They appeared in plain clothes outside a San Diego hotel, wore camouflage as they raided a Los Angeles factory and arrived with military gear at a Ventura County farm.

The presence of thousands of hard-to-identify federal agents is a new fact of life in Southern California this summer as the Trump administration carries out the president’s promised deportations.

Many residents may assume these masked agents are officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But that’s not always the case.

Many of them belong to the Border Patrol, the agency that traditionally has policed the nation’s border with Mexico. But the Trump administration sent officers from other agencies to Los Angeles, too, including the FBI and special tactical teams from the Department of Homeland Security not widely seen until now.

Democrats in California’s Legislature have proposed measures to unmask the federal agents.

Senate Bill 627, the “No Secret Police Act,” seeks to prohibit all local, state and federal officers from using masks with some exceptions. SB 805, the “No Vigilantes Act,” would require that officers clearly display their name or badge number. It’s disputed whether the state can regulate federal officers and law enforcement agencies are lobbying against the proposals.

Federal regulations state that ICE and Border Patrol agents should identify themselves when arresting someone “as soon as it is practical and safe to do so.”

And the public is allowed to ask federal agents to identify themselves.

But David Levine, a professor at UC Law San Francisco said, “they can ask but it doesn’t mean they’ll get the information.”

The number of sweeps and detentions appeared to slow this week after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, finding that agents stopped people based on someone’s race, language, accent, presence at a specific location or job. For ensuing stops, agents must have “reasonable suspicion” that doesn’t consider those factors “alone or in combination,” according to the judge’s order.

While ICE is a different agency than Border Patrol, both are part of the Department of Homeland Security and carry out immigration enforcement.

The difference may not always matter much, but misidentifying an agency can confuse the public, as it did with the sighting of federal agents outside Dodger Stadium in June. The agents reportedly had no visible names or badges and attempted to enter the stadium’s parking lots. The Dodgers put out a statement that “ICE agents” had been denied entry to the stadium. ICE denied it was ever there; the Department of Homeland Security then clarified that it had been Customs and Border Protection agents at the venue.

Images on social media show a constellation of federal agencies supporting immigration sweeps in Southern California. Here’s how you can identify them.

Border Patrol far from the border

Border Patrol agents often wear green uniforms and “Border Patrol” and “U.S. Customs and Border Protection” might be labeled on their badge, vest, shoulder, back, bucket hat or cap, and usually in yellow text over blue.

Their marked vehicles tend to be white with a green slash, reading “Border Patrol” on the side.

Some might confuse Border Patrol with Customs and Border Protection officers. Those officials wear blue and usually stay stationed at ports of entry.

You may be wondering why Border Patrol agents are conducting immigration operations deep into Los Angeles neighborhoods, rather than staying closer to the border.

Border Patrol agents can search vehicles without a warrant throughout much of the country. They’re allowed to operate 100 miles from any edge of the country and coastline, reaching roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to a CalMatters investigation and documentary produced in partnership with Evident and Bellingcat.

Since its creation by Congress in 1924, the Border Patrol’s role has been to prevent unauthorized entry into the United States. The agency polices trade, narcotics, contraband and combats human trafficking.

The agency has a SWAT-like unit known as BORTAC, or Border Patrol Tactical Unit, which has also been documented in immigrant hubs such as MacArthur Park, Los Angeles’ Toy District, and Bell. Border Patrol sources describe the unit’s use for “high-risk” purposes.

In fatigues, the unit wears a “BORTAC” patch on the left shoulder with, at times, black undershirts.

Customs and Border Protection also deployed its tactical Special Response Team in Los Angeles’ North Hills late June, executing a federal search warrant at a “human smuggling hub” tied to national security threats, arresting two, according to the agency.

ICE in police vests

ICE agents might wear an “ICE” patch on the front or back of their vest, usually in black-and-white, though they also can carry a badge of the same design in gold. The ICE emblem features the U.S. Department of Homeland Security eagle seal.

ICE agents might display “police” on their uniform. The ACLU wants ICE to stop using the word “police” on uniforms, contending the agency is impersonating local law enforcement officers

After 9/11, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement within it shortly thereafter. ICE is tasked with enforcing trade and immigration laws, including within the interior of the country.

The Cato Institute found that ICE booked over 200,000 people into detention between October 1 and June 14. More than 93% of book-ins had no violent conviction and 65% had no criminal conviction whatsoever.

ICE itself has a few enforcement divisions. That’s why some ICE uniforms might read ERO—part of their “Enforcement and Removal Operations” team—or HSI for “Homeland Security Investigations.”

In 2024, ICE launched a rebrand and created the investigations unit to develop cases, and improve public outreach, including with local law enforcement, an HSI official told ABC News.

According to its website, HSI combats a broad array of transnational-related crime, ranging from narcotics smuggling to cybercrime, and from human trafficking to intellectual property theft.

ERO meanwhile manages all aspects of the typical immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, GPS monitoring, and deporting unauthorized immigrants. Their site description also says they seek to deport priority undocumented immigrants after they are released from U.S. jails and prisons. They can also assist multi-agency task forces in arresting unauthorized immigrants without any other criminal history who are “deemed a threat to public safety.”

ICE also deployed its Special Response Team (SRT), decked in military wear and weaponry, in San Diego late May. It sent a dozen or more of those officers to the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet near southeast Los Angeles in June, detaining two people for deportation.

Agents from those teams will often feature their logo on the shoulder and will be seen in heavy military-like uniforms. The teams are meant to engage “high risk” situations, according to ICE.

Rare National Guard deployment

National Guard troops had been most visible outside a federal building during protests in downtown Los Angeles, but have also accompanied a few immigration enforcement operations. In mid-June, National Guard soldiers accompanied federal agents raiding marijuana farms around Thermal, a desert town near Coachella, where about 70 undocumented immigrants were arrested, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

On July 7, about 90 California National Guard soldiers swept through the Los Angeles immigrant hub of MacArthur Park, a defense official said, to protect immigration agents from potentially hostile crowds, according to the Associated Press. They also were on site in Carpinteria last week.

The National Guard troops in L.A. wear Army uniforms. Soldiers in the state units have patches on their left shoulder that show a raven, a sunburst, or a sunburst on top a diamond, each in black and green color schemes. Troops will also have a full color U.S. flag on the right shoulder. The patch under that, if any, can vary and may be based on a soldier’s past deployments.

Part of the U.S. military, the National Guard is able to serve both domestically and globally for state and federal duties, assisting with natural disasters, border security, civil unrest, overseas combat, counter-drug efforts and more. Soldiers largely stay in their home state and can be called on by the state governor or president.

Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed President Trump’s decision to send the troops to Los Angeles, and the assignment marked the first time that a president has deployed the National Guard over the objections of a governor since the Civil Rights era.

More federal law enforcement officers

In January, a Homeland Security memo called for Justice Department agents to carry out immigration enforcement, according to ABC News. Deputized bureaus include the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons receiving the “same authority already granted to the FBI.”

Officers’ affiliations can be seen on their vests, jackets, or at times, their shoulder patches.

Agents wearing FBI fatigues were most visible in the worksite sweep at Ambiance Apparel in LA’s Fashion District, arguably the first major operation of the current wave of raids.

On June 10, FBI Los Angeles’ X account touted its collaboration with an ICE operation in Ventura County. They have also participated in other immigration raids across the country.

A spokesperson with the Justice Department declined to comment on how it deployed agents from various agencies. In early June, the FBI told KTLA that it is participating in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and nationwide “as directed by the Attorney General,” supporting with SWAT, intelligence and more.

The ATF was also seen at the Ambiance Apparel raid. The DEA was there, too, and has since collaborated with ICE in the region.

On X, U.S. Marshals touted themselves as “on the front lines of immigration enforcement” in Los Angeles while showing officers interviewing a man on a bike. Marshals were also on site at a Ventura County marijuana farm raid where more than 200 people were arrested.

Can California unmask federal agents?

The use of masked agents without clearly identifying uniforms has confused the public, including local police receiving reports of kidnappings.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned in March that reports of ICE impersonations were growing. Alleged federal agent impersonations have occurred in Huntington Park, Wisconsin, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

“We don’t even know who these people are. It’s so dangerous, it’s so horrific, and it’s time to put standards in place,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who is backing two proposals that would compel law enforcement officers to go without masks and display identification.

The Trump administration maintains that the masks are necessary to protect officers’ identities as they carry out investigations.

“So, I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” said acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a press conference early June.

And some law enforcement experts say the federal government has that authority.

“Certain legislators are giving a false sense of hope that California can legislate laws to control the practices of federal agents,” said Ed Obayashi, a longtime sheriff’s deputy in California and policy adviser to the Modoc County Sheriff’s Office.

“They cannot do that—bottom line. Plain and simple. Federal law is supreme.”

Acknowledging potential legal disputes, Wiener said he’s willing to test the “time-sensitive” bills in the courts.“Federal employees can’t just come in and ignore all California laws,” he said. “There are laws that they have to follow.”

After years of soaring rents, increasingly out-of-reach home prices and an enduring homelessness crisis that touches every corner of the state, California is finally creating a state agency exclusively focused on housing issues.

You might wonder what took so long.

Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced a proposal to split up the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency — an awkward grabbag of disparate bureaucratic operations — into two fresh agencies: One just for housing and homelessness-related departments and one for everything else.

The Legislature had until July 4 to veto the plan. It didn’t though some Republicans tried. Now the work of standing up California’s first housing agency begins.

Supporters of the bureaucratic reshuffle say the move is long overdue. In surveys, Californians regularly name housing costs and homelessness as among the state’s top concerns. That alone warrants the creation of a new cabinet-level adviser to the governor, said Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, which advocates for affordable housing development.

“A cabinet-level secretary who will sit with other cabinet secretaries, whose purview will be housing … that is elevating the agenda to the highest level,” he said.

Pearl, like virtually every expert interviewed for this article about the new agency, described the reorganization as “just the first step” in bringing much-needed order and efficiency to California’s network of funding programs for affordable housing.

“Simply moving people around and giving them a new business card doesn’t change the system,” he said.

A spokesperson for the governor stressed that the creation of a new housing agency is part of a broader effort by Newsom to prioritize one of California’s most vexing issues. Since taking the helm of state government in 2018, the governor has ramped up pressure on local governments to plan for more housing, urged them to clear encampments of unhoused Californians and pushed for legislation aimed at ramping up construction.

“This is the first administration to make this a part of our everyday conversation — putting a magnifying glass on the issue of homelessness and finding ways to effectively address it. These structural and policy changes are going to create a generational impact,” said spokesperson Tara Gallegos.

Among the seven cabinet-level agencies, the BCSH has always seemed like the “everything else” wing of state government. Affordable housing grantmakers, lenders and urban planning regulators share agency letterhead with cannabis and alcohol industry overseers, professional licensors, car mechanic watchdogs and everyone at the California Horse Racing Board.

“We used to call it ‘The Island of Misfit Toys,’” said Claudia Cappio, who ran both the California Housing Finance Agency and the Department of Housing and Community Development in the years immediately before and after 2012 when both were packed into the newly created BCSH. “Imagine a staff meeting of all those things … I learned a lot about horse racing.”

How many financing systems is too many?

Aside from giving housing and homelessness its own box atop Newsom’s organizational chart, the chief selling point of the reorganization has been to simplify the state’s hydra of affordable housing financing systems.

Currently, there is one state organization where affordable housing developers apply for loans, another where they go for most grants, a third where they apply for the federal tax credits that builders use to entice private investors to back their projects and a fourth for the bonds needed to secure many of those credits. This doesn’t include one-off programs for veterans, transit-oriented development and short-term housing for homeless people, which are sprinkled across state government.

Complicating things further, the tax credit and bond funding programs — the backbone of funding for affordable housing development across the country — aren’t even under the governor’s control. Those programs are run by the state’s independently elected treasurer.

“Many, many states have what is essentially a housing finance agency that controls the majority of affordable housing funds,” said Sarah Karlinsky, who directs research at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. California’s programs are split up, which is unusual.

Beyond that, “what makes California so unique,” said Karlinksy, “is the fact that the resources are spread across two different constitutional officers.”

That fragmentation appears to be adding to the cost of construction in California. A Terner Center analysis this spring estimated that each additional public funding source delays a project by, on average, four months, and adds an additional $20,460 in costs per unit.

Affordable housing construction is already distinctly expensive here. Building a publicly funded project in California costs more than 2.5 times more per square foot than in both Texas and Colorado, a recent report from the Rand Institute found.

The dance of secretaries

Will the new housing agency solve that problem? Not everyone is convinced.

Of the many ways in which the scarcity of affordable housing affects most people, “the lines on the org chart” don’t crack the “top 100 list,”  Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, said about the governor’s proposal at a hearing in March.

Cabaldon noted that executive reorganizations are a semi-regular feature of California governance. The Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency is itself the product of a reorganization which spun off California’s independent transportation agency.

“The dance of the secretaries we do constantly, always with grand ambitions,” said Cabaldon. “Simply saying that it’s going to cause more focus, that it will be streamlined, that it will cause leadership level action — but how?”

As written, the new housing agency will consist of the current agency’s housing-related entities along with a new Affordable Housing Finance Committee, which will be tasked with coordinating the housing subsidy programs currently under the governor’s control.

But the major funding sources managed by the treasurer’s office will remain where they are. The California constitution wouldn’t have allowed Newsom to commandeer those functions from the independent treasurer even had he wanted to.

That’s a significant shortcoming, according to the Little Hoover Commission, the state government’s independent oversight agency, which reviewed the governor’s plan before it was passed along to the Legislature. In its final report, the commission recommended that the governor and treasurer strike a formal deal to “create a unified application and review process” for all the affordable finance programs under their respective purviews.

Neither the governor’s office nor the office of state Treasurer Fiona Ma would say if or how they are pursuing that goal.

A single, unified application for every one of California’s public affordable housing funding programs has been the bureaucratic holy grail of California affordable developers and policy wonks since at least the mid-1990s. Though the reorganization stops short of requiring that, it set up both constitutional offices to better coordinate in the future, said Matt Schwartz, president of the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing.

“There’s going to be a bit of diplomacy” between the two executive branches to work out a joint application, said Schwartz, who spoke to CalMatters earlier this year after the governor first introduced the proposal. “That’s the longer-term prize that many of us will be pushing to come out of this process.”

Some affordable housing advocates have urged lawmakers to be cautious in mushing the various bureaucracies together.

In a letter to four powerful Democratic legislators, the California Housing Consortium stressed that the application systems administered by the treasurer’s office already “function extremely well.”

That process “is not broken and doesn’t need fixing,” said Pearl, the consortium’s director. Before monkeying with it, he said, “let’s get the agency set up.”

Pearl and the consortium also noted that past legislation has already mandated the creation of a working group to propose a consolidated application. The findings of that group are due on July 1, 2026. That’s the same day the current BCSH is set to officially dissolve and the two new agencies will take its place.

That’s also just five months before statewide elections will be held to replace Newsom and Ma, giving voters a chance to decide who will shape the future of affordable housing policy in California.

California’s drive to run its electric grid entirely on wind, solar and other clean sources of energy just got harder after President Donald Trump signed a sweeping new budget law.

The changes in federal tax incentives could affect the feasibility of new solar and wind projects as the state is counting on them to provide more electricity for Californians. A state law requires 100% of electricity to be powered by renewable, carbon-free sources by 2045, at the same time it’s moving to electrify cars and trucks.

Incentives championed by former President Joe Biden were rolled back, shortening the timeline for the industry to obtain tax credits. Developers of wind and solar projects now face a new, shorter deadline for obtaining tax credits — most now expire at the end of 2027 instead of no sooner than 2032.

In addition, the new federal rules bar companies from accessing tax credits if they rely on major components from China or other “foreign entities of concern.” This restriction could hit California’s solar and wind industry especially hard, experts said.

The changes to tax credits are estimated to save the federal government approximately $499 billion from 2025-2034.

“For too long, the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar,” Trump wrote in an executive order last week. “The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy sources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”

Projects can still be built without tax credits. But it puts more of a financial burden on their investors. In California, 11 solar projects and one onshore wind project now face potential delays or cancellation, according to an analysis of federal data by Atlas Public Policy provided to CalMatters. The projects are spread across the Central Valley, Inland Empire and Northern California.

Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy for the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement that the industry was still “assessing what the federal tax bill means for them.” He warned the changes could jeopardize up to 35,700 solar jobs and 25 solar manufacturing facilities in California — including existing positions and factories as well as future projects that may now never materialize.

“The reality is, with or without clean energy tax credits, California’s energy demand is growing at a historic rate, and solar and storage are the fastest and most affordable way to meet that demand,” Gallagher said.

California in recent years has been fast-tracking massive floating offshore wind farms 20 miles off the coasts of Humboldt County and Morro Bay. The federal changes add some uncertainty that could chill investment. But experts say it’s not a death knell for the industry because the projects weren’t set to seek federal permits or generate electricity for at least several years.

“Offshore wind is what we would call a long-lead project. It does take years and years to develop,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, former chair of the Assembly’s Offshore Wind Select Committee. “Solar is a little bit shorter of a time frame…but it’s also his incredibly erratic behavior when it comes to market stability overall that is also going to affect these projects in a negative way.”

Experts say in the long-run, the federal changes could drive up energy costs.

“Tax credit savings are typically passed onto ratepayers through lower contracting costs. In the long term, the repeal of the tax credits will result in higher future electricity rates for customers,” the California Energy Commission told CalMatters.

Rising utility bills are already a major political headache for state leaders and a challenge for clean energy advocates who want the state to lead the way in making electricity cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable.

“The whole point of California’s climate policy is not just to reduce California’s carbon footprint — because we are less than 1% of global emissions — but to set an example and show that this can be done,” Berkeley economist Severin Borenstein told CalMatters. “There are going to be fewer other states following our example because it’s going to be more expensive.”

The new hurdles for solar and wind come as they are scaling up to meet surging electricity demand nationwide, including from energy-hungry data centers fueling the rise of artificial intelligence.

California Energy Commissioner Nancy Skinner, in an interview with CalMatters, said the federal law is a national “job killer” and was short-sighted. “The economics of renewable energy generation speak for themselves….The cost of solar generation now is competitive with natural gas,” she said.

“We’re not going to back away from our commitments and our goals,” she added. “Our commitment — whether it is to zero-emission vehicles, or to renewable energy generation — is about cleaning the air as well as addressing the climate crisis…Nobody wants to live in smoggy communities, where the air you’re breathing hurts you.”

Solar and wind projects have helped California log key renewable energy milestones in recent years. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said nine out of every 10 days so far in 2025 have been powered by non-fossil fuels for at least a part of the day.

The state’s grid runs on a mix of renewables — solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, biomass and hydropower — an average of seven hours a day, the governor said, citing new data compiled by the California Energy Commission.

“The fourth largest economy in the world is running on more clean energy than ever before,” Newsom said in a statement. “Trump and Republicans can try all they want to take us back to the days of dirty coal but the future is cheap, abundant clean energy.”

But industry officials say the state isn’t doing enough. They say the state has too many hurdles for building wind and solar projects and needs to offer more funding.

“For years now, too many California leaders have retreated from true clean energy leadership — hopefully the tax bill serves as a wakeup call that their leadership on clean energy is more important now than ever,” Gallagher said.

Trump and Congress did not shorten the tax credit deadlines for nuclear power plants, hydroelectric facilities, battery storage and geothermal plants. Congress also dropped a provision that would have added a new excise tax on wind and solar.

For wind and solar, there’s still a possible path to claim tax credits if construction starts within a year or they come online by the end of 2027. Senators added that provision to soften the blow. In theory, those projects could be finished and connected to the grid as late as 2031 and still qualify, but that depends on how the Treasury Department defines what it means to “start construction,” said Kevin Book, an energy analyst based in Washington, D.C.

“In the short-term, it might actually increase or shift earlier expenditure on these kinds of clean energy projects and all else equal,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at UC San Diego. “California is in a pretty good position to profit from that acceleration.”

But Victor warned that the long-term costs could become “a political nightmare.”

“The long-term incentive, clearly, is to try to slow down investment in solar and wind and electric vehicles,” Victor said.

Borenstein took a more measured view about the impact on costs: California’s high electricity prices aren’t mainly about power production — they’re driven by wildfire costs, including past damage payouts and upgrades to prevent future fires. Other drivers include subsidies for low-income customers and the cost shift from rooftop solar, he said.

Some legislators have advocated for the state budget to cover more of these costs, but Borenstein said it’s politically easier to keep charging customers through their electric bills.

Alex Jackson, who leads the industry group American Clean Power California, said the state should use money from its cap-and-trade program to lower bills. Cap and trade is a market system that charges California companies for the greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Jackson said those funds could help pay for grid upgrades so ratepayers don’t have to.

He said the state also could lower clean energy costs by speeding up permitting, easing environmental rules for upgrades to existing projects and reducing costs for turning farmland into solar farms. He also called for expanding regional electricity markets to help California trade power more efficiently — a controversial idea being debated in the Legislature this year.

The state Legislature has debated for years exempting some clean energy projects from the state’s landmark environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, which is often blamed for delays. State Sen. Scott Wiener, of San Francisco, has advocated for such changes.

“California has always been a leader, and we need to step that up significantly,” Wiener told CalMatters. “We’ve really aggressively invested in clean energy, and we need to ramp up that investment, and we need to make it easier and faster to get clean energy deployed.”

In addition to the wind and solar credits, the budget signed by Trump also ends tax credits for purchase of electric cars, rooftop solar panels, home batteries, heat pumps, insulation, energy-efficient windows and doors, and other upgrades. Rooftop solar tax credits end this year. Federal tax credits for hydrogen production end after 2027 — a blow for California, which had positioned itself as a national hydrogen hub. Those changes are estimated to save about $543 billion from 2025–2034.

The state Energy Commission said the elimination of the EV credits beginning on Sept. 30 will mean “lower adoption of electric vehicles” and a “potential short-term spike in ZEV sales” before that date. Rooftop solar projects and heat pump sales also are likely to decrease, the agency said.

Becoming a doctor will likely become even more difficult under the new tax bill Congress approved after lawmakers slashed the amount of money medical school students can borrow in federal loans.

The extra burden may mean fewer students choose careers in medicine, particularly low-income students. Patients, in turn, may see fewer doctors practicing family medicine.

The new rules, part of the sweeping Republican-backed “big, beautiful bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law July 4, cap federal debt for professional degree students at $50,000 annually and $257,000 for the life of a student’s college journey, including undergraduate debt.

Previously graduate students could borrow up to the cost of their programs to afford their degrees with so-called Grad PLUS loans. Starting next year, those loans will disappear. While all graduate programs are affected by the new law, medical school lasts four years and regularly requires more than $300,000 for tuition, housing, food and other expenses for a degree.

Without public loans, many students will have to borrow from private lenders, which provide far fewer protections for loan repayment and, unlike federal plans, don’t offer loan forgiveness.

Public service loan forgiveness, which can occur after 10 years of employment in nonprofit settings, is a particular draw for medical school graduates who choose to work in government or nonprofit hospitals and care facilities that pay less but have a mission of treating the poor.

Private lenders may also deny some students loans or charge higher interest rates based on their financial history. Private loans typically require cosigners, which not all borrowers are able to arrange.

Martha Santana-Chin, chief executive of the insurer L.A. Care Health Plan, said the cost of college, medical school and loan repayment already presents “financial barrier after financial barrier” that prevents many from pursuing medicine. Reliance on private loans will make it even harder for low-income students in particular to become doctors, she said.

“If you don’t have access to loans, if you don’t have access to preferred loan terms, it’s going to be that much more difficult for you,” Santana-Chin said.

The rules kick in for new students July 1, 2026. A student who has Grad PLUS before that date can continue to use it for their remaining program term, up to a maximum of three years.

The lower borrowing limits are a key way Congress tried to record savings in the tax bill. By capping how much graduate students can borrow, limiting how much loan debt is forgiven and increasing in many cases how much borrowers of all degrees pay monthly, taxpayers cover less of the tab. But the Republican bill includes huge tax and revenue cuts that, even with other budget savings, add more than $3 trillion to the national debt in the next decade. The higher-ed savings were about $300 billion.

”Straightforward economic logic would suggest (the new rules) are going to make it less likely for some of those students to be able to pursue graduate degrees than they are now,” said Jordan Matsudaira, a professor at American University. He was also chief economist at the U.S. Department of Education during the Biden administration.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been in a position where we’ve sent students to the private loan market looking for loans on this scale to be able to finance their education,” he added.

California medical school debt levels

U.S. Department of Education data from the Biden administration that Matsudaira shared with CalMatters show California’s largest producer of doctors, the University of California, regularly graduates students with debt in excess of $200,000, the most the new law says a graduate student in a professional program may borrow from the government.

• At UC Irvine’s school of medicine, the median debt from federal loans for med students was $195,000 for the years 2019-20 to 2022-23. That means that half of the students borrowed more and likely almost all of the new students in those situations would need private loans. Twenty-five percent of students there borrowed at least $254,000 and 10% borrowed at least $284,000.
• Every UC medical school had at least 10% of graduates with debt above $200,000. For UC Riverside, it was $270,000. At UCLA and UC San Diego, 10% of graduates borrowed more than $255,000.
• Many new graduates in similar situations would need $55,000 to $70,000 or more in private debt to finance their education.
• Four of the six UC medical schools had at least 10% of students borrowing more than $73,000 in a single year; new students in similar situations would need to find at least $23,000 in financing from private loans or some other support.
• At the private University of Southern California, 50% of graduates borrowed more than $260,000, and 25% borrowed in excess of $328,000, so a large chunk of new students would need to borrow at least $128,000 in private loans or find other ways of paying. A spokesperson for the school said no one was available to answer CalMatters’ questions.

There were 1,334 students graduating with medical degrees and 361 with similar doctor of osteopathic medicine degrees in 2023, a UC San Francisco report found. The UCs accounted for nearly 800 medical degree graduates.

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The UC perspective

Calvin Yang, a rising senior at UC Berkeley, said attending medical school has been his dream since he was a child. The new caps on federal borrowing won’t deter him from becoming a doctor, but they’ll slow him down and may force him to attend cheaper schools.

He plans to take at least one gap year after he graduates next spring and work to save as much as he can to avoid private loans.

“It’s frustrating to see restrictions on our ability to simply want to pursue an education in order to help the world, right?” he asked. “Long COVID persists. Mental health remains a major issue, diabetes, obesity — those all require medical professionals.”

He thinks some students will “reconsider the medical school pathway.” The loan caps are a concern among his friends with medical school ambitions.

“We do think that the private market will meet a lot of the needs of those students,” said Shawn Brick, associate vice provost of student financial support for the UC Office of the President. “Approval rates are fairly high for medical students.”

Still, “we do share the concern … about the student who may not have credit that would give them access to loans in the private market.”

Brick said the UC has time to work with private lenders on financial products that “would be more accessible to students who maybe don’t have the best credit.”

The median loan size UC med students have had to borrow has declined by about $50,000 over the past four years, adjusted for inflation, UC data show. At the same time, UC grant aid for med students has grown by about 50%.

Nearly 3,000 UC med students receive an average of $32,000 in UC grants to support their education. The UC also issues its own loans, but in small numbers.

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Doctors and advocates weigh in

Even before these changes, Dr. Julián Restrepo said medical school leaves doctors with so much debt that he knows people who are paying off loans decades after graduating, surgeons who work multiple jobs and resident physicians who pick up extra shifts to make ends meet.

“It is a huge burden for us, and it very well determines where we live, where we work, how we work and how we manage our practices,” Restrepo said.

Restrepo graduated from Texas A&M University’s medical school in 2012 and did his residency at Los Angeles County Medical Center. He now works as a primary care physician at a federally qualified health center in Los Angeles and said public service loan forgiveness is an effective way to recruit high quality physicians and specialists to underserved areas.

With interest, Restrepo’s loan of about $230,000 grew to more than $300,000. He made payments on the loan as part of the public service loan forgiveness program for about seven years until a Biden-era loan forbearance program temporarily kicked in.

An L.A. Care program aimed at recruiting physicians to underserved areas will pay off the remainder of his loans, and Restrepo said he’s extremely fortunate. At many points in his career he was forced to defer his loan payments because he couldn’t afford it.

The Association of American Medical Colleges also thinks the impending reliance on private loans may lead to fewer future doctors. “We are concerned that this added barrier could deter qualified candidates from pursuing a medical degree altogether, which could ultimately worsen the existing and expected physician workforce shortage,” said Kristen Earle, director of student financial services at the association, which oversees the medical school entrance exam. The association projects a national shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036. California, like much of the country, has a shortage of primary care physicians, with the Central Coast, Central Valley and Southern Border regions projected to have the most severe shortages.

More pressure on medical residents

And while medical degrees eventually lead to relatively high salaries that are typically $220,000 a year to more than $400,000 depending on the specialization, early career doctors earn much less in residency, a training period of three to sometimes seven or more years. As residents, doctors work 60 to 80 hours a week for salaries of about $70,000 to $100,000, depending on the region and whether residents are unionized.

Private lenders offer a wide range of interest rates for medical school, from about 3% to more than 14%. Federal rates fall in the middle of that range, are less variable and pegged to inflation. Some private lenders indicate online that they don’t require borrowers to pay while they’re in residency for a few years, while others require only a small payment. In either case, the unpaid interest grows the overall debt a borrower will have to pay off.

Earle said she hopes that private lenders keep interest rates fairly low for medical school students because they’re a good bet to pay off their debt given the higher earnings potential.

Dr. Mahima Iyengar is in her final year of residency at the massive Los Angeles General Medical Center to become a primary care physician.

She said she borrowed $250,000 in federal loans to attend medical school — $50,000 above next year’s maximum — and has no idea how someone like her would have avoided private loans. She wanted to study at the public University of Maryland, a less expensive option in her home state, but wasn’t admitted. Instead she attended the University of Rochester, another highly competitive but pricier private medical school hundreds of miles from home.

“I could have tried to live cheaper in med school, but I don’t think it would have been much more possible than how I was living with three, four roommates,” said the 31-year-old, who’s also a leader in her union.

Like a majority of medical school students, Iyengar knew she’d use public service loan forgiveness.

Now that option will be gone for professional school debt above $200,000.

“We want a diverse group of people taking care of patients, because we know that patients have better outcomes from providers that understand where they’ve come from,” she said. But that diversity might ebb if lower-income students, who are more likely to be students of color, feel priced out of med school.

UC agrees. “We don’t know for sure, but we are concerned about this slowing the efforts to build the physician workforce across the country, and especially in California, where we’ve got significant needs in primary care in rural areas,” said Heather Harper, spokesperson for UC’s medical operations.

L.A. Care has invested $255 million since 2018 in scholarships for medical students and loan repayment for physicians to try and recruit doctors, but Santana-Chin said it’s not enough money to meet the need. She hopes that medical schools see the federal changes as a “call to action” to make education more affordable, she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Ever been streaming a show or a movie and been jolted out of your entertainment reverie by an ad so loud it felt like it rattled the windows?

If California’s lawmakers have their way, those blaring commercials on streaming platforms might soon have the volume turned down.

A bill sailing through the Legislature with bipartisan support would prohibit online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu from cranking up the volume during commercials. The proposal would make the platforms comply with the same standards as a 15-year-old federal law that limits how loud traditional television and cable broadcasters can make their advertisements.

Senate Bill 576 hasn’t been a very tough sell for its author, Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana, despite opposition from California’s influential entertainment industry.

“This is the most popular bill I’ve introduced this year,” Umberg said in an interview with CalMatters.

Case in point: Every senator who was present that day voted for the bill when Umberg brought it to the Senate floor in late May. Umberg appealed to their annoyance.

“I’m guessing that all of you have been annoyed when you’re … streaming television, and a commercial comes on and it is exponentially louder than the other shows,” Umberg told his colleagues.

He glanced around the chamber. “You see heads nodding aye.”

President Barack Obama signed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act in 2010, which gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to issue rules ensuring that the average volume of TV commercials does not exceed the volume of the programming they accompany, according to the bill’s analysis. It notes that streaming services were still nascent at the time. Members of Congress have since tried to add streaming platforms to the law, but two 2023 federal bills didn’t get hearings.

Umberg’s bill aims to make streaming services in California follow the same rules despite Congress not yet taking action.

But would it be legal for California to do so?

UC Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania told CalMatters that federal courts have ruled “that the California Legislature could enact consumer protections aimed at California residents, even if they affected out-of-state content providers.”

Narechania cited a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of a California deaf-rights organization that sued CNN for violating state law by failing to put closed captioning on videos it had on its website.

Umberg: Don’t wake the baby!

While a significant amount of legislation comes to lawmakers through lobbyists pitching their proposals, this one came to Umberg from a baby. Well, the baby’s parents anyway.

He said his legislative director, Zach Keller, has an infant daughter named Samantha Rose. The baby had finally settled down to sleep and her parents, in turn, settled down to relax and watch a show when an ad came on so loud it woke the baby.

“Her father, at the behest of the baby’s mother, brought a bill idea to me,” Umberg said. “I thought, ‘That’s a good bill idea,’ so we introduced it.”

The plight of parents with sleeping babies hasn’t been enough to ward off opposition to the bill from California’s entertainment industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America. It has donated at least $204,000 to lawmakers since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

Opponents, including the Streaming Innovation Alliance, argue that the proposal would be difficult for streaming services to implement.

Streaming service ads don’t work the same way as commercials at cable and television networks, Melissa Patack, a representative for the Motion Picture Association, told the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee last month.

“When you choose a program on your streaming service, you’re actually calling up a digital file and advertising is paired up with that in real time,” she said. “The streaming platform may not be able to control the loudness of a particular ad.”

Patack added that the streaming industry has done “a significant amount of work” already to “address loudness issues and develop best practices to match the loudness of ads with programming.”

Umberg isn’t buying it.

“I have a great deal of faith in the entertainment industry, in the technology that they both currently use and are developing, that if they can make ads louder, they can make them less loud,” he said.

Umberg’s bill now moves to the Assembly floor where Umberg is again likely to appeal to lawmakers’ desire for streamers not to wake up more babies such as Samantha Rose.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed the biggest effort in years to undo red tape for housing development, he singled out one group for credit.

“This is the third of the last four years we’ve been together signing landmark housing reforms, and it simply would not have happened without the Carpenters,” Newsom said.

The California Conference of Carpenters has emerged in recent years as one of the most influential voices on housing in Sacramento. The new law rolls back California’s landmark environmental review law to exempt urban apartment developments, an idea once considered a legislative third rail. It’s the most significant yet in a string of bills intended to boost housing production that lawmakers have passed with the union’s help.

The Carpenters’ involvement has given some Democratic lawmakers the opportunity to address the housing crisis with the blessing of a construction union.

They’ve presented an alternative to more traditional demands from organized labor embodied by the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which has opposed nearly all high-profile proposals to lower hurdles for developers that do not include minimum pay levels and union hiring requirements that some housing advocates see as so stringent and costly they effectively hamper building more housing.

The Trades, an umbrella group of 14 affiliated construction unions, are a force in the Capitol. Their members turn out reliably for campaign door-knocking and they are affiliated with the powerful California Labor Federation. Over the past 10 years, the Trades’ statewide and regional councils have donated more than $6.7 million to legislative candidates; the affiliated unions have collectively donated at least another $32 million.

The Carpenters, with its northern and southern councils, spend a formidable amount themselves: nearly $6 million on legislative races in the past decade, rivaling any of the Trades’ unions.

“Unions carry a lot of weight in Sacramento and for good reason,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and an author of the environmental carveout law. “It’s important that we’re supporting good-paying jobs and I don’t want to take anything away from them. But we have to look around at what’s working and we have to build 2.5 million homes. The Carpenters have come to the table with more creative solutions.”

Division bursts into public view

Not everyone is on board. The carpenters’ stance has created a split in the labor movement that makes lawmakers uneasy and sometimes spills into public view.

With the Carpenters’ backing, lawmakers and Newsom last month tried at the last minute of budget deliberations to push through a version of Wicks’ bill that included minimum wages for residential construction workers. The proposed wages were higher than most of the typical non-union wages for private developments, but $40 to $60 lower per hour than the prevailing wages required on publicly subsidized projects — a state-calculated figure that amounts to union-level pay.

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Backlash came swiftly. Following the Trades’ lead, union leader after union leader lined up at the Capitol to slam the proposal, arguing it would undermine their members’ higher wages. Lawmakers quickly scrapped the proposal.

“The Carpenters, in my view, are a pariah” in the labor movement, said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for Trades-affiliated unions representing electrical workers, pipe fitters and sheet metal workers. “They’re willing to sell all workers down the river and pursue really unlivable wage rates so they can try to capture other unions’ work.”

But lawmakers say what caught their attention was more of a philosophical difference. Non-union laborers produce the majority of the state’s housing, and the Carpenters’ approach viewing them not as cheaper competition but as potential members of their union has made them “game-changing,” Wicks said.

“The role of unions is to protect the workers in their organization,” said Danny Curtin, director of the California Council of Carpenters. “But in the larger perspective, it’s to protect all workers, and then bring them into the union movement.”

Home building: The Wild West of construction

The intra-labor rift is as much a story of the American workforce as it is of California politics.

With the exception of affordable and publicly subsidized projects, housing has been largely built with non-union labor for decades. In the late 1960s, corporate giants began backing contractors to resist union demands and promote non-union labor.

An influx of immigrant workers, willing to accept lower pay, made it possible.

Construction unions of all stripes found the small, scattered worksites of the residential market too difficult to organize when larger commercial, industrial or public works projects provided members steadier work, said UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.

Labor groups see home building as the Wild West of construction, rife with fly-by-night contractors, wage theft and physical hazards.

In 2001, the national United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America split from the AFL-CIO, which includes the building trades unions. Douglas McCarron, president of the national carpenters’ union, claimed at the time that the labor umbrella group was overly focused on protecting existing members and failing to “shift resources to organizing” new ones.

In 2022, Jay Bradshaw, the then-newly elected executive secretary-treasurer of the Northern California Carpenters Union, brought that approach to the state’s housing debates.

Before then, development advocates and lawmakers could barely even introduce housing streamlining proposals without the Trades’ insertion of their favored labor standards, lobbyists and current and former lawmakers said. Sometimes, the Carpenters agreed with them.

But Bradshaw, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, was motivated by low pay and labor violations on non-unionized residential jobsites, which he often called “crime scenes,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a major author of housing bills. Bradshaw wanted housing bills to include rules to improve those workers’ pay and conditions, but in contrast to the Trades, he was OK with those hired not being union members.

“It changed everything,” Wiener said. “It created more space for more dialogue and less of the ‘my way or the highway’ approach.”

The theory was that by improving workers’ conditions and visiting job sites to enforce the new rules, the union could one day organize them.

Carpenters focus on non-union workers

So the Carpenters in 2022 broke away from other unions to push for a bill Wicks authored that made it easier to convert strip malls and commercial properties to housing.

It included requirements for developers to pay union-level wages, and for bigger projects, provide workers health benefits and agree to be monitored for wage theft and other labor violations. It did not include language favored by the Trades to hire a “skilled and trained” workforce — essentially, union labor.

The bill passed against the Trades’ wishes, though lawmakers also passed a second, similar bill with the Trades’ hiring language. The following year, they used a similar formula to pass a pair of streamlining bills. Along the way, the support of the Carpenters garnered the support of public school employees and service sector unions, and even some Trades-affiliated unions.

“Count us shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone who will continue to drive to pull those workers up and in, as they should be,” Bradshaw said at last week’s bill-signing ceremony, “to support union labor and protect that, but to make sure that union labor should be held to account to represent all workers.”

Other unions use a similar method of organizing in an era of low unionization rates and an economy defined by subcontracting and franchising.

The Service Employees International Union, which has backed some of the Carpenters’ efforts on housing bills, has also spent years pulling non-union, heavily immigrant workers into the labor movement in part by making policy demands. Its signature Fight for $15 organizing effort in fast food restaurants, an industry notoriously difficult to unionize, got California lawmakers to mandate a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in 2023.

But in restaurants, there isn’t a union of well-paid, skilled workers looking to safeguard their own jobs.

Major reforms to CEQA

There were already bouts of bad blood between the Carpenters and the other construction unions over the years. In particular, the San Francisco Trades council has accused the Carpenters of bidding on projects for their own members, “attempting to claim and steal the work” from other specialized craftspeople.

So attempts to write alternative labor standards into housing laws have come across to the Trades’ unions as undercutting their contracts — or, as Wetch described it, “trying to benefit your organization to the detriment of others.”

The dispute over minimum wages last month sent that dynamic into overdrive.

The new wage standard the Carpenters backed was presented as a way to provide a minor wage hike for the lowest paid construction workers, who are virtually all non-union.

Chris Hannan, president of the Trades council, said the organization was so outraged by the proposal because it could have undercut wage schedules incorporated into union apprenticeship programs. He also said writing new construction wages into state law that are below the union-level prevailing wages would “set a dangerous precedent that may extend outside of residential construction.”

To Hannan, promoting union hiring is how lawmakers can preserve California’s middle class. If lawmakers can guarantee there are new projects for Trades workers, the Trades would expand apprenticeships to bring new workers into well-trained, well-paid positions.

He declined to discuss in detail his disagreements with the Carpenters. But he said the proposal for lower-than-prevailing wages went too far.

“In the past, whether we thought a labor standard (proposed by the Carpenters) was sufficient or not, at least they were meaningful,” Hannan said. “This here, this time, was just a complete non-starter.”

In the end, the California Environmental Quality Act changes passed without the controversial wage proposal, which made the Trades neutral rather than opposed to the bill. It includes labor enforcement language the Carpenters said would help them root out the worst actors, such as adding liability for the developer if their contractors or subcontractors are caught underpaying workers.

The Trades say they, too, got what they wanted. For new infill apartments to skip CEQA review, the law requires union-level wages for projects with 100% affordable units, and some union hiring for projects that are taller than 85 feet.

Most developments over 85 feet use concrete and steel frame construction, which require a higher skilled labor force that is often unionized anyway, and most entirely income-restricted housing projects make use of public subsidies that require union-level wages. These were relatively modest concessions that Wicks said “we were happy to make.”

That leaves market rate and mixed-income apartment buildings under seven-or-so stories, which define the bulk of urban development in California. Hannan acknowledged that those new developments can now skip CEQA review without any new labor rules — whether favored by the Trades or the Carpenters.

“There’s a lot of work to be done there,” he said.

Tens of thousands of California state employees were bracing to return to the office on July 1 after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared there was an “operational necessity” for all California state employees to work in person a minimum of four days per week.

That changed just before the deadline when CalHR, which represents the governor in collective bargaining, negotiated a set of deals with public employee unions that delayed the mandate for a year. Relieved workers welcomed the news.

Yet labor leaders – and even some in-office evangelists – said the governor’s willingness to suddenly drop his demand proved the order was a clever political move and undermined his insistence that in-person work is superior, necessary for productivity and builds public trust.

“Many of our members feel the sudden shift toward rigid (return to office) policies had more to do with politics and pressure than performance,” wrote Anica Walls, president of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, in an email. The union, the largest in California state government, represents almost 96,000 state employees. “This pause is a direct result of our members fighting back.”

Walls declined multiple requests for an interview and insisted that CalMatters send questions in writing.

Many state workers had been on edge since March when Newsom penned the executive order that would have required an estimated 108,000 employees who still worked a hybrid schedule to return to the office nearly full time. The new order doubled the number of required in-office days from two to four, building on Newsom’s first crackdown on work-from-home in April 2023.

Several state employee unions filed grievances, and two groups sued Newsom and CalHR, the state’s human resources agency, alleging that the administration’s order wrongfully sidestepped the collective bargaining process by unilaterally changing working conditions.

Aggrieved state employees also fundraised more than $30,000 to erect billboards around Sacramento that accused Newsom of creating traffic jams. Many workers argued the state had downsized some locations so there would not even be enough room for them to work in person.

Lawmakers, whom the public employee unions view as allies, questioned whether the state was ready to suddenly bring so many workers back to the office. They didn’t get clear answers.

‘You don’t have numbers for us’

During budget hearings in April and May, members of the Assembly subcommittee that oversees government administration grilled officials from CalHR and the Department of Government Services about how much it would cost to have tens of thousands of workers come in four days a week instead of two.

The lawmakers didn’t hide their exasperation when administration officials admitted they did not  even have a rough estimate.

“I’m still really astonished that you don’t have numbers for us,” said Assemblymember Liz Ortega, a Democrat who represents Hayward, during a May 22 committee hearing.

“This is pretty bewildering,” echoed Democratic Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco.

But Newsom maintained that the benefits of in-person work, such as increased collaboration, communication and mentorship for newer employees, were undermined by the two-day in-office policy since teams weren’t required to come in on the same days. Four days in office would mitigate that issue.

The tension escalated in May after Newsom announced the state faced a $12 billion budget problem and suggested delaying state worker pay raises for a year, as well as pausing contributions to their retiree health care funds, to cut costs.

Ultimately, CalHR reached new labor agreements with three unions, including the state’s largest, to delay the in-office order until July 2026. Those new deals also included some of the cost savings the governor wanted.

SEIU Local 1000 recently agreed to offset a 3% pay raise this year with five extra hours of “unpaid” leave time each month. The agreement, which affects about a third of the union’s 96,000 represented workers, could ultimately cost the state more since an employee’s accrued hours gain value as their pay rises over time. Many state workers wait to cash out unused leave when they retire, typically at their highest pay rate.

Proponents of in-office work were also dismayed by Newsom’s about-face. Michael Genest, who served as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finance director, said telework shouldn’t be used as a privilege to sweeten contract negotiations.

“Why is this a bargaining chip?” Genest said. “What it shows is a complete lack of respect for the idea that the taxpayer is paying for something that’s of value.”

Only a fraction have returned to the office

Of the estimated 108,000 employees who continue to work hybrid schedules, only a fraction of them have been required to return to office because their unions did not make agreements to delay the order. Many are state scientists, whose union spent four years fighting for a contract and eventually staged California’s first state worker strike before closing a deal in August 2024.

The scientists’ union, the California Association of Professional Scientists, has so far refused the state’s requests to reopen its contract and negotiate the salary concessions the other unions traded for the extra year of remote work privileges.

“The governor’s RTO mandate is not grounded in any logic, data, or operational need. It’s political,” said Jacqueline Tkac, the scientists’ union president, in a written statement. “We are open to collaboration with the state on this issue, but refuse to compromise our contract to participate in Gov. Newsom’s political games.”

When asked to explain his sudden willingness to delay the return-to-office order, the governor’s office did not respond. In an emailed statement, CalHR spokesperson Camille Travis praised the “collaborative approach” with unions that led to the agreement.

“Departments were preparing to implement the return to office order, and this one-year delay gives us the opportunity to refine those plans and work with our teams to ensure a smooth transition,” Travis wrote.

Genest said Newsom’s sudden reversal on the in-office order, just a week before it was set to take effect, created unnecessary whiplash for departments that were scrambling to prepare enough office space to accommodate returning employees.

“If he’s telling the departments, ‘Gear up,’ and then he’s later going to say, ‘Oh, never mind, we’re going to be able to pay them less so you don’t have to gear up,’” Genest said, “that’s a very cynical thing.”

California government agencies are going all-in on generative artificial intelligence tools after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023 executive order to improve government efficiency with AI. One deployment recently touted by the governor is a chatbot from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the primary agency tasked with coordinating the state’s wildfire response.

The chatbot, which Cal Fire says is independent of Newsom’s order, is meant to give Californians better access to “critical fire prevention resources and near-real-time emergency information,” according to a May release from Newsom’s office. But CalMatters found that it fails to accurately describe the containment of a given wildfire, doesn’t reliably provide information such as a list for evacuation supplies and can’t tell users about evacuation orders.

Newsom has announced AI applications for traffic, housing and customer service to be implemented in the coming months and years. But Cal Fire’s chatbot issues raise questions about whether agencies are following best practices.

“Evaluation is not an afterthought,” said Daniel Ho, law professor at Stanford University whose research focuses on government use of AI. “It should be part of the standard expectation when we pilot and roll out a system like this.”

The chatbot uses the Cal Fire website and the agency’s ReadyForWildfire.org to generate answers. It can tell users about topics such as active wildfires, the agency, fire preparedness tips and Cal Fire’s programs. It was built by Citibot, a South Carolina-based company that sells AI-powered chatbots for local government agencies across the country. Cal Fire plans to host the tool until at least 2027, according to procurement records.

“It really was started with the intent and the goal of having a better-informed public about Cal Fire,” said Issac Sanchez, deputy chief of communications for the agency.

When CalMatters asked Cal Fire’s bot questions about what fires were currently active and basic information about the agency, it returned accurate answers. But for other information, CalMatters found that the chatbot can give different answers when the wording of the query changes slightly, even if the meaning of the question remains the same.

For example, an important way Californians can prepare for fire season is assembling a bag of emergency supplies should they need to evacuate.

“What should I have in my evacuation kit?” returned a specific list of items from Cal Fire’s chatbot. Variations of the question that included “go bag,” “wildfire ready kit” and “fire preparedness kit” instead returned either a prompt to visit Cal Fire’s “Ready for Wildfire” site, which has that information, or a message saying “I’m not sure about the specific items you should have” and the wildfire site link. Two of those terms are present on the site the chatbot referenced.

And while the chatbot didn’t generate incorrect answers in any of the queries CalMatters made, it doesn’t always pull the most up-to-date information.

When asked if the Ranch Fire, a 4,293-acre fire in San Bernardino County, was contained, the chatbot said that the “latest” update as of June 10 showed the fire was 50% contained. At the time CalMatters queried the chatbot, the information was six days out of date – the fire was 85% contained by then.

Similarly, when asked about current job openings at the agency, the chatbot said there weren’t any. A search on the state’s job site showed two positions at Cal Fire accepting applications at the time.

Mila Gascó-Hernandez is research director for the University at Albany’s Center for Technology in government and has studied how public agencies use AI-powered chatbots. Two key factors she uses to evaluate such chatbots are the accuracy of information they provide and how consistently they answer the same questions even if the question is asked in different ways.

“If a fire is coming and you need to know how to react to it, you do need both accuracy and consistency in the answer,” she said. “You’re not going to think about ‘what’s the nice way to ask the chatbot?’”

Currently, the chatbot is unable to provide information about evacuation orders associated with fires. When asked who issues evacuation orders, it sometimes correctly said law enforcement, while other times said it didn’t know. Cal Fire’s Sanchez said it’s reasonable to expect the chatbot to be able to answer questions about evacuations.

If there are no evacuation orders for a particular fire, he said, “the answer should be ‘there doesn’t appear to be any evacuations associated with this incident.’”

Sanchez said he and his team of about four people tested the chatbot before it went out by submitting questions they expected the public to ask. Cal Fire is currently making improvements to the bot’s answers by combing through the queries people make and ensuring that the chatbot correctly surfaces the needed answer.

When CalMatters asked the bot “What can you help me with?” in early May, it responded, “Sorry I don’t have the answer to that question right now” and asked if CalMatters had questions about information on the Cal Fire site. By mid-June, that answer was updated to being able to “provide answers to questions related to information located on this page such as details about current fires, CAL FIRE job classifications, examination requirements and CAL FIRE’s various programs.”

“The big message we want to get across,” Sanchez said, “is be patient.”

But experts said the process of kicking the tires on a chatbot should happen long before procurement begins.

The preferred process, Stanford’s Ho said, is to establish criteria for how the chatbot should perform before a vendor is selected so there are clear benchmarks to evaluate the tool. Ideally, those benchmarks are created by an independent third party. There should also be an evaluation of the benefits and risks before the chatbot is released.

And in a best-case scenario, the public would be involved before launch, Albany’s Gascó-Hernandez said. Agencies interested in using chatbots should identify the questions the public is likely to ask the AI tool ahead of time, ensure those are representative of the expected population the agency serves and refine the chatbot by having members of the public pilot the system to ensure it provides the kind of information they seek.

“These user engagement and user experiences are very important so the citizen ends up using the chabot,” she said.

Carlos was pulled out of a deep sleep by a series of frantic phone calls one Friday morning in June. By the time he arrived at a downtown Los Angeles garment factory sometime after 10 a.m., his brother was in chains.

Agents from a constellation of federal agencies descended on the Ambiance Apparel factory and storefront on June 6, detaining dozens of people. It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s prolonged engagement in Southern California, where masked federal agents are filmed daily pulling people off the street as part of the largest deportation program in American history.

Carlos’ brother, Jose, 35, was shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles. Carlos watched as agents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests led Jose and 13 other garment workers into a waiting white Sprinter van. Carlos hasn’t seen his brother since, though he did confirm that Jose is being held at an immigration detention center in Adelanto.

“We had just lost our other brother, he died,“ said Carlos, whom CalMatters is only identifying by his first name because of his own fears of deportation. “Then, for our family, losing Jose, it was like someone died again.”

Worksite raids like the one at Ambiance are an attention-grabbing component of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, one that it remains committed to despite a brief reversal in mid-June. They’re unfolding across the state, from Los Angeles’s Fashion District to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley and a restaurant in San Diego.

While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace, the reality is far messier: Studies have found that immigration raids don’t do much to raise wages – and actually deflate them. Even after a raid, employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring.

Nevertheless, on the campaign trail, Trump focused on the threat of illegal competition as the political and emotional lynchpin of his deportation plans.

“They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 21. “ Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens, every job, think of it.

“We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you.”

Every new job between 2022-2024 was not, in fact, filled by undocumented immigrants. Studies show actually deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U.S. workers. Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the 1930s and during the Obama administration, has found doing so actually reduces job opportunities for American-born workers.

That’s in part because many American workers, even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries, rely on the services generated by low-wage, undocumented labor — the costs of which would rise with mass deportations.

“Losing some of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of, it shrinks the local economy and there’s a reduction in jobs for Americans,” he said.

There is no evidence, Peri said, that in the face of mass deportations, immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead.

“If there is such a world, it has not been the reality in the U.S. in a long time,” he said.

What does tend to happen, according to a study last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate.

“Actions that target employers – audits, investigations, fines, and criminal charges – have larger effects than raids, which target workers,” the study authors wrote.

The impact to the families can be long-term and devastating. Absences, suspensions, expulsions and rates of substance abuse and self-harm increased among Latino students in a Tennessee town that was raided, even among students whose families were not directly impacted. Property crime dropped but violent crime increased in a small northeast Iowa meatpacking town after a massive 2008 raid. Infants born to Hispanic mothers in that same Iowa town had a 24% risk of low birth weight compared to the same population one year before the raid.

“Our mom is devastated, and she’s scared for herself, too,” Carlos said. “A lot of us are from the same (Zapotec Indigenous) community in Mexico, a lot of people kidnapped in the raid, so it’s like a whole bunch of families had a death.”

In his first term, Trump’s worksite raids focused on the South and the Midwest, when more than 1,800 people were detained, mostly at manufacturing plants and meat and poultry processing facilities. That’s a tiny segment of the estimated 1.5 million people deported under Trump from 2017 to 2021, but it played a significant role in another of the administration’s goals: To create enough fear and mistrust among undocumented immigrants that they self-deport.

But this time, Trump’s focus is on California.

‘There’s no money’ after raid

Employees at Ambiance Apparel told each other that immigration enforcement was likely coming to their garment factory. Employees who did not want to be identified told CalMatters that people in Department of Homeland Security jackets were on site at least twice this year, most recently in April. Those workers say they were told by the company not to worry about a raid.

Ambiance Apparel, through an attorney, denied that the company had any advance warning or involvement with the raid and the company declined to comment further.

The garment industry is a logical target for immigration enforcement because so much of the workforce is undocumented. The same is true of agriculture. Estimates vary, but anywhere from one third to more than one half of California farmworkers are undocumented immigrants.

William Lopez, a University of Michigan public health professor who has written a book on the impact of immigration raids on mixed-status families, said he learned in interviews of people present at six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in 2018 that people “haven’t developed the language” to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a community.

After a raid, “people don’t drive, there’s no money because everyone’s paying bond, no one’s going to school anymore,” Lopez said.

He continued, “the comparisons were, there was hurricanes, there was tornadoes, there was war, some people compared it to a public execution. Some people described it like the death of a grandchild.”

Congress made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who don’t have authorization in 1986, as part of an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The overhaul also legalized about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.

Still, false Social Security numbers have been fairly easy to obtain, and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they’re hired.

Employers have had little incentive to get stricter, even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Demand for labor has remained high, fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated, spreading out the risks of hiring..

“The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a result of these (workplace) raids,” said Leticia Saucedo, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law. “The idea behind all of these was, yes, to target the employers, but employees were collateral damage.”

Saucedo said workplace raids and the deportation of workers highlight tensions between two wings of the Republican Party. Nativist groups want to curb immigration because they believe it displaces American workers, while business interests want access to a stable, legal pool of immigrant workers.

California farmer ready to demand a warrant

California farmers are especially sensitive to potential immigration raids. The Border Patrol conducted a sweep in Kern County just before Trump took office in January that previewed its approach in the new administration. In June, agents swept through farms in Ventura County, conducting immigration raids. iIndustry groups implored the administration to reconsider such tactics.

“To ensure stability for our farm families and their communities, we must act with both common sense and compassion,” Bryan Little, policy director at the California Farm Bureau, said in a statement. “The focus of immigration enforcement should be on the removal of bad actors or lawbreakers, not our valuable and essential farm employees.”

In an interview, Little said he hasn’t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms. But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media, spreading fear among the workforce.

“The way this is all being handled, it’s interfering with food production,” he said.

In Ventura County, federal agents ultimately arrested more than 30 immigrants in June, said Hazel Davalos, director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE.

Lisa Tate manages three of her family’s eight ranches in the county, where they grow citrus, avocados and coffee. Depending on the day, anywhere from five to 100 directly hired and contracted workers plant, trim or harvest on the land.

They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents, but Tate said she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company policy: if agents ever show up, “nobody’s to be on our farm without proper authorization.”

Tate said the raids have put employers like her in a tough position. She said she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers. She said she reviews the employment documents her workers present, fills out the I-9 form and follows the rules.

Still, she called it a “well-known secret” that many in the industry don’t have valid work permits.

She’s tried to use the guest worker visa program before, but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation, and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they’re here. That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers, she said, so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed.

“We need an immigration program that allows for longer-term workers,” she said. “Until we have a solution in place, we shouldn’t take action because the whole system is built on what it is. And if you start picking it apart, there’s all kinds of fallout.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Amid calls for police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, California lawmakers set out to raise education standards for incoming law enforcement officers. Five years later — as California faces a widespread shortage of police officers — those reforms are being debated once again.

In 2020, former Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer introduced a bill that would have required prospective police officers 18 to 25 years old to earn a bachelor’s degree before entering the police force. A growing body of research shows that college-educated law enforcement officers tend to use less force and exercise better decision making.

The bill was ultimately revised after it was criticized as too restrictive by law enforcement and labor leaders. In an updated version, which was signed into law the following year, lawmakers agreed to raise the minimum age of a police officer to 21 years old, and they asked local police and school officials to create recommendations for new higher education requirements.

This year, Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, a Democrat from Thousand Oaks, is proposing a new bill to establish education standards based on those recommendations, but some law enforcement and criminal justice reform advocates are skeptical — albeit for different reasons.

Starting in 2031, Irwin’s new law would require incoming officers to get a policing certificate, associate degree or bachelor’s degree, although there are some exceptions within 36 months of graduating from a police academy. It also creates a law enforcement recruitment task force to identify and recruit candidates for law enforcement agencies throughout the state.

In an interview with CalMatters, Jones-Sawyer said the current bill by Irwin undermines the original intent behind his 2021 law by allowing a loophole for incoming officers to satisfy the education requirement through a certificate, prior military experience or out-of-state law enforcement experience.

Some policing experts, such as former justice department official Arif Alikhan, echoed those concerns and said the exceptions swallow the whole. “It completely obviates the need to have any educational background,” said Alikhan. “Officers who have a college education tend to perform better.”

Representatives from some law enforcement unions, by contrast, think the bill still goes too far. Dustin Smith, president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association, said the new requirements “would be catastrophic to staffing statewide,” limiting the supply of incoming officers.

Those concerns haven’t stopped the bill from sailing through the Legislature, where it has received widespread support from many law enforcement agencies. It’s supported by all of California’s statewide law enforcement advocacy groups, including the California Police Chiefs Association, the California State Sheriff’s Association, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen and the umbrella labor organization that lobbies on behalf of police unions, the Peace Officers Research Association of California. It has received no formal opposition.

Democratic lawmakers at odds with one another over new standards

In introducing his bill, Jones-Sawyer viewed a college education as paramount to law enforcement training because it would expose incoming officers to new perspectives, healthy debate and critical thinking skills.

“We keep looking at law enforcement as if anybody can do it,” said Jones-Sawyer. “No. You need a certain type of person to have the skills and ability to deal with modern-day policing.”

Instead of requiring an associate degree in modern policing, as Jones-Sawyer said he intended, the new bill allows incoming police officers to meet the education standards with four years of military or out-of-state law enforcement experience. While Jones-Sawyer intended to carve out certain exceptions for people with prior specialized military or law enforcement experience, they would have only been given some credit – not all.

New officers also have the option of attaining a “professional policing certificate” from an accredited college or university, although that curriculum has not yet been developed.

The new bill “does not make policing better, it makes it devolve back into what it used to be,” said Jones-Sawyer. Irwin maintained that the bill advances his efforts and will help police officers improve themselves as they rise through the ranks.

Many police chiefs and sheriffs view the bill as a meaningful way to raise education standards while affording incoming officers the flexibility to meet them.

In May, Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna wrote a letter to Sen. Jesse Arreguín, an Oakland Democrat and chair of the Senate’s public safety committee, arguing in favor of Irwin’s bill. The sheriff’s office once required all applicants to have a bachelor’s degree, wrote Luna, but the requirement was “short-lived” because the office saw “an immediate decline in applicants by about 50 percent.”

Luna said Irwin’s bill is a “more workable, more inclusive path forward” because it includes exceptions for those with non-academic experience.

Although the vast majority of local law enforcement agencies nationwide only require a high school diploma, having a college degree can often create more opportunities for better pay and promotions.

Police officer shortage: truth or myth?

All across the state, law enforcement officials say staffing is an ongoing problem, which more education requirements might exacerbate. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office is short roughly 1,500 officers as of June 1, according to spokesperson Miesha McClendon. The office was able to respond to recent protests through the support of staff from other areas of law enforcement, including its jails and detective division, McClendon said.

In rural areas, such as Plumas County in the northeast corner of the state, Undersheriff Chad Hermann said a single officer is sometimes responsible for covering communities that are as far as 70 miles apart. If that officer needs to make an arrest and drive a suspect to jail, a town could spend hours without any nearby police on duty, he said.

Sheriffs and police officers say the shortage is due to several factors, including low wages in some communities, an aging workforce and negative perceptions of police following high-profile instances of misconduct. Departments are offering starting bonuses and other incentives, such as better benefits, as a way to recruit new officers.

Some agencies gave record-breaking raises to officers coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some places, including the California Highway Patrol, entry-level officers can expect six-figure salaries and top notch benefits.

But not all agencies can offer those perks.

“We’re not a rich county — we can’t offer the big hiring stipends,” said Hermann. “By adding a requirement like an associate degree, it’s going to make it harder to get people from our hiring pool.” He said even exceptions for those with military service may not help the recruiting problem since the hiring pool is so small in a county with just under 19,000 residents.

While the new law enforcement recruitment task force in Irwin’s bill is designed to ease some of those staffing challenges, Christy Lopez, a law professor at Georgetown University said it’s troubling to see that it would only comprise people from law enforcement.

“We need to be moving towards a recruiting approach that seeks to screen in the right people, not just screen out the worst people,” she said. “And to make sure that we develop that sort of approach to recruiting, you need perspectives broader than just law enforcement.”

She said the police recruiting crisis is a myth. “The idea that there’s a crisis in recruiting presupposes that we know what the right number of police officers is and that we’re not there,” she said. “And we don’t know that.”

What it takes to become a police officer

Devin Nisbet grew up in Calaveras County and as a kid, he had a positive experience with one of the officers when he prank-called 9-1-1. Instead of just disciplining Nisbet, who was around 6 years old, the officer gave him a tour of the police cruiser and handed him a patch with the sheriff’s office logo. “It made me want to be part of it,” said Nisbet in an interview with CalMatters.

After dropping out of college, Nisbet was working for a grocery store in Calaveras County when that same sheriff’s office held a recruiting event in a nearby parking lot. The agency promises a $10,000 bonus, spread out over three years, for new recruits. At the time, he said he thought to himself, “Why not try to do this?”

It took Nisbet roughly seven months to pass the county’s background checks and exams, which include a written test, a psychological exam and a medical exam. He then received a tentative job offer from the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office, contingent on completing a police academy.

In January, he enrolled in the police academy at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. Police academy training in California typically takes a minimum of six months, but some police departments require far more training. Nisbet is paid by the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office for the entirety of this training, just under $34 an hour.

The college program requires students to learn CPR, first aid, and various laws about use of force, search and seizure and firearms. They’re tested in scenarios that can include chases or combat. In one timed exam, they must pull a 165 lb dummy, cross a 25 yard obstacle course, run 500 yards and scale a 6-foot fence.

Some students fail to pass the academy’s courses. Others never get hired because they fail the police department’s background checks or have low scores.

Nisbet is set to graduate on July 2, at which point he’ll begin working, but his training won’t be over. New officers must complete weeks of field training and a year of probation.

“I believe that people, if they want to do this job, they need to get evaluated first,” said Nisbet, though he said an associate degree shouldn’t be required. He said many of his classmates don’t have a college degree.