California’s billionaires are not the only ones fighting back against the state’s largest health workers union this election season. Now the clinics are too.

The California Primary Care Assn., which represents more than 2,300 community health clinics, and Open Door Community Health Centers filed a lawsuit Thursday to stop Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West from placing an initiative on the November ballot that would dictate how clinics spend money.

The clinic measure is less prominent than the billionaire-backed fight against a wealth tax, but recently came closer to appearing before voters.

The clinic’s lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the union’s ballot measure would interfere with federal laws and regulations that place strict spending requirements on nonprofit health clinics that serve low-income patients.

Joey Cachuela, general counsel for the clinic association, said in a statement the initiative threatens patient care. “We are filing this preelection challenge and need the courts to act to prevent this drastic measure from ever going to the ballot. Patient lives are at risk,” Cachuela said.

Renée Saldaña, a spokesperson for the healthcare workers union, said the proposed initiative was “legally sound” and called the lawsuit a “desperate attempt by the clinic industry to avoid accountability.”

Last month, union members turned in more than 1 million signatures to qualify the “Clinic Funding Accountability and Transparency Act” for the ballot. The union collected nearly double the number of signatures required to place the proposal before voters.

Under California’s election rules, proposals that gather enough signatures qualify for the ballot after the secretary of state’s office verifies their validity.

The union proposal would require federally qualified health centers to spend 90% of revenue on services that fulfill the stated mission to “provide primary and preventive care to low-income and underserved populations.” It would also punish clinics that do not adhere to this spending formula and place the money in a state-operated account that could later be used for worker training and staffing programs.

“It is the intent of this initiative to create a reasonable minimum standard of mission-directed spending … to ensure clinic patient service delivery and workforce stability is prioritized over management and overhead spending,” the initiative states.

Union leaders and members argue that clinics spend too much money on executive pay and administrative overhead and too little on patients. They also contend that some clinics spend only half of their revenue on direct patient care, an allegation that clinics call misleading.

“We have one message for our clinics: Put patients first. It’s time for an end to wasteful spending. It’s time to make sure clinics are putting their money in patient care and not CEO pay,” said Brisa Barrera, a medical assistant from Santa Rosa Community Health during an April rally to celebrate delivering the signatures.

The clinic association, however, argues that the initiative would illegally force hundreds of community health centers to close by stripping nearly $2 billion from health systems.

Tory Starr, chief executive of Open Door Community Health Centers, which operates clinics in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, said the measure would be “devastating” to the organization’s rural patients and would result in layoffs, reduced services and closures.

A nearly identical version of the ballot initiative failed to pass in the state Legislature earlier this year.

The initiative is one of three measures the union has submitted to the ballot. Another aims to limit healthcare executive pay at $450,000, and SEIU-UHW is also backing the “billionaire’s tax” that has drawn ire from both Democrats and Republicans.

Hwang writes for CalMatters.

Federal immigration agents arrested three times more people in Colorado per day on average last year compared with 2024, marking an aggressive shift in enforcement under President Donald Trump, according to new data.

About 12 people each day were taken to federal detention facilities in 2025, up from four in 2024. Even without high-profile enforcement surges like those seen in Illinois, Minnesota, New York and California, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested about 4,160 people in Colorado in 2025, an increase of 281% compared with 1,091 total people arrested in 2024. Arrests in Colorado reached their highest level in April 2025 and have since fallen slightly.

From Jan. 1 to March 10, ICE arrested about 12 people per day in Colorado, demonstrating that last year’s pace continues.

The surge in arrests as well as reports from groups that aid immigrants and track detentions show a heightened focus by ICE to not just arrest more people, but more immigrants living in Colorado. While Trump vowed to target people with criminal records, data obtained by the Sun shows that most people arrested in Colorado last year have never been convicted of a crime.

About 65% of the people arrested by ICE officers so far under Trump had no prior criminal convictions. And among those with criminal convictions, only 5% of those convictions were for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation designates as violent crimes (murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault).

Of those arrested with criminal convictions, the most common convictions are for driving under the influence, assault, and traffic offenses.

That’s despite Trump’s campaign promise to target immigrants who are violent criminals.

The data, obtained from ICE and published by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s Deportation Data Project, illustrates the dragnet approach to arrests in Colorado during the first year of Trump’s presidency and the new landscape that immigrants in Colorado have been navigating. The Colorado Sun has been reporting on the data as it becomes available.

George Valdez, acting director of ICE’s Denver field office, declined to comment through a spokesperson. In a statement, the agency told the Sun “the Deportation Data Project is not accurate,” but did not cite any specific issues. The Sun provided ICE more than a week to review our findings, which relied on data obtained directly from ICE by the Deportation Data Project through the Freedom of Information Act.

ICE agents have arrested people driving to work and at their jobs, at their homes, driving to school and leaving state and immigration courts. 

Many have lived in Colorado for years and have deep ties to the community through family, friends and their jobs, according to advocates.

Andrea Loya, executive director of Casa de Paz, helps families of people who are detained at the ICE detention facility in Aurora.

Far fewer people are being released from the facility, Loya said, and more of those who are released now are Colorado residents, a shift that highlights ICE’s heightened focus on locals. In 2024, Casa de Paz helped 2,087 people released from the facility, most of whom were arrested in other states and brought to Aurora to be processed, Loya said. In 2025, Casa de Paz helped 610 people released from the facility, about 40% of whom lived in Colorado.

In March 2025, Loya saw young children waiting to visit family members detained at the ICE detention center in Aurora for the first time.

“Before it was only volunteers,” she said. “We were seeing so many kids, babies through teenagers, moms, dads, grandmas. That immediately told us it’s local folks who are being detained. We have shifted everything.”

ICE has made it more difficult for people released from detention to fly to other states, Loya said, complicating Casa de Paz’s efforts to assist people.

ICE will often take away a person’s driver’s license while they are in detention, Loya said, and it can take them a while to get their license back. ICE gives people released from detention paperwork showing they have recently been released that used to be sufficient to pass airport security, Loya said, but recently security officers have been confused about who can fly and who can’t. While Casa de Paz used to help people with plane tickets, they are now often resorting to long distance bus tickets, Loya said.

“There is this idea that there’s not a lot of ICE activity here because it doesn’t look visually like the other states,” Loya said. “It for sure is happening here.”

Hans Meyer, a Denver-based immigration attorney, said his typical client profile has shifted from someone who has a criminal history and has not lived in the U.S. for very long to “people who have lived in the country for long periods of time and virtually no criminal history with deep community and family connections.” 

Meyer is suing ICE in federal court to limit how the agency can use warrantless arrests. In November, the court sided with Meyer and granted a preliminary injunction in the case, but Meyer and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and another Denver law firm allege ICE officers are violating the injunction by continuing to arrest people without first verifying they are undocumented and a flight risk.

ICE arrested one of Meyer’s clients, Dionisio Castillo, 53, at his construction job site in January without asking him questions about his background. Had they asked, they would have known he has lived undocumented in the U.S. for 30 years, has three U.S. citizen children and no criminal history. He spent 48 days at the ICE detention facility in Aurora. His family had to pay a $2,500 bond for his release.

“I was standing next to my truck and I turned to the right and I saw that the officers were walking toward me,” Castillo told the judge through an interpreter at a hearing last month. “They handcuffed me with my hands behind my back.”

Training hours for ICE officers at the Denver field office have been cut over the last year, according to Gregory Davies, the assistant field office director, and the office has hired dozens of new officers recently.

Meyer is hopeful the federal judge in the warrantless arrest case will continue to hold ICE accountable.

“The entire country, including the federal courts, are painfully aware that ICE is a pariah law enforcement agency and has lost all veneer of legitimacy,” he said.

Jordan Garcia, the program director for the American Friends Service Committee’s Colorado Immigrant Rights Program, said people are doing a lot more planning for themselves and their families, including putting another person on the title of the car, on the list to pick up the kids from school or day care, just in case they get arrested. More people are participating in workshops to learn about their rights and how best to protect themselves, Garcia said.

“We’ll continue to do the best we can,” he said. “People are trying to be cautious but they’re also trying to protect each other and be good stewards of the community.”