Jose A. Del Real

But just before midnight Wednesday, a silence fell over the crowd.

For nearly seven hours, Puerto Ricans had gathered to protest their embattled governor, Ricardo Rosselló, in hopes that days of demonstrations and political unrest would culminate with his resignation.

But as the night dragged on, many had begun to worry that their activism would not be rewarded. Some believed he might not resign, perhaps plunging the country into further political divisions. And how would the crowds react if he did not step aside? A hot night. Mounds of empty beer cans. Weeks, months, years of pent-up energy.

When the governor finally began to speak, in a statement delivered on Facebook, hundreds of protesters huddled together to listen to their phones.

Some loud cursing, as he spoke at length about his accomplishments as governor.

Then, the sound of exultation pierced through the crowd: “RENUNCIÓ!”

A flurry of Puerto Rican flags flew into the air, strangers clasped arms, and friends began jumping in circles, singing “¡Oé! ¡Oé! ¡Oé!” Cars from all over the city began to honk and, as people danced, fireworks erupted overhead.

Some people cried, the emotion of recent days overcoming them as they realized something historic had happened. Their dissent mattered.

“We just changed history in Puerto Rico,” said Andrea Fanduiz, 25, a pharmacy technician who was among those celebrating. “Ricky the pig is gone,” she added, referring to the governor, “and whoever comes next had better listen to the streets.”

Throughout the night, the celebrations took on the feel of a music festival in parts of the old city, as some motorists blasted music from their car stereos. Some street corners resembled spontaneous dance parties as protesters celebrated the shift in Puerto Rico’s politics.

Over several days, the walls of Calle Fortaleza, the street leading to the governor’s residence, had gradually grown more and more covered with political graffiti that read like a wish list, with phrases like “Resign now!” and others too impolite to print.

But what would happen in the coming days remained unclear. Rosselló said his resignation would not take effect until Aug. 2, and many have already said his possible successor, Wanda Vázquez, is not a suitable replacement.

During a protest the night before the governor’s announcement, Alejandro Santiago Calderón, 30, had wondered if resignation would be enough. Would it be enough to convince him that the island was on a better path?

“This has to change, and it has to change from the top all the way to the bottom,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/san-juan-celebration.html" id="35b2c9e3-bd0e-38ae-af04-54f87a540722">The New York Times</a>.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — All day, the drums and the chants had blared through the streets outside La Fortaleza, the governor’s residence in San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital.

'We Just Changed History': Cheers and Tears in San Juan

But Vázquez has a number of powerful political opponents, complicating any succession, and the island was enmeshed in intense political machinations on Wednesday to determine who would lead it.

Though nothing was certain, here’s a look at the woman who is, at least legally, on deck.

— Who is Wanda Vázquez?

Vázquez has been the island’s secretary of justice, the equivalent of a state attorney general, since January 2017. She is a member of the New Progressive Party, like Rosselló, who appointed her. She worked as an attorney specializing in domestic and sexual violence before her appointment to the top post at the commonwealth’s Department of Justice. She was appointed to lead the office of women’s affairs in 2010.

— Does that mean she would be an advocate for women in Puerto Rico?

Some women’s groups opposed Vázquez during her seven years as the head of the island’s women’s affairs office. (It was supposed to be a 10-year term, but she left early to become secretary of justice.)

“A lot of feminist groups were very critical of Wanda Vázquez,” said Saadi Rosado of the Feminist Collective, an advocacy group. “She failed to address gender violence issues and was another piece of government bureaucracy.”

Women’s groups have been fighting the governor’s administration — at one point conducting a sit-in outside his office — demanding that the governor declare a state of emergency because of a rise in gender-based violence.

“She has not even spoken out about this state of emergency that we have been asking for a year,” Rosado said.

— What is Vázquez’s political standing in Puerto Rico?

Her relationship with the legislative branch is fraught, to say the least. Her time as secretary of justice has been punctuated by criticism that she has dragged her feet on investigating controversies involving members of her own party. She has clashed especially with Thomas Rivera Schatz, the president of the Senate. Vázquez came under intense legal scrutiny herself last year amid ethical complaints filed by the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor. In fact, a new term was trending on Twitter in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, echoing protesters’ demands for Rosselló to resign: #WandaRenuncia.

— What became of that controversy?

In November 2018, Vázquez faced allegations that she had improperly intervened on behalf of her daughter and son-in-law in a housing dispute. She was the first secretary of justice to face criminal charges, according to the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Dia. Vázquez was briefly suspended from her post as the investigation developed. But she was later cleared of any ethical violations by Judge Yazdel Ramos Colón, who said there was not sufficient evidence against her.

Vázquez was immediately reinstated to her post by Rosselló, a move that drew criticism because it came before the period of an appeal had passed.

The case at one point took a personal turn: Her husband, Jorge Díaz Reverón, a judge in Caguas, also came under investigation on matters related to the case. Díaz reportedly interviewed the agent investigating his daughter’s case and asked if he would be willing to testify on Vázquez’s behalf.

Díaz was ultimately cleared of any ethical violations by a Supreme Court judicial disciplinary committee.

— Could these political issues complicate things?

Definitely — especially Vázquez’s problems with the powerful Senate leader, Rivera.

He has been engaged in a public battle with Vázquez for over a year. He called for her resignation, accused her of committing crimes and criticized her handling of several cases. It began when Vázquez investigated allegations of corruption in the Senate leader’s office. The probe led to a federal indictment against a key Senate official, who was accused this year of submitting fake invoices that benefited Rivera’s political allies.

That was when a special counsel’s office, an office over which Rivera is believed to have influence, began the investigation involving Vázquez and her family.

The bad blood between the two politicians has long played out in the local news. Rivera has called Vázquez “the secretary of nothing.”

If Rosselló were to resign, would the Senate president be willing to see her become governor?

— Is there another succession scenario?

There are plenty of them. Puerto Rico’s constitution calls for the secretary of state to become governor in the event of a resignation. That can’t happen at the moment because the secretary of state recently resigned over his participation in the chat exchange at the center of the scandal that has enveloped the governor. Some have suggested that Vázquez, if she became governor, could immediately ask the legislative assembly to confirm a new person to the secretary of state’s position — and then hand the governorship over to him or her.

And it is also possible that the governor could announce he will stay in place until a new secretary of state is confirmed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/puerto-rico-wanda-vasquez-governor.html" id="2ccacf07-fa24-38fa-a33b-b8a2159a3658">The New York Times</a>.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — After more than a week of political turmoil in Puerto Rico, calls are escalating for Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló to resign. In line to succeed him is Wanda Vázquez, the secretary of justice.

Who is Wanda Vázquez, Who is in Line to Become Puerto Rico's Next Governor?

“We kept running the tub, we turned on the sink, we flushed the toilet. All the water was coming out dirty,” Moralez said.

For more than a year, discolored water has regularly gushed from faucets in the family’s bathroom and kitchen, as it has in hundreds of other households in Willowbrook, California, an unincorporated community near Compton in South Los Angeles.

The brown water, provided by the Sativa Los Angeles County Water District, first drew public outrage and local news media attention last year when customers began protesting over unexplained stomach pains and skin so itchy it had scarred from the scratching.

Elected officials were soon jolted into action. Sativa’s elected board of directors was disbanded and Los Angeles County took control of the water district. The county is working furiously to replace dilapidated pipes and wells, and this week began new construction to reinforce Sativa’s system. But problems persist. Overhauling the district has taken far more time and money than anyone had expected because, by the time the county stepped in last fall, the district’s infrastructure was on the brink of collapse.

Sativa is just one case, which erupted into public view after decades of neglect. The rot in California’s water system probably extends far beyond it.

As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — 1 of every 3 — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates drinking water. These troubled districts, which include Sativa, often operate in mostly poor areas on thin budgets. With little oversight, they face problems like bankruptcy, sudden interruptions in water capacity and harmful toxins being delivered through taps.

Nationally, political leaders have struggled to reach consensus over how to rebuild America’s aging infrastructure, including the country’s drinking water systems, which the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a D rating in its 2017 report. In California, the abundance of small water districts, a fraught culture around water rights, and significant oversight gaps have exacerbated those problems.

California has one of the most byzantine drinking water systems in the country, and even in urban parts of the state some water systems are so small they struggle to sustain their maintenance budgets. The small districts are overseen by local boards — often with little to no expertise in water management — making it difficult for the state to keep track of them.

Already, more than 300 public water systems in the state are out of compliance with federal drinking water safety standards, according to publicly available data, and an estimated 1 million Californians are exposed to unsafe drinking water each year. Those are the ones the state knows about because their water quality has been tested as unsafe.

Often, the state water board does not collect enough information from public water systems to catch mismanagement until the systems are already failing, or are approaching that threshold like Sativa, according to interviews with several officials. The state agency does not keep a list of suspected high-risk systems. The limited information that is collected from water districts is often scattered across agencies and levels of government, including county boundary commissions, which may be reluctant to become involved or lack the authority to do so.

“We didn’t know how bad the problems were,” said Russ Bryden, an engineer with the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Works, who took over day-to-day management of Sativa as an emergency administrator last fall. “You could not have known from the outside. Sativa was not supposed to be this bad.”

When Los Angeles County took control, officials discovered that the problems at Sativa ran even deeper than anyone knew. They found the system needed more than $10 million in urgent repairs to protect against it shutting down entirely, according to Bryden. They uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills and debts. And a rash of suspicious spending in 2017 had left the district with just $10,000, according to balances reviewed by The New York Times.

County officials have attributed the discoloration of the water to high levels of manganese from old pipes, but county and state health officials say the water in the Sativa district is safe to drink; the brown color is classified as a secondary, aesthetic violation, according to federal standards.

But no one wants to drink brown water, and residents have lost faith in the district’s promises that the water is safe to use. To them, the problems at Sativa are just another example of the growing inequality they see across California.

The seamstresses, chauffeurs and domestic workers who live in Willowbrook, a community in the district that is primarily Hispanic and where 70% of residents speak Spanish at home, maintain neat front-yard patios where bright purple and yellow flowers bloom. But their roads are lined with potholes, vacant businesses are a common sight and many street signs are so faded they are difficult to read.

Although 1 in 4 residents there live in poverty, those who do not want to drink from their taps — which they no longer trust, even when the water is not brown — spend more money on drinking water than many families do in Beverly Hills, 20 miles away. Moralez, a home health aide, estimates her family spends about $150 a month on bottled water in addition to the family’s $67 monthly payment to the water district, which it still must pay. The family lives on a single income.

Expecting another surge of brown water caused by the new construction this week, the county stockpiled huge amounts of bottled water to hand out to residents.

The distrust among residents was decades in the making, but there were few legal pathways for government intervention.

The district was issued various citations over the years, which were later enumerated in the state water board’s own October 2018 order taking control of the district, including for repeatedly failing to adequately test water quality.

Staff at the county commission that reviews municipal services began to raise alarms about Sativa’s management practices as early as 2005. By 2012, after another service review, the commission discovered that Sativa had not carried out any financial audits in seven years, and it began to push for the district to consolidate with another water utility, said Paul Novak, the executive officer at the Los Angeles Local Agency Formation Commission.

“They had no water meters, they had no computer systems, there were some extreme nepotism issues, and they were giving illegal holiday bonuses,” Novak said. “We don’t go into an agency and say, ‘You need to be dissolved or consolidated.’ But when you’re dealing with people who are, at best, incompetent, the rules have to change.’”

Despite signs of mismanagement, the agency’s commissioners feared becoming mired in a costly battle to dissolve the district.

In November 2015, E. coli was detected in one of Sativa’s three wells and it was shut down after a state recommendation, leaving Sativa with barely enough supply to meet its needs.

All along, the district’s leadership suffered from infighting and poor financial decision-making, said Elizabeth Hicks, who served on Sativa’s board of directors from 2003 to 2015. She described a toxic culture on the board.

“It was in shambles,” she said.

When the county took over day-to-day management of Sativa in November, Bryden, the emergency administrator, said he could not find any financial bookkeeping, including invoices, purchase orders or receipts. The county is conducting a broader audit of the district’s finances, which will be released later this summer.

The financial situation appears to have worsened in recent years. In June 2015, Sativa had nearly $600,000 in an investment fund it used as a savings account; by late 2018, there was just $10,000 left, yet the district had amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid bills and debts. A loan from City National Bank for $1.6 million was taken out during that time to build a new well, but nearly $1 million remains unaccounted for.

Luis Landeros, the Sativa board president from 2016 to 2018, declined to comment. None of the other board members who served during that time responded to multiple requests for comment. Sativa’s former general manager, Thomas Martin, told the Los Angeles Times in September that he did not support the state’s ultimate decision to take over the troubled water district: “I was hoping it would be a different outcome,” he said. “We disagree with the legislators’ decision. We wish the best of luck to the customers.”

As the district fell into deeper financial despair over the past few years, Julia Hernandez and her family in Willowbrook became fearful of showering in the water because of intense itching they felt afterward. Hernandez said that last summer she gave her 4-year-old grandson a bath and he broke out in hives severe enough that she had to take him to a doctor.

On a recent day, she pointed to pockmarks on her own skin, leftover scars from scratching.

The inside of her bathtub is sometimes coated with wet silt, she said. Her washing machine sometimes gets clogged and last year she had to replace her boiler, which cost her family $700.

“You put your white clothes in the washer and they come out brown,” she said.

In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a budget plan in June that includes $130 million annually to help distressed water systems in the state. The money will help small districts fund desperately needed repairs.

But it is unclear how much that would help improve the oversight of troubled districts before they become dysfunctional and even more costly to repair.

For now, Los Angeles County has borne the brunt of the financial costs involved with rehabilitating Sativa. Of the estimated $14 million in repairs necessary, the county will probably pay for about $8 million. The rest will be covered by continued revenue — clients must still pay their bill despite the brown water — and state grants. The county is currently looking for a water utility to take Sativa over permanently, most likely a privately owned water company.

Many people in the Sativa district, even now, are skeptical that things will improve.

“People think this is the ghetto, so they don’t care,” Moralez said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-californians-taps-how-1000-water-systems-may-be-at-risk.html" id="0a9bb593-4499-3f9d-a1ea-e8bc7219f204">The New York Times</a>.

The Crisis Lurking in Californians' Taps: How 1,000 Water Systems May Be at Risk

COMPTON, Calif. — It was bath time and Rosalba Moralez heard a cry. She rushed to the bathroom and found her 7-year-old daughter, Alexxa, being doused with brown, putrid water.

There are plenty of them. Puerto Rico’s constitution calls for the secretary of state to become governor in the event of a resignation. That can’t happen at the moment because the secretary of state recently resigned over his participation in the chat exchange at the center of the scandal that has enveloped the governor. Some have suggested that Vázquez, if she became governor, could immediately ask the legislative assembly to appoint a new person to the secretary of state’s position — and then hand the governorship over to him or her.

For more than a year, discolored water has regularly gushed from faucets in the family’s bathroom and kitchen, as in hundreds of other households here in Willowbrook, California, an unincorporated community near Compton in South Los Angeles.

Elected officials were soon jolted into action. Sativa’s elected board of directors was disbanded and Los Angeles County took control of the water district. The county is now working furiously to replace dilapidated pipes and wells, and this week began new construction to reinforce Sativa’s system. But problems persist. Overhauling the district has taken far more time and money than anyone initially expected because, by the time the county stepped in last fall, the district’s infrastructure was on the brink of collapse.

Sativa is just one case, which erupted into public view after decades of neglect. The rot in California’s water system likely extends far beyond it.

As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — 1 out of every 3 — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates drinking water. These troubled districts, which include Sativa, often operate in mostly poor areas on thin budgets. With little oversight, they face problems ranging from bankruptcy to sudden interruptions in water capacity, to harmful toxins being delivered through taps.

California has one of the most byzantine drinking water systems in the country, and even in urban parts of the state some water systems are so small they struggle to sustain their maintenance budgets. The hodgepodge of small districts are overseen by local boards — often with little to no expertise in water management — making it difficult for the state to keep track of them.

Already, more than 300 public water systems in the state are out of compliance with federal drinking water safety standards, according to publicly available data, and an estimated 1 million Californians are exposed to unsafe drinking water each year. Those are the ones the state knows about because their water quality has already been tested as unsafe.

Often, the state water board does not collect enough information from public water systems to catch mismanagement until the systems are already failing, or are approaching that threshold like Sativa, according to interviews with several officials. The state agency does not keep a list of suspected high-risk systems. The limited information that is collected from water districts is often scattered across agencies and levels of government, including county boundary commissions, which may be either reluctant to become involved or lack the authority to do so.

Although 1 in 4 residents here live in poverty, those who do not want to drink from their taps — which they no longer trust, even when the water is not brown — spend more money on drinking water than many families do in Beverly Hills, 20 miles away. Moralez, a home health aide, estimates her family spends about $150 a month on bottled water in addition to the family’s $67 monthly payment to the water district, which it still must pay. The family currently lives on a single income.

Anticipating another surge of brown water caused by the new construction this week, the county stockpiled huge amounts of bottled water to hand out to residents.

All along, the district’s leadership suffered from infighting and poor financial decision-making, said Elizabeth Hicks, who served on Sativa’s board of directors between 2003 and 2015. She described a toxic culture on the board.

The financial situation appears to have only worsened in recent years. In June 2015, Sativa had nearly $600,000 in an investment fund it used as a savings account; by late 2018, there was just $10,000 left, yet the district had amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid bills and debts. A loan from City National Bank for $1.6 million was taken out during that time to build a new well, but today nearly $1 million remains unaccounted for.

Luis Landeros, the Sativa board president between 2016 and 2018, declined to comment. None of the other board members who served during that time responded to multiple requests for comment. Sativa’s former general manager, Thomas Martin, told the Los Angeles Times in September that he did not support the state’s ultimate decision to take over the troubled water district: “I was hoping it would be a different outcome,” he said. “We disagree with the legislators’ decision. We wish the best of luck to the customers.”

But it is unclear, however, how much that would help improve the oversight of troubled districts before they become dysfunctional and even more costly to repair.

For now, Los Angeles County has borne the brunt of the financial costs involved with rehabilitating Sativa. Of the estimated $14 million in repairs necessary, the county will likely pay for about $8 million. The rest will be covered by continued revenue — clients must still pay their bill despite the brown water — and state grants. The county is currently looking for a water utility to take Sativa over permanently, most likely a privately owned water company.

Who is Wanda Vázquez, and Will She Be Puerto Rico's Next Governor?

<h1>LOS ANGELES — Using machetes, knives and baseball bats, members of the criminal MS-13 gang killed their victims, dismembered their bodies and threw their remains into a canyon in the Angeles National Forest, according to a sweeping indictment unsealed Tuesday by federal authorities in Los Angeles. In one instance, they said, members of the gang ripped out a victim’s heart.</h1>

The indictment against the 22 members of the “Fulton Clique,” a unit of MS-13 operating in Los Angeles, lists crimes ranging from vandalism and drug trafficking to racketeering to murder, some dating back to 2017. All 22 defendants are in custody.

The charges are the culmination of a yearlong investigation by local and federal law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI.

“We have now taken off the streets nearly two dozen people associated with the most violent arm of MS-13 in Los Angeles, where the gang is believed to have killed 24 people over the past two years,” Nick Hanna, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. The charges issued by the grand jury cover seven of those killings.

The indictment opens a window into how MS-13 operates in the Los Angeles region, through a series of “cliques” that each lay claim to a specific neighborhood. Much of the violence detailed in the indictment was directed against members of rival gangs who were suspected of transgressing against MS-13 in some way. But in at least one instance noted in the indictment, gang members who were trying to kill a member of a rival gang accidentally shot an unaffiliated bystander instead.

MS-13 as a criminal operation typically makes money by selling narcotics and by extorting businesses, both legal and illegal. The indictment notes that, often, the prime targets for MS-13 extortion are immigrants who are in the country illegally and who are fearful of turning to law enforcement for help.

“The greatest tragedy in these cases is that these young victims likely left their homelands hopeful that, in the United States, they would find safety and prosperity,” said Jackie Lacey, the district attorney for Los Angeles County, in a statement.

President Donald Trump has often cited the danger posed by MS-13. He has also asserted that the violence committed by groups like MS-13 is being brought to the United States by immigrants. But the organization was founded in the U.S. and has deep roots in the country. MS-13’s first iteration, Mara Salvatrucha, originated in the Los Angeles region in the 1980s and quickly developed a reputation for excessive and gruesome use of violence.

Over time, the indictment notes, the organization developed a foothold in the California prison system, and it gradually spread across Central America as members were deported from the United States, particularly to El Salvador, where many early members were originally from.

MS-13 has become a transnational criminal gang, with more than 10,000 members regularly operating in the United States, and tens of thousands more in Latin America, according to Justice Department estimates.

Of the 22 defendants, 16 would be eligible for the death penalty if convicted in connection with six of the seven murders in the indictment, which were committed “in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner” involving “torture or serious physical abuse to the victim.”

The gang members listed in the indictment are said to be known by nicknames like “Delito” and “Omisidio” — Spanish for “crime” and “homicide.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/ms13-la-murders-indictment.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

MS-13 gang members charged with brutal murders in Los Angeles

The charges are the culmination of a yearlong investigation by local and federal law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI.

Judge Haywood Gilliam of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who ruled at once on two pending lawsuits against the administration, stated President Donald Trump’s efforts to shift Defense Department funds toward the border project were “unlawful.”

The decision follows an earlier temporary injunction, issued last month, in which Gilliam said the White House’s efforts did not “square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic.”

The White House had sought to direct $2.5 billion from counterdrug programs in the Defense Department toward building the wall.

The president’s critics, who said he was overstepping his constitutional authority, denounced that action, which followed a monthslong impasse between the White House and Congress, and a partial government shutdown.

A pair of lawsuits soon followed: one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition; and the other filed by California and 19 other states.

Gilliam issued decisions on both cases Friday. Combined, the rulings prevent the use of the funds on projects in El Paso, Texas; Tucson and Yuma, Arizona; and El Centro, California.

The president’s critics applauded the decision.

“All President Trump has succeeded in building is a constitutional crisis, threatening immediate harm to our state,” Attorney General Xavier Becerra of California said.

Gloria Smith, an attorney at the Sierra Club, said in a statement released after the decision: “We applaud the court’s decision to protect our Constitution, communities, and the environment today. We’ve seen the damage that the ever-expanding border wall has inflicted on communities and the environment for decades.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

US Judge blocks Trump plan to shift $25 billion to pay for border wall

LOS ANGELES — A federal judge in Northern California on Friday permanently blocked the Trump administration from using $2.5 billion in contested funding to build barriers along the United States’ southwestern border, dealing a blow to the White House’s efforts to fund a border wall without congressional approval.

U.S. Judge blocks Trump plan to shift $2.5 billion to pay for border wall

Judge Haywood Gilliam of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who is overseeing a pair of adjacent lawsuits filed against the administration, wrote that the administration’s efforts likely overstep the president’s statutory authority.

The legal challenges were filed shortly after Trump declared a national emergency along the southwest border with Mexico in February.

The move by the president followed a two-month standoff with Congress over funding to build a long-promised barrier wall there.

Judge blocks part of Trump's plan to build border wall

President Donald Trump’s efforts to build a wall along the southwest border hit a roadblock Friday evening when a federal judge in California granted a preliminary injunction against the administration that prevents it from redirecting funds from other agencies toward the barrier.

Five cases of measles are being investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Though vaccination rates are typically high in California, a single case can easily spread — not only to those who are not vaccinated, but also to infants who cannot yet receive immunization and to elderly patients with suppressed immune systems.

The Public Health Department said the transmissions are the first confirmed in the county this year. The department believes additional exposures may have occurred in April at Los Angeles International Airport, at several buildings on the University of California, Los Angeles campus, at a library at the California State University in Los Angeles, and at several restaurants near Glendale.

Officials did not indicate the ages of those infected but said the majority of individuals were unvaccinated.

Nationally, there have been 626 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states so far this year, already the second-highest number since 2000. And the numbers are growing rapidly. In the last week, 71 new cases were confirmed. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesman said Tuesday that the agency is expecting the number of cases in 2019 to exceed 2014, when there were 667 cases.

It does not have to be this way, say physicians and public health officials: The United States declared measles “eliminated” in 2000, meaning that it was no longer endemic because of the country’s strong vaccination system.

But cases still occur among people who are not vaccinated, and measles can be carried into the United States from other countries.

Convincing individuals and communities who oppose vaccination to get immunized has proved difficult for some political leaders. In New York City earlier this month, amid a growing crisis, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a public health emergency, requiring residents of some Brooklyn neighborhoods to receive the measles vaccine.

In California, there have been 23 confirmed cases of measles so far this year, according to the most recent numbers available through the state Department of Public Health. That number is expected to grow, as well.

A single measles case can quickly spiral into an outbreak, especially because people with measles might not know they have the illness for several weeks before they start exhibiting symptoms.

In an outbreak in Butte County in Northern California this year, a single individual transmitted measles to eight other people across several counties.

People who do contract measles often eventually seek medical care at hospitals, where they can potentially transmit the illness to other patients, especially those with compromised immune systems. Infants typically do not receive measles vaccinations until they are about 1 year old and therefore are highly vulnerable.

“The best protection for infants is to have all of the family members vaccinated,” said Dr. Karen Smith, director of the California Department of Public Health. “One of the things we’re doing very, very aggressively is working with hospitals particularly to make sure they are asking about travel when someone comes in with symptoms that could be measles.”

Though it is rare, people who have been vaccinated have been known to develop measles, typically because their immune system is compromised in some way. Elderly people are often at high risk, as are patients who take medication that affects the immune system, like those being treated for arthritis.

In 2015, a single infected visitor to Disneyland in Anaheim led to a 147-case outbreak across California and several other states.

“Twenty percent of the adults who got measles in that outbreak were hospitalized. Measles is not a benign condition,” Smith said. “In adults, it can cause an inflammation of the brain just as it can in children, and that can be severe, and it can leave adults with a long-term intellectual disability.”

But medical recommendations regarding vaccination have been rejected by some parents who are skeptical of the accepted science. Some believe immunization may even be harmful, which goes against medical consensus.

The 2015 outbreak in California motivated Leah Russin, executive director of Vaccinate California, who lives in Palo Alto, to become a pro-vaccination activist. As a new mother during that time, she learned that some parents were opting out of vaccination, which made her deeply anxious about the health of her baby.

Russin said she strongly believes people have the right to make their own parenting decisions. But she said vaccination is about protecting the most vulnerable, not about parenting trends.

“If you want to nurse your child until he’s 15, fine! That’s not going to impact anybody else. If you want to co-sleep, talk to your doctor about how to do it safely. That’s your choice,” she said. “But vaccinating goes beyond that. Vaccinating affects your community.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f0ac2503-0761-3625-a63f-cb1a6ea72452" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/measles-outbreak-los-angeles-county.html">The New York Times</a>.

Measles outbreak declared in Los Angeles county

LOS ANGELES — Public health officials in Los Angeles have declared a measles outbreak in the county, making it the latest metropolitan area to be hit by the illness and part of a national surge in cases rapidly approaching record numbers.

<h1>For nearly a year, community members and activists have demanded police accountability for the death of Stephon Clark, 22, who was killed last March by officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet. </h1>

The two officers had been dispatched to investigate a routine vandalism complaint. Within 10 minutes of their arrival, after a brief pursuit, Clark was dead.

The shooting sparked waves of protests in Sacramento that shut down busy streets, disrupted sporting events and overtook City Council meetings. Clark’s death took on national significance amid continuing tensions over discriminatory policing in black neighborhoods and excessive use of force by police officers.

“Was a crime committed? There’s no question that a human being died,” District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Saturday in Sacramento. “But when we look at the facts and the law, and we follow our ethical responsibilities, the answer to that question is no. And as a result, we will not charge these officers.”

Schubert said the officers had probable cause to stop and detain Clark. She added that police officers are legally justified in using deadly force “if the officer honestly and reasonably believes” he is in danger of death or injury.

“We must recognize that they are often forced to make split-second decisions,” she said. “We must also recognize that they are under tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances.”

The officers fired their weapons 20 times in Clark’s direction within seconds of turning a blind corner. “Both officers believed that he was pointing a gun at them,” Schubert said. She added that police video showed Clark was “advancing” on the officers.

Clark was later found to be unarmed; his cellphone was found under his body.

An autopsy released by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in May found at least seven bullets hit Clark.

A comprehensive analysis of police video footage by The New York Times found that gunfire continued after Clark had fallen to his hands and knees. Six of the seven shots most likely hit Clark as he was falling or was already on the ground, according to The Times’ analysis. Three minutes passed after the shooting before police identified themselves to Clark, and he did not receive medical attention for six minutes.

Black activists have expressed long-simmering frustrations about how their neighborhoods have been policed by the Sacramento Police Department and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

After the shooting, the Police Department sought to swiftly quell public outrage. The department released body camera footage within days of the shooting. Daniel Hahn, the city’s first black police chief, reiterated that the department required training related to race-based discrimination and de-escalation tactics. The next month, the department issued new guidance about when officers can mute their body cameras.

In July, the department also instated a foot-pursuit policy that instructs officers to weigh “whether the need for apprehension justifies the risk to the safety of the officer(s), the public, and the fleeing suspect.”

Hahn and the department have not commented on Mercadal’s and Robinet’s actions specifically. The department did not return a request for comment Saturday.

Timothy Davis, the president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association, said in a statement Saturday that the case had seen unprecedented levels of transparency and oversight.

“Officers have faced volatile life-and-death situations since the inception of policing,” Davis said. “The officers in this case were clearly afraid for their life, and were legally justified in their use of force. We will continue to review our policies and procedures to find ways to reduce tragic outcomes in the future.”

In January, Clark’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city and the two officers.

During her presentation, Schubert noted that Clark had been accused of domestic violence days before his death. A review of his cellphone, conducted by the California Department of Justice, found text messages suggesting a tense relationship between Clark and the mother of one of his children.

The review also found that he had researched how to commit suicide, she said.

“All of this shows us that many things were weighing heavily” on Clark on the day of his death, Schubert said. She added that the facts were uncomfortable but relevant to her legal recommendation not to charge the officers because they would be relevant to a jury.

The officers, as she noted, did not know any of this when they were searching the neighborhood for vandals.

But even with that rationale, the district attorney’s presentation did not sit well with Clark’s family.

During a news conference Saturday, Clark’s mother, Sequette Clark, said “we’re outraged” that the district attorney decided not to prosecute the officers. She blasted Schubert for delving into details she said were irrelevant to the officers’ conduct, including personal text messages and a toxicology report showing that Clark had alcohol, codeine, marijuana, cocaine and Xanax in his system.

“She wants to go on a smear campaign on his character and his actions,” Clark said. “That is not a permit to kill him.”

Tanya Faison, who leads the local Black Lives Matter group, said in a statement released on Twitter, “I’m disgusted and it’s disrespectful. He was completely disrespected. The mother of his child was completely disrespected.”

On Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom called for criminal justice reforms to improve relations between the police and “the communities they serve.”

“We need to acknowledge the hard truth — our criminal justice system treats young black and Latino men and women differently than their white counterparts,” he said. “That must change.”

Anticipating more protests over the announcement, Schubert sought to strike a conciliatory tone throughout her presentation.

“I don’t think there’s any question that people will be very upset and very angry,” she said. “But I want people to understand the fact that no criminal charges will be filed in this case does not diminish in any way the tragedy, the anger, the frustration that we’ve heard since the time of his death.”

“We cannot ignore that. Me as an elected official, as a public-facing leader, me as a human being, we cannot ignore that there is a rage in our community.”

No Charges in Sacramento Police Shooting of Stephon Clark

LOS ANGELES — Two Sacramento police officers who shot and killed an unarmed black man in his grandmother’s backyard last year will not face criminal prosecution, the Sacramento County district attorney announced Saturday, stirring fresh outrage in a city roiled by protests over the killing.

No charges in Sacramento police shooting of Stephon Clark

For nearly a year, community members and activists have demanded police accountability for the death of Stephon Clark, 22, who was killed last March by officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet. The two officers had been dispatched to investigate a routine vandalism complaint. Within 10 minutes of their arrival, after a brief pursuit, Clark was dead.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/stephon-clark-police-shooting-sacramento.html" id="bd0114b2-581e-3cf2-a0f4-9c1115931de4">The New York Times</a>.

But even with that rationale, the district attorney’s presentation did not sit well with local activists.

“I’m disgusted and it’s disrespectful,” Tanya Faison, who leads the local Black Lives Matter group, said in a statement released on Twitter. “He was completely disrespected. The mother of his child was completely disrespected.”

Clark’s family, reached through their lawyers, did not respond to a request for comment.

For nearly a year, community members and activists have demanded police accountability for the death of Stephon Clark, 22, who was killed last March by officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet. The two officers had been dispatched to investigate a vandalism complaint. Within 10 minutes of their arrival, after a brief pursuit, Clark was dead.

The shooting sparked waves of protests in Sacramento. Clark’s death took on national significance amid continuing tensions over discriminatory policing in black neighborhoods and excessive use of force by officers.

The police department released body camera footage within days of the shooting. Daniel Hahn, the city’s first black police chief, reiterated that the department required training related to race-based discrimination and de-escalation tactics. The next month, the department issued new guidance about when officers can mute their body cameras.

The department did not return a request for comment Saturday.

Two Sacramento police officers who shot and killed an unarmed black man in his grandmother’s backyard last year will not face criminal prosecution, the Sacramento County district attorney announced Saturday, stirring fresh outrage in a city roiled by protests over the killing.

<h1>LOS ANGELES — Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced Monday that he would withdraw nearly 400 of his state’s National Guard troops from deployment along the border with Mexico and assign them to other duties.</h1>

The step to rescind state authorization for the border deployment is a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump’s continued warnings that migrants entering the country illegally present a national security risk to the United States.

Jose A. Del Real

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