Politics
California has a history of racist land seizures. Will reparations bills bring justice?
Few governmental practices have caused more rapid disruption or erosion of generational wealth in Black and brown communities than the discriminatory use of eminent domain — the legal tool cities, counties and other official bodies rely on to unilaterally condemn and purchase private land for public use.
Several reparation bills moving through the state Legislature could help Californians of color who believe their land was taken against their will with racist intent to finally get restitution.
The bills turn the spotlight on a phenomenon that is woven into the Golden State’s history, said California state Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat from Gardena who authored three of the pending bills.
Under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan, the city of Manhattan Beach used its eminent domain authority in 1924 to drive out a seaside resort for Black guests owned by Willa and Charles Bruce, promising to put a park in its place.
Just as Silas White was about to realize his dream of establishing the Ebony Beach Club as a Black-owned haven free of racism in 1958, Santa Monica used eminent domain to confiscate his property, demolishing it with plans to create public parking. The luxury Viceroy Hotel now sits on the lot.
“There are multiple examples of African American families who were forced off their land, for no other reason than they didn’t want them there anymore,” Bradford said. “And now their homes have been replaced with freeways or parking lots, or as in Manhattan Beach, an alleged park that was 40 years before it even came into development.”
Families that were forced to sell their land for less than it was worth lost out on years of potential gains from their properties, depriving them of the chance to grow and pass down assets to their heirs, Bradford said.
At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Bradford sat next to Jessie Johnson as she spoke of a pain that hasn’t abated in the six decades since her grandfather’s land was seized in the largely Black and Latino Bay Area community of Russell City, in what was then unincorporated Alameda County. The land wound up in the hands of a developer and was annexed by the city of Hayward.
“We thought we would have the liberty to build on my grandfather’s land,” Johnson told committee members. “Unfortunately, eminent domain took over.”
Bradford believes that hundreds and perhaps thousands of other California property owners, or their descendants, may seek financial remedies under the proposed law.
“I can’t assign a dollar figure — that’s how big it is,” he said.
Bradford’s reparations legislation would set up the Freedmen Affairs Agency, which among other things would determine the validity of claims brought by families that believe their property was unjustly seized.
The legislation currently defines racially motivated eminent domain as “when the state, county, city, city and county, district, or other political subdivision of the state acquires private property for public use and does not distribute just compensation to the owner at the time of the taking, and the taking, or the failure to provide just compensation, was due, in whole or in part, to the owners ethnicity or race.
The state’s Office of Legal Affairs would be tasked with presenting the offending entities with possible remedies such as the return of the seized lands, publicly owned land of equal present-day value or monetary payments.
Bradford’s bills stem from his participation on the state reparations task force, which spent two years studying how California permitted the enslavement of Africans arriving in the state without formally sanctioning the institution of slavery itself. It also examined public policies, such as the use of eminent domain, that further disadvantaged Black Californians.
The senator said he expects the eminent domain provision, which is part of a package of reparations proposals recommended by the task force and backed by the California Legislative Black Caucus, to reach Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk by the end of the current legislative session.
Racially biased eminent domain isn’t a problem only in California. One study authored by research psychiatrist Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove and published by the nonprofit Institute for Justice looked at cases involving the Federal Housing Act between 1949 and 1973. It found that 2,532 civic projects carried out in 992 cities displaced 1 million people, two-thirds of them Black Americans, making that group “five times more likely to be displaced than they should have been given their numbers in the population.”
But although Black Americans have largely been the focus of state and national reparations efforts, Bradford said his eminent domain proposal applies to members of other racial groups as well.
“I hope people understand the importance of reparations by seeing that other folks were harmed too because of the racially motivated taking of their property,” Bradford said.
Bradford’s Senate bills coincide with AB 1950, a separate reparations measure introduced by state Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) on behalf of families from the former Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium stands today, who are seeking restitution for their losses.
In the 1950s, Los Angeles officials evicted families on a 315-acre hillside site that encompassed the largely Latino neighborhoods on the premise that public housing would be built there. Harrowing scenes ensued of children sobbing and a woman kicking and screaming as sheriff’s deputies carried her away by her arms and legs.
“The shorthand version of the story is that the homes in these communities were deemed as ‘slums’ by the Los Angeles Housing Authority, so the compensation provided to the families was lower than what the land should have been priced at,” said Carrillo. “For those that refused to leave, eminent domain was used to remove them.”
Carrillo represents parts of northeast and East L.A., home to large Latino communities. In an email, she explained how racist land grabs and redevelopment schemes have disrupted the lives of Angelenos of color.
Aurora Vargas is carried by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies after her family refused to leave their house in Chavez Ravine in May 1959.
(Hugh Arnott/Los Angeles Times Archive/UCLA)
“Restrictive covenants, redlining and segregation by design has always been the housing story of Los Angeles,” said Carrillo, who also noted that the expansion of the 10 Freeway toward Santa Monica destroyed the affluent Black Sugar Hill neighborhood in West Adams.
For Chavez Ravine families, restitution could come in the form of land, cash payments or access to city programs such as affordable-housing assistance, said Alfred Fraijo, an L.A. real estate and land-use attorney who served as an advisor on the legislation.
“The idea is we want to give local government the opportunity to do right,” before cases devolve into protracted courtroom and media spectacles, Fraijo said.
He believes Carrillo’s Chavez Ravine Accountability Act, along with Bradford’s bill, could if successful prompt government entities to more strongly consider racial and economic equity when considering future uses of eminent domain.
Fraijo, 47, grew up in the heavily Latino East L.A. neighborhood of Boyle Heights and remembers feeling hemmed in by a tangle of interchanges connecting the 10 and 5 freeways, whose construction had erased streets lined with Victorian and Craftsman-style homes.
“These freeways were not built in our community by accident — they were intentional,” Fraijo said.
He describes AB 1950 as “the beginning of a reconciliation and a healing process for our communities.”
The restitution bills come as welcome news to activist Kavon Ward too. Ward started the organization Where Is My Land to help Black Americans in California and nationwide fight for their stolen properties.
Her organization has advised families in the Ebony Beach Club, Russell City and Bruce’s Beach cases, as well as survivors of Section 14 in Palm Springs who were evicted from their homes on the Agua Caliente tribal reservation in the 1960s.
Ward and Bradford’s work on Bruces’ Beach helped the family reach a deal in which Los Angeles County returned two parcels to the family, marking the first time that a local government had given back land to a Black family after recognizing that it had been unfairly seized. The family subsequently sold the property back to the county for nearly $20 million.
Ward consulted with Bradford on his land bill to eliminate the standard five-year statute of limitations on eminent domain challenges, because many of the unfair land takings happened decades ago.
“There should be no statute of limitations on stolen land like this,” Ward said. “The policy is extremely important, because it helps everybody.”
Ward said she understands the fraught politics of the Black land return movement, given the current backlash against government equity and inclusion efforts, attacks on Black history education and repeated attempts to enact a national reparations bill into law.
Some Indigenous leaders have sought a greater role in the state reparations debate. Tribal nations, the original stewards of all of California’s lands, are pushing for the return or co-management of their stolen ancestral territories.
Ward said that land-based restitution cases for Black Americans should not be seen as conflicting with the tribal land reclamation.
“When I think about the LandBack movement, I love that movement,” Ward said. “They’re focused on Native land and they should. What I realized with Bruce’s Beach is that this is so widespread, but nobody is focusing on Black people.”
Bradford agrees that it won’t always be easy to persuade local elected officials to spend taxpayers dollars to set up their own task forces, study the potential return of publicly owned parcels, issue payouts for past land seizures and invest in other reparative measures.
Nothing in either Bradford’s legislation or Carrillo’s obligates eminent domain offenders to make families whole, nor do they commit the state to offering compensation for unjustly seized properties with tax dollars instead, Bradford and Fraijo said.
In the case of Chavez Ravine, Carrillo’s bill has come under criticism from survivors in the nonprofit advocacy group Buried Under the Blue, who recently told radio station KCRW that many members are withholding support for Carrillo’s bill until it holds the Dodgers organization more accountable.
The organization has not responded to a request for comment about the bill.
Bradford said he is confident that despite the potential obstacles, more families will have an easier pathway to restitution.
But he acknowledged that “all cases are not going to end successfully like Bruce’s Beach.”
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The city of San Diego sued the federal government to stop the construction of razor wire fencing on city-owned land near the U.S.-Mexico border, accusing federal agencies of trespassing and causing environmental damage.
The city filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for Southern California on Monday. The complaint named Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth among the defendants.
The city accused the federal government of acting without legal authority when they entered city property in Marron Valley and began installing razor wire fencing.
“The City of San Diego will not allow federal agencies to disregard the law and damage City property,” said City Attorney Heather Ferbert in a news release. She said the lawsuit aims to protect sensitive habitats and ensure environmental commitments are upheld.
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San Diego is suing the federal government to stop the construction of razor wire fencing on city property in Marron Valley. (Justin Hamel/Bloomberg via Getty Images, File)
According to the lawsuit, federal personnel including U.S. Marines accessed the land without the city’s consent, and damaged environmentally sensitive areas protected under long-standing conservation agreements.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth were among the federal officials named in San Diego’s lawsuit. (Reuters/Brian Snyder; AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
San Diego argues the fencing has blocked the city’s ability to manage and assess its own property and could jeopardize compliance with environmental obligations.
An American flag can be seen through the barbed wire surrounding the CoreCivic Otay Mesa Detention Center on October 4, 2025 in San Diego, California. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
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The lawsuit also accuses the federal government of trespassing and beginning construction without proper authority or environmental review, and unconstitutionally taking the land in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Fox News Digital reached out to DHS and the Pentagon for comment.
Former vice presidential contender and current aw-shucks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that he won’t run for a third term, dogged by a scandal over child care funds that may or may not be going to fraudsters.
It’s a politically driven mess that not coincidentally focuses on a Black immigrant community, tying the real problem of scammers stealing government funds to the growing MAGA frenzy around an imaginary version of America that thrives on whiteness and Christianity.
Despite the ugliness of current racial politics in America, the fraud remains real, and not just in Minnesota. California has lost billions to cheats in the last few years, leaving our own governor, who also harbors D.C. dreams, vulnerable to the same sort of attack that has taken down Walz.
As we edge closer to the 2028 presidential election, Republicans and Democrats alike will probably come at Gavin Newsom with critiques of the state’s handling of COVID-19 funds, unemployment insurance and community college financial aid to name a few of the honeypots that have been successfully swiped by thieves during his tenure.
In fact, President Trump said as much on his social media barf-fest this week.
“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” he wrote.
Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson also said he’s conducting his own “investigation.” And Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is claiming his fraud tip line has turned up “(c)orruption, fraud and abuse on an epic scale.”
Just to bring home that this vulnerability is serious and bipartisan, Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman rumored to have his own interest in the Oval Office, is also circling the fraud feast like a vulture eyeing his next meal.
“I want to hear from residents in my district and across the state about waste, mismanagement, inefficiencies, or fraud that we must tackle,” Khanna wrote on social media.
Newsom’s spokesman Izzy Gardon questioned the validity of many fraud claims.
“In the actual world where adults govern,” Gardon said, “Gavin Newsom has been cleaning house. Since taking office, he’s blocked over $125 BILLION in fraud, arrested criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers, and protected taxpayers from the exact kind of scam artists Trump celebrates, excuses, and pardons.”
What exactly are we talking about here? Well, it’s a pick-your-scandal type of thing. Even before the federal government dumped billions in aid into the states during the pandemic, California’s unemployment system was plagued by inefficiencies and yes, scammers. But when the world shut down and folks needed that government cash to survive, malfeasance skyrocketed.
Every thief with a half-baked plan — including CEOs, prisoners behind bars and overseas organized crime rackets — came for California’s cash, and seemingly got it. The sad part is these weren’t criminal geniuses. More often than not, they were low-level swindlers looking at a system full of holes because it was trying to do too much too fast.
In a matter of months, billions had been siphoned away. A state audit in 2021 found that at least $10 billion had been paid out on suspicious unemployment claims — never mind small business loans or other types of aid. An investigation by CalMatters in 2023 suggested the final figure may be up to triple that amount for unemployment. In truth, no one knows exactly how much was stolen — in California, or across the country.
It hasn’t entirely stopped. California is still paying out fraudulent unemployment claims at too high a rate, totaling up to $1.5 billion over the last few years — more than $500 million in 2024 alone, according to the state auditor.
But that’s not all. Enterprising thieves looked elsewhere when COVID-19 money largely dried up. Recently, that has been our community colleges, where millions in federal student aid has been lost to grifters who use bots to sign up for classes, receive government money to help with school, then disappear. Another CalMatters investigation using data obtained from a public records request found that up to 34% of community college applications in 2024 may have been false — though that number represents fraudulent admissions that were flagged and blocked, Gardon points out.
Still, community college fraud will probably be a bigger issue for Newsom because it’s fresher, and can be tied (albeit disingenuously) to immigrants and progressive policies.
California allows undocumented residents to enroll in community colleges, and it made those classes free — two terrific policies that have been exploited by the unscrupulous. For a while, community colleges didn’t do enough to ensure that students were real people, because they didn’t require enough proof of identity. This was in part to accommodate vulnerable students such as foster kids, homeless people and undocumented folks who lacked papers.
With no up-front costs for attempting to enroll, phonies threw thousands of identities at the system’s 116 schools, which were technologically unprepared for the assaults. These “ghost” students were often accepted and given grants and loans.
My former colleague Kaitlyn Huamani reported that in 2024, scammers stole roughly $8.4 million in federal financial aid and more than $2.7 million in state aid from our community colleges. That‘s a pittance compared with the tens of billions that was handed out in state and federal financial aid, but more than enough for a political fiasco.
As Walz would probably explain if nuanced policy conversations were still a thing, it’s both a fair and unfair criticism to blame these robberies on a governor alone — state government should be careful of its cash and aggressive in protecting it, and the buck stops with the governor, but crises and technology have collided to create opportunities for swindlers that frankly few governmental leaders, from the feds on down, have handled with any skill or luck.
The crooks have simply been smarter and faster than the rest of us to capitalize first on the pandemic, then on evolving technology including AI that makes scamming easier and scalable to levels our institutions were unprepared to handle.
Since being so roundly fleeced during the pandemic, multiple state and federal agencies have taken steps in combating fraud — including community colleges using their own AI tools to stop fake students before they get in.
And the state is holding thieves accountable. Newsom hired a former Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, McGregor Scott, to go after scam artists on unemployment. And other county, state and federal prosecutors have also dedicated resources to clawing back some of the lost money.
With the slow pace of our courts (burdened by their own aging technology), many of those cases are still ongoing or just winding up. For example, 24 L.A. County employees were charged in recent months with allegedly stealing more than $740,000 in unemployment benefits, which really is chump change in this whole mess.
Another California man recently pleaded guilty to allegedly cheating his way into $15.9 million in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs.
And in one of the most colorful schemes, four Californians with nicknames including “Red boy” and “Scooby” allegedly ran a scam that boosted nearly $250 million in federal tax refunds before three of them attempted to murder the fourth to keep him from ratting them out to the feds.
There are literally hundreds of cases across the country of pandemic fraud. And these schemes are just the tip of the cash-berg. Fraudsters are also targeting fire relief funds, food benefits — really, any pot of public money is fair game to them. And the truth is, the majority of that stolen money is gone for good.
So it’s hard to hear the numbers and not be shocked and angry, especially as the Golden State is faced with a budget shortfall that may be as much as $18 billion.
Whether you blame Newsom personally or not for all this fraud, it’s hard to be forgiving of so much public money being handed to scoundrels when our schools are in need, our healthcare in jeopardy and our bills on an upward trajectory.
The failure is going to stick to somebody, and it doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure out who it’s going to be.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution, including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills.
The court, in a 4-1 ruling, sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the abortion bans passed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, which returned the power to make laws on abortion back to the states.
Despite Wyoming being one of the most conservative states, the ruling handed down by justices who were all appointed by Republican governors upheld every previous lower court ruling that the abortion bans violated the state constitution.
Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment affirming that competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Voters approved the constitutional amendment in 2012 in response to the federal Affordable Care Act, which is also known as Obamacare.
The justices in Wyoming found that the amendment was not written to apply to abortion but noted that it is not their job to “add words” to the state constitution.
“But lawmakers could ask Wyoming voters to consider a constitutional amendment that would more clearly address this issue,” the justices wrote.
Wellspring Health Access President Julie Burkhart said in a statement that the ruling upholds abortion as “essential health care” that should not be met with government interference.
“Our clinic will remain open and ready to provide compassionate reproductive health care, including abortions, and our patients in Wyoming will be able to obtain this care without having to travel out of state,” Burkhart said.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction and delayed its opening. A woman is serving a five-year prison sentence after she admitted to breaking in and lighting gasoline that she poured over the clinic floors.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction. (AP)
Attorneys representing the state had argued that abortion cannot violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not a form of health care.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling and called on state lawmakers meeting later this winter to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion that residents could vote on this fall.
An amendment like that would require a two-thirds vote to be introduced as a nonbudget matter in the monthlong legislative session that will primarily address the state budget, although it would have significant support in the Republican-dominated legislature.
“This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself. It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote,” Gordon said in a statement.
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Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling. (Getty Images)
One of the laws overturned by the state’s high court attempted to ban abortion, but with exceptions in cases where it is needed to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases of rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, although other states have implemented de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly restricting abortion.
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Abortion has remained legal in the state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging the restrictions moved forward. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in 2024.
Last year, Wyoming passed additional laws requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers and women to receive ultrasounds before having medication abortions. A judge in a separate lawsuit blocked those laws from taking effect while that case moves forward.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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