The Brief

Lý Diệu Anh was just 6 when she learned of the Vietnam War.

Her parents did their best at the time to explain how her grandfather, who had just migrated to the U.S., was imprisoned in a concentration camp, but it mostly went over her head.

Now, as a 16-year-old, she’s part of the Vietnamese Student Association at her high school in Garden Grove and eager to preserve the culture and history of Vietnam. And for her, that includes keeping the memory of Black April alive.

Ly-Dieu Anh, left, pictured with singer Viet Khang and teacher Jenny Tran.

(

Courtesy Ly-Dieu Anh

)

Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured the city of Saigon, the capital of then-South Vietnam, ending the war and prompting an exodus of South Vietnamese refugees, including Anh’s parents, to the U.S. It has come to be known as Black April. Many of the refugees eventually settled in Orange County’s Little Saigon, which is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam.

Black April can mean different things to different people, especially depending on the generation. Anh said she’ll be taking part in a special ceremony at her school Wednesday to tie yellow ribbons on a replica model of the USS Midway. The yellow ribbons symbolize the soldiers who died in the war, including Americans.

 ”We'll have them [the students] write messages to their family members that were lost,” Anh said. “There were at least 2 million people who fled Vietnam, and at least half of them perished in the seas.”

Black April, she said, is a big part of the Vietnamese diaspora’s identity.

“In my family, we talk about it all the time,” she said. “A lot of people in my family worked for the U.S. or they worked in the Southern Vietnamese government. So once Saigon fell ... a lot of their houses and their families were subject to investigations, torture — we had to burn everything in our houses,” she said.

If they don't speak about it, Anh added, what transpired is at risk of being forgotten.

“It's something that we talk about all the time just to maintain it and kind of nurture it,” she said.

Unspoken but not forgotten

Eric Ngo’s family didn’t really discuss that fateful day in Saigon. The now 24-year-old, who serves as president of Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California, said he learned more about those events in high school. At his home, his grandfather would share relics and stories of the war, but never really delved into the fall of Saigon.

“ I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my family, who suffered through months in refugee camps, crazy amount of days and weeks on a boat on their way to Thailand,” he said. “These stories and these experiences that my family talk to me about growing up are things that I used to continue to push myself to do better as a future physical therapist and a person who's in healthcare.”

The stories of how his family and others reached the U.S., he added, inspires him to achieve the American Dream.

Ngo said he’ll commemorate Black April at the city of Westminster’s annual event at Sid Goldstein Freedom Park.

A story that is more than the war 

Tracy La, co-founder and executive director at VietRISE, grew up in San Diego confused — her grandfather, who served in the South Vietnamese military, didn’t want to go back to Vietnam, while her parents raised her to be proud of her Vietnamese culture.

“ We were taught our culture, we were taught about our celebrations, holidays, we were pushed to remember to speak Vietnamese, follow certain traditions at home in the household, certain gender expectations,” she said.

Tracy La in Vietnam.

(

Courtesy Tracy La

)

Then, when she moved to Orange County after high school, she started to see her culture in a negative light. She began to see gender expectations as part of the culture. Politicians, she said, weaponized the community’s stories for political gain. And she would watch other Vietnamese people exploit her parents.

A class in college shifted her perspective. It led to her interviewing her father to learn about his trauma — after the Vietnam War, he was drafted to serve in a proxy war in Cambodia before ending up in a Thai refugee camp. She later canvassed during an election cycle, meeting people in the community and learning their stories, which eventually led to her creating VietRISE in 2018.

Black April, or as La calls it, Reunification Day, is an opportunity for intimate conversations with her team about how they can honor the struggles of their parents and grandparents, while also honoring their culture in their own, unique way, she said.

Tracy La with her family in Vietnam.

(

Courtesy Tracy La

)

In December, La visited Vietnam for the first time with her parents, who were excited to have the family visit their homeland.

 ”There were times where I saw a look in my mom's eyes I'd never seen before, but it just made me empathize with her more and have a better understanding of why she is the way she's today,” she said.

The Los Angeles World Cup host committee has quietly posted its guidance on human rights after months of speculation over where the plan was and when it would be published.

Advocates had pushed the committee, an arm of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission, to produce its plan. But now that it's out, they're not satisfied with what they're seeing.

The human rights guidance is required by FIFA and outlined on the host committee's website. It includes a list of online resources including where to file complaints with various local and state level agencies and a summary of local, state and federal laws protecting human and civil rights. The committee is also touting a partnership with L.A. County in which people can call 211 to report a concern during the tournament.

"Los Angeles is weeks away from hosting one of the largest sporting events in the world, and yet what has been posted is not a plan,” Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti‑Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, said in a statement. “It is a list of laws and hotline numbers."

The human rights document also skirts fears around ICE and its potential presence at the tournament and surrounding celebrations. Todd Lyons, the agency's head, said earlier this year that ICE's investigatory branch will play a key role in security for the tournament.

But ICE and immigration enforcement aren't mentioned on the host committee's web page on human rights or in its outline of its approach to human rights. "Immigration status" only gets a mention in the list of existing anti-discrimination laws.

"It certainly could have been much stronger," Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, said of the plan. She added that her organization participated in a roundtable on the plan, and she was disappointed ICE and recent immigration sweeps weren't mentioned in the resulting document.

"In order for all of this to happen, immigrant workers are part of it," she said of the World Cup. "Your hotel workers, your service workers, stadium workers, drivers." 

LAist reached out to spokespeople for the host committee for comment via email, phone and text, but did not hear back in time for publication. FIFA's press team also did not respond to an email from LAist.

According to the host committee's website, the human rights plan is the result of coordination with the city and county of Los Angeles, the city of Inglewood, and 14 roundtable discussions held in the fall of 2025.

"As a non-profit organization, the Host Committee’s role is primarily and necessarily focused on aligning and collaborating with governmental and non-governmental organizations," the document sums up the committee's approach.

The plan also promises more actions, including "Know Your Rights" training for L.A. residents and visitors and "Know Your Responsibilities" training for businesses and vendors. The committee also says it will develop a "rapid response" strategy to respond to potential problems at the tournament.

Available details on those plans were scant. And with the tournament just 30 days away, labor unions and community groups are continuing to voice concerns about potential ICE presence at SoFi Stadium and other potential consequences of the tournament coming to town.

The mayor of Arcadia has agreed to plead guilty to a charge she acted as an agent for China, federal prosecutors announced Monday. She has resigned from her position with the city.

Eileen Wang, 58, faces one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison.

What we know about the criminal case

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wang and Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills worked at the direction of the Chinese government and with individuals based in the U.S. to promote pro-People’s Republic of China propaganda in the United States. Those actions occurred between 2020 and 2022, prosecutors said.

According to federal prosecutors, Wang and Sun operated a website — known as U.S. News Center — billed as a news source for the local Chinese American community in Los Angeles County. They posted content on the site, described as "pre-written articles," based on directives from Chinese government officials.

Sun, 65, pleaded guilty in October 2025 in federal court to acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. He is serving a four-year federal prison sentence.

Prosecutors also said Wang communicated with John Chen, whom they described as “a high-level member of the [Chinese government] intelligence apparatus,” in November 2021, and asked him to post an article from her website.

In a group chat, Wang referenced the article and wrote: “This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Chen pleaded guilty in New York to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China and conspiracy to bribe a public official. In 2024, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison.

What's next

Wang, who was elected to the City Council in November 2022, was expected to make her first appearance in U.S. District Court Monday afternoon.

Citing a plea agreement, prosecutors said she's expected to enter the guilty plea within the next few weeks.

Arcadia's mayor is selected from the elected council members. A post on the city's website announced that Wang had resigned her position as of Monday and that a new mayor would be picked from the remaining council members at the next meeting.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave itself more time to consider a national ban on telemedicine access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Justice Samuel Alito extended an earlier order he issued by three more days, so rules for prescribing mifepristone online or through the mail remain in effect through Thursday at a minimum.

The case at issue

The tumult over the future of telemedicine access to mifipristone started on May 1 with a ruling from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling re-instituted prescribing rules from before the pandemic that required patients to receive mifepristone in person in a doctor's office or clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration determined that the rule was medically unnecessary in 2021. The state of Louisiana sued last fall, arguing that telemedicine access undermines the state's abortion ban.

What is telemedicine abortion?

The telemedicine abortion process starts with a patient connecting with a healthcare provider on the phone or online. If the patient is eligible, that provider can prescribe two medications — mifepristone and another pill called misoprostol. Patients can pick up the medicine at a local pharmacy, or providers can mail the drugs to a patient's home.

That access is a big part of the reason why the number of abortions nationally has actually increased since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Now, most abortions in the U.S. use this combination of medications, and one quarter happen via telemedicine.

After the 5th Circuit ruling, some providers said they would continue offering telemedicine access to abortion medication using a different protocol that involves higher doses of misoprostol and no mifepristone.

Researchers say that method is just as safe and effective, but tends to cause more pain for patients and more side effects, like nausea and diarrhea. Misoprostol has other medical uses, such as treating gastric ulcers and hemorrhage, and has been on the market longer than mifepristone. It is likely to remain fully accessible, even if mifepristone is restricted.

Since the FDA's prescribing rules for medications apply to the whole country, a change to the rules about how mifepristone can be accessed has national impact. That means it affects states with constitutionally-protected access to abortion, states with criminal bans, like Louisiana, and all states in between.

States' rights

Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states submitted an amicus brief in this case, writing that the appeals court decision put the policy choices of states with bans above the choices of states "that have made the different but equally sovereign determinations to promote access to abortion care."

There are also stakes related to the power of FDA and other expert agencies to set rules. While the Trump administration's FDA did not respond to the Supreme Court's request for briefs, a group of former leaders of the agency, who served under mainly Democratic and some Republican presidents, wrote about this in an amicus brief.

They defended the FDA's process in approving the medication and modifying the rules for prescribing it, and say the appeals court decision "would upend FDA's gold-standard, science-based drug approval system."

Copyright 2026 NPR