A woman branded as the “Ketamine Queen” pleaded guilty Wednesday to selling Matthew Perry the drug that killed him, becoming the fifth and final defendant charged in Perry’s overdose death to admit guilt.

Jasveen Sangha pleaded guilty to five federal charges, including providing the ketamine that led to Perry’s death. Her trial had been planned to start later this month.

Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry, and his stepfather, “Dateline” reporter Keith Morrison, sat in the audience. It was their first time attending court proceedings since the announcement of the indictments one year ago.

Wearing tan jail garb, Sangha stood in court Wednesday next to her attorney Mark Geragos as she repeated “guilty” five times when U.S. District Court Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett asked for her pleas.

Before that, she answered “yes, your honor” to dozens of procedural questions, hedging slightly when the judge asked if she knew the drugs she was giving to co-defendant and middleman Erik Fleming were going to Perry.

“There was no way I could tell 100%,” she said. She later added, to a similar question on vials of ketamine she gave to Fleming, that “I didn’t know if all of them or some of them” were bound for Perry. The comments didn’t affect her plea agreement.

Prosecutors had cast Sangha, a 42-year-old citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., as a prolific drug dealer who was known to her customers as the “Ketamine Queen,” using the term often in press releases and court documents.

Making good on a deal she signed on Aug. 18, Sangha pleaded guilty to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death.

“She feels horrible about all of this. Nobody wants to be in the chain of causation for lack of a better term,” Geragos said outside the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. “She feels horrible and she’s felt horrible since day one.”

Sangha admitted to selling drugs directly to 33-year-old Cody McLaury, who died from an overdose in 2019. McLaury had no connection to Perry.

Prosecutors agreed to drop three other counts.

Geragos, whose other clients have included Michael Jackson, Chris Brown and the Menendez brothers, told the judge that the deal was reached “after a robust back-and-forth with the government.”

The final plea deal came a year after federal prosecutors announced the indictments in Perry’s Oct. 28, 2023 death after a sweeping investigation.

A federal website that informs the public about what information agencies are collecting and allows for public comment went down last weekend, and it has only been partially restored. The outage has raised concerns among advocates who already were troubled by the disappearance of data sets from government websites after President Donald Trump began his second term.

The https://www.reginfo.gov/public/ website went offline at the end of last week and was partially restored this week. Data was missing after Aug. 1, according to dataindex,us, a collective of data scientists and advocates who monitor changes in federal data sets.

As of Thursday, the website’s landing page said, it was “currently undergoing revisions.” Emailed inquiries to the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration weren’t returned on Thursday.

In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance” before access was restored.

Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been “substantially altered,” with the majority having the word “gender” switched to “sex,” they wrote last month in The Lancet medical journal.

Former Census Bureau official Chris Dick, who is part of the dataindex.us team, said Thursday that no one is quite sure what is going on with the regulatory affairs website, whether there was an update with technical difficulties because of staffing shortages from job cuts or something more nefarious.

“This is key infrastructure that needs to come back,” Dick said. “Usually, you can fix this quickly. It’s not super normal for this to go on for days.”

The first domino in a growing national redistricting battle is likely to fall Wednesday as the Republican-controlled Texas legislature is expected to pass a new congressional map creating five new winnable seats for the GOP.

The vote follows prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives, and weeks of delays after dozens of Texas Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in protest. Some Democrats returned Monday, only to be assigned round-the-clock police escorts to ensure their attendance at Wednesday’s session. Those who refused to be monitored were confined to the House floor, where they protested on a livestream Tuesday night.

Furious national Democrats have vowed payback for the Texas map, with California’s legislature poised to approve new maps adding more Democratic-friendly seats later this week. The map would still need to be approved by that state’s voters in November.

Normally, states redraw maps once a decade with new census figures. But Trump is lobbying other conservative-controlled states like Indiana and Missouri to also try to squeeze new GOP-friendly seats out of their maps as his party prepares for a difficult midterm election next year.

In Texas, Democrats spent the day before the vote continuing to draw attention to the extraordinary lengths the Republicans who run the legislature were going to ensure it takes place. Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier started it when she refused to sign what Democrats called the “permission slip” needed to leave the House chamber, a half-page form allowing Department of Public Safety troopers to follow them. She spent Monday night and Tuesday on the House floor, where she set up a livestream while her Democratic colleagues outside had plainclothes officers following them to their offices and homes.

Dallas-area Rep. Linda Garcia said she drove three hours home from Austin with an officer following her. When she went grocery shopping, he went down every aisle with her, pretending to shop, she said. As she spoke to The Associated Press by phone, two unmarked cars with officers inside were parked outside her home.

“It’s a weird feeling,” she said. “The only way to explain the entire process is: It’s like I’m in a movie.”

The trooper assignments, ordered by Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows, was another escalation of a redistricting battle that has widened across the country. Trump is pushing GOP state officials to tilt the map for the 2026 midterms more in his favor to preserve the GOP’s slim House majority, and Democrats nationally have rallied around efforts to retaliate.

House Minority Leader Gene Wu, from Houston, and state Rep. Vince Perez, of El Paso, stayed overnight with Collier, who represents a minority-majority district in Fort Worth.

On Tuesday, more Democrats returned to the Capitol to tear up the slips they had signed and stay on the House floor, which has a lounge and restrooms for members.

Dallas-area Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez called their protest a “slumber party for democracy,” and she said Democrats were holding strategy sessions on the floor.

“We are not criminals,” Houston Rep. Penny Morales Shaw said.

Collier said having officers shadow her was an attack on her dignity and an attempt to control her movements.

Burrows brushed off Collier’s protest, saying he was focused on important issues, such as providing property tax relief and responding to last month’s deadly floods. His statement Tuesday morning did not mention redistricting, and his office did not immediately respond to other Democrats joining Collier.

“Rep. Collier’s choice to stay and not sign the permission slip is well within her rights under the House Rules,” Burrows said.

Under those rules, until Wednesday’s scheduled vote, the chamber’s doors are locked, and no member can leave “without the written permission of the speaker.”

To do business Wednesday, 100 of 150 House members must be present. The GOP plan is designed to send five additional Republicans from Texas to the U.S. House. Texas Democrats returned to Austin after Democrats in California launched an effort to redraw their state’s districts to take five seats from Republicans.

Democrats also said they were returning because they expect to challenge the new maps in court.

Los Angeles students and teachers return to class for the new academic year Thursday under a cloud of apprehension after a summer filled with immigration raids and amid worries that schools could become a target in the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown.

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has urged immigration authorities not to conduct enforcement activity within a two-block radius around schools starting an hour before the school day begins and until one hour after it classes let out.

“Hungry children, children in fear, cannot learn well,” Carvalho said in a news conference.

He also announced a number of measures intended to protect students and families, including adding or altering bus routes to accommodate more students. The district is to distribute a family preparedness packet that includes know-your-rights information, emergency contact updates and tips on designating a backup caregiver in case a parent is detained.

The sprawling district, which covers more than two dozen cities, is the nation’s second largest with more than 500,000 students. According to the teachers’ union, 30,000 students are immigrants, and an estimated quarter of them are without legal status.

Federal immigration enforcement near schools causes concern

While immigration agents have not detained anyone inside a school, a 15-year-old boy was pulled from a car and handcuffed outside Arleta High School in northern Los Angeles on Monday, Carvalho said.

He had significant disabilities and was released after a bystander intervened in the case of “mistaken identity,” the superintendent said.

“This is the exact type of incident that traumatizes our communities; it cannot repeat itself,” he added.

Administrators at two elementary schools previously denied entry to officials from the Department of Homeland Security in April, and immigration agents have been seen in vehicles outside schools.
DHS did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Carvalho said that while staffers and district police officers cannot interfere with immigration enforcement and do not have jurisdiction beyond school property, they have had conversations with federal agents parked in front of schools that resulted in them leaving.

The district is partnering with local law enforcement in some cities and forming a “rapid response” network to disseminate information about the presence of federal agents, he said.
Educators worry about attendance

Teachers say they are concerned some students might not show up the first day.

Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a high school social studies and English teacher at the Roybal Learning Center, said attendance saw a small dip in January when President Donald Trump took office.

The raids ramped up in June right before graduations, putting a damper on ceremonies. One raid at a Home Depot near MacArthur Park, an area with many immigrant families from Central America, took place the same morning as an 8th grade graduation at a nearby middle school.

“People were crying, for the actual graduation ceremony there were hardly any parents there,” Cardona said.

The next week, at her high school graduation, the school rented two buses to transport parents to the ceremony downtown. Ultimately many of the seats were empty, unlike other graduations.

One 11th grader, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be published because she is in the country without legal permission and fears being targeted, said she is afraid to return to school.

“Instead of feeling excited, really what I’m feeling is concern,” said Madelyn, a 17-year-old from Central America. “I am very, very scared, and there is a lot of pressure.”

She added that she takes public transportation to school but fears being targeted on the bus by immigration agents because of her skin color.

“We are simply young people with dreams who want to study, move forward and contribute to this country as well,” she said.

Madelyn joined a club that provides support and community for immigrant students and said she intends to persevere in that work.

An executive order signed by President Donald Trump late Thursday aims to give political appointees power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies. Scientists say it threatens to undermine the process that has helped make the U.S. the world leader in research and development.

The order requires all federal agencies, including FEMA, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to appoint officials responsible for reviewing federal funding opportunities and grants, so that they “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”

It also requires agencies to make it so that current and future federal grants can be terminated at any time — including during the grant period itself.

Agencies cannot announce new funding opportunities until the new protocols are in place, according to the order. The Trump administration said these changes are part of an effort to “strengthen oversight” and “streamline agency grantmaking.” Scientists say the order will cripple America’s scientific engine by placing control over federal research funds in the hands of people who are influenced by politics and lack relevant expertise.

“This is taking political control of a once politically neutral mechanism for funding science in the U.S.,” said Joseph Bak-Coleman, a scientist studying group decision-making at the University of Washington.

The changes will delay grant review and approval, slowing “progress for cures and treatments that patients and families across the country urgently need,” said the Association of American Medical Colleges in a statement.

The administration has already terminated thousands of research grants at agencies like the NSF and NIH, including on topics like transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion.

The order could affect emergency relief grants doled out by FEMA, public safety initiatives funded by the Department of Justice and public health efforts supported by the Centers for Disease Control. Experts say the order is likely to be challenged in court.

The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to halt a court order restricting immigration stops that swept up at least two U.S. citizens in Southern California.

The emergency petition comes after an appeals court refused to lift a temporary restraining order barring authorities from stopping or arresting people based solely on factors like what language speak or where they work.

The move is the latest in a string of emergency appeals from the Trump administration to the high court, which has recently sided with the Republican president in a number of high-profile cases.

The Justice Department argued that federal agents are allowed to consider those factors when ramping up enforcement of immigration laws in Los Angeles, an area it considers a “top enforcement priority.”

Trump officials asked the justices to immediately halt the order from U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles. She found a “mountain of evidence” that enforcement tactics were violating the U.S. Constitution in what the plaintiffs called “roving patrols.”
Her ruling came in a lawsuit filed by immigrant advocacy groups who accused President Donald Trump’s administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people in Southern California during the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Trump’s Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to immediately halt Frimpong’s order, arguing that it puts a “straitjacket” on agents in an area with a large number of people in the U.S. illegally.

“No one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion ... But in many situations, such factors—alone or in combination—can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States,” Sauer wrote.

He also argued that the order “flouted” a recent Supreme Court decision restricting judges from handing down universal injunctions, since it restricted stops in the entire region rather than only the plaintiffs.

Department of Homeland Security attorneys have said immigration officers target people based on illegal presence in the U.S., not skin color, race or ethnicity.

The order from Frimpong, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, bars authorities from using factors like apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a location such as a tow yard or car wash, or someone’s occupation as the only basis for reasonable suspicion for detention.

The Los Angeles region has been a battleground for the Trump administration after its aggressive immigration strategy spurred protests and the deployment of the National Guards and Marines for several weeks.

Plaintiffs on the lawsuit before Frimpong included three detained immigrants and two U.S. citizens. One was Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidia, who was shown in a June 13 video being seized by federal agents as he yelled, “I was born here in the states, East LA bro!”

He was released about 20 minutes later after showing agents his identification, as was another citizen stopped at a car wash, according to the lawsuit.