings echo the narrative of what schools and districts have reported across Southern California since President Trump took office in January and began aggressive immigration raids.

One California principal told researchers she has seen staff members “breaking down in tears about a student.”

“It just doesn’t feel very American,” she added.

John Rogers, a UCLA education professor who co-authored the report, said it was “striking” that principals “across every region in the country spoke of fear and concern in their school communities related to immigration enforcement.”

The researchers surveyed 606 public high school principals from May to August to understand how schools have been affected by Trump’s immigration enforcement. More than 1 in 3 principals, about 36%, said students from immigrant families have been bullied, and 64% said their attendance has dropped.

A drop in attendance has been verified by other researchers who collected data from California’s Central Valley and the Northeastern states. There’s also been a decline in K-12 enrollment that appears to number in at least the tens of thousands, affecting cities including Los Angeles, San Diego and Miami, based on figures provided by school district officials.

Principals, including in Minnesota, Nebraska and Michigan, noticed an uptick in students using hostile and derogatory language toward classmates from immigrant families. Some said a political climate that has normalized attacks on immigrants was to blame.

The vast majority of principals surveyed, nearly 78%, said their campuses created plans to respond to visits from federal agents and nearly half have a contingency plan for when a student’s parents are deported.

In this effort, schools in Los Angeles County have been leaders, taking quick and unprecedented steps to protect and reassure families. L.A. Unified, for example, has provided direct home-to-school transportation for some students.

Their fears are not without cause. In April, Los Angeles principals turned away immigration agents who tried to enter two elementary schools, claiming to be conducting a wellness check with family permission. School district officials said no such permission had been granted.

At a public meeting in November, L.A. school board member Karla Griego reported that a parent was taken into custody on his way to a school meeting about an updated education plan to manage his child’s disabilities.

Charter schools have taken measures to reassure families as well. In the days following a major ICE raid in L.A., attendance rates at Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School in East L.A. slipped from the typical high-90% range to the low 90s, principal Rosa Menendez said.

“A lot of our families have been really impacted and terrified,” Menendez said. “A lot of our kids are afraid to come to school.”

As ICE raids escalated last summer, the charter school ramped up supervision, posting staff members around bus and train stations to watch students arrive and leave. The school will stay open during winter break, offering sports, video games and arts and crafts so students have a safe place to go.

Immigration enforcement is personal for Menendez, who is a child of Salvadorian immigrants and has undocumented family members.

“Coming off the heels of COVID, we were trying to keep our kids safe and healthy, and now it’s a whole other layer of safety,” Menendez said. “But we’re also worrying about our own families … It does add a very intense layer of stress.”

Earlier this year the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement saying ICE does not “raid or target schools.” However, the Trump administration in January rescinded long-standing protections for “sensitive” locations that since 2011 had prevented ICE from arresting people in schools and churches.

A double duty to protect and teach

In addition to the survey, the researchers conducted 49 follow-up Zoom interviews with principals chosen to reflect a diverse mix of schools. Names were withheld over concern that their schools could become targets for immigration enforcement.

One California principal, whose school is located in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood, told researchers her school’s sense of safety evaporated in the spring when news of nearby ICE raids broke during an assembly.

This account was an echo of the unease that spread through a spring graduation ceremony at Huntington Park High School when an ICE raid began at the adjacent Home Depot.

The principals noted that parents have felt torn between keeping themselves and family members safe and supporting their children’s education. In L.A. high schools, many parents elected not to attend graduation last spring.

Immigration enforcement isn’t just affecting students. Many school staff members feel a “double sense of duty” to protect as well as teach, the California principal said.

This administrator also said teachers have joined local immigrant rights networks, walking the blocks in the neighborhood before school each day to ensure there is a safe pathway to campus. One teacher, whose father is undocumented, frequently worries about suspicious cars in the school’s parking lot, the principal said.

“[W]e always want to make sure we’re not caught off guard,” she said. On top of longstanding fears of a potential active shooter situation, she now worries daily that ICE agents will show up. “It’s a lot,” she added.

Maria Nichols, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles and a former LAUSD principal, praised the district for taking quick action to provide school leaders with protocols to follow in case of a raid. But she said the job of a principal has become even more taxing because LAUSD staffing cuts reduced the number of assistant principals.

“The leader, of course, is responsible for the logistics, protocols and procedural matters, but … also has to uplift their school and their community,” Nichols said. “They’re dealing with a crisis right now and it is a very, very difficult and heavy toll at a time where we have less human capital at schools.”

School leaders across the country echoed the sentiments of the California principal.

One Idaho principal told the researchers she worries each day that ICE agents would show up with a judicial warrant to detain students. “As the building leader,” she said, “I feel like I’m responsible for their safety. I hate that, because I don’t feel I’m able to protect them.”

The night before she first walked into Clinton High School in 1956, Jo Ann Allen beamed over her outfit with the excitement of any teenager starting ninth grade.

Her grandmother had sewn the dress — white with a careful trim, pleats and a wide-pressed collar. With her best friend Gail Ann Epps Upton, she buzzed about clothes, classes and making new friends.

Always buoyant, Allen would not have guessed that her daily walk down Foley Hill would soon be met with crowds of jeering segregationists and a bulwark of National Guardsmen. At 14, she was one of the so-called Clinton 12, the first Black students to desegregate a Southern public school following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“These kids did an adult job, basically facing a firing squad every day,” her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, said in an interview. “Jo Ann was so positive and strong through it all. It’s a testament to her and her upbringing.”

Surrounded by family at her Wilshire Vista home, Jo Ann died Wednesday from pancreatic cancer. She was 84.

“She embodied positivity and strength,” said Kamlyn Young, Allen’s daughter. “She was a lover of people. She loved life and always sought to see the good in people through all the adversity.”

Allen, who later married and changed her last name to Boyce, carried that spirit into every chapter of her life — as a pediatric nurse, a member of the family music group The Debs and co-author of, “This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality,” which she shared with student audiences across the country.

“We’ve lost such a caring and humble soul. Jo Ann was someone who was so generous with her own story and shared it with people across the country … She inspired everyone she met,” the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum that preserves the legacy of the Clinton 12, said in a statement.

Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce was born in the small eastern Tennessee town of Clinton on Sept. 15, 1941. She was the eldest of three children born to Alice Josephine Hopper Allen and Herbert Allen.

She grew up in a modest house with a large kitchen and two bedrooms. Boyce shared a bedroom with her sister, Mamie, that was decorated by their mother with red-robin wallpaper and a small dressing table.

An avid learner from an early age, Boyce was already reading by age 5 when she entered first grade at Green McAdoo School. She credited her parents and her first teacher, Teresa Blair, with nurturing her academic curiosity despite the school’s limited resources.

The Allen family’s life revolved around church. Jo Ann would sing duets with Mamie at services, and looked forward to Friday night fish fries.

After graduating from Green McAdoo, she rode the school bus with her classmates to a school in Knoxville — 20 miles from home.

“There were times during those days that we did not make it to school due to inclement weather or some other untoward event,” she wrote in a biographical post on the McAdoo Center website.

In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor issued the order to integrate Clinton High School following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Jo Ann and 11 others would become the first Black students to attend.

“When we started school, there were only a few people around. And I thought maybe, ‘Well, they’re just here to be curious,’ ” Boyce recalled in a 1956 television interview.

But the next day, segregationists — whipped into a frenzy by Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper — crowded the entrance of Clinton High.

At Clinton High, most people were kind and curious, Boyce said. But others tormented the 12 children inside — shoving them in hallways, stepping on their heels, leaving threatening notes and even putting tacks on Boyce’s chair.

“I began to think, ‘Maybe they aren’t going to accept us like I thought they were,’ ” Boyce recalled in the interview. “They looked so mean. They looked like they just wanted to grab us and throw us out. They didn’t want us at all. I could just see the hate in their hearts.”

Violence escalated in Clinton when Kasper was arrested for violating a restraining order meant to keep him away from the school. His followers, incensed, mobbed the small town. They toppled cars with Black drivers, assaulted a pastor who preached against prejudice and beat Upton’s boyfriend as he returned to town from a military deployment. Herbert Allen was arrested and later released for defending the family home from cross-burning Klansmen one night.

The chaos prompted then-Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement to order the National Guard to Clinton to restore peace.

But enough was enough. Alice Allen decided it was time for the family to leave Tennessee.

“And what my mother said, we did,” Boyce said in an interview with CBS Los Angeles in 2023.

On a winter morning in 1957, local journalists interviewed the family before they piled into a car bound for Los Angeles.

“We’re not leaving here with hatred in our hearts against anyone,” Herbert Allen said. “Even those who are against us … we realize that those people are just misled. They were trained and brought up that way.”

The camera now on Boyce, she spoke softly. She talked about the A’s and a B she’d earned that semester, declaring she had “accomplished something.”

The previous five months had been the most painful of her life, she later said.

“She felt cheated,” Young told The Times. “She wanted to stay and graduate to show everyone that she could do it in spite of everything. She was always of the mind that love will conquer all. That’s what guided her through the rest of her life.”

Clinton High was largely reduced to rubble in a bombing in 1958. Nobody was arrested.

Only two of the Clinton 12 would graduate from the school.

The Allen family joined relatives already living in California. Boyce entered Dorsey High School in Baldwin Hills and graduated in 1958. She later attended Los Angeles City College before enrolling in nursing school.

She became a pediatric nurse, and worked in the field for decades.

“She always played the underdog, and she loved kids,” Young said.

Music tugged at her, too. In Los Angeles, she formed a vocal trio with her sister Mamie and cousin Sandra called The Debs, briefly singing backup for Sam Cooke. Later, she performed jazz sets across the city from cabaret stages to the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.

In 1959, she met Victor Boyce at a dance, and he “stole her away” from the partner she’d been dancing with, the family recalled. The couple were later married, and remained so for 64 years, raising three children and generations of extended family, including the actor Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019.

His many fans would call her “Nana,” the title given to Boyce by her grandchildren.

Even as she endured breast cancer, a major stroke and later pancreatic cancer, her signature optimism never left her.

“She would come in and just light up the room,” Libby Boyce said. “She had a sparkle like nobody’s business.”

“Whether owing to that striking optimism or some other loftier force at work,” said family member Gregory Small, she had survived with pancreatic cancer for 12 years, a feat that left her doctors dumbfounded.

The story of the Clinton 12 is not as widely known as the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges, other students who integrated schools after Boyce. She recognized that and set out to change it — spending her later years speaking to students across the U.S.

She co-authored the book, “This Promise of Change,” in 2019 with Debbie Levy and worked with the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, which is located in her childhood elementary school building, to continue the fight for awareness and equality that began when she was 14.

“She used to say that racism is a disease of the heart,” Kamlyn Boyce said. “She moved toward them, not away. Even the people with hate in their heart, she loved. It’s the only way I can put it.”

Boyce is survived by her three children — Kamlyn Young, London Boyce and Victor Boyce — her sister Mamie, three grandchildren and countless people who affectionately call her Nana.

The fight over an effort to boost wages for Los Angeles tourism workers to coincide with the 2028 Olympics has taken a fresh twist, with the City Council president introducing a new motion that critics say would significantly water down the measure.

The issue ostensibly had been put to rest in September, when a business group-backed effort to repeal a $30 per hour minimum wage for Los Angeles hotel and airport workers failed to secure enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

But now, L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson has introduced a motion that, if approved, would phase the increase in over a longer period of time — delaying the full $30 hourly minimum wage until 2030.

Rhonda Mitchell, a spokesperson for Harris-Dawson, said the council president “continues to work with partners around negotiations,” but did not provide other details when asked for comment by The Times on Friday.

Hospitality and service employee unions sharply criticized the proposal.

“It is a shameful day in Los Angeles when our own elected leaders decide to put forth a motion to strip hard-earned wages from some of the city’s lowest-paid workers,” Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said in a statement Friday. “These workers fought for more than two years to improve their working conditions, only to have the very people who should defend them try to take it all away.”

But Rosanna Maietta — president and chief executive of the American Hotel and Lodging Assn., which had supported repealing the wage increase — said relief from higher labor costs is much-needed in an industry that has struggled to bounce back from pandemic shutdowns. The business group urges the council to “swiftly adopt” the new proposal, she said.

“Hotels are essential to the vitality of Los Angeles, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and generating critical tax revenue that funds essential services like schools, sanitation, and public safety,” Maietta said in a statement Friday. “This motion is a long-overdue step in the right direction and provides hotel owners and operators with short-term relief in the face of decreased travel demand and rising operational costs.”

The City Council originally voted in May to approve a series of yearly wage increases for hotel employees and workers at Los Angeles International Airport, following a two-year campaign by labor organizers.

The law was put on hold during the subsequent opposition ballot campaign, but recently went into effect, with workers seeing the first increments in a series of wage increases designed to boost their minimum pay to $30 per hour by 2028.

The new proposal put forth by Harris-Dawson would instead offer smaller annual wage increases, eventually boosting the workers’ wages to $30 two years later, in 2030.

Harris-Dawson backed the original proposal and helped ease it through a council vote. His spokesperson did not elaborate on why he now supports altering the timeline.

However, the motion comes after a coalition of airline and hotel businesses filed paperwork for a ballot measure to repeal the city’s business tax — a move that would strip about $740 million annually from the city’s general fund, which pays for police officers, firefighters and other services.

The business-backed referendum has been approved to circulate for signatures, and is backed by several airlines as well as the American Hotel and Lodging Assn.

David Huerta, president of SEIU-United Service Workers West, which represents airport workers, said the timing of the motion, in the middle of the holiday season, was “particularly callous.”

“We stand ready to defend the Olympic Wage,” he said in a statement.

The proposal now heads to two committees — one dealing with economic development, the other focused on tourism — for consideration.

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

The federal prosecutor faced the jury, brandishing the item he said had been “used as a sword” to assault a federal officer during a July protest in downtown Los Angeles.

The object that Assistant U.S. Atty. Patrick Kibbe said was wielded as a weapon: An umbrella that an investigator needed a special scale to weigh because it was less than one pound.

For months, Trump administration officials have cited violence against federal law enforcement officers carrying out the president’s deportation campaign as justification for aggressive tactics, including threats to deploy the National Guard and U.S. Marines. The Department of Homeland Security has touted a staggering figure, claiming a 1,000% increase in assaults against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

But a Times analysis of court records related to assaults on federal law enforcement in Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Ore., Chicago and Washington, D.C., shows the majority of the alleged attacks resulted in no injury to an agent. In roughly 42% of the cases The Times reviewed, federal law enforcement officers were either shoved, spat on or flailed at, or had water bottles thrown at them, according to court affidavits.

During the umbrella assault trial in October, prosecutors provided no evidence of any injuries. In L.A. and across the country, defendants accused of assaulting federal officers have won acquittals or had charges dropped. More than a third of the cases The Times analyzed ended in dismissals or acquittals, in some instances because the defendants were deported. No cases have ended in a conviction at trial.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, responded to questions from The Times about the assault numbers with a statement that said “our officers are facing terrorist attacks, being shot at, having cars being used as weapons against them, bomb threats, assaults, doxxing.”

McLaughlin highlighted a case in which she said an ICE officer needed 13 stitches and suffered burns after he was beaten with a metal coffee cup by an undocumented immigrant in Houston last month. In another that she flagged, an alleged gang member in Nebraska brutally beat an ICE agent in June, leaving them hospitalized with serious head injuries.

President Trump invoked the 1,000% increase figure in a memo directing federal law enforcement groups to investigate “domestic terrorism,” and federal officials have cited the number repeatedly to justify aggressive tactics against protesters and the need for agents to wear masks to avoid being identified.

Homeland Security officials ignored multiple requests to release a complete list of alleged assaults. In late November, the agency announced a 1,153% increase in assaults on ICE agents from Jan. 21 to Nov. 21, with 238 reported assaults this year compared to 19 in the same time frame in 2024.

The five jurisdictions The Times analyzed were the federal districts where the Trump administration has conducted large-scale law enforcement and immigration operations or threatened to deploy the military because of the supposed danger faced by federal agents. In those areas, 163 cases of assault of a federal officer had been filed between Jan. 21 and Nov. 21. That’s up from 129 in the same areas and time frame in 2024, an increase of 26%. An NPR analysis came up with a similar figure earlier this year.

The 2024 data is also inflated by the filing of assault charges by prosecutors in Washington against rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has pardoned all of those defendants.

The Times analysis captured assaults against all types of federal officers. ICE or Border Patrol agents were described as victims in about 60% of those cases.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the government is relying on the shocking percentages, without proper context, to advance a narrative.

“They are justifying why they need to use extreme force against the people they’re arresting and the public as they interact with individuals on the street,” he said. “I think that’s the primary purpose, to say: ‘We’re under attack. We’re being assaulted daily and therefore we need to be able to use extreme force including military support.’”

In just over half of the cases scrutinized by The Times, court records show the officer who was allegedly assaulted suffered no physical injury. In roughly 30% of the cases, officers sustained minor injuries such as bruising following a punch, kick or bite.

Twenty-six incidents resulted in a serious injury or required an agent to seek medical attention. A Portland ICE agent was smashed in the head with a rock, federal agents suffered dislocated or fractured fingers in Los Angeles and some agents said they were attacked with their own batons or stun guns while trying to detain people.

The Times’ analysis does not capture serious incidents in other jurisdictions, or attacks where no charges were filed. Assailants have opened fire twice this year on ICE facilities in Texas, though the people struck by bullets were immigrant detainees and a local police officer.

The only documented incident in which a federal law enforcement officer was shot during an immigration enforcement action this year happened in Los Angeles in October — when a bullet from an ICE agent’s gun ricocheted into a deputy marshal’s hand during a vehicle stop.

One National Guard member was killed and another was seriously wounded in a shooting in Washington last week. Both were part of Trump’s anti-crime deployment. Officials have said the gunman is from Afghanistan and was admitted to the U.S. in 2021 as part of a Biden administration program to help people fleeing the Taliban, and his asylum application was approved under Trump.

An undocumented immigrant from Mexico was also arrested after allegedly shooting at Border Patrol agents in Chicago on Nov. 8, according to the Department of Homeland Security. A local Fox News affiliate identified the suspect as Hector Gomez, but a criminal complaint makes no mention of shooting at agents. DHS did not respond to inquiries from the Fox affiliate.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) is among those questioning the administration’s claims. During a Nov. 19 subcommittee hearing titled “ICE Under Fire: The Radical Left’s Crusade Against Immigration Enforcement,” Padilla asked why there were no government witnesses “providing facts and data behind the numbers that the Department of Homeland Security so often cites to claim an increase in assaults on its officers and agents.”

“Today’s hearing is not a serious attempt to protect law enforcement,” Padilla said. “It’s designed to fuel the propaganda machine and encourage even more brutal immigration enforcement operations.”

The purported weapons used in some of the cases have only fueled skepticism: A District of Columbia man was charged for throwing a Subway sandwich. In Portland, a woman was charged with assault via tambourine. In L.A., federal agents have claimed assaults involving a hat, a work bag, a flag — and the umbrella.

On June 7 — in the early days of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in California — Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino stood in Paramount, sounding like he was preparing his officers for battle.

Bovino, addressing agents decked out in tactical gear as protesters gathered nearby, told the agents to “arrest as many people that touch you as you want to, those are the general orders all the way to the top.”

“Everybody f— gets it if they touch you,” Bovino said. “This is our f— city.”

The National Guard was deployed the next day, with Trump publicly claiming Los Angeles was under siege.

The clip of Bovino was played during the trial of Brayan Ramos-Brito, who was accused of pushing a Border Patrol agent that day in Paramount. Video evidence shows an agent shove Ramos-Brito, but does not clearly capture him shoving the agent back.

Bovino testified that merely touching an agent “could be assault depending on the situation. Spitting on someone could be assault.”

After about an hour of deliberations — and despite Bovino testifying that he witnessed Ramos-Brito push an agent — the jury came back with a not guilty verdict.

In Los Angeles, court records show federal prosecutors have charged 71 people with assault on a federal officer this year, with 21 of those cases ending in dismissals or acquittals. Only nine such cases were filed in 2024.

During an October news conference, Bill Essayli, who is functioning as L.A.’s top federal prosecutor, said he would not “read too much” into the dismissal figures.

“When we charge a complaint we’re on the clock, so if the agents need more time to collect evidence sometimes we will dismiss a case without prejudice which allows us to bring it back at our choosing,” he said.

A former ICE official, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, said that in prior years the U.S. attorney’s office “didn’t prosecute hardly anybody” for assault — unless the interaction turned violent.

“We’d get guys who would spit on us and all kinds of other stuff and it was like, ‘Hey, it’s part of the job,’” the official said.

Law enforcement experts noted that an increase in assaults is to be expected, since interactions by immigration agents with the public have increased dramatically in Trump’s second term.

John Sandweg, who headed ICE under President Obama, said he believes new tactics are helping drive the increase. Under previous administrations, ICE focused on targeted operations.

“When you shift those tactics and have agents out there in broad daylight, in Home Depot parking lots, when you have these cities on edge … it’s just going to increase the number of incidents where some sort of an assault happens,” he said.

In a number of cases examined by The Times, defendants were arrested and charged with assault after Border Patrol or ICE agents initiated physical contact.

Andrea Velez, a 4-foot 11-inch U.S. citizen, was accused of standing in the path of an ICE officer in downtown L.A. with her arms extended, striking his head and chest when they collided in June. Her defense attorney previously said masked men ran at Velez and one shoved her to the ground. Velez, fearing she was being abducted, held up her work bag to shield herself.

Velez’s lawyer requested body-worn camera video and witness statements cited in the complaint. Soon after, prosecutors dropped the case.

In Chicago, four assault cases were filed against protesters who ignored a dispersal order outside an immigration detention facility and flailed in response to being shoved or struck by Border Patrol agents. One of the defendants was a 70-year-old military veteran. All charges have been dropped, records show.

In another L.A. case, a man was accused of assault for smacking an agent with a hat. Video footage from the scene in August showed the man, Jonathon Redondo-Rosales, swung after he was struck by a government vehicle, as officers were moving to tackle him to the ground.

In October, Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent who alleged she was following him in a car and interfering with a Chicago operation. Martinez allegedly collided with a CBP vehicle, causing minor damage, according to photos included in a criminal complaint.

But in a sudden turnabout a month later, prosecutors moved to dismiss the indictment against Martinez. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Illinois said in a statement that prosecutors are “constantly evaluating new facts and information relating to cases and investigations.”

Martinez’s attorney, Damon Cheronis, thanked prosecutors for doing the right thing after reviewing what he called Border Patrol’s hyperbolic claims against Martinez.

“The criminal complaint made a lot of allegations that our client rammed them. There were all these reports that our client had an assault weapon or was a domestic terrorist,” he said. “None of that was true.”

Homeland Security officials have also claimed a 1,300% increase in vehicle attacks against ICE agents; the 28 alleged attacks this year since Jan. 20 marked a jump from two in 2024.

Of the 26 alleged vehicle attacks captured by The Times analysis, five resulted in serious injuries. A member of a Homeland Security task force was hospitalized with a “possible sternum fracture” after being hit by a car in November in National City, just outside of San Diego, according to DHS.

A handful of other L.A. cases resulted in officers seeking medical evaluation. One ICE agent needed medical attention after they were hit with a skateboard while trying to make an arrest in downtown L.A. in September, records show.

The month before, Oscar Magana Reyes, who was allegedly trying to flee an immigration arrest in San Bernardino, stole an ICE agent’s Taser and briefly incapacitated them with a shock to the groin. Reyes was indicted in October and is awaiting trial.

Although more incidents are being reported, available data still shows local law enforcement officers are far more likely to be attacked in the line of duty than immigration agents. L.A. County sheriff’s deputies faced roughly 600 assaults from January to October of this year, more than double the number of alleged on-duty assaults ICE agents suffered nationwide from Jan. 21 to Nov. 21, according to sheriff’s department records.

Charis Kubrin, a professor of law, criminology and sociology at UC Irvine, said the administration’s trumpeting of a more than 1,000% increase is misleading when the jump is coming from a baseline of almost zero assaults against agents.

“This is what we call in sociology a moral panic,” she said. “A moral panic is created when statistics and other things are used to kind of create or socially construct a problem that is bigger than it is.”

The trial of Alexandria Augustine, the 25-year-old woman accused of assaulting a federal officer with her umbrella, played out over the course of several days in October.

Augustine told The Times she was offered different plea deals in the course of a few months, but decided to take her chances before a jury.

“The entire purpose of a lot of this is to keep people off the streets and hold them up in the courts,” she said. “They don’t expect us to fight back because they have way more resources and power than we do.”

During the trial, Kibbe, the prosecutor, held up the metal skeleton of the umbrella and told jurors that Augustine had hit a Federal Protective Service inspector with it in the arm and chest.

Deputy federal public defender Aden Kahssai said Augustine opened the umbrella to protect fellow protesters. It was the federal officer, she said, who grabbed the umbrella, yanking the fabric off.

“What happened here was not an assault,” Kahssai told jurors.

When Inspector Alexandro Gutierrez took the stand, he testified that he had grabbed the umbrella because it obstructed his view. He testified that Augustine then told him “if you f—ing want it, here,” and then threw it at him in an overhand motion.

“These things could potentially cause serious harm,” he told jurors. He testified that he wasn’t wearing a face shield and the metal ribs of the umbrella could have poked him in the eye.

Among those who turned out for Augustine’s trial was Margaret Ortiz, an Army combat veteran who had been charged with assault after the fabric of a black flag she was holding hit a federal officer in the chin, nose and eyes. The case against her was later dismissed.

“I kind of wanted it to go to trial,” Ortiz said outside the courtroom. “It was going to be stupid, just like this.”

During closing arguments, Supervising Deputy Federal Public Defender Rebecca Abel said Augustine had thrown the umbrella up and it dropped down and connected with Gutierrez. The umbrella, she said, “couldn’t hurt a fly, let alone a 260-pound man” in a Kevlar vest.

“It barely touched him. He was not injured,” Abel said. “This case began with a protest … it should never have ended here, in a federal courtroom.”

Within hours, the jury came back with its verdict: Not guilty.

Times researcher Cary Schneider and Data and Graphics reporter Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed to this report.

Lizzie Osorio remembers customers flooding Lion Boots in early May, browsing embroidered shoes and tasseled suede dresses.

Beyoncé had four concerts scheduled in Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium for her Cowboy Carter tour. So the store tucked in Santee Alley, where 24-year-old Osorio works selling cowboy boots and other Western-style clothing, was the perfect stop for fans.

Osorio expected, or perhaps hoped, the store would see similar traffic at the start of the Thanksgiving holiday week.

After the tumult of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, that remains to be seen. Over the summer, several raids in the neighborhood sparked protests. But the mass arrests and fears of deportation turned the Fashion District into a ghost town for several weeks after, with storefronts shuttered and frightened workers staying home.

The story was the same in other business districts that cater to immigrants. Although conditions have improved in recent months, merchants are still feeling the pain and in desperate need of a holiday retail miracle.

Local officials and activists are encouraging people to shop on Black Friday and beyond, including by holding a festival over the weekend. But it remains unclear how many will feel safe enough to come out.

Some merchants are “living sale to sale, customer to customer,” said Anthony Rodriguez, president of the Fashion District’s business improvement district, a private group of property owners in the area.

“These aren’t big-box stores,” Rodriguez said. “These are family-owned and, in some cases, generational businesses that more than ever need L.A.’s support. If people can come down and just spend $10 to $15 … that’s how we can make a difference.”

On Monday, Osorio said she made just one sale: a pair of utility boots.

She opened the store at 9:30 a.m. and sold the boots at around 2 p.m. They had been marked down $30 from their typical price of $160 because customers have been so reluctant to spend money, she said.

“We are waiting for the good times,” Osorio said. “Honestly, I felt like it was going to be better this week, but it’s been really, really slow. We just pray and keep the faith. Let’s see what happens.”

Small businesses in the area — which includes the historically vibrant, bustling open-air shopping corridor Santee Alley, known for bargain prices — are looking for ways to recoup some of their losses through holiday sales.

Foot traffic in the area is back at levels seen before federal immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, according to the business improvement district.

But Rodriguez said traffic fluctuates day to day and is “at the mercy” of rumors, at times false, of federal enforcement operations circulated among group chats of merchants and community members.

Such alerts prompt businesses to shut down at a moment’s notice with “people literally running from their stores,” Rodriguez said. He said that, one day, agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were conducting an investigation in the area and were confused for Customs and Border Protection officers.

Rodriguez said there are “very valid reasons” to pay attention to alerts but that minimizing their harmful effects is crucial for economic recovery.

Visitors to stores and businesses in the Fashion District dropped dramatically in the week or so after the initial raids on June 6. Foot traffic in the Fashion District dropped 33% while visitors to Santee Alley specifically dropped by 50%, according to the business improvement district.

Rodriguez said it took at least three weeks to recover foot traffic, and even so, vendors are struggling because “people are not spending like they used to.”

And the typical holiday boost has yet to make an appearance, Rodriguez said.

“As of right now, we are not seeing the holiday spike we have seen in previous years,” he said.

In May, the Fashion District saw some 1.98 million visitors, while in June that number dropped to 1.2 million, according to the group. In September, the district saw 1.3 million visitors, far below the the 1.5 million the area saw in the same period last year.

Pop music blared from open doors on Monday afternoon on Santee Street as the light faded. A smattering of storefronts were closed, but most were open, ready to welcome tourists and local families doing their holiday shopping. Clumps of customers gathered. The alley was lively compared with the weeks after the first summer raids.

Maria Fuertes, 43, and her daughter had prowled the area for more than seven hours, since 9 a.m., shopping for outfits for a December wedding. They had made the more-than-hourlong trek from Eastvale in Riverside County to look for formal dresses and shoes. Fuertes said she often shops in the area around the holidays and that it “feels empty” compared to years past.

“It’s kind of creepy and lonely,” Fuertes said.

More than half a dozen businesses in the alley and on Santee Street told The Times their sales remained down after the onslaught of federal immigration raids, with some doing better than others. A lingerie shop saw a dip but not a severe one, with online sales remaining strong. The owner of an accessories store said business was down 30%, while an employee at a jewelry store said business was down 70%.

A local merchants association known as Somos los Callejones and the Los Angeles Tenants Union partnered with Councilmember Ysabel Jurado to host a street festival Saturday in an effort to attract customers in the lead-up to Black Friday.

According to Jurado’s office, the festival drew some 500 attendees. Vendors set up booths and racks of clothing along Olympic Boulevard between Santee Street and Maple Avenue, which was closed to vehicle traffic. The event featured live music, and organizers raffled off 10 turkeys.

The raffling of turkeys highlighted the food insecurity many families in the area are facing, Jurado said in an interview. Some have lost their primary breadwinners to the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, and children have begun to skip school to keep their households afloat.

“Some were so excited to win [turkeys],” Jurado said, adding that the food insecurity “has been really sobering.”

“These are the realities that people are continuing to grapple with,” she said, “as their loved ones have been taken.”

Businesses said they were marketing deals when possible — and emphasizing customer service.

The California Mirage Jewelry Design Center, which is on prime real estate at the entrance to Santee Alley and has been in operation since the 1990s, has been offering 30% off on all items since last week, a promotion that will last through Black Friday.

Carolina Medrano, 38, a store employee who on Monday evening rearranged twinkling gold chains, said that even with the discount, business had been “super slow.”

“I believe everybody is struggling,” said Jessica Morales, 40, an employee at a nearby dress retailer who asked that the store not be named, since she didn’t have permission from her supervisor.

As she used a long pole with a hook to hang a glittery pink dress on a high rack, Morales noted that some customers had become more aggressive in trying to negotiate a lower price, threatening to go to other vendors.

She tries to emphasize the quality and variety of the store’s dresses, and that some other nearby retailers are no longer able to afford to keep their inventory well-stocked.

Some customers talk of quinceañeras being canceled, or their husbands telling them to stay home from parties for fears of raids, Morales said.

“People are trying to save their money. Everyone’s scared to come out,” Morales said. “You have to find a way to connect with customers.”

The hit to sales in the aftermath of immigration raids comes as the local economy is already suffering, weakened by the rise of e-commerce, tourism disruptions from COVID-19 lockdowns and inflationary and other economic pressures pushing consumers to spend less.

Ilse Metchek, a former president of the California Fashion Assn. who has worked in the industry since the 1950s, said the merchandise sold in Santee Alley had changed in recent years. It shifted from the good-quality excess products of local brands — which were then sold at bargain prices — to imitation or cheap goods often imported from abroad.

Famously, Richard Riordan, who served as mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001, “took a very publicized walk [through Santee Alley] where he paid $10 for a silk shirt and made a whole big to-do about it,” Metchek said.

The move by then-President Reagan to grant amnesty, giving legal status and a path to citizenship to many immigrants lacking authorization, helped pave the way for a booming fashion economy, she said.

Immigration crackdowns in recent years, regulations that have increased labor costs and China’s manufacturing boom in the early 2000s have created a difficult economy for California fashion brands and workers.

“It’s a pity,” Metchek said. “There’s a clear pattern of why and what has happened here. This is not nuclear physics.”

Gloria Andrade, 53, owns a business selling makeup, accessories and miscellaneous electronics in the Maple Alley Fashion Center in downtown L.A. that has operated for some 25 years. In May, her family opened up a second storefront nearby in Santee Alley, without anticipating the raids and resulting downturn.

Andrade said the rent for her new location is about $4,500, and that she’s two months behind. Many neighboring businesses are in a similar situation, she said.

“It’s the first day of vacation and nobody came,” she said of the Thanksgiving holiday. “We’ll wait for Christmas to see how it goes.”

Waymo must stop charging its autonomous fleet of cars overnight at two Santa Monica charging stations, the City Council decided last week as a way to resolve a months-long dispute between local residents and the driverless taxi company.

On a unanimous vote, the Santa Monica City Council voted Tuesday to issue a directive to Waymo, the owner of the property and its lessees, to stop overnight operations at the charging stations.

“If the owners and lessees and operators do not comply within an expedited time frame, [the city would then be instructed] to initiate litigation to abate nuisance conditions,” Interim City Atty. Heidi von Tongeln said during Tuesday’s council meeting.

Several local residents have complained about round-the-clock beeping and humming emitted by the self-driving cars as they make their way to two charging stations near the intersection of Euclid Street and Broadway. Waymo said it took steps to reduce noise at the charging stations, but residents still insist the stations are a nuisance, arguing that the noise keeps them up at night and the driverless cars are clogging the streets.

According to a letter from the city to Waymo, obtained by The Times, Santa Monica demanded that the two lots stop operating at night starting Wednesday, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

“The City has received many complaints from neighboring residents regarding the Broadway Lots, and particularly that the overnight operations of the lots are very disruptive to their sleep and peace and quite enjoyment of their homes,” the letter reads.

A city spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment or questions to what prompted the city to consider the demand.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Waymo said the company was committed to operating and investing in the city, but did not answer whether or not the company planned to comply with the city’s directive.

“We’ve been engaging with the city since day one of our operations, and we are committed to working with them to be responsive to our neighbors,” the statement read. “In response to neighbors’ feedback, we adjusted our operations at the site, and we’ll continue to seek community input.”

To address some concerns, Waymo officials pointed to mitigation efforts, like using vegetation around the lots to cut down on light and noise.

A total of 56 Waymo vehicles can charge at the same time at the two stations in Santa Monica. The company has been growing rapidly and expanding the streets where the white, autonomous vehicles can operate, but residents said they received no warning that two charging stations would be operating in their neighborhoods. Emails obtained by The Times suggest that city officials were also caught off-guard by the Waymo lots, and learned about the two stations only after residents started to complain about the noise.

The letter from the city to Waymo alleges that the company contracted by Waymo to charge its fleet at the lots, Voltera, had “continue[d] to downplay the legitimate complaints from a significant number of neighbors, and to wrongfully insist that it and its customer Waymo are immunized from all regulation and entitled to conduct their business however they want.”

A spokesperson for Voltera did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Neighbors of the charging station express relief at the city’s action.

“I’m happy to see that the city has taken a stand,” said Christopher Potter, who lives near one of the lots and started an online petition urging the company to reduce its sound pollution.

Still, Potter said he’s not sure whether Waymo and Voltera will make any changes for the better.

“They come in and they set up shop and they just want to do what they want to do,” he said.

Potter pointed out that several months ago the Waymo vehicles reduced the volume of its beeping, when the vehicles drive in reverse, when in the lots. Now the vehicles only beep when there is someone or an object behind them. But the noise is still significant.

Darius Boorn, who also lives near the lots, agrees.

“I can’t have the windows open because there’s always noise,” he said. “If they [Waymo] really wanted to do something, they could do it.”

Despite the city’s letter to Waymo, Boorn said he believes it was frustrated residents who forced the city to act.

“I truly believe that we forced their hand,” he said. “I think the city finally realized, our backs are against the wall unless we do this for the residents.”

The decisions comes after months of tension between the Waymo, the rapidly expanding driverless taxi company, and residents who allege the charging stations were installed without warning or input from neighbors, and have been constant nuisance since it started operating in January of this year.

Some residents took matters into their own hands by using cones to block Waymos from entering the parking lots and blocking their way into streets and alleys. Some residents also started to block the cars by standing and blocking the driveways to the charging stations, forcing the autonomous cars to stack up along the street waiting for a chance to enter.

Residents started to refer to the protest action as going out to “stack the Waymos.”

Police have been called multiple times to the charging stations, and Waymo at one point unsuccessfully tried to get a temporary restraining order against a resident who continued to protest against the stations.

According to the letter sent by the city to Waymo, city officials have received more than 40 complaints from 15 different individuals regarding noise, light, and traffic in the area because of the lots, prompting the city to meet with neighborhood residents Oct. 15.

The letter also points to an incident on Nov. 2 when a long line of Waymos began to stack up in an alley leading to the lots, forcing attendants to work for about 20 minutes to clear out the blockage.

“If there had been a fire in one of the buildings or a first responder needed to access the area, they would have been trapped and blocked,” the letter from the city reads. “This is not the first such incident, only the most recent.”

The Santa Monica clash could be a sign of possible growing pains for the company as it continues to expand operations into other major cities across the state.

The company in June announced it would be expanding its service area in Los Angeles to more than 120 square miles in the county, ferrying passengers in Playa del Rey, Ladera Hieghts, Echo Park, Silver Lake and across Sunset Boulevard.

Earlier this month Waymo announced it would begin operating on freeways in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well, expanding the distances it could take passengers in the two cities. The company also operates in Santa Monica, Culver City and downtown Los Angeles.

Last week, Waymo announced its driverless cars would start operating in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando. On Friday, the company announced on social media it was also now authorized to drive over a wider area in San Francisco and Sacramento, and that the vehicles would start making an appearance in San Diego in mid-2026.

“Can you just give me one of your leftover sharks?”

It was early in Jay Stein’s tenacious pursuit to turn a throwaway business into a sweet spot for Universal Studios, then owned by Lew Wasserman’s powerhouse entertainment firm MCA.

In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” was a cultural sensation and Stein wanted to capitalize on the movie’s success. He asked his colleagues in film production for props so his crews could re-create the fictional Amity Island coastline in the studio’s hilly back lot miles from downtown L.A.

“He convinced them: ‘Can you just give me one of the leftover sharks and I’ll put it on the studio tour, and we’ll get some promotion out of that,’ ” author Sam Gennawey told The Times, recalling Stein’s brilliance and his pioneering use of intellectual property.

Stein died Nov. 5 at his home in Bend, Ore., according to his wife, Connie Stein. He was 88 and had been suffering from complications related to Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer.

“He left a big hole — but he also left a wonderful legacy,” she said in an interview Sunday. “Not a lot of people have the opportunity to leave a legacy that touches generations. But he’s still making people smile every day.”

The tram tour’s shark attack, which terrified tourists when it debuted in 1976, has long been a staple. It was among Stein’s many theme park enhancements during his more than 30 years as a top MCA executive, which included Universal’s push into Florida to compete with Walt Disney Co.

The “Jaws” attraction helped cement Universal’s decades-long relationship with Spielberg, a span that would include such films as “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jurassic Park,” “Schindler’s List” and “The Fabelmans.” It also spawned other movie-themed attractions that included a “Waterworld” live show and a “King Kong” ride.

Stein insisted that the ape would spew “banana breath,” his wife said.

Within Universal, such jolts and flourishes became known as “JayBangs,” which Gennawey used as the title for his 2016 book about Stein’s contributions to the industry, “JayBangs: How Jay Stein, MCA, & Universal Invented the Modern Theme Park and Beat Disney at Its Own Game.”

“Jay wanted to put you in the movie,” Gennawey said. “He wanted to grab you by the collar and shake you a bit.”

Stein was born in New York City on June 17, 1937, to Samuel and Sylvia “Sunny” (Goldstein) Stein.

His father was a watch salesman who moved the family to Los Angeles when Stein was young. As a teenager, he occasionally skipped school to go to Hollywood Park Racetrack to bet on horses. He had finagled some blank report cards and used them to bring home self-inserted high marks.

But the scam was revealed when the family briefly moved back to New York and Stein was nearing the end of high school. His parents were summoned for a conference, where they learned Stein lacked the credits to graduate. Summer school remedied that.

The family returned to L.A. Stein attended UC Berkeley, majoring in political science, but he left about a semester shy of graduating.

He served in the Army National Guard and, near the end of his service, in 1959, began working in MCA’s mailroom. Initially he wanted to get into film production, but by the mid-1960s, he was steered into the fledgling tour unit.

The company had launched the tram tour in 1964 to make a little money from its ample real estate. But some executives viewed the endeavor as tacky. Its prospects looked dim.

“It started out as two trams and a Quonset hut on Lankershim Boulevard,” Stein told The Times in a 2023 interview. “Quite frankly, the tram was considered something that interfered with television production.”

“I worked for the production office and was given the task of trying to coordinate how close we could come on the backlot without interfering. Everyone I worked for said it was an annoyance and disruptive and will not ever be welcomed.”

Stein was able “to convince others of the benefits of having the studio tour,” Gennawey said. “That’s what saved it.”

Gennawey considers Stein a key pioneer of U.S. theme parks.

“He was remarkably competitive. He recognized that Disney had its thing — but Universal could create something different and complimentary, particularly in the early days,” Gennawey said.

Disneyland was, of course, a top draw.

“But if you are a Los Angeles resident and had relatives coming in town, you knew they [also] wanted to see Hollywood,” Gennawey said. “But Hollywood was kind of scary, so you took them to Universal Studios.”

Stein’s contributions have only recently been appreciated, according to Gennawey. That’s largely because Stein subscribed to Wasserman’s edict that the “stars were the stars,” and executives should blend into the background. Stein also retired early, leaving Universal by the mid-1990s, after Japanese electronics giant Matsushita bought MCA.

Stein worried that Universal’s new owner (and a string of subsequent buyers) would fail to recognize the value of the theme parks, Gennawey said, an observation that proved correct.

That changed in 2011 when Comcast acquired NBCUniversal and began investing heavily.

The company opened its $7-billion theme park, Universal Epic Universe, near Orlando, Fla., to raves earlier this year.

The theme park unit — which includes destinations in Los Angeles, Florida, Japan and China — has become one of the most reliable profit engines for NBCUniversal. Last year, Universal theme parks produced $8.6 billion in revenue.

“Jay was the visionary behind Universal’s expansion from the Studio Tour in Hollywood to the creation of our world-class theme park destination at Universal Orlando and beyond,” Mark Woodbury, chairman and chief executive of Universal Destinations & Experiences, said in a statement.

“He had tremendous creative instincts and defined our style of immersive storytelling, making us the brand that brings great movies to life for generations to come,” Woodbury said.

Stein is survived by his wife, son Gary Stein, daughter Darolyn Bellemeur and their spouses, children and grandchildren, his brother Ira Stein, a nephew, cousins as well as Connie Stein’s children and grandchildren.

The car wash hadn’t yet opened for the day, but its owner was already on edge.

He scanned the street for law enforcement vehicles and hit refresh on a crowdsourced map that showed recent immigration sweeps.

“They were busy in our area yesterday,” he warned his employees. “Be careful.”

But except for staying home, there were few precautions that the workers, mostly men from Mexico, could take.

The business is located along one of L.A.’s busiest thoroughfares. Workers are exposed to the street as they scrub, wax and buff the parade of vehicles that streams in between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., seven days a week.

Immigration agents descended on the business multiple times this summer as part of a broader campaign against L.A. car washes. Masked men hauled away around a dozen workers, most of whom were swiftly deported. The Times is not identifying the business, the owner or the workers.

The raids had spooked remaining employees — and many had stopped showing up to work. The replacements the owner hired were mostly other immigrants who showed him Social Security cards that he hoped were legitimate.

Still, it was an open secret that the car wash industry, which paid low wages for back-breaking labor, largely attracted people without legal status.

“Americans don’t want to do this work,” the owner said.

After the raids, he had been forced to close for stretches during the typically lucrative summer months. He was now operating normally again, but sales were down, he had maxed out his credit cards and he was unsure whether his business would survive. Clients — frightened by the raids — were staying away.

“My target is to pay the rent, pay the insurance and pay the guys,” the owner told his manager as they sipped coffee in the early morning November chill and waited for their first customer. “That’s it.”

The manager, also an immigrant from Mexico, nodded. He was juggling his boss’ concerns with personal ones. He and his team had all seen friends, relatives and co-workers vanish in immigration raids. He left home each morning wondering whether he would return in the evening.

The mood at the car wash had once been lighthearted, with employees joking as they sprayed down cars and polished windows. Now everybody, the manager included, kept one eye on the street as they worked. “We say we’re OK,” he said. “But we’re all scared.”

A few minutes before 7 a.m., a BMW sedan pulled in for a wash. The manager flipped on the vacuum and said a prayer.

“Protect me. Protect my colleagues. And protect the place I work.”

The owner was born abroad but moved to Los Angeles after winning the U.S. green card lottery.

He used his life savings to buy the car wash, which at the time seemed like a sound investment. There are some 36 million vehicles in California. And in Los Angeles, at least for most of the year, people can’t rely on rainfall to keep them clean.

His business already took a major financial hit this year during the L.A. wildfires, which filled the air with smoke and ash. Customers didn’t bother to clean cars that they knew would get dirty again.

Then came President Trump, who promised to deport record numbers of migrants.

Previous administrations had focused on expelling immigrants who had committed crimes. But federal agents, under pressure to meet arrest quotas, have vastly widened their net, targeting public-facing workplaces that pay low wages.

Car wash employees — along with street vendors, day laborers, farmworkers and gardeners — have become low-hanging fruit. At least 340 people have been detained in raids on 100 car washes across Southern California since June, according to the CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center, which advocates for workers in the industry.

The owner was shocked when agents toting rifles and dressed in bulletproof vests first stormed his business, blocking exits with their vehicles and handcuffing employees without ever showing a search warrant.

“It was a kidnapping,” he said. “It felt like we were in Afghanistan or Iraq, not in the middle of Los Angeles.”

Some of the men that the agents dragged away in that raid and subsequent ones had been living in the U.S. for decades. Many were fathers of American children.

The manager was racked with survivor’s guilt. He was from the same small town in Mexico as one of the men who was detained and later deported. Another worker taken by agents had been hired the same morning as the raid.

That’s when many employees stopped showing up. One stayed home for almost a month straight, surviving on groceries his friends and family brought to his apartment.

But eventually that employee — and his brother — returned to the car wash. “I’m not brave,” the brother said. “I need the work.”

The brother had been in the country for nearly 25 years and had three U.S.-born children, one of whom had served as a Marine.

He had toiled at car washes the whole time — crouching to scrub tires, stretching to dry roofs and returning home each night with aching heels and knots in his neck. Less punishing industries weren’t an option for somebody without valid work documents, he said, especially in the Trump era.

He had been at the car wash during one of the raids, and had avoided being detained only when the owner stepped in front of him and demanded agents speak to him first.

The man said he had made peace with the idea that his time in the U.S. might come to an end. “At least my children are grown,” he said.

The two brothers were working this brisk November day, hand-drying Audis, Mercedes and a classic Porsche. They earned a little over minimum wage, and got to keep most of their tips.

Their bosses had told them that if immigration agents returned, the workers should consider locking themselves inside the cars that they were cleaning. “Don’t run,” the manager said. “They’ll only chase.”

At the cash register, the cashier watched a website that tracked Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions around the region. So far, there was no activity nearby.

She had been present during the immigration sweeps, and was still mad at herself for not doing more to stop agents from taking her co-workers. “You think you’re gonna stand up to them, but it’s different when it happens,” she said. “I was like a deer in the headlights.”

As workers cleaned his Toyota Camry, a retired history professor waited on a bench, reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. The ICE raids had scared some clients away, but had prompted others to express their support. He said he had made a point to patronize the business because he was angry at the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“They’re not getting the worst of the worst, they’re getting the easiest,” he said.

He noted that a friend of his — a Latino born in the U.S. — now carried a copy of his birth certificate. Just in case.

“That’s not the America I grew up in,” the customer said.

The owner of the car wash, too, was trying to square the promise of the United States with the reality that he was living.

“I thought Trump was a businessman,” he said. “But he’s really terrorizing businesses.”

The owner had paid taxes on his employee’s earnings, he said. So had they. “They were pushing the economy, paying rent, paying insurance, buying things.”

“Fine, take the criminals, take the bad guys,” he continued. “But these are hard workers. Criminals aren’t working at a car wash or waiting in front of a Home Depot.”

The owner had recently obtained American citizenship. But he was disillusioned — by the raids, L.A.’s homelessness crisis, high healthcare costs. He said his wife longed to leave the U.S. and return home.

“This is not the American dream,” he said. “This is an American nightmare.”

As the sun began to sink on the horizon, the last car of the day pulled out of the car wash — a sparkling clean Tesla.

The manager turned off the vacuum, recoiled hoses and exhaled with relief. He and his staff had survived another day. Tonight — at least — they would be going home to their families.

WASHINGTON  — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups urged the Supreme Court on Friday to block new California laws that will require thousands of companies to disclose their emissions and their impacts on climate change.

One of the laws is due to take effect on Jan. 1, and the emergency appeal asks the court to put it on hold temporarily.

Their lawyers argue the measures violate the 1st Amendment because the state would be forcing companies to speak on its preferred topic.

“In less than eight weeks, California will compel thousands of companies across the nation to speak on the deeply controversial topic of climate change,” they said in an appeal that also spoke for the California Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles County Business Federation.

They say the two new laws would require companies to disclose the “climate-related risks” they foresee and how their operations and emissions contribute to climate change.

“Both laws are part of California’s open campaign to force companies into the public debate on climate issues and pressure them to alter their behavior,” they said. Their aim, according to their sponsors, is to “make sure that the public actually knows who’s green and who isn’t.”

One law, SB 261, will require several thousand companies that do business in California to assess their “climate-related financial risk” and how they may reduce that risk. A second measure, Senate Bill 253, which applies to larger companies, requires them to assess and disclose their emissions and how their operations could impact the climate.

The appeal argues these laws amount to unconstitutional compelled speech.

“No state may violate 1st Amendment rights to set climate policy for the Nation. Compelled-speech laws are presumptively unconstitutional — especially where, as here, they dictate a value-laden script on a controversial subject such as climate change,” they argue.

The emergency appeal was filed by Washington attorney Eugene Scalia, a son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The companies have tried and failed to persuade judges in California to block the measures. Exxon Mobil filed a suit in Sacramento, while the Chamber of Commerce sued in Los Angeles.

In August, U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II in Los Angeles refused to block the laws on the grounds they “regulate commercial speech,” which gets less protection under the 1st Amendment. He said businesses are routinely required to disclose financial data and factual information on their operations.

The business lawyers said they had appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asking for an injunction, but no action has been taken.

Shortly after the chamber’s appeal was filed, state attorneys for Iowa and 24 other Republican-leaning states joined in support. They said they “strongly oppose this radical green speech mandate that California seeks to impose on companies.”

The justices are likely to ask for a response next week from California’s state attorneys before acting on the appeal.

The owners of Crypto.com Arena and L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles have filed plans with the city to potentially add another tower to their multibillion-dollar sports and entertainment complex.

AEG last week proposed a 49-story high-rise that would hold a hotel, residences, bars and restaurants.

The tower would rise across Olympic Boulevard from L.A. Live on a corner lot on Georgia Street now used by AEG for parking.

Many planned residential and other commercial projects in Los Angeles have stalled prior to construction in recent years as developers face economic headwinds, including unfavorable interest rates and rising costs of materials and labor.

AEG, too, will not be breaking ground on this project in the near future, a company representative said.

The company’s recent land-use application, which outlined the plans, is just a “first step for a potential development” on the company’s property at 917 W. Olympic Blvd., spokesman Michael Roth said. “AEG remains optimistic about downtown’s long-term prospects and is positioning the site for future development when conditions improve.”

The application calls for a large-scale development with 364 dwelling units and 334 hotel rooms.

The 783,427-square-foot building would also include bars and restaurants on levels 1, 5 and 6, along with a restaurant/nightclub on the eighth floor.

Residents and hotel guests would share an amenity deck with a restaurant, bar, pool, spa, club room, fitness area and a dining terrace. The complex would have 666 parking spaces.

In September, the City Council approved a $2.6-billion expansion of the Convention Center despite warnings from its advisors that the project would draw taxpayer funds away from essential city services for decades to come. Mayor Karen Bass and a majority of the council believe that the project will create thousands of jobs and boost tourism and business activity, making the city more competitive on the national stage.

The new construction will connect the two existing south and west exhibit halls by adding 190,000 square feet of space to create one contiguous hall with more than 750,000 square feet, and will add 39,000 square feet of meeting room space and 95,000 square feet of multipurpose space.

AEG is a co-developer of the Convention Center project with Plenary Americas.

Los Angeles-based AEG is one of the world’s biggest venue and event companies, with more than 20,000 employees. The company was founded in 1995 when Denver billionaire investor Philip Anschutz bought the Los Angeles Kings, and in 1999 it opened the downtown arena then known as the Staples Center, now Crypto.com Arena.

Among AEG’s recent developments is the IG Arena in the outer citadel of Nagoya Castle in Nagoya, Japan, where sports and entertainment events, including sumo wrestling, are held.

On an overcast morning in September, Hector Alessandro Negrete left his beloved Los Angeles — the city he was brought to at 3 months old — and headed down Interstate 5 to Mexico, the only country where he held a passport.

It was a place that, to him, had “always felt like both a wound and a possibility.”

Negrete, 43, sat in the passenger seat as a friend steered the car south and two more friends in another car followed. He had condensed his life to three full suitcases and his dachshund mix, Lorca.

They pulled over at the beach in San Clemente. Angel Martinez, his soon-to-be former roommate, is deeply spiritual, and his favorite prayer spot is the ocean, so he prayed that Negrete would be blessed and protected — and Lorca too — as they began a new stage in their lives.

On the near-empty beach, the friends embraced and wiped away tears. Martinez handed Negrete a small watermelon.

As instructed, Negrete walked to the edge of the water, said his own prayer and, as a gift of thanks to the cosmos, plopped it into a crashing wave.

Negrete doesn’t call it self-deportation.

“Self-repatriation,” he said. “I refuse to use this administration’s language.”

President Trump had been in office just over a month when Negrete decided he would return to Mexico. Methodical by nature, he approached the decision like any other — by researching, organizing and planning.

Negrete secured three forms of Mexican identification: his voter credential, a renewed passport and a card akin to a Social Security ID.

He registered Lorca as an emotional support animal, paid for a vaccine card and a certificate of good health, and crate-trained her in a TSA-approved carrier.

He announced his decision to leave in June on his Substack newsletter: “If you’re thinking, ‘Alessandro’s giving up,’ look deeper. I am choosing freedom. For the first time, I feel unshackled from the expectations of waiting.”

Negrete had grown tired of wishing for immigration reform. He had built his career advocating for immigrants such as himself, including stints as statewide coordinator for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, and as executive director for the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance.

He said his work had helped legalize street vending in Los Angeles and he assisted the office of then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris in securing the release of a young woman from immigration detention. He was the first openly undocumented and LGBTQ+ person on the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council.

Under previous administrations, Negrete’s political work had felt like a shield against deportation. Even during Trump’s first term, Negrete had marched at rallies denouncing his immigration policies.

But that was before the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols that tore into Southern California during Trump’s second term. On June 6, as anti-ICE protesters took to the streets, Negrete rushed to downtown Los Angeles when fellow activists told him street medics were needed.

“One of my homies said, ‘Hey fool, what are you doing here?’” he recalled. Seeing Los Angeles police officers advancing on the crowd, he realized that no amount of public support could protect him.

He fled. “Thank God I left.”

In mid-August, Negrete hosted a yard sale and going away party. The flier was tongue-in-cheek: “Everything must go! Including me!”

His red T-shirt stated plainly, “I AM UNDOCUMENTED,” and his aviator sunglasses hid the occasional tears. Tattoos dotted his extremities, including an anchor on his right leg with the words “I refuse to sink.”

“I think it hit me when I started packing my stuff today,” he told a former colleague, Shruti Garg, who had arrived early.

“But the way you’ve invited everyone to join you is so beautiful,” she replied.

One table held American pop-culture knickknacks — sippy cups with Ghostface from the movie “Scream,” collectible Mickey Mouse ears, a Detective Batman purse shaped like a comic book, another purse shaped like the locker from the ‘90s cartoon “Daria.”

Negrete said the items reminded him of his youth and represented the gothic, quirky aspects of his personality.

“I was born in Mexico, but I don’t know Mexico,” he said. “So I’m leaving the American parts of me that are no longer going to serve me.”

The back yard slowly filled with loved ones from Negrete’s various social circles. There was his mostly queer softball team — the Peacocks — his running group, his chosen family and his blood family.

Negrete’s close friend Joel Menjivar looked solemn.

“I’m scared it’s going to start a movement,” he said. “Undocumented or DACA friends who are talented and integral to the fabric of L.A. might get ideas to leave.”

Another friend, Mario Mariscal, said he took Negrete’s decision the hardest, though at first he didn’t believe Negrete was serious. More than once he asked, “You really want to give up everything you’ve built here for a new start in Mexico?”

Eventually, Negrete had to tell Mariscal that his questions weren’t helpful. During a deeper conversation about his decision, Negrete shared that he was tired of living with the constant fear of getting picked up, herded into an unmarked van and taken away.

“I just kept telling him, ‘That’s not going to happen to you,’” Mariscal said. “But the more this administration keeps doing it, the more it’s in our face, the more we’re seeing every horror story about that, it became clear that, you know what, you do have a point. You do have to do what’s right for you.”

Negrete is cognizant of the privilege that makes his departure different from that of many other immigrants. He is white-passing, fluent in Spanish and English, and moved with $10,000 in savings.

In June, he was hired as executive director of a U.S.-based nonprofit, Old School Hub, that works to combat ageism around the world. The role allowed him to live wherever he wanted.

He decided to settle in Guadalajara, a growing technology hub, with historic buildings featuring Gothic architecture that he found beautiful. It also helped that Guadalajara has one of the country’s most vibrant LGBTQ+ scenes and is a four-hour drive from Puerto Vallarta, a renowned queer resort destination.

As Negrete began his new job while still in L.A., he picked a moving date — Sept. 4 — and booked a two-week Airbnb near the baseball stadium.

That Guadalajara’s team, the Charros de Jalisco, wore Dodger blue felt like a good omen.

On the drive toward the border, messages poured into Negrete’s phone.

“I’m sending you all my love Alessandro,” one read. “Cuídate. [Take care.] Know that even though you’re far away from home, you carry us with you.”

“Todo te va a salir bien,” read another. Everything will go well for you, it said. “Spread your wings and flyyyyy.”

Afraid of being stopped and detained at the airport, as has happened to other immigrants attempting to leave the country, Negrete preferred to drive to Tijuana and then fly to Guadalajara.

Negrete’s driver, his friend Jorge Leonardo, turned into a parking lot at the sign reading “LAST USA EXIT.”

Negrete put on his black felt tejana hat and called Iris Rodriguez, who was in the companion car. He asked her to cross on foot with him.

“I don’t want to go alone,” he said.

“We’re still on American soil,” Leonardo said. “You can still change your mind.”

Negrete ignored him.

“See y’all on the other side,” he said as he hopped out of the car.

He and Rodriguez stopped for photos in front of a sign with an arrow pointing “To Mexico.” Around a corner, the border came into full view — a metal turnstile with layers of concertina wire above it.

The line for Mexicanos was unceremoniously quick. The immigration agent barely glanced at Negrete’s passport before waving him through.

On the other side, a busker sang “Piano Man” by Billy Joel in perfect English.

“Welcome to the motherland,” Rodriguez told him. Negrete let out a deep breath.

Negrete’s immediate family members, and almost all of his extended family, live in the U.S.

He was born in Manzanillo, Colima, in 1982. Three months later, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where his parents had two more children.

At 17, Negrete was one of two students in his graduating class at Roosevelt High School to get into UC Berkeley. That’s when he found out he didn’t have papers.

His parents had divorced and his father married a U.S. citizen, obtaining a green card when Negrete was at Roosevelt. They began the legalization process for Negrete in 1999, he said, but two years later he came out to his family as gay.

His father was unsupportive and refused to continue seeking to adjust his immigration status. By the time they mended their relationship, it was too late. Negrete had aged out of the pathway at 21.

In 2008, Negrete said, he was arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. Four years later, President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to protect immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Negrete failed to qualify because of the DUI.

He said he got his record expunged in 2016, but — again — it was too late.

The following year, Trump began unwinding DACA, shutting out new generations of recipients, including Negrete.

Negrete waited until his last night in the U.S. to tell his mother, who now lives in Colorado, that he was leaving. He had grown tired of friends and other family members begging him to change his mind.

He had partially hinged his decision on the fact that his mom was in remission from her third bout with cancer and had just obtained legal residency. With life more stable for her, he could finally seek stability for himself.

“You taught me to dream,” Negrete recalled telling her. “This is me dreaming. I want to see the world.”

She cried and scolded him, promising to visit and repeating what she had said when he came out to her all those years before: “I wish you told me sooner.”

At a hotel in Tijuana, Negrete’s emotions finally caught up with him.

The day after Negrete and his three friends left L.A., three more friends surprised him by arriving in Tijuana for a final Friday night out together. One of them presented a gift he had put together with help from Negrete’s entire social circle — a video with loved ones sharing messages of encouragement.

In Negrete’s hotel room, as he and his friends watched, the mood grew sentimental.

“You’re basically the one that formed the family friend tree,” one friend said in her clip. “Friendships do not die out in distance.”

Negrete sobbed. “Yes! Friendships don’t have borders,” he said.

“Every single one of you has said this hasn’t hit y’all, like it’s a mini vacation,” he said. “I want to think of it as an extended vacation.”

“This isn’t goodbye, this is we’ll see each other soon,” he continued.

Off his soapbox, Negrete then chided his friends for making him cry before heading to a drag show.

Negrete had a habit of leaving social gatherings abruptly. His friends joked that they would refer to him as “catch me on the 101” because every time he disappeared during a night out, they would open Apple’s Find My app and see him on the freeway heading home.

“We’re not gonna catch him on the 101 no more,” Martinez said.

On the flight to Guadalajara, Negrete’s heart raced and he began to hyperventilate. The anxiety attack caught him off guard.

Negrete had worked hard to show his friends and family that he was happy, because he didn’t want them to think he had doubts — and he had none. But he began to worry about the unknown and to mourn his former dreams of gaining legal status and running for public office.

“It hit me all at once,” he recounted. “I am three hours away from a whole new life that I don’t know. I left everything and I don’t know what’s next.”

Many deep breaths by Negrete later, the plane descended through the clouds, revealing vibrant green fields and a cantaloupe-hued sunset.

Inside the Airbnb, he was surprised to find a clothesline instead of a dryer. Noticing the blue 5-gallon jug of water in the kitchen, he remarked that he would have to remember tap water wasn’t safe to cook with. But alongside the new was something familiar: The view from his 11–story apartment showed off a sprawling metropolis dotted with trees, some of them palms.

The next day started off like any Sunday, with a trip to Walmart and drag brunch.

Negrete marveled at the cost of a large carton of egg whites ($1) and was shocked to see eggs stored at room temperature, liquid laundry detergent in bags and only single-ply toilet paper. He treated himself to a Darth Vader coffee mug and a teapot featuring characters from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

After brunch, it was time to play tourist. Negrete was accompanied by Rodriguez, who stayed with him for the first two weeks, and a new friend, Alejandro Preciado, whom he had met at Coachella in April and happened to be a Guadajalara local.

Their first stop was the city’s Spanish Renaissance cathedral, where Negrete said a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary at his mother’s request. Negrete treated his friends to an electric carriage ride around the historic buildings, where he excitedly pointed out the Gothic architecture, then they bought aguas frescas and walked through an open-air market, chatting in an English-heavy Spanglish.

“I’m trying to look at how people dress,” Negrete said, suddenly self-conscious about his short shorts. “I’m pretty sure I stand out.”

After dinner, Negrete was booking an Uber back to his Airbnb when a message popped up: “We’ve detected unusual activity.”

The app didn’t know he had moved.

Before he arrived in Guadalajara, Negrete had already joined an intramural baseball team and a running club. Practices began days after his arrival.

Within a month, he moved into an apartment, visited Mexico City and reconnected with aunts in Mexico City and Guadalajara he hadn’t seen in decades.

He reflected on the small joys of greeting neighborhood señoras on morning dog walks, discovering the depths of Mexican cuisine and the peace of mind that came with no longer feeling like a target — though he’ll still freeze at the sight of police lights.

Still, Negrete remained glued to U.S. politics. In late September, the federal government detailed plans to begin processing initial DACA applications for the first time in four years. Had Negrete stayed in the U.S., he would have finally qualified for a reprieve.

He isn’t regretful.

His new dreams are wide-ranging. He wants to buy a house in Rosarito, where friends and family from L.A. could visit him. He wants to travel the world, starting with a trip to Spain. And he wants to help U.S. organizations build resources for other immigrants who are considering repatriating.

The goal isn’t to encourage people to leave, he said, but to show them they have agency.

“I actually did it,” he said. “I did it, and I’m OK.”

Now, he said, Mexico feels like an estranged relative that he’s getting to know again.

Nissin Foods, the Japanese giant that brought the world instant ramen, is testing a new kind of noodle in Los Angeles.

Its sprawling, old factory and corporate office in Gardena is now churning out protein-fortified pastas for Angelenos who want more bang for their bowls.

Nissin invented Cup Noodles, a go-to meal for people across the globe and a favorite among those on a budget. More than 100 billion portions of instant noodles from hundreds of companies are consumed every year.

In the U.S., much of Nissin’s expansion came from Gardena, where it started producing noodle packets in the 1970s. By 1973, the company launched Cup Noodles, an innovation aimed at Americans who liked to drink soup from cups.

The latest American preference Nissin has noticed is a surging demand for protein among mainstream consumers. It is popping up in snack foods, espresso drinks and breakfast cereals. Even Pop-Tarts and Doritos have released products with extra protein.

Nissin launched a new Los Angeles-based noodle company to capitalize on the trend this year. The company, Kanzen Meal, which now has around 10 employees, recently began serving up nutrient-dense meals from the frozen foods aisle. Its products are available in dozens of grocery stores across Southern California.

“There’s an interest in nutrient density and people want more bang for their buck out of the foods that they eat,” Kanzen Meal chief executive Bob Little said. “We think that there’s an opportunity to bring those consumers back to the frozen aisle.”

Kanzen Meal’s shrimp teriyaki, spaghetti Bolognese and other products have up to 24 grams of protein .

Convenience food companies around the world have been struggling with a slowdown in many markets as consumers increasingly avoid highly processed foods. Meanwhile, the spreading use of Ozempic is making it easier for millions of people to control their appetites and be choosier about what they consume.

Amiud this trend, Nissin shares have fallen around 30% over the last 12 months.

Nissin, which opened its facility in Gardena in 1972, recently established a new regional headquarters in Torrance, where Kanzen Meal is based. Many of its attempts to remain relevant start in L.A.

This month Nissin announced its upcoming launch of a “hot water van” that will tour the U.S. and distribute samples of instant noodles. For the holiday season, it has unveiled both turkey and pumpkin pie-flavored Cup Noodles.

With the establishment of Kanzen Meals, Nissin is looking to Los Angeles as the prime testing grounds for its products.

“We’ve got deep ties to the Los Angeles area and we thought that this would be a great market for us to start in,” Little said in an interview. “We recognized early on that Los Angeles is the epicenter of well-being.”

Kanzen Meal products hit shelves in stores such as Gelson’s and Bristol Farms in June. Since then the company has been growing rapidly, Little said. The company announced this month it would expand its distribution to stores on the East Coast in states including New York, Connecticut and North Carolina. It plans to have products in 1,000 stores by the end of the year.

Little attributes the swift growth to a surge in consumer demand for simple access to nutrients, especially in Southern California.

Kanzen will introduce two new frozen products this month, including spicy Dandan noodles and spaghetti carbonara. Each meal contains macronutrients, fats, carbs and fiber and retails for $6.99 to $7.99.

As added protein trends online and in stores, nutritionists are warning consumers to pay attention to all the components in a product. Some with a high dose of protein may also contain large amounts of sugar and sodium, experts said.

“The bigger picture here is that just because something has more protein does not mean it’s healthier for you,” said Yasi Ansari, a Los Angeles-based registered dietitian and nutritionist.

The protein boom actually could lead to American consumers overindulging, Ansari said. The average woman needs around 46 grams of protein to prevent a deficiency, and the average man needs 56 grams, she said.

Protein bars typically contain 20 to 30 grams of protein, and new products such as the Starbucks protein latte can have up to 36 grams.

“Protein is vital to the body’s cells, but we may be missing out on other nutrients that we could be getting from a whole food profile,” Ansari said.

Little said Kanzen Meal’s products offer a healthy balance of ingredients. “Kanzen” means complete in Japanese, he pointed out.

Retail analyst Dominick Miserandino said the demand for protein is creating opportunities for new products, including within the $91.3-billion U.S. frozen food market. But the proliferation of food items advertised as high-protein, ranging from toaster pastries to tortilla chips, could lead consumers astray, Miserandino said.

“It might give a false consumer impression that having these snacks is always a healthy choice,” he said. “Are you going to now have a generation of kids eating snack foods for their daily dose of protein?”

Walt Disney Co. is alerting viewers that its channels may go dark on YouTube TV amid tense contract negotiations between the two television giants.

The companies are struggling to hammer out a new distribution deal on YouTube TV for Disney’s channels, including ABC, ESPN, FX, National Geographic and Disney Channel. YouTube TV has become one of the most popular U.S. pay-TV services, boasting about 10 million subscribers for its packages of traditional television channels.

Those customers risk losing Disney’s channels, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles and other ABC affiliates nationwide if the two companies fail to forge a new carriage agreement by Oct. 30, when their pact expires.

“Without an agreement, we’ll have to remove Disney’s content from YouTube TV,” the Google Inc.-owned television service said Thursday in a statement.

Disney began sounding the alarm by running messages on its TV channels to warn viewers about the blackout threat.

The Burbank entertainment company becomes the latest TV programmer to allege that the tech behemoth is throwing its weight around in contract negotiations.

In recent months, both Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal publicly complained that Google’s YouTube TV was attempting to unfairly squeeze them in their separate talks. In the end, both Fox and NBCUniversal struck new carriage contracts without their channels going dark.

Univision wasn’t as fortunate. The smaller, Spanish-language media company’s networks went dark last month on YouTube TV when the two companies failed to reach a deal.

“For the fourth time in three months, Google’s YouTube TV is putting their subscribers at risk of losing the most valuable networks they signed up for,” a Disney spokesperson said Thursday in a statement. “This is the latest example of Google exploiting its position at the expense of their own customers.”

YouTube TV, for its part, alleged that Disney was the one making unreasonable demands.

“We’ve been working in good faith to negotiate a deal with Disney that pays them fairly for their content on YouTube TV,” a YouTube TV spokesperson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Disney is proposing costly economic terms that would raise prices on YouTube TV customers and give our customers fewer choices, while benefiting Disney’s own live TV products – like Hulu + Live TV and, soon, Fubo.”

Disney’s Hulu + Live TV competes directly with YouTube TV by offering the same channels. Fubo is a sports streaming service that Disney is in the process of acquiring.

YouTube said if Disney channels remain “unavailable for an extended period of time,” it would offer its customers a $20 credit.

The contract tussle heightens tensions from earlier this year, when Disney’s former distribution chief, Justin Connolly, left in May to take a similar position at YouTube TV. Connolly had spent two decades at Disney and ESPN and Disney sued to block the move, but a judge allowed Connolly to take his new position.

YouTube TV launched in April 2017 for $35 a month. The package of channels now costs $82.99.

To attract more sports fans, YouTube TV took over the NFL Sunday Ticket premium sports package from DirecTV, which had been losing more than $100 million a year to maintain the NFL service. YouTube TV offers Sunday Ticket as a base plan add-on or as an individual channel on YouTube.

Last year, YouTube generated $54.2 billion in revenue, second only to Disney among television companies, according to research firm MoffettNathanson.

The dispute comes as NFL and college football is in full swing, with games on ABC and ESPN. The NBA season also tipped off this week and ESPN prominently features those games. ABC’s fall season began last month with fresh episodes of such favorite programs as “Dancing with the Stars” and “Abbott Elementary.”

ABC stations also air popular newscasts including “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight with David Muir.” Many ABC stations, including in Los Angeles, run Sony’s “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”

“We invest significantly in our content and expect our partners to pay fair rates that recognize that value,” Disney said. “If we don’t reach a fair deal soon, YouTube TV customers will lose access to ESPN and ABC, and all our marquee programming – including the NFL, college football, NBA and NHL seasons – and so much more.”

On Saturday morning, the coastal town of San Clemente became ground zero in the battle between California and the Trump administration over a preplanned live-fire exercise over the freeway during a military event at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.

A 17-mile stretch of Interstate 5 was periodically closed through Camp Pendleton. The northern side of the closure was just outside San Clemente’s city limits.

Midmorning on Saturday, the southbound 5 ground to a halt about half a mile ahead of the El Camino Real exit, the second-to-last exit before the closure.

The previous three freeway exits — Avenida Palizada, Avenida Pico and Avenida Vista Hermosa — all had flashing signs warning of the impending closure.

Motorists who were brave or foolish enough to venture beyond Avenida Palizada endured a minimum of 30 minutes trying to exit the freeway.

Some vehicles on the interstate illegally made nearly 90-degree turns on the freeway heading southbound to break through the bottleneck by exiting the vacant El Camino Real onramp for about 15 minutes. A California Highway Patrol officer eventually rode up the ramp and shut off access.

San Clemente City Councilmember Mark Enmeier said that the freeway closure came “completely out of the blue” and that he found out about it just as many residents did on Saturday morning when the Orange County Sheriff’s Department announced it on Instagram.

“There was no coordination with any local officials on this whatsoever,” Enmeier said. Or if there was, he said, “I was not informed of it.”

To Enmeier, the live-ammunition event was a “show of force on behalf of a few individuals” more than likely intentionally timed to this day of widespread protest. Plus, he said the freeway closure is a source of needless financial strain.

“Not only are we paying as a taxpayer for these shows of force, we’re also losing money,” Enmeier said. “I mean, this is a major arterial road, and there’s no other way down to San Diego from Orange County without taking an hour-and-a-half detour.”

At the SC Cafe in San Clemente, owner Joey Abi-Loutfi said: “I heard about the traffic from the news a day earlier and wasn’t exactly sure what to think. That’s the give-and-take of owning a restaurant right next to a freeway ramp.”

Abi-Loutfi said he’s not thrilled about the interstate shutdown, though, aside from slower-than-usual business due to the government’s show of force in firing off weapons.

“What a great use of funding,” he said with a sarcasm thicker than his restaurant’s chunky salsa.

By midafternoon, it appeared motorists had gotten word of the closure and conditions around San Clemente had eased.

By the 91 and 15 freeways — the inland alternatives to the 5 between Los Angeles and San Diego — were jammed.

Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the White House for failing to coordinate or share safety information ahead of the Marine Corps 250th anniversary celebration featuring Vice President JD Vance.

California said it closed the 5 for safety reasons.

“It is not safe for people to drive on a major freeway at high speeds directly under LIVE MUNITIONS,” his office wrote on X. “White House not communicating, endangering the public, and then trying to blame the Governor for doing the right thing — keeping people out of harm’s way — yet another day living in Trump’s authoritarian America,” the post said.

Administration officials said the Pendleton event was safe and that a freeway closure was not needed.

“Gavin Newsom wants people to think this exercise is dangerous,” said William Martin, the communications director for Vance, in a statement.

Newsom’s office said Thursday it was told no live fire would go over the freeway, only to be informed Friday that the military event organizers asked the California Department of Transportation for a sign along the I-5 that read “Overhead fire in progress.”

Earlier Saturday morning, the state was told that live rounds were scheduled to be shot over the freeway around 1:30 p.m, prompting California Highway Patrol officials to recommend the freeway closure because of the potential safety risk and likelihood it would distract drivers.

When millions of demonstrators took to the streets in June for “No Kings Day” — depicting President Trump as a wannabe monarch intent on violating American democratic norms — it was still fairly early in his administration.

The immigration raids in Los Angeles were just getting under way and Trump had deployed military troops to the city to clamp down on protests.

But four months later, many Americans feel Trump’s threats and norm-shattering actions have only gotten more intense as protesters prepare to take part Saturday in more than 2,700 “No Kings” demonstrations scheduled across the country.

In that period, the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids across L.A. and Chicago and deployed National Guard troops to Washington D.C. It has also pressured universities to comply with his agenda or lose funding, fired government officials he deems insufficiently loyal and embarked on an aggressive sweep of prosecutions of political opponents.

“We’re seeing an escalation, right?,” said Hunter Dunn, a spokesman for 50501, one of the “No Kings” coalition’s core organizing partners. “We are watching as ICE’s mass deportation program is speeding up and becoming even more aggressive than it was. What happened in Los Angeles is now happening in Memphis, in D.C., in Chicago.”

But the second “No Kings” protest comes with some existential questions for organizers who trying to mount a sustained protest movement. What is the most effective way to challenge Trump? And how do you make noise without playing into the president’s hands?

Saturday’s revival of the massive series of demonstrations — organized around the slogan “No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings” — will voice left-wing concerns that the Trump administration is embracing authoritarian tactics and unraveling U.S. democracy. But it will also include a broader range of issues, including rising prices and rollbacks of environmental protections.

For Dunn, a 22-year-old organizer in Los Angeles County who is part of a coalition of thousands of groups, the threat Trump poses goes beyond immigration. Trump, he noted, had used the Federal Communications Commission to try to silence broadcasters he does not like, brought “spurious” charges against protesters and demonstrators outside of ICE facilities and signed a so-called “big, beautiful bill” that Dunn said had funneled trillions of dollars from the average American to billionaires who supported the Trump regime.

“We’re seeing the Trump administration repeatedly try and fail to shake the pillars of democracy, and in doing so, escalate the threat level,” Dunn said.

The June 14 event inspired more than five million people to rally against Trump. One test will be whether they can increase that number on Saturday.

In both Los Angeles and Chicago, Trump has tried to use protests — many of them peaceful — to claim that the streets are unsafe and in need of military troops. Trump pushed back against the underlying premise of the protest in an interview with Fox News Friday.

“They’re referring to me as a king,” he said. “I’m not a king.”

Protesters also face increasing attacks from Trump’s allies on the right, some of whom are branding their demonstrations as anti-American.

“We call it the ‘hate America’ rally,” U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday at a news conference. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see Antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”

Organizers expect a broad and diverse group of Americans to attend Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations. About 600 more events are scheduled than the 2,100 demonstrations that took place in June, and slightly more people have signed up, even though the organization is discouraging registrations.

David S. Meyer, a professor of sociology at UC Irvine who studies social movements, said that people’s opinions about the Trump administration have not changed too much since June. Rather, he argued, people felt a higher level of urgency about the danger of the Trump administration.

“What’s increased is the willingness of people to take more action, to do something,” he said. “I think there’s a hunger for action.”

Meyer said he was surprised to see key GOP leaders falling into line with Trump and pushing the idea that “No Kings” is anti-American.

“There are plenty of presidents who’ve encountered protests against their policies,” Meyer said. “That’s part of what America is all about. And usually presidents say, ‘I have to represent everybody and do what I think is best for the country. And I understand that there are other Americans who disagree with me.’”

In an attempt to broaden the scope of “No Kings,” Meyer noted, organizers are appealing to Americans upset over the rising cost of living, gutting of environmental protections, sweeping overhauls of federal agencies and the government shutdown over looming healthcare cuts. These issues, Meyer argued, are connected to the theme of American democracy.

“Trump doesn’t consult with people who disagree with him … and the people surrounding him, and this is by design, are explicitly chosen because of their loyalty rather than their specific competencies,” Meyer said. “The strategy of the ‘No Kings’ organizers is to provide a kind of large and inclusive bucket for all the grievances to fit into and for people with all kinds of different gripes to show up.”

Another reason “No Kings” touches on so many issues, Dunn said, is in response to the Republican tactic — articulated by Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone” — of overwhelming the public with a barrage of information, disinformation and controversy.

“Republicans’ strategy is to worsen the economy for everyone, to worsen the cost of living for the average American… to try to weaken the American people and make it harder for them to stand up against this administration’s abuses,” Dunn said. “So that’s why we’re standing up on all those fronts, because we have to meet them at every front that they’re using to harm the American people.”

The goal of “No Kings” goes beyond just getting Americans out on the streets together in solidarity against Trump. They want to connect people who are upset and frustrated with the Trump administration to local organizing groups.

“Getting involved in those groups, making those face to face connections and joining them will have a much larger impact over the next few days, the next few weeks, next few months, the next few years, than just one day of protest,” Dunn said.

Going forward, Dunn said, one of the key questions facing the Trump resistance movement is how to pressure leading Democratic elected officials to get on board.

While legislators such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen had done a lot to resist the Trump administration, he said, he wanted to put more pressure on mainstream Democrats across the country.

“How do we get support from what is supposed to be the opposition party?”

Dunn said he was not worried about the prospect of violence Saturday when millions take to the streets. The rallies and demonstrations that took place on the June demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful, he noted. Organizers put a major emphasis on de-escalation and protest safety, bringing in community and faith leaders and training tens of thousands of volunteers across the country in de-escalation. He scoffed at the idea extremists might hijack any of the demonstrations.

“The biggest threat to safety at every protest I’ve ever been at — unless law enforcement gets involved — is always dehydration and heat exhaustion,” Dunn said.

Olivia Negron, 73, an organizer with Studio City Rising who has protested in that L.A. neighborhood every weekend since April, said she was alarmed not just by the president’s rhetoric, but by the Trump administration’s actions against immigrants through the courts and in the streets.

“The president doesn’t know what it is to be American,” said Negron, a Latina and the child of a U.S. Navy officer. “The American dream is about inclusivity and making sure that immigrants are welcomed into the United States.”

Negron, who marched against the war in Vietnam, said she felt the people in power have taken away what it means to be American and made it difficult to fly the American flag. But she said she was hopeful that the Trump administration’s actions since the last “No Kings” day would push more people to protest.

“We need to turn the ship of state around and get this democracy heading in the right direction,” Negron said. “Absolutely more inclusion, more equity, more diversity. Diversity is our strength and empathy is our superpower.”

With holiday shopping madness around the corner, Amazon is beefing up its staffing, and announced plans this week to hire 30,000 seasonal workers at its distribution centers in California.

The effort is part of a broader hiring push by the e-commerce giant to add 250,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal roles across the United States.

The California jobs will include as many as 3,000 openings across Los Angeles, Long Beach and Anaheim, and 8,000 across Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario, the company said.

Amazon said many of its seasonal roles could transition into year-round employment with benefits.

“Seasonal Amazon jobs offer competitive pay, flexible schedules, and the opportunity to be part of the bustling retail industry during its busiest time of year,” the company said in its news release about the hiring effort.

Amazon spokesperson Carly Levy said regular full- and part-time employees earn an average of $23 per hour with benefits, and seasonal employees, who don’t receive benefits, earn about $19 per hour on average.

Levy said the number of seasonal positions that are converted to permanent positions will depend on the company’s operational needs in the coming months.

Experts and labor advocates have said seasonal and other warehouse work at Amazon can be difficult and physically demanding, with increased risks during peak seasons because of a flood of new, inexperienced workers as well as higher pressure to meet quotas.

“You get a lot of people who aren’t career shipping and receiving people picking up seasonal work,” said Bilal Kassem, an attorney and co-founder of Oakland-based firm Pacific Workers. “People who aren’t used to doing the work are more likely to get injured.”

Kassem suggests that new workers acquaint themselves with safety guidelines, and ensure they have proper channels to express concerns.

Sheheryar Kaoosji, executive director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for warehouse workers, said people take work at Amazon over the holidays hoping it will turn into a permanent position — but very soon after Christmas and New Year’s, many are let go. He said workers complain that there’s not a clear process or path to permanent employment.

“It’s very arbitrary,” Kaoosji said. “Sometimes we talk to workers who have been seasonal employees for multiple years and don’t get let on, and other people come in for the first time and are offered permanent employment.”

In Amazon parlance, seasonal employees are referred to as “white badges,” while part- and full-time employees are “blue badges.”

Levy, the Amazon spokeperson, said seasonal workers receive the same onboarding and training that blue-badge employees receive, and that they can apply for any permanent positions open at any time during their employment. The company has said injury rates in its facilities have improved significantly and that it continues to invest in safety throughout its operations.

The pilot who crashed a helicopter in Huntington Beach near a waterfront hotel on Saturday, injuring five people including himself, was known for leaning into thrills during some of his flights, according to a review of his social media.

Videos shared on pilot Eric Nixon’s Instagram page showed several low-altitude maneuvers, including some that appear to come very close to vehicles and buildings. In one that appeared to promote Saturday’s helicopter landing party for the Cars ’n Copters on the Coast event in the Orange County city, one of Nixon’s choppers swooped in close to the rooftop lounge at Hilton’s Waterfront Beach Resort — near where he later crashed.

Five people were injured when Nixon’s Bell helicopter — the type made popular by the 1980s television drama “Airwolf” — crashed in Huntington Beach Saturday afternoon as the city readied for the car and helicopter show.

Frightening videos captured the crash, showing the helicopter spinning out of control before crashing onto palm trees and the stairwell of a pedestrian bridge connecting a beach parking lot on Pacific Coast Highway to the Hyatt Regency resort.

Some videos appeared to show the helicopter’s tail rotor fly off moments before the crash in front of hundreds of spectators. People can be heard in the video screaming and are seen scrambling to evade debris.

Two people were pulled from the aircraft, and three people, including a child, were injured on the ground, police said.

The helicopter was being piloted by owner Nixon, who was bringing the 1980 Bell 222 to appear in the annual Cars ’n Copters show Sunday featuring exotic cars along with aircraft from private owners, law enforcement and the military. Helicopters flew in Saturday for a “landing party” event.

Despite the crash, the show went on Sunday, appearing to draw hundreds to the flashy car and helicopter event. Organizers posted online that they were “sending our prayers out to all involved in the unfortunate incident.”

Nixon’s father-in-law, Jerry Miller, told the Orange County Register on Saturday night that Nixon was “in the hospital with some broken ribs, crushed vertebrae and several bruises.”

In addition to Nixon and another person in the helicopter with him, a child and two adults were injured on the ground. All five were hospitalized, but no official information was released about their injuries as of early Sunday afternoon.

Nixon’s Instagram account said he and his passenger were safe after the crash.

A GoFundMe account, which could not be independently verified, identified the youngest victim and said the boy was in a hospital with a collapsed lung and brain bleed.

In images obtained by KTLA, bystanders can be seen pulling a child from beneath the wreckage and whisking the boy away. The crash was “like something in a nightmare,” witness Kurt Johnston told KTLA.

One pilot told NBC 4 that Nixon made a quick decision on Saturday.

“He chose to sacrifice the helicopter and put it on top of the palm trees, therefore avoiding cars and people that were there,” Esteban Jimenez said.

Nixon’s Bell 222 departed from Redlands Municipal Airport, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.

A cosmetically modified Bell 222 was the centerpiece of “Airwolf,” which revolved around a high-technology attack helicopter, code-named Airwolf, and its crew.

The crash has been reported to the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, police said.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals appears poised to recognize President Trump’s authority to send soldiers to Portland, Ore., with members of the court signaling receptiveness to an expansive new read of the president’s power to put boots on the ground in American cities.

A three-judge panel from the appellate court — including two members appointed by Trump during his first term — heard oral arguments Thursday after Oregon challenged the legality of the president’s order to deploy hundreds of soldiers to Portland. The administration claims the city has become lawless; Oregon officials argue Trump is manufacturing a crisis to justify calling in the National Guard.

While the court has not issued a decision, a ruling in Trump’s favor would mark a sharp rightward turn for the once-liberal circuit — and probably set up a Supreme Court showdown over why and how the U.S. military can be used domestically.

“I’m sort of trying to figure out how a district court of any nature is supposed to get in and question whether the president’s assessment of ‘executing the laws’ is right or wrong,” said Judge Ryan D. Nelson of Idaho Falls, Idaho, one of the two Trump appointees hearing the arguments.

“That’s an internal decision making, and whether there’s a ton of protests or low protests, they can still have an impact on his ability to execute the laws,” he said.

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland, another Trump appointee, previously called the president’s justification for federalizing Oregon troops “simply untethered to the facts” in her temporary restraining on Oct. 4.

The facts about the situation on the ground in Portland were not in dispute at the hearing on Thursday. The city has remained mostly calm in recent months, with protesters occasionally engaging in brief skirmishes with authorities stationed outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

Instead, Nelson and Judge Bridget S. Bade of Phoenix, whom Trump once floated as a possible Supreme Court nominee, questioned how much the facts mattered.

“The president gets to direct his resources as he deems fit, and it seems a little counterintuitive to me that the city of Portland can come and say, ‘No you need to do it differently,’” Nelson said.

He also appeared to endorse the Department of Justice’s claim that “penalizing” the president for waiting until protests had calmed to deploy soldiers to quell them created a perverse incentive to act first and ask questions later.

“It just seems like such a tortured reading of the statute,” the judge said. He then referenced the first battle of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, saying, “I’m not sure even President Lincoln would be able to bring in forces when he did, because if he didn’t do it immediately after Fort Sumter, [Oregon’s] argument would be, ‘Oh, things are OK now.’”

Trump’s efforts to use troops to quell protests and support federal immigration operations have led to a growing tangle of legal challenges. The Portland deployment was halted by Immergut, who blocked Trump from federalizing Oregon troops. (A ruling from the same case issued the next day prevents already federalized troops from being deployed.)

In June, a different 9th Circuit panel also made up of two Trump appointees ruled that the president had broad — though not “unreviewable” — discretion to determine whether facts on the ground met the threshold for military response in Los Angeles. Thousands of federalized National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines were deployed over the summer amid widespread protests over immigration enforcement.

The June decision set precedent for how any future deployment in the circuit’s vast territory can be reviewed. It also sparked outrage, both among those who oppose armed soldiers patrolling American streets and those who support them.

Opponents argue repeated domestic deployments shred America’s social fabric and trample protest rights protected by the 1st Amendment. With soldiers called into action so far in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, many charge the administration is using the military for political purposes.

“The military should not be acting as a domestic police force in this country except in the most extreme circumstances,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “That set of circumstances is not present right now anywhere in the country, so this is an abuse of power — and a very dangerous one because of the precedent it sets.”

Supporters say the president has sole authority to determine the facts on the ground and if they warrant military intervention. They argue any check by the judicial branch is an illegal power grab, aimed at thwarting response to a legitimate and growing “invasion from within.”

“What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one,” Trump said in an address to military top brass last week. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

The 9th Circuit agreed to rehear the Los Angeles case with an 11-member “en banc” panel in Pasadena on Oct. 22, signaling a schism among Trump’s own judges over the boundaries of the president’s power.

Still, Trump’s authority to call soldiers into American cities is only the first piece in a larger legal puzzle spread before the 9th Circuit, experts said.

What federalized troops are allowed to do once deployed is the subject of another court decision now under review. That case could determine whether soldiers are barred from assisting immigration raids, controlling crowds of protesters or any other form of civilian law enforcement.

Trump officials have maintained the president can wield the military as he sees fit — and that cities such as Portland and L.A. would be in danger if soldiers can’t come to the rescue.

“These are violent people, and if at any point we let down our guard, there is a serious risk of ongoing violence,” Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Eric McArthur said. “The president is entitled to say enough is enough and bring in the National Guard.”

Los Angeles Police Department officers raided the warehouse of the famous sneaker retailer CoolKicks and detained its employees, accusing the company of buying stolen shoes.

The company is well-known among sneakerheads across the country for its viral short videos, in which its internet-famous sneaker-authenticator Rami Almordaah evaluates, buys, and sells rare sneakers that often cost thousands of dollars.

Police arrested and later released the chief executive of the company, Adeel Shams, for allegedly receiving known stolen property valued at more than $950, which is a felony charge, according to LAPD Officer Drake Madison.

LAPD officers took three other people into custody and seized dozens of Nike sneakers during the raid, which occurred on the 1700 block of Stewart Street in Santa Monica.

Shams is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 23.

CoolKicks is a sneaker destination for new and used shoes frequented by celebrities, influencers and professional athletes. It offers thousands of collectible sneakers and has two locations in Los Angeles, including one on Melrose Avenue in the Fairfax District.

The company issued a statement on Instagram saying that its leadership had no reason to believe the seized sneakers had been stolen.

“The LAPD impounded a small allotment of Nike sneakers that CoolKicks purchased and received within the last 48 hours, alleging that the merchandise was stolen,” the statement said. “This news came as a complete shock to our entire team.”

There have been no allegations that the sneakers are counterfeit, the company said.

“We entered into this purchase in good faith, as we always have, committed to running an honest business,” the company said.

CoolKicks began when Shams and classmate Bereket Abraham opened a buy-sell-trade sneaker shop on Virginia Commonwealth University’s Richmond campus in 2014. Three days after graduating, Shams moved to Los Angeles to open a flagship store on Melrose.

The Melrose shop is where Almordaah records videos of deals being done. He has amassed more than 2 million followers on TikTok by showcasing his bargaining and verification skills. Almordaah can tell the difference between knockoffs and the real thing by checking details such as font size and even smell.

The sneaker resale business has matured well beyond its humble roots into a collectibles industry in which shoes are assets that trade like stocks on well-known sites including StockX, GOAT and Flight Club. For immediate, in-person transactions, sneaker collectors will buy and sell at a place such as CoolKicks.

Hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to seek a court order to stop President Trump from deploying 300 of the state’s National Guard troops in Oregon, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Sunday night.

Officials from California and Oregon sought the restraining order after the president sent California Guard troops to Oregon earlier on Sunday.

“The rule of law has prevailed — and California’s National Guard will be heading home,” Newsom said in a statement. “This ruling is more than a legal victory, it’s a victory for American democracy itself. Donald Trump tried to turn our soldiers into instruments of his political will, and while our fight continues, tonight the rule of law said, ‘Hell no.’”

The federal judge who issued the restraining order Sunday evening had, just a day before, temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.

“What was unlawful yesterday is unlawful today,” Oregon Atty. Gen. Dan Rayfield told the Associated Press. “The judge’s order was not some minor procedural point for the president to work around, like my 14-year-old does when he doesn’t like my answers.”

Originally, the two states only named the California National Guard when seeking the court order. They asked for the order to be expanded to any Guard troops, however, after a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was submitted to the court saying up to 400 Texas National Guard personnel were being activated for deployment to Oregon, Illinois and possibly elsewhere.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday night in a post on X that he “fully authorized” the use of the Texas National Guard to “ensure safety for federal officials.” “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” he wrote.

In the more sweeping order on Sunday evening, Judge Karin Immergut questioned the federal government’s attorney, asking how the decision to send troops from California and Texas to Oregon could not be seen as anything other than circumventing her order.

Constitutional law experts also called the move an obvious effort by the president to sidestep the judge’s ruling on Saturday.

“This is a blatant attempt to circumvent Judge Immergut’s order,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “Her decision makes very clear that there is no lawful basis for deploying federalized National Guard troops in Oregon.”

Such an action is without precedent, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School.

“I cannot think of a historic analog where we have the president — against the will of local elected officials — sending the federalized National Guard from state A to state B,” she said.

Trump, who mobilized the California National Guard amid immigration protests in Los Angeles in June, has pursued the use of the military in cities including Chicago and Washington, sparking outrage among Democratic officials in those jurisdictions.

He says the interventions are needed to fight crime. Local leaders, including those in Portland, have said the actions are unnecessary and without legal justification.

“The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words — ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents,” Newsom said.

The federal jurist who issued the ruling in Oregon, Judge Immergut, was appointed by Trump during his first term.

In June, Newsom and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a federal lawsuit over Trump’s mobilization of the state’s National Guard during immigration protests in Los Angeles.

In a statement before Judge Immergut’s ruling Sunday evening, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that Trump “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement.”

Referring to Newsom by a crude nickname, she said that he “should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country.”

Jackson couldn’t be reached Sunday evening following the temporary restraining order.

Portland is a new focus

There have been regular protests in Portland outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in recent weeks. But those demonstrations in a city of nearly 650,000 have been far smaller and less disruptive than, for example, the protests there during the summer of 2020.

Immergut noted in her ruling Saturday that the scale of recent demonstrations didn’t justify the use of federalized forces and that deploying them could hurt Oregon’s sovereignty.

Goitein said it was clear that the conditions detailed under that order had not been met by the Trump administration. “So what he’s doing is illegal, under her opinion,” Goitein said.

Trump appealed the judge’s ruling late Saturday.

Tension in California

As protesters filled L.A. streets in June to demonstrate over federal immigration enforcement raids, Trump deployed nearly 2,000 members of the National Guard to the city without the consent of the governor.

If not for the National Guard, Trump said, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”

But local and state leaders criticized the move as an unwarranted escalation. And The Times reported that many Guard personnel had little to do and seemed bored by the assignment.

Days after the Guard was deployed, Newsom and Bonta filed a lawsuit. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the president’s use of the National Guard soldiers and Marines in L.A. was illegal — but he allowed the 300 remaining here to stay as long as they did not enforce civilian laws. The Trump administration appealed the ruling.

Those same 300 troops were rerouted to Portland on Sunday, a spokesperson for the governor said.

“The Trump Administration’s flagrant disregard for the courts was on full display when it sought to circumvent Judge Immergut’s order blocking the federalization of the Oregon National Guard by redeploying troops from Los Angeles to Portland,” Bonta said. “This disrespect for the rule of law cannot stand — and I’m glad the court agreed.”

Newsom has ratcheted up his rhetoric about Trump in recent days: On Friday, Newsom lashed out at universities that may sign the president’s higher education compact, which demands rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.

“I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history,” Newsom said. “This is it. We are losing this country.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Months of negative news have triggered a tough summer for tourism in Los Angeles, deepening the economic woes for a city buffeted by natural disasters and immigration raids.

Tourist arrivals fell by close to 10% this season, according to the latest numbers from Visit California.

The region’s economy and image suffered significant setbacks this year. Shocking images of the destructive Eaton and Palisades fires in January, followed by the immigration crackdown in June, made global news and repelled visitors. Meanwhile, President Trump’s fickle tariff policies and other geopolitical posturing have convinced many international tourists to avoid America.

On Hollywood Boulevard, there are fewer tourists, and the ones who show up spend less, says Salim Osman. He works for Ride Like A Star, an exotic car company that rents to visitors looking to take a luxury vehicle for a spin and snap the quintessential L.A. selfie.

Last year, crowds lined up to rent its Ferraris and Porches for around $200 an hour, Salim says. However, this summer, foot traffic dropped by nearly 50%.

“It used to be shoulder to shoulder out here,” he said, looking along the boulevard. “It’s a lot harder for people to come here, or they’re afraid of what’s going on here, so they just don’t come.”

Business has been slow around the TCL Chinese Theater, where visitors place their hands into the concrete handprints of celebrities like Kristen Stewart and Denzel Washington.

There were fewer people to hop onto sightseeing buses, stop inside Madame Tussauds wax museum and snap impromptu photos with patrolling characters such as Spiderman and Mickey Mouse. Souvenir shops nearby say they have also had to increase the prices of many of their knick-knacks because of tariffs and a decline in sales.

Of all the state’s international travelers, the most significant absence was from Canadian tourists. Arrivals from visitors from up north fell around 30% in June and July.

Summer in Palm Springs was okay this year, said its mayor, Ron deHarte, but only because domestic tourists offset the sharp decline in Canadians.

“We’ve hurt our Canadian Friends with actions that the administration has taken. It’s understandable,” he said. “We don’t know how long they won’t want to travel to the States, but we’re hopeful that it is short-term.”

Visitors from China, India and Germany also avoided the state. Surprisingly, Mexican tourists didn’t stay away. There were 5.4% more arrivals from our southern neighbor despite the ICE raids, which often targeted Latino people.

There was a dip in traffic to most Los Angeles airports. With the World Cup on the books for next year and the Summer Olympics gearing up in 2028, the growing decline in tourism is worrisome for many across all industries.

Cynthia Guidry, the director of the Long Beach Airport, says reduced airline schedules, economic pressures and rising costs also impacted airport traffic. She’s currently seeking out ways to best prepare for the Olympics, which don’t involve flight revenue, such as dining at the airport and souvenir shopping.

“We’re focused on attracting new service, growing non-aeronautical revenue and managing expenses to stay resilient,” she said.

Many of the state’s most prominent attractions are also experiencing dry spells. Yosemite reported a decrease of as much as 50% in bookings ahead of Memorial Day weekend.

Dennis Speigel, president of International Theme Park Services, a consulting firm in the industry, says that this past year has been a “soft year” for most theme parks nationwide.

There have been fewer international visitors and more domestic traffic, as more people are embracing the idea of staycations, or spending their holidays closer to home.

“People in the locales where the parks are stayed in their areas,” he said, adding that this summer people stayed home because of “the general economy, the media, the tariffs, the confusion and the uncertainty that came with that.”

Los Angeles and California depend on tourism.

Last year, the state’s tourism hit a new high, with visitors spending $157.3 billion, up 3% from 2023, and creating 24,000 jobs, according to a 2024 economic impact report from Visit California.

“Los Angeles is California’s primary international gateway; the impacts are felt statewide,” Adam Burke, president of Los Angeles Tourism, said in a statement to The Times. “Looking ahead, long-term recovery will depend on global economic conditions and how the U.S. is perceived abroad.”

Australian tourists Geoffrey and Tennille Mutton ignored the warnings of their friends and family to bring their two daughters to L.A.

“A lot of people have had a changed view of America,” said Geoffrey as his family enjoyed Ben & Jerry’s ice cream outside of Hollywood’s Dolby Theater. “They don’t want to come here and support this place.”

The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento has said she was fired after telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.

Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor who was made the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California earlier this year, told the New York Times that she was let go after she warned Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that a court injunction blocked him from carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in Sacramento.

Beckwith did not respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times, but told the New York Times that “we have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

Bovino presided over a series of raids in Los Angeles starting in June in which agents spent weeks pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.

But such indiscriminate tactics were not allowed in California’s Eastern District after the American Civil Liberties Union and United Farm Workers filed suit against the Border Patrol earlier in the year and won an injunction.

The suit followed a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

As Beckwith described it to New York Times reporters, she received a phone call from Bovino on July 14 in which he said he was bringing agents to Sacramento.

She said she told him that the injunction filed after the Kern County raid meant he could not stop people indiscriminately in the Eastern District. The next day, she wrote him an email in which, as quoted in the New York Times, she stressed the need for “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”

Shortly thereafter her work cell phone and her work computer stopped working. A bit before 5 p.m. she received an email informing her that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.

It was the end of a 15-year career in in the Department of Justice in which she had served as the office’s Criminal Division Chief and First Assistant and prosecuted members of the Aryan Brotherhood, suspected terrorists, and fentanyl traffickers.

Two days later on July 17, Bovino and his agents moved into Sacramento, conducting a raid at a Home Depot south of downtown.

In an interview with Fox News that day, Bovino said the raids were targeted and based on intelligence. “Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”

He also said that his operations would not slow down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” he said. “We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”

Beckwith is one of a number of top prosecutors who have quit or been fired as the Trump administration pushes the Department of Justice to aggressively carry out his policies, including investigating people who have been the president’s political targets.

In March, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources.

In July, Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was fired by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

And just last week, a U. S. attorney in Virginia was pushed out after he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute James B. Comey. A new prosecutor this week won a grand jury indictment against Comey on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

In the push to expand as quickly as possible, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is aggressively wooing recruits with experience slapping handcuffs on suspects: sheriff’s deputies, state troopers and local cops.

The agency even shelled out for airtime during an NFL game with an ad explicitly targeting officers.

“In sanctuary cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down,” the August recruitment ad warned over a sunset panorama of the Los Angeles skyline. “Join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst.”

To meet its hiring goal, the Trump administration is offering hefty signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness and six-figure salaries to would-be deportation officers.

ICE has also broadened its pool of potential applicants by dropping age requirements, eliminating Spanish-language proficiency requirements and cutting back on training for new hires with law enforcement experience.

Along the way, the agency has walked a delicate line, seeking to maintain cordial relations with local department leaders while also trying to poach their officers.

“We’re not trying to pillage a bunch of officers from other agencies,” said Tim Oberle, an ICE spokesman. “If you see opportunities to move up, make more money to take care of your family, of course you’re going to want it.”

But despite the generous new compensation packages, experts said ICE is still coming up short in some of the places it needs agents the most.

“The pay in California is incredible,” said Jason Litchney of All-Star Talent, a recruiting firm. “Some of these Bay Area agencies are $200,000 a year without overtime.”

Even entry level base pay for a Los Angeles Police Department officer is more than $90,000 year. In San Francisco, it’s close to $120,000. While ICE pays far more in California than in most other states, cash alone is less likely to induce many local cops to swap their dress blues for fatigues and a neck gaiter.

“If you were a state police officer who’s harbored a desire to become a federal agent, I don’t know if you want to join ICE at this time,” said John Sandweg, who headed ICE under President Obama.

Police agencies nationwide have struggled for years to recruit and retain qualified officers. The LAPD has only graduated an average of 31 recruits in its past 10 academy classes, about half the number needed to keep pace with the city’s plan to grow the force to 9,500 officers.

“That is a tremendous issue for us,” said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, a professional advocacy organization.

ICE, too, has long failed to meet its staffing targets. As of a year ago, the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations — it’s dedicated deportation force — had 6,050 officers, barely more than in 2021.

As of Sep. 16, the Department of Homeland Security said it has sent out more than 18,000 tentative job offers after a summer recruitment campaign that drew more than 150,000 applications.

It did not specify how many applicants were working cops.

At an ICE career expo in Texas last month, the agency at times turned away anyone who didn’t already have authorization to carry a badge or an honorable discharge from the military.

“We have so many people who are current police officers who are trying to get on the job right now and that’s who we’ve been prioritizing,” one ICE official at the event said.

But the spirited pursuit of rank-and-file officers has sparked anger and resentment among top cops around the country.

“Agencies are short-staffed,” said David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. “They are complaining constantly about recruitment and retention and looking every which way to maintain their workforce — and here comes along ICE — trying to pull those officers away.”

Law enforcement experts say that outside of California, especially in lower income states, many young officers take home about as much as public school teachers, making the opportunity for newer hires to jump ship for a federal gig even more enticing.

Some fear the ICE hiring spree will attract problematic candidates.

“The scariest part keeping me up at night is you hear agencies say we’re lowering standards because we can’t hire,” said Justin Biedinger, head of Guardian Alliance Technologies, which streamlines background checks, applicant testing and other qualifications for law enforcement agencies.

At the same time, the Trump administration is finding ways to deputize local cops without actually hiring them.

The Department of Homeland Security has dramatically overhauled a controversial cooperation program called 287(g) that enlists local police officers and sheriff’s deputies to do the work of ICE agents.

As of early September, according to the program website, 474 agencies in 32 states were participating, up from 141 agencies in March.

Some states such as Georgia and Florida require their agencies to apply for the program. Others, including California, forbid it.

But that, too, could soon change.

The administration is exploring ways to force holdouts to comply, including by conditioning millions of dollars of funding for domestic violence shelters, rape crisis hotlines and child abuse centers on compliance with its immigration directives. In response, California and several other states have sued.

Even in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions such as Los Angeles, where local laws prohibit cops from participating in civil immigration enforcement, police officers have found themselves tangled up in federal operations. The LAPD has drawn criticism for officers responding to the scenes of ICE arrests where confrontations have erupted.

“We get called a lot to come out and assist in providing security or making sure that it doesn’t turn violent,” said Marvel, the police advocacy organization president.

“The vast majority of peace officers do not want to do immigration enforcement because that’s not the job they signed up for,” Marvel said. “We want to protect the community.”

Among the agency’s most vocal critics, the push to beef up ICE is viewed as both dangerous and counterproductive.

“Punishing violent criminals is the work of local and state law enforcement,” said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute. “If we were to abolish ICE and devote the money to those things, we’d have lower violence and crime.”

The cash and perks ICE is dangling will inevitably draw more people, experts said, but some warned that newly minted deportation officers should be careful about mortgaging their future.

The potential $50,000 hiring bonus is paid out in installments over several years — and the role may lack job security.

At the same time Trump is doubling ICE’s headcount, he’s also rewriting the rules to make it far easier to ax federal workers, said Sandweg, the former Obama official.

That could come back to haunt many agency recruits four years from now, he said: “I think there’s a very good chance a future Democratic administration is going to eliminate a lot of these positions.”

Zurie Pope, a Times fellow with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, contributed to this report.

As officials ponder whether to spend at least a year and $1.5 billion more on an already ambitious upgrade of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, locals are asking if the mess they will have to endure during construction will be worth it.

Soon after the California Department of Transportation shared plans to fix up the more than 60-year-old bridge that connects downtown Long Beach to San Pedro and Terminal Island, the Port of Los Angeles piled on with even bigger plans.

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of L.A., suggested Caltrans also raise the height of the symbol of the locality by 26 feet.

Raising the bridge would allow larger cargo ships to pass under its deck, helping create jobs and keep the port relevant. It would also increase the project’s price, already projected at more than $700 million, by an additional $1.5 billion.

Most painfully for local commuters and businesses, it would mean the bridge will be closed for around 28 months rather than the originally planned 16 months.

About 40% of the port’s cargo container capacity is beyond the bridge, which is 185 feet high. Raising the bridge to 211 feet would accommodate the next generation of cargo ships, which will be larger and more energy efficient, Seroka said.

“You’re going to need more capacity at the nation’s largest port,” he said. “Caltrans was looking to resurface the bridge and we thought maybe there was a way you could accomplish both.”

Seroka said he has already secured private funding from banks and industry participants to raise the bridge by putting sleeve lifts and platforms on the bridge’s legs.

The Bayonne Bridge connecting Staten Island, N.Y., and Bayonne, N.J., was raised in a similar manner in 2019.

While the Port of Los Angeles has garnered support for the idea, many communities surrounding the bridge have raised concerns about travel disruptions and the effect of rerouted traffic.

Closing the bridge for more than two years would require an alternative route for cargo trucks traveling to and from the port, and would likely affect tourism across San Pedro and Long Beach.

“It’s not only for employees going back and forth through the port complex,” said Elise Swanson, president of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. “The bridge is really a connection to our communities for art, culture, dining.”

In August, the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce voted to support a study of the effects of raising the bridge.

Swanson said she saw the merits of raising the bridge while acknowledging the disruption the project would have, particularly to Wilmington residents, where truck traffic would be rerouted.

Preliminary detour routes would send commuters, tourists and cargo through Harry Bridges Boulevard in Wilmington and on the 110 and 405 freeways.

“We’re all in agreement on the study and getting all the facts in front of us,” Swanson said. “If we’re going to go through all of this work and spend this money on fixing the current bridge, is that really a good expenditure of funds if the bridge won’t meet future needs for the shipping industry?”

Caltrans is expected to decide on the bridge raising in October, following a late September meeting with the Port of Los Angeles. The $706 million re-decking project is slated to begin next year and will also replace the bridge railings, fences and median barrier.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Tim McOsker, who represents port-adjacent communities including Wilmington, Harbor City and San Pedro, said he supports raising the bridge as long as it is safe and takes locals’ needs into account.

“In the years that it would take to come up with the plans, the financing and the environmental review for raising the bridge, we have to think about the traveling public in the meantime,” he said.

Under its original plans, Caltrans hoped to reopen the bridge to traffic in late 2027 or early 2028, in time for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

If the bridge is raised, it would likely not be done before the Olympics, making it harder for the tourists to visit that corner of Los Angeles.

The Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn., which represents marine terminal operators, says raising the bridge is worth the trouble.

“We would like to see the bridge’s useful life increased,” Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn. President Michael Jacob said of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which opened in 1963.

Increasing the port’s capacity and ability to accommodate larger ships would boost job opportunities by about 20% for longshoremen, truckers, warehouse workers and terminal operators, Seroka said. The newest and largest container ships are also the most environmentally friendly, he said.

Caltrans declined to comment on its decision-making process regarding the bridge raising and directed questions about the bridge to the Port of L.A.

“Caltrans is focused on delivering a needed bridge deck replacement project and is collaborating with our partners on those efforts,” the department said in a statement.

McOsker said his constituents are waiting on a decision.

“Making the bridge higher with a greater clearance is really important to industry and the workforce, but it also has significant time implications and significant cost implications,” McOsker said. “Caltrans will have to speak for themselves.”

A grainy circle flashes on the top-right corner of the screen at the Eagle Theater. The single-screen repertory cinema, run by the nonprofit organization Vidiots, was showing a 35-millimeter print of Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychological drama “The Master.”

The faint warning is easily missed by most viewers, but it appears every 10 minutes, alerting the projectionist to change the reel.

The auditorium was sold out. Audience members clapped as the film title appeared onscreen. There was a buzz in the air even before the lights faded to black with the standby line filled with hopefuls trying to grab a last-minute ticket. The stakes were high for the person manning the reel exchange.

Michael Rousselet, a projectionist at the Eagle Rock theater, often drinks a lot of coffee to stay alert during late-night screenings.

“If we do a good job, no one knows we exist,” Rousselet quipped as he showed off the projection booth. “If we mess up, everyone knows we exist.”

The carefully curated communal experience offered by repertory theaters is enduring the hardships of the box office, even after the pandemic, which led to the demise of some well-known cinemas. The famed Cinerama Dome and adjoining former Arclight theater on Sunset Boulevard have still not reopened, despite popular demand.

A Monday screening of a 35-millimeter copy of the 2007 film “Michael Clayton” by American Cinematheque sold out. Independent cinema has captured a niche population that has helped it prevail in a time when box office revenue is tumbling down.

The summer box office season, which stretches from early May through Labor Day, grossed $3.67 billion in the U.S. and Canada, down slightly from last year and significantly less than the pre-pandemic norm of $4 billion. Some new films with major stars struggle to get anyone to show up. “Americana,” starring Sydney Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s top young stars, earned $500,000 during its opening weekend last month.

The unique cinematic experiences crafted by the different repertory theaters play a pivotal role in revitalizing the film industry in Los Angeles, according to Maggie Mackay, executive director of Vidiots.

“I don’t think you can [raise the next generation of film lovers] through one platform,” Mackay said, sitting down in her auditorium. “I don’t think you can fall in love with an art form by clicking a few times and observing it by yourself.”

A 2024 study by Art House Convergence showed that between 2019 and 2024, audiences became younger and more diverse. The number of wide releases have also made the independent industry healthier, according to Rich Daughtridge, president of Independent Cinema Alliance.

Independent theaters “are still down compared to 2019, but the momentum attraction is going up,” he said.

Netflix bought the Egyptian Theatre from American Cinematheque for an undisclosed amount in 2020. The influx of money helped the organization grow the brand and host more screenings — the total jump from 500 screenings to 1,600 with 350,000 patrons visiting their theaters, according to Grant Moninger, artistic director at American Cinematheque.

Part of the reason audiences are choosing smaller theaters over multiplexes is the care and attention staff members put into each showing. The viewing experience at these revival theaters always starts with a crew member reminding the audience to stay away from their phones — they want everyone to enjoy the tiny scratches, dust specks and vibrant colors of the print they are showing.

“I think people are desperately in search of community right now and of feeling closer to other people and sharing things and not feeling disconnected by technology,” Sean Fennessey, the host of the podcast “The Big Picture,” said after the “Michael Clayton” screening.

“We’re very lucky in Los Angeles that we have so many great spaces … that are encouraging people to come together and hang out and laugh and cry and feel chills,” he added.

Each location offers Hollywood cinephiles and casual viewers alike options to catch a variety of movies based on their niche. Independent cinema has had the least trouble recruiting an audience post-pandemic, according to Art House Convergence.

The Vista Theater and the New Beverly show personal copies from the private collection of Quentin Tarantino, who saved the theaters from extinction. Its recent run of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” sold out and warranted the Vista announcing a new run of it.

American Cinematheque hosted a festival of films handpicked by different podcasters, which sold out screenings in the middle of the week.

Vidiots hosted a discussion with American Cinema Editors member Leslie Jones after a screening of 2012’s “The Master,” a filmed she worked on. The showing sold out and most of its audience stayed late for a Q&A discussion with her.

Regardless of the inspiration these repertory theaters provide with, say, retrospectives of Akira Kurosawa, the model is not bulletproof to the punches theaters have taken. Organizations like Vidiots and American Cinematheque still rely on their nonprofit status.

These organizations count on donations and memberships. Access to directors, actors, prints and people in the industry also plays an important role in keeping afloat, according to Moninger.

“Our job is to get everybody in [the theater]. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re a nonprofit,’” he said.

The uncertainty of the model does leave room for growth, according to Roger Durling, the executive director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The nonprofit organization recently purchased the Film Center, a five-screen multiplex, in the downtown Santa Barbara area. It is the second five-screen theater they have purchased, and it will also screen films during the festival every winter.

Throughout the year, when the theaters aren’t showing movies for the festival, the organization will maintain its existence through a repertory model.

“The nonprofit aspect allows you to concentrate more on the artistic side as opposed to thinking, ‘I just need to make money,’” Durling said.

But the thought is still on his mind.

“The more you concentrate on the artistic side of it, the money will take care of itself.”

The Original Pantry, the iconic eatery in downtown Los Angeles that closed earlier this year, is set to make a comeback.

The diner, which had been serving up hot coffee, burgers and breakfast platters for more than 100 years, was acquired this week by real estate developer Leo Pustilnikov.

Pustilnikov bought the Original Pantry’s nearly 8,000-square-foot building on James M. Wood Boulevard with the blessing of hospitality union Unite Here Local 11. The union, which represents Pantry workers, inked a deal with Pustilnikov ensuring that the diner would keep union representation and bring back all 25 workers who lost their jobs when it closed in March.

Pustilnikov has an electic set of real estate interests, having amassed high-end properties from Beverly Hills to Redondo Beach alongside a slew of supportive housing units on Skid Row. He plans to reopen the diner on New Year’s Eve, if he’s able to acquire the necessary permits and licenses in time.

“I wanted to buy the Pantry because it’s a piece of L.A. history,” Pustilnikov told The Times. “Some of those employees have worked there for almost 50 years, I’d like for them to be able to finish out their careers in a place they love and made successful. I never actually considered buying it without them.”

The restaurant’s former owner, the Richard J. Riordan Trust, abruptly shuttered the restaurant in March after a labor dispute. Pustilnikov acquired the restaurant building and a parking lot for patrons across the street for a total of $5.5 million in a sale that closed Thursday, he said.

On Thursday morning, the shuttered diner was adorned with festive red, white and black balloons. A cake decorated to look like a stack of pancakes dripping with maple syrup rested on a nearby folding table. Workers and their families, as well as union organizers, labor leaders and L.A. City Council members Ysabel Jurado and Curren Price gathered outside for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“Now we can breathe,” said Diana Garcia, who has worked at the diner for 17 years. “We’re all excited to come back.”

Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, credited workers for staging protests and fundraisers to keep the diner open.

“The Pantry’s dishwashers, cooks, and servers — with more than 300 years of service between them — never gave up,” Petersen said in a statement.

The Original Pantry opened in 1924 and built its Los Angeles legacy on its 24-hour service, becoming a familiar haunt for night owls. The restaurant changed its location in the 1950s when the building of a freeway off-ramp forced it move. Then, former Mayor Richard Riordan took over the restaurant in 1981 as part of a larger land deal.

Tensions between ownership and workers kickstarted in April 2023, when Pantry workers filed a lawsuit alleging unpaid wages for overtime, and rest and meal breaks. Two weeks later, Riordan died. Ownership of the diner then transferred to Riordan’s trust, which sought to sell the business.

Earlier this year, Unite Here Local 11 attempted to negotiate terms that would require any new owner to honor workers’ existing union contract. But after a tumultuous back and forth, ownership instead closed the restaurant and laid off its workers. The property was listed for sale two months later.

Some of Pustilnikov’s other inroads in downtown L.A. have been contentious. In 2011, he and two wealthy investors sought to purchase half a dozen aging buildings with a value of more than $100 million. But less than a year later, the deals fell through amid allegations of fraud.

Since then, Pustilnikov has built up his portfolio, and made moves last year to buy 1,500 Skid Row apartments. His efforts to run one of the largest collections of supportive housing units in Los Angeles have faced some difficulties. But he has said that, with the project, he hopes to meet the overwhelming housing need in Skid Row by filling hundreds of vacancies in the units.

Times staff writers Paige St. John and Liam Dillon contributed to this report.

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.”

A Trump administration policy to deny bond hearings to immigrants who entered the country without authorization was upheld by an immigration appellate board Friday, expanding mandatory detention to thousands of people already behind bars and potentially millions more nationwide.

Although the policy is being challenged in federal court, the ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals is likely to send an immediate chill through immigration courts where judges for decades have released individuals on bond whom they did not deem a flight risk or danger.

Those judges are now bound by the board’s decision. Immigration courts are not part of the judicial branch but fall under the Department of Justice.

Immigrant rights attorneys say holding immigrants throughout their cases — a process that can sometimes take years — is intended to break the spirit of many and force them to sign their own deportation orders.

“This is an effort to increase the number of people in detention significantly,” said Niels W. Frenzen, director of the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, who is part of a team of attorneys who have filed habeas petitions for dozens of immigrants picked up during the summer raids in Los Angeles.

“Literally millions of people are now subject to being held without bond,” he said.

One of those is Ana Franco Galdamez, a mother of two U.S. citizens who has been in the country for two decades. She was getting treatment for breast cancer when she was arrested in a June 19 raid in Los Angeles County, where nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants reside, according to estimates.

She was denied bond and missed treatment, but she was eventually released after a lawyer filed a habeas case.

“Detention conditions are horrific, and they’ve gotten even worse,” Frenzen said. “The goal of the administration is to make it difficult for people to fight their cases and to give up.”

Federal judges have ruled in several cases that denying bond violated federal statutes and constitutionally protected due process. The group is now seeking to block the no-bond policy in a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Other lawsuits are also pending.

The Trump administration introduced the no-bond policy nationally in a memo in July — paving the way for the mandatory detention of immigrants.

The move came after Congress authorized expanding immigration detention and enforcement amid a crackdown inside courtrooms and at immigration check-ins.

Immigrants, most of whom had been following the rules to adjust, maintain or gain legal status, were arrested and detained.

For months now, those inside the immigration courts system have been pressed to implement Trump administration policies. Judges have been fired, and the Pentagon has said it is identifying military lawyers and judges to temporarily sit on the bench.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the ruling a “big win for our ICE attorneys securing our ability to detain illegal aliens until they are deported.” The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, did not answer specific questions from The Times — but pointed out that the ruling was a precedent.

“It strips judicial discretion in many cases,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It basically says, if you entered illegally, only ICE can decide if you get out of detention.”

The Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision stems from the case of a Venezuelan immigrant who crossed the border in November 2022 near El Paso, and was later granted temporary protected status. That status expired on April 2 after the Trump administration terminated the program, a decision that is also tied up in litigation.

The board determined that immigration judges had no authority to issue bonds because immigrants “who are present in the United States without admission … must be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings.”

In other words, the board’s decision treats people who have been in the U.S. for years the same as newly arriving immigrants at the border, who can be quickly deported without bond.

“We’ve had clients that are pregnant, we’ve had clients that are breastfeeding. We’ve had clients who have never been arrested, let alone commit, convicted of any crime ever, who’ve never missed an ICE check-in — they’re all being told, ‘You’re subject to mandatory detention because of this new interpretation by the Trump administration,’ ” said Jordan Wells, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “This now solidifies that as the law of the land, unless and until [the] federal circuit court rules otherwise.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom sent a letter Friday to California’s home insurer of last resort, asking it to process smoke-damage claims stemming from the Jan. 7 wildfires “expeditiously and fairly.”

Citing more than 200 complaints the Department of Insurance has received from policyholders over how their claims have been handled, the governor urged the California FAIR Plan Association to change its course.

“I write with an urgent call to action regarding smoke damage claims resulting from the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. I am deeply concerned that the FAIR Plan’s handling of these claims is unscrupulous and unfair, and may ultimately be illegal,” stated the letter sent to the plan’s president and board.

The plan, operated and financially backed by the state’s licensed home insurers, including State Farm General, has been deluged with nearly 5,000 claims after its rolls grew following the withdrawl of insurers from the state’s troubled insurance market. The plan has said it expects to pay some $4 billion in claims.

In making his call to action, Newsom cited a cease-and-desist order Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued to the plan in July that calls on it to stop employing a smoke-damage standard that courts have deemed to be illegal.

“I continue to hear from survivors of one of the worst disasters in California history who are angry and frustrated by the delay and denial of their claims,” the letter stated.
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A financially troubled skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles has gone into receivership as office landlords there struggle to keep their buildings leased.

One California Plaza — the gleaming 42-story tower on Bunker Hill that was one of the most prestigious addresses in the city when it opened in the 1980s — has dropped 74% in value from its market peak.

Earlier this year, the owners defaulted on their $300-million debt, set to mature in November, and faced foreclosure.

At the request of lenders, a judge appointed Trigild, a receivership service, to take control of the 1 million-square-foot property, the Real Deal reported.

One California Plaza is appraised at $121.2 million, down from $459 million in 2013, according to a Morningstar Credit report, real estate data provider CoStar said.

Net cash flow at the property trailed expectations by 37% last year, and the building is now 62% leased after the departure of major tenants, including law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which is set to relocate to Century City.

Ownership of the property at 300 S. Grand Ave. includes Los Angeles landlord Rising Realty Partners, which declined to comment on the receivership. Co-owner DigitalBridge, a Boca Raton, Fla., investment company, did not respond in time for publication.

In recent years, the downtown office market has shifted against landlords as many tenants have reduced their office footprints in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became more common for employees to work remotely.

Elevated interest rates recently have weighed on prices by making it difficult for building owners to refinance debt, pushing them into quick sales or foreclosures.

Some downtown L.A. office tenants have expressed concern that the streets feel less safe than they did before the pandemic and have left for other local office centers, including in Century City.

Downtown L.A. has 54 office buildings that are at immediate risk of devaluation and could result in nearly $70 billion in lost value over the next 10 years, creating a potential loss of $353 million in property tax revenue, according to a recent report by BAE Urban Economics.

The report suggested converting some of them to housing because they potentially could have more value as apartments or condominiums, which could help mitigate expected tax losses.

Converting just 10 big office buildings to housing would boost their combined assessed property value over a decade by $12 billion, adding $46 million in tax revenue and creating more than 3,800 residential units, the report said.

The Gas Company Tower on Bunker Hill sold for around $200 million to Los Angeles County last year, down 68% from a $632-million valuation just four years ago, according to CoStar. The 777 Tower at 777 S. Figueroa St. was sold last year for $120 million, a 70% drop from its 2013 sale. EY Plaza at 725 S. Figueroa St., once valued at $446 million, is now worth about $150 million, a 66% decline.

Fashion model Hannah James faced a dilemma as she weighed whether to digitally clone herself.

On one hand, the 25-year-old worries digital replicas of models could render her job obsolete. On the other hand, the Los Angeles model wants to get ahead of artificial intelligence and use it to potentially make more money before it’s too late.

She partnered this year with Kartel.ai, a Beverly Hills startup that’s building a platform for brands and businesses to license the likenesses of models for a fee. Kartel.ai helps models create digital replicas of themselves that can be hired for advertising campaigns.

“It’s crazy to see what they can create in hours,” said James, who has modeled for a decade. “It’s beautiful, but at the same time, it’s scary.”

Models like James are contending with how to retain control over their careers as the rise of AI-powered tools that can quickly generate images and videos alters the creative process. Advancements in AI have made it easier to generate digital clones of models or virtual people who don’t exist in real life.

Unlike real people, AI models and digital clones don’t get sick or deal with bad-skin days. AI models can be in many places at the same time, and they don’t need a break as campaigns try different shots, locations and products.

Applying generative AI — the kind of technology used by ChatGPT — to generate and manipulate fashion shoots and other images has been taking off this year, sparking debate about whether AI will take away jobs in an industry already rife with concerns about financial exploitation.

Some of the brands experimenting with AI models have faced backlash from consumers concerned about job displacement and unrealistic beauty standards.

In the August issue of Vogue, widely considered a fashion bible, Los Angeles brand Guess had an ad featuring a curvy blond AI model in a light blue floral romper. Swedish fast fashion retailer H&M showcased the digital “twins” of some of its models in July.

While the brands received attention for using cutting-edge technology and innovation, they also faced criticism.

“Technology is definitely reshaping the modeling industry, and it’s doing so by introducing synthetic models that threaten jobs and by digitizing real people, often without clear standards for consent or compensation,” said Sara Ziff, founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a nonprofit in New York that advocates for workers’ rights in the fashion industry.

Many models aren’t unionized because they’re often independent contractors. While the job appears glamorous, models deal with myriad challenges, including late payments, financial debt, eating disorders and sexual harassment, Ziff said.

H&M declined to comment. Guess didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Los Angeles is a hub for fashion, modeling and social media influencers. In 2024, there were 880 models employed in California, with most of those jobs in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, including Anaheim and Long Beach, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationwide, there were an estimated 5,350 modeling jobs that year.

The agency projects that employment of models nationwide will remain unchanged from 2023 to 2033, noting that there are cheaper options on social media or that companies could reuse images of models and products. There will still be an estimated 600 job openings for models each year because workers will switch jobs or retire.

In 2024, the median pay for a model was $89,990 a year or $43.26 an hour, according to the bureau.

Models are still trying to sort out how to get fairly compensated when brands use their digital likeness, and the rates can vary. Models may earn less from jobs their digital clones perform compared with booking in-person shoots, but they might also be able to complete more jobs without the need to travel to a location.

Ben Kusin, co-founder of Kartel.ai, said the use of AI and digital clones could help brands cut down on the other expenses tied to producing an ad campaign, such as booking travel and employing stylists to do hair and makeup.

With licensing of AI clones, models will still be paid and can choose whether they allow a brand to use their likeness.

“A lot of folks need to re-skill quickly to be able to survive what’s the upcoming transition into this new world of AI-generated media,” he said.

Brands still have to tread carefully. In 2023, Levi’s faced criticism after the company said it was partnering with AI company Lalaland.ai to create AI models with a variety of skin tones and body types, sparking questions about why they didn’t just hire more diverse models.

Kusin said he draws the line, though, at creating models that don’t exist in real life, as Guess did in its ad campaign.

Valentina Gonzalez and Andreea-Laura Petrescu, who founded the AI marketing agency Seraphinne Vallora, which worked with Guess, said they’re not trying to destroy the modeling industry.

“We’re not looking to replace anybody. We’re looking to supplement the industry,” Gonzalez said. “Just like any other industry, you open new avenues of marketing. People have the choice.”

The firm, which has 233,000 Instagram followers, created entirely new models based on Guess’ aesthetic. It also offers other services, including enabling models to digitally clone themselves. Videos of some of the AI models featured on their Instagram account have racked up more than 1 million views.

The duo, who met as students studying architecture, pointed out there’s still a design process they go through to create AI models. It involves taking photos of real clothing and models and placing those images in a database. They envision a future where human models, their digital clones and completely AI-generated models coexist.

Boutique modeling agencies such as Otto Models in Newport Beach are concerned it will become even tougher for models who have to work hard to maintain their look to compete against virtual people.

“We’re getting into the realm of replacing models with these AI virtual people,” said Tereza Otto, who co-founded and runs the agency. “That won’t bode well for our business, because there’s a certain human purity to having an actual model do a campaign.”

As for James, there still will be in-person photo shoots that she believes AI won’t be able to replicate.

“It’s important to have a vibe on set with who you’re working with,” she said.

The Trump administration cannot deny funding to Los Angeles and 30 other cities and counties because of “sanctuary” policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration agencies, a judge ruled late Friday.

The judge issued a preliminary injunction that expands restrictions the court handed down in April that blocked funding cuts to 16 cities and counties, including San Francisco and Santa Clara, after federal officials classified them as “sanctuary jurisdictions.”

U.S. District Judge William Orrick of the federal court in San Francisco ruled then that Trump’s executive order cutting funding was probably unconstitutional and violated the separation of powers doctrine.

Friday’s order added more than a dozen more jurisdictions to the preliminary injunction, including Los Angeles, Alameda County, Berkeley, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago.

Mayor Karen Bass applauded the court’s decision.

“Another win for our city as the courts continue to make clear that the federal government’s attempts to inflict their cruel policies on Angelenos are unlawful,” Bass said in a statement to the Times. “We will always defend the rights of Angelenos in the face of these continued assaults on our city.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House said the Trump administration expected to ultimately win in its effort on appeal.

“The government — at all levels — has the duty to protect American citizens from harm,” Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement. “Sanctuary cities interfere with federal immigration enforcement at the expense and safety and security of American citizens. We look forward to ultimate vindication on the issue.”

The preliminary injunction is the latest chapter in an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to force “sanctuary cities” to assist and commit local resources to federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice published a list of what it determined to be sanctuary jurisdictions, or local entities that have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

“Sanctuary policies impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk by design,” Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi said in a statement accompanying the published list.

Several cities and counties across the country have adopted sanctuary city policies, but specifics as to what extent they’re willing — or unwilling — to do for federal immigration officials have varied.

The policies typically do not impede federal officials from conducting immigration enforcement activities, but largely keep local jurisdictions from committing resources to the efforts.

The policies also don’t prevent local agencies from enforcing judicial warrants, which are signed by a judge. Cooperation on “detainers” or holds on jailed suspects issued by federal agencies, along with enforcement of civil immigration matters, is typically limited by sanctuary policies.

Federal officials in the suit have so far referred to “sanctuary” jurisdictions as local governments that don’t honor immigration detainer requests, don’t assist with administrative warrants, don’t share immigration status information, or don’t allow local police to assist in immigration enforcement operations.

Orrick noted that the executive orders threatened to withhold all federal funding if the cities and counties in question did not adhere to the Trump administration’s requests.

In the order, the judge referred to the executive order as a “coercive threat” and said it was unconstitutional.

Orrick, who sits on the bench in the Northern District of California, was appointed by former President Obama.

The Trump administration has been ratcheting up efforts to force local jurisdictions to assist in immigration enforcement. The administration has filed lawsuits against cities and counties, vastly increased street operations and immigration detentions, and deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles as it increased immigration operations.

The U.S. Department of Justice in June sued Los Angeles, and local officials, alleging its sanctuary city law is “illegal.”

The suit alleged that the city was looking to “thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations” by enacting sanctuary city policies.

A crowd of local union members and organizers formed in front of the classical-style arches of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum early Thursday morning, holding a banner with the colorful, iconic Olympic rings and “Fair Games” printed across them.

With the city of Los Angeles set to become a mega sporting events capital of the world — scheduled to host the FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Olympic and Paralympic Games all in the next few years — labor groups pushed for what they are calling a “New Deal” to get the city and the LA28 Olympics organizing committee to make commitments to improve the lot of working people.

The unions are calling for multibillion-dollar investments to build 50,000 units of housing, a prohibition on Airbnb and other short-term rentals, more transparency in venue agreements and protections for immigrant workers — as well as foreign visitors and fans — from federal raids.

“Let’s fight for our future, let’s fight for our democracy. Because together we can hold LA28 and the [International Olympic Committee] accountable,” said Victor Sanchez, executive director of advocacy group Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, at the Thursday rally.

Union officials noted that world sporting events have often failed to produce lasting benefits for host cities, causing price increases that displace low-income residents and leaving communities indebted.

“After the Games are over, what’s left for L.A.? “ said Armando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of United Farm Workers, in an interview.

Olympic organizers and corporate partners rejected the idea that local residents would be left out of the economic benefits of hosting the Games.

Jacie Prieto Lopez, a spokesperson for LA28, said in a statement that the Olympic and Paralympic Games “will mean good-paying jobs and real opportunities for working people in Los Angeles, including benefits that reach the neighborhoods and families who keep this city running.”

“In collaboration with the City of Los Angeles, we look forward to our partnerships with local unions and remain confident the Games will bring positive economic impact to the region and leave behind a stronger future for working people,” Lopez said.

The region’s intractable housing and homelessness crisis is at the core of the union push.

The campaign calls for the International Olympic Committee to end its partnership with Airbnb, which it announced in 2019 and is set to last through 2028, covering five Games. Short-term rental companies have been accused of depleting housing stock by removing them from the long-term rental market, thereby driving up rents and exacerbating L.A.’s homelessness crisis.

And it calls on the Olympic committee as well as LA28 to contribute $5 billion to fund housing construction.

Airbnb representatives pushed back on claims that it hurt housing stock. The company cited a study it published last year that found it had generated $4.4 billion in economic activity in L.A. in 2023, supporting thousands of jobs and bringing in $1.2 billion in tax revenue.

“Airbnb is focused on ensuring Los Angeles’ visitors have an affordable place to stay, while the city gets the revenue it needs to prevent cuts to public services — all without taxing Angelenos,” Justin Wesson, a senior public policy manager at Airbnb, said in a statement. “UNITE HERE continues to put hotel special interests ahead of what’s best for locals.”

The company said it fills a crucial lodging gap, with the 2028 Olympics expected to draw as many as 2.3 million tourists to the Los Angeles region. Hotels in the Los Angeles area can accommodate approximately 174,000 guests per day, out of the estimated need of accommodating about 575,000 guests per day, according to Airbnb.

The International Olympic Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said that in the early stages LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman had said that if Los Angeles won its bid to host the Olympics, it would build an Olympic Village with 17,000 beds for athletes, coaches and staff that would later be converted into permanent housing. Those plans in L.A. fell through, Petersen said.

“Housing is the No. 1 problem for everyone,” Petersen said. “We gave [housing construction] up here. and we’re saying ‘no no no.’ We need to have that vision — that vision that somehow disappeared.”

A spokesperson for LA28 said Wasserman’s comments were made before a bid was submitted. The city’s official bid to host the Olympics had named UCLA’s campus as the site for the Olympic and Paralympic Village.

MEXICO CITY — Julio César Chávez Jr., whose high-profile boxing career was marred by substance abuse and other struggles and never approached the heights of his legendary father, was in Mexican custody Tuesday after being deported from the United States.

His expulsion had been expected since July, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him outside his Studio City home and accused him of making “fraudulent statements” on his application to become a U.S. permanent resident.

In Mexico, Chávez, 39, faces charges of organized crime affiliation and arms trafficking, Mexican authorities say.

He is the son of Julio César Chávez — widely regarded as Mexico’s greatest boxer — and spent his career in the shadow of his fabled father.

His father both supported his troubled son and chastised his namesake, whose struggles included substance abuse, legal troubles and challenges in making weight for his bouts.

Despite his highly publicized problems, Chávez won the World Boxing Council middleweight title in 2011 before losing the belt the following year.

Chávez was turned over to Mexican law enforcement authorities at the Arizona border and was being held Tuesday in a federal lockup in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, authorities here said.

During her regular morning news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed that the boxer was in Mexican custody.

Days before his July arrest in Studio City, Chávez faced off in Anaheim for his last bout — against Jake Paul, the influencer-turned-pugilist. Chávez lost the fight.

When he was arrested in July, U.S. authorities labeled Chávez an “affiliate” of the Sinaloa cartel, which is one of Mexico’s largest — and most lethal — drug-trafficking syndicates.

Chávez has faced criticism over alleged associations with cartel figures, including Ovidio Guzmán, a son of infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, now serving a life sentence in a U.S prison for his leadership role in the Sinaloa cartel. Ovidio Guzmán recently pleaded guilty to drug-trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago and is reported to be cooperating with U.S. prosecutors.

Controversies have long overshadowed the career of Chávez.

Chávez served 13 days in jail for a 2012 drunk-driving conviction in Los Angeles County and was arrested by Los Angeles police in January 2024 on gun charges. According to his attorney, Michael Goldstein, a court adjudicating the gun case granted Chávez a “mental health diversion,” which, in some cases, can lead to dismissal of criminal charges.

“I’m confident that the issues in Mexico will be cleared up, and he’ll be able to continue with his mental health diversion” in California, Goldstein said.

A lingering question in the case is why Chávez was apparently allowed to travel freely between the United States and Mexico on several occasions despite a Mexican arrest warrant issued against him in March 2023.

On Jan. 4, 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Chávez reentered the United States from Tijuana into San Diego via the San Ysidro port of entry. He was permitted in despite the pending Mexican arrest warrant and a U.S. determination just a few weeks earlier that Chávez represented “an egregious public safety threat,” the DHS stated in a July 3 news release revealing the boxer’s detention.

Homeland Security said that the Biden administration — which was still in charge at the time of Chávez’s January entry — had determined that the boxer “was not an immigration enforcement priority.”

While in training for the Paul match, Chávez spoke out publicly against President Trump’s ramped-up deportation agenda, which has sparked protests and denunciations across California. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he accused the administration of “attacking” Latinos.

Chávez told The Times: “I wouldn’t want to be deported.”

McDonnell reported from Mexico City and El Reda from Los Angeles. Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

COVID-19 rates in the Southwestern United States reached 12.5% — the highest in the nation — according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this week. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County recorded the highest COVID levels in its wastewater since February.

The spike, thanks to the new highly contagious “Stratus” variant, comes as students across California return to the classroom, now without a CDC recommendation that they receive updated COVID shots. That change in policy, pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been criticized by many public health experts.

The COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, mutates often, learning to better transmit itself from person to person and evade immunity created by vaccinations and previous infections.

The Stratus variant, first detected in Asia in January, reached the U.S. in March and became the predominant strain by the end of June. It now accounts for two-thirds of virus variants detected in wastewater in the U.S., according to the CDC.

The nationwide COVID positivity rate hit 9% in early August, surpassing the January post-holiday surge, but still below last August’s spike to 18%. Weekly deaths, a metric that lags behind positivity rates, has so far remained low.

In May, RFK Jr. announced the CDC had removed the COVID vaccine from its recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.

The secretary argued it was the right move to reverse the Biden administration’s policy, which in 2024, “urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children.”

That statement promptly spurred a lawsuit from a group of leading medical organizations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Assn. — which argued the “baseless and uninformed” decision violated federal law by failing to ground the policy on the recommendation of the scientific committee that looks at immunization practices in the U.S.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has been routinely recommending updated COVID vaccinations alongside the typical yearly flu vaccination schedule. In its update for the fall 2024-spring 2025 season, it noted that in the previous year, a COVID booster decreased the risk of hospitalization by 44% and death by 23%.

The panel argued the benefit outweighed isolated cases of heart conditions and allergic reactions associated with the vaccine.

The panel also acknowledged that booster effectiveness decreases as new COVID strains — for which the boosters were not designed — emerge. Nevertheless, it still felt that most Americans should get booster shots.

The CDC estimates that only about 23% of adults and 13% of children received the 2024-25 COVID booster — even with the vaccine recommendation still in place. That’s compared to roughly half of adults and children who received the updated flu shot in the same time frame.

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.”

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.”

The Los Angeles we know has long been an irresistible subject for novelists and moviemakers — so much so that they’ve often tortured reality to make it conform to their imagination.

Robert Towne mined the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in his screenplay for “Chinatown” but moved the story ahead up by some two decades, from 1913 to the 1930s, to give his scenario its noir sensibility.

Ridley Scott and his filmmaking team depicted a future Los Angeles beset with darkness and a never-ending downpour of rain for “Blade Runner” — never mind that its source material, Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” was set in San Francisco, that provincial burg some 400 miles to the north.

But the task of depicting a future Los Angeles hasn’t been monopolized by fiction writers. Nonfiction writers have joined them in their obsession. They include the late environmentalist Marc Reisner, author of the indispensable “Cadillac Desert,” the public policy expert Steven P. Erie of UC San Diego, historians such as Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams, and polemicists such as Mike Davis. Even most of those whose subject is or has been the L.A. of their own time have taken pains to look ahead.

How well have they outlined the future of Los Angeles and Southern California? Let’s see.

The tone of nonfiction conjectures about the future of Los Angeles generally fall into two categories, elegiac or apocalyptic — and sometimes both: “utopia or dystopia,” in the words of Davis.

Davis was the avatar of the latter approach. The first of his books about Los Angeles, “City of Quartz” (1990), mostly looked back at the history of the city’s development. It was his follow-up, “Ecology of Fear” (1998), that really attempted to sketch out a future for the city, based on his vision of “the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch-style homes — as it erodes socially and physically into the twenty-first century.”

Davis drew a line from what he saw as “the current obsession with personal safety and social insulation … in the face of intractable urban poverty and homelessness, and despite one of the greatest expansions in American business history” in the mid-1990s to explain “why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles.”

He wasn’t far wrong. A few years later, I visited the maker of underground nuclear shelters fashioned from corrugated steel at his shop and showroom on the 5 Freeway in Montebello, where he was doing great business for models that started at $78,000 each; “Yes, paranoia does sell” was how I headlined my column. It still does: Guard dogs, surveillance cameras and sentry-protected neighborhood tracts have proliferated all around the Southland.

Davis foresaw the continued development of “tourist bubbles” — theme park-like “historical district, entertainment precincts, malls … partitioned off from the rest of the city” — think developer Rick Caruso’s shopping center the Grove, opened in the Fairfax District in 2002, which presents blank or billboarded walls to the outside world, enclosing a Disneyesque landscape of shops and restaurants inconspicuously monitored by security services.

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As opinion pollsters know, when you ask people what the future will look like, they invariably paint a picture that looks just like the present, only more so: If there’s a crime wave when they’re being polled, they foretell a world beleaguered by armed gangs; if there’s a recession, they expect a world of unrelieved poverty; if it’s a period of technological advancement, they foresee a world of flying cars.

Writers projecting a future of L.A. tended to fall into the same pattern. The Slovenian transplant Louis Adamic, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in the port community of San Pedro, scrutinized Southern California with pitiless objectivity in a 1930 essay titled “Los Angeles! There she blows!”

Adamic mentioned the conviction among Angelenos that their city “will ultimately — perhaps within the next three or four decades — be the biggest city in the world.” And he acknowledged that “the place has many great advantages, among the foremost, of course, being Climate, and but a single drawback, which, however, is an extremely serious one — that of water shortage.”

Nevertheless, noting that the city’s population had doubled over the previous 10 years to nearly 2 million, he confidently predicted that it would number 3 million by 1935. It didn’t reach that mark until the 1980s, and it’s not the first time, nor the last, that a prediction of the city’s future overshot the target. His concern about water, of course, was spot-on.

Another writer who extrapolated from what he saw of the Los Angeles of his time was Morrow Mayo, whose 1933 book “Los Angeles” is quoted elsewhere in The Times’ Future of L.A. package. Mayo expressed the opinion that even if “the territory known as the ‘City of Los Angeles’” grew from its then-population of 1.2 million to 4 million or more, he doubted that “it will ever be permanently the great vibrant, vital, nerve-center of the Pacific coast.”

The reason, Mayo wrote, was its climate — “meant for slow-pulsing life; a climate where man, when he gets adjusted to the environment, takes his siesta in the middle of the day. Go-getterism in this climate does violence to every law of nature.”

What kept Los Angeles even marginally vibrant was the steady influx of vigorous immigrants from the East and Midwest. After a few generations under the sun, Mayo concluded, “it will settle back to normalcy, and become in tune with nature, for man has never yet failed to adjust himself to the climate in which he lives.”

Thus did Mayo pioneer the stereotype of the laid-back Angeleno with barely a care in the world.

On the other hand, Mayo quoted a fellow prognosticator as finding in the city’s industrial districts “that same peculiarly contented type of workman, the same love of little homes ‘across the street from the factory,’ the diligence and care for the flowers in the front yard, or the fruit trees and vegetables in the rear, a total lack of the Bohemian spirit, the love of a comfortable, humble existence,” that could be seen in Philadelphia.

As a picture of Los Angeles, Mayo wrote, “I suspect that it is prophetic. ‘Los Angeles — the Philadelphia of the West.’”

Such miscalculations point to another pitfall facing those who would dare to predict the future of Los Angeles: Change has come so rapidly that any prediction can be confounded within the lifetime of its author. Thus Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of the California pageant, wrote in his book “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land” that the aircraft industry was “likely to remain in the region and even to expand production.”

McWillliams wrote those words in 1946; by 1980, when he died, the industry had crashed in Southern California, entering a long period of retrenchment that ended with Boeing’s closing of the region’s last commercial aircraft manufacturing plant in 2005. The Long Beach plant’s 300 workers were transferred to Boeing’s military aircraft assembly line, but that was shut down in 2015, ending an era, as The Times observed, in which the region was. “once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft.”

The trajectory of the Los Angeles ecology, and by extension that of Southern California and the entire state of California, was the subject of Reisner’s 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert.” He viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics. Water was wasted by farmers and urban residents because it was almost free. That was already beginning to change in his time, he observed, but the process would need years, even decades, to play out — if it ever could.

“The West’s real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth,” he wrote in the closing pages of “Cadillac Desert.” Reisner looked ahead, hopefully, to a West that “might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states’ rain …. A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more — in revenues, in jobs — than water taken out of the rivers.”

“At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future than forward to the past.”

Regrettably, Reisner, who died in 2000, didn’t live to see that happen. Whether his hope will ever be fulfilled remains an open question.

Perhaps the most penetrating look at the future of Los Angeles and its state came from Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee. In his 1998 book “Paradise Lost,” Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region’s future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole. (Its subtitle was “California’s Experience, America’s Future.”)

When he wrote the book, California was in one of its boom phases. It was again “the driving engine of national economic growth and likely to remain in that position until well into the next century …. Because of foundations laid forty years go … it is at the forefront of the world’s leading-edge technologies and of its creative energy.” (He was right about that, at least up to this moment.)

But Schrag also pointed to the state’s “increasingly dysfunctional governmental and fiscal public institutions, the depleted state of its public infrastructure, services, and amenities, the growing gaps between its affluent and its poorer residents, and its pinched social ethos,” which “hang like dark clouds in the sunny skies.”

California had exported to other states the facile low-tax policies of Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan’s view of government as “the problem, not the solution.”

In addition, Schrag saw that the emergence of social media “may insure against the power of Big Brother to dominate communications, but they also amplify the power of shared ignorance …. What used to be limited to gossip over the back fence is now spread in milliseconds.”

And he foresaw how the changing demographics of California would be replicated nationwide:

“The new kids now crowding into the schools and universities of California — black, brown, Asian — will constitute the majority of the state’s workforce, and a good part of the nation’s, in the next decade, and forever after,” he wrote.

Schrag had his finger on an essential truth about Los Angeles and California that remains true to this day: They’re the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs no less than for consumers of novels and movies. That has been true since the vision of a land of gold — El Dorado — drew the Spanish conquistadors to these shores. The world wishes to know what L.A. and California are, and where they are headed.

Kevin Starr, writing in 1995, understood how that impulse would play out in the decades to come. “The United States is testing its future through California,” he said in an essay for the website of the California State Library, which he served as state librarian from 1994 to 2004. Establishing California as a “bellwether state,” he wrote: “The American people are asking a series of questions which now become the California challenge …. Can the American people turn to positive effect the cultural diversity of a nation in the process of being transformed? … Can the American people maintain their standards of living and education?”

Starr’s answer to the questions he posed was a resounding yes! “In recent times,” he wrote, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded …. The American people have turned to California for new models of lifestyle, new ways of enjoying and celebrating the gift of life, and California responded with an outpouring of architecture, landscaping, entertainment, sport and recreation.”

The confidence that Starr projected 20 years ago may have faded, and may fade further in the future in Los Angeles and up and down the state. But one thing that probably will remain true is that the region’s path into the future will inspire writers to keep peering into their crystal balls, cloudy as they are.

The Trump administration on Thursday petitioned the Supreme Court to free up its mass deportation efforts across Southern California, seeking to lift a ban on “roving patrols” implemented after a lower court found such tactics likely violate the 4th Amendment.

The restrictions, initially handed down in a July 11 order, bar masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets of Los Angeles and cities in seven other counties without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

Under the 4th Amendment, reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on race, ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of Los Angeles found in her original decision.

The Trump administration said in its appeal to the high court that Frimpong’s ruling, upheld last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”

Lawyers behind the lawsuits challenging the immigration tactics immediately questioned the Trump administration’s arguments.

“This is unprecedented,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition of civil rights groups and individual attorneys challenging cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests. “The brief is asking the Supreme Court to bless open season on anybody on Los Angeles who happens to be Latino.”

The move comes barely 24 hours after heavily armed Border Patrol agents snared workers outside a Westlake Home Depot after popping out of the back of a Penske moving truck — actions some experts said appeared to violate the court’s order.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case, many now think similar aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate enforcement actions could once again become the norm.

“Anything having to do with law enforcement and immigration, the Supreme Court seems to be giving the president free rein,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law and a prominent scholar of the country’s highest court. “I think the court is going to side with the Trump administration.”

The Department of Justice has repeatedly argued that the temporary restraining order causes “manifest irreparable harm” to the government. Officials are especially eager to see it overturned because California’s Central District is the single most populous in the country, and home to a plurality of undocumented immigrants.

In its Supreme Court petition, the Justice Department alleged that roughly 10% of the region’s residents are in the U.S. illegally.

“According to estimates from Department of Homeland Security data, nearly 4 million illegal aliens are in California, and nearly 2 million are in the Central District of California. Los Angeles County alone had an estimated 951,000 illegal aliens as of 2019 — by far the most of any county in the United States,” the petition said.

President Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, and has poured billions in federal funding and untold political capital into the arrest, incarceration and removal of immigrants. Though Justice Department lawyers told the appellate court there was no policy or quota, administration officials and those involved in planning its deportation operations have repeatedly cited 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year as objectives.

District and appellate courts have stalled, blocked and sometimes reversed many of those efforts in recent weeks, forcing the return of a Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison, compelling the release of student protesters from ICE detention, preserving birthright citizenship for children of immigrant parents and stopping construction of “Alligator Alcatraz.”

But little of the president’s immigration agenda has so far been tested in the Supreme Court.

If the outcome is unfavorable for Trump, some observers wonder whether he will let the justices limit his agenda.

“Even if they were to lose in the Supreme Court, I have serious doubts they will stop,” Segall said.