The Associated Press reported on court documents showing that federal agents conducted an undercover surveillance operation involving organizations and labor unions protesting immigration enforcement in Minneapolis. UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham said the scope of the surveillance was concerning and could discourage people from expressing their beliefs out of fear that doing so could prompt federal scrutiny. The documents describe agents attending meetings, monitoring activist group chats and using license plate information to identify people who attended gatherings. Read more about UCLA in today’s Vox, Los Angeles Magazine and others.

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More highlights from UCLA in the News: August 14, 2026

“California, like some other states but unlike most states, forbids recording confidential communications, even with the consent of one of the parties in the conversation,” said UCLA’s Eugene Volokh (approx. 3:15 mark).

“We have to be walking between complacency and alarmism,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UCLA. “Both of those are bad.”

“Today the parties want to build very different worlds, and in 2006 they wanted to build worlds that were different, but not as different as they are today,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science and communications professor at UCLA. “In 2006, if you were a voter who didn’t have a strong party allegiance, you were better able to entertain a vote for one side or the other side.”

But this [UCLA] study found 95% of respondents reported ongoing financial stress, nearly a year later.

“It’s going to make us distrust everyone and everything,” Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said about AI-generated political ads. “Both are sledgehammers to democracy because you have to have not just a common basis of understanding of reality or what the truth is, but you also have to have some basic notion of trust in what you see.”

Experts in the field, like Ben Hyman, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, are saying that AI has had specifically concentrated impacts in the tech-related industries — figuratively taking from the hands that made it. 

A recent study in the International Journal of Obesity found that people hold more negative views toward people who lost weight with a GLP-1 (like Wegovy or Ozempic) versus someone who didn’t lose weight at all. GLP-1 users are stigmatized for “taking the easy way out,” says UCLA health psychologist and study co-author Janet Tomiyama. “The American way is willpower, diet, exercise — you’re not allowed to take any shortcuts,” Tomiyama says (approx. 16:00 mark).