Lawsuit Aims to End ‘Systematic’ Snatching of Brown-Skinned People by Trump Agents
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“These guys are popping up, rampant all over the city, just taking people randomly, and we want that particular practice to end,” one attorney in the case said of Department of Homeland Security agents.
Immigrant rights defenders in California on Wednesday sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, accusing the Trump administration of “abducting and disappearing community members using unlawful stop and arrest practices and confining individuals at a federal building in illegal conditions while denying them access to attorneys” as part of its mass deportation effort.
The lawsuit was brought by five individual workers, three advocacy groups, and a legal services provider: The Los Angeles Worker Center Network, United Farm Workers (UFW), the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), and Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Their complaint accuses DHS of unconstitutionally arresting and detaining people, according to the ACLU, which is assisting with the legal challenge, “in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration.”
According to the complaint:
The raids in this district follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.
“DHS—at explicit direction from the Trump administration—has gone after day laborers, car wash workers, farm workers, street vendors, service workers, nannies, and others who form the lifeblood of communities across Southern California,” said ACLU Foundation of Southern California senior staff attorney Mohammad Tajsar, who is representing plaintiffs in the case.ho “Everyone deserves to feel safe going about their daily lives. DHS must stop disappearing people from our communities.”
Tajsar told the Los Angeles Times that “these guys are popping up, rampant all over the city, just taking people randomly, and we want that particular practice to end.”
Alvaro M. Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center and a plaintiff’s attorney in the suit, said in a statement that “the federal government is waging a campaign of terror across Southern California, abducting community members off the streets and warehousing them in deplorable conditions away from their loved ones, all while denying them access to legal counsel.”
“It’s blatantly unconstitutional, cruelly inhumane, and a violation of any common decency,” Huerta added. “If the Trump administration insists on trampling Angelenos’ rights, we’ll see them in court.”
Plaintiffs in the case—who are seeking to represent people subjected to random stops and arrests—are asking the court to certify the case as a class action. They have also requested preliminary and permanent injunctions barring further violations of constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and self-incrimination, as enshrined in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, respectively.
As the lawsuit notes, “one of the clearest patterns that have emerged in the raids in Southern California… has been stops and interrogations… on the basis of apparent race and ethnicity.”
“These raids have targeted the most vulnerable members of our workforce, essential workers who are the backbone of our local economy,” said Los Angeles Worker Center Network executive director Armando Gudino. “We cannot allow racial profiling, warrantless arrests, and denial of due process to become the standard operating procedure in our communities.”
DHS has been holding arrested people in the basement of a federal building in downtown Los Angeles commonly referred to as B-18. The lockup has no beds, showers, or medical facilities, according to the ACLU of Southern California. Furthermore, B-18 is meant to hold only a small number of people on a temporary basis while they are processed.
“We have heard from over 100 families of Individuals taken to B-18 and other detention centers that attest to their loved ones being kept in overcrowded, cold, and inhumane conditions,” said CHIRLA executive director Angelica Salas. “They are held in small windowless rooms with dozens or more other detainees, in extremely cramped quarters while being verbally humiliated and pressured into signing papers they don’t understand.”
The ACLU of Southern California said: “The ongoing raids have led to the disappearance of more than 1,500 people. The suit details how federal agents consistently refuse to identify themselves or what agency they are with when asked, using anonymity as a tactic to shield lawlessness.”
UFW president Teresa Romero noted in a statement that “the raids in the greater Los Angeles area have not been limited to the urban center; we have also seen horrific instances of Border Patrol agents chasing down farm workers in the fields of Ventura County. The spouse of a UFW member was among those unjustly detained.”
“Now the very workers who feed America go to work in fear,” she added. “Their American-born children are scared not knowing if their parents will come home. Farm workers deserve better. We’ve seen these unconstitutional and un-American tactics before, with Border Patrol targeting random farm workers and anyone with brown skin in Kern County during their large sweep in January. We sued then and we are suing now.”
While U.S. President Donald Trump, members of his administration, and Republican lawmakers and supporters claim the DHS crackdown is targeting dangerous criminals, critics have noted that people legally seeking asylum, families, relatives of American citizens, and even citizens themselves have been swept up in the mass deportation dragnet.
According to the libertarian Cato Institute, 65% of people taken by ICE had no criminal conviction whatsoever and 93% had no conviction for violent offenses.
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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‘Matter of Life and Death’: New Tracker Exposes Trump Regime’s Attack on Disaster Preparedness
Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“It’s only a matter of time before Trump and Musk’s reckless assault on disaster response and preparedness kills people in the United States,” said a researcher with government watchdog The Revolving Door Project.
President Donald Trump has openly stated his desire to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency—a move that has left some experts fearful about how the United States will handle natural disasters such as hurricanes in the coming months.
The Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog group, has now put together a tracking tool to keep tabs on how much the administration’s attacks on both FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have worsened the nation’s disaster preparedness.
The tool has two components: An interactive map showing all of the state disaster aid requests that the Trump administration has outright denied or only partially approved and an interactive timeline documenting all of the times that the administration has undermined the functionality of America’s disaster preparedness agencies through actions such as placing agency employees on administrative leave and disbanding key bodies such as FEMA’s National Advisory Council and its National Dam Safety Review Board.
All of these disruptions and cuts, argued Revolving Door Project senior researcher Kenny Stancil, are likely to come back to bite America in a big way when another natural disaster strikes.
“It’s only a matter of time before Trump and Musk’s reckless assault on disaster response and preparedness kills people in the United States,” he said in explaining the need for the initiative. “It nearly happened in mid-May in Kentucky, where a DOGE-damaged NWS forecast office had to scramble for staff before a tornado. Amid last week’s heatwave, low-income households across the country were missing the federal support they need to keep the air conditioning on. And when a major hurricane arrives, Trump, Musk, OMB Director Russell Vought, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem will almost certainly have blood on their hands.”
Revolving Door Project executive director Jeff Hauser issued a similarly dire warning about the administration’s actions on U.S. disaster preparedness and he described the actions being taken by the administration as “a matter of life-and-death.” He also accused the administration of “preventing forecasters and emergency managers at all levels from doing what is necessary to prepare for and respond to disasters.”
Trump in the past has tried to use federal disaster relief money as a cudgel against his political opponents, such as when he threatened to withhold funding from California during catastrophic wildfires unless the state did a better job of “raking” its forests.
Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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‘Downright Orwellian’: In Midst of Planetary Emergency, Trump Admin Takes Down Website Hosting Influential US Climate Report
Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Photo: Tiffany Rose/Getty Images)
“This is the modern version of book burning,” said one scientist.
Amidst an ever-worsening climate emergency, the Trump administration this week took down the website hosting the U.S. government’s preeminent climate assessment, sparking outcry from experts who have worked previous versions of the report.
Considered the definitive body of research about how planetary warming is transforming the nation, the National Climate Assessment—which is required by Congress to be published every few years—gives a rundown of how global warming is impacting different sectors of the economy, ecosystems, and communities.
The five assessments that have been published so far were previously available through the website globalchange.gov, but the address stopped working Monday afternoon, according to The New York Times. As of Wednesday morning the website was still down.
However, it is still possible to access some of the climate research. The fifth assessment is available through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. An archived version of the fifth assessment is also available via Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. According to a NASA spokesperson who spoke to NPR, all five editions of the assessment will also be available on NASA’s website, though it’s not clear when.
“It’s critical for decision-makers across the country to know what the science in the National Climate Assessment is. That is the most reliable and well-reviewed source of information about climate that exists for the United States,” Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist who coordinated the 2014 version of the assessment, toldThe Associated Press.
“This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts,” she added.
“They’re public documents. It’s scientific censorship at its worst,” said Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist who worked on the version of the assessment published in 2000, toldThe Los Angeles Times. “This is the modern version of book burning.”
Howard Crystal, legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, said in a statement on Tuesday that “it’s downright Orwellian for the Trump administration to take the nation’s premier climate reports and just yank them offline.”
“Hiding these congressionally mandated reports won’t make climate change go away, but it will leave Americans uninformed and unprepared,” he said.
Earlier in April, the Trump administration enacted cuts to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which oversees the production of the National Climate Assessment, and later that month dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts working on the next version of the report, the 6th National Climate Assessment.
Meanwhile, a new budget document outlining fiscal year 2026 spending for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) details deep cuts to climate research at the agency, including the elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, though some of its activities would be transferred to the National Ocean Service and the National Weather Service.
The budget proposal “eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. It also does not fund Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research, the National Sea Grant College Program, Sea Grant Aquaculture Research, or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program,” according to the document.
With the termination of Climate Competitive Research, which funds academic institutions to do climate-related research, “NOAA will no longer support climate research grants,” the document also states.
“That’s it—with that statement, the administration signals its intent to have NOAA, arguably the world’s leading oceanic and atmospheric governmental organization, completely abandon climate science,” wrote Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who previously worked for NOAA.
Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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