The Brief

The last thing David Ramirez remembers, he was protesting peacefully at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in the early hours of May 2, 2024.

Then, he said everything seemed to move in slow motion, and there was “nothing but ringing” in his ear.

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After the George Floyd protests of 2020, California took steps to reign in violent policing of protests by passing laws restricting how law enforcement uses less-lethal weapons, like tasers and rubber bullets. But high profile protests in 2024 and 2025 – including this summer’s protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles – have revealed major flaws in those laws. LAist Senior Editor Jared Bennett joins us to talk about an investigation around these flaws and what they mean for people exercising their right to free speech.

Why California's protest law is flawed and the consequences to protesters

After the George Floyd protests of 2020, California took steps to reign in violent policing of protests by passing laws restricting how law enforcement uses less-lethal weapons, like tasers and rubber bullets. But high profile protests in 2024 and 2025 – including this summer’s protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles – have revealed major flaws in those laws. LAist Senior Editor Jared Bennett joins us to talk about an investigation around these flaws and what they mean for people exercising their right to free speech.

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He’d just been shot in the head with a less-lethal projectile by law enforcement officers while they cleared the encampment. Ramirez described his experience at a news conference this past May.

“My first instinct was to remove the foreign object, but it triggered profuse bleeding,” he said while standing in front of a poster bearing the image of his wound.

In 2021, California lawmakers passed a law that was supposed to prevent injuries like the one Ramirez sustained. The law, Assembly Bill 48, forbids law enforcement from targeting peaceful protesters with chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles like the 40mm kinetic energy projectiles that injured Ramirez. Officers also aren’t supposed to aim less-lethal projectiles at the head.

Ramirez and three other people suing law enforcement over the violent response to the 2024 campus protests say officers with the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol broke state law that day.

The law requires that agencies report on their use of less-lethal weapons and resulting injuries. More than a year later, Ramirez still doesn’t know who fired the projectile that hit him in the head, and neither agency has reported injuring any protesters while clearing the encampment.

Four years after California lawmakers tried to rein in violent policing at protests, Ramirez’s lawsuit and more recent protests against federal immigration raids have put law enforcement’s actions under a microscope and revealed major gaps in enforcement of California’s existing protest laws.

LAist found that hundreds of agencies do not appear to document the use of less-lethal weapons, as required by law. The extent of that documentation varies from agency to agency, making it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable when something goes wrong.

While the California Department of Justice is responsible for posting all such reports on a public website, the agency says it's not responsible for making agencies write the reports or evaluating what’s in them. Compliance with the law is left entirely up to the agencies — some of which told LAist they don’t have staffing or capacity to manage.

Cristina Garcia, a former state Assembly member from Bell Gardens and primary sponsor of Assembly Bill 48, said she and other lawmakers passed the law to protect the rights of Californians, and said it should be up to the DOJ to make sure that’s happening.

“Is this [law] being implemented properly, are we meeting expectations, are we breaking promises? That should be asked of the DOJ,” she said. “If we don’t have enforcement, do we really have a law?”

What the law says

California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 48 after seeing the police response to protests in the summer of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.

Still from LAPD body camera footage, showing officer shooting Benjamin Montemayor with a projectile during the protests of 2020.

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Under AB 48, officers are only allowed to deploy crowd control tools — including chemical agents or less-lethal projectiles — in response to violence, physical threats or to an “objectively dangerous and unlawful situation.”

The law forbids authorities from aiming at protesters' heads, neck or vital organs, or firing indiscriminately into a crowd.

The same year AB 48 became law in 2021, U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall issued a court order placing similar restrictions on the LAPD, specifically.

Civil rights lawyers told LAist in June that the LAPD and other agencies responding to protests that month against federal immigration enforcement appear to have violated this law and the court order. They’ve secured a separate court order forbidding the LAPD from targeting journalists and filed several lawsuits on behalf of protesters.

The law gives agencies 60 days to publish reports about their use of force at protests. The LAPD missed this deadline to report on their response to the protests in June on Aug. 5.

LAPD has not responded to repeated questions about the delayed report.

The LAPD’s website does include reports on previous protests. And the department is among just 32 out of the 624 law enforcement agencies in California that have sent crowd control reports to the California Department of Justice.

LAist reviewed news reports and police documents and found several instances where agencies used less-lethal weapons during protests, yet no crowd control records were posted online as required by state law.

In one instance, an LAPD officer allegedly shot a man in the jaw with a less-lethal projectile on June 8. While LAPD has started conducting an internal investigation into the incident, a report has yet to be generated. It’s been 93 days since the man was shot.

San Francisco police officers fired pepperballs, a form of less-lethal projectile with a chemical irritant, while responding to anti-immigration enforcement protests on June 8, according to news reports. The agency does not appear to file AB 48 reports with the California Department of Justice, and LAist has been unable to locate any such reports on the agency’s website.

The San Francisco Police Department has not yet responded to a request for comment.

In another, UC Riverside PD documented using a less-lethal weapon during a joint response during UC Berkeley’s pro-Palestinian protests in a separate report, yet has not created an AB 48 report for that incident.

UC Riverside Police Lt. Jason Day said his small department didn’t have the capacity to compile the reports.

“A lot of times things are just going to have to get set aside,” he told LAist.

LAPD creates a perimeter to move back anti-ICE protesters on San Pedro Street on June 9, 2025.

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Documenting injuries

Civil rights attorneys and experts told LAist that monitoring the use of chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles at protests is important because, despite their name, these weapons are dangerous.

“They absolutely are lethal weapons. They’ve killed people, they've permanently disabled people, caused really significant and substantial injuries to people,” said Rebecca Brown, an attorney who is representing Ramirez and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against agencies for allegedly misusing less-lethal weapons. “These should not be brought to a protest in the first place.”

Dozens of injuries have been documented by news organizations, on social media and in lawsuits from the May 2 protest where Ramirez was injured.

The LAPD and CHP both filed reports about their use of force at the UCLA protest, but neither documented any injuries as a result of less-lethal weapons.

Carlena Orosco, an assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said the nature of protest response, where multiple agencies often respond to incidents together, makes it difficult to document injuries.

“There are going to be data limitations when it comes to not only identifying categories of injuries, but also ensuring that they are reported comprehensively and accurately… especially when we think of a crowd situation,” she said.

For Brown, law enforcement’s failure to fully document the injuries they cause shows a lack of enforcement.

During the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Brown said “CHP and LAPD did not put any effort into identifying who they hurt, identifying what their injuries were, what kind of treatment they needed.” Without an enforcement mechanism making sure they report injuries, she said law enforcement agencies are “only going to report on that when they have to.”

LAPD has not responded to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the CHP said the agency could not comment due to pending litigation.

Who’s responsible?

Garcia, the former Assemblymember and lead sponsor on Assembly Bill 48, said it should be up to the California Department of Justice to make sure agencies are reporting what they need to comply with the law.

The DOJ doesn’t see it that way. The law requires the department to compile and publish a list of AB 48 webpages from all law enforcement agencies. But according to the DOJ's spokesperson, Elissa Perez, the law doesn’t ask the agency to do anything else by way of enforcement.

“The bill [AB 48] does not include requirements for DOJ to review, audit, or enforce law enforcement agency requirements,” Perez wrote to LAist.

The law also does not outline repercussions for non-compliant agencies.

According to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which sets selection and training standards for California law enforcement, agencies are responsible for complying with the law, but there’s no repercussions if they don’t.

“The way the law is written, there is no stated enforcement mechanism,” Meagan Poulos with the commission wrote to LAist in an email. “The individual agencies are responsible.”

Orosco of Cal State LA said while it’s crucial to ensure law enforcement agencies follow the law, it would be difficult for the DOJ to check what is written in the reports filed by individual departments.

“I don't know how they would go about reviewing every department's information,” she said.

Without proactive enforcement of the law, LAist found there are few options for citizens to hold agencies accountable for their use of weapons at protests.

Officers who violate internal department policy can be punished, but those investigations often take years.

Civil lawsuits can also take years and the financial burden ultimately falls to the taxpayer. Los Angeles has so far paid $20 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from the LAPD’s response to protests in 2020.

Garcia said lawsuits like those cost taxpayer dollars and threaten existing services for constituents, so city officials should be interested in making their police departments follow the law.

Five years after Assembly Bill 48 became law, Garcia says proper enforcement requires constant partnership between cities, police departments, the DOJ, the media and constituents.

“Compliance and accountability is a constant, ongoing situation,” she said. “It's never a one-and-done. It's a partnership.”

Watchdog Editor Jared Bennett contributed to this report.

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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“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.”

Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter on Monday backed a proposed fan boycott of World Cup matches in the United States because of the conduct of President Donald Trump and his administration at home and abroad.

Blatter was the latest international soccer figure to call into question the suitability of the United States as a host country. He called for the boycott in a post on X that supported Mark Pieth's comments in an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Der Bund.

Pieth, a Swiss attorney specializing in white-collar crime and an anti-corruption expert, chaired the Independent Governance Committee's oversight of FIFA reform a decade ago. Blatter was president of the world's governing body for soccer from 1998-2015; he resigned amid an investigation into corruption.

In his interview with Der Bund, Pieth said, "If we consider everything we've discussed, there's only one piece of advice for fans: Stay away from the USA! You'll see it better on TV anyway. And upon arrival, fans should expect that if they don't please the officials, they'll be put straight on the next flight home. If they're lucky."

In his X post, Blatter quoted Pieth and added, "I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup."

The United States is co-hosting the World Cup with Canada and Mexico from June 11-July 19.

The international soccer community's concerns about the United States stem from Trump's expansionist posture on Greenland, and travel bans and aggressive tactics in dealing with migrants and immigration enforcement protesters in American cities, particularly Minneapolis.

Oke Göttlich, one of the vice presidents of the German soccer federation, told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper in an interview on Friday that the time had come to seriously consider boycotting the World Cup.

Travel plans for fans from two of the top soccer countries in Africa were thrown into disarray in December, when the Trump administration announced an expanded ban that would effectively bar people from Senegal and Ivory Coast following their teams unless they already have visas. Trump cited "screening and vetting deficiencies" as the main reason for the suspensions.

Fans from Iran and Haiti, two other countries that have qualified for the World Cup, will be barred from entering the United States as well; they were included in the first iteration of the travel ban announced by the Trump administration.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The Central Library in downtown Los Angeles hits a big milestone this year: It’s turning 100 years old.

The century-old landmark has been through a lot of changes since opening, but how we got this iconic library in the first place is a saga in its own right.

A scrappy start

To understand what it took to get here, we’ll go back to 1872. Back then, the city of L.A. only had about 6,000 residents. Dirt roads were everywhere and agriculture was king.

The region was still fresh off the transition to American rule, and local leaders were just starting to dream up what the city could look like, especially in the downtown area.

There was no “LAPL” during this time — a group called the Los Angeles Library Association attended to local reading needs. John Szabo, current L.A. city librarian, says that early system was pretty bare bones.

“ It was a very small one room library with a handful of books,” he told host Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3’s AirTalk.

That was in the Downey Block building at Temple and Main streets, which is where the Federal Courthouse stands today. There were newspaper racks and shelves with about 750 books, while another space had checkers and chess — because what more do you need to fuel young minds?

The Downey Block building circa 1897.

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The city needed a lot more because of rapid growth, but money was an issue. To help meet the demand, the association became an official city department in 1878. That allowed local officials to fund their new “Los Angeles Public Library.”

Over the years, LAPL would open satellite “reading rooms” and branch libraries. However, the main collection was expanding quickly. The books were essentially couch-surfing for years. They moved four times into different rented spaces, including into City Hall in 1889.

This was a temporary home that lasted for a couple of decades. Then, the effort to build a central library picked up steam. One of those was with a plan to put it in Pershing Square, but the project went awry. So the collection moved again — this time into a department store building (while it was still running), between women’s clothes and furniture, where it stayed for six years.

A new, innovative library

When Everett Perry, an energetic city librarian, took the helm in 1911, he lobbied for years for a central library to be created.

Finally, a decade later, voters passed a measure for a $2 million bond to pay for a new dedicated building. That would become the Central Library we have today. L.A. was a little late among large U.S. cities for getting a central library, but it finally opened in July 1926.

The Central Library's rotunda and ornate ceiling, which is designed to mirror the mosaic pyramid on the exterior roof.

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The building was designed by New York architect Bertram Goodhue with art deco and Egyptian influence, common motifs of the time.

It’s elaborately decorated with murals, mosaics and sculptures. For example, black marble sphinxes sit inside and a mosaic tile pyramid  with a handheld torch makes up the roof. Szabo says it was well received by Angelenos.

“ Of course I’m biased, but I think it’s the most beautiful library in the world,” Szabo said. “ [It was] a great sense of pride in a growing city, sort of putting L.A. on the map.”

Sithy Yi fled genocide in Cambodia and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1981. She was detained earlier this month at a regular immigration check-in in Santa Ana, and her lawyer, Kim Luu-Ng, says Yi is being held unlawfully at the Adelanto detention center.

Luu-Ng said Yi was ordered by an immigration court to be removed from the country in 2016, but her removal was withheld out of concerns she would be tortured if she returned to Cambodia.

After 10 years complying with ICE instructions and initiating a still-pending visa application, Luu-Ng claims that federal immigration officials detained Yi two weeks ago as a form of punishment and to instill fear in immigrant communities.

Yi is one of potentially hundreds of people with pending visa applications meant to protect victims of crime or human trafficking whose status has been abruptly put at risk by immigration policy changes ordered by the Trump administration, Luu-Ng and other immigration attorneys told LAist.

Yi cannot be deported back to Cambodia, her attorney said. Luu-Ng said immigration officials have not told her where Yi might be deported to and says her detention is unconstitutional and inhumane without a plan of where to send her. Luu-Ng has filed a petition in federal court arguing for Yi to be released from detention.  Federal officials have not yet responded in court.

”I think this case asks a very simple question,” Luu-Ng said. “Can the government jail someone when it has no real plan to deport them?

“The Constitution says no."

ICE has not responded to LAist’s request for comment on this story.

Escaping violence

Sithea San, Yi’s sister, remembers the day her family was forced to leave their home.

According to her recollection, the Khmer Rouge approached them at gunpoint April 17, 1975, saying they had to leave before American forces were expected to bomb their city, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge was a Communist regime that brutally tortured, murdered and starved more than a million Cambodians in the 1970s. A United Nations-assisted tribunal began investigations in 2007 and found surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The family left that day thinking they would be gone for only three days. Their horrific experience would last years, until they arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1981.

Sithea San recounted how Yi, the eldest sister who was just 9 years old when they left their home, used to steal food to keep her family alive in Cambodia.

After getting caught stealing by the Khmer Rouge several times, San said her sister was given a final warning: If she got caught again they would kill her entire family. They led Yi to a place where they said she, her mother and two sisters would all be buried.

Yi was subjected to forced labor and torture at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, which she later described to Luu-Ng in 2016 as she fought in immigration court to be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Yi still carries scars from where guards would burn her with cigarettes, Luu-Ng told LAist. She said Yi has other scars that lie deeper.

Safe from the Khmer Rouge, troubles continue in the US

San said her family came to the U.S. in 1981, sponsored by her uncle. They arrived in California with just $10.

Yi’s mother and sisters had all become U.S. citizens by 1990, San told LAist, but Yi’s path to legal residency was more complicated.

San said their family did not understand it at the time, but Yi suffered from PTSD. She began to have seizures after they escaped Cambodia, which often prevented her from going to school once they arrived in the U.S.

Yi was also bullied at school, leading her to drop out, her sister said.

Far from Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, she again became a victim of abuse. Yi fell into a cycle of domestic violence, Luu-Ng told LAist, and she was severely abused by multiple partners over the years.

In 2011, Yi was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to probation. The abuse she faced at home continued and after being so severely beaten by her partner that she could not walk, Luu-Ng said, Yi missed one of her probation appointments.

She said that probation violation led to about a year in state prison, and from there Yi was transferred to ICE custody for removal proceedings.

Protections for victims of torture

Luu-Ng began working under a United Nations grant to help survivors of torture in immigration proceedings in 2009, and first met Yi in 2013.

She had talked with survivors of torture camps in Germany, Poland, Afghanistan and many other countries, but the story of what Yi and her family went through still left her shocked.

“ I've spoken to a lot of survivors of torture,” Luu-Ng told LAist. “Sithy’s story impacted me very, very deeply.”

Luu-Ng took on her case and argued in immigration court that Yi fell under protections granted by the United Nations Convention Against Torture — commonly known as CAT — banning anyone from being deported to countries where they will most likely be tortured.

The judge presiding over a 2016 hearing agreed.

“ We literally walked out of court within 30 minutes,” Luu-Ng said, “even the government counsel acknowledged the grave humanitarian concerns with this case.”

LAist reached out to ICE and an attorney who represented the agency, but they did not comment on the case.

Luu-Ng said Yi is not eligible for asylum status because of her conviction, but she has never heard of anyone being deported after receiving CAT protection.

“ Individuals who receive CAT withholding typically are allowed to live out the rest of their lives in the United States with a work permit,” she told LAist.

Even so, Luu-Ng said Yi also applied for a U visa in 2022 to further protect her from being deported. U visas are intended to give temporary immigration status to crime victims who have cooperated with law enforcement. Luu-Ng said Yi did cooperate with law enforcement in a case against one of her abusers and should qualify for a U visa, but she said they can take eight to ten years to be granted in some cases. She is still waiting for a decision on whether Yi’s visa will be approved.

Jennifer Diep, San Croucher, Sithy Yi and Sithea San attend the book release for "Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back," by Katya Cengel. The family was featured in the book.

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A policy change puts Yi’s future at risk

The Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) and other immigrant rights organizations sued the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, in October of last year over new immigration enforcement policies on how immigration agents treat victims of abuse or human trafficking.

The group claims in court documents that the new policy “has allowed, for the first time in decades, the detention and removal of survivors of these violent crimes as a routine matter, without regard for the many protections Congress put in place for them.”

Erika Cervantes, a staff attorney for The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, is part of the legal team representing ICWC in the case. She told LAist that until early 2025 there was a presumption that victims who came forward to help law enforcement would be protected.

She said that U visas and T visas — another type of visa for victims of human trafficking — have strengthened law enforcement by allowing victims to be comfortable coming forward and telling police about their abuse without risk of being deported.

Then, in January, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the “total and efficient” enforcement of immigration laws. ICE shortly followed with a memo that removed previous requirements for agents to identify whether their targets are victims of crimes that might qualify them for protections against deportation.

Cervantes said the memo also cuts protections that had been in place for victims who are waiting for their U and T visas to be approved. Attorneys for ICE previously had been instructed to not seek deportation of U and T visa applicants unless there were “exceptional or exigent circumstances,” according to the new ICE memo, but Cervantes said the new memo removes the presumption that victims would be protected.

“ [The memo] essentially green lights targeting this vulnerable community who went out of their way to share their story, go through this visa process,” Cervantes said. “There’s an about face, and now they’re being put behind bars.”

Cervantes said the ICE memo has affected hundreds of people, and ICWC is asking a federal judge to set aside the policy changes.

“ We're trying to challenge the administration's attempt to criminalize victims,” she told LAist.

Detained by ICE

Yi’s detention on Jan. 8 came as a complete surprise.

According to her sister, Sithea San, she had helped the government when she came forward as a victim and always went to her monthly check-ins with ICE.

“ She complied with every single thing that the government asked her to do,” San told LAist.

In November, two months before her detention, Luu-Ng and San went with Yi for her check-in with ICE. Luu-Ng said they were concerned at that time that Yi could be detained because they saw reports of other people being taken from their families during check-ins.

After discussing Yi’s case with Luu-Ng, the immigration officials at the Santa Ana facility said she would need to start wearing an ankle monitor, but she was free to go home. Luu-Ng recalled one official telling her that as long as Yi didn’t tamper with the ankle monitor or violate any conditions of her electronic monitoring, ICE would not detain her.

“We went out and everyone was in tears, relieved,” Luu-Ng said.

Yi continued to check in, and Luu-Ng thought she would be fine because she was following ICE’s instructions. The next two months Yi went to her check-ins without a lawyer, but her sister still came along.

At her January check-in, San said they saw people crying in the waiting area. She said Yi approached them and tried to comfort them.

Then after waiting about an hour, ICE called Yi into a back room, alone.

Yi can’t read in English, San said, and sometimes she struggles to understand when people talk to her. San wanted to accompany her sister to be sure she understood any questions she might be asked.

Instead, she was stopped at the door.

“ And then I heard the sound . . . the handcuffs,” San said. “And that moment I feel like, am I dreaming? Is this real?”

San said she told the ICE agents that her sister had CAT protections and a pending U visa application, which she showed them. She said they told her it didn’t matter.

When San was later able to visit her sister in detention, she said Yi told her the ICE agents tried to coerce her to sign legal documents she couldn’t understand and threatened that things would get worse for her if she refused.

She said Yi didn’t sign the documents.

“So unfair”

Yi would not be in this situation under any other administration, said Mariko Khan, who is on the board of the nonprofit organization Cambodia Town, where she met Yi about 15 years ago.

“ Things would've been taken care of years ago and she certainly would not have had to be corralled at her check-in,” Khan said. “I mean, that's so unfair.”

Khan said Yi has been a consistent volunteer with Cambodia Town, which serves the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia itself.

Khan had heard about some of Yi’s background over the years, and she learned that Yi had first found counseling when she was in prison. Having a background as a mental health professional, Khan said she was amazed to see Yi’s improvement.

“ I think it shows a lot of character and integrity that she could, given all that she had suffered, actually get better,” Khan said.

Yi has also been a mainstay with the Cambodia Town Parade. Khan said Yi had led a group of up to 30 women in the parade’s “Stop the Hate” event for the past three years.

Sithea San said Yi planned on coming to her house on Jan. 8 to work on the choreography for this year’s parade after they went to check in with ICE.

Fear in local communities

Manju Kulkarni is the executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, and she says people being detained by masked agents in the streets and others being held at their immigration appointments reminds some in Southeast Asian communities of the governments their families once fled.

Federal agents have repeatedly detained people at scheduled immigration check-ins over recent months, including Eaton Fire survivor Masuma Khan, 60-year San Diego resident Kazem Majd and dozens of others across California.

“ Communities that are made up often of refugees who escaped an American war in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam . . . are faced with the familiar terror,” Kulkarni told LAist. “Terror from which they thought they had escaped.”

Kulkarni and Luu-Ng told LAist they are deeply concerned that if Yi is deported to a third-country, she will then be sent by that country back to Cambodia despite an immigration judge already acknowledging she would most likely be tortured.

Reuters found that 22 people who were deported to Ghana as a third-country were then sent to their country of origin last year, despite court orders in the U.S meant to prevent that from happening.

For now, Luu-Ng is focused on getting Yi out of detention.

When San visited her sister at the Adelanto detention center on Jan. 18, Yi said she’d just had a nightmare, with scenes from her time under the oppression of the Khmer Rouge.

She told San being detained reminds her of those times, and she tries to keep her mind on other things.

“Remember during the Khmer Rouge,” San told Yi. “You know what we do. We need to have hope.”

Yi told her sister she had been trying to fill her time by teaching the other detainees how to do traditional Cambodian dances.

“How do you do it? How do you get the music?” San recalled asking Yi.

“She said she just sings.”