The Brief

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is failing to provide adequate healthcare at a new detention center in California City, according to a report from an independent monitor at the facility, where detainees complained of missing medications and months-long delays to cancer treatment.

The findings appear in a report by Dr. Muthusamy Anandkumar, a court- appointed monitor of the California City Immigration Processing Center, which is about 75 miles east of Bakersfield and run by the private prison company CoreCivic. The federal government purchased the facility earlier this month, but CoreCivic continues to operate it.

A judge appointed the monitor in March as part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by seven detainees who allege the conditions in the California City facility are a violation of their due process rights.

“The facility lacks a reliable system to consistently provide adequate health care, placing individuals at serious risk of both immediate and long-term harm,” Anandkumar wrote. “This pattern indicates broader problems in the facility's healthcare delivery system rather than occasional lapses in care.”

The fault, Anandkumar wrote, was not with the individual healthcare workers, but rather an issue of staffing, management and oversight. At times, staff was pulled out of training to cover a shift because of staffing shortages.

“As a result, staff who had not been fully trained were themselves training new staff,” Anandkumar wrote. “Given the number of patients and the seriousness of their medical and mental health needs, these substantial gaps contribute to an unsafe environment.”

Anandkumar found 13 areas of deficiency in CoreCivic’s healthcare program in California City. Among them were inadequate emergency care, dental care and chronic disease management. The monitor also found that the facility did not provide timely access to prescribed medications.

ICE opened the immigration detention center at the site of a closed state prison and began admitting detainees in August. In September, a state disability rights group conducted a two-day inspection of the facility and found that its operators failed to distribute medication for life-threatening conditions and did not schedule timely surgeries for people that needed them.

The findings of that two-day inspection by Disability Rights California mirror many of the conclusions found 10 months later by Anandkumar, including delays in response to acute sick call requests and a failure to distribute prescription medication for conditions requiring consistent management like diabetes, high blood pressure and seizures.

A CoreCivic spokesperson said the facility provides daily access to physical and mental care services, and said emergency medical services are available 24 hours a day, every day.

“When specialty or advanced care is required beyond the services available onsite, facility healthcare staff coordinate with community physicians, hospitals, and specialty providers to facilitate access to medically necessary treatment,” said CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin. “While we work diligently to arrange and support those appointments, the scheduling, availability, and capacity of outside providers are not controlled by the facility.”

Gustin said compliance with detention standards in immigration detention facilities is monitored by an ICE compliance officer.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in the Northern District of California by people held in California City claims detainees do not have appropriate clothing for the chilly desert nights, nor appropriate medical attention for life-threatening conditions. The lawsuit alleges detainees with mobility issues don’t have access to wheelchairs, and in some cases are unable to bathe or dress themselves.

Sokhean Keo, a California City detainee and a plaintiff in the lawsuit against ICE said in a statement distributed by the ACLU that he never received the medication he was prescribed for an infection.

“If there is no change to this system,” Keo said, “sick people are going to die.”

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

A state appeals court ruled Monday that Long Beach must rehire an officer it fired four years ago after he was accused of lying in official reports.

The unanimous decision from the three-judge panel upholds a previous ruling from a city employment panel and a lower court. It also brings an end to a roughly five-year legal saga during which the city filed two appeals in an attempt to keep former Long Beach police Officer Dedier Reyes off the force, even at a time when the department has struggled to fill vacancies.

Long Beach City Attorney Dawn McIntosh said she was “disappointed” by Monday’s decision by the appeals court, but said her office does not plan to file any further appeals.

Monday’s ruling means Long Beach owes Reyes more than four years of pay he has missed since his dismissal, and the city must offer him a job with the police department that is on par with his previous position as a patrol officer. Records from Transparent California show Reyes’ base salary was $121,948 in his last full year at the LBPD.

The city fired Reyes in 2022, shortly after he was charged with one count of filing a false police report and one count of perjury for allegedly lying about his observations during a 2018 gun arrest. A jury ultimately acquitted Reyes and his less-experienced partner, Officer David Salcedo.

But the charges, the city’s firing of the two officers and the criminal trial that followed, cast doubt on their credibility. As a result, prosecutors dropped dozens of cases where the two made arrests or would’ve needed to testify to make the case.

Reyes, who was training Salcedo, was accused of lying and perjuring himself when he wrote in a February 2018 police report that he recognized two gang members standing outside a Long Beach taqueria and then saw one go inside and leave a bag containing a gun.

Surveillance video from the taqueria made internal affairs investigators question how Reyes could have seen what was happening inside the restaurant and also showed he arrested the wrong gang member for allegedly carrying the bag with the gun.

Reyes later told internal affairs investigators that he “made a mistake in this police report,” according to an interview transcript from a separate civil lawsuit.

Reyes and Salcedo continued working and weren’t criminally accused for nearly four years after the incident. Then-District Attorney Jackie Lacey reviewed the case and decided it didn’t merit charges, but when George Gascón became the new District Attorney in 2021 — after making police reform central to his campaign — he brought charges against the officers.

After their acquittal on the criminal charges, a city employment panel ruled they must be rehired, but Long Beach sued to try to block that decision.

After reviewing all of the evidence, the three-judge appeals panel sided with Reyes on Monday. They found it plausible that he mistakenly recalled the events leading up to the 2018 arrest and noted that the city “identified no apparent motive” for him to falsify the police report, according to their ruling.

When the city fired Reyes, it noted that he had racked up 14 use-of-force reviews and 11 citizen complaints since 2010, according to court documents. But the department determined that all of those uses of force were within policy and none of the citizen complaints were determined to have merit, the court noted in its ruling.

Long Beach has, however, been sued twice over Reyes’ alleged misconduct, resulting in payouts of $550,000 and $499,800.

After Monday’s ruling, Reyes will have the option of rejoining LBPD.

Salcedo has already been rehired and assigned to work patrol, LBPD Executive Communications Officer Allison Gallagher wrote in an email last October.

Canter's Deli turns 95 this year, and the iconic Jewish deli and coffee shop will sell its hot pastrami sandwich — with coleslaw, pickle and chocolate chip rugelach — for 95 cents.

Is there a catch?

No. But dine-in only, limit one per customer.

I don’t eat meat

Lucky you — a plant-based corned beef substitute is available.

Why it matters

The Fairfax institution has been feeding Angelenos since 1953, serving everyone from the neighborhood's Jewish community to the Supreme-loving skate punks who arrived decades later.

Co-owner Marc Canter, the third-generation owner, put it best: Canter's is the place where "grandkids grow up and bring their grandkids."

Why 95 cents?

Canter says the price is purely symbolic of the anniversary, not the actual cost — they charged 50 cents for the 50th anniversary and 75 cents for the 75th.

The history

Now three generations deep, the family has logged roughly 159 years combined behind the counter: Canter's grandfather, about 50; his father, about 65; and Marc himself, 44 and counting.

The sprawling namesake business started in 1931, when Marc Canter’s grandparents sold corned beef sandwiches off a cart in Jersey City before landing in Boyle Heights on Brooklyn Avenue (now César Chávez Avenue).

Canter said his Aunt Selma struck out on her own in 1948 at age 23 and moved the business to Fairfax. Her parents joined her there in 1953. One current employee has been on staff since 1964 — 62 years and counting.

Despite the neighborhood's changes, Canter's hasn't: No remodels, no menu overhauls. The matzo ball soup, potato pancakes, and cheese blintzes have never left.

"The ancestors are watching from above," Canter said, "so you have to keep [going] to make them proud."

Glen Hansard, the Irish singer who won an Oscar for the musical movie Once and led the bands The Frames and The Swell Season, died on Wednesday. He was 56 years old. Hansard's management shared a statement with NPR, and confirmed that he died following a motorcycle crash in Dublin.

"With broken hearts we announce the passing of Glen Hansard in the early hours of this morning," the statement reads. "We are still dealing with the shock of it all, so we kindly ask that the privacy of Glen's family, colleagues and friends is respected at this difficult time."

Hansard dropped out of school at 13 to focus on music, performing frequently as a busker in Ireland. Not long after forming his band The Frames in 1990, he landed a part in the movie The Commitments — about a tempestuous Irish band that couldn't overcome conflicts among its members.

Hansard's own career proved more stable and long-lasting: The Frames, named for Hansard's affinity for bicycles, became a hit in Ireland, though it struggled for years to find the same level of fame in the U.S. The band married alt-rock bombast — stormy guitars, weeping strings — with the intimacy of a seasoned busker. Hansard's own showmanship, honed through years of street performances, made him a natural frontman.

After short stints on several major U.S. labels, The Frames nurtured a grassroots following in America, as 2001's independently released For the Birds attracted some of Hansard's best early reviews.

Hansard's biggest career move came when he was cast as the unnamed male lead in the 2007 film Once. Hansard and the Czech-born singer Markéta Irglová starred as a pair of struggling musicians in Dublin, and the pair won the 2008 Academy Award for best original song for their romantic duet, "Falling Slowly." The song quickly became a standard and the film's soundtrack sold hundreds of thousands of copies; later, after Once spawned a hit Broadway musical of the same name, Hansard won a Grammy Award for best musical theater album.

Hansard and Irglová became romantically involved during Once's run of success, and continued to collaborate over the years. In the wake of Once's success, they formed a band together called The Swell Season, which contained several members of The Frames. The group released a post-Once album, 2009's Strict Joy, before Hansard and Irglová embarked on solo careers; the pair reunited 16 years later to put out another album, Forward, in 2025.

Hansard also released a string of solo albums which often showcased a more subdued and reflective side of the artist; 2015's Didn't He Ramble was nominated for a Grammy for best folk album. Though the music often veered from the bombastic passion of Hansard's work with The Frames and The Swell Season, it also found him growing more musically expansive, as he worked with large bands that often included supporting players he'd worked with for years.

Earlier this year, Hansard released a pair of albums called Don't Settle. The albums, recorded over two nights in 2025, features live performances of songs that span Hansard's career.

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