The Brief

As lobbyists for businesses and labor groups negotiate with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration on how to amend a unique California labor law that allows workers to sue their bosses, the two sides seem to agree on at least one puzzling reality.

The law, known as the Private Attorneys General Act, generates millions each year for a state fund reserved for enforcing state labor laws, including those against wage theft. But despite rising worker complaints of labor violations and severe understaffing hampering the state Labor Commissioner’s Office’s response, California leaves much of the money untouched.

The money comes from the state’s cut of the settlements and fines that businesses pay in response to these lawsuits. For years, the fund has grown faster than lawmakers and Newsom have directed it to be spent, according to state budget documents. In 2022-23 they left $197 million in the fund unspent; the 2023-24 budget leaves $170 million.

The state draws from the fund each year for portions of the Labor Commissioner’s budget, as well as other agencies. And the fund has paid for some worker outreach and enforcement. Those programs include $8.6 million in recent grants to 17 local prosecutors to pursue criminal charges in wage theft cases, and a pandemic-era partnership with community groups to inform workers in 42 different languages about workplace rights.

But the fund’s single biggest use in the past five years has been to shore up the state budget. In 2020, the state borrowed $107 million from the labor fund for other uses. In April, an early budget deal between Newsom and legislative leaders allowed the state to borrow another $125 million as they sought to reduce a record shortfall.

Neither of these loans need to be repaid until at least 2027. The administration has proposed to leave $119 million in the fund unused in the 2024-25 budget it’s negotiating with lawmakers this month. They’re seeking to cover the remaining $28 billion shortfall.

The fund’s use has frustrated businesses and labor groups alike, who say the state should spend much more of the money to help the Labor Commissioner’s Office hire or retain more staff needed to process a record number of workers’ wage theft claims.

In response to questions from CalMatters, Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson Erika Monterroza wrote in an email that the loans are not unusual during budget deficits and only come from money that’s not being used. She said $7.6 million from the fund is already allocated this year to processing wage claims.

But the department has struggled to fill those new positions. A state audit released in May found the staff shortages are caused in part by a slow hiring process and salaries that are lower than some comparable state and local government jobs.

Monterroza said it’s out of her department’s hands whether the money could be used to increase salaries or speed up hiring, saying that must be bargained with state employee unions. Newsom’s office declined to comment, referring questions to the department.

The fund is also part of the negotiations between business and labor on potential changes to the Private Attorneys General Act to take a business-backed measure to repeal the law off the November ballot. Recent polling suggests voters support a legislative fix over a ballot measure. The sides face a June 27 deadline for the Legislature to approve changes.

If a deal is reached to avert the costly ballot measure, it is likely to address how to spend the enforcement fund.

“The Labor Commissioner’s Office has hundreds of millions currently available,” said Kathy Fairbanks, a spokesperson for the coalition of employers sponsoring the ballot measure. “We strongly support using these funds to quickly hire and train staff to help resolve employee claims.”

Between 30,000 and 40,000 workers a year file wage theft claims with the office. The state audit found chronic understaffing has led to a backlog of 47,000 cases, and the claims regularly take six times longer than the time state law allows to resolve.

Lorena Gonzalez, leader of the California Labor Federation and a former state Assemblymember, said labor groups have advocated in past budgets to allow Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower to use the money to address the backlogs.

“Obviously we have a crisis and we have been asking and pushing the Legislature and the governor to beef up spending, to hire up,” Gonzalez told CalMatters. “We were having a hard time getting attention. It’s one of many examples that it’s not a priority to process wage theft claims.”

The Assembly’s current and former labor committee chairpersons, San Jose Democrat Ash Kalra and Hayward Democrat Liz Ortega, both declined to comment through spokespersons. Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, a Los Angeles Democrat who leads the Senate labor committee, could not be reached for comment last week.

California Chamber of Commerce CEO Jennifer Barrera also said she supported using available money to increase staff.

Still, an agreement for the state to appropriate the funds depends on broader negotiations about the scope of the PAGA law.

The two-decade-old state law allows the Labor Commissioner’s office to outsource the role of suing employers over alleged labor violations to private attorneys, with a worker standing in as plaintiff on behalf of the state and their coworkers. Most suits are brought over wage theft claims, according to a UCLA Labor Center report.

Business groups have pushed to repeal it for years, arguing it primarily enriches lawyers while subjecting businesses to frivolous cases over technical violations. Their ballot measure would direct cases back to the Labor Commissioner’s Office, where Fairbanks said workers stand to keep more money if they win individual wage theft claims.

Labor advocates say that would only worsen the backlogs at the Labor Commissioner’s Office, and take away an option for workers to bring workplace-wide suits against problem employers.

Gonzalez said even if the enforcement funds are spent on beefing up Labor Commissioner staff, the law should still stand. The May state audit concluded the office would need nearly 900 employees to efficiently process all wage claims. That’s almost triple the positions currently approved for the office — and a third of those are vacant.

“The Labor Commissioner itself is not equipped to handle all the cases we’re seeing in California today,” Gonzalez said. “We’re not fine with taking away the right of employees to sue.”

USC canceled a gubernatorial debate set to be held on March 24 after widespread claims that the debate purposefully left out candidates of color.

The USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future was organizing the debate, with ABC/KABC Los Angeles and Univision set to co-host and televise in both English and Spanish. Many of the Democratic candidates, including those who were invited, have been calling for the inclusion of all candidates regardless of their positioning in USC’s debate criteria formula.

"USC vigorously defends the independence, objectivity and integrity of USC Professor Christian Grose, whose data-driven candidate viability formula is based on extensive research and enjoys broad academic support,” said a USC statement sent to the media late Monday night. “At the same time, we recognize that concerns about the selection criteria for tomorrow’s gubernatorial debate have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters.

“Unfortunately, USC and KABC have not been able to reach an agreement on expanding the number of candidates at tomorrow’s debate. As a result, USC has made the difficult decision to cancel tomorrow’s debate and will look for other opportunities to educate voters on the candidates and issues."

Controversy surrounding the debate began as early as March 16, when former Human and Health Services Secretary and candidate for governor Xavier Becerra sent letters to USC, ABC7 and Univision calling the debate criteria a “patently arbitrary, spontaneous qualification formula.”

The former California Attorney General took issue with no candidates of color being invited to participate, while a white candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, was invited despite polling lower than Becerra and others.

The Democrats who were invited — Mahan, Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Rep. Katie Porter — all took to social media in the last week calling on USC to expand its debate to include all of the Democratic candidates.

Also invited to the debate were political commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, both Republicans who are polling fairly high.

Becerra took the debate cancellation as a win, saying in an X post late Monday night that “hopefully next time it’s done right.”

“Thank you to everyone who stood up, raised hell and demanded justice,” reads the post. “Never give up when you’re fighting for fairness!”

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board voted unanimously Tuesday to rename two campuses named after César Chávez by fall 2026 and to fund the removal of murals and any other commemorations of the disgraced labor leader at other schools.

A New York Times investigation published last week found Chávez sexually abused girls and women including United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta.

Board Member Kelly Gonez introduced the resolution.

“These heart-wrenching stories represent a betrayal for so many of us and yet they resonate with many survivors and many women who have experienced this as girls and in our adulthood including myself,” Gonez said through tears.

Board Vice President Rocío Rivas co-authored the resolution.

“This is not an easy moment, but it’s a necessary one,” Rivas said.

What comes next?

The board committed to working with the communities surrounding César Chávez Learning Academies in San Fernando and César Chávez Elementary School in El Sereno to identify new names that “reflect the District’s values of equity, justice, and community leadership.”

The district will also recognize March 31 as Farm Workers Day this year and in future calendars.

Read the resolution and go deeper to see how educators are responding to the allegations.

At the Supreme Court Monday, the conservative majority seemed ready to overturn laws in 29 states that allow mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day if they were postmarked by Election Day.
President Donald Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, believing — incorrectly — that those late votes improperly cost him the 2020 election. But citizens and politicians alike have enthusiastically embraced voting by mail.

The split was illustrated in Monday's case from Mississippi. In 2020, the state Legislature, by a bipartisan and nearly unanimous vote, approved a five-day grace period for counting election ballots if they were postmarked by Election Day but arrived late.

But in the Supreme Court Monday, the conservative justices, like Trump, seemed suspicious of extending a short grace period to count late-arriving ballots. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, fixated on what they deemed the possibility of voters "recalling ballots," which they said could be theoretically done by the U.S. Postal Service or other common carriers like FedEx.

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart tried repeatedly to assure the court that the state does not permit ballot recalls. But Gorsuch in particular seemed to view those assurances as unreliable.

"FedEx isn't an election official," Gorsuch said.

Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether a grace period to count legally cast ballots might undermine public confidence in the election process. And Justice Clarence Thomas wondered how early voting is legal. On that, however, even the Trump administration's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, conceded the validity of early voting.

The larger question that seemed to divide the court's six conservatives from the three liberals was where the court should be in terms of assessing new election procedures.

Why, asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, should we look only at old procedures and not new ones that Congress has left undisturbed. And finally, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took aim at what she viewed as dishonesty in the Trump administration's brief.

"I am a little upset — not a little, a lot upset — by many of the statements in your brief quoting historical sources out of context," she said.

A decision overturning Mississippi's law would have particularly profound implications for large rural areas, and members of the military abroad.

The state most likely to suffer serious ramifications is Alaska, the nation's largest state by area, where 80% of the population lives off the road system, the weather is unpredictable, and some communities do not offer in-person voting. Indeed, in 2022, ballots from six rural villages were not counted because the U.S. Postal Service failed to deliver them in time.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployments to American cities are a central part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Yet, according to data analyzed by NPR — and interviews with law enforcement and city officials — these actions stretched local police departments thin, disrupted businesses and left city budgets struggling to absorb the fallout.

In Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the immigration enforcement surge resulted in ballooning overtime costs for local police. In Portland, Ore., decreased police manpower contributed to longer call response times.

Amid what the Trump administration has dubbed Operation Metro Surge, businesses in cities like Bloomington and St. Paul, Minn. lost revenue, experienced unrest, and were similarly left with high bills.

What unifies these ICE actions is they were all sustained over several weeks in communities where local law enforcement isn't authorized to assist with federal immigration efforts. Still, these deployments resulted in knock-on effects that required the use of local police to bring about or preserve order.

Police overtime surged as departments were forced to deploy officers for demonstrations, extra patrols, security around federal facilities and emergency responses tied to the raids — often at overtime pay rates.

In cities already struggling with staffing shortages, like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, those extra hours quickly added up.

In Los Angeles, where the financial situation is already dire, LAPD overtime spending climbed to $41 million in June 2025, when immigration raids sparked weeks of protests — well above the department's typical monthly range of $18 to $30 million, according to the City Controller's Office.

In Minneapolis, the Police Department reported more than $6 million in overtime and standby pay in less than a month, from Jan. 7 to Feb. 8, according to the city's police chief. That's more than double the city's entire annual police overtime budget of $2.3 million.

The full financial picture is still not fully known. City leaders are reviewing their budgets and expect costs to continue to go up.

In response to NPR's questions about how the immigration crackdown has affected city budgets, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, provided a statement and included source links: "Illegal aliens cost American taxpayers over $150 billion in 2023 alone and expenditures for benefits provided to the illegal aliens who entered during the Biden surge will add $177 billion in mandatory federal spending through 2034."

NPR has not independently verified these figures.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to NPR's questions for this story.

What happened in Los Angeles?

In early June 2025, ICE agents began a series of aggressive immigration sweeps in Southern California.

"The first three weeks of it, we were really balancing and teetering on martial law," LA Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez told NPR. She said the city didn't expect "such a heavy-handed and militarized and war-like response from the federal government to people expressing their First Amendment rights."

The LAPD spent around $17 million between June 8 and June 16 responding to the anti-ICE protests that broke out that month. Close to $12 million of that went to overtime costs, according to a report from the LA City Administrative Office.

These figures do not include the costs of potential lawsuits or liability claims from residents and protesters injured during the demonstrations, and from aggressive policing by the LAPD that the city expects to face, Hernandez said.

To meet these financial needs, the city has had to tap into its reserve funds. 

In response to questions from NPR, the LAPD did not provide any information about what types of activities officers were engaged in when they incurred the overtime hours.

The City Controller's Office pointed NPR to the public database of city funding for more information. But the data lacked specifics.

Overtime costs for the LAPD for the entire month of June 2025 ballooned to more than $40 million. Overtime hovered between $22 million to a little over $33 million from January 2025 through May 2025.

The LAPD, the country's third-largest police department, has struggled with short staffing — contributing to the need to spend millions on overtime in prior years, according to the LAist. 

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not answer questions about the financial repercussions on the city from the police response to the raids or on local businesses.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stand off against demonstrators as tear gas fills the air outside the federal ICE building during a protest in Portland, Ore., last June.

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Portland's story: 'We are understaffed, under-resourced'

Not long after the unrest in Los Angeles, Portland Police Bureau Chief Robert Day said protesters and federal agents began to converge on the city's ICE facility in June.

"The bulk of our overtime investment, and demands on our time have been at the [federal ICE] facility," Day told NPR.

Like LA, Portland's police department has dealt with staffing shortages for years.

From June until November 2025, Portland police officers were staffed at the ICE facility nearly every day, according to the city data provided to NPR. There were other times when officers were actively monitoring but weren't at the facility.

In 2025, the Portland Police Bureau recorded 38,213 overtime hours categorized as "event response," according to data provided to NPR. For context, Portland police racked up 19,166 overtime hours for event response for all of 2024.

The overtime hours accrued in 2025 are nearly half of what was accrued when police responded to major protests in 2020 and 2021 following the death of George Floyd. Those protests lasted months, and the at-times chaotic demonstrations damaged property and sometimes turned violent.

Police worked between 70,000 to more than 80,000 hours of overtime to respond to those events, according to the data.

Local law enforcement's role at the ICE facility this summer and fall was to maintain order. Protests got out of hand at times. "The facility was badly damaged. It was heavily attacked. Windows broken and graffiti," Day said.

During now-outgoing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's October visit, Portland police were tasked with providing even more security to the center — 456 officers, resulting in close to 3,000 hours of overtime hours worked, according to data provided to NPR, and equating to "a few hundred thousand bucks," according to Day.

"Cops were working long days, long weeks, over an extended period of time," Day said. "We are understaffed, under-resourced, and the rest of the city suffers because of that."

In the summer and fall, that meant calls for service took much longer, according to Day. "Our average response time to priority calls has grown to 17,18 minutes … and it should be more like six to eight," he confirmed.

Police stand during a noise demonstration outside the Graduate by Hilton Minneapolis hotel in January.

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Minneapolis police report PTSD symptoms 

At the peak of the immigration enforcement surge, there were around 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents in the Minneapolis area. There are only around 600 cops in the Minneapolis Police Department, and statewide, there are around 10,000 law enforcement officers.

"I cannot imagine any other city going through the intensity and the sheer amount of chaos that happened here. It was terrible," Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told NPR. "Minneapolis is a small city. This is not Chicago. It's not LA, I don't think it would be possible for them to overwhelm those cities in the way that this city was really overwhelmed by that surge."

There is still a presence of ICE agents in the city, but far fewer than at its peak.

Early on, O'Hara made big changes to respond to the deployments of federal agents to Minneapolis. He changed operational procedures and created a full-time position for a lieutenant to be available to monitor ICE-related calls. He also staffed the department's operation center with civilian community service officers to help monitor social media and the city's camera feed to see action in the streets in real time, he explained.

By early January, O'Hara was instructing all sworn officers to be in uniform at all times while on duty.

"I was afraid there was going to be a need for an emergency situation that would require a massive deployment. And the next day is when Renee Good was killed," he told NPR. "From that moment, until about a day or two after the third shooting that we had when Mr. Pretti died, I would say it just continued to escalate."

When the police were responding to and protecting active crime scenes in the aftermath of the shootings, ICE agents continued with immigration stops and arrests. In response, demonstrations of thousands in opposition to the raids continued.

Minneapolis police had to respond to all of it.

O'Hara compared that chaos to the unrest after the 2020 killing of Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to major protests and riots.

After Good's death, all days off for officers were canceled. Police were tasked with handling marches, protests at hotels and monitoring vigil sites. Specialized units were activated and police generally tried to maintain order.

As a result, overtime costs skyrocketed. O'Hara said the department spent about $6.4 million on overtime costs from Jan. 7 through Feb. 8.

"It was, honestly, an overwhelming situation that for most of it, it felt like there was just no end in sight," he said.

Activists gather in protest to light candles on frozen Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis, spelling "Ice Out," in January.

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By the third week of January, O'Hara said he received reports that officers were experiencing symptoms of PTSD, "which scared me," he said.

The 2020 Floyd protests had a huge impact on the department — so much so it led to a mass exodus of officers reporting symptoms of PTSD.

"As emotionally charged as things were on the street, it was difficult for them," O'Hara said. "It took them back to the feelings and things that they had experienced in 2020. That was really tough for a lot of the cops."

O'Hara continued, talking about staffing concerns: "It was my fear that we were going to wind up having this cycle again and just wind up losing more people. Unlike in 2020…there's absolutely no buffer. We're at bare bones here."

With police pulled to respond to keep public order, officers were being pulled off of active investigations. Crimes weren't being solved or investigated as quickly as they could have, he added.

The financial cost of the deployment to the city as a whole is also pronounced. Minneapolis issued a report on Feb. 13 that estimated the total economic fallout in one month during these operations was more than $203 million.

The report lists a host of consequences from the raids, including residents detained, job losses and business closures.

"The impact was both extraordinary and it was devastating for those months, while this invasion was taking place," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told NPR. "People were afraid to go out. Afraid to go to the grocery store. Terrified that their families were going to get ripped apart."

He said, "ICE is clearly to blame."

NPR asked the White House to respond to this criticism.

Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said in her statement: "When will NPR ask sanctuary cities if they will reimburse the American people for expenses incurred by illegal aliens? Or if they will apologize to the victims of violent criminal illegal aliens?"

O'Hara said the problem was not that immigration enforcement was happening. The problem is the "unsafe and questionable methods" of the federal agents and "questionable leadership."

Noem, the head of DHS at the time of this surge, was recently fired in part because of the political fallout from these operations.

Consequences of ICE deployment spread beyond city borders

St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota and close neighbor to Minneapolis, loaned some officers to Minneapolis to deal with the crush of Operation Metro Surge, according to Rebecca Noecker, the president of St. Paul's City Council.

"This was a problem that we did not make and it's a problem we don't have the resources to solve," said Noecker.

Following the shooting of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis, St. Paul police spent $46,000 in overtime in just one day to assist the neighboring police department, Noecker said.

From Jan. 7 to Feb. 5 St. Paul police shared with NPR that 4,679.75 employee overtime hours were worked in response to Operation Metro Surge. That cost $372,341.38. They didn't tell NPR how many officers worked the additional hours or provide additional data beyond early 2026.

"The line between physically intervening with ICE to keep protesters safe and physically intervening with ICE in a way that prevents a lawful enforcement action is a really fine one," Noecker said. "What I heard mostly from our police was: 'We're really in an impossible situation.'"

Community members and neighbors of people detained by ICE gather in protest at a Target store on Jan. 19 in St. Paul.

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Noecker says the numbers her city is seeing now are not the end of the story. She expects these bills to go up.

In nearby Bloomington, Minn., 10 minutes south of Minneapolis, the city's police Chief Booker Hodges told NPR protests against ICE spilled into his community. He said, for example, demonstrations broke out in front of hotels where it was rumored that ICE agents were staying.

In January, when the White House deployed federal law enforcement to Minneapolis "all hell broke loose," Hodges said.

Border Patrol and other federal agents were seen following residents to nearby schools, which triggered emergency calls to the department. There were also racial profiling incidents targeting the city's large Latino and Somali population, Hodges told NPR.

He also said officers of color were subjected to racist abuse by anti-ICE protesters.

Hodges said his officers were exhausted, but that his department is fully staffed so didn't require as much overtime as other agencies.

His department spent more than $32,000 in overtime costs in response to immigration protests and activities, he told NPR. That covered 60 police officers and totaled 415.5 hours.

The work for these officers involved extra patrols in retail and at the city's more than four dozen hotels. It also required the deployment of the department's Public Order Group (a group trained to respond to public disorder). It was deployed once all of last year. This year, as of mid February, the group was deployed four times.

He would like to see reimbursement from the federal government, but said, "it's pointless to even ask them for it."

He says time would be better spent pushing for comprehensive immigration reform: "Because even though the surge has ended here, the laws that allowed it to take place are still in place."

Copyright 2026 NPR