Politics
From working with Black Panthers to calling for cease-fire, Barbara Lee stands by her beliefs
On a rainy January day, Rep. Barbara Lee wandered the campus of Mills College pointing out sites from her momentous past.
The leafy, seminary-like grounds in Oakland look different from when she attended. To her frustration, even the school’s name has been changed to Northeastern University Oakland.
But for Lee, her time on campus is preserved in amber — the years of student activism, her first trip to Africa, and a political awakening.
Rep. Barbara Lee gives a tour of her alma mater, Northeastern University Oakland. “I’m a Black woman in America; we always have to deal with stuff, because like Shirley Chisholm said, ‘These rules weren’t made for me,’’’ she said.
(Loren Elliott / For The Times)
It’s where she met Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and where she volunteered with the Black Panthers during the tumultuous late 1960s and early ’70s. Her work at the women’s college provided her first taste of Oakland politics, one that carried her to Congress and now animates her bid for the U.S. Senate against fellow Democratic Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Katie Porter, as well as Republican and former Dodger Steve Garvey.
“She is an organic leader who was a seed that came from the soil of the Oakland community, which has long cared deeply about doing right in society,” said retired Pastor Alfred J. Smith, 92, a famed local clergyman who led Allen Temple Baptist Church, which Lee has attended for decades.
Lee’s quarter-century serving in Congress has been defined by that desire to do right. At times it’s been a lonesome pursuit, but it’s one that she feels has, over the years, proved prescient.
Lee cast the sole vote in 2001 against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that gave then-President George W. Bush the power to wage war against the nations, people and organizations that aided the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that felled the World Trade Center towers.
Her support in 2003 for Medicare for all, to provide comprehensive healthcare to all Americans, was considered a relatively fringe position at the time but is now a common topic of debate in Democratic primaries.
Lee speaks during a televised debate on Jan. 22 in Los Angeles for candidates in the Senate race to succeed the late Dianne Feinstein.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
More recently, Lee, 77, called for a cease-fire the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, as Israel’s military began responding with attacks on the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based. Her top Democratic opponents, Schiff and Porter, both declined to take that position initially. Porter later came to support a cease-fire, while Schiff remains opposed to one.
During her time in Congress, Lee has represented one of the most liberal districts in the state if not the country, which gives her the freedom to stick to her progressive ideals and take tough, sometimes unpopular stands. But that shield also has been isolating, since issues that might be popular in Oakland and Berkeley may not be as closely embraced in less politically progressive areas of the state.
Though much of the nation sees California as a far-left haven, its residents hold a wide range of political views, which may explain in part why Lee has been languishing in recent opinion surveys on the Senate race. The latest polling from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies last month indicated that Schiff was backed by 21% of likely voters, compared with 17% for Porter and 13% for Garvey. Lee was in fourth, with the support of 9% of likely voters.
Schiff and Porter also have far larger national profiles and more sophisticated fundraising operations than Lee, said Ludovic Blain, executive director of the progressive California Donor Table, which has endorsed Lee.
From left, Reps. Barbara Lee, Adam B. Schiff and Katie Porter along with Republican Steve Garvey participate in a Senate debate last month in Los Angeles.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
“She and those of us who support her haven’t been able to pull together the funds needed to educate voters about her, especially younger voters,” Blain said.
Just nine Black people have ever been elected to the Senate. Only two, Lee is quick to remind people, were women. Now more than ever, she said, the Senate needs her experience — which includes living through America’s civil rights movement and the entrenched discrimination that still lingers more than half a century later; the daily challenges of single motherhood; being surveilled by the FBI as a young activist in Oakland; and facing death threats and accusations of being a traitor for opposing the war in Afghanistan.
“I’m a Black woman in America; we always have to deal with stuff, because like Shirley Chisholm said, ‘These rules weren’t made for me,’” Lee said.
Lee’s assertiveness has made Democratic leaders uncomfortable at times, including last fall when she criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom for saying he’d appoint a Black woman to the seat to replace the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein — but not any of the candidates already running in the 2024 Senate election, since that would provide an advantage. That took Lee out of consideration for an appointment.
“By advocating for herself, she never had a chance. The minute she spoke up she [disqualified] herself,” said Democratic consultant Doug Herman, who helped elect Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in 2022.
In the end, Newsom appointed Emily’s List Chief Executive Laphonza Butler, who later announced she wouldn’t run for a full term.
For Blain and other Lee allies, the goal was not to get a Black woman into that seat just to serve until the end of 2024 — but to have one win and serve an entire term.
“She did a great job of pushing, because the knots that Gavin tied himself up in needed to be exposed. He needed to be held accountable,” Blain said of Lee’s criticism of the governor.
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Lee’s political idealism and moral clarity rose from a life beset by heartache, personal injustice and misfortune.
Born in El Paso, Lee recalls often how her mother, Mildred, nearly died during childbirth. When Lee was a teenager, her family moved to the San Fernando Valley, where she became the first Black cheerleader at her high school after her mother urged her to enlist the support of the local chapter of the NAACP, the civil rights group.
Lee later became pregnant, and since abortion was then illegal in California — as it is now in many conservative states — her mother sent her back to Texas to cross the border with $200 to obtain an abortion in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
When she was just out of high school, she married an Air Force serviceman and moved to England, where they lived for two years before divorcing. She landed in the Bay Area with their two sons and began dating a man who abused her, she recounted in her autobiography, “Renegade for Peace and Justice: Congresswoman Barbara Lee Speaks for Me.”
Lee at a civil rights and nuclear disarmament march on the National Mall in Washington in 1978.
(Barbara Lee)
In the aftermath of this trauma, she floated in and out of homelessness — staying in cheap hotels to keep her young boys off the streets.
It was around this time when Lee arrived on Mills College’s campus and became enmeshed in the activist culture of the Black Panthers. By 1971 the organization had become famous — and heavily criticized — for its founders’ view that Black Americans needed to arm and protect themselves from law enforcement agencies targeting Black communities.
In the late 1960s, violent confrontations between the Black Panthers and police across the nation left organization leaders dead. The Black Panther Party’s armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality, and their armed protest at the state Capitol, led to a 1967 California law that made it illegal to carry a loaded firearm in public without a permit — a law signed by the Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.
Images of armed Black Panther Party members in leather jackets and berets outside the Capitol swept the nation and brought the group more fame, funding and notoriety.
Lee never formally joined the party but served as a community worker at a time when the group was pulling back from its more global revolutionary goals and focusing on volunteer work and building local political power in the East Bay Area.
Lee with her former boss, the late Rep. Ronald V. Dellums of Oakland, right, a progressive icon whom she would succeed in Congress, in an undated photo.
(Barbara Lee)
“It was mainly community service, and political awareness,” Lee said.
Previously, Lee had been an underclassman at Mills who brought her two sons to statistics class and led the Black Student Union. She had never registered with a political party, much less voted. Her focus — very much at the behest of her parents — was good grades and stability. She bought her first home near campus for about $19,000 through a federal program while she was still a student.
When she took a class that required students to volunteer on a 1972 presidential campaign, none of the candidates appealed to her.
“I said, ‘Flunk me, I’m not working in any of these guys’ campaigns,’” she recalled.
That winter, faced with the prospect of failing the class, she invited then-Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a New York Democrat, to speak on campus to the Black Student Union. Chisholm, described by the Oakland Tribune as “the dynamic little woman with the big voice,” spoke about the need for big countries to limit arms sales, stopping aid to countries that repress their citizens, and reducing discrimination in housing.
All of these subjects would become signature policy issues for Lee.
“America is at a crossroads today and it is going to take a combination of men, women, young people, Blacks, Chicanos and Indians — everything put together, not in a melting pot but in a salad bowl — to straighten it out,” Chisholm told the crowd.
After Chisholm announced her plans to run for president, Lee walked up to her and volunteered for her campaign. Eventually she rose to become the campaign’s organizing director in Northern California and one of the 28 delegates representing Chisholm at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach.
Lee on the campus of her alma mater, Northeastern University Oakland (formerly Mills College), last month.
(Loren Elliott / For The Times)
“Barbara had never even registered to vote before. But in the end they were to be responsible for a 9.6 percent vote for me in Alameda County,” Chisholm wrote in her memoir of Lee and another Mills College student, Sandra Gaines.
Lee and Gaines, Chisholm wrote, “could operate without having the aura of power and authority that an outside leader would have relied on.”
The 20-something Lee had begun to straddle the worlds of activism and more mainstream political work. The Chisholm campaign taught her how to organize and to be a sophisticated fundraiser — training that would stay with her. But the experience also alienated her from some of the Black Panthers activists she worked with, Lee recounted in her book.
“There were Black Panthers who accused me of being an FBI agent or simply part of ‘The System,’” she wrote.
She’d arrived in the Bay Area in the late 1960s as a single mom to two children and had survived a violent and abusive relationship. By the middle of the next decade, her activism and organizing work would help her overcome the pain she’d experienced and give her a sense of purpose from which to build.
Lee said the Panthers and her time at Mills College served as a bridge from a young adulthood marked by insecurity and grief, and molded the political worldview that would carry her into elected office.
“Being a part of the Black Panther movement toughened me up,” she wrote.
“It made me realize that racism, sexism, economic exploitation, poverty … are a by-product or result of a system of capitalism that relies on cheap labor and keeping people fighting each other rather than uniting and working together for the common good.”
Mourners gather for the funeral of Black Panther George Jackson at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland in 1971.
(Harold Adler / Underwood Archives / Getty Images)
This foray into politics launched a career in which she was able to maneuver inside the system as well. After Chisholm lost, Lee worked as fundraising coordinator for the 1973 Oakland mayoral campaign of Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, who took the Republican incumbent to a runoff but lost.
As Lee fell more fully into political work, she obtained a master’s degree in social work from UC Berkeley in 1975 and helped start Community Health Alliance for Neighborhood Growth and Education, or CHANGE Inc., a nonprofit that offered mental services to East Bay residents.
Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther Party chair, said Lee was driven to help people, whether inside the political system or outside it.
“You have a Joe Biden today, who would pretend that he is doing something, but he’s not. Barbara was true to her word,” Brown said. “She wanted to be elected so she could vote for things that would serve our interests. It wasn’t very complicated. It was very deep and very sincere.”
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During a recent drive to St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in west Oakland, Lee passed by large homeless encampments and boarded-up storefronts. The Black Panthers had served free breakfast for kids at the church — an experience that impressed upon her how government didn’t sufficiently care for the country’s neediest while focusing on military interventions abroad.
“It was always on my mind that what I saw then and now is because of systemic policies and institutional racism,” Lee said. “Back then I really felt I wasn’t just putting a Band-Aid on something.”
It was through political education classes, she said, that she’d come to understand “the circumstances that gave rise to this” system, but that “in the meantime, we had to help people survive.”
Lee poses outside St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, where she had participated in Black Panther Party events including serving free breakfast to kids.
(Loren Elliott / For The Times)
Lee eventually became chief of staff for Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), a progressive icon whom she would succeed in Congress. In the mid-1990s, after she had returned to Oakland to run a facilities management company, it was Dellums’ political network that lured her back to politics, urging — really cajoling — her to run for an open state Assembly seat.
“She pays attention to what people’s needs are and hears them. She’s intellectually brilliant at composing solutions for problems both at an individual and social scale,” said Lee Halterman, who spent 27 years working for Dellums and advised some of Lee’s early campaigns.
“We wanted to continue the coalition idea,” Halterman said, “that in districts that can send people of color to Congress, that should be a priority.”
In 1998, after Dellums resigned midway through his term, Lee won a special election for his House seat.
Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner from St. Augustine’s Church, Lee doused a slice of avocado toast in hot sauce and sipped a honey oat lavender latte. Three constituents of Ethiopian descent came up to thank her for her office’s help dealing with some paperwork problems on a citizenship application.
Lee in front of her former home in Oakland last month.
(Loren Elliott / For The Times)
There’s been less time in recent years for Lee to visit these moments from her past and connect with this history. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that she spent less time at in-person events. The Senate campaign has meant she’s traversing the state more when she’s not in Washington for votes.
She recalled a piece of advice from Dellums: “He would always say this to me: ‘Stand on the corner — by yourself. Just stand there. Sooner or later, everybody is going to walk to you if you’re on the right side of the issue.’”
Politics
Supreme Court weighs phone searches to find criminals amid complaints of ‘digital dragnets’
WASHINGTON — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.
He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.
What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.” The court will hear arguments on the issue on April 27.
Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.
Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.
“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.
The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal next week.
The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.
The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.
This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.
Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.
Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.
The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.
Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”
Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.
“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.
He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.
Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.
Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.
Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.
Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.
The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.
After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.
The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.
That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”
The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.
By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.
The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.
The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.
But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.
In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.
The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
Judge Troy Nunley was fed up.
Federal immigration officials had once again flouted his authority by keeping a man locked up in a California City detention center after Nunley ordered him released. When he was finally set free, the man was booted onto the street with no passport, driver’s license or other personal effects. The judge’s demand that the items be returned were met with silence.
And so on Tuesday, Nunley, the chief judge of the Eastern District of California, slapped Department of Justice attorney Jonathan Yu with an official sanction and a $250 fine.
In a scathing order, Nunley laid out why he was compelled to take such a rare step. The fine may have been less than some traffic tickets, but it’s nearly unheard for a judge to formally admonish a government lawyer.
By Yu’s own admission, he was drowning in work. In his order, Nunley recounted the attorney’s claim he’d been assigned more than 300 nearly identical cases in the last three months, all of immigrants in detention who argued they were being held without cause.
Court filings show many California cases involve longtime U.S. residents unexpectedly hauled off to jail after routine check-ins with immigration officials. One was an Afghan who’d helped the American war effort. Another a Cambodian grandmother of eight who fled Pol Pot’s killing fields as a girl nearly 50 years ago.
Until last year, most would have fought deportation on bond after a brief hearing with an immigration judge. Now, their only hope of release is to file a petition for writ of habeas corpus — a legal maneuver once typically reserved for death row inmates and suspected terrorists — inundating the country’s busiest federal courts with thousands of emergency suits.
The Trump administration attorney said he was trying to “triage” the situation, but Nunley found he repeatedly failed to comply, leaving people with the right to walk free stuck behind bars.
“The Court is not persuaded,” he wrote, issuing the sanctions.
The order came days after Nunley took the unusual step of announcing a “judicial emergency” in the district, which covers nearly half of California, stretching from the Oregon border to the Mojave Desert in the inland part of the state, including Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento.
In the last year, the Eastern District has received more petitions from immigration detainees than almost any other jurisdiction in the United States: More than 2,700 since January, compared to fewer than 500 last year and just 18 in 2024. Similar crises are playing out elsewhere, with federal courts in Minnesota briefly paralyzed amid the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz there last winter.
People detained are seen behind fences at an ICE detention facility in Adelanto, California on July 10, 2025.
(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
In an interview with The Times, Nunley said dealing with the surge of activity since last summer has been “like being hit over the head with a bat.”
“We’re up all night doing these cases,” he said.
So far this year, the Eastern District’s six active judges have ordered almost people 2,000 freed.
“The majority of the cases that we see are cases where people should not be detained,” Nunley said. “They should be receiving hearings to determine whether or not they are to remain in this country, and until they receive those hearings, they should be free.”
Since last July, the Department of Homeland Security has ordered that all immigrants it arrests are subject to “mandatory detention” — a policy that had previously only applied to those caught at the border.
The change came four days after President Trump signed a spending bill that earmarked $45 billion to expand the federal network of immigrant lockups.
“This has been a sea change in the way the government has read the law,” said My Khanh Ngo, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “Almost every judge who has looked at this has agreed these people should get bond, and yet thousands of people are still sitting in detention.”
Elizabeth Vega, 15, right, and Darlene Rumualdo, 15, from Torres High School join labor organizers, clergy leaders and immigrant rights groups to protest immigration raids nationwide at La Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles on January 23, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Longtime U.S. residents who might once have fought removal from home — where they can more easily gather evidence to support their case and confer with lawyers — are instead being held indefinitely.
Many have no criminal record. Some have been in the U.S. so long that the countries they came from no longer exist.
“People are locked up in the same facilities as people accused of crimes, people who’ve been convicted of crimes … and then you’re telling people, you have no shot of getting out,” Ngo said. “Detaining people and not giving them the chance to get out of detention is a way of coercing people to give up their claims.”
The habeas process can take weeks or months depending on the judge and the district.
“When the immigration cases dropped on our district, we got hit harder than any other outside West Texas,” Nunley said. “Initially we had more cases than anyone else.”
Today, data compiled by ProPublica and legal activist groups including the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative show almost a quarter of the roughly 30,000 active habeas petitions in the United States are in California courts. Nunley’s own tabulations show half the California cases are in his district, where a perfect storm of stepped-up enforcement, a large population of immigrant workers and a concentration of detention centers produced a flash flood of habeas petitions.
The cases rely on the Constitution’s guarantee of due process before being deprived of life, liberty or property. But according to court filings, in some instances the government has argued “the Fifth Amendment does not apply” to detained immigrants.
DOJ lawyers responding to the bids for freedom now regularly complain they’re being crushed under paperwork.
Judges accustomed to having government lawyers comply with their orders have been left fuming.
In California’s Central District, which includes L.A. and surrounding areas, Judge Sunshine Sykes wrote a fiery decision earlier this year that said the Trump administration is inflicting “terror against noncitizens.”
Sykes is one of several federal judges across the country that have tried to compel the government to resume bond hearings. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that decision in March, leaving the habeas system in place for now. But with challenges or recent decisions across multiple circuits, experts say the fight is fated for the Supreme Court.
“ICE has the law and the facts on its side, and it adheres to all court decisions until it ultimately gets them shot down by the highest court in the land,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times.
A woman holds a “ICE not welcome here!” sign at a vigil in San Pedro in January.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The lawyers fighting to free those jailed under the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy say they were not initially equipped for these legal battles because they used to be exceedingly rare.
Most federal judges had only seen a handful of habeas petitions before last summer — then suddenly they had hundreds of requests for urgent relief, according to Jean Reisz, co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic.
Reisz said there are efforts to get pro bono law groups trained on how to effectively argue habeas cases, “but it takes a while to get up to speed.”
A federal agent asks residents to move back after a shooting during an immigration enforcement operation in Willowbrook on January 21, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, Reisz said, lawyers are pushing judges who oversee the cases to act swiftly, since interminable procedural delays ensure people remain incarcerated.
“Most of the habeas petitions include a motion for temporary restraining orders, and that requires emergency decisions from the courts, which requires the courts to act very fast,” Reisz said.
In California’s federal district courts, the backlog remains thousands deep. Nunley said the system is struggling to keep up with the crush of cases.
“There’s nothing that says that noncitizens should not be entitled to due process,” Nunley said. “These are our people, they reside in our district. They’re entitled to the same due process that you and I are entitled to.”
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