The Brief

A bill that would make it easier for Californians to sue immigration agents and other federal officials for civil rights violations sailed through the state Senate on Tuesday.

Senate Bill 747, dubbed the No Kings Act, would create a first-in-the-nation legal pathway for residents to seek financial damages in state court for excessive force, false arrest and other violations of constitutional rights committed by federal officers.

The bill was written by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. If state or local law enforcement officers had shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two people recently killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, they could be held financially liable, he said.

“But under current law, it’s almost impossible to file that same lawsuit against a federal agent who does the same thing,” Wiener said. “If the federal government won’t hold these agents accountable for violating the Constitution, we will.”

The measure passed the state Senate on a 30-10 party-line vote, with Republicans arguing the bill could expose local police to more lawsuits.

Tuesday’s vote is the latest move by Democrats in the state Legislature to create a bulwark against the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown.

Last year, lawmakers set aside $25 million for legal nonprofits to defend residents facing detention or deportation. They also approved a bill, written by Wiener, to prohibit local and federal law enforcement officers from wearing masks on duty — which is currently facing a legal challenge from the Trump administration.

SB 747’s supporters said it would give Californians a chance to hold federal officials accountable in a way that can be difficult under current law.

Border patrol agents march to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on Aug. 14, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. California prosecutors are pushing back on claims from the federal government that ICE agents have immunity from prosecution, vowing to investigate federal agents who break the law.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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“Today we are deliberating an issue to try to solve and also remedy the fear that folks are living with,” said Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara. “In combination with the fact that we have not seen due process.”

Wiener argued that existing law makes it difficult for victims to receive damages in federal court. For example, the Federal Tort Claims Act protects the government from liability arising from decisions made by individual officers and requires plaintiffs to first file an administrative claim.

Supporters of SB 747 include the Prosecutors Alliance, a coalition of progressive district attorneys, and Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, which advocates for immigrants in California’s Inland Empire.

The bill is opposed by organizations representing California police officers, sheriffs and Highway Patrol officers.

They argued the change will undercut an existing state law, known as the Bane Act, which requires Californians who sue law enforcement officials to show that a civil rights violation was accomplished through “threats, intimidation, or coercion.”

“The question before you is not whether accountability should exist, but what creating a second, overlapping state system actually adds — other than more litigation and more risk for those on the front lines,” said Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, R-Santa Clarita.

During debate on the Senate floor, Wiener said local police officers and sheriffs can already be sued under federal law for violating constitutional rights.

“The liability that local and state police officers face will be the same after this is signed into law as before,” Wiener said. “It doesn’t change that.”

Senate Bill 747 now heads to the state Assembly.

In an analysis of SB 747, staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote, “the bill is very likely to be challenged by the federal government if signed into law.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Below 40-degree temperatures didn’t stop a running crew of women from gathering before sunrise in Lincoln Heights on one of L.A.’s coldest mornings this year. 

Bundled up in beanies and gloves, they warmed up by stretching their arms and legs before setting off into residential streets. They logged three miles in just over 30 minutes.

But this isn’t your regular run club.

As they run through El Sereno, Cypress Park, Highland Park and Lincoln Heights, they scan intersections for suspicious or unmarked vehicles. They slow down near bus stops with early risers on their way to work. They greet street vendors selling tamales.

They’re the N.E.L.A Patrol Runners, and they’re looking for immigration agents.

The group formed in February, amid heightened anxiety in Northeast L.A., where federal agents have taken day laborers at the Cypress Park Home Depot and detained a food vendor in Highland Park as recently as last month. In neighborhoods with high immigrant populations, founder Claudia Yanez said she saw a need for neighbors to look out for each other in real time. 

The idea came to 30-year-old Yanez while on a recent run in her El Sereno neighborhood, when she found herself “unconsciously patrolling.”

“If you live in areas targeted [by ICE], you’re already looking out,” Yanez said.

While groups across Los Angeles, including Unión del Barrio, the Harbor Area Peace Patrols in Terminal Island, and the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network, conduct rapid response efforts, Yanez said their patrol runs are rooted specifically in Northeast L.A.. 

Their mission, she said, is “to defend from ICE terrorism.”

The N.E.L.A Patrol Runners stretch on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, before beginning their run toward the Home Depot in Cypress Park.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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They start at 6 a.m. and typically run two to three miles at an 11- to 12-minute mile pace, allowing them to stop, investigate and document any vehicles that could be linked to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If they spot anything suspicious, they would quickly call Unión del Barrio.

The goal is not to physically interfere, but to document and alert neighbors of ICE activity nearby. 

“As a runner, you kind of already have eyes out,” said Yanez, who recently attended a patrol training with the Community Self-Defense Coalition.

“You’re not in a car, so you’re able to see things a little more clearly, closely and slower.”

As Yanez recruits for more runners, a pinned post on the group’s Instagram reads: “Do you like running and hate ICE? Join N.E.L.A. Patrol Runners.”

So far, the group is made up of a small but consistent set of runners — all women.

“I need men to show up,” Yanez said. 

With a handful of runners, “we’re also vulnerable,” she said. “When it’s a big group of people, especially if we’re actively patrolling, we need numbers so it could feel safer.”

To Yanez, this work is a shared responsibility. “I feel like we all have a part to play right now,” she said.

The NELA Patrol Runners jog on Daly Street in Lincoln Heights.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Ultimately, Yanez hopes their efforts do more than monitor immigration agents. She hopes to also build community and reassurance. “The more we do it, the more we get to know our neighbors,” she said. She wants vendors and others to find comfort knowing: “They’re looking out for us.”

The N.E.L.A Patrol Runners drew inspiration from the Huntington Park Run Club, a group that began tracking and verifying ICE activity after agents in early June raided the Home Depot on Slauson Avenue and State Street. 

“We’ve always responded to the needs of the community,” said Iris Delgado, 34, founder of the Huntington Park Run Club. “That’s what people have known about us.”

Since its founding in 2024, the run club has advocated for pedestrian safety after a relative of a run club member was hit by a vehicle; they’ve also discussed the role of men in keeping each other safe after one of their runners was sexually harassed at a local park. 

“When the raids happened in June, it was like, ‘OK, this is another safety component,” Delgado said.

The run club morphed into providing community self-defense tactics. 

Members of the run club trained with the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network to learn how to monitor ICE activity as people began sending footage of reported immigration raids to their Instagram account. They raised and distributed money for local day laborers and street vendors, and helped establish a community defense center at the nearby Home Depot.

Their efforts inspired the creation of the Southeast Los Angeles Rapid Response Network.

For Delgado, running in your neighborhood is a source of pride and joy. “No matter what’s happening, we’re still outside,” she said.

“The role of a person who runs, who’s able-bodied, is to be aware of why other people in your community don’t feel safe running … and try to make it a little bit safer for them,” Delgado said. 

“When the N.E.L.A. Patrol runners first started, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah,’” Delgado said. “When people take it as their responsibility to look out for each other, that’s what makes the community safer.”

A N.E.L.A. Patrol Runners sign can be seen on the window of a coffee shop in Highland Park.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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In Cypress Park, the N.E.L.A. Patrol runners last Friday jogged toward the Home Depot on Figueroa, where last fall a toddler was among six people taken in an immigration raid.

“Buenos dias, chicas,” a tamalera said, greeting them.

“Bien despiertas,” a passerby said. 

The runners reached the Home Depot parking lot, slowed down and walked closely toward parked trucks to ensure the vehicles were not the kind typically used by ICE. 

They determined the scene was clear and ran back to complete their patrol. Another quiet morning – for now.

ICE has released Cambodian Genocide survivor Sithy Yi from immigration detention following an order by a federal judge.

Yi, who fled the genocide and came to the U.S. with her family in 1981, was detained by ICE at a routine immigration check-in in Santa Ana on Jan. 8 and held at the Adelanto Detention Facility for almost two months.

In response to a lawsuit arguing that she was being held unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela issued an order Friday requiring ICE to “immediately release” Yi. The order also prevents the agency from deporting Yi without providing an opportunity to be heard by a neutral arbiter and bans ICE from transferring her outside the court’s jurisdiction.

The ruling says the government did not oppose Yi’s request for the court to order her released. Her attorney had alleged ICE failed to follow procedural requirements such as showing she violated any conditions of her release or proving that she would likely be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Reunited with her family

Yi was released Monday and has returned to her family, according to her attorney. Yi’s family includes her mother and two sisters she helped to survive starvation and mass killings at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia before they came to the U.S. as refugees.

Retaliation allegations against detention center staff

Yi’s attorney says that in addition to the court’s findings, she believes her client’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment was violated while detained at Adelanto.

“ She was retaliated against by security and medical personnel because she had been communicating with her family, and through her family with me. And we've been reporting about these conditions to Sen. [Adam] Schiff, as well as other members of Congress. And somehow word got back and she was retaliated against,” her attorney Kim Luu-Ng told LAist’s AirTalk on Tuesday.

“She was verbally abused, but she was also punished. She was not allowed to use the bathroom. She was not allowed to shower,” Luu-Ng continued.

“It is absolutely freezing in the detention center, but they don't care. She said to me that she has to wrap herself in blankets, but they're still freezing.”

Yi and other detainees were regularly getting sick from spoiled food served at the facility.

“These are civil detainees. These are not criminal detainees. And there are laws in this country that are supposed to protect against this type of punitive and cruel treatment of detainees,” Luu-Ng added.

She said that in many ways, she feels “criminal detainees have even more rights than civil detainees. And so this is a real crisis.”

ICE has not responded to a request for comment.

Why Yi was released

Luu-Ng has represented Yi since her immigration case began in 2013. Yi was first brought to immigration court after a drug conviction her family says stemmed from untreated mental health issues from being tortured as a child and prolonged exposure to abuse into adulthood.

Her immigration case ended in 2016, with a judge ruling to withhold an order of removal due to concerns she would be tortured if she were deported to Cambodia.

Yi also applied for a U visa — a type of visa providing temporary immigration status to crime victims who have cooperated with law enforcement — in 2022. That visa application is still pending.

Judge Valenzuela explained her reasoning for the order, writing in the document that ICE did not oppose a motion by Yi’s lawyer requesting she be released. Luu-Ng claimed in the motion that ICE detained her client without following required steps, such as showing she violated any conditions of her release or proving that she would likely be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Valenzuela also pointed to another case against ICE where she granted an order for Ramy Hakim to be released based on similar circumstances Jan. 22. Hakim was detained at a regular immigration check-in Dec. 19 despite receiving protections in 2004 against being deported to Egypt where he would likely be tortured. He was held at the same Adelanto facility as Yi.

ICE has not responded to LAist’s request for comment on Friday’s court order. In an emailed statement on Jan. 29, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Yi was ordered to be removed from the country in 2016 following a drug conviction and had “received full due process.”

Yi’s attorney says ICE kept her detained through the weekend despite the judge ordering her to be released immediately.

 ”ICE doesn't work on the weekends,” Luu-Ng said. “Any minute that my client was detained beyond the time that the order was issued was an unconstitutional detention.”

ICE spokespeople have not responded to a request for comment about this allegation.

Reza Arzanian has only been able to get in touch with his parents in Iran once since the U.S. and Israel began bombing the country over the weekend. Communication into the country is nearly impossible — he has to rely on them contacting him.

The Los Angeles resident isn’t yet sure how to think about the evolving attack on the country of 90 million people, where he lived until he was 25. Even when news came Saturday that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, Arzanian was unmoved.

“ I wasn't happy or I wasn't sad,” he said. “All I could think of was the last time I spoke with my mom and her voice was shaking and she was telling me her jaw was shaking because she was so scared.”

This is the reality for so many Southern Californians with ties to the Middle East. In the last few years, there has been a relentless barrage of news about tragedy and bloodshed: Iran’s Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement in 2022; Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed about 1,200 people and Israel’s subsequent military assault on Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria; recent protests in Iran over economic conditions that the regime violently put down; and other headlines from Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The unrelenting stories of destruction and tragedy from the region — which are inescapable on the news, social media and in group text message threads — are taking a toll.

Marwa Azab, a mental health expert and a professor at Cal State Long Beach, said people can go from a state of “hyperarousal” — or increased anxiety — in their nervous systems to “being disconnected from the body, feeling emotional numbness.”

 ”The misinformation, inciting and inflaming media has made our identity fragments fight each other, like parts of us are fighting each other, really making it very difficult, if not impossible, at this present moment to feel whole,” she said.  ”This numbness, this detachment from the body where the mind and body becomes separate, makes us further removed from who we are, from our identity, and gives us a sense of being fragmented.”

Arzanian, who is Iranian American, can relate.

“ It feels hard to exist in my body,” he said Monday. “Like yesterday, I didn't know what to do with myself. I cannot distract myself.”

Rachel Sumekh, an Iranian Jewish economic justice activist, told LAist she feels as though she is holding her breath, struggling to exhale.

“We have no idea what will happen. We pray that what happens next will be something that's good, will be something that brings freedom to the people of Iran,” she said.

And as a U.S. citizen with Iranian roots who is Jewish and has ties to Israel, Sumekh called the current moment “nuts.”

But her identity has also been politicized since she could remember.

“ I have avoided telling people I'm Jewish at times since Oct. 7, simply because I feel like then I need to qualify that I believe in human rights and whatever my international positions are,” she said.

But she added that this multifaceted identity has also helped her cope and navigate life in America, “designing and developing life here in America in a way that feels future-oriented as opposed to saddled with what the heaviness of those identities comes with.”

Sumekh has never set foot in Iran. Her father left before the Iranian Revolution, and her mother escaped a few years after the Revolution on the back of a camel. Israel was where her family escaped to as refugees when they left Iran. And her identity shows up in how she interacts with people and moves through life. Her activism, including organizing around ending campus hunger, she said, is rooted in Persian principles of hospitality, warmth and openness.

One way she copes with the heaviness of it all, she said, is deleting social media.

Arzanian said he has been avoiding social media, too. Instead, he relies on a Telegram channel for news updates. To get away from the news, he tries to stay active, do breath work and write in his journal.

“I  try to write before doing anything, and usually my writing is a mixture of how I'm feeling and prayers,” he said.

Shared reality 

Sandy Hamideh knows how Sumekh and Arzanian are feeling.

The last few years have left the Palestinian American who lives in Rowland Heights “overwhelmed.”

Her young children remind her of the children dying in Gaza, and as she prepares their food and helps them with homework, she’s reminded of the people back home.

“ I'm just stuck in this cycle, the same just recurring cycle,” Hamideh said. “We think it's going to get better, and here we are two and a half years later and still, stuck and confused and scared.”

Israel’s war on Gaza has changed her, she said. She's become a more grateful person, not overlooking the little luxuries. And, she said, she has been heartened by the outpouring of support she's seen for Palestinians. Before, Hamideh said, she would quickly brush past the fact that she was Palestinian.

“ Now, I'm more proud about it because people are out there like learning and loving your culture, so that's really nice,” she said.

But there is also a sadness that permeates everything she does, Hamideh said.

 ”The things I would get excited for before, now I look at it differently,” she said. “People across the world don't have these resources or have these moments of good times or these chances to go out and explore and just the freedom.”

Sumekh also identified with recent victims of violence. She said the news of Iranian protesters being killed earlier in the year as they called for regime change affected her more than the recent strikes.

“ Those were Iranians who could have been me there fighting for freedom,” Sumekh said. “What's happening now is just a bunch of strong men, politicians bombing each other.”

Survivor’s guilt 

Marwa Azab, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Cal State Long Beach’s Azab calls this survivor’s guilt “a beautiful thing.”

 ”It means that we are still human … that we have morality,” she said.

She cautioned that people should not let that fester into feeling responsible for the destruction and tragedy.

Instead, Azab advised, people should turn any guilt they feel into values. Remind yourself that feelings of guilt mean you value human life and relationships.

For people with ties to the Middle East, the images can be retraumatizing, she said. The danger that some people fled has not ended, so they keep reliving that trauma over and over again.

And, Azab said, the images of destruction can be more triggering for people with ties to the region because they share aspects of their identity.

How to prioritize conversation 

Andrea Hodos, associate director of NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change, understands why people feel overwhelmed.

“ I'm worried about Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel. I'm worried about Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I'm worried about people in Saudi Arabia. I'm worried about people in UAE and Lebanon and all of these places. Jordan was hit because there are U.S. bases there and there are so many civilians who are impacted by Iranian leadership,” she said.

Her advice to people is to have deep conversations — and to do more listening than talking.

Even if you go into a conversation really wanting to share your perspective, she said, first be prepared to listen. You may find openings in someone else’s perspective and the other side will be open to hearing your side.