The Brief

It’s hard for the eye to settle on any one item on a visit to the Huntington Library, so vast are its treasures. In one display case, you have the Ellesmere Chaucer, which dates from the 15th century, one of the most important copies of The Canterbury Tales in existence. In another, you have the Gutenberg Bible, which started a printing revolution and changed the world.

With much discussion these days about national documents and their whereabouts generally, we wanted to find out what it takes to preserve these pieces of history.

Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington; Kehinde Wiley's A Portrait of a Young Gentleman (2021) installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington

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Joshua White/The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

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Kristi Westberg is the senior book and paper conservator at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. For the past eight years, she and a team of experts have been in charge of handling the library's oldest and most precious documents.

Huntington also houses modern treasures, like the papers of science-fiction pioneer Octavia Butler. It also has ancient work.

"We have the oldest printed book on exhibition at the Huntington and that was printed in 1085," Westberg told LAist's news program AirTalk, which airs on 89.3 FM. The book about 40 feet long.

What goes into taking care of them? How do you display them responsibly? And, crucially, when handling, gloves or no gloves?

First, it's important to distinguish the material you're working with.

Parchment or paper?

Yemenis attend a historical Quranic manuscripts fair at Al-Kabir Mosque on March 20, 2023 in Sanaa'a, Yemen. The five-day fair showcases 39 handwritten copies of the Quran manuscripts written on paper and 26 manuscripts written on parchment, all date back to different periods in Islamic history.

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"Parchment is actually made from animal skin," says Westberg. It's removed from the animal, along the flesh and hair, then stretched like a drum and pulled very thin. Paper, on the other hand, can be made from a variety of materials. Really nice paper, Westberg said, is made from cotton rag. This used to be the main form of paper produced. But that changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when people started to make shortcuts.

That's when paper started being made with wood pulp, which is very acidic and less durable but significantly cheaper to produce. There's a misconception, Westberg says, around paper. A lot of people think older books present the biggest challenges when it comes to conservation, but it's actually newer books. Have you ever left your newspaper out in the sun and seen the paper turn yellow?

"That happens with more modern papers," Westberg said. Believe it or not, 14th- and 15th-century books are usually in much better shape.

Proper storage is key

"Books and library materials kind of like the same environment that humans like," says Westberg. If you're like most people, that means an indoor space that is not too hot, not too cold, and not too humid. Westberg and her team at The Huntington Library keep the documents stored at a temperature no higher than 72 degrees and maintain 30-50% humidity.

You may also notice the dim lighting when you visit their exhibition. Light damage, says Westberg, is cumulative and irreversible. "We can repair a lot of things but we can't bring the ink back." To prevent light damage, items are rotated every 3-6 months, pages are turned frequently and of course, the mood is set to dim.

One of the most common questions Westberg fields is about gloves — Should you wear them to protect documents from the oil on your hands? It depends, she says. For most instances, gloves aren't necessary and can actually lead to more damage. When handling an extra-fragile document, Westberg says it's important to be able to feel it. "You might not realize how fragile it is."

A photo of the Ellesmere Chaucer, a famous early 15th century manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" on display at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.

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Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

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With gloves on, one would love that sensation to know what you're handling. What she generally recommends is clean, dry hands. "No lotion, no sanitizer," she adds. Photographs can be an exception as they can be more reactive to the oils on our hands. In those instances, wearing gloves is best.

Why is preservation so important?

Preservation of culture, protection of rights, to promote learning and knowledge — there are a lot of reasons to preserve historical documents. We have repositories all around the world, each with their own special records and slice of history. They also have their own special challenges when it comes to preservation. Westberg says it takes "informed and measured decisions" to keep these materials alive, and we may be better off for it. Every day, Westberg and her team watch scholars and historians come and go from the library, which is actively trying to digitize certain documents so more scholars around the world can access them.

Westberg was planning to go into graphic design, but while working a job at a special collections library, it was the conservators who caught her eye. She asked them what they were up to, they explained their job, and that was it. "I was hooked. I was sold."

Listen to the conversation

The Supreme Court has sided against President Trump, rejecting his efforts to enact new mail-in voting restrictions for the midterm election.

The ruling released Monday by the high court means the U.S. Postal Service is expected to continue delivering ballots as usual.

Voting by mail has already begun in states including Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with more soon to follow — including Western states such as Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, where elections are held primarily or fully with mail ballots.

Under the still-blocked USPS plan, which followed an executive order by Trump, states would have had to turn over lists of voters' names and addresses and have certain specific barcodes on ballot envelopes in order to have them delivered by the mailing agency.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Boston had issued a preliminary injunction against USPS, blocking the mailing agency from imposing those new ballot requirements on states. The judge found the requirements are likely illegal because the Postal Service has no authority to control mail-in voting.

Now, a majority of the Supreme Court decided to keep that injunction in place.

Trump said he issued the call for USPS to change its rule for ballot mail as a way to stop illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens, a problem that many studies and audits show is extremely uncommon. For this legal fight over the USPS plan, the administration's lawyers have provided the courts with no evidence of mail-voting fraud.

Trump has been a vocal critic of the way around one-third of voters cast ballots in the last two federal elections. In 2024, the share of voters who reported casting ballots by mail was higher among Democrats (37%) than Republicans (24%), according to a national survey by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

In a social media post last year, Trump said he is "going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS" and claimed that "ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING."

This year, Trump himself voted by mail in Florida.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Editor's note: USPS is a financial supporter of NPR.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

Copyright 2026 NPR

Ray Jayawardhana, a seasoned astrophysicist and university administrator, officially took over as Caltech’s 10th president on July 1.

The newly appointed president sat down with Larry Mantle on AirTalk, LAist 89.3’s daily news program, to talk about his plans for the future of the esteemed university.

Ray Jay and Caltech — it was in the cosmos

Jayawardhana, who goes by “Ray Jay,” told Larry he was always interested in the cosmos growing up.

He shared that, as a teenager in Sri Lanka, he wrote to the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) — NASA's leading space exploration center, which is managed by Caltech — to ask for images from the Voyager space missions they were conducting during the 1980s.

“I waited impatiently for a response, and one day, this large envelope with an oversized wheel of books arrived with a set of images of the outer planets and their moons,” he said. “That just delighted me to no end.”

Saturn and its satellites Tethys (outer left), Enceladus (inner left) and Mimas (right of rings) are seen in this mosaic of images taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on Oct. 30, 1980 from a distance of 18 million kilometers (11 million miles).

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This view of Jupiter was taken by Voyager 1. This image was taken through color filters and recombined to produce the color image. This photo was assembled from three black and white negatives by the Image Processing Lab at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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This picture of Neptune was produced from images taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 in the summer of 1989 as it became the first spacecraft to fly by the planet.

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Today, he’s the first South Asian American to lead Caltech, overseeing the operations of the same Jet Propulsion Lab he wrote to in the '80s.

How he came to the U.S.

After attending St. John’s College in Sri Lanka, he decided to pursue higher education in the United States. He earned an undergraduate degree from Yale and subsequently his doctorate in astronomy from Harvard, quickly establishing himself as one of the world’s most renowned astrophysicists.

He previously held positions at Cornell University and Johns Hopkins.

Exoplanetary president

Aside from his main focus as the school’s head of administration, Ray Jay continues his own research exploring the formation of planets and stars, saying it keeps him intellectually engaged.

He's part of a team that works with the James Webb Space Telescope to observe and characterize so-called exoplanets — planets around other stars — with an eye toward the potential for life beyond Earth.

He’s confident in Caltech’s future with JPL

Universities like Caltech are on rocky terrain amid sweeping federal government cuts of public funding for scientific research.

Additionally, JPL's future is uncertain. NASA — which now owns and sponsors JPL — is opening its contracting to other research institutions for the first time, which could mean a bidding war.

The entrance to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

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Losing the contract for Caltech would mean losing a stream of federal funding valued at $3 billion per year.

Jayawardhana said he’s confident Caltech and JPL’s partnership will continue, saying that the university's value proposition is unrivaled.

“It’s not only about the self-interest in continuing to ensure there's federal and public funding for research, it's also about enriching humanity,” he said.

NASA’s current contract with Caltech expires in September 2028.

The little girl stared up at Norma Gómez from the doorway of her neighbor’s apartment, her sad, brown eyes suddenly flashing with hope.

“Are you the person who’s going to bring my mom back?” she asked.

Gómez struggled to find an answer. It was a December morning, and she’d brought food, diapers, baby wipes, and clothes — items she hoped would help the 6-year-old girl, her baby brother and the neighbor who had stepped in to care for them. The children were left alone after federal immigration agents arrested their parents outside their apartment in Oxnard, a mostly Latino agricultural community on the Southern California coast. But Gómez had no power to bring the parents back.

“We’re working on that,” Gómez recalled telling the girl. In reality, she was at a loss for how to answer truthfully without upsetting her.

As a project manager for a nonprofit that provides food assistance to immigrant families affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Gómez has witnessed the tumult and pain that have roiled the lives of millions of immigrant families since President Donald Trump returned to office, with devastating consequences for children’s health. They include an estimated 205,000 children with at least one parent detained by immigration authorities through April, a number that has undoubtedly climbed since. Separation from parents harms children psychologically. It destabilizes families, often leaving the remaining parent or caregiver scrambling to stay housed, buy food, and fulfill kids’ medical needs. Some kids are left alone to care for themselves.

Many kids whose parents aren’t detained are experiencing threats to their health and well-being too. Two children in the South died by suicide in February 2025 after reportedly being bullied over their family’s alleged immigration status.

Millions of children live in families losing access to medical care, food, tax credits, and other supports as federal and state governments roll back eligibility for immigrants with and without legal status. Fear of federal enforcement has pushed parents to avoid taking kids to school, going to the doctor and engaging in social activities. Some have disenrolled from or avoided signing kids up for health and nutrition programs.

Children from immigrant backgrounds are also living in fear. They’re experiencing more emotional distress, increased bullying in school and anxiety about racial profiling by ICE, even when they or their family members are citizens or legal residents.

Most of these children are American citizens. About 1 in 4 U.S.-born kids have an immigrant parent, including around 4.6 million with a parent who lacks legal status.

“I'm really concerned about how long it's going to take for us as a country to address all of the harm that's happening to this generation of kids,” said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “This type of stress can have long-term developmental harm and can really inhibit their ability to do well in school, to have good health outcomes, and to grow into thriving, stable adults.”

Curbing public benefits

Trump has made cracking down on immigrants — including the children of immigrants — a priority since his second term began last year. On Inauguration Day, he issued an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for kids born to parents without legal status or in the country on temporary visas, an attempt ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court.

His administration, with the approval of Republicans in Congress, has poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, detaining the parents of an estimated 145,000 U.S. citizen children as of April, and, according to an analysis by nonprofit newsroom The Marshall Project, over 6,200 children. It’s sought to rescind temporary protected status, or TPS, for over 1 million immigrants, tens of thousands of whom have U.S. citizen children, and stalled renewals in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which includes the parents of about 300,000 citizen children.

White House officials say the immigration crackdown benefits American citizens by freeing up resources such as jobs and housing, reducing pressure on public coffers, expelling criminals, and restoring integrity to the immigration system. (Studies have shown that mass deportations harm U.S. workers.) Trump and other Republican leaders have argued that birthright citizenship encourages unauthorized immigration and “birth tourism,” and that TPS has allowed immigrants from “dangerous, third-world countries” to remain in the United States indefinitely under what is supposed to be a temporary program.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis did not directly address whether the administration is concerned about long-term harm to children and increased healthcare costs because of its immigration policies. Instead, she repeated past White House criticisms that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies allowed children to be trafficked across the U.S. border.

“The real story is the psychiatric impact on the tens of thousands of children who were smuggled across the border — many by human and sex traffickers,” she wrote in an email.

Gómez at a monthly food distribution organized by the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Santa Paula. She says she has delivered food to families caring for children with one or both parents detained by immigration authorities.

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Only 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has accused the children of immigrants of draining public resources and perpetuating problems from their parents’ home countries. Research, however, shows that immigrants earn more and do better the longer they live in the United States and that they and their children assimilate rapidly. Data also shows they rely less on welfare than native-born Americans.

“This is the great lie of mass migration,” Miller wrote on the social platform X in November. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

The Republican tax-and-spending law enacted last summer curbs immigrant eligibility for health and food assistance programs. And this July, the administration issued new “public charge” rules that give immigration officers broad discretion to deny green cards to lawfully present immigrants if they or family members have used public benefit programs, a move that could result in over a million U.S. citizen children disenrolling from safety net healthcare programs.

Together but afraid

Separation from parents is traumatic for children and can lead to lifelong health problems, including anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, and learning difficulties. Children separated from their parents at the border during the first Trump administration were found to exhibit lasting trauma. Researchers have also tied deportations and detentions of immigrant parents — as well as the threat of them — to widespread emotional trauma, higher school dropout rates, housing instability, and hunger among both immigrant and U.S.-born children.

It’s also costly to society. A 2024 study by federal researchers estimated that health conditions related to childhood trauma accounted for $292 billion in healthcare spending in 2021 alone, including by taxpayer-funded programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

Emmanuel, a 13-year-old in Oxnard, gets anxious every time his dad goes to work as a farm laborer, his mother, Ana, said. He asks her for reassurance that his father will return, and about what would happen to him if his parents got detained. He tries to hurry Ana up when they’re out in public, worried that ICE could suddenly appear. KFF Health News is not using their full names because they fear deportation.

Doctors and therapists interviewed by KFF Health News said they have observed a notable increase in mental health problems, especially anxiety, in children from immigrant families. Kimberly McNally, a pediatrician at Venice Family Clinic's Inglewood South La Brea Health Center, said she’s regularly referring children of all ages for mental health services related to fears that their parents will be taken away. At daycares, kids have been showing up with an extra bag in case their parents don’t pick them up, said Liza Davis, advocacy director for Children in Immigrant Families at The Children’s Partnership, which works with a coalition of early childhood educators.

Sometimes, the distress leads young people to take extreme actions. In June, 19-year-old Eliel José took his own life after his father was deported from the Atlanta area to Mexico, according to Univision.

Rosie Harrison, executive director of Grow Initiative GA, a community organization that serves low-income families, said she’s received calls over the past year from immigrant parents seeking help for suicidal and depressed kids. Their situations are often made worse because many lack health insurance and can’t afford to pay for therapy. That’s often because parents have lost jobs that came with health insurance due to worksite raids or because of eligibility changes imposed by the Trump administration.

“I’m concerned about the families that are going to be burying their child,” Harrison said. “I’m concerned that we are going to miss out on having an amazing person do amazing things for our community, for our country, because they took their life.”

Strength under pressure

Many children are showing resilience, though.

In a role reversal, some children have become their parents’ protectors. They go grocery shopping and take their younger siblings to school so that their parents don’t have to leave the house.

Staff with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project distribute school supplies and food to people in Santa Paula, where many families are feeling the impacts of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

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Giselle Gonzalez, a university student and volunteer with the immigrant protection network VC Defensa in Ventura County, said she’ll never forget the morning last summer when she woke up to the sound of kids on bicycles pedaling through her immigrant-heavy neighborhood in Thousand Oaks, yelling “La migra! La migra! Don’t come out!” They’d spotted ICE agents grabbing factory workers and gardeners on their way to work, she said.

Neighbors, community groups, health providers, and others have also stepped up in a variety of ways to support children and families affected by immigration enforcement. They deliver groceries, provide free therapy, walk kids to school, and help parents create emergency childcare plans in case they get detained or deported.

Ultimately, more humane immigration policies and enforcement tactics will be required to end the harm being done to children, academic experts and advocates said.

Researchers at Arizona State University point to a pilot called the Family Case Management Program as a model for keeping families together while also enforcing immigration laws. Launched in January 2016 under President Barack Obama, the program allowed families seeking asylum to remain in the community while awaiting resolution of their cases. Through a case manager, they received support in meeting the obligations of their immigration cases and preparing for deportation if needed. The program, which proved successful and cost-effective, was terminated by the first Trump administration.

At Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles, case manager Mabel Alavez sees the pressures facing families who are still together but worried they could be separated. Many of the people are parents or grandparents who have been in the U.S. for decades. Some are afraid to take their children to school, the park, or the beach. They ask whether it’s safe to enroll their U.S.-born kids in Medicaid. She helps families who are facing eviction because they’re afraid to go to work and can no longer afford rent. She often helps them create plans for who will look after their children if they get detained.

Raised in an immigrant family herself, Alavez knows how challenging it can be for kids who are first-generation Americans to navigate growing up, going to school, and finding a sense of belonging in a country their parents aren’t from.

“It’s hard for me to imagine how they could possibly do that in addition to what’s going on now,” she said. “I do feel like there will be a big impact on them. What that might look like, I’m not exactly sure.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

"Two or more races" or "other": These are the types of boxes that a lot of multiracial people default to checking off on forms and applications. But it paints a narrow picture of the often complicated identities of multiracial people.

So: How do multiracial people identify themselves? What terms do they actually use when talking about their own, often unique and individual identity? On a recent episode of AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news program, host Larry Mantle encouraged mixed-race listeners to call in and share the terms they prefer to use when identifying themselves ... and, on the flip side, the ones they take issue with.

Some things they said:

• Many rejected labels they felt were imposed on them by others.
• Many callers said their identity was primarily informed by how they were raised and their lived experiences.
• Some shared the hybridized terms they coined for themselves.

Listen to the full episode above: to hear from one listener who dubs himself a "Filexican."