Mercedes Maradiaga sat across from her 19-year-old son in the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles in complete devastation. Her son had at that point been incarcerated at the prison for two years and she had visited him every weekend. But that day in September 2024 was especially hard because it was their first visit since he had been beaten by officers earlier that week in a space in the…
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As a child in the 1950s and ’60s, Regina Martin became so used to the oil pumpjacks near her home that she assumed every child lived beside them. Everyone was made “sick to [their] tummy” by the sulfurous, rotten-egg smell that never seemed to leave, she thought. Only until she was grown did she begin to see a possible connection between growing up on top of the nation’s largest urban oil…
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Teachers in the second-largest school district in the nation have had to remove Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and Palestinian flags from their classrooms as part of so-called corrective actions taken following a complaint alleging discrimination. The changes occurred at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district has over half a million students and 1…
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In a World Cup-fueled union win, concessions workers at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles have won the right to walk off the job, should ICE pose a threat to their safety. The stadium’s 2,000 cooks, bartenders, dishwashers, servers, and attendants had a major piece of leverage this summer: eight scheduled World Cup matches. Their victory came days after a 96 percent vote to authorize a strike.
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One year after the Trump administration deployed thousands of federal agents to Los Angeles to arrest and detain people, immigrant rights activists are cautiously optimistic about the success of their organizing efforts. Although arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Southern California have dramatically dropped, organizers expect them to ramp up again in the future.
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As the World Cup nears, Los Angeles’s service workers — the people who staff hotels and keep the restaurants and bars going inside the city’s big stadium — have threatened to go on strike if the tournament becomes hunting grounds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They have good reason to be worried. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated that it may not routinely…
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