News

Los Angeles Geared Up for Fire Risk, but Fell Short

Published

1 year ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Los Angeles Geared Up for Fire Risk, but Fell Short

Follow continuing coverage of the wildfires in Southern California.

The alert came in blaring, hot-pink, all-caps: Be prepared for a “LIFE THREATENING & DESTRUCTIVE WINDSTORM!!!”

The notice on Monday was one in a series of warnings issued by the National Weather Service about the powerful Santa Ana winds that were about to blow through Southern California, which hadn’t seen serious rain in months.

Officials in Los Angeles, a city that is accustomed to treacherous fire conditions, turned to a well-worn playbook. The city predeployed nine trucks in vulnerable areas and called in 90 extra firefighters. The county fire department moved 30 extra engines into the field and called up 100 off-duty firefighters. The U.S. Forest Service brought in trucks and support units, as well as bulldozers, helicopters and planes.

But by Tuesday afternoon, five hours after a fire ignited high in a canyon in the oceanside Pacific Palisades neighborhood, it was clear their preparations would not be enough. As furious wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour tore through the city and propelled showers of embers that ignited entire neighborhoods, Anthony Marrone, the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, stood at a command post on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Blasted by dust and dirt kicked up by the relentless wind, he snapped a picture with his phone of smoke obscuring the sun and looked out at a panorama of flames, smoke and debris. The fire, he thought to himself, looked unstoppable. It was moving “like a funnel, like a speedway,” he said. “I knew that if we had one start, we probably weren’t going to be able to contain it.”

The conflagrations that killed at least 11 people and destroyed thousands of homes have raised questions about whether the dozens of federal, state, county and city fire departments involved in this week’s fire response deployed enough resources — and the extent to which modern firefighting tools are effective against the megafires that have become increasingly common in California over the past decade.

It was only hours before a situation that bore no resemblance to an ordinary red-flag alert, the kind set off when the Santa Ana winds blow in over the Mojave Desert from the inland West, began to evolve. A second huge fire broke out in Altadena, the unincorporated area adjacent to Pasadena, destroying more than 5,000 structures. A third ignited in Sylmar, to the north, and yet another, the next day, in the Hollywood Hills.

Chief Marrone quickly acknowledged that the 9,000 firefighters in the region were not enough to stay ahead of the fires.

“We’re doing the very best we can, but no, we don’t have enough fire personnel,” he said at a news briefing on Wednesday afternoon. “The L.A. County Fire Department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four.”

The hurricane-force winds, low humidity and parched landscape created unusually perilous conditions: On the first day, when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, it was too windy by late afternoon to send up the aircraft whose drops of water and fire retardant might have helped slow the spread of the blazes.

Chief Marrone said the parched terrain and the concentration of homes, surrounded by forested hillsides, also combined to create an indefensible landscape.

“The next time I’m not going to do anything differently because I don’t feel that I did anything wrong this time,” he said in an interview.

Los Angeles city fire officials had a similar view. “The fire chief did everything she could with the resources she had,” Patrick Leonard, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said, referring to the city’s fire chief, Kristin Crowley.

The question of resources will almost certainly arise in the weeks ahead as the fire response is analyzed. The Los Angeles Fire Department has said for years it is dangerously underfunded. A memo sent to city leaders in December by Chief Crowley complained that recent budget cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”

But there are a host of other factors at play. Fire experts have long warned that climate change and more home-building outside of urban areas are straining firefighters’ ability to prevent and contain fires. As fires have grown in size and complexity, California has explored mitigation through thinning brush out of forests, safer power grids and shoring up home protection. But it has been far from enough, they say.

The fires in Los Angeles have also raised the critical question of how departments can battle so many powerful infernos at once. After the Woolsey fire burned more than 1,600 structures in the northern part of the county in 2018 — at the same time that other major fires were raging across the state — Los Angeles County commissioned an assessment that found that the simultaneous outbreaks had slowed the ability of other fire agencies to fight the blaze because they were already busy.

Lori Moore-Merrell, the head of the U.S. Fire Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who flew this week to Los Angeles to inspect the firefighting efforts and damage, said she believed that the reason for the widespread devastation was not the firefighting response.

“They deployed enough,” Dr. Moore-Merrell said in an interview. “This fire was so intense. There isn’t a fire department in the world that could have gotten in front of this.”

The question of predeployment will almost certainly prove one of the keys to understanding the response.

It nearly always involves weighing a host of unknown factors. Firefighting experts agree that having engines and firefighters very close to the site of an outbreak is essential, especially in very windy conditions; fires in those cases must be stamped out immediately, or they will very likely begin to spread out of control.

“Once a wind-driven fire is well established you’re not going to put it out,” said Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department who ran the response to many of the major fires the city has faced over the past decade.

With the threat of highly destructive fires increasing, he said, fire authorities should “flood” fire-prone areas with extra fire engines and crews during times of high winds.

But such predeployments are enormously costly, and fire chiefs often have a tough task convincing political leaders to repeatedly spend the money on them — especially when no fires break out.

Chief Butler, who now runs the fire department in Redondo Beach, Calif., said he prepositioned firefighters on a large scale at least 30 times during heightened fire threats. Fires broke out after those threats just three times, but to him, it was worth the cost.

“I’m not in the business of making decisions that are politically palatable,” he said.

Chief Marrone began preparing for his own predeployments after meteorologists at the National Weather Service, on the first weekend of the new year, issued a bulletin warning of a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” — code words for a severe weather warning, the kind the federal government issues only about two dozen times a year. Based on the conditions in Los Angeles, it was clear that fire would almost certainly ensue.

The chief authorized overtime and supplemental state funding to add 100 people for duty drawn from a pool of around 2,000 off-duty firefighters so they could have more units prepositioned in areas known to be vulnerable to fire, including Santa Clarita and the Santa Monica mountains.

He prepositioned four strike teams, each with five trucks, and asked the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state fire agency known as Cal Fire, to preposition two more teams. The staffing was typical for a red-flag wind event, he said. Early on Tuesday morning, the chief ordered that 900 firefighters who were finishing their shifts stay on the job. The decision increased the number of county firefighters on duty to 1,800.

And the U.S. Forest Service, which fights fires in national forests, also began mobilizing. Adrienne Freeman, an agency spokeswoman, said that on Monday, the day before the winds kicked up and the first fires started, the agency had 30 trucks from out of state and Northern California in place at four Southern California forests and at a local coordination center. On Monday night, the agency called in 50 more trucks that arrived on Tuesday, she said.

The city fire department proceeded with prepositioning the nine fire trucks it was deploying on Tuesday morning, according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times, three each in Hollywood, Sunland Valley — in the northwestern part of the city — and near the city of Calabasas in the western foothills. The extra 90 firefighters the city was predeploying were called up on overtime. No extra trucks were sent to Pacific Palisades.

Those extra firefighters the city of Los Angeles called on made up less than a tenth of the approximately 1,000 on duty on any given day. And the 100 additional people called up by the county added to its daily firefighting force of 900.

Mr. Leonard, the city battalion chief, said the trucks were positioned based on historical patterns of fire during high-wind events.

“Predicting where the fire is going to start is a scientific guess,” he said.

Then the wind started, and the first embers started flying.

Chief Crowley, with the city department, texted the chiefs in the counties surrounding Los Angeles at 10:35 a.m. Tuesday, five minutes after the Palisades fire was first reported, notifying them, according to an account of the messages shared with The Times.

Chief Marrone responded immediately. “What do you need?” he texted.

The Ventura County chief said he was sending strike teams. “They’re on the road now,” he wrote.

Orange County’s chief said he could provide three strike teams of five trucks each, along with a helicopter and a crew that uses hand tools to cut firebreaks.

The Los Angeles Fire Department put out a call for off-duty members to come to their stations and scoured mechanic yards for vehicles.

Tens of thousands of people were being evacuated out of Pacific Palisades as the fire spread out of the foothills, leaping across the four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway and wiping out restaurants and homes along the coast.

Then, at 6:18 p.m. on Tuesday, came more stunning news: the second major fire, in Altadena, had ignited.

Chief Marrone put Eaton Canyon, the site of the new fire, into a navigation app and set off from the Palisades. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic, he could see the fresh fire and its smoke swelling into the sky.

Around 9 p.m., he called Brian Marshall, the chief of fire and rescue for the California Office of Emergency Services.

“I said, ‘We are out of resources, we need help,’” Chief Marrone said. He requested 50 strike teams, a total of 250 fire engines and 1,000 firefighters.

At 10:29 p.m., a third major fire ignited in Sylmar, in the northernmost part of the San Fernando Valley, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, and a fourth broke out near Santa Clarita on Wednesday afternoon.

Mutual aid teams from across the West, and beyond, began streaming toward Los Angeles.

Firefighters tried and failed to stay ahead of the furious flames.

“Resources were scarce” during the initial hours of the blazes, said Capt. Jason Rolston of the Orange County Fire Authority, who was among those who traveled to join the firefighting effort in Los Angeles. “There were too many houses to protect, and not enough fire engines.”

The wind was gusting so powerfully that smoke boiled across the terrain. Firefighters said the barrage of ash and soot was so overwhelming at times that they struggled to even move through the fire zone.

“There would be times when you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of the rig,” said Capt. Shawn Stacy, another Orange County firefighter who deployed to the Palisades fire. “What went wrong is that you had 80-m.p.h. winds.”

Some firefighters said there was so much demand on water systems that they ran out of water.

Capt. Ryan Brumback of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said he was five hours into an all-out effort to save buildings in Altadena from the Eaton fire early Wednesday morning when the hydrants started running dry — a situation firefighters also faced in the Palisades.

Suddenly, he said, “we noticed our hoses became very limp and soft.” The problem, he said, was that a power shut-off intended to prevent additional ignitions also shut off the pumps that help with water pressure in Altadena. “It was devastating, because you want to do all that you can do.”

By Friday, both initial major fires were still burning with little containment, and others that ignited later in the week also required aggressive responses, particularly in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening and in the West Hills, northwest of Los Angeles, late on Thursday. Fire officials were still focused on saving lives and homes, and said they would spend time later looking at whether their preparations had been sufficient.

“It wasn’t for a lack of preparation and decision making that resulted in this catastrophe,” Chief Marrone said at a news briefing on Saturday. “It was a natural disaster.”

The coming analysis, several experts said, will have to take into account that the standard guidelines that have long determined red-alert fire responses may no longer apply, as weather and fires become more virulent.

“There’s going to be a real reckoning about land use, escape routes, water pressure, water supply,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former longtime Los Angeles City Council member and county supervisor. Mr. Yaroslavsky said the fire might serve as a “Pearl Harbor” moment for the city, an alarm bell that signals fundamental new questions about how the city approaches the threat of wildfires.

“A lot,” he said, “will be reassessed.”

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Ivan Penn contributed reporting.

Click to comment

News

How the federal government is painting immigrants as criminals on social media

Published

7 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

How the federal government is painting immigrants as criminals on social media

Getty Images, Dept. of Homeland Security and The White House via X/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR

Two days after At Chandee, who goes by Ricky, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the White House’s X account posted about him, calling the 52-year-old the “WORST OF WORST” and a “CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN.”

Except that the photo the White House posted was of a different person. The post also incorrectly claimed Chandee had multiple felony convictions — he has one, for second-degree assault in 1993 when he was 18 years old. He shot two people in the legs and served three years in prison.

At “Ricky” Chandee with his wife, Tina Huynh-Chandee.

Via the Chandee family

hide caption

toggle caption

Via the Chandee family

Chandee, who came to the U.S. as a child refugee, was ordered to be deported back to his home country, Laos. But Laos had not been accepting all of the people the U.S. wanted it to, so the federal government determined that it was likely infeasible to deport him, his lawyer Linus Chan told NPR. Chandee therefore was granted permission to stay in the U.S. and work so long as he checked in with immigration authorities periodically. He has not missed a check-in in over 30 years and has not had another criminal incident.

People who know Chandee do not see him as “worst of the worst.”

After Chandee completed his prison sentence, he finished school and became an engineering technician. He worked for the City of Minneapolis for 26 years, became a father, and his son grew up to join the military.

In his free time, Chandee enjoys hiking and foraging for mushrooms, Minnesota Public Radio reported.

“We are proud to work alongside At ‘Ricky’ Chandee,” said Tim Sexton, Director of Public Works for the City of Minneapolis in a statement. “I don’t understand why he would be a target for removal now, why he was brutally detained and swiftly flown to Texas, or how his removal benefits our city or country.” Chandee is petitioning for his release in federal court.

Chandee’s case is not unique

Social media accounts from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and other immigration agencies have spent much of the past year posting about people detained in the administration’s immigration crackdown, typically portraying them as hardened, violent criminals. That’s even as over 70% of the people detained don’t have criminal records according to ICE data.

NPR’s research of cases in Minnesota shows that while many of the people who have been highlighted on social media do have recent, serious criminal records, about a quarter are like Chandee, with decades-old convictions, minor offenses or only pending criminal proceedings. Scholars of immigration, media and criminal law say such a media campaign is unprecedented and paints a distorted picture of immigrants and crime.

A year into President Trump’s second term, the X accounts of DHS and ICE have posted about more than 2,000 people who were targets of mass deportation efforts. Starting late last March, DHS and ICE began posting on X on a near daily basis, often highlighting apprehensions of multiple people a day, an NPR review of government social media posts show.

Among the 2,000 people highlighted by the agencies, NPR identified 130 who were arrested by federal agents in Minnesota and tried to verify the government’s statements about their criminal histories.

In most of the social media posts, the government did not provide the state where the conviction occurred or the person’s age. Public court records do not tend to include photos so definitive identification can be a challenge.

NPR derived its findings from cases where it was able to locate a name and matching criminal history in the Minnesota court and detention system, in nationwide criminal history databases, sex offender databases, and in some cases, federal courts and other state courts.

In 19 of the 130 cases, roughly 1-in-7, public records show the most recent convictions were at least 20 years ago.

Seventeen of the 19 cases with old convictions did include violent crimes like homicide and first-degree sexual assault. ICE provided some of those names to Fox News as key examples of the agency’s accomplishments. “It’s the most disturbing list I’ve ever seen,” said Fox News reporter Bill Melugin on X, highlighting the criminal convictions of each person on the list.

For seven people, their only criminal history involved driving under the influence or disorderly conduct.

ICE agents approach a house before detaining two people in Minneapolis on Jan. 13.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Six of the 130 Minnesota cases highlighted by the administration involved people with no criminal convictions. The government’s social media posts for those six instead rely upon the charges and arrests as evidence of their criminality, even though arrests don’t always lead to charges and charges can be dismissed.

In yet another case, the government highlighted a criminal charge even while noting it had been dismissed. (The person did have other existing convictions.)

For 37 of the 130 people, NPR was unable to confirm matching criminal history after consulting the databases and news coverage. Some of the names turned up no criminal history at all. The government said these people committed crimes ranging from homicide and assault to drug trafficking, and cited one by name to Fox News. NPR tried to reach out to all 37 people and their families for comment but did not receive a response from any.

In a statement to NPR, DHS’s chief spokesperson Lauren Bis did not dispute NPR’s findings or provide documentation where NPR wasn’t able to confirm matching criminal history.

“The fact that NPR is defending murderers and pedophiles is gross,” Bis wrote. “We hear far too much about criminals and not enough about their victims.” before listing four of the people with old convictions of homicide and sexual assault, underlining the date of deportation order for three of them.

Images designed to trigger emotion

The stream of social media posts with photos of mostly nonwhite people are meant to draw an emotional response, says Leo Chavez, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. They “have been used repeatedly over and over to get people to buy into, really drastic, drastic and draconian actions and policies,” he said.

Chavez, whose most recent book is The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, recalls how political campaigns in past decades presented images of Latinos — often men — without context. “Just by showing their image, showing brown people, particularly brown men, it’s supposed to be scary.”

The fact that the government’s social media posts come with statements about criminal history as well as photos reinforces that emotional response, Chavez said. DHS has previously acknowledged inaccuracies on their website. But even if the department issues corrections, Chavez said, “the goal was actually achieved, which was to reinforce the criminality and the visualization.”

CNN’s analysis of DHS’s “Arrested: Worst of the Worst” website showed that for hundreds out of about 25,000 people posted on the website, the crimes listed were not violent felonies. Instead, DHS listed people with records that included traffic offenses, marijuana possession or illegal reentry. DHS said the website had a “glitch” that it will fix but also that the people in question “have [committed] additional crimes.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this when it comes to immigration enforcement in the modern era,” said Juliet Stumpf, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School who studies the intersection of immigration and criminal law. She said the drumbeat of social media posts focused on specific individuals was like “FBI’s most wanted posters” or “like reality TV shows.”

Then-DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, flanked by deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Madison Sheahan (left), and Acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, speaks during a news conference at ICE Headquarters, in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2025.

Jose Luis Magana/AP

hide caption

toggle caption

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Stumpf drew a parallel with an incident from the 1950s when the U.S. government deported two permanent residents suspected of being communists. “The government was kind of proclaiming and celebrating their deportation because getting rid of these communists was making the country safer,” said Stumpf, “Maybe that’s comparable to something like [this].”

An analysis by the Deportation Data Project shows a dramatic increase in arrests of noncitizens without criminal records during President Trump’s current term compared to President Biden’s term.

“If you look at research, immigrants actually tend to commit fewer crimes than even U.S. citizens do. And that’s true of immigrants who have lawful status here and immigrants who don’t,” said Stumpf. “If we have a number of social media posts that are painting immigrants as the worst of the worst…it’s actually really putting out a distorted version of reality about who immigrants actually are.”

Some claims are disputed by other authorities

In some posts, DHS and ICE have also used photos of people and statements about their criminal histories to burnish the federal government’s accomplishments, defend their agents and criticize states like Minnesota. State and local authorities have in turn pushed back, and some of the federal government’s claims about the people it has detained have been met with setbacks in the courts.

DHS accused Minnesota’s Cottonwood County of not honoring detainers, written requests by ICE to hold prisoners in custody for a period of time so ICE can pick them up. In one post, the agency identified a person who was charged with child sexual abuse, writing “This is who sanctuary city politicians and anti-ICE agitators are defending.”

The Cottonwood County sheriff’s office said DHS’s post “misrepresented the truth” in their own post on Facebook. According to their account, the county did honor the detainer but ICE said it was unable to pick up the person before the order expired and the county had to release the suspect.

The Minnesota Department of Corrections wrote in a blog post that dozens of people DHS listed on its “Worst of the Worst” website were not arrested as DHS described, but were transferred to ICE by the state because they were already in state custody. The Corrections Department has since launched a page dedicated to “correct the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) repeated false claims.”

The “Worst of the Worst” website has some overlap with the department’s social media posts, but it contains a much larger number of people — over 30,000 nationally. It included a Colombian soccer star who was extradited to the U.S., tried in Texas, convicted of drug trafficking and served time in federal prison. The website incorrectly describes him as being arrested in Wisconsin. The soccer player, Jhon Viáfara Mina, recently finished his sentence early and returned to Colombia, according to Spanish newspaper El Diario Vasco.

In some instances, DHS and ICE wrote about incidents where they ran into conflict when carrying out arrests. In those posts, they named the arrestees and posted their photos. But in one case where the incident went to court, the government’s account of the events shifted. After a federal agent shot Julio C. Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis in January, DHS claimed he was lodging a “violent attack on law enforcement.” Assault charges against Sosa-Celis fell apart in court as new evidence surfaced, and the officers involved were put on leave.

Despite the fact that the charges were dropped, DHS’s post profiling Sosa-Celis remains online.

News

Bill Clinton to testify before House committee investigating Epstein links

Published

19 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Bill Clinton to testify before House committee investigating Epstein links

Former president Bill Clinton is scheduled to give deposition Friday to a congressional committee investigating his links to Jeffrey Epstein, one day after Hillary Clinton testified before the committee and called the proceedings “partisan political theatre” and “an insult to the American people”.

During remarks before the House oversight committee, Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, insisted on Thursday that she had never met Epstein.

The former Democratic president, however, flew on Epstein’s private jet several times in the early 2000s but said he never visited his island.

Clinton, who engaged in an extramarital affair while president and has been accused of sexual misconduct by three women, also appears in a photo from the recently released files, in a hot tub with Epstein and a woman whose identity is redacted.

Clinton has denied the sexual misconduct claims and was not charged with any crimes. He also has not been accused of any wrongdoing connected to Epstein.

Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton’s presidency, according to White House visitor records cited in news reports. Clinton said he cut ties with him around 2005, before the disgraced financier, who died from suicide in 2019, pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida.

The House committee subpoenaed the Clintons in August. They initially refused to testify but agreed after Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt.

The Clintons asked for their depositions to be held publicly, with the former president stating that to do so behind closed doors would amount to a “kangaroo court”.

“Let’s stop the games + do this the right way: in a public hearing,” Clinton said on X earlier this month.

The committee’s chair, James Comer, did not grant their request, and the proceedings will be conducted behind closed doors with video to be released later.

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s proceedings were briefly halted after representative Lauren Boebert leaked an image of Clinton testifying.

During the full day deposition, Clinton said she had no information about Epstein and did not recall ever meeting him.

Before the deposition, Comer said it would be a long interview and that one with Bill Clinton would be “even longer”.

News

Read Judge Schiltz’s Order

Published

1 day ago

February 26, 2026

Press Room

CASE 0:26-cv-00107-PJS-DLM

Doc. 12-1 Filed 02/26/26

Page 5 of 17

and to file a status update by 11:00 am on January 20. ECF No. 5. Respondents never provided a bond hearing and did not release Petitioner until January 21, ECF Nos. 10, 12, after failing to file an update, ECF No. 9. Further, Respondents released Petitioner subject to conditions despite the Court’s release order not providing for conditions. ECF Nos. 5, 12–13.

Abdi W. v. Trump, et al., Case No. 26-CV-00208 (KMM/SGE)

On January 21, 2026, the Court ordered Respondents, within 3 days, to either (a) complete Petitioner’s inspection and examination and file a notice confirming completion, or (b) release Petitioner immediately in Minnesota and confirm the date, time, and location of release. ECF No. 7. No notice was ever filed. The Court emailed counsel on January 27, 2026, at 10:39 am. No response was provided.

Adriana M.Y.M. v. David Easterwood, et al., Case No. 26-CV-213 (JWB/JFD)

On January 24, 2026, the Court ordered immediate release in Minnesota and ordered Respondents to confirm the time, date, and location of release, or anticipated release, within 48 hours. ECF No. 12. Respondent was not released until January 30, and Respondents never disclosed the time of release, instead describing it as “early this morning.” ECF No. 16.

Estefany J.S. v. Bondi, Case No. 26-CV-216 (JWB/SGE)

On January 13, 2026, at 10:59 am, the Court ordered Respondents to file a letter by 4:00 pm confirming Petitioner’s current location. ECF No. 8. After receiving no response, the Court ordered Respondents, at 5:11 pm, to immediately confirm Petitioner’s location and, by noon on January 14, file a memorandum explaining their failure to comply with the initial order. ECF No. 9. Respondents did not file the memorandum, requiring the Court to issue another order. ECF No. 12. On January 15, the Court ordered immediate release in Minnesota and required Respondents to confirm the time, date, and location of release within 48 hours. ECF No. 18. On January 20, having received no confirmation, the Court ordered Respondents to comply immediately. ECF No. 21. Respondents informed the Court that Petitioner was released in Minnesota on January 17, but did not specify the time. ECF No. 22.

5