In response to the Trump administration’s ongoing federal immigration raids in Los Angeles, Ventura County and beyond, the local community group Centro del Pueblo will host a “People’s Assembly” on the Arcata Plaza from 7:15 to 8 p.m. tonight.

The goal of the event is to provide information while offering people a space to gather and talk about the raids being conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to Peyton Leone, a spokesperson for Centro del Pueblo.

“There is a lot of affected community here — students with family in L.A. or [residents] who have connections to L.A.,” Leone said. 

Organizers will also inform people about their constitutional rights and the preparations they should make in case ICE comes to Humboldt County.

“We’re preparing for this the same way we prepare for a natural disaster,” Leone said. “This is a human disaster. This is something we’re preparing for by making sure everyone has their documents, like birth certificates; anything they would need in an emergency should be prepared, like [in] a backpack, and be ready to be carried. That goes for everybody. We see that there’s not just people that are undocumented being arrested … . People with legal status in the United States are being arrested and detained as well.”

Arcata Mayor Alex Stillman and Councilmember Meredith Matthews said they also plan to attend the event. Stillman will address attendees and reaffirm Arcata’s position as a sanctuary city, a status codified in the municipal code eight years ago. 

“It’s important that individuals in the community feel they’re safe no matter who they are, and that police understand that they’re part of the community,” Stillman said. She added that Arcata Police Lt. Chris Ortega will also be in attendance.

Another APD officer was deployed to Los Angeles because he’s enrolled in the National Guard, according to Stillman.

“All I can think is that he’s sleeping on the floor somewhere with no food or water,” the mayor said, referring to reports that troops were deployed to the city without proper supplies or a place to sleep. “The plan was not well executed.”

Earlier today, Senator Alex Padilla was “forced to the floor, handcuffed and removed by federal agents” at a news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to the New York Times and other news reports.

More information on tonight’s gathering can be found in the Instagram post below:

Press release from the City of Eureka:

The City of Eureka will be performing Road Construction work at the above location in Eureka beginning Monday, June 23rd, 2025. Work is anticipated at the following location; June 23rd work will begin on Myrtle Avenue at 7th Street to Harrison Avenue. Road paving preparations will occur starting on 6/23/2025 and road paving will be performed on Myrtle Avenue from 7th Street to Harrison Avenue on 6/24/2025.

Intersection will have closures between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Monday-Friday, WEATHER PERMITTING. Noticing will follow describing the location and extent of future work. There will be controlled traffic and detours at these locations, and motorists should expect short delays.

The patience and cooperation of motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians in the vicinity of the work zone is greatly appreciated.

The City of Eureka realizes that this disruption is an inconvenience, but maintaining the City’s streets and sidewalks is vital to the health and safety of our residents.

Press release from the United Congregational Christian Church:

In the early morning hours between June 7 and June 8, the Pride banner displayed on the front of United Congregational Christian Church in Eureka was stolen. Just one day after replacing it with a Trans Pride banner, that too was destroyed — shredded under the cover of darkness on the evening of June 9.

The acts of targeted vandalism occurred shortly after the church participated in the local Pride event, hosting a booth and standing in visible solidarity with the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Unfortunately, this is not the first time the church’s inclusive banners have been attacked.

United Congregational Christian Church has been an Open and Affirming congregation since 1995, deeply committed to welcoming and affirming people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. As a dual-affiliated church with the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), it draws from rich traditions of justice, inclusion, and compassion. The church has served Eureka for over 165 years, remaining a steadfast refuge for the marginalized.

The banners, which include the phrase “A Just World for All,” are symbols of visibility, hope, and affirmation and stay up year round, not just during pride month.

In response to these incidents, the church has launched a fundraising effort on gofundme: https://gofund.me/094c0ab3. Funds raised will be used to:

• Replace the stolen and destroyed Pride and Trans Pride banners and purchase additional banners for quick replacement of future vandalism.

• Fortify church signs and improve security to deter future vandals

• Support the Free Community Pride Spaghetti Dinner on June 28 — a celebration of welcome, resilience, and healing, and

• Sustain the church’s Outreach and Social Justice Ministry.

The church is inviting the community to take part by contributing to this work. “Whether it’s $5 or $15, your support proclaims: Love is stronger than hate. And love will always rise again.”

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Get ready, America. After years of firm denials, Gov. Gavin Newsom is finally acknowledging his presidential ambitions.

Over the past month, the Democratic governor who once insisted that he had “sub-zero interest” in the White House has begun publicly inching toward the idea. In a profile published in the Wall Street Journal this week, Newsom said he would wait to see if the moment felt right.

“I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he said.

The shift in tone comes, perhaps fortuitously, as all eyes are on Newsom again.

With President Donald Trump sending military troops into Los Angeles in recent days to quell sometimes unruly protests against immigration enforcement raids, Newsom has seized the moment to reestablish himself as the leader of resistance. The governor sued to stop the deployments and is now doing nearly endless rounds in the media accusing Trump of slipping into authoritarianism. He has sent daily queries to his fundraising list referencing the situation in Los Angeles and the president advocating for his arrest.

On Tuesday evening, Newsom gave a short video address, carried live on CNN, that sought to elevate his fight to national significance, warning that “other states are next,” and to rally the public behind him to defend democracy.

“This is about all of us. This is about you,” Newsom said. “It’s time for all of us to stand up.”

Many people already assume that Newsom is in campaign mode. A poll released last month by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times found that more than half of California voters believe Newsom is more focused on boosting his presidential prospects than governing the state and solving its problems.

But the ability to expand his message beyond California could stir voters in the rest of the country to start seeing Newsom as a potential leader, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

He commended Newsom for channeling the growing fear and anger over Trump’s actions in his remarks, which Sabato believes may have changed the minds of some skeptics who regarded the governor as just “another pol with good hair gel.”

“He saw the danger to the American republic,” Sabato said. “It was a home run.”

Though speculation about a future presidential bid has followed Newsom throughout his career — his family even joked about it in a congratulatory message in his college yearbook — he never would have admitted that he had his eye on the White House even a few years ago.

After defeating a recall attempt in 2021, Newsom told NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview that he had “never” considered running for president and had “no, no, no, no, no” interest in ever doing so because “who needs the damn stress?”

During an endorsement interview with the San Francisco Chronicle during his re-election campaign for California governor the following year, Newsom said he had “sub-zero interest” in being commander in chief and that “it’s not even on my radar.” He reiterated to CBS that “it’s not my ambition” and “I have no interest” in ever running.

The question came up again repeatedly last summer as frantic Democrats considered whether to replace President Joe Biden on the ticket, and Newsom always loyally batted it down, emerging as perhaps Biden’s most forceful surrogate until the bitter end.

Newsom’s star has risen in recent years

Whether those proclamations were sincere is, of course, another matter.

Newsom’s political star exploded with his early handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and he has spent the years since burnishing his national profile — touring red states to campaign for fellow Democrats, proposing a constitutional amendment to restrict gun ownership, debating Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Fox News, launching a controversy-generating podcast. The recent book “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” reported that Newsom was among the prominent Democrats who contacted campaign operatives last summer to explore their chances if Biden dropped out.

Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press conference in the state Capitol following the first COVID-19 death in California. March 4, 2020. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters

Representatives for Newsom did not respond to questions about why he is speaking differently now about a potential presidential campaign and whether it represents an intentional strategy. But the switch has been notable and consistent in recent weeks.

In early May, Newsom told the video podcast Next Up with Mark Halperin that his decision was “to be determined.”

“I might. I don’t know,” he said. “But I have to have a burning ‘why’ and I have to have a compelling vision that distinguishes myself from anybody else. Without that, without both and, I don’t deserve to even be in the conversation.”

On his own podcast last week, guest Dr. Phil asked Newsom whether he was running for president in 2028 and the governor did not rule it out. “You’re not ruling anything out about your future either, so we’ll leave it at that,” he said.

If Newsom does ultimately enter the race, voters are unlikely to care about his pivot from past pledges that he would not, Sabato said, because it will be so expected.

“If you’re governor of California, the assumption is that you’re running for president,” he said.

And broken promises seem to matter little in politics anymore, Sabato added, “The one thing that Trump has done for everyone is eliminate the issue of hypocrisy.”

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Does President Donald Trump or Gov. Gavin Newsom have final say on deploying the California National Guard to Los Angeles? And when can a sitting president send the Marines to a U.S. city, as Trump did in L.A.?

Those are the questions at the heart of a rapidly moving legal challenge Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed against Trump that is scheduled to get its first hearing starting at 1.30 p.m. today at a federal court in San Francisco.

What the judge rules, and the likely appeals that follow, may alter decades of understanding about the roles of governors and the White House in quelling domestic unrest.

Some legal experts called Trump’s moves to bring in troops unnecessary and an abuse of power. Newsom has argued that and more. He delivered a fiery speech Tuesday that likened Trump to other “failed dictators.”

“Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves, but they do not stop there,” Newsom said. “Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power.”

But Jessica A. Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that blocking the president’s authority is “going to be a hard argument for the governor to make” during an appearance on the Dan Abrams Show on Wednesday.

The administration argues that the armed troops will do what local law enforcement has so far been unable to do: Bring order to the streets of L.A. Critics, including Newsom, counter that sending soldiers — especially Marines trained for the battlefield — to quell a civil disturbance is just as likely to inflame the situation and ratchet up the risk of violence.

Trump called up the National Guard to Los Angeles on Saturday after protests broke out in response to federal immigration officers raiding work sites and arresting individuals they say are in the country without authorization. Trump’s order cited “incidents of violence and disorder” in his message. The soldiers will “temporarily protect” the immigration enforcement officers, the memo said.

The president has so far ordered 4,000 National Guard and 700 U.S. Marine troops to L.A. The judge on the case is Charles Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Trump has not yet invoked the Insurrection Act, a law that would give him more authority to deploy troops domestically and use them for law enforcement. As is, the National Guard soldiers are charged with protecting federal agents and building.

Core to Trump’s justification was a federal statute that only one president had previously used, Bonta’s legal team wrote. President Richard Nixon employed it so that the National Guard could deliver the mail during the U.S. Postal Service strike of 1970. It’s also the first time since 1965 that a president federalized a state National Guard without the request of a governor.

Newsom and Bonta sued Monday after the governor formally asked Trump to rescind his activation of the Guard. They filed the suit just as news outlets began reporting that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would deploy the U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, as well. On Tuesday Newsom and Bonta sought a temporary restraining order to halt both orders.

The California challenges argue that involving the Marines and National Guard harms state sovereignty, drains California’s resources and “escalates tensions and promotes (rather than quells) civil unrest.”

Newsom’s suit says the city does not need the military to keep the peace. “To put it bluntly, there is no invasion or rebellion in Los Angeles; there is civil unrest that is no different from episodes that regularly occur in communities throughout the country, and that is capable of being contained by state and local authorities working together,” the suit said.

He also maintains that a president cannot deploy the National Guard without approval from the state governor. Newsom and Bonta cite the government code that permits Trump to deploy the National Guard, which says federalizing the troops is “issued through” the governor.

The Trump legal team offers the opposite interpretation of the government code: “The statute is thus clear that the orders are issued by the President, and they are conveyed through State officials. Nothing in the statute entitles a Governor to veto or impede a valid presidential order,” the team wrote in their filing on Wednesday.

The filing excoriated Newsom’s pitch for a restraining order as a “crass political stunt endangering American lives.” It also said local and state law enforcement were “unable to bring order to the city”

Levinson underscored the stakes of the case: “Saying that you need the governor’s consent would mean that any single governor would have the ability to essentially veto the president using power under this statute.”

Chris Mirasola, a law professor at the University of Houston, wrote that the issue has seen “no meaningful challenges” but that this is an area in which the “courts have traditionally been exceedingly deferential to the executive branch.”

Bonta told reporters on Monday that challenging Trump on his powers has few precedents, since deploying troops without a governor’s support is rare. “This is not a section of the law that’s been subject to multiple opinions and has a lot of case law on it,” he said.

Eighteen state attorneys general who are Democrats backed Bonta. “The president’s decision to federalize and deploy California’s National Guard without the consent of California state leaders is unlawful, unconstitutional, and undemocratic,” they issued in a joint statement.

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Ben Christopher contributed to this story.

In Loving Memory of Michael Joseph Mangiantini
March 4, 1952 – May 30, 2025

Michael Joseph Mangiantini, beloved son, husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and friend, passed away on May 30, 2025, at the age of 73. Born on March 4, 1952, to Connie and Ernest Mangiantini, Michael lived a life marked by dedication, resilience, and a deep love for his family and community.

Michael was the devoted husband of Kathy Mangiantini for over 25 years until her passing. Their marriage was built on love, laughter, and shared strength, and it remained a cornerstone of Michael’s life.

He was a man of many talents and trades, working at a variety of places including his parents’ bakery in Sonoma, Gallo Winery in Sonoma, John Deere in Fernbridge, the Firestokers Youth Group in Rio Dell, Sun Valley Floral Farm in Arcata, and in West Yellowstone as a trusted maintenance man. Whether he was repairing planes or lawnmowers, Michael approached every job with pride and precision. He was known for his ability to fix nearly anything and for his willingness to lend a hand to anyone in need.

Michael was preceded in death by his loving parents, Ernest and Connie Mangiantini; his aunt Louise Mangiantini; his uncle Ezio Mangiantini; and his sister, Ernistine Mangiantini.

He is survived by his siblings: John (Jennifer) Mangiantini, Theresa Rivera, Rose (Dave) Carey, and Dan Mangiantini. He also leaves behind his daughter Kimberley Olson and her fiancé Alejandro Marquez; his stepdaughter Michelle Petracek and her husband Don; his grandchildren Miriam, Alex, and Destiny Petracek, Brianna, Heather, and Christopher Olson; and his great-grandchildren Nevaeh Baldy and Orion Petracek. Michael’s circle of love extended far and wide, and he is also survived by countless friends whose lives he enriched.

Michael will be remembered for his generous spirit, his quick wit, his mechanical genius, and his enduring love for family. He was a man who showed up, worked hard, and made people feel welcome, whether they were family or friends.

Services will be announced at a later date.

“Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day.”

Tim Anthony Moore passed away at the age of 50 years old at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka. He went peacefully with loved ones at his bedside.

Tim was born on March 4, 1975 to Marita Louise (Wheeler) Moore and Randall Wesley Moore in Phoenix, Arizona. Tim spent most of his childhood moving around with military parents. He and his younger siblings Pamela, Benjamin, and Scott had extraordinary experiences living in Texas, New Mexico and Mississippi. They lived a couple of years overseas in Azores, Portugal. Tim and his family travelled to Germany while overseas.

With his family, Tim moved to Sacramento, California, for his junior year of high school before moving to Humboldt County, where he graduated from McKinleyville High School. After high school, Tim attended Humboldt State University.

Tim was known for his amazing artwork, displayed in Eureka a few years ago. He hoped to publish a collection of deeply philosophical essays. In younger years, he greatly enjoyed swing dancing. He will be remembered by his family and friends as a kind, caring, and brilliant man.

Tim was preceded in death by his brothers, Ben and Scott, and by his parents, Rita and Randy. He is survived by his sister Pamela (Moore) Coleman, niece Ericka Rosas, nephews Dameon, Jordan Moore, and Jasper Hedrick Moore, grandmother Gloria (Gannon) Wheeler, and many aunts, unclose, cousins, and family-by-love Alex and Bob.

Internment will be at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Arcata on Wednesday, June 25 at 11 a.m.