The Trump administration late Friday said they would exclude electronics like smartphones and laptops from “reciprocal” tariffs, a move that could help keep the prices down for popular consumer electronics that aren’t usually made in the U.S.

It would also benefit big tech companies like Apple and Samsung and chip makers like Nvidia.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said items like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, flat-panel monitors and some chips would qualify for the exemption. Machines used to make semiconductors are excluded too. That means they won’t be subject to the current 145% tariffs levied on China or the 10% baseline tariffs elsewhere.

Trump previously said he would consider exempting some companies from tariffs.

The move takes off “a huge black cloud overhang for now over the tech sector and the pressure facing U.S. Big Tech,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a research note.

Neither Apple nor Samsung responded to a request for comment early Saturday. Nvidia declined to comment.

Anderson writes for the Associated Press.

Nine people have been charged with federal crimes in connection with an alleged scheme to smuggle at least $200 million of counterfeit and illicit goods from China through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, prosecutors announced Monday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged a conspiracy among logistic company executives, warehouse owners and truck drivers to transport shipping containers to warehouses in the City of Industry, unload the contraband inside and replace it with “filler” cargo before customs officials could inspect the containers.

Eight of the defendants in the 15-count indictment have been arrested. The lead defendant, Weijun Zheng, 57, of Diamond Bar, whom prosecutors said controls several logistics companies in the Los Angeles area and orchestrated the scheme, remains at large and is believed to be in China. Zheng and the other defendants were charged with smuggling, breaking customs seals and conspiracy.

To evade discovery, prosecutors alleged, the defendants broke and removed locked security seals, which are supposed to be opened only by customs officials, and replaced them with counterfeit ones with the same unique numbers.

Investigators seized more than $130 million worth of contraband goods, including counterfeit shoes, perfume, luxury handbags, apparel and watches. The smuggled goods also included illegal and dangerous chemicals, as well as unapproved food and drugs that pose risks to consumers, authorities said.

Jaime Ruiz, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said that the charges announced Monday involve the largest trade fraud on record at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex.

Authorities at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach regularly intercept all manner of counterfeit goods, from electronics, clothing and handbags to guitars and engines. In recent years, they have confiscated shipments of prohibited chemicals, plants and animal products, weapons parts and counterfeit coins. In 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that the ports had seized $1 billion worth of counterfeit products in one year, a record high driven by pandemic-era surge in online shopping.

While customs officials have rigorous standards to prevent tampering with security seals before inspection, authorities acknowledged that the scheme exposed a serious vulnerability at the nation’s busiest port complex. The L.A.-Long Beach ports handle about 30% of the international seaborne cargo coming in and out of the country, and only a fraction of the thousands of shipping containers moving through every day are opened and inspected.

“With this much activity, transnational criminal organizations have a wide berth to operate and exploit vulnerabilities, and the defendants charged in this indictment took full advantage,” Eddy Wang, special agent in charge with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, said at a news conference Monday at the Port of Los Angeles.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has taken steps to fix the vulnerabilities discovered in the investigation, said Joseph T. McNally, acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.

“I’m not going to get into exactly what it is, because I think that that would present its own risks,” McNally said, “but they have identified the issue and have taken steps to address it.”

McNally said that “prohibited and unregulated items coming into the United States threaten the health and well-being of our citizens, and smugglers threaten our national security by allowing dangerous items to enter without detection.”

The scheme was in operation from at least August 2023 to June 2024, prosecutors said, and was responsible for smuggling at least $200 million in goods from China. It was discovered as part of a routine examination of a shipment by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialist, who noticed that the security seal appeared to have been tampered with and that the cargo inside did not match what was on the manifest.

“He immediately notified his supervisors,” said Cheryl Davies, director of field operations for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Los Angeles field office. “And they quickly realized that the original cargo appeared to have been removed and replaced with domestic cargo before the shipment was presented to CBP for inspection.”

Prosecutors said the counterfeit security seals used to deceive customs officials were also shipped to the U.S. from China. The scheme was lucrative for the truck drivers involved, who usually earn $200 to $300 each time they move a shipping container but earned about $10,000 for each illegal shipment.

They covered themselves with hazmat suits, gloves and masks and put plastic bags over their boots. That’s how dangerous the substance was that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were examining Wednesday morning.

A cadre of agents — veterans who had seized fentanyl, heroin and other illicit narcotics in previous raids — dug deep, hands and boots in a sea of pungent material, before hitting pay dirt.

What agents said they found was almost 2 tons of methamphetamine and cocaine — valued at $10.4 million — buried within dozens of vats of fiery jalapeño paste. The cargo was seized from a commercial tractor-trailer near the Otay Mesa border.

“It was an extremely spicy situation,” Michael Scappechio, a CBP spokesperson, told The Times. “You never really know what you’re dealing with just in terms of dangerous narcotics and then you throw in there all that organic material; we had to break out the full PPE,” or personal protective equipment.

A 28-year-old man with valid border-crossing credentials was stopped Wednesday around 10:36 a.m. by agents while hauling his cargo. The individual was a Mexican national, according to Scappechio.

His electronic shipment manifest listed only vats of jalapeño paste among his consignment.

Customs officers decided to review the man’s haul.

“We won’t expose the reasons that led to the further examination,” Scappechio said, “but agent suspicion is often used.”

The truck was moved from the border to the nearby screening facility, where a K-9 unit then screened the cargo and alerted agents for a full inspection.

There, they poured out barrel-sized drums of jalapeño paste, removing 349 suspicious packages from the vats. About 3,161 pounds of methamphetamine and 523 pounds of cocaine were extracted from the haul.

The driver was turned over to the Department of Homeland Security for arrest and processing while the CBP seized the drugs and trailer.

Never underestimate the power of a dog’s nose.

“Our K-9 teams are an invaluable component of our counter-narcotics operations, providing a reliable and unequaled mobile detection capability,” said Rosa Hernandez in a statement. The Otay Mesa port director said the CBP had stepped up its efforts “to secure communities and stifle the growth of transnational criminal organizations, one seizure after another.”

Last month, San Diego’s field office seized more than 14,000 pounds of narcotics at California’s land borders.

But what’s going to happen to all that jalapeño paste?

Scappechio said he couldn’t say for certain but noted that the agency was “not going to hold organic material for too long” before destroying it. He did say the owner could petition to retrieve the property.

“Since the jalapeño paste was laden with dangerous drugs,” Scappechio said, “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

WASHINGTON — 

Nearly 1,100 migrant families have been separated while being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego since September, immigrant advocacy groups said in a letter sent Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security that seeks an investigation into the matter.

The separations stem from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s ongoing practice of releasing high volumes of migrants to street locations around San Diego County without coordinated reception plans, according to the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy and three other groups that signed the letter. As migrant arrivals at the California-Mexico border have increased, Customs and Border Protection has turned to street releases and holding migrants between border walls to reduce the number of people in its short-term facilities.

According to the letter, immigration law group Al Otro Lado documented 1,081 family separations among the hundreds of migrants it serves each day at a border welcome center in San Diego, where it provides legal aid and translation services. Of that total, there were almost 400 separations of spouses and about 200 separations of adult children from the parents they were traveling with, including 43 children between age 18 and 21. Separations of those in other family relationships, such as adult siblings, cousins and common-law partners, make up the remainder of the total.

In at least 39 cases, families remained separated after one or more members were transferred to long-term immigrant detention facilities. In at least two cases, one family member was deported while the others remain in the U.S.

Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

“The trauma families experience during the periods of separation is compounded by CBP’s lack of communication and the near-total opacity of their practices,” states the letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s office of civil rights and civil liberties, which was also signed by the ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and Jewish Family Service of San Diego.

To prevent further separations, the organizations are asking Homeland Security to broaden the definition of a family group under agency practice to include parents with adult children, couples without marriage certificates, adult siblings and extended family members. The groups are also asking that Homeland Security agents document all relationships among family groups and ensure families are released together, or to communicate the whereabouts of any family members that aren’t released at the same time.

The letter comes after a federal judge in San Diego approved a court settlement last week that bars widespread separations of parents from their underage children at the U.S.-Mexico border for the next eight years. The settlement stems from a 2018 ACLU lawsuit over the separations, including those that took place under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to the prosecutions of migrant parents who crossed the border without authorization.

The settlement doesn’t affect family separations like those documented by Al Otro Lado, which the group believes are undercounted.

An April 20 Customs and Border Protection memo obtained by The Times, which offers guidance on processing family groups, states that Homeland Security is “committed to protecting the unity of families encountered at the border to the extent legally and operationally feasible.”

The guidance included in the memo pertains to parents or guardians with unmarried adult children up to age 25, grandparents with unmarried adult grandchildren up to age 25 and spouses and unmarried adult siblings up to age 25. Agents are required under the guidance to consider any verifiable documentation acknowledging such relationships and to link those individuals as a family group, with the goal of processing them out of custody together.

“If the guidance truly is in furtherance of CBP’s stated commitment to maintaining unity of families, then in practice it should be implemented in a way that allows for families to report and have documented their relationships in accordance with the realities of people who are forced to flee their countries,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney with the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA.

Most separated families said they had informed Customs and Border Protection that they were traveling in a family group, according to the letter, but families were rarely told they would be separated or how to locate their relatives.

In October, Customs and Border Protection detained nearly 30,000 migrants near San Diego, up from nearly 18,000 in October 2022, according to agency figures.

Meghan Zavala, data and policy analyst for Al Otro Lado, said these kinds of separations aren’t unique to San Diego.

But Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney at Brownsville, Texas-based Lawyers for Good Government, which provides legal aid to migrants, said separations aren’t common in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, noting that Customs and Border Protection drops people off at designated locations. Few migrants stay overnight because even if family members are processed separately, there is little delay before they reunite at a welcome center. Spouses are often processed together, she said.

“If you came here you’d have absolutely no idea that thousands of people were processed daily,” Orta said. “There’s zero chaos.”

Just under half of the families recently separated at the border near San Diego are from Colombia, with smaller numbers from China, Brazil, Afghanistan and Peru, according to Al Otro Lado. Some separations have lasted hours or days, while others documented by the organization have lasted more than a month.

Separations involving families who speak languages other than Spanish are particularly difficult, causing advocates to scramble to find interpreters, Zavala said. Some families spend days in crowded San Diego shelters waiting to see whether their relatives will be released, she said.

“Our organization along with others continue to be very strained in our capacity and yet are given all these additional hurdles,” Zavala said. “We try to do our best to get information for these families who are quite desperate to know where the person they were traveling with is now being held.”

In one case documented by Al Otro Lado, a husband and wife from Colombia were taken into Border Patrol custody in September. The husband was released just across the border from Tijuana in San Diego’s San Ysidro district without his wife, who had been transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana and was deported before she could speak with a local attorney.

In another case, a husband and wife were separated during Customs and Border Protection processing. The husband was released without his wife at the San Ysidro Transit Center and returned to the center for weeks, hoping to find her. He later learned she had been transferred to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas, where she experienced medical complications. They were separated for 49 days.

Julieta, 38, who asked that only her first name be used out of fear for her safety, told The Times she arrived in Tijuana from Colombia with her 19-year-old son.

She said they turned themselves over to border agents on Nov. 22. Two days later, she was led to a bus and dropped off at a shelter, with no idea as to her son’s whereabouts.

Five days after that, Julieta’s son was dropped off at the same shelter and they reunited. She said she knew they would be detained at the border, but didn’t anticipate that they would be separated.

“It’s hell,” she said. “Not knowing if your son is safe, if he is alive, if something happened to him. All you can do is pray to God.”