Three Ways California Immigrants Fight Back

President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has disrupted the lives of California immigrants involved in the early childhood care industry, the commercial trucking business and the justice system. Let’s dive into the details:

• Childcare: Trump’s immigration crackdown has had a particularly adverse effect on the child care industry — both on child care centers, where nearly 40 percent of California’s workforce is foreign-born, and on families who rely on providers to get to work. Child care centers have lost staff, according to recent reports. Vendors in Alameda County, for example, avoid public parks and playgrounds. That disruption can have a huge impact on children, said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, an early childhood education advocate: “Kids benefit from going to child care. It’s a healthy and safe place for them.” Read more CalMatters” by Carolyn Jones.

• Commercial truck drivers: Life for truck drivers in California’s Sikh community has been turned upside down since the Trump administration’s September audit challenged the legality of thousands of California commercial driver’s licenses held by immigrants. The state’s plan to revoke the licenses of 61,000 truck drivers over the next few years has hit the Sikh community particularly hard, as 35 percent of the state’s commercial drivers are believed to belong to the Indian religion. At a truck depot in Stockton, dozens of trucks sit idle after drivers were notified last fall that the Department of Motor Vehicles was revoking their commercial driver’s licenses. “We lost nearly $2 million in the last four months while paying $200,000 a month to the bank and insurers for 35 parked trucks,” said Bikramjit Singh Gill, owner of the trucking operation. Read more by Gagandeep Singh for CalMatters.

• Judicial arrests: As the California Legislature weighs two bills aimed at limiting immigration arrests in courthousesthe state’s chief justice also said he wanted to ensure people had safe access to the courts. California Superior Court Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero said the Judicial Council, the policy-making body for California courts, will consider a proposal to formalize the process of tracking immigration arrests in and around superior courts by April. Courts will be required to regularly provide civil arrest data, which will then be forwarded to the California Attorney General’s office. Read more by Cayla Mihalovich of CalMatters.

Casting the deciding vote to pass Trump’s sweeping federal spending plan could came back to haunt a Republican member of Congress from Californiawrites Maya S. Miller of CalMatters.

An estimated 64 percent of voters in U.S. Rep. David Valadao’s Central Valley district are enrolled in Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, the highest enrollment rate of any Republican seat in the country. But Valadao last year voted to pass Trump’s bill, which included cutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years, putting millions of Californians at risk of losing Medi-Cal coverage.

In the run-up to the November election, Democratic challengers for Valadao’s seat are criticizing Valadao for his vote. But one Republican political strategist said that vote does not guarantee that residents will turn their backs on Valadao when he seeks re-election. In seven elections during his career in Congress, Valadao lost only once in 2018 and later won back the seat in 2020.

• Rob StutzmanGOP political strategist: “Now he’s the long-term incumbent. He’s got a lot of muscle and power in this district.”

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The Trump administration convened top officials from California and the six other Colorado River basin states in Washington on Friday to discuss how to share dwindling water supply of the most important river. The issue is tense and ongoing.

As CalMatters’ Rachel Becker explains, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum led the two-hour meeting after calling on the governors of the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada, and the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Gov. Gavin Newsom was unable to attend the meeting due to a long-standing commitment and sent the state’s secretary of natural resources to speak on behalf of California.

Carla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, told Rachel that having the governors in the same room as the secretary is unusual — as far as she knows, it’s never happened before in river negotiations. Nemeth gave Rachel an inside look at what this newfound pressure to make a deal looks like.

The deadline for a decision on the water use of the river is Valentine’s Day. Will there be love between countries?

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For the first time in 30 years, San Diego teachers are planning a strike. The district-wide walkout, scheduled for Feb. 26, is due to a disagreement with the school district over special education staffing and services. Read more by Deborah Brennan of CalMatter.