Federal judge hands press groups wins in lawsuits against LAPD, DHS: "The First Amendment demands better”

Via USA Today

September 15, 2025 

A federal judge handed press and civil liberties groups wins in two separate cases against the Los Angeles Police Department and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over the treatment of journalists covering immigration raid protests.

U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera's preliminary injunctions bar, among other actions, the police department from arresting journalists for failing to disperse or otherwise interfering with journalists' ability to cover Los Angeles protests. The Department of Homeland Security's officers are also barred from "dispersing, threatening or assaulting" journalists who haven't "committed a crime unrelated to failing to obey a dispersal order." --click to read full article

"There's an old line in policing: We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,” Adam Rose, press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, said in a news release following the rulings. “Press organizations have been trying to help LAPD for years take the easy way, just asking them to train officers and discipline offenders. They wouldn't stop resisting. LAPD failed to police themselves. Now a judge is doing it for them."

An Enduring Aftermath: An Interview with Nina Berman, Documentary Photographer

Posted on October 4, 2011 by 10yearsandcounting

Minneapolis curator and arts writer Tricia Khutoretsky interviews photographer Nina Berman for 10 Years + Counting. Nina begun taking photographs 10 years ago, and has since been working on ongoing documentation of America since the invasion of Afghanistan

Photographs are often a glimpse into the past, a way to remember and a way to record. Nina Berman’s award-winning and internationally exhibited documentary photographs however seem to hold a sort of timelessness. Perhaps this is because many of the images she captures are of our country changed by a war that is equally endless. From the legacy left on war veteran’s bodies and minds, to images taken in Afghanistan pre-invasion, or her exploration into America’s troubling ideological landscape… her photographs attempt to understand subjects that she feels personally curious about. That genuine search for deeper insight translates visually in a way that is memorable and provoking. In the following interview, Nina and I converse about the coinciding 10 year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the stories and motivations behind her decade long study of a nation at war.

Full interview here.