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Los Angeles school year begins amid fears over immigration enforcement
Headline Legal News |
2025/08/14 13:55
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Los Angeles students and teachers return to class for the new academic year Thursday under a cloud of apprehension after a summer filled with immigration raids and amid worries that schools could become a target in the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown.
Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has urged immigration authorities not to conduct enforcement activity within a two-block radius around schools starting an hour before the school day begins and until one hour after it classes let out.
“Hungry children, children in fear, cannot learn well,” Carvalho said in a news conference.
He also announced a number of measures intended to protect students and families, including adding or altering bus routes to accommodate more students. The district is to distribute a family preparedness packet that includes know-your-rights information, emergency contact updates and tips on designating a backup caregiver in case a parent is detained.
The sprawling district, which covers more than two dozen cities, is the nation’s second largest with more than 500,000 students. According to the teachers’ union, 30,000 students are immigrants, and an estimated quarter of them are without legal status.
Federal immigration enforcement near schools causes concern
While immigration agents have not detained anyone inside a school, a 15-year-old boy was pulled from a car and handcuffed outside Arleta High School in northern Los Angeles on Monday, Carvalho said.
He had significant disabilities and was released after a bystander intervened in the case of “mistaken identity,” the superintendent said.
“This is the exact type of incident that traumatizes our communities; it cannot repeat itself,” he added.
Administrators at two elementary schools previously denied entry to officials from the Department of Homeland Security in April, and immigration agents have been seen in vehicles outside schools.
DHS did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Carvalho said that while staffers and district police officers cannot interfere with immigration enforcement and do not have jurisdiction beyond school property, they have had conversations with federal agents parked in front of schools that resulted in them leaving.
The district is partnering with local law enforcement in some cities and forming a “rapid response” network to disseminate information about the presence of federal agents, he said.
Educators worry about attendance
Teachers say they are concerned some students might not show up the first day.
Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a high school social studies and English teacher at the Roybal Learning Center, said attendance saw a small dip in January when President Donald Trump took office.
The raids ramped up in June right before graduations, putting a damper on ceremonies. One raid at a Home Depot near MacArthur Park, an area with many immigrant families from Central America, took place the same morning as an 8th grade graduation at a nearby middle school.
“People were crying, for the actual graduation ceremony there were hardly any parents there,” Cardona said.
The next week, at her high school graduation, the school rented two buses to transport parents to the ceremony downtown. Ultimately many of the seats were empty, unlike other graduations.
One 11th grader, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be published because she is in the country without legal permission and fears being targeted, said she is afraid to return to school.
“Instead of feeling excited, really what I’m feeling is concern,” said Madelyn, a 17-year-old from Central America. “I am very, very scared, and there is a lot of pressure.”
She added that she takes public transportation to school but fears being targeted on the bus by immigration agents because of her skin color.
“We are simply young people with dreams who want to study, move forward and contribute to this country as well,” she said.
Madelyn joined a club that provides support and community for immigrant students and said she intends to persevere in that work.
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Trump’s nominee to oversee jobs, inflation data faces shower of criticism
Legal Topics |
2025/08/11 20:55
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The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.
But like so much in President Donald Trump’s second administration, this time is different.
Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.
His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. While many former Labor Department officials say it it unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.
Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.
For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.
The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.
When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that, “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”
Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue, instead of a careful economist who considers tradeoffs and prioritizes getting the math correct.
“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.
His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly-purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.
“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.
On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.
Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data has flaws and is threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.
“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”
Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS Commissioner under President Bill Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.
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Trump executive order gives politicians control over all federal grants
Legal Business |
2025/08/09 20:54
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An executive order signed by President Donald Trump late Thursday aims to give political appointees power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies. Scientists say it threatens to undermine the process that has helped make the U.S. the world leader in research and development.
The order requires all federal agencies, including FEMA, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to appoint officials responsible for reviewing federal funding opportunities and grants, so that they “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”
It also requires agencies to make it so that current and future federal grants can be terminated at any time — including during the grant period itself.
Agencies cannot announce new funding opportunities until the new protocols are in place, according to the order. The Trump administration said these changes are part of an effort to “strengthen oversight” and “streamline agency grantmaking.” Scientists say the order will cripple America’s scientific engine by placing control over federal research funds in the hands of people who are influenced by politics and lack relevant expertise.
“This is taking political control of a once politically neutral mechanism for funding science in the U.S.,” said Joseph Bak-Coleman, a scientist studying group decision-making at the University of Washington.
The changes will delay grant review and approval, slowing “progress for cures and treatments that patients and families across the country urgently need,” said the Association of American Medical Colleges in a statement.
The administration has already terminated thousands of research grants at agencies like the NSF and NIH, including on topics like transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The order could affect emergency relief grants doled out by FEMA, public safety initiatives funded by the Department of Justice and public health efforts supported by the Centers for Disease Control. Experts say the order is likely to be challenged in court.
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Trump sues Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch
Legal Business |
2025/08/05 20:48
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President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch Friday, a day after the newspaper published a story reporting on his ties to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The move came shortly after the Justice Department asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Epstein’s sex trafficking case, as the administration seeks to contain the firestorm that erupted after it announced that it would not be releasing additional files from the case, despite previously pledging to do so.
The controversy has created a major fissure between Trump and his loyal base, with some of his most vocal supporters slamming the White House for the way it has handled the case, and questioning why Trump would not want the documents made public.
Trump had promised to sue the Wall Street Journal almost immediately after the paper put a new spotlight on his well-documented relationship with Epstein by publishing an article that described a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
Trump denied writing the letter, calling the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
The suit, filed in filed in federal court in Miami, accuses the paper and its reporters of having “knowingly and recklessly” published “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements,” which, it alleges, caused “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” to the president.
In a post on his Truth Social site, Trump cast the lawsuit as part of his efforts to punish news outlets, including ABC and CBS, which both reached multimillion-dollar settlement deals with the president after he took them to court.
“This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher, responded Friday night, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The letter revealed by The Wall Street Journal was reportedly collected by disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a birthday album for Epstein years before the wealthy financier was first arrested in 2006 and subsequently had a falling-out with Trump.
The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper.
Trump denied writing the letter and promised to sue. He said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, before the story was published and told them the letter was “fake.”
“These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures,” the president insisted.
The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely or provide details on how it came to learn about it.
In the lawsuit, Trump takes issue with that fact. The defendants, it attests, “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.”
“The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists,” it goes on to charge, alleging that the “Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.”
Earlier Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche filed motions in a separate federal court urging them to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.
The Justice Department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.
The Justice Department said in the court filings that it will work with with prosecutors in New York to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personally identifying information before transcripts are released.
“Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims,” Blanche wrote.
But despite the new push to release the grand jury transcripts, the administration has not announced plans to reverse course and release other evidence in its possession. Attorney General Pam Bondi had hyped the release of more materials after the first Epstein files disclosure in February sparked outrage because it contained no new revelations.
A judge would have to approve the release of the grand jury transcripts, and it’s likely to be a lengthy process to decide what can become public and to make redactions to protect sensitive witness and victim information.
The records would show testimony of witnesses and other evidence that was presented by prosecutions during the secret grand jury proceedings, when a panel decides whether there is enough evidence to bring an indictment, or a formal criminal charge. |
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Senate confirms Pirro as top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital
Court News |
2025/08/01 20:49
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The Senate has confirmed former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital, filling the post after President Donald Trump withdrew his controversial first pick, conservative activist Ed Martin Jr.
Pirro, a former county prosecutor and elected judge, was confirmed 50-45. Before becoming the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in May, she co-hosted the Fox News show “The Five” on weekday evenings, where she frequently interviewed Trump.
Trump yanked Martin’s nomination after a key Republican senator said he could not support him due to Martin’s outspoken support for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Martin now serves as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney.
In 2021, voting technology company Smartmatic USA sued Fox News, Pirro and others for spreading false claims that the company helped “steal” the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company’s libel suit, filed in a New York state court, sought $2.7 billion from the defendants.
Last month, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send Pirro’s nomination to the Senate floor after Democrats walked out to protest Emil Bove’s nomination to become a federal appeals court judge.
Pirro, a 1975 graduate of Albany Law School, has significantly more courtroom experience than Martin, who had never served as a prosecutor or tried a case before taking office in January. She was elected as a judge in New York’s Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county’s elected district attorney.
In the final minutes of his first term as president, Trump issued a pardon to Pirro’s ex-husband, Albert Pirro, who was convicted in 2000 on conspiracy and tax evasion charges. |
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Immigration judges fired by Trump administration say they will fight back
Attorney News |
2025/07/26 21:30
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Federal immigration judges fired by the Trump administration are filing appeals, pursuing legal action and speaking out in an unusually public campaign to fight back.
More than 50 immigration judges — from senior leaders to new appointees — have been fired since Donald Trump assumed the presidency for the second time. Normally bound by courtroom decorum, many are now unrestrained in describing terminations they consider unlawful and why they believe they were targeted.
Their suspected reasons include gender discrimination, decisions on immigration cases played up by the Trump administration and a courthouse tour with the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat.
“I cared about my job and was really good at it,” Jennifer Peyton, a former supervising judge told The Associated Press this week. “That letter that I received, the three sentences, explained no reason why I was fired.”
Peyton, who received the notice while on a July Fourth family vacation, was appointed judge in 2016. She considered it her dream job. Peyton was later named assistant chief immigration judge in Chicago, helping to train, mentor and oversee judges. She was a visible presence in the busy downtown court, greeting outside observers.
She cited top-notch performance reviews and said she faced no disciplinary action. Peyton said she’ll appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent government agency Trump has also targeted.
Peyton’s theories about why she was fired include appearing on a “bureaucrat watchdog list” of people accused by a right-wing organization of working against the Trump agenda. She also questions a courthouse tour she gave to Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois in June.
Durbin blasted Peyton’s termination as an “abuse of power,” saying he’s visited before as part of his duties as a publicly-elected official.
The nation’s immigration courts — with a backlog of about 3.5 million cases — have become a key focus of Trump’s hard-line immigration enforcement efforts. The firings are on top of resignations, early retirements and transfers, adding up to 106 judges gone since January, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents judges. There are currently about 600 immigration judges.
Several of those fired, including Peyton, have recently done a slew of interviews on local Chicago television stations and with national outlets, saying they now have a platform for their colleagues who remain on the bench.
“The ones that are left are feeling threatened and very uncertain about their future,” said Matt Biggs, the union’s president.
Carla Espinoza, a Chicago immigration judge since 2023, was fired as she was delivering a verdict this month. Her notice said she’d be dismissed at the end of her two-year probationary period with the Executive Office for Immigration Review. |
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Judge blocks Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions in third ruling
Opinions |
2025/07/23 04:30
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A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally, issuing the third court ruling blocking the birthright order nationwide since a key Supreme Court decision in June.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, joining another district court as well as an appellate panel of judges, found that a nationwide injunction granted to more than a dozen states remains in force under an exception to the Supreme Court ruling. That decision restricted the power of lower-court judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
The states have argued Trump’s birthright citizenship order is blatantly unconstitutional and threatens millions of dollars for health insurance services that are contingent on citizenship status. The issue is expected to move quickly back to the nation’s highest court.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement the administration looked forward to “being vindicated on appeal.”
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who helped lead the lawsuit before Sorokin, said in a statement he was “thrilled the district court again barred President Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional birthright citizenship order from taking effect anywhere.”
“American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation’s history,” he added. “The President cannot change that legal rule with the stroke of a pen.”
Lawyers for the government had argued Sorokin should narrow the reach of his earlier ruling granting a preliminary injunction, saying it should be “tailored to the States’ purported financial injuries.”
Sorokin said a patchwork approach to the birthright order would not protect the states in part because a substantial number of people move between states. He also blasted the Trump administration, saying it had failed to explain how a narrower injunction would work.
“That is, they have never addressed what renders a proposal feasible or workable, how the defendant agencies might implement it without imposing material administrative or financial burdens on the plaintiffs, or how it squares with other relevant federal statutes,” the judge wrote. “In fact, they have characterized such questions as irrelevant to the task the Court is now undertaking. The defendants’ position in this regard defies both law and logic.”
Sorokin acknowledged his order would not be the last word on birthright citizenship. Trump and his administration “are entitled to pursue their interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and no doubt the Supreme Court will ultimately settle the question,” Sorokin wrote. “But in the meantime, for purposes of this lawsuit at this juncture, the Executive Order is unconstitutional.”
The administration has not yet appealed any of the recent court rulings. Trump’s efforts to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily will remain blocked unless and until the Supreme Court says otherwise.
A federal judge in New Hampshire issued a ruling earlier this month prohibiting Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide in a new class-action lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire had paused his own decision to allow for the Trump administration to appeal, but with no appeal filed, his order went into effect.
On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based appeals court found the president’s executive order unconstitutional and affirmed a lower court’s nationwide block.
A Maryland-based judge said last week that she would do the same if an appeals court signed off.
The justices ruled last month that lower courts generally can’t issue nationwide injunctions, but it didn’t rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The Supreme Court did not decide whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.
Plaintiffs in the Boston case earlier argued that the principle of birthright citizenship is “enshrined in the Constitution,” and that Trump does not have the authority to issue the order, which they called a “flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”
They also argue that Trump’s order halting automatic citizenship for babies born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily would cost states funding they rely on to “provide essential services” — from foster care to health care for low-income children, to “early interventions for infants, toddlers, and students with disabilities.”
At the heart of the lawsuits is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. That decision found that Scott, an enslaved man, wasn’t a citizen despite having lived in a state where slavery was outlawed.
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Headline Legal News for You to Reach America's Best Legal Professionals. The latest legal news and information - Law Firm, Lawyer and Legal Professional news in the Media. |
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