Nearly 1,000 incarcerated men and women have joined the frontlines in a battle against record-breaking wildfires burning across southern California.
The number deployed – now 939 – are part of a long-running volunteer programme led by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).
Their numbers have steadily increased since Tuesday, the day the deadly fires began spreading uncontrollably through Los Angeles.
Over 10,000 structures have been destroyed and 37,000 acres burned, as thousands of emergency workers descend on the Los Angeles area to fight the flames.
Advertisement
At least 11 people have been killed in the wildfires, officials said.
The incarcerated firefighters have been drawn from among the 35 conservation fire camps run by the state, minimum-security facilities where inmates serve their time and receive training. Two of the camps are for incarcerated women.
The 900-plus incarcerated firefighters in use account for roughly half of the 1,870 prisoner-firefighters in the scheme.
In the field, they can be seen in prison-orange jumpsuits embedded alongside members of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
The incarcerated firefighters have been working “around the clock cutting fire lines and removing fuel from behind structures to slow fire spread”, CDCR told the BBC in an emailed statement.
Advertisement
The programme, which dates back to 1946, has divided critics, who see it as exploitative, and supporters, who say it is rehabilitative.
The state pays inmates a daily wage between $5.80 and $10.24 (£4.75 and £8.38), and an additional $1 per day when assigned to active emergencies.
Those wages are a fraction of the salaries received by citizen firefighters in California, who can earn upwards of $100,000 annually.
“You’re getting pennies compared to the other folks that’s alongside of you. You’re just cheap labour,” Royal Ramey, a former incarcerated firefighter and co-founder of the non-profit Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), told the BBC.
“And if you do pass away while fighting fires, you don’t get any benefits from that,” he continued.
Advertisement
“You’re not gonna get no award. You’re not gonna be recognised as a wildland firefighter,” he said, adding that he would remember in the field that he had already signed his own death certificate.
Still, Mr Ramey said the low pay is more than a California prisoner would otherwise earn performing jobs in the state penitentiaries.
The conservation camps and their “park, picnic-type feel” also offer additional perks like better food, he said, compared to California’s notoriously dangerous and overcrowded prisons.
“It’s a better living situation, definitely,” he said.
Camp participants can also earn time credits that help reduce their prison sentences, CDRC said.
Advertisement
Inmates convicted of crimes categorised as “serious” or “violent” felonies are not eligible to participate.
After incarcerated firefighters are released from prison – having been trained by the state – many try to get hired as citizen firefighters, but are denied, Mr Ramey said.
“There’s a stigma to it. When people think of firefighters they think of some clean-cut guy, a hero, not someone who’s been locked up,” he said.
He launched his nonprofit to help formerly incarcerated firefighters overcome the barriers and help fill the firefighter shortage California has faced for years.
There are currently five wildfires burning through billions of dollars worth of structures in the Los Angeles area, predicted to be one of the most expensive in history.
Advertisement
Strained for resources, the state has called on over 7,500 emergency personnel and first responders, including the state and National Guard and firefighters from as far away as Canada.
The fires have still been difficult to contain and continue to spread, with 35,000 acres from the two largest fires, Palisades and Eaton, already burned.
SACRAMENTO — President Donald Trump may visit California this week as state Attorney General Rob Bonta begins filing expected lawsuits against the president’s new executive orders.
Mr. Trump announced he will be visiting the Southern California fire zone Friday to tour the devastation from the historic wildfires in the Los Angeles area. During his inauguration speech, the president criticized California’s response to the fires.
As the legal battles begin between Democratic state legislators and the president, California’s GOP, including Republicans in Sacramento County, was celebrating on inauguration night.
The Capitol Lincoln Club held an inauguration party in Fair Oaks. Newly elected Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez was part of the crowd.
Advertisement
“Trump reminded us where we were four years ago and where we could be today,” Rodriguez said.
“The Republican Party has never been in a better position to succeed,” Capitol Lincoln Club board member Christian Forte said.
As state Republicans celebrated, Bonta, a Democrat, prepared for legal clashes with the Trump administration, including over plans for mass deportations. Nearly half of the country’s undocumented immigrants live in California.
Following the president’s executive orders, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas issued a statement saying, “I will always fight for immigrants, especially children because America is a nation of immigrants, and I believe in our country’s promise.”
Besides mass immigration policies, Trump is also seeking to revoke the federal waiver allowing California to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars in 2035. It’s another move expected to end up in court.
Advertisement
“California is only able to do that because the federal government grants us permission to smart that standard and, apparently with Trump’s executive order, he basically campaigned on this as well. He’s ordering the [Environmental Protection Agency] to revoke that authority from California,” said UC Berkeley Professor Ethan Elkind, who is also the director of the climate program at the university’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, California sued him more than 100 times.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, streamline permitting for oil and gas drilling and revoke electric vehicle rules.
The claims, which came in his inaugural address and in statements from the White House, are a replay of actions Trump took to roll back environmental rules during his first term from 2017 to 2021.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said Monday. “America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it… we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers.”
But many of Trump’s efforts to rewrite environmental laws during his first term were overturned by courts or reversed by President Biden after he took office four years ago. As with Trump’s first term, experts are expecting California and other Democratic states to continue now to push to meet the Paris Agreement’s voluntary targets — which aimed to keep the planet from warming more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit or 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels — and take other steps to maintain their state environmental laws.
Advertisement
“I think there is going to be more rhetoric about California than impact on California,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University. “California has very strong decarbonization policies and state environmental policies. The concern is all the other states. California can’t tackle climate change alone. But California will use the resources we have to move its targets forward.”
In 2017, former Gov. Jerry Brown helped launch the U.S. Climate Alliance, an organization of states that agreed to work toward the Paris targets by expanding renewable energy, electric vehicles and other areas. Today there are 24 states in the group representing 55% of the U.S. population, including California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and most of the New England states.
“We’ve filled the void left by the federal government before and Americans can be sure, we’ll do it again,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, on Friday.
Trump is likely to clash with California on the environment in five main areas: Vehicle emissions, offshore oil drilling, offshore wind energy, water policy and federal aid for wildfires and other natural disasters.
When he was president the first time, Trump denied California permission under the federal Clean Air Act to set pollution standards for cars and trucks that are tougher than national standards, something it has done since the 1960s. Trump also attempted to revoke the state’s ability to set tougher standards at all for cars, trains, trucks or any vehicles.
Advertisement
But he failed to achieve long-lasting change. California sued, and the lawsuit was still pending when Biden took office and restored the state’s powers. A month ago, Biden granted a key waiver to allow California to move forward with state rules to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, minivans and pickup trucks starting in 2035. Already, 24% of new vehicle sales in California are electric, with higher percentages in the Bay Area.
After the first clash, California also signed voluntary agreements with five large automakers — Ford, VW, Honda, BMW and Volvo — to adhere to the state’s tailpipe emissions standards through 2026 as a way to ensure consistency when they design and build vehicles.
On offshore oil, Biden signed a sweeping memorandum earlier this month withdrawing all federal waters off California, Oregon and Washington from new offshore oil drilling. Trump said he would overturn it. But Biden used a 1953 law that a federal judge in 2019 ruled cannot be reversed without a vote of Congress. Some Republicans in California, Florida and other coastal states do not support expanding offshore drilling.
On offshore wind, the Trump White House announced Monday that “President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.”
Trump has opposed wind energy for years, ever since the government in Scotland allowed turbines near a golf course he owned. He has claimed without evidence that wind turbines cause cancer and kill whales.
Advertisement
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Biden pushed hard to build floating offshore wind turbines 20 miles or more off California’s coast to expand renewable energy. Trump could block new leases. But Biden already approved leases with five companies who have paid the federal treasury $757 million for the rights off Morro Bay and Humboldt County. Proposition 4, approved by voters in November, includes $475 million in state funding to expand ports to help build and deploy wind turbines. But the stock prices of some large wind companies fell after Trump’s win in November.
On disaster aid, Trump threatened to deny it to California during a rally in October over disagreements with the state over forest management and water policy.
“We’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. “It’s not hard to do.”
Newsom and Democratic leaders, along with a few Republicans, like Rep. Young Kim, R-Anaheim, have said they do not support any conditions being placed on disaster assistance. Trump is scheduled to visit Los Angeles on Friday to tour areas that burned.
“In the face of one of the worst natural disasters in America’s history, this moment underscores the critical need for partnership, a shared commitment to facts, and mutual respect,” Newsom said Monday.
Look up how your sheriff responded to questions about their plans to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to ramp up immigration enforcement could put California’s 58 elected sheriffs in the hot seat because of their responsibility to manage local jails. CalMatters surveyed all of California’s sheriff’s about how they plan to navigate the complexities in local, state and federal immigration laws. Here’s what they told us.
CalMatters reached out to the sheriffs by email and website contact forms. When those weren’t available, we called the contact number on their website. Two county sheriffs’ offices — Monterey and San Mateo — did not return calls seeking comment.
Advertisement
For months, Trump allies have signaled that they’d focus initial immigration enforcement on undocumented people who have committed crimes. This month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would empower immigration agencies to deport people arrested on suspicion of burglary, theft and shoplifting. The bill is expected to pass the Senate.
During the previous Trump administration, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a so-called sanctuary law that limits how local enforcement agencies interact with federal immigration officers. At the time, several sheriffs from inland counties criticized the law and embraced Trump’s immigration policies.
Tomas Apodaca is a journalism engineer. He supports CalMatters and The Markup’s journalism by exploring data, reverse-engineering algorithms, and creating custom tools.
Before joining CalMatters and…
More by Tomas Apodaca
Nigel Duara joined CalMatters in 2020 as a Los Angeles-based reporter covering poverty and inequality issues for our California Divide collaboration. Previously, he served as a national and climate correspondent…
More by Nigel Duara
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23935558/acastro_STK103__01.jpg "Amazon Prime will shut down its clothing try-on program")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25826211/lorealcellbioprint.jpg "L’Oréal’s new skincare gadget told me I should try retinol")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25832751/2192581677.jpg "Super Bowl LIX will stream for free on Tubi")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25835602/Switch_DonkeyKongCountryReturnsHD_scrn_19.png "Nintendo omits original Donkey Kong Country Returns team from the remaster’s credits")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24774110/STK156_Instagram_threads_1.jpg "Meta is already working on Community Notes for Threads")