The long-empty buildings, part of a 110-year-old state mental hospital complex, will not be demolished but instead are being remodeled as new housing that combines stable living with wrap-around services for treatment of residents with drug addiction and mental health illnesses, authorities announced at a groundbreaking ceremony on Friday, March 6.

“This project is going to save lives. We are going to help people that need help. Instead of sitting empty, these buildings will be a place for recovery, care, and stability. This campus here in Norwalk is making history,” said State Sen. Bob Archuleta, D-Norwalk on Friday.

It is a $107 million project being built by Los Angeles County and various state agencies, with full support of the city of Norwalk. About $65 million comes from Proposition 1, approved by voters exactly two years ago to provide funds for behavioral health facilities with an emphasis on helping those suffering from mental illness and living on the street. The rest comes from various state and county grants.

The Los Angeles County Care Community is the first such project to be funded by 2024’s Proposition 1, which allows the state to fund mental health beds and treatment centers throughout the state.

Archuleta’s Senate Bill 1336 from two years ago, after being signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, paved the way for the state to lease the old buildings to L.A. County on 13 acres of the hospital property. The law allowed a lease for 55 years with a nonprofit or a local government to create housing and psychiatric treatment facilities.

There are 72,308 people living without a permanent shelter in Los Angeles County, according to the more recent homeless count numbers.

But its not enough just to find housing for about 72,000 homeless people in the county. Thats because surveys indicated at least 25% of the unhoused on the streets have a serious mental illness, such as psychotic disorders and schizophrenia. Thus, housing without behavioral treatment wont be successful, experts say.

A county report said the biggest barrier to providing mental health services to the unhoused is finding beds. Developing new facilities is difficult because of a lack of available land, the report concluded.

“One of the biggest challenges we face in Los Angeles County is that we simply do not have enough places where people can get the compassionate, competent mental health care they need,” said Fourth District Supervisor Janice Hahn in her opening remarks.

“Our hospitals are overwhelmed,” Hahn continued.” Too often people end up cycling from the streets to our emergency rooms and our jails. That is exactly why today is so important.”

The project does not requiring tearing down the old buildings but completely remodeling them.

“The public always says we should be using vacant buildings to create mental health facilities. And remodeling instead of building from the ground up is faster and cheaper,” said Hahn, who introduced the idea to Archuleta and the state.

The state-county partnership is innovative and was first seen as not doable, said Archuleta. But that changed when his bill was approved and signed by the governor and state agencies caught the vision and a county blueprint for their use.

“We here excited to partner with LA County by making this portion of our campus available. It begins a new chapter in the long history of this hospital,” said Stephanie Clendenin, director of the Department of State Hospitals.

Remodeling has already begun on two buildings, which will be completed by December 2027, said Mark Pestrella, director of L.A. County Public Works. More buildings will be finished in early 2028. “There is healing built into every detail,” he added.

The county is working with architects to remodel each building to turn them into modern interim and permanent living quarters with treatment services. He said the buildings are of concrete construction, which is a good thing. Some of the roadblocks include removal of asbestos, he said.

While touring one old building that once treated patients with mental health problems, Pestrella said the rehab job is one the county can do but it will not be easy. “It is a heavy duty lift,” he said.

Hahn’s office reported that the project offers three levels of care:

' Two locked mental health rehab centers for young adults ages 18 to 25. These will provide 32 beds within a secure, treatment-based setting for those patients with the highest level of mental health needs.

' One interim housing facility with 70 beds serving young adults. These are patients who are stable but require short-term housing along with wrap-around mental health treatment services.

' Two permanent housing facilities totalling 60 apartments for adults living with mental illness who previously were homeless. This population needs long-term housing and access to ongoing care.

' One building will provide a communal space for the residents of the two permanent apartments. Inside there will be a kitchen, a computer lounge and offices for case managers. The outside areas are for recreational activities that support healing and well-being.

The state-county partnership is seen as a model for more beds for mental health treatment for homeless Californians in other parts of the state, Hahn said.

“It is a model for counties across the state to follow,” she said. “Its success will spur the state to look at other vacant properties.”

Zobaidul Amin, 28, pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance in Anchorage on Thursday after the FBI took custody of him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he had been studying medicine and facing related charges, U.S. prosecutors wrote in a detention memorandum.

'Amin delighted in sexually abusing hundreds of minor victims over social media,' the document said. 'He bragged about causing victims to become suicidal and engage in self-harm. He shared hundreds of nude images and videos of minor victims all over the internet and encouraged other perpetrators to do the same.'

A federal grand jury indicted Amin in 2022 on charges including child pornography, cyberstalking and wire fraud. He adopted false identities, often posing as a teenager, to trick victims into sending him explicit images.

The investigation began when a 14-year-old Alaska girl reported her abuse to law enforcement, saying that after she had stopped communicating with him, he followed through on his threats by sending pornographic images of her to her friends and followers.

In executing dozens of search warrants and subpoenas, investigators eventually learned his identity and realized he had done similar things to hundreds of minor victims, prosecutors wrote. The only way to get him to stop demanding more images, Amin told the girls, was to recruit other victims, the document said.

'Because he was in Malaysia and his victims were primarily in the U.S., Amin viewed himself as untouchable by law enforcement,' prosecutors wrote. 'In one conversation, he told a minor victim that the ‘cops wont do anything, and the ‘cops wont track me down because I live no where near u.'

Efforts to extradite Amin to face charges failed, but with the assistance of the FBI, Malaysian authorities brought charges, the Justice Department said. He was released on bail during the proceedings, and eventually the U.S. succeeded in having him expelled from Malaysia. The FBI took him into custody and flew him to Alaska.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kyle Reardon on Thursday ordered that Amin remain in custody while his case proceeds.

A top Pentagon official said Anthropics dispute with the government over the use of its artificial intelligence technology in fully autonomous weapons came after a debate over how AI could be used in President Donald Trumps future Golden Dome missile defense program, which aims to put U.S. weapons in space.

U.S. Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael, the Pentagons chief technology officer, said he came to view the AI companys ethical restrictions on the use of its chatbot Claude as an irrational obstacle as the U.S. military pursues giving greater autonomy to swarms of armed drones, underwater vehicles and other machines to compete with rivals like China that could do the same.

'I need a reliable, steady partner that gives me something, thatll work with me on autonomous, because someday itll be real and were starting to see earlier versions of that,' Michael said in a podcast aired Friday. 'I need someone whos not going to wig out in the middle.'

The comments came after the Pentagon formally designated S an Francisco-based Anthropic a supply chain risk, cutting off its defense work using a rule designed to prevent foreign adversaries from harming national security systems.

Anthropic has vowed to sue over the designation, which affects its business partnerships with other military contractors.

Trump has also ordered federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude, though the Republican president gave the Pentagon six months to phase out a product thats deeply embedded in classified military systems, including those used in the Iran war.

Anthropic said it only sought to restrict its technology from being used for two high-level usages: mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons.

Michael, a former Uber executive, revealed his side of months-long talks with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a lengthy conversation with Silicon Valley venture capitalists Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya, co-hosts of the 'All-In' podcast.

A fourth co-host, former PayPal executive David Sacks, is now Trumps AI czar and was not present for the episode but has been a vocal critic of Anthropic, including for its hiring of former Biden administration officials shortly after Trump returned to the White House last year.

As talks hit an impasse last week, Michael lashed out at Amodei on social media, saying he 'has a God-complex' and 'wants nothing more than to try to personally control' the military. In the podcast, however, he positioned the dispute as part of a broader military shift toward using AI.

Michael said the military is developing procedures for enabling different levels of autonomy in warfare depending on the risk posed.

'This is part of the debate I had with Anthropic, which is we need AI for things like Golden Dome,' Michael said, sharing a hypothetical scenario of the U.S. having only 90 seconds to respond to a Chinese hypersonic missile.

A human anti-missile operator 'may not be able to discriminate with their own eyes what theyre going after,' but an autonomous counterattack would be a low risk 'because its in space and youre just trying to hit something thats trying to get you.'

In another scenario, he said, 'who could oppose if you have a military base, you have a bunch of soldiers sleeping, that you have a laser that can take down drones autonomously?'

In response to the podcast comments, Anthropic pointed to an earlier Amodei statement saying 'Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.'

Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, was sworn in last May and said he took over the militarys 'AI portfolio' in August. Thats when he said he began scrutinizing Anthropics contracts ' some of which dated from President Joe Bidens Democratic administration. Michael said he questioned Anthropic over terms of use that he deemed too restrictive.

'I need to have the terms of service be rational relative to our mission set,' he said. 'So we started these negotiations. It took three months and I had to sort of give them scenarios, like this Chinese hypersonic missile example. Theyre like, ‘OK, well give you an exception for that. Well, how about this drone swarm? ‘Well give an exception for that. And I was like, exceptions doesnt work. I cant predict for the next 20 years what (are) all the things we might use AI for.'

Thats when the Pentagon began insisting Anthropic and other AI companies allow for 'all lawful use' of their technology, Michael said.

Anthropic resisted that change, while its competitors ' Google, OpenAI and Elon Musks xAI ' agreed to them, though some still have to get their infrastructure prepared for classified military work, Michael said. The other sticking point for Anthropic was not allowing any mass surveillance of Americans.

'They didnt want us to bulk-collect public information on people using their AI system,' Michael said, describing the negotiations as 'interminable.'

Anthropic has disputed parts of Michaels version of the talks and emphasized that the protections it sought were narrow and not based on any existing uses of Claude. The next stage of the dispute will likely happen in court.

NEW YORK (AP) ' A Pakistani business owner who tried to hire hit men to kill a U.S. politician was convicted Friday in a trial that showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil.

As the Iran war unfolded in the Mideast, Asif Merchant acknowledged in a U.S. court that he sought to put an assassination in motion during the 2024 presidential campaign ' a plot that was quickly disrupted by American investigators before it had a chance to proceed.

A jury in Brooklyn convicted Merchant on terrorism and murder for hire charges.

The verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations followed a weeklong trial that included remarkable testimony from Merchant himself.

Merchant told the jury he was carrying out instructions from a contact in the Islamic Republics powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. According to Merchant, the handler never specified a target but broached names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who was also in the race for a time.

The Iranian government has denied trying to kill U.S. officials.

The nascent plot fell apart after Merchant showed an acquaintance what he had in mind by using objects on a napkin to depict a shooting at a rally. He asked the man to help him hire assassins. Instead, he was introduced to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording him, as had the acquaintance.

Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing 'some political person' and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.

'This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump ' instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,' U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement released after the conviction.

Merchants attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, didnt immediately reply to a message seeking comment.

Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the U.S. for his garment business.

Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme, Merchant said.

He maintained that he had to do his handlers bidding to protect loved ones in Iran. The defendant said he reluctantly went through the motions but thought hed be arrested and explain his situation to authorities before anyone was killed.

'I was going along with it,' he said, speaking in Urdu through a court interpreter.

Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didnt proactively go to authorities.

Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trumps life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the Butler gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trumps life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called 'unsubstantiated and malicious.'

When Merchant subsequently spoke to FBI agents to explore the possibility of a cooperation agreement, he didnt say he had acted out of fear for his family.

Prosecutors argued that he didnt back up a defense of acting under duress. Merchant sought to persuade jurors he simply didnt think the agents would believe him because they seemed to 'think that I am some type of super-spy,' which he said he was 'absolutely not.'

ATLANTA (AP) ' Georgia Republicans are pushing for more restrictions on local prosecutors, saying their investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis proves the moves are needed.

Willis in August 2023 obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an 'appearance of impropriety' stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor she had hired to lead the case.

Several of the state senators who backed a measure that passed the chamber on Friday are running for statewide office, with primaries set for May 19. The fate of legislation concerning local prosecutors is unclear in the House, which is less rawly partisan than the Senate, although still under GOP control.

The measure that passed the Senate adds more reasons that local prosecutors can be disciplined or removed by a commission created in 2024 to provide oversight to elected district attorneys in Georgia, as well as elected solicitors general who prosecute lower-level crimes in some counties.

The measure lets the commission discipline prosecutors for violating bar rules, for failing to notify crime victims of prosecutor actions, failing to comply with public records requests, or showing 'undue bias or prejudice' against the person being prosecuted.

'There was quite a bit of evidence presented to us, and testimony about conduct of prosecutors and really the lack of public faith in the independence and the impartiality of the prosecuting attorneys in the state,' said state Sen. Bill Cowsert, an Athens Republican running for attorney general.

Cowsert denied the measure was targeted at Willis, but Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has been endorsed by Trump in his run for governor, saw it differently.

'But Fani Willis lawfare of President Trump and his allies has highlighted why oversight by the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission is vital,' Jones said in a statement. 'This bill gives the PAQC the ability to go after DAs who refuse to be transparent, who engage in unprofessional attorney conduct, and who dont take seriously their duties to victims of crimes.'

Of 140 complaints filed with the commission in 2025, only three related complaints about the same solicitor general in a rural county, were not dismissed. Washington County Solicitor General Michael Howard resigned in July while under investigation, agreeing to never run for a prosecutor post again.

Earlier in the session, senators passed a bill to enhance the commissions investigatory power. But its a relatively meager outcome for the investigation, including an appearance by Willis herself in Decemnber when she engaged in a combative back-and-forth with Republican Sen. Greg Dolezal, who is running for lieutenant governor.

A second measure Friday was defeated that would have made district attorneys and some other county officials be elected on a nonpartisan basis in five Democratic-dominated metro Atlanta counties. That would have included Willis, a Democrat. Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican from Acworth, argued that nonpartisan officials would be more effective and efficient. But the measure failed after eight Republicans voted against it.

A third measure originally would have allowed Georgias attorney general to intervene in serious criminal cases without the district attorneys consent, but Democrats supported the measure after Cowsert watered it down to allow district attorneys to request assistance.

The state Senate, created the Special Committee on Investigations in January 2024 to examine allegations of misconduct against Willis, an elected Democrat, with regard to her prosecution of Trump.

Mardesich was born Aug. 28, 1924, in Los Angeles, and was the second child of immigrant parents Andrew and  Maria (née Chaidez) Fistonich. Her father, a native of the Isle of Hvar, in the Republic of Croatia, founded Star Fisheries in 1921 and was a pioneer of the commercial fish markets now located at 22nd Street in San Pedro.

Her mother escaped the reign of Pancho Villa when she emigrated from Mexico in 1918.

Mardesich, who died late last month, grew up in San Pedro and attended 15th Street Elementary, Richard Henry Dana Junior High and San Pedro High schools. She graduated high school in 1942.

Growing up, she often worked in the family business, along with her sister and brother.

After her high school graduation and during World War II, she worked for the then-combined Army Air Force at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro; the Naval Station at Terminal Island; the Regan Forge Agency, a family business at the foot of Knoll Hill next to Todd Shipyard in San Pedro; and at Starkist Fisheries on Terminal Island.

She married Nick Mardesich in 1952 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Pedro.

Their son and only child, Nick Mardesich Jr., was born in 1953.

While she was raised in Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, she became an active parish member of Holy Trinity after her marriage and worked alongside her husband in several business enterprises that culminated with their own fish market, American Fisheries, on 22nd Street. The family lived in the South Shores area of San Pedro, which is where she still lived at the time of her death on Feb. 24.

Mardesich was an advocate of local history and the community, a member of the Dalmatian American Club and a founding member of the San Pedro Peninsula Cancer Guild. With her sister, she was also a supporter of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

She shared her story as part of the town’s oral history project, “Stories of Los Angeles Harbor Area For Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” (You can find it at storieslaharborarea.com.) She shared memories of growing up in the Great Depression, as well as other stories, and often reflected on her parents’ immigrant history, friends said. Her father also helped sponsor immigrants form his native Croatia who were coming to the United States.

Mardesich was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, her son, and siblings Helen (Fistonich) DiMaggio and Andrew Fistonich, Jr.

She is survived by three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, along with many nieces and nephews.

“I think how wonderful and carefree we were,” she was quoted in the Random Lengths News on the occasion of her 100th birthday in 2024. “How wonderful everything was and our parents, not that we never thought of money, (but) it’s always having each other, loving one another, doing for one another.”

A funeral mass will take place at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 12, at Holy Trinity Church, 1292 W. Santa Cruz Street, in San Pedro. Visitation will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 11, at McNerney’s Mortuary, 570 W. Fifth St.

Private interment will be at Green Hills Memorial Park, 27501 S. Western Ave., in Rancho Palos Verdes.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent in her memory to Mary Star of the Sea High School, 2500 N. Taper Ave., San Pedro, 90731; the San Pedro Peninsula Cancer Guild, 1536 W. 25th St., No. 524, San Pedro, 90732; and St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital (dedication gift in her name), P.O. Box 1000, Dept. 142, Memphis, TN, 38148.

NEW YORK (AP) ' The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus is closing more department stores as it focuses on its most profitable businesses and trims debt during its Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring.

Saks Global Inc. said Friday it will close 12 more Saks Fifth Avenue stores and three more Neiman Marcus stores. The shuttered Saks stores include sites in Chevy, Chase, Maryland, Chicago and San Antonio, Texas. The stores will remain open until the end of May, a company spokesperson said.

The closures come on top of the eight Saks Fifth Avenue stores and one Neiman Marcus store it said it would close last month. The stores targeted for the first round of closing are expected to remain open until the end of April.

With plans to close a total of 24 department stores by spring, that would leave the parent company with 13 Saks Fifth Avenue stores ' including its flagship store on Manhattans Fifth Avenue ' as well as 32 Neiman Marcus locations and Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.

Saks also said 500 brands have resumed shipping, releasing close to $1.3 billion in retail receipts. That accounts for more than 80% of the inventory the company expects to receive from February through April, with momentum expected to continue, the company said.

The parent company is also in talks or has reached repayment agreements with about 175 suppliers.

Saks Global has been shrinking its business since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Last month, it said it will wind down 14 standalone Fifth Avenue Club personal styling suites, keeping three.

It also shuttered home goods retailer Horchow.com, a business that Neiman Marcus acquired in the late 1980s. As of Feb. 19, shoppers have been redirected to the home category on NeimanMarcus.com.

Its also closing down all but 12 of its Saks Off Fifth locations The remaining outlets will serve primarily as a selling channel for residual inventory from Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman.

WASHINGTON (AP) ' The Food and Drug Administrations embattled vaccine chief, Dr. Vinay Prasad, is once again leaving the agency ' the second time in less than a year that hes departed after controversial decisions involving the review of vaccinations and specialty drugs for rare diseases.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced the news to FDA staff in an email late Friday, saying Prasad would depart at the end of April. Makary said Prasad would return to his academic job at the University of California, San Francisco.

Prasads latest ouster follows a string of high-profile controversies involving the FDAs review of vaccines, gene therapies and biotech drugs in which companies have criticized the agency for reversing itself, in some cases calling for new trials of products previously greenlighted by regulators.

In July, Prasad was briefly forced from his job after running afoul of biotech executives, patient groups and conservative allies of President Donald Trump. He was reinstated less than two weeks later with the backing of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Makary.

A longtime academic and critic of the FDAs standards for drug reviews, Prasad has taken a seemingly contradictory approach to regulation since arriving at the FDA last May. On repeated occasions, Prasad has joined Makary in announcing steps to make FDA drug reviews faster and easier for companies. But he also has imposed new warnings and study requirements for some biotech drugs and vaccines, particularly COVID shots that have long been a target for Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before joining the Trump administration.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A six-year-old deaf boy who attended the California School for the Deaf at Fremont, alongside his mother and brother, have been detained and deported by federal immigration agents, according to California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

At a Friday, March 6 news conference at the Diagnostic Center on the campus of Cal State University Los Angeles, Thurmond demanded the immediate return of the deaf 6-year-old boy, his 5-year-old sibling and his 28-year-old mother to California.

A lawyer for the deaf child’s family said he spoke with the mother, Lesley Rodriguez Gutierrez, on Friday. She confirmed that she and her children have been deported to Colombia, three days after they attended a routine U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in in Hayward in Northern California.

The attorney, Nikolas De Bremaeker of Centro Legal de la Raza/ACILEP, said Friday the family is “traumatized and horrified by the past few days.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, in a Friday, March 3 statement, claimed that Rodriguez Gutierrez entered the country illegally in 2022.

“She received full due process and was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on November 25, 2024,” the DHS statement said.

Thurmond and Rodriguez Gutierrez’s attorney, though, stressed that Rodriguez Gutierrez was in compliance with her asylum application. She arrived in the U.S. four years ago and works as a child care worker and cleaner.

“She is under an order of supervision, which should have prevented their deportation. She has a removal order but there are other forms of relief available to her, and given the supervision order she should not have been removed in this way,” said De Bremaeker. “As long as you comply with (the supervision order), it grants certain protections ' those were not followed. It’s pulling the rug from under immigrants, who have been complying.”

De Bemaeker also said that Rodriguez Gutierrez has no criminal record. Her two children, the attorney added, immigrated to the U.S. with her.

“Here’s a mom who’s at an appointment with immigration officials, doing the right things, and they experience the worst punishment,” said Thurmond. “How cruel could you be towards this family? Again, this is a student who needs access to medical devices, (and in) a program where he can receive support and care ' not in some detention center, not in some cell, living in squalor and poor conditions.”

The 6-year-old child, who lived in Hayward, attended the California School for the Deaf in Fremont. The child was home sick from school Tuesday, March 3, the day of the ICE check-in appointment, which he attended with his mother, Thurmond said Friday. He was detained at the appointment alongside his mother without vital medical equipment to help him hear, Thurmond said.

“I am sick to my stomach that someone would abduct a 6-year-old child who has a disability when his mother was reporting to a center and doing what was right,” Thurmond said Friday. “This is a young man who is without the devices that allow him to deal with his disability and is no longer in an environment that supports him.”

De Bremaeker, the family’s attorney, and Thurmond said Friday that ICE officials he spoke with about the case lied about the family’s whereabouts in order to thwart their legal options.

The attorney told KTVU previously that advocates trying to locate the family were initially told they were in Louisiana or Washington State, when they were actually being held in Phoenix. That, De Bremaeker said, impeded efforts to submit emergency court filings to prevent their removal from the country without due process.

“This is no way for a democracy to work, with officials completely obstructing this family’s access to legal counsel,” De Bremaeker said Friday. “It is inhumane, illegal and unconstitutional for this to happen.”

Jeannette Zanipatin, director of policy and advocacy for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, said what happened is a moral outrage and profound abuse of power.

“This is not enforcement,” Zanipatin said. “It is plain cruelty. No government that claims to respect human rights should ever treat a mother and her children in this manner. Families should not be disappeared into the immigration detention system.”

The DHS spokesperson said Friday that “ICE does not separate families.”

'Parents are given a choice: They can be removed with their children or place them with a safe person they designate,” DHS said. “This is consistent with past administrations immigration enforcement. Gutierrez chose to be removed with her children, and they returned to their home on March 5.”

Thurmond, meanwhile, continued his call for the federal government to return the family back to Hayward. He specially called out Markwayne Mullen, the Oklahoma senator who was recently tapped by President Donald Trump as the new Secretary of Homeland Security after Kristi Noem was ousted from the position.

“Senator Mullen, you’ve shown that you’re a tough guy. Well if you’re a tough guy, get on the damn phone, call Donald Trump, and have this student released and returned so we can continue to provide care for this young man,” Thurmond said.

The state superintendent also noted that he is in contact with Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff about the situation.

MIAMI (AP) ' The top Justice Department prosecutor in Miami is considering criminal investigations of Cuban government officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The inquiry comes as President Donald Trump has raised the possibility of a 'friendly takeover' of the communist-run island.

Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, has created a 'working group' that includes federal prosecutors and officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to try to build cases against people connected to the Cuban government and its Communist Party, according to one of the people. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the effort.

It was not immediately clear which Cuban officials the office is targeting or what criminal charges prosecutors may be looking to bring.

The Justice Department said in a statement Friday that 'federal prosecutors from across the country work every day to pursue justice, which includes efforts to combat transnational crime.'

The effort is taking place against the backdrop of Trumps increasingly aggressive stance against Cubas communist leadership.

Emboldened by the U.S. capture of Cubas close ally, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump last month said his administration was in high-level talks with officials in Havana to pursue 'a friendly takeover' of the country. He repeated those claims this week, saying his attention would turn back to Cuba once the war with Iran winds down.

'They want to make a deal so bad,' Trump said of Cubas leadership.

While Cuba has faded from Washingtons radar as a major national security threat in recent decades, it remains a priority in the U.S. Attorneys office in Miami, whose political, economic and cultural life is dominated by Cuban-American exiles.

The FBI field office has a dedicated Cuba group that in 2024 was instrumental in the arrest of former U.S. Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha on charges of serving as a secret agent of Cuba stretching back to the 1970s.

In recent weeks, several Miami Republicans, in addition to Florida Sen. Rick Scott, have called on the Trump administration to reopen its criminal investigation into the 1996 shootdown of four planes operated by anti-communist exiles.

In a letter to Trump on Feb. 13, lawmakers including Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez highlighted decades-old news reports indicating that former President Raúl Castro ' the head of Cubas military at the time ' gave the order to shoot down the unarmed Cessna aircraft.

'We believe unequivocally that Raúl Castro is responsible for this heinous crime,' lawmakers wrote. 'It is time for him to be brought to justice.'

While no indictment against Castro has been announced, Floridas attorney general said this week that he would open a state-level investigation into the crime.

The Trump administration has also accused Cuba of not cooperating with American counterterrorism efforts, adding it alongside North Korea and Iran to a select few nations the U.S. considers state sponsors of terrorism.

The designation stems from Cubas harboring of U.S. fugitives and its refusal to extradite several Colombian rebel leaders while they were engaged in peace talks with the South American nation.

Richer reported from Washington.