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."

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Families of transgender youth in California learned this week that their private medical records will not be sent to the Trump administration, for now. That's after a federal judge temporarily blocked hospitals in California from producing any documents responding to criminal subpoenas from the Department of Justice.

For nearly a year, the DOJ has served hospitals with subpoenas, seeking detailed patient files of transgender youth, personnel files for clinicians, and other documents related to transgender healthcare. Attorneys for the government haven't articulated exactly what's being investigated, but they have pointed to the stated goal of President Donald Trump to end gender-affirming care for youth.

Criminal subpoenas to hospitals

At first, the DOJ issued administrative subpoenas, and many of those were quashed in court. Now they've moved to criminal subpoenas using a grand jury in a federal court in Texas.

One was posted publicly by NYU Langone Medical Center last month. It is not known how many hospitals across the country have received the criminal subpoenas, but the notice from NYU says that it was "one of several institutions" to receive them. The Trump administration refers to transgender healthcare as "sex-rejecting procedures" in the subpoena.

The administrative and criminal subpoenas are practically identical, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, which has brought many of the lawsuits fighting these subpoenas. "Nothing has changed — they haven't uncovered some new reason or basis to be seeking these records," he says.

"It is pure harassment. It's just an effort to frighten people, to intimidate doctors out of providing the care and to frighten parents and make them afraid that the federal government is going to seek them out, identify them and harm their families in some way," he adds.

Stanford case brought by families

The win in California this week is significant, Minter says. A group of six families who received care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford sued to block the hospital from sending any of their medical files to the Justice Department.

Right before a deadline for the hospital to send those files, a federal judge in the Northern District of California granted a request for a temporary restraining order that applies to the whole state.

A Justice Department spokesperson in a statement said "it will use every legal and law enforcement tool available to ‌protect innocent ⁠children from being mutilated under the guise of 'care.'"

'Long journey to survive'

Arne Johnson is the parent of a trans teen in the Bay Area and a volunteer with the group Rainbow Families Action. He says even if the win is temporary, it's still a relief for parents like him. "This is like being in a stormy ocean right now — like you're floating on a raft and each individual wave is terrifying, but we also know we have a really long journey to survive," says Johnson, who is not a plaintiff in the case.

He says he's grateful to the families who brought the case and the attorneys representing them. "It's impressive and very noble in a time when people are compromising and turning their backs on our families," he says, fighting tears. "It just really means a lot to folks to see how hard people are working to fight for our kids."

So far, the many legal challenges to the Trump administration's attempt to get the medical files of transgender youth have been quite effective, Minter says. "We don't have any reason to believe that any hospitals have turned over records yet, but there would be no way to know that for certain," he adds.

At the same time, many hospitals and clinics that had been providing gender affirming care for young people all over the country have ended their programs, citing legal and financial pressure from the Trump administration. And this week, a federal judge in Maryland rejected a bid to certify a class of families of transgender youth nationwide to fight the administrative subpoenas.

Craig Konnoth is a professor specializing in health law and LGBTQ rights at the University of Virginia School of Law. He notes that the federal government's moves to get private medical records are unprecedented and could have effects far beyond transgender youth.

"It's not just search and seizure of medical records," he says. "It's the ability of the government to come after you, hoping that they'll be able to catch you out in something, that they will attach a label to afterwards, because they don't like the group that you belong to or the group that you're trying to assist."

That's why, he says, if the government succeeds in these efforts, the implications are vast.
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Congress is about to let a key spy tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, lapse.

Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States.

The government says that more than 60% of the president's daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority.

What happens when it expires?

Intelligence collection will continue

Intelligence collection under FISA's Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court's authorization, even if the law lapses before the court's next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies.

Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turnover communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel.

Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail — but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America's 250th celebration and the World Cup.

Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the second Obama and first Trump administration, says he doesn't believe Section 702's lapse to be a sky-is-falling moment — but that Congress could have chosen to avoid any issues by passing an extension.

"I don't want to overhype this and say that the statute's lapse is a horrific risk. It clearly is not," Gerstell said. "But by the same token, I just want to emphasize that it is irresponsible to accept any risk in this area under circumstances where we can control the risk. We can make it zero."

Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy rights advocate and senior director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, says the FISA law is clear that companies must continue to comply with the government's collection requests even after lapse — and that existing case law means any challenges will be sorted quickly. Companies risk a fine of $250,000 per day by not complying.

"The FISA court, under the law, has 30 days to resolve this type of challenge," Goitein said, and because the court has previously reviewed the statute, "I do not think it would take very long for the FISA court to compel compliance."

Goitein said she feels the security risks of a lapse are limited — and wants to see the law updated with key privacy and civil liberties reforms.

Why is Congress letting the law expire?

Section 702 has never been short on controversy. Each time the provision has come up for renewal over its nearly two decade history, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has pushed for reforms to the program to better protect Americans' privacy rights.

In collecting the communications of foreign nationals targeted by the intelligence community, Americans' information — including calls, texts and emails — can also be swept up in the dragnet.

And federal law enforcement regularly queries the FISA database for Americans' information and reviews their content. Those reviews are subject to certain procedural and executive branch oversight measures but do not require intelligence agencies and agents to demonstrate probable cause of wrongdoing to a court.

Reform-minded members of Congress — pointing to a history of abuses — want to see additional changes to the program, including a warrant requirement before law enforcement can review Americans' information.

The fight over those reforms led to a series of short-term extensions to the law this year as lawmakers struggled to reach agreement.

In the weeks leading up to the June 12 expiration, it appeared there was movement toward a three-year extension with moderate reforms, though stopping short of a warrant requirement. While any deal was far from certain, there were signs of progress.

Then, things fell apart when, last week, President Donald Trump nominated Bill Pulte. As director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte is known for leveraging his post and large social media audience to attack the president's perceived foes, to serve as acting director of national intelligence.

The fallout

Democrats — even those most closely aligned with the intelligence community — immediately decried the appointment and said that they would not reauthorize Section 702 while Pulte was Trump's pick over concerns that Pulte would weaponize FISA information as well as the rest of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the chamber's intel committee, said "he's extraordinarily unqualified, but the timing could also not be more of a mistake." Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, described Pulte as a "political hack" and "malignant clown."

Even Republican leaders expressed worries. "We don't need a weaponized DNI," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last week. "We need professionals there." Sen. Tom Cotton, the top intel Republican, refused to weigh in on Pulte's qualifications.

At the end of this week, both the House and Senate made a series of failed bids to extend Section 702, then — on Thursday — left town. The Senate is back next week, while the House is not scheduled to return until the week of June 22.

On Thursday afternoon, President Trump announced a permanent nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, federal prosecutor Jay Clayton. When asked by reporters in the Oval Office if Pulte would still take the job on an acting basis, Trump said he would "for a short while." He didn't say how long.
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Under growing pressure from a restive public during the summer of 2020, the Legislature passed a bill that put police shootings of unarmed people under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Justice.

The belief, at the time, was that pulling investigations from local prosecutors — the same prosecutors who relied on police officers to testify in criminal cases — would reduce conflicts of interest and restore faith in a judicial system that was the subject of nationwide protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In its five years since then, the police shooting program has closed 41 cases. It has never recommended charges against an officer who shot and killed an unarmed person. CalMatters originally looked at this program after its first year, and returned to investigate the program in its fifth.

Here’s what we found:

Investigations take longer

Attorney General Rob Bonta originally pledged to close shooting investigations within one year. That still hasn’t happened.

The average investigation takes nearly two years and five months. Eight investigations, including a cluster of cases in rural Northern California, stretched past three years.

The Department of Justice has argued that it is underfunded. The police shooting program got just $13 million annually, despite asking for $26 million. On its first investigation, program investigators were already complaining that they were undermanned.

Some exceed statutes of limitations

When anyone is accused of a crime, police officer or not, the state has a set limit of time to file charges. For 92% of crimes in California, that time limit is three years. For certain crimes, like murder, there is no statute of limitations.

When the Department of Justice investigations stretch past three years, that means that an officer can’t be charged with certain crimes potentially involved in the case — crimes that have previously been leveled at officers who shot and killed people. Some of the crimes that the Justice Department can’t charge after three years include involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault.

Blowing past decertification deadline

One year after Califoirnia established its police shooting investigation program, the Legislature passed a law that would allow police departments to decertify officers for serious misconduct, stripping their license to work in law enforcement.

But decertification has a time limit, too: three years.

So when investigations stretch past three years, the Department of Justice can no longer recommend any officer lose their certification.

The certification program is run by a state agency, the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST. POST told us that it can start investigations on its own if an officer is accused of serious misconduct.

Was local accountability better?

Before the police shooting investigation program went into effect, many law enforcement leaders and district attorneys predictably opposed it.

But some liberal, reform-minded prosecutors also had their doubts about its potential. Specifically, they worried that taking the investigations out of the hands of locals would dilute the pressure that people could put on their district attorney.

Now, the cases go to Sacramento. A county district attorney never has to answer for the decision to charge or not charge a police officer.

“Local concern, local protests, local interest is felt by local prosecutors,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, who created a unit investigating police officers at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she was chief of staff.

Local investigators back off

Local police and sheriff’s departments are still supposed to do their own investigations into police shootings. After all, someone was killed in their jurisdiction. Bonta’s office says nothing in the law prevents local authorities from conducting their own parallel investigations.

But we found that, as a practical matter, local authorities take a hands-off approach once Bonta’s office steps in.

“If the case meets the criteria under (the police shooting law) and DOJ confirms they are taking over the investigation, we do not do a parallel criminal investigation of our own or do a criminal investigation of our own after DOJ concludes their investigation,” said Capt. Brian Cole, who oversees the detective division at the Redding Police Department. “They have complete criminal jurisdiction of the matter.”

Although the Justice Department maintains that it’s only looking at the potential criminal culpability of an officer, in practice, that means that theirs is the only shooting investigation once they take over.

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

The FIFA World Cup has finally arrived once again on American soil.

On Friday night in Southern California, the world's largest sporting event returns to the U.S. for the first time in more than three decades when the U.S. men's national soccer team kicks off its first group-stage match against Paraguay.

This 2026 World Cup has been circled on the calendar of U.S. Soccer for nearly a decade — the long-awaited chance to finally rewrite a legacy of inferiority in international soccer.

The heavyweight talent and strong soccer tradition of European and South American teams have long proven elusive for the U.S. to match, despite decades of investment in the sport. The furthest the U.S. team has finished in a modern World Cup was a run to the quarterfinals in 2002; since then, the U.S. has managed just three total wins across all the World Cups.

Yet the chance to host the tournament at home has coincided with the development of perhaps the most talented generation of players that American soccer has ever produced.

For the first time in the national team's history, its major players all have key roles on teams in Europe's top-flight professional leagues. Midfielder Tyler Adams and defenders Chris Richards and Antonee Robinson are regular contributors to their English Premier League teams, while Weston McKennie is a favorite at Italian club Juventus, and Christian Pulisic, the one-time boy wonder of Team USA, is now, at 27, a bona fide star for AC Milan.

"This is for me the biggest opportunity to grow the game, to inspire people, to show that American players are at the level of the rest of the world," Adams said Thursday.

Paraguay is already struggling

The team's first challenge is Friday's game against Paraguay, currently No. 40 in FIFA's international rankings. The two teams faced off in an international friendly last November, which the U.S. won 2-1 after a scuffle between players broke out during stoppage time.

"We know that they're gonna be super, super aggressive, so we're going to have to match that. We saw that the last time we played them," said U.S. forward Tim Weah.

Paraguay may have to play without its biggest talent, the 22-year-old midfielder Julio Enciso, who was stretchered off the field in the first half of his team's final warm-up match last week.

After Friday's match, the U.S. will play Australia next week, then wrap up the group stage with a June 25 game against Turkey.

The expansion of the tournament to 48 teams means it will be easier than ever to emerge from the group stage. A win in Friday's game, plus either a second win against Australia or Turkey or a draw against both teams, would likely be enough for the U.S. to advance to the knockout round — though the U.S. could earn a more advantageous path if it finishes the group stage in first place.
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