Politics
California could boot thousands of immigrants from program that aids elderly and disabled
In Bell Gardens, Raquel Martinez said she has relied for nearly three years on a program that pays an assistant to help her make it safely to her frequent appointments at the MLK Medical Campus.
Martinez, 65, is blind and has cancer. If she did not have the help of her support worker, Martinez said, she would struggle to navigate the elevators and find the right office. Her assistant also helps her with groceries and other daily tasks such as housekeeping, she said, tending to her 21 hours a week.
“I was in need of a lot of help,” Martinez said in Spanish.
As budget cuts squeeze the state, California could yank such assistance from elderly, blind or otherwise disabled immigrants who have relied on the state’s In-Home Supportive Services program.
IHSS pays assistants who help people with daily tasks such as bathing, laundry or cooking; provide needed care such as injections under the direction of a medical professional; and accompany them to and from doctor’s appointments. It aims to help people remain safely in their own homes, rather than having to move into nursing facilities or suffer without needed care.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed cutting immigrants in the country illegally from the IHSS program, estimating it would save California nearly $95 million as the state stares down a $44.9-billion budget deficit.
The proposed cut has outraged groups that advocate for immigrants and disabled people, which argued it would be a shortsighted move that would jeopardize Californians who need day-to-day support, put them at increased risk of deportation and ultimately drive up costs for the state.
At a recent hearing in Sacramento, Ronald Coleman Baeza called it “indefensible” for Newsom to propose “to eliminate these services for a population for no reason but for their immigration status.”
“It’s right out of Donald Trump’s playbook,” said Baeza, managing director of policy for the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “Without IHSS, these individuals will need costly and preventable hospital and nursing home care, and family caregivers will go without pay,” perpetuating “a generational cycle of poverty.”
In California, IHSS is open to blind, disabled and aged people on Medi-Cal, the California Medicaid program. Medi-Cal has expanded over time to include immigrants here illegally, beginning with children and eventually covering Californians of all ages. State officials emphasized that if the cut goes through, immigrants without legal status would remain eligible for Medi-Cal.
“The IHSS benefit for the undocumented population was an expansion of services,” H.D. Palmer, deputy director of external affairs for the Department of Finance, said in an email. “None of these solutions were made easily or lightly. The overall goal was to maintain core programs and base benefits” such as Medi-Cal, “in particular, Medi-Cal services regardless of citizenship status.”
The California Department of Social Services said nearly 3,000 immigrants without legal status had been authorized for IHSS. Budget officials said more than 1,500 were receiving such benefits as of earlier this year.
At a California State Senate subcommittee hearing, a Department of Social Services representative said the state agency was working with the Department of Health Care Services to see what other benefits people being jettisoned from IHSS might be able to access “to mitigate any negative impacts.”
Most of the affected people getting such assistance are 50 and older, but the program also serves children with disabilities who might otherwise need to live in facilities, advocates said.
Advocates fear that if the proposed cut is approved by state lawmakers, people in the country illegally could lose such support as soon as July. The Department of Social Services said it would issue notices at least 10 days in advance to people being cut off. Martinez, who is here illegally, hadn’t heard that IHSS could be yanked away until a reporter mentioned it.
Blanca Angulo, 62, who helps others through the local group Inmigrantes con Discapacidades — Immigrants with Disabilities — said rolling back the benefits would be “a terrible blow.”
“They don’t know the life of a disabled person because they’re not walking in our shoes,” she said in Spanish. “So for them it’s very easy to take away these services without thinking about it.”
Booting people from the program could also have reverberating effects on families, advocates said. In many cases, relatives are the ones being paid to provide care under the program. Anthony Wright, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Health Access California, called it “a double whammy.”
If a caregiver “loses income and has to potentially find other work, then who does the caregiving?” he asked. “Or they continue the caregiving, but then they have no means to meet basic needs.”
In the Hollywood area, Jose Villasana Moran worries about what losing the program would mean for his family. His husband took a pay cut from working as an assistant manager at a restaurant to serve as the IHSS caregiver for his 63-year-old mother, who is here illegally and has Alzheimer’s disease.
“My mom needs help 24/7,” Moran said. “I don’t know what we will do. … We have to dress her. We have to comb her hair, clip her nails, make her food because she cannot cook anymore.”
Putting her in a nursing home “would be the last resort,” if they could even afford it, Moran said. His late father had needed more care than they could provide and had endured shoddy care at a dirty facility, he said.
“I would not want my mom to go through that.”
Being jettisoned from the program would mean losing the income his husband had been receiving for her care, now capped at 195 hours a month, he said. Moran was determined that somehow, between the two of them, “we’re going to try to take care of my mom, even if we don’t have the money.”
But he fears other vulnerable people who are in the country illegally may be left alone without help, putting themselves and others at risk, “because family members are forced to leave the house and work.”
In Contra Costa County, Norma Garcia has been attending to her 67-year-old mother, who has dementia and needs constant care, through the IHSS program. If her mother is cut off from the program, and Garcia is no longer paid to care for her, “how am I going to buy food? How will I keep paying the bills?” she asked.
“My spouse works, but it’s not enough,” she said in Spanish. Finding another job outside their home in El Sobrante is impossible when her mother needs so much help, Garcia said.
“I can’t leave her alone for even a minute.”
Hagar Dickman, a senior attorney with the advocacy group Justice in Aging, called it “a really big inequity issue.”
“It forces a targeted population, which is the individuals who are undocumented, to either seek institutional care … or to increase impoverishment of their families,” Dickman said.
Critics also argue that any savings from ejecting people here illegally from IHSS could be outstripped by the expense of putting more of them into nursing facilities. Attorneys with Disability Rights California pointed out that the state has estimated a nursing home costs an average of $124,188 annually — far more than the average cost of roughly $28,000 for people in the country illegally on IHSS, they said.
“This looks like a classic example of ‘a penny wise, a pound foolish,’ ” Wright said. Even if only a fraction move into nursing homes, “it would still cost more money, because nursing home care is so much more costly.”
Dickman added that being pushed into a nursing facility could put immigrants at risk of losing their shot at legal status. Under the “public charge” rule, people can be blocked from getting a green card or citizenship if they are likely to become “primarily dependent” on government aid. Medi-Cal benefits do not usually factor into those decisions — but they can if someone is institutionalized for long-term care at government expense.
As it stands, Angulo said many immigrants here illegally are already afraid to use IHSS services for fear of possible consequences. “The laws are always changing,” she said in Spanish, “for good or for bad.”
At a recent hearing, a representative of the Western Center on Law & Poverty warned that the advocacy group believes the cuts would violate state and federal law, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, and said it was “exploring litigation options.”
Palmer said Newsom “respects that there will be disagreement over many of these proposals, and that other alternative approaches may be put forward in the weeks ahead as discussions with the Legislature continue.”
Politics
During Watergate, the Supreme Court spoke with one voice. Can it do the same in Trump's case?
Fifty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court was mulling a landmark case with profound implications for America’s democracy.
The question before justices in the Watergate tapes dispute was whether the president was above the law, shielded from prosecutors and a judge who were investigating a crime.
The court’s answer was clear, unflinching and unanimous.
A unanimous Supreme Court ruling helped resolve another constitutional crisis in 1974, when President Nixon claimed executive privilege over his White House tapes during the Watergate investigation.
(Associated Press)
The Constitution has no “absolute, unqualified presidential privilege of immunity,” the court said in July 1974 in United States vs. Nixon. The president’s claim of executive privilege for his White House tapes, justices said, “cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of … the fair administration of criminal justice.”
Chief Justice Warren Burger, an appointee of then-President Nixon, wrote the court’s opinion. The Watergate case marked a high point for an often divided and contentious court and helped bring together a nation that was in the grip of a constitutional crisis.
The same basic issue is before the court again in Trump vs. United States: Are presidents above the law, immune forever from criminal charges for their actions in the White House? Or can they be prosecuted and held to account for breaking the law?
The decision figures to rewrite the law on the powers of the president and a cast a lasting shadow on the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Few are predicting the current court will rise to the occasion and deliver a clear, unanimous ruling.
The two sides of the debate drew a sharp contrast when the court heard arguments in late April.
“Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution,” Trump’s attorney John Sauer told the court, “there can be no presidency as we know it.”
Justice Department veteran Michael Dreeben replied that presidential immunity had been rejected in the past and should be rejected now.
“All former presidents have known that they could be indicted and convicted. And Watergate cemented that understanding,” Dreeben said, arguing on behalf of special counsel Jack Smith.
The Justice Department’s Michael Dreeben, speaking to justices on April 25 in this artist’s sketch, argued that “all former presidents have known that they could be indicted and convicted. And Watergate cemented that understanding.”
(Dana Verkouteren / Associated Press)
If the justices split along ideological lines, with the three liberals in dissent, the decision is sure to be condemned as partisan.
So the chief justice is likely to try to put together a majority that includes at least one liberal for what could be seen as a middle-ground position.
That would mean rejecting Trump’s claim of absolute immunity as well as Smith’s view that a former president has no shield from being prosecuted, even for truly official acts.
Trump was indicted last year on accusations of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he’d lost to Joe Biden, including by making false claims of election fraud and encouraging thousands of his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when the House and Senate met to confirm Biden’s election.
Trump pleaded not guilty and insisted that his actions — taken while he was president — should be forever immune from prosecution.
Several Justices — some of whom have worked in Washington for decades — said during arguments in April that a president’s use of his “core executive powers” should be off-limits to future charges. They are wary of opening the door to politically driven criminal investigations.
Prior to Trump, no president had been indicted after leaving office, though at times charges were contemplated.
Could President Reagan have been prosecuted for the so-called Iran-Contra affair, a secret White House scheme to sell arms to Iran to support rebels in Nicaragua after Congress blocked their funding? Could President George H.W. Bush have been prosecuted for denying he knew about the scheme when he was vice president? While no such charges were brought, an independent counsel looked into those allegations.
President Reagan, seen in 1987, and his vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, were investigated for possible charges in the Iran-Contra scandal, but were not among the 13 people indicted.
(Dennis Cook / Associated Press)
President Clinton was also threatened with prosecution after leaving office for having lied to investigators about his relationship with a White House intern.
To take a more recent example, could former President George W. Bush have been investigated or prosecuted by a Democratic administration for his responsibility in the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or over the alleged torture of prisoners at secret CIA sites in Europe?
The Obama administration did not pursue any such charges, but former White House lawyers, including now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, voiced concern about subjecting presidents to criminal charges after they leave office.
A critical question in the Trump case is: What qualifies as an “official” act by a president, and what sort of actions are considered private, even potentially criminal?
Most of the justices appeared to agree during arguments in April that Trump had been indicted over a private scheme, not for the use of any core executive powers.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, noted that the former president was accused of enlisting lawyers to submit “false claims of election fraud” and to send “fraudulent slates of presidential electors” to Congress.
“Sounds private,” she said.
Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett was among a majority of justices in April who seemed to agree that the former president had been indicted over a private scheme as a candidate, not for official presidential actions.
(Morry Gash / Associated Press)
Sauer, the Trump attorney, agreed.
“So you would not dispute those were private, and you wouldn’t raise a claim that they were official?,” Barrett asked.
Again, the lawyer agreed.
Later, when pressed by others, Sauer agreed with a lower court that had drawn a distinction between the conduct of an officeholder and that of a candidate for office. Prosecutors relied on that distinction, arguing that Trump was indicted for his actions as a failed candidate for reelection, not as an officeholder carrying out his official duties.
Barrett’s questions hinted at the possibility of a narrow ruling rejecting Trump’s claim of immunity from charges that he conspired to overturn his election defeat. The three liberal justices could agree with that.
But conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they favored a broader shield for presidents when they use their official powers.
If that becomes the majority opinion, the court’s liberals may well refuse to go along. They voiced concern about shielding a president who abuses his power.
What if the president orders a “military coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked during the arguments.
As commander in chief, if a president “told the generals: ‘I don’t feel like leaving office. I want to stage a coup,’” she asked, would that be an official act, shielded from future prosecution?
“It could well be,” Sauer replied.
John Sauer, right, with the former president and fellow Trump lawyer John Lauro in January, said in April that a president “could well be” be shielded from prosecution for ordering a military coup to stay in office.
(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
So the problem facing the chief justice is that an opinion supporting a president’s immunity for official acts could drive the three liberals to dissent, while some conservatives may balk and refuse to join a ruling if it only holds that an ex-president can be prosecuted.
Four years ago, Roberts had a solid 7-2 majority rule against a Trump claim of “absolute immunity” and order the then-president to turn over financial and tax records to New York prosecutors.
The chief justice said the presidential supremacy claimed by Trump had never been part of America’s history.
“In our judicial system, the public has a right to every man’s evidence. Since the earliest days of the republic, ‘every man’ has included the president of the United States,” Roberts wrote in Trump vs. Vance. Two conservative justices, Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented.
Critics say the Roberts court has already delivered a victory of sorts for Trump by taking so long to decide on his immunity claim.
“This case goes to the heart of our democracy, and they’ve been slow-walking it,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy21 and a champion of campaign funding limits since the Watergate era. The court decided the Watergate case 16 days after the oral argument, he noted.
This year, by contrast, the justices have taken months to ponder a claim of immunity, a delay that has postponed Trump’s federal prosecutions and is almost certain to prevent a jury from deciding before the November election whether he conspired to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.
“The court should never have taken this case,” Wertheimer said. “The voters were entitled to know whether Trump engaged in criminal conduct to overturn an election he lost.”
He’s not the only Watergate-era lawyer who is troubled. In 1974, Philip Lacovara, as counsel to the special prosecutor, urged the Supreme Court to reject Nixon’s claim of executive privilege with a “definitive” ruling. Nixon had hinted he may defy the decision if the justices were divided.
Vice President Gerald R. Ford, in the foreground at Nixon’s final Cabinet meeting before his August 1974 resignation, would go on to pardon his former boss ahead of his “possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States.”
(David Hume Kennerly / Getty Images)
Just 16 days after the court ordered him to disclose the tapes, Nixon resigned. A month later, President Ford granted him a full pardon, after saying his predecessor was facing “possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States.”
In a recent interview, Lacovara warned against making a former president immune from criminal prosecution, noting that history has shown that sometimes strong men with no moral compass can win election.
“That’s why this could be the most dangerous decision the court has ever made,” he said of Trump’s case. “Once you crack it open and say the president gets to violate some laws, there’s no way to constrain it. You have started down a very dangerous road.”
The Biden campaign released a new ad Monday morning as part of a $50 million ad blitz ahead of the first presidential debate later this month, highlighting former President Trump’s conviction, and saying “character” is the central dynamic of the 2024 presidential race.
The new ad, titled “Character Matters,” highlights the verdict in New York v. Trump, when a jury found the former president and presumptive Republican nominee guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and has vowed to appeal the decision.
President Biden waves as he arrives, Saturday, June 15, 2024, in Los Angeles, where he attended a campaign event. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
BLACK MALE VOTERS SOUR ON BIDEN, TRUMP: ‘TIRED OF BEING FORCED TO CHOOSE THE LESSER OF THE GREATER EVILS’
“This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself, and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad says, highlighting Trump’s legal challenges and saying the president has been focusing on “lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.”
The ad comes ahead of next week’s first presidential debate, which is set for June 27.
The ad is part of the Biden campaign’s June $50 million paid media campaign. The campaign said the ad will run on general market television and Connected TV in all battleground states and on national cable.
Former President Trump, left, and President Biden. (Getty Images)
“Trump approaches the first debate as a convicted felon who continues to prove that he will do anything and harm anyone if it means more power and vengeance for Donald Trump,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said. “That’s why he was convicted, that’s why he encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, and it’s why his entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution; because that man is blind to the people a president should be serving and will do absolutely anything for his own personal gain and for his own power.”
Tyler stressed that, in the 2024 presidential campaign, “character matters, and the President of the United States should be someone who understands that the highest office in the land is about you and your family – not a vehicle to enrich yourself.”
President Biden, left, and actor George Clooney. (AP/Getty)
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“That is the ethos Joe Biden puts into the job every day: to fight for safer communities, for the middle class, and to ensure that corporations are paying their fair share. It’s a stark contrast, and it’s one that matters deeply to the American people,” he said. “And it’s why we will make sure that every single day we are reminding voters about how Joe Biden is fighting for them, while Donald Trump runs a campaign focused on one man and one man only: himself.”
The Biden campaign on Monday also said the media campaign will target voters in battleground states for June as part of its “aggressive and comprehensive efforts to engage and activate voters who will decide this election.”
The ad blitz also includes a “historic” investment to reach Black, Latino, and Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander voters, with the campaign calling it the “largest investments to date.”
The ad campaign comes after the Biden campaign raised a record $30 million at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Big names, including former President Obama and Hollywood actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts, were in attendance.
The massive haul comes after Biden attended a star-studded fundraiser in New York City in April, where he raised more than $25 million.
Meanwhile, the first presidential debate will be hosted by CNN on June 27 in Atlanta.
Donald Trump says the rioters who assaulted police officers in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot are “warriors.” That’s not just wrong; it’s dangerous.
On Jan. 6, 2021, more than 2,000 supporters of then-President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, hoping to stop the certification of President Biden’s election. Many came armed with pistols, knives, baseball bats, metal pipes, stun guns, or bear spray, and used them to attack police. Some 140 officers were assaulted.
In the ensuing three years, prosecutors have charged more than 1,400 of the rioters. More than 100 have been charged with causing serious injury to an officer or using a dangerous weapon. Several dozen are in jail awaiting trial.
Daniel Rodriguez of Fontana pleaded guilty to stunning a police officer in the neck with a taser. A federal judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.
Peter Schwartz of Owensboro, Ky., attacked police officers with pepper spray and a folding chair. He got 14 years, largely because he had 38 prior criminal convictions.
Christopher Quaglin of North Brunswick, N.J., tackled a police officer and choked him. A judge appointed by Trump called him “a menace to our society” and sentenced him to 12 years.
For months, Trump has called defendants like them “hostages” and “political prisoners,” as if they were being held unfairly by a repressive regime — a grotesque lie meant to attack the judicial system Trump wants to destroy.
But recently he gave the Jan. 6 attackers a more heroic title.
“Those J6 warriors — they were warriors,” the former president said at a rally in Las Vegas. “But they were really, more than anything else, they’re victims of what happened. All they were doing is protesting a rigged election.”
That’s quite a promotion. “Warriors” is a word Americans generally apply to members of the armed forces, not militants who attack police officers with bear spray.
Trump has crossed a line from defending the Jan. 6 detainees to lionizing them.
He has also promised to pardon most or all of them if he regains the White House.
The big problem isn’t how many he would pardon in 2025.
The problem is the message he’s sending to extremists who might be tempted to act in 2024: If you fight for me, you, too, can count on getting off — and on being hailed as a hero.
That’s a pretty loud dog whistle — only one step removed from “stand back and stand by,” Trump’s instruction to the extremist Proud Boys during the 2020 campaign. (They stood by until Jan. 6, when they showed up to batter down the Capitol’s doors.)
Trump’s praise for the rioters has come with an ugly escalation of his language on other themes.
He has denounced his opponents as “vermin.” a word that usually suggests extermination. He has claimed that migrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa are “poisoning our blood,” language once used by segregationists and Nazis.
And he has talked about taking revenge on Biden and others who he claims “rigged” his conviction by a New York jury for 34 felonies in a state court. (There is no evidence that the Biden administration played any role.)
Scholars of terrorism find all this worrisome.
“His message is escalating,” said Jon Lewis of George Washington University. “He’s saying: ‘We are warriors, and we have to stop this tyranny.’ It sounds intended to get his base ready for an impending conflict that will require violence.”
Trump’s promise of pardons serves a similar purpose, said Jacob Ware of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Prosecutions have two goals: punishment and deterrence. The [Jan. 6 defendants] have been punished, but Trump’s language has eroded any deterrence.”
It comes at a dangerous time. In its annual threat assessment, the Department of Homeland Security warned that any presidential election increases the risk of domestic terrorism.
The groups that led the assault on Jan. 6 have retreated in the face of prosecutions, but they haven’t gone away. Members of the Proud Boys have turned up at Trump rallies in North Carolina and New Jersey, apparently to recruit new members. Other organizations, including the Active Clubs network — successor to the California-based white supremacist Rise Above Movement — have been growing.
Federal law enforcement agencies have stepped up their attention to those threats, but they have sought to keep a low profile.
“There’s a lot of concern [in the federal government} about election violence,” said Ware, coauthor of a recent book on domestic extremism, “God, Guns and Sedition.”
“My worry is that conspiracy theories are so deeply entrenched in the [pro-Trump] movement, anything the federal government tries to do will be seen as an escalation. Efforts to protect vote counters will be portrayed as efforts to ‘protect the steal.’ Education efforts will be dismissed as ‘fake news,’” he said. “So it may be more effective for state and local governments and civil society [nongovernmental organizations] to take the lead.”
One focus of state efforts will be protecting vote-counting sites, especially in swing states with a history of slow tabulation: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The first step, though, is to take the problem seriously.
This isn’t just Trump being Trump.
He claims to be a champion of law and order, but he’s in favor of violence if it will help him take power — and he’s proclaiming it in plain sight.
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