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VOL. 14,
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Arrests target San Gabriel Valley gang
The shakedown: Trump’s DOJ pressured lawyers to ‘find’ evidence that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism
By City News Service
By Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
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n the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed. Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California. He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration. The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education. In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious
Law enforcement continues to search for the following defendants: Larry Castillo, 42, a.k.a. “Lil Dee,” of Victorville; and Soo Kang, 31, a.k.a. “Easy,” of the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. | Photos courtesy of U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California
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same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening. Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it. UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders
ixteen suspected members and associates of a San Gabriel Valleybased gang were arrested Wednesday on narcotics and other charges, federal authorities said. The suspects are among 20 defendants -- including one who was already in state custody and three of whom are still at large -- named in an indictment returned by a Los Angeles federal grand jury, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The indictment outlines various alleged offenses, including narcotics activity, kidnapping, shootings and illegal firearms sales. The investigation into the La Puente-based gang, which authorities said is affiliated with the Mexican Mafia, involved the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, with assistance from the Covina Police Department and others. During the probe, authorities allegedly uncovered a series of criminal acts, including the December 2022 shooting of rival gangsters at a Covina residence in which one of the suspected shooters, Dominic Ornelas,
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UCLA’s campus in Westwood. | Photo courtesy of Brian Sterling/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus. According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers
to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes. The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by proPalestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the
23, of Rancho Cucamonga, is said to have tripped and left behind his left shoe, which later helped law enforcement link him to the shooting. Federal prosecutors contend that in July 2023, Adrian Lopez, 25, of La Puente, and Heather Covarrubias, 40, of Diamond Bar, plus others kidnapped two victims to retrieve items they believed had been stolen during a burglary at Lopez’s residence earlier that month. One of the victims eventually was allowed to leave, but the other victim fled after being severely beaten, prosecutors said. Another gang-related shooting occurred in May 2025 outside a La Puente liquor store in which Isaac Estrada-Frost, 21, of Rosemead, mistaking a victim for a member of a rival gang, yelled racial slurs at the victim and shot at the victim’s car when the victim drove away from the scene, striking one of the car’s doors, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Other criminal acts outlined in the affidavits include illegal sales of dozens of firearms, and the trafficking of pound quantities