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    Newsom to sue Trump over California national guard deployment to Oregon

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    California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Sunday that he is suing Donald Trump over the alleged deployment of 300 California national guard personnel to Oregon.“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said in a press statement. “The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words – ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents.”Newsom’s proposed lawsuit follows a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon national guard to Portland. US district judge Karin Immergut agreed with arguments it would inflame rather than calm tensions in the city.Immergut said in her ruling, which delays sending the guard until at least 18 October, that there was a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.Caroline Turco, Portland’s senior deputy attorney, said that there had been no violence against Ice officers for months and that recent Ice protests were “sedate” in the week before the president declared the city to be a war zone, sometimes featuring fewer than a dozen protesters.“This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” Newsom said. “We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the President of the United States.”In a statement on X, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield said the state is “quickly assessing our options and preparing to take legal action.“The President is obviously hellbent on deploying the military in American cities, absent facts or authority to do so,” he wrote. “It is up to us and the courts to hold him accountable. That’s what we intend to do.”The California national guard referred questions to the defense department. A department spokesperson declined to comment.“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement. For once, Gavin Newscum should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country,” read a response from the White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson.The news from Oregon came just a day after Trump authorized the deployment of national guard troops to Chicago, the latest in a string of similar interventions across several US states.Trump had first announced the plan on 27 September, saying he was “authorizing full force, if necessary” despite pleas from Oregon officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who said there had been a single, uneventful protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.For years, Trump has amplified the narrative that Portland is a “war-ravaged” city with anarchists engaging in chaos and unlawful behavior.During his first term in 2020, he deployed federal forces to the city amid the protests over the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protests spread across the US but were especially heightened in Portland. Despite protests against Ice being relatively small in the state this year, Trump has used them as a justification to deploy troops.Speaking on X about the latest move from Trump, Newsom said: “It’s appalling. It’s un-American, and it must be stopped.” More

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      California measure brings rideshare drivers one step closer to unionizing

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      More than 800,000 ride-hailing drivers in California will soon be able to join a union and negotiate for higher wages and better benefits under a measure signed Friday by the governor, Gavin Newsom.Supporters said the new law will open a path for the largest expansion of private-sector collective bargaining rights in the state’s history. The legislation is a significant compromise in the years-long battle between labor unions and tech companies.California is the second state where Uber and Lyft drivers can unionize as independent contractors; Massachusetts voters passed a ballot referendum in November allowing unionization, while drivers in Illinois and Minnesota are pushing for similar rights.“Donald Trump is holding the government hostage and stripping away worker protections,” Newsom said in a statement, referring to the estimated 750,000 federal employees who are furloughed as a result of the first federal government shutdown since 2018, with the administration planning to implement another sweeping wave of cuts.“In California, we’re doing the opposite: proving government can deliver – giving drivers the power to unionize while we continue our work to lower costs for families. That’s the difference between chaos and competence,” he added.The new law is part of an agreement made in September among Newsom, state lawmakers and the Service Employees International Union, along with rideshare companies Uber and Lyft. In exchange, Newsom is expected to sign a measure supported by Uber and Lyft to significantly cut the companies’ insurance requirements for accidents caused by underinsured drivers.Lyft CEO David Risher said in September that the new insurance rates are expected to save the company $200m and could help reduce fares.Uber and Lyft fares in California are consistently higher than in other parts of the US because of insurance requirements, the companies say. Uber has said that nearly one-third of every ride fare in the state goes toward paying for state-mandated insurance.Labor unions and tech companies have fought for years over drivers’ rights. In July of last year, the California supreme court ruled that app-based ride-hailing and delivery services like Uber and Lyft can continue treating their drivers as independent contractors not entitled to benefits like overtime pay, paid sick leave and unemployment insurance.A 2019 law mandated that Uber and Lyft provide drivers with benefits, but voters reversed it at the ballot box in 2020 with a measure known as Proposition 22. Uber and Lyft spent more than $200m in their efforts to bar app-based workers from being classified as traditional employees. Drivers and labor groups opposed Prop 22, saying it would allow companies to sidestep their obligations to provide benefits and standard minimum wages to their workers even as they make billions.The collective bargaining measure now allows rideshare workers in California to join a union while still being classified as independent contractors and requires gig companies to bargain in good faith over issues such as driver deactivations, paid leave and earnings. The new law doesn’t apply to drivers for delivery apps like DoorDash.“Trump is gutting workers’ fundamental right to come together and demand fair pay and treatment,” said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California. “But here in California, we are sending a different message: when workers are empowered and valued, everyone wins. Shared prosperity starts with unions for all workers.”The insurance measure will reduce the coverage requirement for accidents caused by uninsured or underinsured drivers from $1m to $60,000 per individual and $300,000 per accident.The two measures “together represent a compromise that lowers costs for riders while creating stronger voices for drivers – demonstrating how industry, labor, and lawmakers can work together to deliver real solutions,” Ramona Prieto, head of public policy for California at Uber, said in a statement.The new law arrives as Uber and Lyft continue negotiating a settlement with California and the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, which sued the companies for allegedly withholding wages from thousands of drivers before Proposition 22 took effect.Rideshare Drivers United, a Los Angeles-based advocacy group of 20,000 drivers, said the collective bargaining law isn’t strong enough to give workers a fair contract. The group wanted to require the companies to report their data on pay to the state.New York City drivers’ pay increased after the city started requiring the companies to report how much an average driver earns, the group said.“Drivers really need the backing of the state to ensure that not only is a wage proposal actually going to help drivers, but that there is progress in drivers’ pay over the years,” said Nicole Moore, president of Rideshare Drivers United. More

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      LA 2028 Olympics: fears of mass displacement and homeless sweeps as Trump threat looms

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      In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the city deployed 30 police officers on horseback to rid downtown of unhoused people and, in the words of a captain, “sanitize the area”.Some people were arrested and transported to detox centers. Others were forced from public view while their possessions were trashed.Now, as the city prepares to host the games once more in 2028, civil rights advocates are fearful history will repeat itself, and authorities will again banish unhoused communities in ways that could exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis.Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, has vowed not to bus unhoused people out of the city and repeat the tactics of 1984, telling the Los Angeles Times her strategy will “always be housing people first”. But the scale of the problem in LA is larger than it was four decades ago, and the Trump administration’s forceful stance on homelessness could increase pressures on Bass and the unhoused population.LA county is home to an estimated 72,000 unhoused people, including 24,900 people in shelters and 47,400 people living outside in tents, makeshift structures and vehicles. In the last two years, Bass and county leaders have reported some progress in moving people indoors, which they attributed to their strategy of targeting people in encampments with shelter options and resources.But the dramatic shortage of affordable housing in the region will make it difficult to get tens of thousands of people stably housed in less than three years and stop new encampments from rising up.Meanwhile, Trump, who appointed himself White House Olympics taskforce chair, has made it clear he wants to see encampments disappear from American cities, signing an executive order in July to push local governments to clear encampments and making it a point of focus during the federal crackdown in Washington DC.Combined with a supreme court ruling allowing governments to fine and jail unhoused people when no shelter is available, Trump’s ongoing deployment of troops to Democratic cities, significant support from California residents for tougher policies towards the unhoused, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s push for aggressive sweeps, experts fear the Olympics could force out many of LA’s poorest residents.“The pressures are going to come from the White House, from the state and from local government as we get closer to the Olympics,” said Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group that advocates for unhoused people and is based in Skid Row, a downtown area with a high concentration of homelessness. “My fears come from being an Angeleno and seeing our communities attacked and displaced when major events come our way.”‘I remember the arrests’There is a long history of Olympics host cities trying to get rid of their most disenfranchised communities.In Moscow in 1980, organizers pledged to “cleanse” the city of “chronic alcoholics” and dumped people outside city limits. In Atlanta in 1996, officials arrested thousands of unhoused people under anti-loitering and related ordinances. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than 70,000 people were displaced. And last year in Paris, thousands of unhoused people, including asylum seekers, were bussed out.The 1984 LA games led to the increased militarization of the LA police department (LAPD) and an escalation of racist and aggressive policing that targeted Black and Latino youth, experts say.“I remember the pre-Olympics arrest of my older cousins,” said White, 56, who grew up within walking distance of the Coliseum, a stadium that served as an Olympics venue then and will be used for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. “Young Black and brown men were afraid to be in the streets, because they were sweeping people up under the pretext of addressing gang violence.”View image in fullscreenThe games helped LAPD acquire flashbang grenades, specialized armor, military-style equipment and an armored vehicle, which it used a year later to ram a home where small children were eating ice cream, Curbed LA reported. The Olympics-fueled law enforcement expansion also paved the way for LAPD’s notorious Operation Hammer, a crackdown that led to mass arrests of Black youth.In 2018, after LA won the 2028 bid, then-mayor Eric Garcetti said the games would present an opportunity to improve homelessness, which he said could be eliminated from the streets by the games.“Garcetti kept saying: ‘We’ll end homelessness in LA,’” said Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, a group founded in 2017 to oppose the Olympics in LA. “And we have been warning that the only way they can actually end homelessness is by disappearing people.”Increasing sweepsCalifornia, LA and LA 2028 officials have not released plans for a homelessness strategy.But on the streets, there are already fears that sweeps of people living outside are escalating due to the Olympics – and as LA prepares to also host the World Cup next year.In July, the city shut down a long-running encampment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando valley, north-west of downtown and visible from the 405, a major freeway. The site, which residents called the Compound, was across from the Sepulveda Basin where the Olympics is planning events. The sweep displaced roughly 75 people. The city said it offered 30 motel rooms to the group and other shelter options.Carla Orendorff, an organizer working with the residents, said she was aware of at least 10 displaced people now back on the streets, including several who had been kicked out of the motels, which have strict rules. Residents were dispersed to eight motels, and in one, staff ran out of food and people were left hungry, she said.Those still out on the street “are just forced further underground, in places that are harder to reach, which makes it incredibly dangerous for them”, Orendorff said.Giselle “Gelly” Harrell, a 41-year-old displaced Compound resident, said she lost her motel spot after she was gone for several days. She was temporarily staying in a hostel with help from a friend, but would soon be back in a tent, she said. Before the Compound, she was at another major encampment that was swept.View image in fullscreen“They’re strategically cleaning out the area for the Olympics,” Harrell said. “They’re destroying communities. It’s traumatizing … I wish all that money for the Olympics could go toward housing people … but they are not here to help us.”It was hard to imagine the Olympics taking place in an area where so many people were living outside and in cars, Orendorff added: “The city has all these plans, but our people don’t even have access to showers.”Bass denied that the Compound closure was Olympics-related, with the mayor telling reporters the site was a hazard. Officials had worked to shelter everyone and keep people together and would aim to transition residents into permanent housing, she said, while acknowledging some “might be in motels for long periods”. “I will not tolerate Angelenos living in dangerous, squalor conditions,” she added.The mayor’s office continued to defend the Van Nuys operation in an email last week, saying an outreach team had built relationships with encampment residents over several months and offered resources to all of them: “Coming indoors meant access to three meals a day, case management and additional supportive services.”Zach Seidl, Bass’s spokesperson, did not comment on the city’s Olympics strategy, but said in an email that since the mayor took office, street homelessness had decreased by 17.5% and placements into permanent housing had doubled: “She is laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy that includes preventing homelessness, urgently bringing Angelenos inside and cutting red tape to make building affordable housing in the city easier and more efficient.”Inside Safe, Bass’s program addressing encampments like the Compound, has brought thousands of people indoors and “fundamentally changed the way the city addresses homelessness by conducting extensive outreach, working with street medicine providers and offering other supportive case management services while they are in interim housing”, he continued. “This is why she ran for office and this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”The White House did not respond to inquiries about the Olympics, and a spokesperson for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), the lead public agency responsible for addressing homelessness in the region, declined to comment.‘Legal restraints are gone’Advocates’ concerns are partly fueled by a supreme court ruling last year that gave local authorities significantly more leeway to criminalize encampments.“The legal restraints are gone, to the extent they were meaningful, and there is broad policy-level agreement by liberals and conservatives that sweeps are an acceptable approach,” said John Raphling, associate director of Human Rights Watch, a non-profit.He authored a report last year on LA’s policing of unhoused people, which found that unhoused Angelenos were routinely subject to aggressive LAPD crackdowns, misdemeanor arrests and sweeps that destroy their belongings.Homelessness-related arrests and citations, such as anti-camping violations, increased 68% in LA in the six months after the supreme court ruling, a recent CalMatters analysis found. The crackdowns are happening even as LA has vowed to not rely on criminalization and has promised a more restrained approach than other California cities.View image in fullscreenSheehan said he was concerned LAPD would work with federal authorities to target people during the Olympics, especially after officers aggressively attacked protesters and journalists during demonstrations against Trump’s immigration raids in June, in violation of the department’s own protocols.Newsom, meanwhile, has pushed California cities to ban encampments by adopting ordinances that make it a violation to camp in the same spot for three days, and advocates fear his presidential ambitions could lead him to continue to push punitive strategies as the Olympics approaches.“We’re already seeing a contest between Trump and Newsom as to who is going to appear tougher on homelessness, with tough being defined as how one responds to visible homelessness,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-wrote a report last year on the 2028 Olympics in LA and the unsheltered population. “There aren’t good signs from either of them. Newsom offers the promise of alternatives he doesn’t identify and Trump offers the promise of some equivalent to incarceration.”In a statement to the Guardian, Newsom said the state has a “strong, comprehensive strategy for fighting the national homelessness and housing crises” and was “outperforming the nation”. “I’ve emphasized that our approach is to humanize, not criminalize – encampment work is paired with shelter, services [and] behavioral health support,” he said, citing his Care court program, which is meant to compel people with severe psychosis into treatment.“Bottom line: encampments can’t be the status quo. We’re cleaning them up with compassion and urgency, while demanding accountability from every level of government. There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” the governor added.Tara Gallegos, Newsom’s spokesperson, said the governor’s approach was distinct from the president’s, writing in an email: “The Trump administration is haphazardly bulldozing and upending encampments without creating any sort of supportive strategy to go along with it. It is about fear, not support … California’s strategy pairs urgency with dignity and care, creating wrap-around services addressing the root causes of homelessness.”An LA 2028 spokesperson did not comment on homelessness, but said in an email: “We work closely with our local, state and federal partners on Games planning and operations, and remain committed to working collaboratively with all levels of government to support a successful Games experience.”Organizers and providers prepareHomelessness service providers and advocates said they hoped LA officials would pursue bold solutions that quickly get people housing and resources without the threat of criminalization.A key part of the region’s strategy during the early pandemic was getting people out of tents and into motels, but those programs are costly and not a good fit for all of LA’s unhoused residents; it can also be challenging to transition participants into permanent housing. Blasi noted that that approach would become even harder during the Olympics when hotels face an influx of tourists.Blasi advocated for direct cash payments to unhoused people, akin to the 2020 stimulus checks, which could help some unhoused people get off the streets at a faster and cheaper rate than the traditional process, he argued: “There are a lot of people who can solve their own homelessness if they just have a little bit more money.”Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said LA has seen success with rapid rehousing programs that offer people rental subsidies, and that he hopes those efforts can be scaled up: “We know how to move people back into housing and do it quickly. It’s just a matter of whether we can marshal the political will to bring the money to make that happen.”Funding cuts, including from Trump’s slashing of federal homelessness resources, will be a barrier.The Union Rescue Mission, a faith-based group that runs the largest private shelter in LA, has recently seen an influx of people needing services as other providers have faced cuts, said CEO Mark Hood. Hood, however, said he has had productive conversations with the Trump administration and remained optimistic the Olympics would provide an “opportunity to collaborate with our city, county, state and federal government in ways that we never have before”.He said he hoped the Olympics would lead to increased funding for providers, but was so far unaware of any specific plans.White, the longtime organizer, said he expected grassroots groups to come together to defend unhoused people, especially as mutual-aid networks have grown in response to Trump’s raids: “The kidnappings of immigrants and the attempted clearing of houseless people as we get closer to the Olympics gives us an opportunity to bring various communities together, and that’s when we can build the power necessary to push back.” More

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      Oregon sues to block ‘illegal’ deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland

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      The state of Oregon filed a lawsuit in federal court on Sunday seeking to block the deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland, arguing Donald Trump’s characterization of the peaceful city as “war ravaged” is “pure fiction”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said at a news conference that she had been notified by the Pentagon that the US president had seized control of the state’s reservists, claiming authority granted to him to suppress “rebellion” or lawlessness.“When the president and I spoke yesterday,” Kotek said, “I told him in very plain language that there is no insurrection, or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland.”A Pentagon memorandum dated Sunday and signed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, obtained by the Washington Post, said: “200 members of the Oregon National Guard will be called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days.”Trump’s action, in asserting federal control of the state’s national guard troops, is clearly “unlawful”, Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said, given that it was not taken in response to a foreign invasion or mass anarchy, but one small protest by dozens of activists outside a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland.“Let’s be clear, local law enforcement has this under control,” Kotek, said. “We have free speech demonstrations that are happening near one federal facility. Portland police is actively engaged in managing those, with the federal folks a the facility, and when people cross the line, there’s unlawful activity, people are being held accountable.”The state’s lawsuit notes that the president’s false claims about the Ice facility being “under siege”, and life for Portland resident being “like living in Hell”, appear to be based on a single Fox News report broadcast earlier this month, which mixed social media video from a conservative journalist of the current protest with video of much larger protests in 2020, in another part of the city.“The problem is the president is using social media to inform his views,” the attorney general said, either because he was trying to mislead the public intentionally, or is “relying on social media gossip” about the actual conditions in a US city.Kotek added that she had tried to inform Trump, during a phone conversation on Saturday, that he had been badly misled about current conditions in Portland, which is once again a vibrant and peaceful city a half-decade on from the pandemic-era racial justice protests.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What I said to the president is: ‘I don’t understand what information you have.’ When he says to me that the federal courthouse is under attack, that is absolutely not true,” Kotek said. Video featured in the recent Fox News report on Portland did show images of a 2020 protest outside the federal courthouse in downtown Portland that were wrongly described as recorded during the current anti-Ice protest.“Some demonstrations happening at one federal facility, that are being managed on a regular basis by local law enforcement, if that is the only issue he’s brining up, he has been given bad information,” Kotek said.“We cannot be looking at footage from 2020 and assume that that is the case today in Portland.” More

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      A Trump ally in California is fighting redistricting. Is that what his constituents want?

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      Inside a packed banquet hall in northern California in early August, tensions were flaring. As the representative Doug LaMalfa spoke to constituents in his district, he faced immediate pushback from frustrated audience members who shouted the Republican down.It was the first public town hall LaMalfa had held in Chico, the largest city in his district, in eight years. The booing and shouts grew louder still as the Republican representative, a loyal supporter of Donald Trump, talked about “waste and fraud” in government programs, and the uproar continued for more than an hour as people expressed fear and anger over immigration raids, tariffs, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts on rural hospitals. Some called for his resignation, while one attendee yelled: “No fascism in America.” The rowdy scene made headlines across the US.It came before a crucial moment for the representative – just days later, California’s governor announced plans to move forward with a proposal to redraw the state’s voting map in an effort to create five new Democratic seats in the US House of Representatives. The redistricting plan is a direct response to gerrymandered maps in Texas. Now voters will decide on the proposal in a special election in November. If the proposition is approved, LaMalfa, a seven-term representative, could lose his seat in the war over control of the House.With less than six weeks before the election, the fight is on in the first congressional district, which covers a vast swath of northern California from the almond orchards and rice fields of the Sacramento valley to the forested and fire-prone foothills of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. Audrey Denney, a previous Democratic challenger who came closer than any prior candidate to unseating LaMalfa, has said she will run again if Proposition 50 passes. LaMalfa, meanwhile, “is committed to running in his current district and ensuring that Proposition 50 fails”, his office said in a statement.Democratic and Republican groups alike are preparing for a contest that could dramatically reshape the area’s political representation and ultimately determine the US president’s ability to advance legislation after the midterm elections.“Overwhelmingly, the reason people care is the belief that the Democrats [winning] control of the House of Representatives next year is the only possible meaningful impediment to Donald Trump’s implementation of his authoritarian agenda,” said David Welch with the Democratic central committee of Butte county, where Chico is located.Conservatives in this area argue that Prop 50 represents an existential threat that will erode the already limited Republican representation in the state.“We already only have nine seats throughout the entire state of California on the Republican side and we could go down to four seats if 50 passes. It’s not a fair representation for the parties – it’s not fair for both sides,” said Teri DuBose, the chair of the Butte county Republican party, who also works for LaMalfa’s office. “The voters should be picking their representatives, not the representatives picking their constituents.”Residents of this part of northern California, with its remote mountain communities, frequent wildfires and vast agricultural industry, often say it’s different from the more densely populated areas of the state.“We’re very rural here,” DuBose said. “As I drive from Chico to Orland right now, all I see are almond trees and open fields and walnuts and tractors. We don’t have the big-city high-rises and freeways with traffic.”The first congressional district is among the most conservative, and whitest, in the state.Water, wildfires, housing and homelessness have been key issues for voters in recent years. The area was already struggling with a severe housing shortage when several years of large wildfires destroyed thousands of homes, worsening the crisis and pushing more people onto the streets.Over the last decade, wildfires have scorched nearly 40% of land in the county, including the 2018 Camp fire, which destroyed the community of Paradise and killed 85 people, 2020’s North Complex fire, which wiped out Berry Creek and left 16 people dead and last year’s Park fire, one of the largest blazes in state history.While there was a strong base of Democratic supporters in the region in the mid-20th century, much of what is now California’s first congressional district has largely voted Republican since the 1980s. Trump has consistently carried the area since 2016 and in 2024 received 61% of the vote.Butte county, where LaMalfa is from, is more evenly politically split due to the more liberal community of Chico, a university town, and the more conservative agricultural areas – in 2008, it supported Barack Obama, in 2020 backed Joe Biden, but in 2016 and 2024 went for Trump.LaMalfa, a rice farmer who previously served as a state lawmaker, has represented the district since 2013. In an interview this year with the Chico Enterprise-Record, he cited the work his staffers have done assisting people having issues with social security, Medicaid and Veterans Affairs as his proudest accomplishments in office.“It’s defending these folks and giving them a level of hope that somebody is actually listening to them,” he said.He’s garnered attention – and criticism – in recent years as an ally of the president who challenged the 2020 election outcome and voted against certifying the result and has expressed skepticism about the climate crisis and its cause. Efforts to unseat LaMalfa have been unsuccessful, but the 2018 and 2020 elections revealed some level of discontent.“He does not at all differ from Trump’s line-by-line mandate of what he says Republicans should say,” Denney said, adding that LaMalfa has introduced “anti-LGBTQ, anti-public health” legislation that “harms our communities”.In the 2018 race, Denney, an educator and consultant with a background in agriculture, pledged to represent working families in the district. She closed the representative’s more than 30-point lead in the primary down to 9.5%, and raised $1m, but LaMalfa ultimately prevailed, and did so again in 2020.“At the end of that election, I was feeling pretty defeated. And then when they redrew the maps in 2022, it was just clear to me that it was not a winnable district,” she said.But this year, frustrations in some corners of the district have continued to mount over the Trump budget, which is expected to have a significant impact on rural areas and hospitals with its cuts to Medicaid and new work requirements for food stamps. That anger was on full display at LaMalfa’s town hall.LaMalfa did not agree to be interviewed, but in a statement, Paige Boogaard, his communication director, said the representative had anticipated as much but stated that most constituents back Trump’s agenda.“Congressman LaMalfa purposefully chose highly contentious areas of his district so that they feel heard. Their reactions were completely expected,” she said. “Raucous townhalls in Chico do not change the fact that District 1 and Northern California remain overwhelmingly conservative and overwhelmingly supportive of both Congressman LaMalfa’s and the President’s policies.”Meanwhile, the area is already grappling with the loss of one rural hospital. Glenn medical center will close its emergency room in just a few days, leaving Glenn county without a hospital, after the federal government moved to eliminate its “critical access” designation. The representative “continues to work on issues related to Glenn Medical Center and rural healthcare”, Boogaard said.‘Not a fair representation for the parties’Ten days after the town hall, Gavin Newsom announced California would move ahead with a plan to put a redistricting proposal before voters. The governor described it as “neutralizing” Texas’s new maps that could flip up to five seats. The referendum would temporarily suspend the use of maps from California’s independent redistricting commission and instead use legislatively drawn maps until after the 2030 census. The special election could cost as much as $282m.LaMalfa has sharply criticized the effort.“No state should be doing mid-decade redistricting unless directed by a court or forced to. Voters in California have voted overwhelmingly twice to prevent partisan redistricting,” he said in a statement at the time. “I will fight to make sure Northern California is represented by someone they elect, not someone Sacramento Democrats selected in a back room.”Under the new map, Butte county and much of district 1 would be joined with counties further to the west and south, including Sonoma county. Democrats have praised the proposal, not just for what it will mean locally, but to the country.“I think Governor Newsom doing Prop 50 has got Democrats all across America saying to themselves: ‘Hey, we got a chance to retake the House to defeat Trump,” said Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and Butte county resident.Denney argued it was a necessary course of action for the current political era in which the Trump administration is “tearing down institutions and norms”.“In this moment of time that we’re living in, with the scope and the scale of the threat that we’re up against, I think it’s absolutely the right move,” she said.“I love the new district. I love how it combines the two college towns on each end, Santa Rosa and Chico. Both have been historically devastated by wildfires, both surrounded by agriculture,” she said, adding that it will bring together areas where natural resources and land management are of deep concern.Republican and Democratic chapters across the district are working to rally voters before the November election, spreading signs far and wide and door-knocking. In Denney’s Chico home earlier this month, she had boxes with thousands of pieces of pro Prop 50 literature.Further south, in Yuba county, the local Republican party has purchased 10,000 yard signs to spread across the state, said Johanna Lassaga, the county party chair.“I think [Prop 50] would be devastating to our area. Putting the urban areas with the rural areas, we don’t get that fair representation,” she said.West of Chico, in the farmlands of Glenn county, Lee McCorkle, the local Republican party chair, has also been posting signs far and wide. He argued LaMalfa has been a valuable representative, citing his role in securing federal money to build a reservoir and nearby levee.“Doug, he’s a conservative guy, he’s a rice farmer, he spends a lot of time to be a congressman,” McCorkle said. “It’s a heck of a job. I wouldn’t want it.”Texas shouldn’t have moved ahead with their new congressional maps, DuBose said, but she argued what’s happening in California is also wrong. People are frustrated the state is moving forward with a costly special election, she said, when the governor did not fully fund Prop 36, a measure approved by voters last year that implements harsher penalties for theft and drug offenses. (Newsom’s budget did not initially include funding for that proposition, which he said was a result of shortfalls, but he later approved $100m to support the legislation.)And the speed at which the proposition has moved ahead has forced the party to quickly jump into gear, she said.“We really kind of got blindsided. It didn’t give us much time, so we just went all out [with the campaign],” she said. “Every moment that I’m not working, I am doing this.”In a historically conservative district, the local Democratic party has relatively few resources, said Welch with the Butte county Democrats, but they too are doing “everything we can to mobilize and motivate people”.“It’s almost certain the spending [to] defeat this will be enormous,” he said. “Really our best hope of overcoming that is with motivating individuals to volunteer to work at a grassroots level.”For her part, Denney, who also chairs the Democratic Action Club of Chico, has been traveling to the far reaches of the district in north-eastern California to talk to voters about Prop 50.“Even up to a month ago, I had zero belief that anything would ever change,” she said. “It’s gonna have a different ending this time.” More

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      Portland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’

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      A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.Dickinson, who is from Portland and has helped organize the small but persistent protest at that location, which is going on three months, said he was not surprised to see Trump focus his attention on the city. But he called the president’s threat to have soldiers use “full force” against the protesters, whose numbers occasionally swell into the dozens, unwarranted.“There’s no justification, no reason for the national guard or military to be using ‘full force’ on people,” Dickinson said, “but they have this narrative about Portland that’s been helped by selectively edited videos to set themselves up for a crackdown.”The Ice field office, which the city of Portland recently accused the agency of illegally using for detentions, is also attractive to protesters because it sits directly next to a Tesla dealership. Another protester held up a sign that read “Tesla Funds Fascism/Stop Buying Teslas”.A third protester, a young man who goes by the nickname Burrito, said that he was “protesting them wrongfully kidnapping random individuals based on their skin color”.He also rejected the president’s characterization of the city and of the anti-Ice protesters. “This is not a war zone and it’s disgusting the way that he talks about us,” he said.The activist said that the point of the protests was to frustrate and wear out the federal agents, who, he said, have been responsible for any violence that has taken place: “As the day progresses, we get more numbers, they start to show more force and our people come out. It’s just a matter of how they escalate things, because they are the escalators, not like the one that Trump took that doesn’t work.”The number of protesters was vastly smaller than the number of people in nearby coffee shops and restaurants, where Portlanders went about their usual weekend business, joking about life during wartime.The city’s downtown blocks, which were the scene of mass protests in 2020, first against racist policing and then against Trump’s deployment of federal agents to guard a courthouse, were similarly placid.View image in fullscreenThe only person on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse was a street sweeper, wearing a neon-green vest with the words “Clean & Safe” on the back. The fence that surrounded the building five years ago had long since been removed, as had the plywood boards that covered the windows of the adjacent police headquarters, where thousands of racial justice protesters rallied after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.There was also no sign of activity at the nearby Edith Green federal building, with its distinctive facade clad in vegetated screens, one day after a local TV reporter recorded the arrival of a convoy that included masked federal agents in an armored homeland security truck.By contrast, the nearby Portland farmers’ market was packed with residents and tourists buying produce and eating acaí bowls from a thriving local business started by a yoga and meditation teacher.On social media, Portlanders continued to mock Trump’s false claims about the city as they have for weeks, by posting images of themselves enjoying life in the city with audio of the president saying, earlier this month, that it is “like living in Hell”. More

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      Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary”, ignoring pleas from local officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who suggested that the president was misinformed or lying about the nature and scale of a single, small protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.Trump made the announcement on social media, using references to antifascists and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “There is no national security threat in Portland. Our communities are safe and calm,” she wrote on social media. “My office is reaching out to the White House and Homeland Security for more information. We have been provided no information on the reason or purpose of any military mission.”A visit by the Guardian to downtown Portland on Saturday morning confirmed that the city is placid, the farmers’ market was packed and the protest against immigration enforcement in an outlying residential neighborhood remained small. There were just four protesters on the sidewalk near the Ice field office Trump claimed was “under siege”. One, wearing a chicken costume and draped in an American flag, held up a sign that read: “Portland Will Outlive Him.” Passing motorists honked in appreciation.The White House did not provide details in connection with Trump’s announcement, including a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved.Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said at a hastily assembled news conference on Friday night that the city had become aware of “a sudden influx of federal agents in our city. We did not ask for them to come. They are here without clear precedent or purpose.”“The President has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland, to induce a reaction, to induce protests, to induce conflicts. His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as,” Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley said. “He wants to induce a violent exchange. Let us not grant him that wish. Let us be the force of orderly, peaceful protest.”The senator also drew attention to video evidence from the local newspaper, the Oregonian, which showed federal agents using force against a small number of protesters outside the Ice facility, who remained peaceful.Although a spokesperson for the Oregon national guard told the Oregonian that no official request for troops had been made yet, convoys of dozens of federal agents, in marked and unmarked SUVs, were seen on Friday entering a federal building downtown and an Ice field office in a residential neighborhood that has been the scene of regular protests by dozens of protesters.“The President of the United States is directing his self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ to unleash militarized federal forces in an American city he disagrees with,” Representative Maxine Dexter wrote in a social media statement on Saturday, referring in part to the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth. “This is an egregious abuse of power and a betrayal of our most basic American values. Authoritarians rely on fear to divide us. Portland will not give them that.”Both of Oregon’s US senators and three of its House representatives had in recent days strongly rejected Trump’s claims about mass anarchy in the city as a fiction intended to justify the unnecessary deployment of federal troops as part of an “authoritarian” crackdown.Ron Wyden, the state’s senior Democratic senator, told reporters on Friday: “It’s important to recognize that the president’s argument is a fable – it does not resemble the truth.”“If he watches a TV show in the morning and he see Portland mentioned, he says it’s a terrible place,” Wyden added.During an Oval Office event on Thursday to announce that the administration intends to investigate and disrupt what it claims is “organized political violence” funded by leftwing groups, Trump made several wild claims about Portland, which was a center of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But life has long since returned to normal, and barriers around the federal courthouse and police headquarters downtown have been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president, however, apparently deceived by video of a handful of protesters gathered outside the Ice facility in a south-west Portland neighborhood broadcast by conservative outlets, insisted that the city has been in non-stop “anarchy” since 2020 and is barely livable.“Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there, it’s amazing. But it’s anarchy out there,” Trump said. The president then claimed, falsely, that most of the city’s retail stores had closed, due to arson attacks, and “the few shops that are open” were covered in plywood.Describing the small number of protesters who have gathered outside an Ice facility that has been illegally used for detentions in a residential neighborhood, Trump claimed, without evidence: “These are professional agitators, these are bad people and they’re paid a lot of money by rich people.“But we’re going to get out there and we’re gonna do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that.”Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said on Friday: “This proclaimed ‘war on Antifa’ is completely a fallacy. Antifa is an ideology, it is not a group, and so we’re extremely concerned with what he’s going to try to do with that pronouncement.”“Donald Trump does not care about safety. If he cared about safety he would not have released 1,600 convicted insurrectionists into the streets. He cares about control and authoritarianism,” she added, referring to Trump’s clemency for those who carried out the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Portland does not need the military. We do not want them, we do not need them, we do not welcome them to come here under his orders.”Trump, a Republican, has sent military troops to the Democratic-controlled cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC so far in his second presidency. He has discussed doing the same in Memphis and New Orleans, which are also Democratic strongholds. More

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      Trump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raids

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      Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.The day before, Beckwith had received a phone call from Gregory Bovino, who leads the Border Patrol’s unit in El Centro, a border city 600 miles south of Sacramento. Bovino was planning an immigration raid in Sacramento and asked Beckwith who in her office to contact if his officers were assaulted, the Times reported, citing Beckwith.She informed Bovino that agents were not allowed to indiscriminately stop people in her district, north of Bakersfield, per a federal court order issued in April that prevents the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. The US supreme court overturned a similar court order issued in Los Angeles earlier this month.In a 10.57am email on 15 July, Beckwith repeated her message, telling Bovino she expected “compliance with court orders and the constitution”. Less than six hours later, her work computer and cellphone no longer functioning, she received a letter to her personal email account notifying her that she had been terminated.Two days later, Bovino proceeded with his immigration raid at a Sacramento Home Depot.“Folks, there is no such thing as a sanctuary city,” he said in a video he shared from the California state capitol building.“The former acting US attorney’s email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement,” Bovino said in a statement to the New York Times. “The supreme court’s decision is evidence of the fact Border Patrol follows the constitution and the fourth amendment.”On 8 September, the supreme court ruled that federal immigration agents can stop people solely based on their race, language or job, overturning the decision of a Los Angeles judge who had ordered immigration agents to halt sweeping raids there.Beckwith’s firing is one of a series of federal firings, including of prosecutors who did not abide by the president’s agenda. Last week, US attorney Erik Siebert resigned under intense pressure and Trump replaced him with his special assistant Lindsey Halligan just hours after ordering his attorney general Pam Bondi to do so in a since deleted social media post.Siebert had been overseeing investigations into Letitia James and James Comey. Beckwith has appealed against her termination, according to the Times.“I’m an American who cares about her country,” she told the paper. “We have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.” More

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      Jury finds LA protester not guilty of assaulting border patrol agent

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      A Los Angeles protester charged with assaulting a border patrol agent in June was acquitted on Wednesday after US immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident.The not guilty verdict for Brayan Ramos-Brito is a major setback for the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in southern California and for Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who has become a key figure in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 29-year-old defendant, who is a US citizen, was facing a misdemeanor and was the first protester to go to trial since demonstrations against immigration raids erupted in LA earlier this summer.Border patrol and prosecutors alleged that Ramos-Brito struck an agent during a chaotic protest on 7 June in the south Los Angeles county city of Paramount outside a complex where the Department of Homeland Security has an office. But footage from a witness, which the Guardian published days after the incident, showed an agent forcefully shoving Ramos-Brito. The footage did not capture the demonstrator assaulting the officer.The jury delivered its not guilty verdict after a little over an hour of deliberations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Bovino testified earlier in the day and faced a tough cross-examination from public defenders.Bovino was one of four border patrol agents who testified as witnesses, but was the only one to say he saw the alleged assault by Ramos-Brito, according to the LA Times. Videos played in court captured the agent shoving Ramos-Brito, sending him flying backward, and showed the protester marching back toward the agent, the paper reported. The videos did not capture Ramos-Brito’s alleged assault.There were multiple factual discrepancies in DHS’s internal reports on the protest, which initially led to charges against five demonstrators, the Guardian reported in July. A criminal complaint suggested Ramos-Brito and others had attacked agents in protest of the arrests of two sisters, but records showed the women had been arrested in a separate incident that occurred after Ramos-Brito’s arrest.A supervisor later documented the correct timeline and “apologized” for errors, records showed.At trial, Cuauhtemoc Ortega, a federal public defender, sought to cast doubt on Bovino’s credibility, questioning him about facing a misconduct investigation several years ago, which resulted in a reprimand for referring to undocumented people as “scum, filth and trash”, the LA Times reported.After Bovino responded that his comment was in reference to a “specific criminal illegal alien”, Ortega read from the reprimand, signed by Bovino, which said he was describing “illegal aliens”, the newspaper said.Ortega also argued the agent who Ramos-Brito allegedly assaulted lied about the incident and Bovino was “trying to cover up for him”.Bovino has previously faced scrutiny for making false and misleading statements. He defended a major immigration sweep in January by claiming agents had a “predetermined list of targets”, many with criminal records, but documents showed that 77 out of 78 people taken into custody during the operation had no prior record with the agency, a CalMatters investigation revealed.And in June, while defending the arrest of a US citizen in a high-profile case, Bovino falsely claimed on social media that the man was charged with assaulting an officer.In Ramos-Brito’s trial, videos also contradicted initial claims of a border patrol agent who had said he was chasing a man who assaulted him, but was stopped by Ramos-Brito and Jose Mojica, another protester, the LA Times said. The footage showed no chase.Mojica first shared his account of the incident with the Guardian days after his arrest, saying he was assaulted and injured and had not attacked officers. The US attorney’s office subsequently dismissed felony assault charges it had initially filed against Mojica and Ramos-Brito, but then filed a lower-level misdemeanor against Ramos-Brito.Ramos-Brito’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.A spokesperson for Bill Essayli, the US attorney appointed by the president earlier this year, declined to comment on the acquittal. Border patrol officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry and requests for comment from Bovino.Essayli’s office has aggressively prosecuted protesters and people accused of interfering with immigration arrests, with more than 40 cases filed in June and July. But prosecutors have repeatedly dismissed some of the felony charges soon after filing them.Carley Palmer, an attorney who served as a supervisor in the US attorney’s office in LA until she left last year, said Thursday it was notable that the federal government had devoted significant resources to a misdemeanor case against an individual with no reported criminal history. Bovino, a senior official, flew in from Chicago for the trial.It is challenging to win convictions in cases like these without video evidence, she said: “The government bears the burden of proof, and if you don’t have footage of the relevant events, then everything is going to rise and fall on the credibility of your witnesses. If the witnesses are law enforcement officers and jurors believe they had bias … that’s really going to hurt their credibility.”The discussion at trial of Bovino’s past misconduct could create challenges for the government moving forward, she added: “In addition to harming the individual case, if a law enforcement witness has their credibility impeached on the stand, that can impact if they can testify in future cases and if their word can be relied on in sworn affidavits going forward.”Meghan Blanco, an attorney who represented Mojica, said it was significant that jurors did not believe the statements of such a senior official.“These jurors had the opportunity to listen firsthand to the CBP officer overseeing enforcement nationally and could not have found his testimony to be credible,” said Blanco, a former federal prosecutor. “It is a bad sign for the federal government. They are doing everything they can to try to legitimize their prosecutions, and thank God the jury and the public are seeing right through it.” More