Border Patrol’s year of unchecked force

I’m CalMatters reporter Adam Echelman and I’m subbing in for Lynn today.

Border Patrol agents have been roving from city to city, far from their home bases in California and elsewhere along the U.S./Mexico border, over the last 15 months, engaged in an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. 

CalMatters, along with partners Evident Media and Bellingcat, has tracked these agents, documenting their tactics on the ground and through mountains of video footage, since their first proof-of-concept raid in Bakersfield in January 2025. 

Exactly one year later, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, followed weeks later by the killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent. 

Our latest investigative video shows that, beyond those two shootings, immigration agents engaged in a pattern of force and questionable detention, aggressive tactics that courts have said likely violated the constitution.

• John Roth, former Department of Homeland Security inspector general: “The first thing that you do when you give an agent a gun and a badge and the authority over American people is to make sure that they follow the Constitution, period.”

• Steve Bunnell, former DHS general counsel: “There are sort of two essential components of DHS and law enforcement generally being effective, and that’s trust and credibility. And they have lost those things to the extent they had them.”

In this new video, we focus on the activity of five agents from the US-Mexico border whose identities we’ve been able to confirm. Watch it here. 

Remember the week after Trump’s inauguration, when he tried to freeze all federal funding?

Had the Trump administration succeeded, California would have lost as much as $168 billion. For context, that’s about half of the state’s annual budget. 

But California sued and a judge forced the Trump administration to let money flow. On Monday, Attorney General Rob Bonta said that an appeals court upheld the original injunction, allowing California to continue accessing its federal funding while the court case proceeds. The Trump administration could appeal this decision, which would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to withhold money for other programs, making that original lawsuit seem like a distant memory. 

Bonta has sued the federal government over 60 times since 2025. During the first term of Trump’s presidency, California sued 123 times and won two out of every three cases.

From CalMatters political reporter Nadia Lathan: 

The legislative Progressive Caucus met on Tuesday to outline its plans to address federal funding cuts to Medicaid. Notably absent from their demands was any mention of a ballot initiative to tax the state’s ultrawealthy, which proponents say would go toward the roughly $30 billion California is expected to lose annually in healthcare funding.

Assemblymember Alex Lee, chair of the Progressive Caucus and a Milpitas Democrat, said he supports the measure, but that the caucus will not take a position on the initiative until it’s officially on the ballot.

• Lee: “I think the sentiment is very clear that people want billionaires to pay. Any disagreement is about technicality and policy, which is good and healthy to have.”

Most Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, oppose the proposal over fears that it would spur a mass exodus of the state’s billionaires, some of whom have already left in response to the proposal, and worsen the budget deficit in the long run without their income, which makes up much of the state’s revenue.

California has already shuttered five different prisons since Gov. Gavin Newsom came into office in 2019. With the state’s prison system still under capacity, some state lawmakers say it’s time to close a sixth prison, reports CalMatters’ Adam Ashton.