The Brief

A federal court on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California.

The ruling came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed after the El Centro Border Patrol traveled to Kern County to conduct a three-day sweep in January, detaining day laborers, farm workers and others in a Home Depot parking lot, outside a convenience store and along a highway between orchards.

The ruling prohibits Border Patrol agents from taking similar actions, restricting them from stopping people unless they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is in violation of U.S. immigration law. It also bars agents from carrying out warrantless arrests unless they have probable cause that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.

“You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston said during a Monday hearing in Fresno that featured moments of heated exchange between government attorneys and the judge.

The ACLU filed suit on behalf of United Farm Workers, arguing that the stops violated the Fourth Amendment. The judge has not decided on the totality of the case, but on Tuesday granted the ACLU’s motion to stop the Border Patrol from conducting similar operations while the case moved through the courts.

“I think that it’s pretty clear that half of a century of really established law is being upheld. It's unfortunate that this is a cause for celebration. It’s not legal to snatch people off the street for looking like farm workers or day laborers,” said Elizabeth Strater, vice president of United Farm Workers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta agreed. “That’s existing law, and the judge’s order reflects existing law.”

"You can't just indiscriminately stop people and search them without any appropriate reasonable suspicion or probable cause or without a warrant," Bonta said at a news conference in San Diego on Monday about conditions in ICE detention. "So, it sounds like the judge had seen enough and wanted to issue an order. "

The injunction is in effect in the jurisdiction of California’s Eastern District, which spans the Central Valley from Redding to Bakersfield.

After the January sweep, the man who led it, Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, said his agents specifically targeted people with criminal and immigration histories. However, a CalMatters investigation revealed that the Border Patrol had no criminal or immigration history on 77 of the 78 people it arrested.

The court also ordered the Border Patrol to document every stop and provide reports within 60 days. During oral arguments on Monday, the government attorney said doing so would be burdensome to Border Patrol agents. Judge Thurston rebuked the government, saying: “They have to make a report for every arrest, not sure what the burden is.”

According to sworn declarations filed in court by those detained, Border Patrol agents slashed tires, yanked people out of trucks, threw people to the ground, and called farmworkers “Mexican bitches.”

Border Patrol attorneys characterized those examples as actions of individual agents, and not reflective of a policy from the agency.

Thurston disagreed. “The evidence is that this was wide scale” and not limited to individual agents, she said.

Border Patrol agents receive new training

Border Patrol attorneys didn’t offer evidence of their own to dispute the evidence presented by the ACLU, including stopping people based on their race and warrantless arrests. They tried to persuade Thurston that the order would not be necessary because the agency is already taking steps to retrain its officers. In a previous court filing, government attorneys said Border Patrol had issued guidance to retrain the El Center sector’s 900 agents on the Fourth Amendment in order to prevent warrantless arrests.

At Monday’s hearing, Thurston questioned why guidance would even be necessary since agents are trained on the Fourth Amendment in the academy.

Government attorneys told the judge 270 agents have received the training. Thurston asked for details on how the training was being carried out. “Shift by shift?” she said. But government attorneys said they did not know.

The packed courtroom was contentious at times. U.S. Department of Justice attorney Olga Y. Kuchins argued that the Border Patrol’s sweep in Kern County, known as “Operation Return to Sender” wasn’t standard policy. “This two-day operation does not a policy make,” she said.

Thurston asked how many days were needed for an operation to be taken as policy, and on what authority the government was relying on to establish this operation could not be interpreted as part of Border Patrol policy.

“Do you know of that authority?” Thurston said.

“I don’t know of that authority,” Kuchins said.

The injunction also compels the El Centro Sector to provide proof within 90 days, and every 30 days thereafter, that agents involved in these operations have been trained on these rules.

“This ruling is a powerful recognition that what happened in Kern County and surrounding area in January was illegal,” said Bree Bernwanger, ACLU senior staff attorney.

She called it a “powerful reminder that law enforcement agents – including immigration – cannot stop you, detain you because of the color of your skin.”

Another immigration sweep

Even after government attorneys pledged to retrain agents on the Constitution, El Centro sector traveled more than 200 miles north to Pomona last week and rounded up day laborers outside a Home Depot, an action reminiscent of the Kern County raid.

Witnesses say federal agents arrived in unmarked vehicles around 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, and quickly surrounded the Home Depot parking lot on South Towne Avenue.

“When they saw that a critical mass was gathered, they executed the raid,” said Alexis Teodoro, a Worker Rights Director with the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents arrested 10 and placed them into removal proceedings. No other agencies were involved, said Michael Scappechio, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Advocates are adamant that more than 20 people were initially taken into custody, based on piecing together the accounts of different witnesses about what happened.

Federal officials defended their actions, saying agents were initially targeting a single individual with an active arrest warrant. During the operation, nine other people were also taken into custody. Some of those detained had prior charges, including child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, immigration violations, and DUI, said Hilton Beckham, the assistant commissioner for CBP’s office of public affairs.

Jesus Domingo Ross, 38, was standing on a street corner looking for work near the Home Depot in Pomona last week when, he said, agents appeared from all sides, grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

“I panicked,” he said, describing the moment he realized he was in custody of U.S. immigration authorities. “Just with everything you’re seeing on the news right now, I really panicked because we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

He spoke to CalMatters on Saturday night during visiting hours at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, where he is now being held.

“I’m trying to keep my confidence in God to carry me through this,” he said quietly.

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

It’s been four years since James Oreste started Ubefest, a festival meant to highlight the purple yam that’s become beloved not just in the Filipino diaspora but across the country. In that time, the food festival has grown in the number of vendors and become a broader appreciation of Filipino cuisine.

The restaurant:

This year's event is happening Saturday April 11 and Sunday April 12 in Cerritos. One of the festival’s vendors, Emerson Baja, owner of Long Beach Lumpia, has been involved with the event for years, and he came into the studio to talk to host Austin Cross.

The food:

Baja’s pop-up menu was inspired by a variety of things, with the traditional aspects of his menu coming from his family and other aspects by food he experimented with while attending Long Beach State. He became a probation officer after he graduated college, but his heart was always with food, specifically lumpia, which he served at a potluck.

“People were like ‘you’re in the wrong business,’” Baja said.

For the segment, Baja brought in a variety of lumpias: traditional Shanghai; pork chile verde; veggie pancit pizza; and ube cheesecake turon.

The verdict: 

When Emerson mentioned the Shanghai lumpia being a homemade recipe, Cross added, “Home is delicious! You have a home like this?”

“It’s finger-licking good over here,” Cross said after his first bite of the ube cheesecake turon lumpia. He added: “It’s really special because it has an aftertaste of a very heartwarming pastry…feels very homey.”

Listen to the full conversation here:

President Donald Trump has endorsed Steve Hilton for California governor, a move that could possibly consolidate Republican voters ahead of the still wide-open primary election in June.

Hilton, a former Fox News host based in the Bay Area who previously served as a political adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, has campaigned on the goal of improving California’s hostile relationship with the federal administration. He and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco are the only two Republicans among the 10 notable candidates in the primary field.

“I have known and respected Steve Hilton, who is running for Governor of California, for many years. He is a truly fine man, one who has watched as this once great State has gone to Hell,” Trump wrote early Monday on his social media site, Truth Social. “Steve Hilton has my COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT. He will be a GREAT Governor and, importantly, WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!!!”

With Democratic voters split, Hilton and Bianco have risen to the top of public polling in the race, threatening to leave the majority party in the state without a candidate in the top-two general election. Now, Trump’s endorsement could boost Hilton and allow a Democrat to overtake Bianco.

“It certainly increases the chances that a Democrat is going to make it into the top two,” said Tim Rosales, a Republican strategist. “The Bianco campaign has to reassess and reposition themselves in the wake of this, but the Democrats still don’t have a clear front-runner.”

In the most recent public polling, Hilton and Bianco have occupied a crowded top five alongside three Democrats: Rep. Eric Swalwell, investor Tom Steyer and former Rep. Katie Porter.

Hilton and Bianco often split the Republican Party’s support about evenly in polling, and a March primary election simulator created by Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., put the odds of a Republican-only general election at about 25%.

If that were the case, the state would have a Republican governor for the first time in more than two decades.

In an interview with KQED’s Political Breakdown, Hilton touted his relationship with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and vowed to work collaboratively with the Trump administration to boost California’s timber industry and manage forests.

“There’s a whole set of positive things we can do if we work more closely with the federal government on that issue,” he said.

While he told Politico that as of last week, he hadn’t spoken to Trump about the gubernatorial race, he’s repeatedly invoked the president’s own campaign slogan, saying that as governor, he would “Make California Great Again.”

Trump remains deeply unpopular in California, with just 30% of likely voters approving of the job he is doing as president, per a February poll from the Public Policy Institute of California. But that same survey found Trump’s support remains strong among California Republicans, with 76% approval.

“Republican voters still hold the president in pretty high regard,” Rosales said. “It certainly does make Hilton the front-runner amongst Republicans, and in a top-two primary like this, where you’ve got a crowded field, anything that a candidate can do that really solidifies a base of voters is critically important.”

The loyalty of the GOP base has allowed Trump to play kingmaker in past California primary elections. In 2018, he endorsed businessman John Cox, boosting Cox into the general election and dashing the prospects of an all-Democrat general election between Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Before Trump’s overnight endorsement, Bianco also seemed to have been courting the president’s support, launching a high-profile recount of ballots cast in last November’s special election, when California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 to redraw congressional maps to favor Democrats. Last month, Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots, calling the unprecedented investigation a “fact-finding mission” into potential voter fraud, which Trump has often called rampant despite a lack of evidence.

Many Republican strategists, however, believed that the party’s best chance to win both spots in the primary relied on Trump’s staying out of it. The state’s GOP also hasn’t weighed in, though it’s expected to decide whether to make an endorsement at its upcoming convention next weekend.

Now that celebrity bald eagles Jackie and Shadow have welcomed two new chicks, tens of thousands of fans are regularly tuning into the livestream of the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake for a peak at the fuzzy eaglets.

The chicks, which hatched Saturday night and Easter Sunday morning, will be referred to as Chick 1 and Chick 2 for now, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the popular YouTube livestream.

The eaglets are still gaining strength in their first few days of life — learning to move neck muscles and pick up pieces of meat from mama Jackie and papa Shadow’s beaks. Those early feedings can be challenging or awkward, and the organization often refers to the chicks as “bobbleheads” at this stage.

Some fans worried about the second chick struggling to hold its head and getting enough food, but both eaglets are doing “great,” according to Jenny Voisard, Friends of Big Bear Valley’s media manager.

“Trust the process, trust the eagles, and settle in and enjoy these cute little fur balls because they change every day,” Voisard said. “And you don't want to miss this time, because they're just so precious.”

Sibling 'bonking'

The eaglets are tiny — each weighs about a few ounces — in a nest that’s estimated to be 6-feet deep. The nest sits near the top of a Jeffrey pine tree on the north side of Big Bear Lake.

Chicks multiply in size over the first weeks and months of life, establishing a pecking order along the way, according to the nonprofit.

Viewers may notice Chick 1 and Chick 2 headbutting each other, a sibling rivalry behavior that the organization calls “bonking.” Voisard said it’s “totally normal” in the nest, especially since the chicks can’t see very well at this stage.

“It won't last too long,” she said. “There is plenty of food for them to eat, and so they shouldn't be in competition with each other.”

Last season’s trio of chicks participated in bonking for a while.

Voisard said Sunny and Gizmo went on to be “best friends” before they flew away from the nest last June. One of last season’s chicks, which the nonprofit named “Misty,” didn’t survive a winter storm within weeks of hatching.

For Jackie and Shadow, everything now revolves around stocking up food and making sure the chicks are safe, warm and dry in the nest, Voisard said.

“They do a very good job, and we've been seeing fish deliveries and other prey the last couple of days and the chicks are hungrily gobbling it up,” she said.

Upcoming naming contest

Now that the chicks have hatched, many people are wondering what their names will be — and offering suggestions. The nonprofit said it’s seen hundreds of requests to name one of the chicks “Sandy” in honor of Sandy Steers.

Steers was an environmental advocate who helped launch the eagle livestream and the late executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley. She died in February, a few weeks before the pair of eggs were laid.

But the organization said that’s not what Steers would have wanted. Voisard said Steers loved having Big Bear third-grade students select the eaglets’ names, and Friends of Big Bear Valley plans to keep the tradition going.

“We are working on a way to honor, memorialize Sandy in something that’s more permanent,” Voisard said.

The naming privileges are usually given to the third-graders because they study bald eagles in school, but last year was a bit of an exception. The fourth- and fifth -grade classes were invited to help select names because Jackie and Shadow didn’t have chicks in 2023 and 2024, when the students would've been in third-grade.

"We want to make sure we're doing it the way that [Steers] wanted to do it, and those kids live for being able to do this,” Voisard said. “It's a right of passage.”

Friends of Big Bear Valley is expected to launch a naming contest where the public can submit ideas for this season’s eaglets, and the details will be announced online. A random list of names will be pulled from the submissions and shared with Big Bear third-grade students for the final vote.

Chick 1 and Chick 2 will then be officially named based on the results of the students’ ballots.