The Brief

The videos are everywhere.

They show federal immigration agents on the streets of downtown Los Angeles, Paramount and communities across L.A. County, masked and in tactical gear, facing off with demonstrators.

As crowds protested the sudden presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies on the streets of Los Angeles, law enforcement officers responded in some cases with tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets.

Some protesters reported injuries and accused federal law enforcement of excessive force.

But seeking accountability for a federal agency is challenging.

“These incidents involving federal agents just essentially go into a black hole,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal civil rights prosecutor who now consults with law enforcement on reforms.

He said people can lodge complaints with ICE, but they’ll never learn the results.

It’s also hard to identify individual agents. They wear masks and uniforms without their names. Sometimes, the uniforms only read: "Police."

At a news conference last week, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass questioned whether some of the masked men were even federal agents.

“Who are these people?" Bass asked. “And frankly, the vests that they have on look like they ordered them from Amazon. Are they bounty hunters? Are they vigilantes? If they're federal officials, why is it that they do not identify themselves?”

LAist reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment on complaints and its response to the protests. The department has not responded.

Peter Eliasberg with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said he doubted the federal government would take calls for accountability for agents accused of excessive force seriously, given recent comments from President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

" Even if there are oversight mechanisms built in, I just have a hard time believing that Secretary Noem or President Trump has any interest in using those oversight mechanisms," Eliasberg told LAist. "They seem to equate protests with something illegal that needs to be tamped down, but in fact, it is a fundamental constitutional right."

Demonstrators in Paramount describe excessive force

At a recent meeting in the city of Paramount, residents packed a small council chamber to express concerns about the response to a June 7 protest.

Alyson Barragan said she was at least 100 feet away from agents and protesting peacefully when they started shooting tear gas and projectiles at the crowd. At the City Council meeting, she lifted her shirt to reveal a large purple bruise on her lower back.

Several people in the audience gasped.

"I was shot running away from the violence inflicted by the agents," she said.

Alyson Barragan says federal agents shot her in the back with a rubber bullet while she was peacefully protesting their presence in Paramount.

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Alyson Barragan

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Abraham Flores told the council federal agents shot him in the head with a non-lethal projectile, landing him in the hospital with a brain bleed and concussion.

"Everyone was being peaceful," he said. "And it wasn't until those trigger-happy ICE agents started shooting at people that the chaos happened."

Vicki Martinez said she was driving to Home Depot for a flower pot when she was caught up in the protest that Saturday morning. She choked on tear gas as it streamed into her car.

"I feel like I have PTSD," she said.

Sara Aguilar, a medical assistant, said she saw two demonstrators with head wounds at the protest that day.

 "It's just excessive force — it's brutality,” Aguilar told LAist about federal agents at the scene. “I think that they should be accountable for that. [You are] shooting your rubber bullets at unarmed civilians. And that's not OK."

Federal policy issued in 2023 instructs officers to identify themselves and issue a verbal warning "when feasible" before using force.

In a video from the Paramount protest, demonstrators appear to be some distance away from a cluster of federal agents in tactical gear when the agents start throwing flash bang grenades, sending demonstrators running. No verbal warning can be heard in the video.

The members of the Paramount City Council have said that the city has no authority over federal agencies' actions.

No civilian oversight for Homeland Security

Local agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and county Sheriff’s Department, responded to the protests, too, and have faced accusations of excessive force. The difference is they have some level of oversight.

The Los Angeles Police Department has a five-member civilian commission that holds weekly meetings and reviews cases of serious use of force by officers.

The county Sheriff’s Department has an 11-member civilian advisory board where the public can air complaints.

The Department of Homeland Security has no such body. The federal agency oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Citizenship and Immigration Services and more.

According to its website, ICE has a formal complaint process through its Office of Professional Responsibility. Complaints against agents can be filed online or via phone. Homeland Security also has a civil rights office where people can lodge complaints.

The department did not respond to questions from LAist about accusations of excessive force. It said previously that ICE officers have experienced a 500% increase in assaults against them, but the agency did not provide data that supports that claim.

A spokesperson said "anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties will face consequences," including arrest.

Gennaco, the law enforcement expert, said Congress has the authority to investigate federal law enforcement agencies, and has looked into ICE detention facilities. But he said such investigations are rare.

Individual agents are hard to identify — and nearly impossible to sue

It can be hard to identify a federal agent who fired a rubber bullet or pepper ball.

"Those federal agents had to be the Department of Homeland Security or ICE," said Gabriel Garcia, who said he was at the protest in Paramount. "They  were full-on wearing camo suits. They had gas masks on, they had military ballistic helmets on."

A 2021 law passed in the wake of the George Floyd protests requires federal military and civilian law enforcement personnel responding to a “civil disturbance” to wear visible personal identification and the name of the government entity employing them.

California lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban most law enforcement officers from covering their faces while working.

But even if they could be identified, it’s nearly impossible to sue individual federal agents, according to UCLA Law Professor Joanna Schwartz, an expert on police misconduct litigation.

A 1971 Supreme Court case allowed individuals to sue federal officials for violating their constitutional rights, specifically when those rights are violated under the color of law. But over the years, the court has slowly chipped away at that right.

“The Supreme Court’s decisions have narrowed this right to sue so dramatically that it only covers only a few very narrow circumstances,” she said.

Lawsuits against Homeland Security

Suing the U.S. government is still an option. And that's what some organizations and people are doing.

The L.A. Press Club and others filed a lawsuit last week against the Department of Homeland Security, accusing federal agents of using "retaliatory violence" against protesters, legal observers and journalists at protests across the region.

Eliasberg, with the ACLU, is representing the Press Club. He said a legal doctrine known as "qualified immunity" makes it much harder to sue law enforcement. It protects government officials from liability unless they've violated "clearly established" constitutional rights.

The Press Club lawsuit seeks an injunction that would require Homeland Security officers to only use force in response to specific threats and not target journalists.

"Doing crowd management, policing First Amendment activity and protest – that's not what they're trained to do," Eliasberg said of the federal agents. "You're not supposed to use excessive force and generally indiscriminate force."

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly, "not rioting."

"Anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties will face consequences, which could include arrest," the statement reads.

Barragan, who was hit in the back by a projectile at the Paramount protest, said she plans to file a lawsuit against ICE and Homeland Security.

Her lawyer, Robin Perry, said litigation is one of the only routes available to Angelenos outraged by what they've seen on their city's streets.

" There's no meaningful oversight of ICE with this administration," Perry said.

A comment from the Trump administration last week indicates how it feels about efforts like Barragan's.

"President Trump and Secretary Noem are committed to restoring law and order in Los Angeles and around the country," Homeland Security said in an email. "No lawsuit, this or any other, is going to change that."

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

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

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024