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FEATURING ROB BONTA - Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have continued to conduct indiscriminate and violent sweeps of immigrant spaces in Los Angeles, violating court orders barring the federal government from making arrests based on race, language, or vocation. 

Most recently, ICE Agents hid in the back of a truck rented from the private company Penske to swarm a Home Depot in Van Nuys, Southern California and snatched several people. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed, without any evidence, that the area is under control of a Salvadorian gang MS-13. 

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, almost at the rate of once a week, including over the federal government’s deployment of National Guard troops in LA.

I met Bonta at last week’s Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans and asked him about the lawsuits.

Special thanks to Free Speech TV for sponsoring my travel.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Welcome to the program. 

Rob Bonta: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Kolhatkar:I wanna talk about California taking on Trumpism. Your office has spent effort, money, and time and resources in challenging the Trump administration legally. How effective has that been for an administration that has openly defied rulings, judicial decisions, that doesn't respect legal rulings?

Bonta: Our lawsuits have been incredibly effective and in our lawsuits where we secure orders, the Trump administration has broadly been following them, um, we have brought lawsuits in weeks, more than one a week. Our North Star is the rule of law. If Trump breaks the law, we sue him. If he doesn't break the law, we don't sue him. 

If all we have is political grievance or ideological or policy difference, we don't go to court. We won't go to court. We can't go to court. The court will throw out our case. So, we only sue him when he breaks the law. In the 20 cases where a court has issued an order on a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, we've won 18 of the times. So we have a 90% success rate. We've spent $5 million of funding that the legislature and the governor gave us in the special session. And we have secured $168 billion of federal funding that Trump was trying to withhold. 

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