The Brief

With federal agents conducting more immigration-related arrests throughout Southern California, residents have been active, too, capturing on camera those detentions in their communities — by real agents and potential impersonators.

Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel for First Amendment rights at the ACLU of Southern California, said community members have a constitutional right to record government officials engaging in public duties: “Doesn’t matter if it’s LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, ICE or Border Patrol.”

But being a bystander also means navigating moments that can take very quick turns.

LAist cannot offer legal counsel, but we have turned to civil rights experts for guidance about how to document these detentions safely and effectively.

What can bystanders record?

The public has the right to capture agents’ faces and license plates, Eliasberg said.

WITNESS, a nonprofit devoted to using video evidence to expose injustice, recommends gathering images of any documents that agents present, including warrants. Community members can also record badges, weapons and uniforms. Video of the context in which detention takes place — including street signs, landmarks and any cameras that might be affixed to nearby buildings — can be used to authenticate the footage and corroborate community members’ experiences.

How close can you be to law enforcement?

How far away must witnesses be while recording interactions between agents and detainees?

“There's no tape measure rule,” Eliasberg said. “You have a right to record, and you have a right to be pretty close. You just can't get in the way so much that you're interfering with what the officer's trying to do.”

Eliasberg also noted that there may be public safety reasons for law enforcement to close off an area, including crime scenes and disaster zones.

After federal immigration agents shot and killed Minnesota residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the national ACLU held an information session to provide guidance for observers. More than 76,000 people tuned in.

“A good rule of thumb would be that you want to be enough steps away from the officer that they would have to affirmatively walk towards you to be in physical contact with you,” said Byul Yoon, a fellow at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “That's going to reduce the chance that they claim that you were interfering.”

WITNESS encourages community members to “film openly and comply with any instructions agents give you.”

But “if the agents tell you to stop filming, you can tell them: ‘I am exercising my right to document this arrest,'” a WITNESS instructional video adds. And if agents ask you to step back, “document yourself complying.”

Can you ask agents to identify themselves?

Given that agents continue to cover their faces, use unmarked vehicles and sometimes wear plain clothes, community members have increasingly demanded that they identify themselves. This, too, is permissible, Eliasberg said.

“The public has a right to ask: ‘Who are you? What is your name?’” he added. “They may not get an answer, but they have an absolute right to ask that question.”

If witnesses don’t get answers, Eliasberg said, “trying to take a photograph of the badge to see the name is a perfectly appropriate response.”

Can you ask detainees questions?

In videos circulating across social media, community members have also taken to asking detainees three questions:

1. What is your full name?
2. What is your birthday and year?
3. Who can we call?

Eliasberg said this is “absolutely permissible.”

At the ACLU of Southern California, he added, “we are hearing stories all the time where people are saying: ‘I have no idea what happened to my family member.’ I mean, literally, they've been snatched off the street, or they don't even know. They just don't come home one night.”

Can you remind detainees about their rights?

The public also has the right to tell people who are being arrested that they have rights, Eliasberg said. This includes the right to remain silent and not to sign any documents.

“You're simply informing them what their constitutional rights are,” he said.

Is it OK to record ICE from inside my car?

In some parts of the country, federal agents have set up traffic stops, then proceeded to ask drivers for proof of citizenship. In such situations, drivers can “absolutely” record these interactions, said Gloria Leal, general counsel of League of United Latin American Citizens, a nonprofit that works to advance the economic condition, educational attainment and civil rights of Latinos in the U.S.

But, “whenever possible,” Leal recommends observing and filming immigration agent activity on foot. The courts and law enforcement “generally treat vehicles as potentially deadly weapons, even when no harm is intended [by the driver],” she said.

If you’re in a vehicle and are approached by an immigration agent, she added, “you should not inch forward or reposition your vehicle without instruction. Do not block lanes, driveways, or sidewalks.”

Maribel Hernández Rivera, the ACLU’s national director of immigrant community strategies, offered another piece of advice: “Don’t record while driving.”

Yoon added: “If you're recording ICE from behind the wheel while you're driving and holding your phone, you could be pulled over or cited for breaking that law."

What if an agent takes away my phone?

If an immigration agent takes an observer’s phone, deletes their recordings or coerces them into sharing a password, those actions are a potential violation of the Fourth Amendment, Leal said.

In such situations, she added, an observer “should not physically resist.”

“They should state that they do not consent to the seizure or search,” she said. “They should [also] try to document the officer's identity, then seek legal counsel.”

WITNESS and Eliasberg emphasized that agents cannot take your phone if you're simply trying to record what's happening. They also can’t force you to delete your footage. But they may try anyway.

To help create a barrier, WITNESS recommends that witnesses lock their phones with a passcode, which are protected under the Fifth Amendment. (Fingerprint IDs and facial recognition are not.)

If you feel that your civil rights have been violated, you can seek help from organizations like the ACLU, which offers free services.

“The problem,” Eliasberg said, “is we don't necessarily have the resources to help everybody.”

How should I share my footage?

Community members typically share their footage with trusted media outlets, attorneys at civil rights organizations, or on social media. The state has also moved to track potentially unlawful activity by federal agents. Recently, the California Department of Justice launched a portal where the public can submit videos and photos. The portal asks community members to indicate whether their footage depicts excessive force, unlawful searches or arrests, or other civil rights violations.

In its tip sheet for filming immigration enforcement activity, WITNESS recommends securing consent from the arrestee “and/or direct representatives,” including members of that person’s family or their lawyer. WITNESS also suggests keeping a copy of the video file in a secure location, in case your footage is removed from social media.

If you’d like to share your footage with LAist’s investigative reporting team, you can do so by contacting editor Jared Bennett on Signal. His username is jbennett.18. You can also share it with watchdog correspondent Jordan Rynning, whose username is jrynning.56. For instructions on getting started with Signal,visit the app's support page. Once you're in the app, you can type their usernames in the search bar after starting a new chat.

How footage can help community members

The morning of June 17, Oscar Preciado went to a Walmart in Pico Rivera to pick up merchandise for his work as an Instacart shopper.

That day, 20-year-old Adrian Martinez was detained and taken by Border Patrol — even though he’s a U.S. citizen.

Preciado was in the parking lot. When he saw the agents appear, he whipped out his phone.

In a conversation with LAist, Preciado said he and other community members were recording the agents’ vehicles and license plates when he noticed that “they were throwing someone to the ground.”

Preciado ran over to capture what was happening.

“It was horrifying to witness,” he added. “The kid weighs 110 pounds, maybe, and he was being thrown around by these big guys.”

The federal government later said that Martinez was detained for punching officers. But after watching video footage, a federal judge said he threw no punches.

Martinez has since been released from custody on bond. He also lost his job. But he's home with his family.

Learn from a bystander: What is the experience like?

Since detentions by the Department of Homeland Security intensified in southeastern L.A. County, local resident Eric Eztli has been monitoring Home Depot parking lots and car washes. He keeps an eye out for suspicious vehicles, as well as for people who, in his view, are racially profiling and unfairly detaining his community members.

Last summer, Eztli went to a Home Depot in Huntington Park, bearing witness as men in sage green uniforms, with Border Patrol patches affixed to their sleeves, chased a day laborer. The agents’ faces were covered.

Eztli ran toward them and started to record the interaction on his cellphone.

In his video, Eztli is heard demanding that the agents show a warrant for the man’s arrest. They do not.

One of the agents tackles the day laborer to the ground. Then, three agents hold down the day laborer and handcuff him. As they tie his arms behind his back, one agent pushes the day laborer’s face into the dirt, first with his hand, then with his knee. Eztli repeatedly asks the day laborer for his name. The man manages to say “Jorge” before agents drag him away. “Jorge what?” Eztli shouts after him, trying to get his last name.

As the agents’ unmarked vehicles pulled away from the parking lot, Eztli recorded their license plate numbers.

The scene hurt to watch, he told LAist, but he wanted to gather as many details as he could. Some of it might be of use to Jorge.

“I was going to get his birthday, too, but they just took him very quickly,” Eztli said.

Eztli also meant to get a contact number so he could reach out to Jorge’s family and let them know he’d been detained. Full names and birth dates are also required to search for people in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s inmate locator system.

“I think it's important for the community to exercise their right to record and make sure that [agents] are being held accountable,” Eztli added. “But it's hard because they are hiding behind anonymity, so they can do whatever they want — that's why it feels so scary.”

As Gov. Gavin Newsom weighs whether to require data centers to disclose how much water they use, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says concerns over AI’s water use don’t hold “up to any scrutiny.”

On the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath released Tuesday, Altman said that it takes 38,000 ChatGPT queries to use as much water as producing a single almond in California.

“If you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of, you know, people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever,” Altman told Heath.

The problem, experts say, is that it’s impossible to verify those numbers given what’s public about the secretive industry.

“The information we have is so limited,” said Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside.

Far too many factors affect how much water data centers use to boil it down to any one convenient statistic, Ren said, rattling off a handful of variables: the data center’s location, the temperature outside, the type of cooling system, the length of the prompt, the reasoning required, the output. All affect how much water the data center uses.

“This is the whole reason that these bills need the governor’s signature,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment. “There’s no published data — certainly not for California — and what is public seems all over the place.”

Over the past two weeks, California lawmakers passed two bills by Assemblymember Diane Papan aimed at increasing transparency; both now await Newsom’s signature.

One would require operators to report their water sources and usage when seeking business permits. The other would block local governments from approving new data centers unless developers disclose their water plans. They’d also have to pay for any water upgrades needed to connect to the local supply.

It’s the San Mateo Democrat’s second attempt at more transparency around data center water use. Newsom vetoed her bill last year, saying he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements … without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.”

The heavy-hitting tech industry and business groups again opposed the bills. But now, as data center fights erupt across the state and local governments ban the facilities outright amid a wider bipartisan backlash, the question of how much water data centers really use is gaining urgency.

“If we know what an almond uses, maybe we can figure out what a data center uses?” said Alex Biering, director of policy advocacy who specializes in water issues for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

What the data actually shows

Regardless of whether it takes thousands of queries to match the water needed to produce a single almond in California (a number that varies substantially over time and space, according to a 2019 study), the Congressional Research Service says data centers are using more water than they used to. 

One study reported the facilities directly used about 17 billion gallons in 2023, up from 5.6 billion gallons in 2014. Another report found that hyperscale data centers could use 150 billion gallons of water from 2025 to 2030 — which is as much water as 4.6 million households use in the U.S. in a year.

Annual water use isn’t the whole story, Ren cautioned. The hottest days, when data centers require the most cooling, can substantially increase peak water demand, according to Ren’s research, which is under review by a scientific journal and available online as a preprint.

“For community water systems, the peak capacity is more important because they need to be designed and built to accommodate the peak demand at all times, similar to our power grid,” Ren said.

Ren’s team found that data center cooling systems could call for 697 to 1.45 billion more gallons of peak water capacity per day. It’s comparable to New York City’s average daily supply, the study says. And unlike irrigation water typically used for farms, water for data centers is often treated, potable water from public water systems, the team reported.

That’s a problem, because water systems across the country — and certainly in California — are “aging, fragmented, and/or financially constrained, thus lacking sufficient available capacity to meet the additional peak water demands of large data centers.”

The researchers pointed to examples in Georgia and Virginia where water suppliers worried they “just don’t have the water” to accommodate peak demand from the data centers drawing from their systems simultaneously.

Ren said water use could drop by as much as 50% if data centers opt for less water-intensive cooling systems, like dry cooling, but there are tradeoffs — such as increased energy needs.

And that, too, requires water.

With a little more than two months to go until the general election, the two mayoral candidates running to lead the city of Los Angeles fielded questions about the environment at a Thursday night forum hosted by LAist.

Incumbent Karen Bass and her challenger, L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, each answered questions separately about how they would approach many environmental challenges facing the city, including emergency preparedness, water resiliency and transportation policy.

These and other environmental and climate issues are top of mind for many Angelenos during a summer marked by extreme heat, humidity and the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights that affected surrounding neighborhoods for months. Communities are also still rebuilding from last year’s destructive Eaton and Palisades fires.

The forum, held at Los Angeles Trade Technical-College, was organized by the L.A. League of Conservation Voters, SCOPE-LA, Sierra Club, Clean and Healthy California, Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance and Communities for a Better Environment, and was moderated by LAist climate and environment Reporter Erin Stone.

Here are three takeaways from the event:

Differing visions of LA

Bass, who was elected mayor in 2022, painted a picture of an L.A. that’s made significant progress on environmental issues during that time, while Raman said the city has stalled under Bass’ leadership.

Bass referenced her work transitioning the city off of coal-generated energy and expanding the city’s electric bus fleets and clean-energy jobs. She said she wants to build on that momentum, particularly with a focus on helping communities impacted by environmental and industrial pollution.

She pointed to many communities of color that bear the brunt of industrial pollution, including in South L.A. neighborhoods dotted with oil wells and residents who live in close proximity to the Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights.

“Where we need to go now in the future is focusing on environmental justice, focusing on the communities that are disproportionately impacted by greenhouse gases and by the environment,” she said.

Raman also talked about a need to focus on environmental justice, but she said environmental programs are underfunded and understaffed, and that she would invest more in them if she becomes mayor.

She said Bass’ administration has not prioritized environmental climate issues enough, and that there should be a more aggressive policy around them.

“Too much of that work remains unfinished,” she said. “Our transition to clean energy has slowed. Efforts to build a resilient water supply, close neighborhood drilling sites, make our streets safer, all of these have slowed over the last four years.”

Raman specifically called out Bass for her proposal to cut funding for the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office as the city faced a billion-dollar budget shortfall last year.

Bass defended the proposal, arguing the program had not developed a climate action plan as directed and needed to be revamped.

The office has shrunk under Bass’ leadership, and she removed the city’s chief heat officer and quietly appointed a new one earlier this year.

Emergency response failures

Both Bass and Raman said L.A. has room for improvement when it comes to preparing for fires, earthquakes and other disasters.

Raman criticized the city’s response to last year’s Palisades Fire, saying there was no clear leadership to guide the community through the recovery effort. She pointed to Bass' appointment of Steve Soboroff to head the recovery. He left the post after his three-month term and was not replaced.

 ”What we saw in the Palisades, I think, was an example of what shouldn't happen,” Raman said. “ A lot of residents in the Palisades have been feeling like they don't know who to reach out to, who is the person that they need to connect with in order to make sure that recovery really happens.”

But she defended her administration’s response, and said confusion over city and state land made it more difficult.

 ”Part of the brush was the city, part of the brush was the state. There was a reluctance to go into state territory because our folks were told they couldn't do that,” Bass said. “As far as I'm concerned, that's not gonna happen again.”

Bass said the biggest impediments to the recovery process — and to people moving back into their homes — are insurance companies and banks. She called for legislative reforms to the insurance process.

Raman also criticized the response to the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights this summer, calling out Bass directly for sharing misleading information about air quality.

Bass said she relied on inaccurate information from public health and air quality management officials.

Both candidates said there’s a need for stronger enforcement and higher fines that could be levied against corporations like Lineage, the warehouse owner, and better planning for emergencies around industrial buildings.

Shared goals

Although the candidates leaned into their differences, the reality is that they align on many climate and environmental policies.

Unhoused Angelenos are especially at risk from extreme heat, and Bass said the city needs to provide more places for them to cool off.

“My plan, priority one, is to get people off the streets,” Bass said, adding that during heat emergencies that needs to include providing emergency shelters and other ways to cool off.

Raman talked about similar solutions.

“ Responding to people who are experiencing homelessness to ensure that they're actually able to get indoors and off the streets, so that they're not dying from exposure to heat, because that is a very, very high risk that people who are experiencing homelessness face,” she said.

They had other shared goals.

Both said incentives and rebates that keep down the cost of utility bills need to be more accessible, especially in low-income communities.

Both called for more severe penalties for owners of industrial sites like the Boyle Heights warehouse.

And they both said they want to grow the city’s electric vehicle fleet, and decrease car use by building more public transit ridership and expanding biking infrastructure.

Topline:

The details: State water officials confirmed a harmful algal bloom in Lake Hemet that’s showing up as green, cloudy discolored water, scum and algae.

Why it matters: The bloom can produce toxins that could cause you and your furry friends to get sick. People and pets are being urged to stay out of the water and away from any scum or algae along the shore. Dogs and children are especially vulnerable because they’re more likely to swallow water while playing and swimming, according to the State Water Resources Control Board. You can learn more about healthy water habits here.

Why now: The warning for the Riverside County lake comes about a week after a similar alert was issued for Big Bear Lake. Lake Hemet is under an advisory until further notice, state officials said.

The backstory: Harmful algal blooms are most common in California between the warmer months of late May through October, although they can pop up year round, according to the board.

What's next: You can check California’s map to see if any harmful algal blooms have been reported in the area.

Go deeper: What's the green sheen on Big Bear Lake? What you need to know about harmful algal blooms

Yama Sushi Marketplace is a local chain that helps set the standard for quality sushi and Japanese cuisine in Los Angeles — all while trying to keep prices more affordable than you might expect.

About the owners

Kenzo Yamada opened the business in 1984 after working as a local fish broker. He eventually sold the business in 2021 to Scott Kohno and his family. Kohno sat down with Austin Cross, who hosts AirTalk every Friday, to explain how they've continued to deliver quality sushi and expand the business.

Making Japanese culture accessible and affordable

Yama Sushi Marketplace's Koreatown grand opening.

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Courtesy Alysia Rodriguez

)

Yama Sushi Marketplace looks to provide the best of both worlds — high-quality sushi lower costs — in serving customers.

How do they do it? They've benefited from Yamada's connections, sourcing quality fish through trusted suppliers like Bluefiná. It also helps that it's not a restaurant, minimizing the overhead costs that come with staffing.

Restaurant details

• The Kohno family has expanded to West L.A. and Koreatown. A fourth location is set to open in Sherman Oaks, although its official opening date hasn’t been announced.
• Co-owner Wendy Kohno has a background as a kikisake-shi — sake sommelier — and has helped build out the market’s selection of more than 200 sakes, most of which you can find at their San Gabriel and West L.A. locations.
• They also have classes on sushi, sake and miso.

What we tried

• California Roll (their most popular menu item)
• Bara Chirashi
• Yama Deluxe Platter
• Narumi Sake (Yama's own craft sake)

Yama Sushi Marketplace is co-hosting American Craft Sake Fest on Saturday, Sept. 10. Click here for more details.

What should we try next?