California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bills related to redrawing the state’s congressional maps on August 21, 2025 in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more congressional seats in Texas,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November.”
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme when it refused to take up an emergency request by the California Republican Party to override an appeals court ruling that greenlit a newly redrawn congressional map in their state.
The court’s decision came two months after it cleared the way for Texas to adopt a new map drawn up by state Republicans, which analysts have projected could net the GOP as many as five additional seats in the US House of Representatives.
California’s initiative to redraw its map came as a direct rebuke to the Texas GOP, which pushed through its mid-decade partisan gerrymander at Trump’s insistence. As drawn, the new California map is expected to balance out the redrawn Texas map by netting Democrats in the House five additional seats of their own.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who led the charge to redraw his state’s map, took a victory lap after the Supreme Court decision.
“Donald Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more congressional seats in Texas,” Newsom wrote in a social media post. “He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November.”
Attorney Norm Eisen, executive chairman of Democracy Defenders Fund, hailed the court’s decision as a “huge, gigantic, enormous win” that will counter “Trump’s attempt to steal congressional seats.”
Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting crusade, which began in Texas and subsequently spread to Missouri and North Carolina, has been hit with major pushback from Democrat-controlled states.
In addition to California, Democrats in Virginia and Maryland are also working on redrawing their congressional maps to counter Trump’s efforts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
However, Trump and his allies have signaled that aggressive gerrymandering won’t be the only trick they’ll play to hold onto power in the 2026 midterms.
Right-wing podcaster and political strategist Steve Bannonclaimed on Tuesday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers will “surround” polling places in November, and Trump on Monday called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and take away states’ power to conduct their own elections.
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Protesters hold signs during an anti-ICE protest outside of San Francisco City Hall on October 23, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“Maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them,” quipped one writer.
After threatening for days to deploy troops to San Francisco, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would pull back for the moment, apparently after some of his billionaire “friends” in the city called him and asked him not to.
“The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “But friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress.”
Trump said he “spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told [Lurie], I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove. I told him, ’It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer but, let’s see how you do?‘”
In a separate post, Lurie affirmed that he had spoken with Trump. He said he told the president that “San Francisco is on the rise,” and that a military occupation would “hinder our recovery.”
Although Trump is walking back his troop threat, for now, US Customs and Border Protection agents still arrived in the Bay Area on Thursday as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.
The Associated Pressreported that “police used at least one flash-bang grenade to clear a handful of demonstrators from the entrance” of Coast Guard Island in Alameda, where the CBP agents will be based.
In addition to threatening San Francisco in recent days, Trump has sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles, California; Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and Chicago, Illinois—where a judge has halted the deployment.
Like virtually all of the cities where Trump has either surged or threatened to surge federalized troops, San Francisco has no crime wave to “turn around.” In fact, crime has been falling precipitously in the city. Homicides dropped by 35% during 2024 and hit a 60-year low this year, contradicting Trump’s assertions that the city is a “mess” and that people there lived in constant fear of being “mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted, or shot.”
Lurie said he agreed to help Trump go to war on this imaginary crime wave, and said he would welcome “would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US attorney.”
Trump said he was persuaded to hold off on the surge of troops after he was called by two Silicon Valley billionaires, Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang, whom he called “great people.”
Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a longtime Democrat who quickly morphed into an outspoken Trump supporter after his victory in 2024. He was also an initial champion of Trump’s proposal to send troops to San Francisco, but later backed off and even apologized after facing criticism from local officials and former political allies.
Huang, the CEO of the computer tech company Nvidia, meanwhile, cut an unprecedented deal with Trump in August that allowed the company to sell computer chips in China if it handed 15% of the revenue from those sales to the federal government, which was described as a “shakedown” by one financial columnist.
Trump said that these two and some unspecified “others” called him, “saying that the future of San Francisco is great” and that “they want to give [Lurie’s efforts] a ’shot.‘”
“Therefore,” Trump said, “we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday.”
Hafiz Rashid, a writer for the New Republic, quipped that “maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them.”
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People hold signs as they rally outside the Phillip Burton Federal Building to support immigrant and activist Guillermo Medina Reyes before a deportation hearing on July 15, 2025, in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Accusing the president of sending in agents to cause “anxiety,” so he can then deploy the National Guard, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
President Donald Trump’s assault on immigrants in Democrat-led cities continued Wednesday with confirmation from the US Coast Guard that its base in Alameda, California is preparing to host 100 federal agents—whose looming arrival is seen as “a likely precursor” to the Republican deploying National Guard troops to San Francisco.
The San Francisco Chronicle initially reported that agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—an agency in the US Department of Homeland Security—were headed to the Bay Area, citing a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A spokesperson from the Coast Guard, also part of DHS, then confirmed that the base would serve as a “place of operations.”
“This support of DHS agencies continues the Coast Guard’s operations to control, secure, and defend US borders and maritime approaches,” the spokesperson said in a statement to multiple local media outlets. “Through a whole-of-government approach, we are leveraging our unique authorities and capabilities to detect, deter, and interdict illegal aliens, narco-terrorists, and individuals intent on terrorism or other hostile activity before they reach our border.”
As KQEDpointed out Wednesday, the region has already seen increased immigration enforcement in recent months:
Since May, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP officials have been escalating operations throughout the Bay Area, moving to have undocumented immigrants’ asylum cases dismissed and arresting them outside of courtrooms and ICE field offices.
More than 2,000 people were arrested in San Francisco’s “Area of Responsibility” between January and July 2025, according to Mission Local.
The reporting on the federal agents due to start arriving in the Bay Area on Thursday followed various threats from Trump to send National Guard soldiers into San Francisco, as he has with Los Angeles, California; Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and Chicago, Illinois. The president and Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee have also collaborated to deploy National Guard troops in Memphis.
A federal judge has blocked the National Guard deployment in Illinois—where ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz is ongoing—but the Trump administration has appealed to the US Supreme Court. Citing two unnamed officials,CBS News‘ Camilo Montoya-Galvez reported on social media Wednesday that Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino, who has led immigration raids in Chicago and Los Angeles, “is expected to be involved in the operation” in the Bay Area.
Elected officials across California have condemned the deployment of federal agents and Trump’s threats to send National Guard troops. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom—a likely 2028 presidential candidate—declared in a Wednesday video on social media that “this is right out of the dictator’s handbook.”
Newsom accused Trump of sending in masked immigration agents to cause “anxiety,” so he can then justify deploying the National Guard. As the governor put it, “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
BREAKING: Donald Trump is sending federal agents to San Francisco.
Democratic San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said Wednesday that “our communities have already endured the painful impact of aggressive immigration enforcement. At the same time, we continue to see escalated operations across the country, with military personnel on the ground in cities like Chicago and Portland.”
“For the last 10 months, we have been taking steps to prepare for this kind of escalation here in San Francisco,” he continued. “Just a few minutes ago, I signed an executive directive that will build on these preparations, strengthen the city’s support for our immigrant communities, and ensure our departments are coordinated ahead of any federal deployment.”
“Immigrants are the small business owners, essential workers, community leaders, and neighbors who make San Francisco a place that we are proud to call home. They fuel our economy—contributing nearly $275 billion in output and $23 billion in annual tax revenue across California,” he added. “San Francisco will never stand by as our neighbors are targeted, and neither will I.”
Meanwhile, in Alameda, where the base is located, the city said in a Wednesday statement that “the Alameda Police Department (APD) is not a part of this operation, and APD does not enforce federal immigration laws or related civil warrants.”
The city also shared various resources and stressed its commitment “to the values of dignity, inclusivity, and respect for all individuals, regardless of ethnic or national origin, gender, race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, or immigration status.”
San Francisco won’t cower to a president who uses our troops for political retribution.
It’s time to do right by our troops and by Californians. Call off the National Guard. pic.twitter.com/rqqEmzvw2V
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a former speaker of the House of Representatives, said Tuesday that “San Francisco does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos. Our city takes great pride in the steps we’ve taken to significantly increase public safety and reduce crime—without the interference of a president just seeking headlines.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta this week threatened to sue over any deployment of the National Guard, as did San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu—who on Monday urged the US Supreme Court “to uphold the bedrock legal principle that domestic law enforcement is not the military’s job.”
“San Francisco has seen historic drops in crime,” Chiu said, “and our local law enforcement are more than capable of keeping our city safe while upholding First Amendment rights.”
The administration’s attacks on First Amendment rights have extended far beyond immigrants and protesters of the president’s anti-migrant agenda; Trump and his officials have also targeted journalists and media companies, comedians, law firms, federal workers, anti-fascists, and anyone expressing views deemed “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism,” or “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
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Grassroots immigrant rights activists challenge federal claims about the circumstances of the ICE raid that lead to the farmworker’s death
Jaime Alanís succumbed to injuries sustained amid an ICE raid at Glass House Farms, where he had labored for over a decade
On July 10, 2025, while being pursued by ICE agents during a violent raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, 57‑year‑old farmworker Jaime Alanís fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof and succumbed to his injuries two days later.
A devoted husband, father, and the sole breadwinner for his family, Alanís had labored at the farm for over a decade. On July 12, the worker became the first known casualty of the Trump administration’s intensified ICE raids.
His death ignited a fierce public outcry. While the Department of Homeland Security maintains he was not actively being chased and climbed the roof on his own accord, his family, as well as immigrant rights activists, contend he was fleeing from the violence of Trump’s ICE agents, who have terrorized immigrant communities across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security denies that Alanís was being pursued at all, although this does not explain why the worker ended up climbing 30 feet onto the roof of a greenhouse. DHS also claims that the raid resulted in the rescue of children from “potential exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.”
To some immigrant rights activists, Alanís’ death has become a poignant symbol of the human cost of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, and the policies that make them possible.
On July 9, the US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers, and that the Trump administration is seeking a workforce composed entirely of those from the US. Rollins plans to accomplish this via automation and mobilizing the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program.”
Trump has recently signed legislation that would create the first-ever federally mandated work requirements for those covered by Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program. According to a May report by the healthcare policy group KFF, 92% of those on Medicaid under age 65 and not receiving SSI or SSDI benefits and not covered by Medicare, were either working full or part-time, or not working due to caregiving duties, illness or disability, or attending school.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ventura County activist Elaine Yompian, part of the immigrant rights coalition VC Defensa, for more on the fight for justice for Jaime Alanís and the millions of immigrant workers with targets on their backs.
“We understand that even though this wasn’t an immediate death, his injuries and the danger that he was put in is a direct result of the ICE operation and the brutality in which agents were conducting this raid,” Elaine told Peoples Dispatch. “We’re calling it the first murder that has happened in an ICE operation.”
Read the full interview here:
Peoples Dispatch: Can you describe what took place during the raid at Glass House Farms and the surrounding events?
Elaine Yompian: The same day as the raid, there was a huge protest that broke out in defense of the community. We kind of put out a call for people to immediately show up.
That’s been one of the key things that we’ve been doing, mobilizing people to take action wherever ICE is present so that their actions don’t go unnoticed or unchecked.
We didn’t know how big the raid was when it started. We put out a call for emergency mobilization to that location, and soon we saw that the National Guard was coming in. We kept making calls for people to just show up to declare that we wanted ICE out of the county, and away from our neighbors and family members.
We were there for over six hours, standing basically in front of the ICE agents, hoping that they wouldn’t pass, hoping that they wouldn’t take more people. Amid the chaos, we have heard of four US citizens that were taken, two of which were our volunteers, and one is a person that we know.
All four have been released so far. One of them was our volunteer, she’s a mother, and she was held for over 10 hours. She was beaten up, then taken to the hospital. And when she was taken to the hospital, we called for a protest there, for them to release her, and ICE agents actually tried to enter the hospital and were pushing the hospital staff to try to get in. A lot of the staff held their ground because of HIPAA compliances and everything, and the ICE had no warrants.
Eventually ICE agents did get in, apparently someone let them in, and then they took her again and she saw all kinds of really horrible things while in their custody. They tried to intimidate her, but eventually they released her with no charges.
The other US citizen that was detained, Jonathan Anthony Caravello, is a labor organizer and a volunteer of ours. He is math and philosophy professor at California State University, Channel Islands, and he was also taken and detained for several days. They released him recently.
Another US citizen who was detained is a US Army veteran, George Retes, who we met during the first raid that happened in June, and he was also detained and freed yesterday.
We stayed back at the site of the raid for a very long time, even after the agents had left, to help those who were hiding with farm workers, to get back to their cars or get back home.
After the raid, our hotline was getting back to back calls of families who were looking for their loved ones. We had a family search team, trying to find where they were taken, if they were taken, or if they were just missing – whether they had been detained or were still hiding somewhere, and we needed to go find them. We were doing all that work, as well as doing food distribution for families that have been affected.
With Jaime Alanís’ family in particular, we got in contact pretty quickly because the news reports were saying that he had died during the raid. The family was pretty upset that the media was saying that he had already passed away when he was still on life support.
When I spoke to his niece, who was his immediate family member in the US., her goal is to eventually sue the DHS for his murder.
PD:How does the violence deployed during the ICE raid in Camarillo compare to tactics used in other Trump-era ICE raids, such as militarization or arrests of noncriminals? How do these raids compare to raids under past administrations?
EY: Raids have always been a form of human torture. It’s always involved family separation, and the level of trauma and impact that it has on our communities has never really shifted, depending on whether it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president in office. It’s always been something that has caused incredible amounts of pain to the families and to the people being taken.
The use of force has also always been brutal. The conditions within detention centers have always been truly horrific. There’s no other word to describe them other than torture.
Now with Trump, it’s definitely intensified, we’re not going to deny that.
PD:DHS is justifying this raid by claiming that children were rescued from potential violations of child labor laws and human trafficking taking place at the farm. What is your response to this justification?
EY: It’s a common tactic for the US to claim that they’re doing this for the safety of the community, for the well-being of children. Let’s even say that the farm had conditions that DHS claims. However, these conditions are also caused by systems of injustice. The reason why so many people go into jobs that have these extreme amounts of physical labor for very low pay is a result of capitalist exploitation.
But the solution for that would never be a one time intervention on one farm in one county in the middle of California. That is not going to solve the larger issue.
So if the government wants to say we’re doing this because we were trying to protect children from working these conditions, the finger should be pointed right back at the government itself and the capitalist system, because that’s what’s causing these conditions and that’s what’s allowing for this to happen.
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Masked federal agents arrest a man after his immigration court hearing at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on July 1, 2025. (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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