The Brief

Demonstrators and journalists are suing the Department of Homeland Security, alleging federal agents used excessive and unnecessary force at protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Press Club, individual protesters and others filed the lawsuit in federal court Wednesday night, claiming federal immigration agents' use of force at demonstrations "punishes and suppresses the exercise of First Amendment-protected rights."

The group is seeking a temporary restraining order that would require Homeland Security officers to only use force in response to specific threats and not target journalists, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

"Since the protests began, DHS officers have been intentionally and indiscriminately misusing militarized weapons and unnecessarily attacking protesters and members of the press," the complaint states. "DHS agents have consistently used these weapons to suppress First Amendment protected activity when they faced no meaningful threat of violence at all."

Response from Homeland Security

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security sent a statement to LAist, saying the First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly, "not rioting," and reminded journalists to "exercise caution" while covering these events.

"Anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties will face consequences, which could include arrest," the statement reads, adding that ICE officers had experienced an increase in assaults against them as they've carried out their duties.

The statement said President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were committed to restoring law and order in Los Angeles and around the country, and that "no lawsuit, this or any other, is going to change that.”

Details from the lawsuit

The lawsuit accuses federal agents of firing chemical agents and projectiles at people without warning them and hitting multiple journalists with pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas. Two journalists said they were each shot in the head by federal officers while reporting at a protest in Paramount on June 7.

Adam Rose with the Los Angeles Press Club said at least seven members of the organization experienced some type of use of force by federal officers or violation of their rights as representatives of news media.

"These journalists were just doing their job, not breaking any law," Rose said in a statement.

Federal policy issued in 2023 instructs officers to identify themselves and issue a verbal warning "when feasible" before using force.

What does the law say?

Two recent California laws prevent law enforcement from using projectiles and chemical agents except when there's a clear threat to officers. They also protect journalists covering protests from interference by law enforcement.

These state laws don't apply to federal agents, according to Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California who is representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. But he said the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizures, does.

" You're not supposed to use excessive force and generally indiscriminate force that isn't targeted at people who pose a threat," he said. "Those are all forms of excessive force, and those are all forms of force that the DHS officers are using grossly."

The Press Club and others who filed the lawsuit are asking the court to issue a restraining order before the weekend.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill directing the state to coordinate the temporary deployment of thousands of police officers to the Los Angeles region for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics.

Law enforcement officials are expecting to deploy up to 16,000 officers a day across the region during the mega-event, according to Los Angeles Police Department Commander Mario Mota, who is part of the department’s major events group. Overall, Mota said, they anticipate needing between 24,000 and 30,000 officers. With those numbers, local law enforcement agencies, including LAPD, don’t have the personnel to staff the Games on their own and will need to bring in outside officers.

That’s where the new legislation comes in. The bill, AB 2411, requires the state’s Office of Emergency Services to negotiate agreements with outside law enforcement agencies to temporarily deploy in the L.A. area during the Games. It also directs the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to create a training program for officers coming from out of state.

“ We want to make sure that officers coming from other states have the same trainings that our officers do here in California,” said California Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who wrote the bill and represents Inglewood and Venice Beach, both Olympic venue locations. “The reason why we did this is because we need more officers.”

LAPD alone estimates it will need 6,703 personnel a day during the busiest period of the Summer Games, according to a May budget memo. According to those estimates, LAPD can only deploy a third of that number from its own ranks, and the rest will need to come from other law enforcement agencies.

It’s unclear how much these agreements could cost the state of California. Security planning for the Olympics and Paralympics in Los Angeles is being overseen by the U.S. Secret Service, and the federal government has allocated $1 billion to security costs. The fiscal analysis for the bill assumes that the federal coffers will cover the cost of bringing in other law enforcement agencies.

But if it doesn’t, the Office of Emergency Services estimates that contracting costs could be more than $1 billion.

WASHINGTON — The federal agency in charge of air traffic control is turning to artificial intelligence to help manage the nation's airspace.

The Federal Aviation Administration officially launched its ambitious $875-million software overhaul on Monday, announcing the rollout would begin at three major airports that serve the Washington, D.C., region.

The new system is known as Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART for short.

"By fundamentally reshaping how we manage our airspace and preventing problems before they happen, SMART will slash those frustrating delays, reduce stress on air traffic controllers, and lower travel prices," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.

Regulators and airlines hope the AI-enhanced tool will make flying more efficient, though critics warn that it won't solve bigger problems with the air traffic control system.

FAA and DOT leaders emphasize that the new technology is not intended as a replacement for human air traffic controllers. They describe it as a tool that's supposed to make controllers' jobs easier by reducing congestion and conflicts in the air before they happen.

"The way we manage traffic today is chaotic and we can do better," said FAA administrator Bryan Bedford during a Senate hearing earlier this year. "We need to manage that at the FAA, rather than rely on commercial airlines to simply schedule however they want."

FAA leaders say the SMART system will help optimize the nation's airspace by considering all planned airline flights, as well as weather, wind, and other variables, and tweaking those flight schedules to reduce congestion.

It's part of a broader $12.5 billion push to modernize the nation's air traffic control system.

The FAA tapped a relatively small company called Air Space Intelligence to build the system. The company has previously made AI-enhanced software for dispatchers at Alaska Airlines and other carriers, but this project presents a significantly bigger and higher-profile test.

Skeptics question whether the SMART system will be the game-changer FAA leaders have promised.

"It won't replace humans. It'll be another tool in the toolbox," said Dave Riley, a former air traffic controller who retired in 2020 after more than 20 years at the FAA. "But of course, when you call it AI, it gets a lot of attention."

Riley downplayed concerns of the AI tool going rogue because human air traffic controllers will still be in charge of keeping planes safely separated.

"The fears of AI killing us all in the next 10 years, I don't think this platform is going to be about that," he said.

But Riley doubts the tool will do much to solve the bigger problems in the air traffic control system — particularly the staffing shortage. The FAA is still thousands of certified air traffic controllers short of full staffing, forcing many controllers to work mandatory overtime and grueling schedules.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents controllers, distanced itself from the new system.

"NATCA has not been involved in the design, testing, or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce at this time," the union said in a statement.

Airlines for America, the trade association that represents the major airlines in Washington, praised the FAA's push to modernize the nation's flight management tools.

"Its potential to strengthen safety, increase capacity and improve efficiency will have a direct positive effect on American travelers," the group said in a statement. "We're just in the initial stages, but it's one of the most exciting and bold initiatives taken on by the FAA in decades."

Copyright 2026 NPR

As governments and political leaders increasingly push for regulations to rein in artificial intelligence, neither candidate for California governor has committed to firm policies on AI safety, including two requirements Gov. Gavin Newsom called for Friday.

Both Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton say the new technology warrants more regulations. AI has been in the spotlight since last week when an Anthropic researcher quit, declaring on social media, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

CalMatters asked both candidates about what they would do to address AI risks.

In a Thursday interview, Hilton said addressing AI risks would be a “very urgent priority” if he were to become governor, and said he’s “very interested” in considering regulations safety advocates are seeking such as requiring AI developers to undergo safety monitoring from external evaluators. But on Friday he followed up to say he does not support Newsom’s call to require AI developers to program a “kill switch” to shut down models during emergencies, calling such a proposal “a gimmick.”

He also stopped short of endorsing other policies such as requiring external monitoring, saying he doesn’t want to rush during the recent panic into “really bad regulation.”

Becerra’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview, instead issuing a statement that said “California cannot accept technology that poses catastrophic risks to public safety.”

“As governor, (Becerra) will set firm guardrails around real harms — including harms that could emerge when AI accelerates dangerous capabilities or operates beyond human oversight — and ensure California's AI safety laws are actively enforced,” his spokesperson Jonathan Underland wrote.

Becerra is leading Hilton by 22 percentage points in the race to replace Newsom in November, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California released this week.

Newsom on Friday issued an executive order directing state agencies to develop safety recommendations including external evaluations and kill switches, despite vetoing legislation that would have done that two years ago.

The governor asked for the recommendations by Nov. 16, raising the possibility he could call a special legislative session in his final weeks in office to implement them.

Underland did not respond when CalMatters asked whether Becerra would implement those recommendations. Hilton, while opposing the “kill switch” idea, said he supports Newsom’s move to convene a panel to recommend AI safety policies and would do the same.

Meanwhile, advocates for more regulations on tech companies say it is critical for California to adopt tougher rules since President Donald Trump has dismissed recent warnings about AI risks and said he remains committed to speeding up development in the face of foreign competition.

“The incoming governor has a really grave responsibility to make sure we get this right,” said Scott Wisor, policy director at the national Secure AI Project. “I think it should be the very top priority for them when they come into office.”

Half of all Americans are anxious about AI-driven job losses and community backlash to building data centers is now a bipartisan issue ahead of the November election. But California is one of the few states moving to regulate AI to address the potential of catastrophic harm, such as AI agents creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.

Newsom last year signed Senate Bill 53, which requires transparency from large AI model developers on how they manage catastrophic risks — defined as the potential to contribute to 50 or more deaths, the release of chemical or biological weapons or more than $1 billion in theft or damage. The law forces companies to report safety incidents to the state that cause deaths, injuries of “materialized catastrophic harm.”

But proponents of the technology caution against overregulation. Newsom and lawmakers want to keep the industry in California, where the AI boom is driving San Francisco’s economy and delivering billions of dollars of tax revenue into state coffers.

New politics of artificial intelligence

In 2024, Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1047, which would have required the monitoring and kill switches he’s now seeking and imposed stricter liability for companies when their agents cause damage.

“At that time, you could not utter a sentence about AI without making sure there was a comma, and before the comma was something about the risks and after the comma was something about curing cancer,” said state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat who chairs the privacy and technology committee. “There is no doubt the conversation has changed.”

Recent incidents in which AI agents went rogue appeared to confirm researchers’ fears that people could lose control of the technology. Most famously, over the summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents broke out of a contained testing environment, gained access to the internet and coordinated with each other to orchestrate a cyberattack on the startup Hugging Face. OpenAI and Anthropic have since disclosed additional similar incidents.

Dreamforce attendees explore the agentic enterprise city at the conference in San Francisco on Sept. 15, 2026.

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Anna Hoch-Kenney

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CalMatters

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Some industry leaders now embrace third-party safety auditing; in their calls for a development slowdown, both Anthropic and OpenAI said they would commit to giving external evaluators employee-level access to their systems.

Seve Christian, director of California policy at Encode AI, which sponsored the law that requires AI companies to disclose how they handle catastrophic risks, also wants the state to enforce minimum safety standards before AI products are released to the public, similar to how the government ensures planes are airworthy or drugs are safe.

Christian said the group is “cautiously optimistic” about Becerra’s general call for stricter regulations. Encode AI is a donor to Becerra’s campaign.

Bahrad Sokhansanj, a senior research scholar at the Institute for Law and AI, said the state should also make sure it has the legal authority to shut down an AI model itself during emergencies — for example, if a model were carrying out a cyberattack on a power plant.

“Everything we have now was designed for malware, or the cybersecurity problems of 10 or 15 years ago,” he said.

Hilton ready to ban AI in schools

Asked this week whether Becerra supports mandating kill switches and third-party monitoring, Underland wrote only that he “will ensure California's existing AI safety requirements are actively enforced, he will close the gaps that allow bad actors to evade accountability, and strengthen standards as the technology evolves.”

Underland said Becerra’s campaign has held meetings with AI researchers, economists, advocates and industry leaders, but declined to name them.

Echoing other skeptics, Hilton said he thinks industry warnings of the potential collapse of humanity are “reckless and irresponsible.”

“If they really believed what they were doing, that they’re about to try and raise money to do more of, would end the human race, they would stop working on it immediately,” he said. “It’s just obvious that they don’t really mean it.”

Hilton has focused on what he called “practical action that could and should be taken on AI, that most people would agree with and that are not that complicated.” He said on the first day of his administration he would call for a statewide halt on using AI in schools, as the New York and Los Angeles school districts have done. He has endorsed a bill on Newsom’s desk, Senate Bill 947, that would prohibit employers from solely using automated systems to discipline or fire workers.

That position puts him in surprising alignment with the California Labor Federation and in opposition to the California Chamber of Commerce, both of which endorsed Becerra.

Underland said Becerra supports “clear, proportionate, and workable transparency and human review standards for high-stakes automated decisions that affect a person's livelihood,” but stopped short of supporting that bill.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California college students without legal immigration status still cannot work at public colleges and universities after Gov. Gavin Newsom again vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given them that right.

Assembly Bill 713 would have adopted an untested legal theory that argues that a 1986 federal law barring employers from hiring workers in the country without authorization doesn’t apply to state governments. The logic? That 40-year-old law doesn’t mention state governments as a type of employer that cannot hire workers without proper status.

But for the second time in three years, Newsom decided that adopting that theory for California would expose the state’s higher-education system to the wrath of the federal government.

“The current federal government has shown it is quick to wreak destruction for political spectacle — attacking California's public higher education institutions and terrorizing immigrant communities, including students, with reckless disregard for consequences and a desire for chaos,” Newsom wrote in his veto message.

He added: “But given the gravity of this bill's consequences — including potential criminal and civil liability for state employees — the federal courts must resolve the legality of the novel legal theory behind this legislation before we proceed. Seeking declaratory relief in federal court would provide such clarity.”

Newsom vetoed a nearly identical bill in 2024.

The latest bill by Assemblymember José Luis Solache, a Democrat from Lakewood, was meant to allow the estimated 60,000 students without legal immigration status at California’s community college and public universities to earn paychecks safely on campuses instead of working for cash under the table. Backers of the bill say campus jobs could be tailored to fit the students’ academic schedules or align with the research interests, such as employment in labs.

Campus jobs are a key way these students can afford college given that they are ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California provides eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of their immigration status, so many of them can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

“While California has a longstanding commitment to expanding access, affordability, and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers,” Solache said at a bill hearing in June.

The University of California itself abandoned its review of employing students without legal status in 2024 out of fears that the federal government could punish the system by withholding federal money or prosecuting UC personnel.

That decision gutted a coalition of students who led the campaign to persuade the UC to voluntarily adopt the legal theory allowing them to work.

After Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill, a student and former lecturer at the UC sued the system. A state appellate court ruled that UC’s argument that the federal government might sue the system was an abuse of discretion under the state’s law that bans employment and housing discrimination. The court said UC’s policy of not hiring students without legal status was legally indefensible unless it can show that federal law requires the UC to continue its policy of not hiring undocumented students. The UC appealed, but the state Supreme Court let the appellate ruling stand. Still, the court ruling was silent on the soundness of the legal theory that the state can hire workers without legal status.

Newsom’s veto message indicated that a federal court must weigh in on the legal theory before California can adopt a law such as Solache’s.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.