California professor accused of assault after he was ‘kidnapped' during ICE protests at cannabis farm raid
Jonathan Anthony Caravello, a math and philosophy lecturer at California State University Channel Islands, was arrested July 10 as heavily armed federal agents fired tear gas into crowds demonstrating against the raids.
Bill Essayli, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, accused Caravello of 'throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement' and said his office is preparing to charge him with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers. Carvello's first court appearance is Monday.
According to witnesses, a tear gas canister had rolled under the wheelchair of a legal observer who struggled to breathe or move. Caravello had reportedly rushed over to help when he was tackled by agents.
Following his arrest, more than 24 hours passed before Caravello's whereabouts were discovered. His educators' union, California Faculty Association, posted a statement saying that he had been 'kidnapped' by four masked agents who did not identify themselves or state where they were taking him as they placed him in an unmarked car.
The university said in a statement that it believed Caravello 'was peacefully participating in a protest — an act protected under the First Amendment and a right guaranteed to all Americans.'
'If confirmed, we stand with elected officials and community leaders calling for his immediate release,' the university said.
Members of the California Faculty Association held a vigil Sunday in front of a detention center demanding his release.
The raids and intense standoff between protesters and federal agents have emerged as the latest flashpoint in Donald Trump's aggressive anti-immigration agenda, which has deployed masked federal law enforcement agents into communities to make mass arrests and swiftly remove thousands of people from the country.
Last week, officers arrested more than 300 people during a pair of raids inside cannabis farms in Camarillo, California, roughly 50 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Agents allegedly discovered 10 undocumented immigrant children working there.
The United Farm Workers union said several workers were critically injured during the raids, while other targeted workers, including a U.S. citizen, 'remain totally unaccounted for.'
Agents are accused of chasing one worker who fell 30 feet from the top of a building. Jaime Alanis Garcia was hospitalized and placed on life support with a broken neck, broken skull and a severed artery.
Garcia was later removed from life support and died from his injuries.
'His wife and parents decided today to let him rest. He has passed away,' his family said in a statement.
The raids sparked an intense standoff between protesters and federal officers who arrived on the scene in military-style vehicles.
'We are outraged by these military-style tactics that target immigrants and terrorize communities,' California Faculty Association said in a statement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security agents are 'tearing families apart and undermining the constitutional rights of everyone — including U.S. citizens — who stand with marginalized communities,' the group said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Women born in East Germany have lived between two worlds. That's why we're shaking up art and politics
In February 1990, the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran the headline 'Why are they still coming?', adding: 'In West Germany, hatred for immigrants from the GDR could soon reach boiling point.' That year, resentment towards so-called newcomers from the east erupted without restraint. East Germans were insulted in the streets, shelters were attacked and children from the former GDR were bullied at school. There was a widespread fear that the weekly influx of thousands of people would overwhelm the welfare system and crash the housing and job markets. The public consensus? It needed to stop. That same year, Kathleen Reinhardt and her parents moved from Thuringia in the former GDR to Bavaria. She was in primary school, and her new classmates greeted her with lines such as: 'You people come here and take our jobs. You don't even know how to work properly.' It was a formative shock. Reinhardt, who was recently appointed curator of the German pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has an eye for imbalance, for what is missing, for who is not being considered. That she will represent Germany at one of the art world's most prestigious exhibitions is – against this backdrop – not just remarkable, it's historic. Thirty-five years after reunification, a different kind of German story is being heard. At a time of polarisation, when supposedly stable institutions and even the global order itself are faltering, figures such as Reinhardt – someone who understands 'otherness' and has lived between two worlds – are exactly what is needed. In her career, Reinhardt is known for going where things are uncomfortable, for entering terrain that is politically fraught or typically avoided by curators. She thrives in the difficult – and confronts it. Perhaps this is because she was born in a small GDR town in the early 1980s and was raised under socialism, but then grew up in Bavaria – the very embodiment of West German order. Reinhardt studied American literature (with a focus on Black writing), art history and international management in Bayreuth, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. She speaks four languages and holds a PhD on the American conceptual artist Theaster Gates. She has managed the studios of the South African artist Candice Breitz and the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj, and has curated high-profile exhibitions at the Dresden state art collections. In 2022, she became director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. Located on a quiet, tree-lined street in what still smells like old West Berlin, the museum was once sleepy and conformist. But it now attracts curators, artists and critics with its radical reprogramming. Reinhardt's exhibitions there aim to reveal ambivalences, focusing on fracture rather than polish. But it's not just her CV that points to something worth noting about millennial Germans shaped by the GDR. I interviewed Reinhardt a few weeks ago, and I came away realising that women like her play in a league of their own. She wants to understand how it all connects – who we are today and the past we emerge from – while keeping a healthy scepticism towards grand narratives. That in itself feels almost avant garde in a time when stories from then and now are being instrumentalised, appropriated, bent or simply glossed over. On one of her first walks through the museum's garden, Reinhardt encountered The Dancer's Fountain by Georg Kolbe – a 1922 commission from the Jewish art collector Heinrich Stahl, who was later deported to Theresienstadt and murdered. The fountain had vanished during the Nazi era, resurfaced in the 1970s and was reinstalled with no explanation. At the top: a graceful, dancing female figure. At the base: stylised Black male bodies supporting the basin. Reinhardt's reaction? She started to dig. Working with art historians and provenance researchers, she traced the fountain's journey, uncovered records and identified a likely model whom Kolbe had used. She brought to light the complex and violent histories of the 20th century inherent in this object, becoming the first director in the museum's 75-year history to refuse to look away. Earlier this summer, she invited Lynn Rother to the museum to take part in a panel discussion on provenance research, its current status and future potential. Like Reinhardt, Rother has an East German background. Born in 1981 in Annaberg-Buchholz, she now lives between Berlin, Lüneburg and New York. She is the Lichtenberg-professor of provenance studies at Leuphana University and the founding director of its Provenance Lab. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York created a new position just for her: its first curator for provenance. Rother's work is also about the stories behind objects. Who owned them? Who lost them – and why? Her research lays bare the darker infrastructures behind museum collections: looting, coercion, legal grey zones. She exposed the largest art deal of the Nazi era and now leads two major digital research projects backed by €1.8m in funding, exploring how machine-readable data can help trace – and eventually close – gaps in provenance. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Art, as Rother told me, has always been a mobile asset in times of war and crisis. Museums and the art market have benefited, directly and indirectly, from the tragedies of the 20th century. Some works in today's collections were acquired through murky channels in moments of extreme horror. The great challenge of Rother's work is to recognise and document those entanglements. You could say it's a dirty job. Provenance researchers are seen as troublemakers. Their work sometimes leads to restitution, and with it, uncomfortable questions about national narratives and institutional pride. Rother's team recently ran a computational analysis of provenance records and found a striking pattern: married women were systematically erased. Even when a work had belonged to a woman, her husband was listed as the owner. 'That's not a clerical error,' she said. It shows that structural discrimination and patriarchal mechanisms are just as present in the art market as anywhere else. Like Reinhardt, Rother has spent years inside global institutions. I haven't shared their stories just to chart the rise of two exceptional women, but because it's been a hard-fought road since German reunification in 1990. We, the women from the East, have come a long way. For years, we were ridiculed, overlooked and reduced to stereotypes. Even Angela Merkel was first seen as a quiet little girl, then branded a Mutti, a motherly figure, a term simultaneously condescending and comforting and used to downplay her authority. But we're no longer a punchline. Today, women from the East – not just in politics and culture, but now also in the global art world – hold some of the most influential positions. To me, the stories of Reinhardt and Rother show how exclusion and institutional rigidity can – slowly, painfully – become insight. How memory, for those shaped by the GDR, is rarely linear. And how power, when approached from the margins, can be exercised more critically, and with greater care. In Bavaria, Reinhardt often felt she wasn't in – but not completely out either. 'What I had was school. Education. That was my little step up.' Her parents, a factory worker and a utility clerk, provided support but no privilege. It was similar for Rother, who was driven from early on. After studying art history, business and law, she earned a traineeship at Berlin's state museums in 2008. There, she came to see that it wasn't only about hard work – her origins suddenly mattered. She was constantly asked: 'Are you from East or West?' The hierarchy was obvious. Westerners ran the institutions. Eastern directors were deputies – at best. Even the art mirrored this: East German works were written off as second-rate. Both women have long rejected the patronising West German gaze. The 'east', Reinhardt argues, is not a special case, but a prism – a way to look at broader geopolitical lines and ask bigger questions about how we approach history and transformations in societies. Or in Rother's words: 'With artworks, labels matter. But we as people shouldn't be bound by them.' What these women offer isn't nostalgia. It's clarity. A resistance to simplification. A belief that history is not a finished room. In Reinhardt's office, there's a poster that reads: 'You don't have to tear down the statues – just the pedestals.' Both of these millennials are doing just that – carefully, insistently, telling it all again. We need more like them. Carolin Würfel is a writer, screenwriter and journalist who lives in Berlin and Istanbul. She is the author of Three Women Dreamed of Socialism
Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Trump's FBI boss Dan Bongino escalates Epstein feud with Pam Bondi with bold plan to address 'failures'
Donald Trump 's second-in-command at the FBI is escalating his feud with DOJ's Pam Bondi after Jeffrey Epstein 'failures' sparked a MAGA civil war. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino were targeted with fury after a leaked DOJ/FBI memo found convicted pedophile Epstein did not kill himself and there was never a 'client list' of his co-conspirators. Despite the backlash, all three political appointees appear to be keeping their Trump administration jobs – for now. But that isn't stopping nasty infighting among the agency heads. Sources close to Bongino said last week that he wouldn't stick around at the FBI if Bondi remained in her post because he blames her for the rough rollout of the memo's findings. A person close to the White House told the Daily Mail that Bongino was working at FBI headquarters on Monday, but he may only be staying under one condition. They said Bongino is pressuring Bondi to hold a press conference to answer lingering questions on the Jeffrey Epstein files. That includes why the review came up way short of what she promised to reveal in the high profile child sex trafficking case. 'While the Deputy Director has many significant operations underway that he finds very important to see through, he does plan to continue to fight for transparency and accountability for failures in the Epstein saga, including a press conference from the attorney general to explain discrepancies in communication directly to the American people,' the source said. The Justice Department did not respond to a request on whether there are plans for Bondi to hold a press conference. Attorney General Pam Bondi has faced a slew of criticism from MAGA world for the letdown of the Justice Department's review of the documents in the Epstein investigation Patel, for his part, dispelled 'conspiracies' that he was also considering a departure due to the Justice Department's botched handling of the review of Epstein's crimes. President Donald Trump came to the defense of his AG in a lengthy Truth Social post over the weekend where he told his supporters and critical FBI leadership to 'let Pam Bondi do her job.' He said that Patel and Bongino should be focused on matters outside of the Epstein files – like investigating voter fraud, political corruption and the 2020 election. Trump's 2024 campaign centered on his promise to break down the bureaucracy of government and reveal federal secrets – including the Epstein files and documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Bongino is particularly irked by Bondi overselling what she had during the early stages of the Epstein investigation. In February, the Attorney General invited MAGA influencers to the White House and gave them binders containing 'a truckload' of new details in 'phase one' of the release. Upon closer inspection it was discovered the folders contained no new information. Bondi then said she had Epstein's highly anticipated 'client list' on her desk waiting for review and release, which never came. An unsigned memo with DOJ and FBI seals was leaked this month and maintains Epstein's client list does not exist. It also concluded that Epstein likely died by suicide, rather than the long-held conspiracy held by many within MAGA that he was murdered in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Bondi said that no more people would be arrested or convicted in the case. Currently, British socialite and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex trafficking ring. She is the only living person facing the music for Epstein's crimes. The Justice Department on Monday opposed a filing requesting the Supreme Court take up Maxwell's appeal in the case. Maxwell's lawyers argue that their client shouldn't have been prosecuted because she was protected under a plea agreement that Epstein made with the Southern District of Florida in 2008. Several high profile and famous people – including Trump – were associated with Epstein and on the flight logs of his private plane, which he used to go to and from his island. Democrats claim that Trump is using Bondi to prevent any more information from coming to light in the Epstein files because they claim the president and some of his rich buddies might be implicated.
BBC News
31 minutes ago
- BBC News
Data shows immigration status of benefit claimants for first time
Data showing the immigration status of those claiming universal credit (UC) - a benefit designed to help both employed and unemployed people with living costs - has been published for the first June, nearly eight million people received universal credit, 83.6% of whom were British and Irish than a million claimants were born overseas, including around 700,000 EU citizens who arrived in the UK before Brexit and have the right to live and work in the 1.5% of claimants were refugees and 0.7% had arrived in the UK via safe routes such as those for Ukrainians and Afghans. More than 75,000 claimants who are in the UK temporarily and would typically not be able to receive benefits are also claiming UC. The BBC has asked the Department for Work and Pensions for more information. The figures were published following pressure from some Conservatives and the independent MP Rupert Lowe. A Downing Street spokesperson said the prime minister wanted to see the number of claimants reduced and insisted the government was "toughening up the system" by doubling the time a migrant has to wait before qualifying for permanent - or settled - status in the UK. They added that people in the UK illegally are not allowed to access UC. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the "staggering figures" were "clear proof that the Labour government has lost control of our welfare system". "Under Kemi Badenoch, we've set out a clear, common-sense position. This is about fairness, responsibility and protecting support for those who've contributed to this country," he Conservatives have said foreign nationals should not get the personal independence payment (Pip) disability benefit or the health element of said the publication of the data was a "huge win" for those who had "relentlessly pushed for this".He described the levels of foreign nationals claiming UC as "absolute insanity" adding: "We cannot afford it. The country is BROKE."
