Politics
Biden's prisons chief tapped to fix lagging mental health care in California lockups
SACRAMENTO — Following through on intentions broadcast a year ago, a federal judge is putting control of California’s troubled inmate mental health programs into the hands of an outsider: President Biden’s former chief of prisons.
With inmate suicide rates at an all-time high, U.S. District Senior Judge Kimberly Mueller said her aim is to force changes in California’s prison mental health system, which a federal judge in 1995 deemed to be so poor as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
To do that, Mueller is naming a federal “receiver-nominee” to develop an oversight plan for psychiatric services for California’s prison population. Three prior candidates, for varying reasons, passed up the job.
Mueller’s pick to tackle the prisoner mental health care system is Colette Peters, who stepped down as Federal Bureau of Prisons director the day Donald Trump returned to the White House. The choice was announced Tuesday during a closed-door meeting with lawyers for inmates and Gov. Gavin Newsom, and published Wednesday as an order. Participants in the case said Peters has accepted a four-month position.
In that time, Mueller proposes that Peters work with opposing sides to come up with a plan of attack. Her full appointment as receiver would hinge on that plan. Lawyers for the state and for inmates have 10 days to comment on the judge’s proffer.
Newsom’s office would not immediately comment on what it described as “pending litigation.” State lawyers Tuesday told Mueller that while Peters was an acceptable choice, they reserved the right to contest California’s loss of control over a critical and expensive component of its sprawling incarceration system, a hearing participant said.
In that vein, a state lawyer in December argued that the “weighty decision” for a court takeover requires evidentiary hearings. At the time, Supervising Deputy Atty. Gen. Damon McClain said the need for a receiver was negated by improving conditions — namely the hiring of more social workers, just one of the positions for which the prison system has chronic shortfalls.
The state’s rosy depiction of improvements drew a rebuke Wednesday as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Mueller’s July 2024 civil contempt findings against the state. The state argued it had “substantially complied” with orders to hire mental health staff “by taking all reasonable steps to comply.”
The appellate panel said that was untrue. It pointed to delays in responding to job applicants, and unaddressed grievances from staff frustrated with high workloads, lack of security protection, insufficient supplies and lousy workspaces “which often took the form of windowless converted cells in old and unheated prisons.”
The appellate opinion noted the state did not rebut this evidence or show why it could not address those problems.
Lawyers for inmates in the long-running class-action lawsuit described Mueller’s decision to name a receiver-nominee as a breakthrough. Plaintiff’s attorney Michael Bien said a receiver is empowered to make decisions that otherwise could be entangled in years of litigation. Dockets show lawyers for both sides have been wrangling for years over a policy to permit half of mental health staff to work remotely and deliver care by video and phone.
More than 34,000 inmates — more than a third of the California prison population — are considered to have some sort of serious mental disorder. According to court findings, not once in 35 years of litigation has California had enough mental health staff to provide an acceptable minimum level of care.
Court declarations cite a 2023 state analysis that found that of the 30 inmates who killed themselves in 2023, more than a fourth had received inadequate mental health care because of understaffing. One who hanged himself with a bedsheet had not had a mental health visit for more than seven months.
A special master appointed by the court to do fact-finding in the case said last year that a “bona fide mental health staffing emergency” persisted and in some prisons had gotten worse. The report concluded that only 38% of reviewed patients received adequate care.
The class-action lawsuit is named after a 1990 complaint filed by inmate Ralph Coleman, objecting to a lack of psychiatric services at Pelican Bay State Prison. It was expanded by prison rights attorneys to address what they allege are lapses in care that have resulted in inmate suicides, mentally ill prisoners being held naked in barren isolation cells and lengthy waiting lists for treatment.
In the course of the proceedings, prison rights attorneys have shown videotapes documenting the use of pepper spray, restraints, hoods and batons on mentally ill inmates in the throes of psychotic episodes.
Mueller, a former Sacramento City Council member who studied law at Stanford, was named to the Eastern District bench in 2010 by President Obama. She inherited the Coleman case from Judge Lawrence Karlton, who died in 2015 after retirement.
The Coleman case is one of two landmark class-action suits against California’s prison system that have been overseen by a three-judge panel that 10 years ago issued sweeping orders requiring California to reduce prison crowding.
The companion case found medical care in the prisons to be so poor as to cause preventable deaths, and resulted in appointment of its own federal receiver in 2006. Still present, that receiver has mandated increased funding for medical care and electronic health records, among other changes. Given the improvements, the court in 2015 began returning control of medical services to the state, one prison at a time. That process is nearly complete.
The Coleman case has so far failed to bring about similar improvements in inmate psychiatric care. As the prison population overall has decreased, the percentage of inmates in need of mental health services has risen.
Citing “ongoing constitutional violations,” Mueller in 2023 asked the U.S. attorney general to weigh in on California’s staffing for inmate mental health care and lagging efforts at suicide prevention.
“The state repeatedly has fallen short of its constitutional obligations in a number of critical areas: suicide prevention; the treatment of mentally ill inmates in administrative segregation; those inmates’ access to higher levels of care, including mental health crisis beds; and staffing,” she wrote in her 2023 petition.
Though the Ninth Circuit upheld Mueller’s 2024 contempt finding against California, the appellate panel asked the judge to show calculations for the associated monthly fines, which now exceed $197 million. The amount is intended to reflect the savings the state realizes from leaving prison mental health jobs unfilled.
In 2024, Mueller wrote that the contempt order and fines were having little impact.
“The court has exhausted virtually every mechanism for prodding defendants to finally achieve compliance,” Mueller wrote in a July 2024 order contemplating appointment of a receiver.
In the prison medical care case, the receiver crafted a turnaround plan for the state, ramped up physician salaries and negotiated with the administration for funding to build medical facilities. The medical receiver launched an electronic records system, tackled disease outbreaks including Valley Fever, and even monitored the health of prisoners staging a systemwide hunger strike.
It’s not yet clear what powers a mental health receiver would be given.
As head of the federal prison system under Biden from 2022 to early 2025, Peters confronted issues such as crumbling infrastructure, inadequate staffing and a scandal at a federal women’s prison in Alameda County so beset by allegations of sexual abuse that it was dubbed “the rape club.” She ordered that prison closed down.
Prior to that, she ran Oregon’s state prison system.
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
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Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity[1]
- The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd[1]
- Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier[1]
- The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud[1]
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences[1]
- The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents[1]
- Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination[1]
Different views on the topic
- Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”[1]
- Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”[1]
- A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism[1]
- Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism[1]
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President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.
According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.
But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.
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