Mejia and her son are U.S. citizens…. The interaction has left lasting scars on her son, who now suffers from nightmares and sometimes “breaks down” in tears when she’s driving, Mejia said.
“People with the slightest shade of brown in their skin in L.A. fear that they may be the target of immigration officials,” Contreras said. “It’s across the board now.”
Federal agents are violating a court order that prohibits them from racially profiling Latinos and other Southern California residents as the directive winds it way through an appeals process, immigrant advocates and local officials say.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden-era appointee, imposed the temporary restraining order in Los Angeles more than a month ago, but arrests in locations frequented by Latino workers, such as Home Depots and car washes, have become daily occurrences.
“It’s a complete disregard,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA. “It’s almost like the rounding up of cattle in the road.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, denies racially profiling people in its efforts to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
“Unelected judges are undermining the will of the American people,” DHS said Wednesday in an emailed statement. “What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel, which filed the original lawsuit in July, filed a new motion Tuesday asking Frimpong to order additional evidence from the federal government “in light of apparent violations” of her order.
“This limited discovery is needed to determine whether further action may be necessary to enforce the Court’s TRO and to inform what additional measures, if any, may be needed to ensure compliance with any preliminary injunction the Court may issue,” the motion reads.
It details six arrests in August — three at Home Depots and three at car washes in Los Angeles County — that appear to undermine the temporary restraining order.
In one instance, on Aug. 22, federal agents detained seven people at a Pasadena car wash, including a legal resident, according to the motion. The man was handcuffed and detained despite having proper documentation nearby, the motion said. He was later released but described the incident as “devastating and humiliating.”
Frustrated by the lengthy court battle, immigrant rights’ organizers say communities are being torn apart while lawyers file motion after motion. But local officials say the order has been difficult to enforce while litigation remains ongoing.
“We’re using every tool at our disposal to put a stop to this behavior,” said Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto.
Last month, Soto’s office led a coalition of 20 California cities — including Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Long Beach — in joining a federal lawsuit alleging that the federal government conducted unconstitutional and unlawful arrests and raids without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
The organizations asked the court to stop federal agencies from using “disproportionate force,” which has sometimes led to U.S. citizens being detained.
The federal government twice challenged the temporary restraining order, first in the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals and then in the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling was upheld in the appeals court, and the Supreme Court has not weighed in on the issue.
The lawsuit is set for a hearing on Sept. 24 for a preliminary injunction that would extend the order as the case progresses through the courts.
Meanwhile, immigration advocates said they recorded more than a dozen arrests at Home Depots and car washes in Los Angeles and Orange counties Tuesday.
Volunteers who witnessed the arrests or went to the scene to help families get information about their missing loved ones said the workers all spoke Spanish.
Eight people were arrested last week outside a Home Depot near a day labor center, which has been the target of at least three previous enforcement actions, NBC Los Angeles reported.
Video shot by immigration advocates and circulated on social media shows federal agents arriving in unmarked cars as workers run, some tripping over themselves.
DHS said in a statement that three of the eight people had “extensive rap sheets,” but did not mention the other five.
“Every day, DHS is enforcing our nation’s laws across all of LA not just Home Depots,” the department said in Wednesday’s emailed statement.
The operation unfolded at the same Home Depot where federal agents jumped out of a Penske rental van and took a dozen people into custody.
Joshua Erazo, a day laborer organizer who connects workers with employers at the center, told NBC Los Angeles that the people who were detained included street vendors.
Data compiled by CHIRLA shows that 471 of the 2,800 arrests made by the Department of Homeland Security from June 6 to July 20 occurred in predominantly Latino neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley.
As of Wednesday, Homeland Security has made more than 5,000 arrests in Los Angeles, “including murderers, rapists, and child abusers,” it said in the statement.
Believing they have little recourse, some residents have filed individual lawsuits instead of waiting for the temporary restraining order to be enforced.
Lawyers representing a Los Angeles mother took the first step last week toward suing the federal government after her teenage son was detained by agents at gunpoint in a case of mistaken identity. They filed a claim for $1 million in damages for personal injury, including “assault, battery, false arrest, false imprisonment,” according to court documents.
Andreina Mejia said she and her son, who is 15 and has special needs, were sitting inside her parked car outside Arleta High School when masked federal agents approached them with guns drawn. They were both pulled out and Mejia was handcuffed while agents questioned her son, she said.
“He didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “So, I just told him, ‘Don’t make any movement, don’t move, just follow instructions.’”
Agents asked for the whereabouts of a person whose name her son did not recognize and briefly detained him when he could not provide information, Mejia said. One of the agents appeared to realize they had the wrong person and let her son go, she said.
Mejia and her son are U.S. citizens. Agents said they were looking for a young man from El Salvador.
“The family is Mexican American,” said Mejia’s attorney, Christian Contreras. “It feels as if they were exploited, abused and taken advantage of because of the color of their skin.”
The interaction has left lasting scars on her son, who now suffers from nightmares and sometimes “breaks down” in tears when she’s driving, Mejia said.
“People with the slightest shade of brown in their skin in L.A. fear that they may be the target of immigration officials,” Contreras said. “It’s across the board now.”
President Donald Trump will host a high-powered list of tech CEOs for a dinner at the White House on Thursday night.
The guest list is set to include Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a dozen other executives from the biggest artificial intelligence and tech firms, according to the White House.
One notable absence from the guest list is Elon Musk, once a close ally of Trump, whom the Republican president tasked with running the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had a public breakup with Trump earlier this year.
The dinner will be held in the Rose Garden, where Trump recently paved over the grassy lawn and set up tables, chairs and umbrellas that look strikingly similar to the outdoor setup at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “The president looks forward to welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio.”
The event will follow a meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which first lady Melania Trump will chair.
“During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance,” she said in a statement. “We are living in a moment of wonder, and it is our responsibility to prepare America’s children.”
At least some of the attendees at the president’s Thursday’s dinner are expected to participate in the task force meeting, which aims to develop AI education for American youths.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner is also set to include Google founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
Isaacman was an associate of Musk whom Trump nominated to lead NASA, only to revoke the nomination around the time of his breakup with Musk. Trump cited the revocation of the nomination as one of the reasons Musk was upset with him and called Isaacman “totally a Democrat.”
The dinner was first reported Wednesday by The Hill.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tech-ceos-white-house-rose-garden-e234e719d96d299d2f670037f9505a9f
A US federal court has overturned billions in funding cuts by President Donald Trump’s administration to Harvard University.
Judge Allison Burroughs ruled the government violated the Ivy League college’s free speech rights when it revoked around $2bn (£1.5bn) in research grants.
The ruling is a major legal victory for Harvard, but the White House has vowed to appeal. When it froze funding in April, the Trump administration accused the college of antisemitism, “radical left” ideologies and racial bias.
Three other Ivy League universities, Columbia, Penn and Brown, struck deals with Trump to preserve funding that was at risk due to similar claims by the administration, rather than go to court.
Boston-based Judge Burroughs wrote in Wednesday’s ruling: “The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment.”
She blocked the administration from stopping any more federal funding to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based college and barred the government from withholding payment on existing grants.
The White House said they would immediately challenge the “egregious decision” and called the judge an “activist” who was appointed by former President Barack Obama and was never going to rule in their favour.
“Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future,” assistant press secretary Liz Huston said.
Alan Garber, president of the university, said in a statement on their website that “the ruling affirms Harvard’s First Amendment and procedural rights”.
“We will continue to assess the implications of the opinion, monitor further legal developments, and be mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission,” he added.
Judge Burroughs wrote in her 84-page decision that Harvard should have done more to deal with antisemitism, which she said had “plagued” the institution in recent years.
“Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did,” wrote the judge.
But she said that fighting antisemitism was not the Trump administration’s “true aim” in penalising the nation’s oldest and richest university.
She suggested the government had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities”.
Judge Burroughs has previously blocked Trump’s efforts to prevent Harvard from hosting international students.
The university sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze in April, while also pledging to fight antisemitism.
Harvard’s president said no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.
Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and take control of the university’s patents stemming from federally funded research.
The government has been discussing with Harvard a potential deal to unfreeze federal funding. Trump has said he wants the university to pay no less than $500m.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security’s social media channels are beginning to look like a white nationalist content mill, churning out bigoted, jingoistic schlock.
A recent report from Hatewatch, the extremism watchdog run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows how the agency and top Trump administration officials have ramped up their promotion of white nationalist or anti-immigrant social media posts since June, when the agency reposted anti-immigrant propaganda that originated from an avowedly racist social media account.
MSNBC has noted the agency’s propaganda in the past, including their use of cruel memes that vilify nonwhite immigrants and of American artworks to promote themes of ethnic cleansing.
The Hatewatch report takes a comprehensive look at these incidents since June, citing an apparent increase in racist propaganda as part of what the watchdog calls “an escalating trend in American immigration enforcement toward overt use of white nationalist and anti-immigrant myths to recruit personnel and justify departmental operations.”
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment on Hatewatch’s claims. When asked last month by NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate about the campaign, the DHS called its digital strategy “bold and effective.”
Here’s one example Hatewatch flagged:
In one recruitment poster, published on Aug. 11, a white Uncle Sam caricature in the style of a Norman Rockwell painting stands at a crossroads of directional signs that include such phrases as “INVASION,” “CULTURAL DECLINE,” “HOMELAND” and “LAW & ORDER.” The poster includes the caption “Which way, American man?” — which appears to be a nod to the influential white nationalist text Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson. Published by an imprint associated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the book is a reflection and critique of society from Simpson’s travels. While critical of some aspects of society, it largely frames Western civilization as superior and veers into sexist and antisemitic commentary.
To some online observers, like author and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild, this apparent nod to an unabashed bigot was hardly subtle
….
The report notes that multiple Trump administration figures in senior leadership roles have ties to racist organizations or have been known to espouse white nationalist themes. That includes border czar Tom Homan, who collaborated with anti-Muslim hate group The United West on his “Defend the Border” project, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose white nationalist views first came under scrutiny during Trump’s first term.
The report also refers to multiple posts from DHS that promote the idea of forging friendships or strengthening familial bonds over the targeting of immigrants. And it notes that the agency’s social media strategy has been celebrated by known white supremacists like activist Jared Taylor, who called the posts a “remarkable change” during an episode of his podcast in August.
That’s certainly one way to describe the Department of Homeland Security’s embrace of racist propaganda to further the Trump administration’s draconian anti-immigrant agenda.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/homeland-security-social-media-white-supremacy-rcna228582
