Business
With Trump vowing deportations, workers in Los Angeles race the clock for a reprieve
A line of immigrant workers formed outside an office building in Koreatown on a recent Friday afternoon.
They followed makeshift signs to a small courtyard, where scores of volunteer lawyers, translators and other staff helped them apply for a little-known federal program that offers an unusual — and probably fleeting — reprieve from deportation.
Under the Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program, people in the U.S. illegally who work at companies under investigation for workplace violations can receive permission to work in the country for four years. The program, which was started during the Biden administration, is intended to encourage undocumented workers to cooperate with investigations into safety violations, employment abuses and other issues without fear that their immigration status will be used against them.
Earlier registration clinics like the three-day push that the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance began Nov. 8 drew little interest. But President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of people when he returns to office has reignited fears among the millions of people living and working in the U.S. illegally. More than 500 workers turned up at the KIWA event, several hundred more than initially expected, as information about the government program and the registration clinic spread by word of mouth.
With applications averaging 60 days to be processed, the workers found themselves in a race against the clock to try to secure four years of protections before Trump takes office Jan. 20. With time running out, aid groups are ending their registration efforts. Hundreds of workers from California traveled to Las Vegas over the weekend, where Arriba, an organization that helped run the Koreatown event, held a final registration clinic.
Although Trump is widely expected to do away with the program, immigrant labor advocates said they don’t expect that officials in the new administration will rescind work permits that already have been granted.
Bliss Requa-Trautz, executive director of Arriba, a Las Vegas-based advocacy group, said she warns workers of the risks that come with applying to the deferred action program: Although applications are meant to be confidential, applying nonetheless makes authorities aware that a worker is in the country illegally, giving rise to the possibility that they could be targeted for deportation afterward.
“Once you’re in the system you’re visible to the agencies, whereas otherwise folks might be flying under the radar,” said Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown worker center. “It’s a certain level of visibility that comes with a risk.”
Regardless, for many workers who take odd jobs under the table or use a false Social Security number to work, a temporary job permit can mean better pay and a temporary reprieve from the fear of being deported.
A man who said he immigrated to the United States from Chihuahua, Mexico, more than 20 years ago sat in a white plastic chair waiting his turn to meet with an attorney at the Koreatown registration drive. He learned about the clinic from some of his friends whom he used to work with at Bella+Canvas, a local apparel manufacturer and wholesaler. The company has worked with BaronHR, a staffing company that has come under scrutiny from federal agencies for alleged abuses of workers it recruits for warehouses, factories and distribution center jobs in California and elsewhere.
A man who asked to be identified by only his first name, Hector, waits at the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance for help applying for job permits under a federal program that provides deportation protection for workers involved in labor investigations.
(Suhauna Hussain / Los Angeles Times)
“I am sure my life is going to change,” said the man, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Hector. “I’m going to be able to take more work to help my family.”
During the Obama administration, authorities began granting relief to workers involved in some labor cases and the program was formalized under Biden at the beginning of 2023. As of the end of October, more than 7,700 workers had been granted protections under the program for assistance in more than 50 investigations by state and federal agencies, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Over the summer, the length of the protection was expanded to four years from two.
An investigation of a chemical leak that killed six workers at a Georgia poultry plant in 2021 served as an early test case of how granting protections to workers could help bolster the collection of evidence and testimony, said Jessie Hahn, senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center. Immigrant workers had initially hesitated to come forward because they feared retaliation by the plant’s owner, including a call to local police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she said.
“One thing to understand is that this program does not have a humanitarian purpose. It has a law enforcement purpose,” Hahn said. “The government is trying to facilitate investigations.”
Hahn said her organization has partnered with the United Farm Workers union to help farmworkers employed by major farms and labor brokers under investigation by California’s workplace safety agency enroll in the program.
Daniel Lopez, a spokesperson for California’s Department of Industrial Relations, said state labor agencies — including the Labor Commissioner’s office and the Division of Occupational Safety and Health — have submitted about 150 requests to the Department of Homeland Security requesting protections for workers employed by companies under investigation. Each request can cover multiple workers.
Attorney Yvonne Medrano of Los Angeles-based Bet Tzedek Legal Services, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, said the loss of the program would not only affect workers but also would create an uneven playing field for employers that follow the rules since it will become difficult to punish bad actors that are flouting minimum wage laws and other regulations.
“We want workers to speak out against bad employers because it benefits everybody,” she said.
To apply, a person must show a letter issued by a government agency naming the worker’s employer as the subject of an investigation and specifying the period covered by the inquiry. A worker admitted into the program is not required to cooperate with the investigation.
A worker who asked to be identified by only his first initial, “A,” because of fear of being identified as being in the country illegally, decided the day of the clinic to drive from Santa Fe Springs with his parents to the Koreatown clinic. He was among many workers at the clinic employed by BaronHR. Until the firm collapsed this year, workers whom the firm employed were often underpaid and working in unsafe conditions, according to a New York Times report published Sunday.
The 30-year-old, who immigrated to the United States from El Salvador with his family when he was 10, had been reluctant to apply to DALE over fears of reprisals if he spoke out about the staffing agency, which also employed his parents. And after so many years living in the country illegally, he also didn’t trust that the program really offered the possibility of working in the country legally.
“Growing up undocumented you grow skeptical, with a nonstop defense mechanism. Even though I’ve seen co-workers get permits, I haven’t accepted it,” A. said. “I’m protecting myself by not letting myself care too much.”
Around 5 p.m., as the light disappeared and the air grew chilly, Jovita Bautista, 50, stayed at her post at the check-in desk outside KIWA, where she had been stationed since 8 a.m. Bautista had applied for her work permit in early August, and received it weeks later.
She said she has been able to secure better-paying work, leaving behind her minimum-wage staffing agency job. She now does the same work, but because she is directly employed by the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, she is paid $22 per hour, she said.
Bautista said she admires Trump for what she describes as his business acumen, and said she owns three of his books. But she fears his impending presidency, because she worries about her siblings who are in the country without authorization.
“I like Donald Trump, but not as president.”
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
Business
Commentary: How right-wing anti-transgender attacks led to a Supreme Court ruling upholding sex discrimination
At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality.
On the surface, the Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women’s and girl’s sports teams looks like a victory for women’s rights.
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh certainly presents itself that way. “Females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Therefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.” He also asserted that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.”
The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against “biological” males’ participation on women’s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.
There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court’s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl’s sports
Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one’s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth.
Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of “gender ideology extremism.” The U.S., his order stated, recognizes “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” That’s a “biological truth,” he declared.
In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: “As all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.”
Science recognizes that some people are “born with sex traits that don’t fit into typical male or female patterns,” to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page on the topic “intersex.” The condition “may involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.”
From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes “gender dysphoria” as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.
No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.
But that’s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women.
The International Olympic Committee — in a policy statement Kavanaugh cited incompletely — says that in “most running and swimming events,” males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That’s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes — transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The “cis” prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)
West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls’ teams. So under their rules transgender girls can’t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what’s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?
But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court’s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they’re members of an alien species.
It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations.
Trump’s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination. He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care.
He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)
I wrote during Trump’s first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that “one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law.
In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, “there was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.”
In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students’ requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create “an enormous practical and administrability problem.”
Is that so? That wasn’t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student’s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would “result in an unfair athletic advantage” or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn’t be learned.)
It was Maine’s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams. “We’ll see you in court,” Mills snapped.
Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to “invasive sex verification procedures,” as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling.
They’re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men’s protection, Theoharis wrote — “the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.” (There don’t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men’s sports.)
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl’s teams — track and cross-country — in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn’t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join — her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she “came in near the back.”
Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones.
Thanks to the court’s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports “because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria.”
So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?
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