What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
Trump Administration Freezes $108 Million in Funds to Duke University
"The university was accused of racial discrimination in its health care system, the latest high-profile school targeted and stripped of federal funding.
Duke University is facing a budget crunch, its president said recently.Travis Dove for The New York Times
The Trump administration has frozen $108 million in federal funds for Duke University’s medical school and health care system, according to two administration officials, after the government accused the university of “systemic racial discrimination.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and Linda McMahon, the education secretary, sent a letter to Duke administrators on Monday expressing concerns about “racial preferences in hiring, student admissions, governance, patient care, and other operations” in the university’s health care system.
In the letter, the officials accused Duke of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race and nationality in programs receiving federal funding. Mr. Kennedy and Ms. McMahon called on Duke Health, the university’s health care system, to review all policies “for the illegal use of race preferences” and to create a “Merit and Civil Rights Committee” that would work with the federal government.
The $108 million cut could be permanent, if the government concludes the university violated the Civil Rights Act, according to the two administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Duke University did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.
The university isweighing layoffs amid a budget crunch. It’s considering about $350 million in cuts, amounting to roughly 10 percent of its budget. In a video message last month, Duke’s president, Vincent E. Price, said the university was trying to sort out proposals from the federal government “that have quite dire implications for the university.”
He added there was “sadly, no scenario in which Duke can or will avoid incurring substantial losses of funding due to these policy changes.”
The university has imposed a hiring freeze and developed buyout plans, but Dr. Price said that Duke would “likely” resort to layoffs.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration."
"Ms. Goldberg, an Opinion columnist, reported from Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Terna is a photographer in Los Angeles and New York.
Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.
It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.
“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”
A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”
But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.
Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t particularly political until June, when Donald Trump sent the military into Los Angeles.
At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.
Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.
“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”
Ron Gochez, a high school teacher, at an early morning meeting in South Central Los Angeles. His organization, Unión del Barrio, doesn’t just document ICE’s operations; it tries to actively disrupt them.
The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries.) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”
Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.
It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.
“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”
Pablo Alvarado helped found one of the organizations plugging activists into a citywide network of people tracking ICE’s activities.
These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”
The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.
When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”
In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politicoheadlineshortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”
While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.
Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helpedpush downthe company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.
The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.
The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”
This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.
As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”
Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.
In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March. No similar spectacle greeted his return.Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Donald Trump used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics in Los Angeles as a pretext to send the military in June.
In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.
Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)
“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”
With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.
In New York, activists are showing up at the courts to inform immigrants of their rights.
When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.
A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.
The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.
At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.
Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.
This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino,toldFox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.
One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”
It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.
Since Castillo and her neighborsstarted their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.
After ICE started targeting Home Depots, activists adopted various locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents.
Passing out tangerines and cookies to day laborers in Pasadena.
Ready to warn of ICE sightings.
While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.
Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”
Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.
“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”
There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.
Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’aggressiontoward civilianobservers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.
Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”
To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.
If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isolation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.
“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment."
Dropped cases against LA protesters reveal false claims from federal agents
US immigration officers made false and misleading statements in their reports about severalLos Angelesprotesters they arrested during the massive demonstrations that rocked the city in June, according to federal law enforcement files obtained by the Guardian.
The officers’ testimony was cited in at least five cases filed by the US Department of Justice amid the unrest. The justice department has charged at least 26 people with “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers and other crimes during the protests over immigration raids. Prosecutors, however, have since been forced todismissat least eight of those felonies, many of them which relied on officers’ inaccurate reports, court records show.
The justice department has also dismissed at least three felony assault cases it brought against Angelenos accused of interfering with arrests during recent immigration raids, the documents show.
The rapid felony dismissals are a major embarrassment for the Trump-appointed US attorney for southern California,Bill Essayli, and appeared to be the result of an unusual series of missteps by the justice department, former federal prosecutors said.
The Guardian’s review of records found:
Out of nine “assault” and “impeding” felony cases the justice department filed immediately after the start of the protests andpromotedby the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges.
In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video.
One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.
One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government’s most high-profile cases.
Trump claims he hasn't been 'overly interested' in furor about his links to Jeffrey Epstein
Asked about his denials that his name appears inthe Epstein filesand whether the attorney general would have to tell him if it did,Donald Trumpsaid he hadn’t been “overly interested” in the whole affair and, as usual, blamed the Democrats.
I haven’t beenoverly interested.
You know,it’s a hoaxthat’s been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this. Those files were run by the worst scum on earth … The whole thing is a hoax. They ran the files.
He suggested that his enemies could have put material in the files that was fake, and added that if the Democrats had had damaging material to use against him, they would have used it before the election.
I don’t do drawings. I’m not a drawing person. I don’t do drawings. Sometimes you would say, would you draw a building? And I’ll draw four lines and a little roof, you know, for a charity stuff. But I’m not a drawing person. I don’t do drawings of women, that I can tell you.
He also claimed his poll ratings had increased by 4.5 points since this “ridiculous Epstein stuff” has been in the news “because people don’t buy it”. (He is of course ignoring the fact that much of the criticism and pressure has come fromhis own furious support baseand even the likes of House speakerMike Johnsonhave called for the release of the files)."
Law enforcement officers arrest a demonstrator outside the federal building as protests continue in response to federal immigration operations in Los Angeles on 10 June.Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
US immigration officers made false and misleading statements in their reports about several Los Angeles protesters they arrested during the massive demonstrations that rocked the city in June, according to federal law enforcement files obtained by the Guardian.
The officers’ testimony was cited in at least five cases filed by the US Department of Justice amid the unrest. The justice department has charged at least 26 people with “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers and other crimes during the protests over immigration raids. Prosecutors, however, have since been forced todismissat least eight of those felonies, many of them which relied on officers’ inaccurate reports, court records show.
The justice department has also dismissed at least three felony assault cases it brought against Angelenos accused of interfering with arrests during recent immigration raids, the documents show.
The rapid felony dismissals are a major embarrassment for the Trump-appointed US attorney for southern California, Bill Essayli, and appeared to be the result of an unusual series of missteps by the justice department, former federal prosecutors said.
The Guardian’s review of records found:
Out of nine “assault” and “impeding” felony cases the justice department filed immediately after the start of the protests andpromotedby the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges.
In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video.
One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.
One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government’s most high-profile cases.
“When I see felonies dismissed, that tells me either the federal officers have filed affidavits that are not truthful and that has been uncovered, or US attorneys reviewing the cases realize the evidence does not support the charges,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former California state prosecutor who is now director of Prosecutors Alliance Action, a criminal justice reform group.
She said officers often call for charges that prosecutors don’t end up filing, but it was uncommon for the justice department to file, then dismiss cases, especially numerous felonies in rapid succession.
“It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear and discourage people from exercising their first amendment rights,” DeBerry said.
There are at least 18 cases brought by the justice department against LA protesters that prosecutors have not dismissed, covering a wide array of alleged criminal conduct, according to case records the US attorney’s office shared with the Guardian. In three of those cases, protesters have agreed to plea deals, including one defendant accused of spitting at an officer and another who allegedly threw rocks. Some still facing charges are accused of throwing bottles and molotov cocktails, pointing a laser at a helicopter and aiding in civil disorder by distributing gas masks.
In six of the felony dismissals reviewed by the Guardian, the justice department has refiled lower-level misdemeanors against the defendants.
For the many protesters whose charges were withdrawn or scaled back, the officers’ initial allegations, as well as the department’s filings, have deeply affected their lives. All the demonstrators who won dismissals spent time in jail before the government’s cases against them fell apart.
“We are not the violent ones,” said Jose Mojica, one of the protesters whose assault case was dismissed, in anearlier Guardian interview. “They are chasing down innocent people.”
Dismissed ‘in the interest of justice’
The justice department’s initial wave of cases stemmed from one of the first major protests in the LA region, ademonstration on 7 Junein the south Los Angeles city of Paramount. Border patrol sightings hadsparked fearsthat agents weretargeting laborers at a Home Depot, and as dozens of locals and demonstrators gathered outside an office complex that houses DHS,officers fired teargasand flash-bang grenades while some protesters threw objects.
The US attorney’s office filed a joint case against five demonstrators, charging each with assaulting officers, a felony the justice department warned could carry 20-year sentences.
A criminal complaint, written by DHS and filed in court by the justice department on 8 June, said that as the crowd grew, some protesters “turned violent”. Two sisters, Ashley, 20, and Joceline Rodriguez, 26, began “blocking” officers’ vehicles, the complaint alleged. When a border patrol agent attempted to move Ashley, she “resisted” and “shoved the agent with both her hands”, then Joceline “grabbed the arm” of one of the agents to prevent her sister’s arrest, the charges said. Both were arrested.
In an investigative file, the DHS suggested that “in response” to the sisters’ arrest, Christian Cerna-Camacho, another protester, began to “verbally harass” agents, making threatening remarks. Demonstrator Brayan Ramos-Brito, then “pushed [an] agent in the chest”, the DHS claimed, at which point, a fifth protester,Jose Mojica, “used his body to physically shield” Ramos-Brito and then “elbowed and pushed” agents. Agents then “subdued” and arrested Mojica and Ramos-Brito, the complaint said.
A protester holds a sign as he stands in front of federal agents as the groups clashed near a Home Depot after a raid was conducted Ice in Paramount on 7 June.Photograph: Allison Dinner/EPA
All five defendants are Latino US citizens.
The DHS’s own subsequent reports, however, reveal multiple factual discrepancies in the narrative initially presented by officers and prosecutors. While the complaint suggested Cerna-Camacho, Ramos Brito and Mojica attacked agents in protest of the sisters’ arrest, records show the women were arrested in a separate incident – which occurred after the men were detained.
Border patrol agent Eduardo Mejorado, a key witness considered a victim of the assaults, appeared to initially give inaccurate testimony about the order of events. He “clarified” the timeline when questioned, a DHS special agent wrote in a report three days after charges were filed. A supervisor on the scene also documented the correct chronology in a later report and “apologized” for errors, saying, “Due to the chaos of the events that day, some events may have been miscommunicated.” Mojica had outlined the discrepancies in aninterview with the Guardiandays after his arrest.
The DHS special agent also noted that defense lawyers had presented video they said was “in direct contrast to the facts” laid out in the initial complaint. The footage, seen by the Guardian, appeared to show an agent pushing Ramos-Brito, not the other way around, before he was taken to the ground along with Mojica, who was also not seen in the footage shoving or assaulting agents.
The agent acknowledged the officer’s shoving and said the subsequent “fight” was “hard to decipher”. The agent also claimed Ramos-Brito’s behavior before he was pushed included “pre-assault indicators”, such as “clenching fists” and “getting in [the agent’s] face”.
Meanwhile, chaotic social media footage of the arrest of the sisters appeared to show an officer pushing Ashley, prompting her to briefly raise her hand, at which point two agents grabbed her and took her to the ground. Her older sister was then seen briefly touching the arm of one of the agents on top of her sister. Both appeared to be filming with their phones before their arrests, and it’s unclear who the DHS and the justice department were alleging were the victims in their purported assaults.
DHS records also show that one supervisor emailed a female border patrol agent seen in the video standing near the sisters, saying he was “trying to tie that whole event together for prosecution” and looking into a “rumor” Ashley “may have shoved” this agent. The agent responded that she had told Ashley to move, but did not say she was shoved.
Within two weeks of the initial charges, the US attorney’s officefiled motions to dismiss the casesagainst the sisters, Ramos-Brito and Mojica “in the interest of justice”, without providing further explanation.
The justice department then filed a new case against the sisters, this time accusing them each of a single misdemeanor, saying they “assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, and interfered with” the border patrol, but offering no detail. The sisters pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanors; Ashley’s lawyer declined to comment and Joceline’s attorney did not respond to inquiries.
The justice department also filed a misdemeanor indictment against Ramos-Brito, but then said it was erroneous and rescinded it, only to refile a misdemeanor in a different format. Ramos-Brito pleaded not guilty and his lawyer didn’t respond to emails.
Mojica, whospoke outabout how he was injured during his arrest, has not been charged again.
Essayli, the US attorney for LA, who is an ardent Trump supporter appointed this year, initially published mugshots of the defendants, but has not publicly acknowledged that he has since dismissed their felonies. Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for Essayli, declined to comment on a detailed list of questions about specific cases. The LA Timesreported last weekthat Essayli was heard “screaming” at a prosecutor over a grand jury’s refusal to indict one of the protesters.
Law enforcement clashes with demonstrators during a protest following federal immigration operations, in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles on 7 June.Photograph: Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images
McEvoy said the LA Times story relied on “factual inaccuracies and anonymous gossip”, without offering specifics, adding in an email: “Our office will continue working unapologetically to charge all those who assault our agents or impede our federal investigations.”
Bondi defended Essayli in a statement, calling him a “champion for law and order who has done superlative work to prosecute rioters for attacking and obstructing law enforcement in Los Angeles”. She added: “This Department of Justice is proud of Bill, and he has my complete support as he continues working to protect Californians and Make America Safe Again.”
Jaime Ruiz, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, which oversees border patrol, did not respond to detailed questions about cases and officers’ inaccurate testimony, saying the department is “unable to comment on cases under active litigation”.
“DHS and its components continue to enforce the law every day in greater Los Angeles even in the face of danger,” he added. “Our officers are facing a surge in assaults and attacks against them as they put their lives on the line to enforce our nation’s laws. Secretary [Kristi] Noem has been clear: If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary, added in a statement: “Our agents, officers, and prosecutors will continue to work together to keep Americans safe, and we will follow the facts, evidence, and law.” Mejorado, the border patrol agent, could not be reached.
Cerna-Camacho is the only defendant of the five whose original charges are still pending, but when he showed up to court for his recent arraignment, the justice department attorney was forced to admit his office had made an error: the one-paragraph indictment filed against Cerna-Camacho erroneously named Ramos Brito. Cerna-Camacho’s lawyers have argued that the government’s 30-daywindowto indict his client had passed, and the case must be dismissed. Cerna-Camacho pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer declined to comment.
“This is an extraordinary mistake and a dangerous embarrassment,” said Sergio Perez, a former justice department lawyer who is now executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, a California-based legal advocacy group, about Cerna-Camacho’s case. “The US Department of Justice is supposed to be the pinnacle of professional and responsible criminal prosecutions. When you can’t get the name right, it calls into question all other factual assertions in those documents. It’s way beyond a clerical error. It’s smoke where there is likely fire.”
The case is a significant one for the Trump administration. Cerna-Camacho was arrested four days after the protest, when two unmarked vehiclesrammed his carwhile his toddler and infant were inside, with officersdeploying teargas. The incident caused outrage locally.
But DHS aggressively defended the arrest, publishing a photo of Cerna-Camacho being detained, and saying he had “punched” a border patrol officer at the Paramount protests. Video from the protest showed Cerna-Camacho and an officer scuffling in a chaotic crowd, with Cerna-Camacho at one point raising his hand, but it’s unclear if he made contact with the officer.
More cases crumble
In an initial complaint against Jacob Terrazas, DHS accused the man of felony assault, saying he was “one of several individuals … actively throwing hard objects [at officers]” during the Paramount protests, without referencing specific evidence or details. Video of his arrest showed an officer slamming him to the ground, and at his arraignment, Terrazas appeared badly concussed, and a judge ordered he immediately get medical attention.
Terrazas was released after nine days in jail, then two days later, the justice department moved to dismiss the case. However, prosecutors filed a new misdemeanor charge, accusing him of a “simple assault” misdemeanor, saying he “aided and abetted” others and “forcibly assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, and interfered with” a border patrol employee, without providing details. Terrazas has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer did not respond to inquiries.
The government has also dismissed its “conspiracy to impede an officer” felony charges against Gisselle Medina, but then filed an “accessory” to “assault” misdemeanor, claiming in a brief charging document that she had “assisted the offenders”. The charges did not offer any details on how she allegedly assisted others. Medina has not yet been arraigned and her lawyer did not respond to inquiries.
The justice department also recently dismissed felony assault charges against Russell Gomez Dzul, who had been stopped on 7 June by border patrol when officers deemed him suspicious for appearing “nervous” near them and biking away, but then filed a simple assault misdemeanor, without offering details. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Andrea Velez, a US citizen arrested during a 24 June raid in downtown LA on her way to work, also had a felony assault charge dismissed this month, and has not faced further prosecution.
A large crowd fills the streets during an anti-Ice protest in downtown Los Angeles.Photograph: Sahab Zaribaf/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
One of the only cases from the first round of prosecutions that the government has not dropped is the one that made international headlines – the arrest ofDavid Huerta, a prominent California union leader jailed while observing an immigration raid.
Carley Palmer, a lawyer who served as a supervisor in the US attorney’s office in LA until she left last year, said the dismissals and downgrading of charges probably occurred after more in-depth evaluation by line prosecutors and supervisors, and in some ways reflected “the process working”: “We want prosecutors to feel they can re-evaluate evidence and change their mind when new information comes to light.” Prosecutors might dismiss cases if a grand jury declines to indict, if they believe they can’t persuade jurors at trial, or if they learn officers violated the defendants’ rights, she added.
The LA Timesreportedthat Essayli has struggled to secure indictments at grand juries.
Palmer, now an attorney at the Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg firm, said it was unusual, however, for the office to prosecute these kinds of “he said she said” protest scuffles in the first place, taking away resources from traditional priorities, including fraud, economic crimes, public corruption and civil rights abuses.
“Federal charges are very serious and have real implications for people’s lives,” Palmer added. “Even if it gets dismissed, it will be on someone’s record for the rest of their lives. It carries a lot of consequences, so you want prosecutors to understand and appreciate the power they have.”
