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ICE raids occur in Pasadena, LA area; Trump keeps control of National Guard By Joe Taglieri joet@beaconmedianews.com
An ICE officer draws his gun as he confronts a man behind the officer’s vehicle in the middle of a Pasadena street Wednesday. | Photo courtesy of Kevin Dalton/X
on social media. “I was denied entry despite my legal right as a Member of Congress to inspect (Department of Homeland Security) facilities. This is outrageous and unlawful.” ICE did not respond to a request for comment. According to published reports of eyewitness accounts and information from immigration advocates, around 6
a.m. Wednesday, ICE agents detained several people near a Pasadena shopping center, including two men at a bus stop at Los Robles Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard. City spokeswoman Lisa Deriderian said via email that “local public safety personnel ‘staged’ in front of (Pasadena) City Hall for approximately an See ICE Page 28
Threat in your medicine cabinet: The FDA’s gamble on America’s drugs By Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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ngoing immigration enforcement operations in Southern California occurred Wednesday in Pasadena and Pico Rivera. Six Pasadena residents were detained and transported to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, according to Rep. Judy Chu’s office. “ICE agents are pointing guns at innocent individuals, no warrants, no explanations, just fear and intimidation,” Chu posted on X. “These raids in my district are absolutely vile. Masked and armed like a militia, they’re terrorizing families and destroying any sense of safety in our communities. This is not law enforcement it’s a gross abuse of power, and I will not stand for it.” The eight-term Pasadena Democrat’s office issued a statement saying Chu was planning to visit the Metropolitan Detention Center on Wednesday afternoon to “demand accountability and transparency, and seek answers regarding her constituents currently being detained, the circumstances of their apprehension, and whether they are being granted due process.” However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials would not let her into the facility, the congresswoman reported. “ICE agents even brandished a gun at a young man just for filming,” Chu posted
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hour.” She also said city officials are “aware of multiple reports regarding enforcement activity at various locations in the city (Wednesday) morning. We are actively investigating social media posts, photos, and videos to gain a better understanding of the situation.
Reporting Highlights • Risky Medications: The FDA has given more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to continue sending drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants that the agency had banned. • Troubled Factories: The medications came mostly from plants in India where inspectors found contaminated drugs, filthy labs and falsified records. • FDA Secrecy: The agency did not proactively inform the public when drugs were exempted from import bans, and it did not routinely test the medications to ensure they were safe. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside. For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for Americans.
Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs. Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply. A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that
See FDA Page 04
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