Assembly Bill 1267, authored by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, cleared the Legislature in August with overwhelming bipartisan support. It now sits on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, awaiting his signature before a Sept. 30 deadline. If signed, California would join the vast majority of states that have already set a minimum marriage age, leaving only New Mexico and Mississippi without one.

The bill’s path to passage was anything but straightforward. For years, efforts to ban child marriage in California have collapsed under opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — two organizations with deep ties to Democratic politics and significant sway at the Capitol.

Both groups have historically argued that restricting marriage for minors would infringe on young people’s rights to make their own decisions, including about reproductive health and bodily autonomy. The ACLU has contended that marriage offers minors a legal path to emancipation, while Planned Parenthood has framed the issue as one of personal choice.

Critics, however, say those arguments ignore the reality facing thousands of California children. According to Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that tracks and campaigns against child marriage, roughly 9,000 minors marry in California each year, the overwhelming majority of them girls wed to adult men. Because the state’s age of consent is 18, advocates argue that these marriages effectively legalize relationships that would otherwise be considered statutory rape.

This year, lawmakers took an unusual route to get the bill moving. Pellerin used a legislative maneuver known as a “gut and amend,” stripping the language from an unrelated bill and replacing it with the child marriage ban after the normal bill-introduction deadline had passed. Advocates say the timing was deliberate — an effort to keep the proposal off Planned Parenthood’s radar until it was too late for the organization to mount effective opposition.

The strategy appears to have worked. While the ACLU again registered its opposition, no lobbyist showed up to defend minors’ right to marry during this year’s committee hearings. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, took a “neutral” stance, declining to formally support or oppose the measure.

“We need to be clear that girls, no matter how mature they may seem, are still girls,” Pellerin said in an interview. “Girls don’t have freedom without protection.”

Neither organization agreed to make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters. In a June letter outlining its opposition, the ACLU wrote that “prohibiting marriage for all minors would represent a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to respecting minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in matters of reproductive autonomy.” The ACLU’s press office declined to answer further questions about its position.

Planned Parenthood spokesperson Shelby McMichael said in an emailed statement that the organization evaluates legislation on a bill-by-bill basis each session. “Given the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood health centers last year, we chose to prioritize issues related to the Trump administration and the ongoing attacks from congressional Republicans on health care,” she wrote.

Planned Parenthood’s influence in Sacramento is substantial. The organization has donated at least $2.7 million to Democratic lawmakers since 2002, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, and it operates more than 100 clinics statewide. The group also publishes an annual legislative scorecard tracking how often lawmakers vote in line with its positions — in 2025, nearly every Democrat scored 100%.

That influence became even more pronounced after President Donald Trump moved to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, pushing the organization to rely more heavily on state support. In February, California lawmakers approved $140 million in emergency funding to help offset those federal losses.

The current fight echoes a similar battle two years ago, when Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, introduced a nearly identical measure, Assembly Bill 2924. That bill never received a hearing. Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee, told advocates at the time that Planned Parenthood needed to drop its opposition before he would allow a vote. Kalra said he was also concerned the bill could jeopardize minors’ abortion rights, even though California voters had already enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution in 2022 — two years before that bill was introduced.

“I think that was certainly one of the factors,” Kalra said of Planned Parenthood’s opposition and the bill’s failure to advance. “Planned Parenthood’s voice matters on this issue, and on other matters that come before us at the Capitol.”

The pattern dates back further. In 2017, then-state Sen. Jerry Hill introduced similar legislation after learning that a 13-year-old girl in his district had been engaged to a 38-year-old man from another country. “I thought, who could possibly oppose this? Who could say this is wrong?” Hill recalled. Instead, his proposal ran into fierce debate over cultural differences, adolescent autonomy and bodily rights.

Then-Assemblymember Lorena González, a labor-aligned Democrat who chaired the Assembly Appropriations Committee at the time, told Hill she would block the bill unless it were amended to lower the marriage age to 16 or 17 rather than banning marriage for minors outright. The legislation was eventually watered down into the law still in effect today, which allows minors to marry with parental and judicial consent but sets no minimum age.

Hill blames special interest groups for repeatedly derailing reform efforts. “These interest groups in Sacramento are very powerful. They have a lot of influence over what passes in the Legislature,” he said. “Politics trumps policy about 80% of the time.”

González remembers it differently. While she acknowledges blocking an outright ban, she said she doesn’t recall Planned Parenthood weighing in or factoring into her decision. Instead, she said her hesitation stemmed from experiences in her own district, where some Latino families encouraged pregnant teenage girls to marry the child’s father if he was close to their age. “I had girls tell me this was the best option for them,” González said, adding that the age gap between spouses seemed to matter more than the marriage itself. At the time, she said, an outright ban felt “classist.”

For survivors like Sara Tasneem, the state’s decades of inaction carried lasting consequences. Tasneem said she was forced into marriage at 15 with a 28-year-old man as part of arrangements made within a Northern California Sufi group her father belonged to. After her father learned she was dating a classmate, he arranged the marriage instead. “I was handed off to a complete stranger I had just met,” she said. She left school, was repeatedly raped, and said she felt trapped because, as a minor, she could not hire a divorce attorney. Tasneem said she had two children with her abuser before leaving him in 2003 at age 23, taking her children with her. She later became an advocate for ending child marriage nationwide.

Momentum for reform grew last November after a New York Times opinion piece singled out the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for helping block anti-child-marriage legislation in California, even as Republican-led states such as Arkansas and Louisiana enacted stricter age requirements.

Fraidy Reiss, executive director of Unchained at Last, was herself forced into marriage at 19 within an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. She said California’s long delay in addressing the issue is frustrating, but progress is still progress.

“Should this have happened a decade ago? Yes, it should have,” Reiss said. “But at least we’re here now.”

Original source: CalMatters

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The ruling, made public this week, stems from body-camera footage, sworn statements and internal text messages gathered during litigation over immigration sweeps that rattled Los Angeles neighborhoods in the summer of 2025. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong upheld an earlier preliminary order finding that Border Patrol and ICE agents cannot simply take someone into custody — even someone suspected of being in the country illegally — without first assessing whether that person is likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained.

“This court finds sufficient evidence that defendants have a continuing policy and practice of making warrantless arrests in violation of the requirement to conduct a flight-risk analysis,” Frimpong wrote.

Federal law allows immigration officers to make warrantless arrests only when they have reasonable grounds to believe a person is in the country unlawfully and is likely to escape before a warrant can be secured. Attorneys representing immigrant rights groups argued that agents routinely skipped that step altogether, instead detaining people first and sorting out their legal status later.

“This ruling is one of the most significant decisions to date in the community’s fight to end the federal government’s cruel and unlawful practice of snatching people off the street and tearing families apart,” said Mayra Joachin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

The Department of Homeland Security defended its agents’ conduct, saying in a statement that ICE has legal authority to make arrests under federal statute, using “reasonable suspicion” to investigate immigration status and probable cause to justify detentions in line with the Fourth Amendment. The agency noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has previously sided with it on similar enforcement questions.

The case grew out of a lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU and a coalition of advocacy organizations against the Department of Homeland Security, following a series of high-profile raids across Los Angeles led by former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino. DHS attorneys have said those specific operations ended in February, but the broader deportation push under President Donald Trump has only accelerated since then. Nationally, arrests hit their highest point of Trump’s second term in July, with nearly 50,000 detentions recorded, according to the Deportation Data Project. In California, arrests were up more than 15% compared with the same period a year earlier.

One case at the center of the ruling involved a man identified in court records only by his initials, AT, who was detained outside a car wash in Los Angeles on a scorching August day. Body-camera footage shows a Border Patrol agent running up behind him as he stood near a Mazda with a rag and spray bottle in hand. Within seconds, the agent grabbed him by the collar of his Handy J Car Wash shirt.

“Hey, sir, let’s go,” the agent said in Spanish. Confused, the man asked where they were going and told the agent he had documentation. He was handcuffed within ten seconds and driven away in an unmarked Dodge Charger to an ICE processing facility, leaving his cleaning supplies behind on the hood of the car. He was fingerprinted and released later that day once officials realized he was a lawful permanent resident.

The arresting agent’s report claimed AT made “a couple of quick movements” suggesting he might flee — a claim not supported by the body-camera video. The agent also wrote that when asked about his citizenship, AT answered “United States” but appeared “confused and unsure of his answer, similar to people I have arrested previously.” Court records show the agent never attempted to check identification or ask basic background questions before handcuffing him — the kind of assessment federal law requires before a warrantless arrest can be made.

At the same car wash that day, another worker was detained by a different agent. That agent’s report noted the man had complied with instructions, yet later justified the arrest by claiming the man had “disobeyed the agent’s orders” — a contradiction that judges and attorneys pointed to as evidence of the pattern advocates have described. In legal filings, attorneys said roughly 80% of the arrest reports they reviewed either lacked any real flight-risk analysis or relied on boilerplate language that didn’t match the footage.

Frimpong specifically cited that car wash arrest in her ruling, noting stark differences between the government’s written justification and what the video actually showed. She wrote that although agents claimed the worker, identified as EGG, was likely to flee based on alleged “flight from law enforcement,” the footage showed him standing in the same spot throughout the encounter, working, until an agent called him over. “Contrary to the government’s written flight-risk analysis,” the judge wrote, “he did not flee.”

In that same recording, a supervising agent tells the worker, “We’re going to take you in and check that everything is fine. If everything checks out, we’ll let you go” — a comment attorneys say reveals how these operations actually functioned: arrest first, verify later.

Other footage submitted in the case appears to show agents disregarding earlier immigration court decisions altogether. In one clip from September, an agent asks a colleague whether they are still detaining people who already have scheduled immigration court hearings — a circumstance that typically signals a person has already been screened and found not to be a flight risk. Another agent responds, “I don’t care if you have a court date coming up, you’re a custody redetermination case,” indicating that agents were overriding prior judicial findings.

Attorneys representing the detained workers argued that even individuals already moving through the immigration court system, previously released on the presumption that they weren’t flight risks, were being swept up again. Agency policy requires Border Patrol officers to ask about identification, address and other flight-risk indicators before making an arrest, but plaintiffs say body-camera footage repeatedly shows agents skipping that step.

In one August 2025 raid captured on video, Border Patrol agents jumped out of a Penske rental truck to detain people in a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles. According to court records, an agent arrested a man identified as Tijerino-Garmendia after writing in his report that the man “stated he did not have any identification indicating his identity or address.” Footage reviewed by attorneys shows the agent never actually asked him those questions.

Similar rulings barring warrantless arrests have been issued by federal judges in Oregon, Colorado and Washington, D.C., though in at least two of those cases, courts later found that agents continued the practice despite the orders.

In the Los Angeles case, Frimpong directed agents to document the “specific and particularized facts” supporting probable cause that a person was likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained. She declined, however, to require agents to document community ties — such as employment, housing or family connections — when flight risk could be shown through other means. She also declined to require documentation of encounters where agents speak with someone but do not make an arrest.

The federal government asked for a two-week delay before the order took effect while it considered an appeal. Frimpong denied that request, stating that the government could not reasonably claim harm from being ordered simply to follow the law.

Original source: CalMatters

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For years, efforts to ban child marriage in California have stalled in Sacramento — not because of resistance from conservative lawmakers, but because of pushback from the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, organizations closely aligned with the Democratic supermajority that controls the Legislature. Now, after nearly a decade of failed attempts, a bill banning marriage before age 18 sits on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, awaiting his signature or veto by September 30.

Under current California law, a minor can marry with the consent of a parent and a judge, regardless of age. Only two other states, New Mexico and Mississippi, similarly have no minimum marriage age. According to the advocacy group Unchained at Last, roughly 9,000 children are married in California each year, the overwhelming majority of them girls wedding adult men. Because the state’s age of consent for sexual activity is 18, critics argue these marriages effectively legalize relationships that would otherwise be considered statutory rape.

The path to this year’s bill, Assembly Bill 1267, began quietly in March, when a group of Democratic lawmakers started laying the groundwork to finally push a ban through — this time working to keep Planned Parenthood from blocking it before it even reached a hearing.

Assemblymember Gail Pellerin of Santa Cruz introduced the measure using a legislative maneuver known as a “gut-and-amend,” swapping the language of an unrelated bill after the normal bill-introduction deadline had passed. Advocates say the timing was intentional — an effort to sidestep the kind of early opposition that has doomed similar bills in the past.

This time, the strategy worked. While the ACLU again formally opposed the bill, no lobbyists showed up to argue against it during summer committee hearings, and Planned Parenthood declined to take a position, staying neutral. The bill passed with near-unanimous support in August.

“We need to make it clear that girls, despite their perceived maturity, are children,” Pellerin said. “Children don’t have unprotected freedom.”

The ACLU has argued for years that restricting marriage among minors would strip young people of an important form of legal independence, including access to emancipation and reproductive health decisions made without parental involvement. In a letter opposing the bill in June, the organization wrote that banning marriage for all minors “is a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to honoring minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in the realm of reproductive autonomy.”

An ACLU spokesperson declined to answer further questions or make anyone available for an interview.

Planned Parenthood, for its part, said it evaluates legislation on a case-by-case basis each session. A spokesperson said that given ongoing threats to defund Planned Parenthood health centers under the Trump administration, the organization chose to focus its political capital elsewhere this year rather than fight the marriage bill.

Planned Parenthood’s influence in California politics is substantial. The organization has donated more than $2.7 million to state lawmakers since 2002, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, and nearly every Democrat in the Legislature earned a 100% rating on the group’s 2025 legislative scorecard.

That influence proved decisive two years ago, when Irvine Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris introduced a similar ban. Assemblymember Ash Kalra, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee, told advocates at the time that Planned Parenthood’s opposition needed to be resolved before the bill could even get a hearing. Kalra said he was concerned that banning marriage for minors could complicate their access to abortion services, and he ultimately never scheduled the bill for a vote.

“Planned Parenthood’s voice matters in that, and in other issues that come before us in the Capitol,” Kalra said in a recent interview, acknowledging the group’s opposition played a role in his decision.

The pattern dates back further. In 2017, then-state Senator Jerry Hill introduced a bill to ban child marriage outright after learning that a 13-year-old girl in his district had become engaged to a 38-year-old man. Hill said he was stunned when the proposal drew opposition rather than broad support.

“I thought, ‘Who could oppose that? Who could say that it was wrong?'” Hill recalled. Instead, the bill became entangled in a larger debate over cultural norms, youth autonomy and reproductive rights. Then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who chaired the Appropriations Committee, refused to advance an outright ban, insisting instead on amendments that preserved marriage rights for 16- and 17-year-olds. That compromise became the law still in effect today.

Gonzalez, now removed from the Legislature, disputes that Planned Parenthood factored into her decision. She said her reluctance stemmed from cases she saw in her own district, where pregnant teenage girls sometimes chose to marry partners close to their own age rather than face other pressures. To her, an outright ban felt like it unfairly targeted families making difficult personal choices.

For survivors like Sara Tasneem, the state’s decades-long inaction had lasting consequences. Tasneem said she was forced into marriage at 15 to a 28-year-old man as part of an arrangement orchestrated by her father, who she said belonged to a Northern California religious group. She said she endured years of abuse and could not seek legal help to leave the marriage until she turned 18, since minors cannot retain an attorney on their own. She eventually left the marriage in 2003, at age 23, taking her two children with her.

Tasneem has since become an advocate for ending child marriage nationwide, work she says stems directly from feeling powerless as a teenager with no legal recourse.

National scrutiny of California’s law intensified last November, when a New York Times opinion piece singled out the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for their roles in blocking similar legislation, noting that even Republican-led states like Arkansas and Louisiana had already tightened their marriage laws.

Fraidy Reiss, executive director of Unchained at Last and herself a survivor of forced marriage at 19 in a New York Orthodox Jewish community, said she is hopeful Newsom will sign the bill despite the long delay in getting it this far.

“Should it have happened a decade earlier? Yes, it should have,” Reiss said. “But at least we’re here now.”

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Seeks to Ban Child Marriage, But Faces Pushback From Civil Rights Groups appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong and unsealed this week, cements a preliminary ruling she first signaled last month. It represents a significant setback for federal immigration enforcement tactics that have drawn intense scrutiny across Los Angeles since aggressive street operations swept through the region in 2025.

The case centers on a basic legal requirement: immigration officers cannot arrest someone without a warrant unless they have probable cause both that the person is undocumented and that the person is likely to escape before a warrant could be secured. Frimpong found overwhelming evidence that agents have been ignoring that second requirement altogether.

“This Court finds ample evidence that Defendants have an ongoing policy and practice of conducting warrantless arrests in violation of the requirement to conduct a likelihood-of-escape analysis,” she wrote.

One case illustrating the pattern involved a man identified only by the initials A.T., a worker at Handy J Car Wash in Los Angeles. Body camera footage from August 2025 shows a Border Patrol agent sprinting toward him as he wiped down a vehicle, then grabbing him by his shirt collar. Within ten seconds, A.T. was in handcuffs, despite telling the agent he had legal documentation. He was placed in an unmarked Dodge Charger and taken to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where he was fingerprinted and released hours later after officials determined he was a lawful permanent resident.

The agent’s written report claimed A.T. made sudden movements suggesting he might flee — a claim the body camera footage does not support. The agent also noted that A.T. seemed “confused and unsure” when asked about his citizenship, and used that uncertainty to justify the arrest. At no point, according to the footage, did the agent attempt to check identification or ask basic background questions before making the arrest — the type of assessment the law requires.

The lawsuit that led to Frimpong’s ruling was filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy organizations, following widely criticized immigration raids across Los Angeles overseen by former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino. Attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security have said those large-scale operations ended in February. Still, nationwide arrest numbers have continued to climb under the Trump administration’s expanded deportation push, hitting nearly 50,000 arrests in July — the highest monthly total of the administration, according to the Deportation Data Project. In California, arrests during that period were up more than 15 percent compared with the same time last year.

Attorneys representing those detained say the discrepancies between agents’ official arrest narratives and body camera footage were central to their case. In one example cited in Frimpong’s ruling, an agent claimed a worker identified as E.G.G. had tried to flee — but footage instead shows the man standing in place at the car wash the entire time, from when agents entered the business to when he was called over and detained. A supervising agent is heard on the recording telling the man, “We’re going to give you a ride, and check if everything is OK. If everything is OK, we’ll let you go” — a comment attorneys say reveals a pattern of arresting first and sorting out legal status afterward.

Other footage submitted in the case appears to show agents disregarding determinations already made by immigration courts. In one recording, an agent asks a colleague whether they are still detaining individuals who hold a notice to appear before an immigration judge — a document typically issued to people who have already been found not to pose a flight risk. Another agent responds bluntly that a pending court date does not matter, saying the person is subject to what he called a “custody redetermination.”

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued this showed agents were not merely failing to perform their own flight-risk evaluations, but actively overriding judicial findings that a person was safe to release.

In another episode captured on video, agents jumped from a rented Penske truck to detain workers in a Home Depot parking lot in August 2025. One man, identified in court records as Tijerino-Garmendia, was reported by the arresting agent as having no identification or verified home address. But according to attorneys, the footage shows the agent never actually asked him those questions — undermining the written justification for the arrest.

Attorneys for the ACLU say such gaps were common. In a review of arrest reports connected to the case, they found that roughly 80 percent lacked any genuine flight-risk analysis, instead relying on generic, repeated language that did not reflect what agents actually observed or asked in the field.

“This ruling is one of the most important decisions to date in the community’s effort to end the federal government’s cruel and illegal practice of abducting people and separating them from their families,” said Mayra Joachin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

Frimpong’s order requires agents going forward to document specific, individualized facts supporting their belief that a person was likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained. She stopped short, however, of requiring agents to detail community ties — such as employment, housing or family connections — as long as flight risk can be established through other means. She also declined to require documentation in cases where agents question someone but ultimately do not make an arrest.

Similar rulings restricting warrantless immigration arrests have been issued by federal judges in Oregon, Colorado and Washington, D.C. In two of those cases, courts later found that agents continued the practice despite the orders.

The Department of Homeland Security had requested a two-week delay before the new requirements take effect, citing the possibility of an appeal. Frimpong rejected that request, stating that the government could not reasonably claim to be harmed by simply being required to follow the law.

Original source: CalMatters

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U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who presides in the Central District of California, had already ordered federal officials back in January to speed up the process of copying data from personal phones belonging to more than 800 agents connected to the 2025 immigration raids in Los Angeles. This week, Frimpong went further, slapping the government with a $500-per-day fine until it complies with the original order to hand over the devices for evidence review — and requiring the federal government to cover legal costs that plaintiffs’ attorneys racked up trying to obtain the records in the first place.

The contempt finding follows an admission in June, when DHS attorneys told the court that the agency simply hadn’t turned over the records. According to those attorneys, government-issued phones were being processed at a pace of roughly three devices every two weeks — a timeline that, plaintiffs’ lawyers noted, would take nearly four years to complete at that rate.

Attorneys representing immigrants swept up in Operation At Large, the name given to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Los Angeles last year, say the phones could hold evidence supporting claims that federal agents engaged in a pattern of racial profiling during the operation.

Back in May, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that DHS had “simply proceeded to thwart” Frimpong’s order, both by slow-walking the imaging of government-issued phones and by openly resisting the directive as it applied to agents’ personal devices.

Last month, ACLU attorneys asked Frimpong to issue a separate order explicitly barring agents from detaining people based on their race or ethnicity. In their filing, they pointed to text messages and body-camera footage showing agents using slurs — including “wetback” and “tonks” — to describe working-class Latino residents they intended to detain, according to court records.

“Federal agents aren’t just violating the Constitution out on the streets — the government is also violating court orders by deliberately withholding critical evidence about its immigration enforcement operations,” said Mayra Joachin, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

DHS has not responded to inquiries about whether agents’ use of the term “tonks” violated agency policy.

Following Frimpong’s contempt ruling, DHS issued a written statement identical to one it released just last week in response to another development in the case.

“Our agents are focused on protecting the American people, not manufacturing outrage,” the statement read. “Where is the media outrage for the families who lost a loved one to a crime committed by an illegal alien?”

Original source: CalMatters

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U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who sits in the Central District of California, issued the ruling Tuesday after finding that DHS had failed to comply with a January order directing the agency to expedite the imaging of personal cell phones belonging to more than 800 agents who took part in the 2025 immigration raids across Los Angeles.

As part of the contempt finding, Frimpong ordered the federal government to pay $500 a day until it complies with the discovery order, along with covering the legal costs plaintiffs’ attorneys have incurred trying to obtain the records.

The dispute came to a head in June, when DHS attorneys acknowledged in court that the records still had not been handed over. They told the judge that government-issued devices were being processed at a pace of roughly three phones every two weeks — a timeline that plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed out would take close to four years to finish.

The case stems from Operation At Large, the name given to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement push in Los Angeles last year. Attorneys representing immigrants swept up in those operations argue that the withheld phone records could reveal evidence of racial profiling by federal agents during the raids.

In a filing back in May, attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union accused DHS of deliberately undermining Frimpong’s order, writing that the agency had “simply proceeded to thwart” it “by dragging their feet on imaging government-issued cell phones and by openly defying the order as to personal phones.”

Last month, ACLU lawyers went a step further, asking Frimpong to issue a separate order barring agents from detaining people based on race. In their request, they pointed to text messages and body camera footage showing agents allegedly using slurs — including the terms “wets” and “tonks” — to single out working-class Latino residents for stops, according to court filings.

“Not only are federal agents violating the Constitution on the streets, the government is violating court orders by intentionally withholding critical evidence about its immigration enforcement operations,” said Mayra Joachin, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

DHS has not addressed questions about whether agents’ alleged use of the slur “tonks” violated department policy.

Following Frimpong’s contempt ruling, the agency released a written statement nearly identical to one it had issued the previous week in response to another development in the case.

“Our agents are focused on protecting the American people — not entertaining performative outrage,” the statement read. “Where is the media’s outrage for Angel families who lost a loved one to illegal alien crime?”

Original source: CalMatters

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CARE Court, formally known as the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act, lets family members, first responders and others petition a judge to connect someone suffering from a serious untreated mental illness — conditions like schizophrenia — with a voluntary community-based treatment plan. If that voluntary arrangement doesn’t hold, a judge has the authority to order the person into treatment.

L.A. County launched its program in December 2023, but for much of its existence it has fallen well short of the caseload state officials originally predicted. Between December 2023 and June of this year, only 1,111 petitions were filed countywide — a fraction of the roughly 3,800 cases per year that state projections had anticipated.

That trend appears to be shifting. County officials say petitions climbed by about 85% between November and March, with 68 filed in March alone.

Martin Jones, a program manager with the county’s Department of Mental Health, credits the uptick to closer coordination with hospitals, first responders and other agencies that can identify and refer people who might benefit from the program.

“We’re doing quite a bit of work to put tools in their hands to also help them identify and refer folks to us who might benefit from the support,” Jones told LAist. “I think we’re approaching the project from several fronts, and we’re seeing the results of that.”

Jones also pointed to a change that took effect in January, which expanded the program’s diagnostic criteria to include people with bipolar I disorder accompanied by psychotic features. That broader eligibility, he said, has contributed to the recent surge in filings.

Supporters of CARE Court, a priority initiative for Newsom, argue it offers a more structured but less restrictive path toward stabilizing people with severe mental illness, and they view the rise in petitions as evidence the program is finally catching on.

Not everyone is convinced the growth is meaningful. Some mental health advocates and civil liberties groups say the numbers obscure a lack of real progress.

“The number of petitions says nothing about outcomes, which is the real point of the program,” said Eve Garrow, a policy analyst with the ACLU of Southern California. “Positive outcomes are really minuscule compared to the population in need.”

Statewide data show roughly half of all CARE Court petitions are ultimately dismissed. County officials counter that more than 4,000 people across California have instead been connected to alternative county mental health services when a formal CARE agreement wasn’t the right fit.

Critics, including Garrow, have also raised concerns about cost. A review by the Assembly Committee on the Judiciary found that in fiscal year 2024, the roughly 100 people enrolled in CARE Court statewide cost an average of about $713,000 per participant.

Garrow argues the program sidesteps the deeper issue — a chronically underfunded mental and behavioral health system.

“Basically what it does is it slaps a court order onto a broken system instead of fixing the system,” she said.

As for outcomes in L.A. County specifically, the Department of Mental Health reports that through June, 21 participants had completed the program’s 12-month track, with four more expected to graduate within the coming year. The department also noted that 63% of participants in the county have chosen to keep receiving CARE Court services rather than complete the program and exit.

Original source: CalMatters

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The documents were filed Monday as part of a motion for a preliminary injunction in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, several advocacy groups and private attorneys. The filing argues that federal agents have continued a pattern of “suspicionless and discriminatory” stops throughout the Central District of California, even after last summer’s widely publicized street operations wound down. In a deposition included in the filing, one ICE agent acknowledged that current enforcement is essentially “the same thing” as the earlier campaign, known as “Operation at Large,” just “with a different name.”

The evidence, gathered through months of court-ordered discovery, includes body-camera footage and sworn agent testimony obtained after U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong required the disclosures. That order followed a September decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to stay an earlier temporary restraining order in the case.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs contend the new material contradicts the federal government’s earlier assurances to the Supreme Court that agents based stops on specific intelligence rather than race or ethnicity.

Among the disclosures: body-camera video from a Home Depot parking lot in Hollywood shows a Border Patrol agent saying, “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet, he was just sitting in that minivan” — using a slur for people believed to be undocumented immigrants. Other text messages cited in the filing include an agent instructing colleagues to “plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out,” and another describing seeing “tonks everywhere selling food.”

“Tonks” is a term with a disturbing origin — reportedly derived from the sound made when a heavy object, such as a flashlight, strikes a person’s head. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, formally discouraged agents from using the word in 2019, citing its offensive nature, according to internal communications previously obtained through public records requests.

In another deposition cited in the filing, an agent described the kind of person who draws suspicion simply as an “older Hispanic male.” Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that such statements show agents were not conducting the kind of individualized assessments required under the Fourth Amendment before detaining someone, and instead targeted people they assumed were low-income and Latino — sweeping up U.S. citizens in the process.

The filing also cites a May 2025 directive from ICE headquarters urging field agents to “turn the creativity knob up to 11” in order to increase arrests of so-called “collaterals” — individuals encountered during an operation who were not the original target.

According to the ACLU, this approach wasn’t the result of individual agents acting outside their authority but rather a strategy encouraged by leadership. “This was not a rogue method of operationalizing agency orders; it was precisely what agency leadership desired,” the filing states.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys also noted that ICE significantly expanded its enforcement teams in Southern California, aided in part by recruitment materials that have drawn criticism for containing what experts described as white nationalist imagery and messaging. Some plaintiffs — including U.S. citizens — say they have been stopped by agents more than once.

Much of the evidence relies on communications retrieved from agents’ personal cell phones, though many of the agents involved in the Los Angeles operations have not yet turned their devices over for review. Last month, Frimpong held a tense hearing to consider whether to hold the federal government in contempt for failing to comply with an order requiring the surrender of agent phones for forensic examination.

According to statements made in court, more than half of the roughly 1,400 Border Patrol agents involved in the Los Angeles operations acknowledged using personal phones while on duty. Federal officials said agents were asked to upload relevant data to a government server as part of an agreement with their union intended to avoid workplace disputes. However, only 88 agents volunteered their personal phones for forensic imaging, and none of those phones have yet been processed.

Plaintiffs argue the government should face sanctions for what they characterize as an outright refusal to comply, citing officials’ own admission that they would not enforce the order out of concern that agents might object.

Progress on reviewing government-issued phones has been similarly slow. Attorneys for the federal government told the court that only three government phones are being imaged every two weeks, with an estimated 200 to 300 devices still awaiting review — a pace that could take nearly four years to complete.

“There’s enough to suggest that this is a system-wide practice of identifying people through racial slurs,” said Mayra Joachín, an attorney with the ACLU involved in the case.

CalMatters has reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for comment.

Original source: CalMatters

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What the Ruling Means

The Court’s decision reverses earlier restrictions put in place by lower courts. Under the ruling, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents will have broader authority to carry out arrests without warrants, provided they claim “reasonable suspicion” of immigration violations.

Supporters of the practice, including some law enforcement officials and border security advocates, argue that roving patrols are necessary to strengthen border enforcement and reduce the presence of unauthorized immigrants who they say strain public resources.

Concerns from Advocates

Immigrant rights groups across the Inland Empire and Southern California immediately condemned the ruling, warning that it will lead to racial profiling, family separations, and a climate of fear in immigrant-heavy communities like Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“This ruling undermines trust between residents and law enforcement, making families more afraid to seek help, report crimes, or even access health and education services,” said representatives from the Inland Region Housing Justice Coalition in a statement.

Local groups including the ACLU of Southern California, Inland Congregations United for Change (ICUC), and Time for Change Foundation have pledged to mobilize, offering “Know Your Rights” workshops and legal assistance for immigrant families who may be targeted by increased patrols.

Impact on the Inland Empire

The Inland Empire has one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in California, with tens of thousands of residents in mixed-status households. Advocacy leaders warn that roving arrests will disproportionately affect Latino and Indigenous communities, many of whom already experience economic and housing insecurity.

“The chilling effect of this ruling is enormous,” said a San Bernardino-based immigrant advocate. “When people fear arrest at any moment, they avoid interacting with police, schools, and hospitals. That makes everyone less safe.”

A History of Controversy

Roving patrols have long been controversial in Southern California. Critics point to past cases where citizens and legal residents were detained and questioned based solely on their appearance or language. In the Inland Empire, several lawsuits were filed in the 1990s and 2000s challenging roving stops on major highways and near agricultural areas.

Civil rights organizations say the Supreme Court’s decision could revive those same abuses. “We fought this battle before, and here we are again,” said a Riverside attorney who has represented families in immigration cases.

Local Response

Some Inland Empire city officials expressed concern that the ruling could strain relationships between local law enforcement and residents. While local police departments are not required to assist in federal immigration enforcement, past collaborations between county jails and federal agencies have been criticized by immigrant advocates.

Community leaders are urging city councils and county supervisors to adopt “sanctuary-style” policies that limit cooperation with roving immigration arrests. They argue that such protections would help maintain community trust and safety.

What Happens Next

Immigrant rights groups in the region are planning a series of community meetings in coming weeks to explain the ruling’s implications, provide legal resources, and educate residents on their constitutional rights if stopped by federal agents.

“This decision may have passed, but our communities are united in demanding dignity, compassion, and justice,” said one Inland advocacy leader.

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Their fight comes amid a headline-making spike in jail deaths in this sprawling county east of Los Angeles. In 2022, at least 19 people died while held in Riverside county detention facilities, according to California department of justice data. That’s a higher rate of jail deaths than in LA county that year, which had three times as many inmates. Last year, at least 14 people died in the Riverside county detention centers.

But the high number of deaths isn’t the only reason behind the families’ quest. In Riverside county, as in 48 of California’s 58 counties, the coroner’s office is run by the sheriff’s department – the same agency that runs the jails.

That structure, legal experts say, presents at least the perception of a conflict of interest when someone dies in jail, in police custody, or following police use of force.

Many families of people who have died in Riverside county jails agree. That’s because Chad Bianco – the Riverside county sheriff and a rabble-rouser who was once affiliated with the Oath Keepers and recently endorsed Trump by saying “I think it’s time to put a felon in the White House” – has deflected responsibility for the deaths on his watch. When the California attorney general in 2023 announced an investigation into Bianco’s department, he dismissed it as a political maneuver by his detractors in Sacramento. “Every single one of these inmate deaths was out of anyone’s control,” Bianco told Riverside’s Press-Enterprise. “The fact of the matter is that they just happened to be in our custody.”

In another instance, Bianco used his personal Facebook account to respond to an article posted by the Press-Enterprise about deaths in his jails, most of which were due to drug overdoses or suicide. “Did [inmates’ families] ever demand their family members not commit suicide or consume drugs while they were in custody?” he wrote. “Did they ever demand that their family members not commit crimes in the first place?”

And in an interview with the Guardian in March, Bianco doubled down. “It’s not my fault that someone is going [to] extraordinary lengths to smuggle fentanyl into the jail,” he said. “When are we going to say that it’s not the government’s fault or the government’s responsibility to take care of all this?”

Lisa Matus’s son Richard died of a fentanyl overdose at Riverside county’s Cois M Byrd detention center in 2022. The autopsy performed by Bianco’s office ruled Matus had died of a fentanyl overdose. But it also found that his left anterior descending artery, which provides half the heart’s blood, was 80-90% closed. Matus’s family alleges he was not given adequate medical attention while in jail, despite requesting care on multiple occasions.

Richard was awaiting trial with his brother Raymond for attempted murder and attempted robbery when he was found unresponsive in his cell, according to the coroner’s report. Matus said she called the sheriff’s department multiple times to locate Richard’s body but couldn’t get answers until she got an attorney involved.

“How do you trust somebody that’s bashing you [on] social media, but is also in charge of letting us know what happened inside the jail?” she said.

Matus has filed a civil suit against the department, which is ongoing.

When the Guardian asked Bianco about his social media remarks, he softened his stance. He said his comment was not meant to single out Matus or imply she was to blame for her son’s death. If given the opportunity to speak to Matus in person, he said: “I would make it perfectly clear to her that that’s not what I meant. And never would I think or accuse her of that.”

‘Not to satisfy law enforcement but to get to the truth’
If the idea of a law enforcement agency overseeing a coroner’s office sounds unusual, that’s because it is. California is one of just four states that uses a sheriff-coroner system, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Generally speaking, a coroner is an administrative figure who oversees autopsies conducted by physicians who are also board-certified forensic pathologists. In California, anyone 21 or older with a high school diploma and no felony convictions meets the minimum requirements to become a coroner.

Several experts said allowing law enforcement officials to serve as coroners in their own jurisdictions, as is the case in Riverside, is problematic. “The job of the person doing an autopsy is not to satisfy law enforcement but to get to the truth,” said Thomas Mauriello, a former police officer and federal investigator who teaches at University of Maryland’s department of criminology and criminal justice. Law enforcement agencies and coroners, he said, “should be separate and distinct”.

Marcella Fierro spent 14 years as the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and has written extensively on death investigations for the National Academy of Sciences. “Death investigations and forensic science investigations need to be separate from law enforcement, unequivocally,” she said.

Over the years, there’ve been reports about the relationship between sheriff’s departments and coroners impacting investigations elsewhere in the state. In a high-profile California case, two forensic pathologists in San Joaquin county accused their boss, then sheriff-coroner Steve Moore, of meddling in a death investigation that might have implicated his deputies, and resigned. Moore denied the allegations. The San Joaquin county board of supervisors later stripped Moore of his duties, separated the sheriff- coroner office and implemented a new system.

And there’s been research into the topic. A 2023 study by researchers at University of Southern California found that California counties that use a sheriff-coroner system “grossly undercount” deaths involving officers.

The Riverside county sheriff’s department, which oversees 4,000 people incarcerated across five detention facilities, recently faced scrutiny over one such death: Christopher Zumwalt died in 2020 after sheriff’s deputies raided his jail cell with pepper spray and shocked and restrained him, according to recent reporting by the New York Times. The sheriff’s department determined Zumwalt’s cause of death to be cardiac arrest, according to the Times, and the coroner ruled it a justified homicide.

Law enforcement agencies are required to report such incidents to the state. But the Guardian could not find a similar case in the California justice department’s use-of-force database, where the information would ordinarily be.

Bianco did not respond to a request for comment about whether his department reported the use-of-force to the state, or the accuracy of the Times’s reporting.

‘Tired old false argument’
Aided by the ACLU, Matus and other family members of people who died in Bianco’s jails have had some success putting the issue on the agenda of local leaders. In December 2023, Riverside county supervisors Kevin Jeffries and V Manuel Perez authored a proposal to study the separation of the coroner from the sheriff. “While there is no evidence of any improprieties in Riverside county regarding the operations of the coroner’s office under the sheriff,” they wrote, “the optics of a potential conflict of interest can lead to a loss of confidence in our institutions.”

The group that conducted the study ultimately advised against separating the sheriff from the coroner, citing costs.

But Jeffries, Perez and advocates scored a small victory. In March, the board voted in favor of a new arrangement: autopsies for people who die in the county’s detention facilities will be outsourced to neighboring agencies. Luis Nolasco of the ACLU said that’s a step in the right direction, but he worries that law enforcement employees look out for each other regardless of jurisdiction, and “there may be some influencing [between] neighboring counties”.

Bianco bristles at Nolasco’s suggestion. “That’s a tired old false argument,” he said. “There is no law enforcement officer that looks out for themselves.”

The argument over which county coroner examines a body is beside the point, experts say. The real problem is the fact that coroners exist at all. Fierro said coroners typically have limited training and juggle responsibilities with other duties. “This is not a part-time, do-it-on-the-weekend job,” she said. “Coroners should be done away with unless the coroner is an MD.”

Many states, like Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts, use state-run systems made up of forensic pathologists overseen by medical examiners, who are either physicians, forensic pathologists or both; those systems are not associated with law enforcement agencies.

Some California counties, such as Los Angeles, San Joaquin and San Diego, have medical examiners’ departments that are also separate from law enforcement.

But replacing coroners with medical examiners, in California or anywhere else, is challenging. In the US, there are only about 700 forensic pathologists across roughly 2,400 death investigation systems, according to a 2022 study in the journal Missouri Medicine.

“It’s a very rare career choice,” said J Keith Pinckard, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “It is a lower-paying specialty compared to other branches of medical practice,” he said, “and salaries in government may not be comparable to the private sector”.

‘Less headache’
The ACLU of Southern California and the families say they’re not done fighting for the separation of the sheriff and the coroner.

There’s some attention on the issue at the state level, too. California assemblymember Mike Gipson, who in 2021 introduced a bill to separate coroners and sheriffs statewide that failed over budget concerns, says he plans to reintroduce his bill after the November elections, when the state legislature has new members.

The Riverside county sheriff, meanwhile, has his hands full. The California attorney general’s investigation into his department is ongoing. And the department has been under a federal consent decree due to poor jail conditions since 2016, prior to Bianco’s election. Bianco has been working with court-appointed attorneys to comply with the decree, which calls for improvements and better staffing of medical and mental health units, and improved conditions in mental health settings.

Two inmates have died in Bianco’s jails since the Riverside county supervisors’ decision earlier this year to outsource jail death autopsies to neighboring counties. The procedures were done by the San Bernardino county sheriff-coroner’s department; San Bernardino county has not fulfilled a request for autopsy reports.

Bianco said sending the bodies of people who die in his jails out of the county is fine by him. He even said he would be open to having someone else serve as coroner. “Would I be open to less responsibility? Would I be open to less scrutiny? Would I be open to less headache? Would I be open to less calls in the middle of the night? Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely.”

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