The Brief

A California project that provides legal advocacy for unaccompanied child immigrants will end in September unless backers can convince lawmakers to renew funding by next month.

The Children’s Holistic Immigration Representation Project was funded through a one-time allocation in 2022 and not renewed when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s $298 billion budget last month.

There were 64,173 unaccompanied children released in California between January 2015 and May 2023, according to a CalMatters analysis of federal data obtained by the New York Times.

The project’s clients include A.L., who lives with his aunt in Northern California. When A.L. was in the first or second grade, a motorcycle chase ended in the courtyard of his elementary school. He said that he and other young children from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, watched in horror as a group of men surrounded another man, kicked him, beat him, and dragged him all around the school. He never knew why.

“I froze,” said A.L., a 17-year-old who came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor when he was 14. “That’s an example of the violence we live with in my country.”

Honduras has a homicide rate five times higher than the United States, according to the Migration and Asylum Lab, which provides expertise about conditions in Latin American countries for use in asylum applications. San Pedro Sula, the capital where A.L. lived, is called “the world’s murder capital.”

CalMatters is only identifying A.L. by his initials because he fears for his safety and his family’s well-being back in Honduras. We interviewed him with the permission of his sponsor, his aunt, and other advocates.

Without CHIRP, the free legal representation and the social services program A.L. says saved his life, “I’d probably be back in my country,” he told CalMatters.

Rather than providing kids just with legal services, social workers under the project also help children find mental health services, enroll in school, get vaccines, and get work authorization, an approach known as “trauma-informed intervention.”

Unaccompanied children are a particularly vulnerable group. They can be exploited in full-time, dangerous jobs that violate labor laws, advocates and government officials say.

CHIRP was funded as a pilot program with $15.3 million in fiscal year 2022—enough to carry it through this coming September.

Newsom has not met with anyone to discuss the termination of the project, advocates say. His budget sought to close a huge deficit with $16 billion in cuts and delays.

Newsom’s office declined an interview request about overall cuts to immigration services, but a spokesperson said the governor’s budget maintains nearly $60 million for immigration-related legal services provided to Californians, including students, workers, and unaccompanied minors.

“We don’t find any joy in this – but we’ve got to do it, we have to be responsible. We have to be accountable. We have to balance the budget,” Newsom said previously about general budget reductions amid the funding shortfall.

Time is running out, but not all hope is lost.

“The legislature remains active on CHIRP and [is] exploring possible solutions to ensure its survival,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, advocacy director of Immigrant Defense Advocates. “We are cautiously optimistic that there will be a path to continue the program, especially given there is no clear alternative for the vulnerable population that it serves.”

The legal advocacy project is in jeopardy just as new federal shifts in immigration policy might prompt an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors being released into California.

In June, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that limits asylum processing after encounters with migrants between ports of entry reach 2,500 per day. The new policy exempts unaccompanied minors, in the same way that such children were eventually exempted from a 2020 order that turned away migrants in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19. Advocates worry the exemption may prompt parents from dangerous countries to make the hard decision to send their children across the border alone.

“We don’t think that will happen,” said Tom Perez, a senior advisor to the president and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, during a press call in June.

But several years ago, that is the decision A.L.’s parents had to make.

By the time A.L. was 14, gangs in Honduras waited outside his school nearly every single day, threatening him, harassing him, and trying to recruit him, he said. He and his family decided he should flee for the United States.

During the 23-day journey by himself on foot and bus to the U.S.-Mexico border, A.L. said he was robbed by Mexican police. He crossed near the Rio Grande, and U.S. border authorities sent him to live in a center for unaccompanied children in San Antonio, Texas. There, he said, he often didn’t have enough food to eat, and he was not allowed to make phone calls to his family or to find an attorney.

When he was finally released to his family in California at age 15, he was given a long list of attorneys’ names that he was expected to call on his own to secure legal representation for his pending immigration case.

“A.L.,” (far left) an unaccompanied minor from Honduras visits the state Capitol in March of 2024 to advocate for funding for the CHIRP program, which helps protect migrant children alone in the U.S. from deportation.

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Community Justice Alliance

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“I tried to call and call and call many lawyers. Some of them never answered me, and others said they were already too busy. In the end, no one was able to help me. From that long list of attorneys, none of them could help me,” A.L. told CalMatters. Soon, he received a deportation order.

Kristina McKibben, the executive director of Community Justice Alliance, the nonprofit that administers the legal advocacy project, said unaccompanied minors are often expected to navigate the complicated immigration court system without any representation.

“And so, they’re expected to just figure it out,” said McKibben, who said clients as young as third graders can be left to navigate the court system on their own. “I think we all know that it’s ridiculous.”

In 2023, only 56% of unaccompanied migrant children defending their cases in U.S immigration court had attorneys representing them, according to data from the Justice Department. The immigration court system does not guarantee a right to counsel, even for parentless children.

The stakes are high. Between October 2017 and March 31, 2021, 90% of minors without legal representation were ordered removed from the country by federal authorities, according to data provided in a 2021 Congressional Research Service report.

A.L.’s pending deportation order weighed so heavily on him that he couldn’t concentrate or make friends at school.

“I was so lonely because all my classmates were talking about what their daily life was like, or you know, ‘I remember when this happened to me,’ and they were sharing their experiences. And I was always just quiet, listening, … because I was afraid to share my story,” said A.L.

Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park, said most unaccompanied children who arrive in California are forced to flee their home countries because of violence and abandonment. She is advocating to keep the program because she says it goes beyond just legal representation for minors.

“The program is centered on an understanding that these children have faced trauma, both before coming to the U.S. and within the immigration system itself,” she said in a written statement. “These unaccompanied children are a symbol of resilience and a testament that a better life and future are possible. California should stand with them and invest in a shared future.”

One of A.L.’s teachers frantically started making calls and finally connected him to the advocacy project, which helped him get his deportation order lifted. He’s now living in a legal limbo called deferred action, which means the Department of Homeland Security has agreed not to deport him, but he does not have any official or permanent legal status. One of his advocates said it will be an approximate five-year wait before he can apply to become a lawful permanent resident, or to receive what is commonly referred to as a green card.

A.L. said he’s not afraid to share his story anymore. He recently traveled to the state Capitol to try to convince lawmakers to maintain funding for other children like him.

“Now I feel more confident because I know that I have support,” he said.

Data journalist Erica Yee contributed to this report. 

This story was reported through a fellowship on U.S. immigration policy in El Paso organized by Poynter with funding from the Catena Foundation.

Hop onto TikTok and you'll find lots of videos of young people — mostly women — fake baking under the glowing UV lights of a tanning bed. Seattle dermatologist Heather Rogers says this is an alarming trend that comes after years of decline in indoor tanning in the U.S.

She points to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Dermatology which found 20% of Gen Z respondents prioritize getting a tan over protecting their skin. And 25% say it's worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.

They feel like "it's better to be tan than it is to worry about skin cancer," Rogers says.

A new study in the journal Science Advances reinforces just why they should worry.

Researchers found that tanning bed users were nearly three times as likely to develop melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer — compared to people who'd never tanned indoors. They also had DNA damage that can lead to melanoma across nearly the entire surface of the skin.

"Even in skin cells that look normal, in tanning bed patients, you can find those precursor mutations" that lead to melanoma, says Dr. Pedram Gerami, one of the study's authors and the IDP Foundation professor of skin cancer research at Northwestern University.

Gerami and his collaborators compared the medical records of nearly 3,000 patients who used tanning beds to an age-matched control group of patients who didn't tan indoors. They found that the more people used the tanning beds, the higher their risk of melanoma.

"If they had 10 to 50 tanning bed exposures, their risk was twice as high as the control group," Gerami says. If they had over 200 tanning bed visits, their risk was more than eight times as high.

"If you think about it, getting 200 tanning bed exposures can happen really quickly. If you go once a week for four years, there you are," he says.

The researchers also performed genetic sequencing on normal skin cells from tanning bed users. Most were younger women, which makes sense, because studies have shown that young women in their teens and 20s are the heaviest users of indoor tanning, says study co-author Hunter Shain, an associate professor of dermatology at the UC San Francisco.

Shain says when the researchers compared these skin samples to normal skin cells from people in the general population who were twice the age of the indoor tanners, they were "stunned" by what they found.

"Women in their 30s and 40s had more mutations than people in their 70s and 80s from the general population," says Shain, whose research focuses on the biology of skin cancer. "They somehow were able to cram in two lifetimes' worth of UV damage in 30 years."

Dr. Heather Rogers, who was not involved in the study, notes that tanning beds can emit ultraviolet radiation that is 10 to 15 times stronger than what you'd get from the sun. She says that tanning beds are often marketed as being safer than the sun, but this study shows how wrong those claims are.

Dr. Pedram Gerami says many of the patients he sees at a high-risk melanoma clinic are women who started indoor tanning as teens wanting to look better for events like homecoming and prom.

"Now, as young adults, they're having to deal with frequent skin checks, frequent doctor visits, frequent biopsies, lots of anxiety, and the emotional burden of having been diagnosed with cancer at a young age," Garami says. "So they have a lot of heaviness to deal with."

He says some of these patients chose to donate skin samples to the study in hopes of helping other young people avoid the same fate.

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Nearly every pop music holiday song written in the past 80 years owes at least some of its DNA to one Christmas tune in particular: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby, which he first recorded in 1942.

It's reportedly still one of the best-selling songs of all time in any genre, though chart data from decades ago is unreliable. Even given that murkiness, the Guinness Book of World Records named it as the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.

"White Christmas" wrote the formula for modern secular holiday songs — despite its complex and troubling history.

Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

The infant Irving Berlin Jr. died suddenly, less than a month after he was born. And at its heart, "White Christmas" is a deeply melancholic song.

Most Christmas carols and pop songs were unabashedly joyful. Berlin's song represented a turn, Rosen said: "It was strange to have a song that was all about this nose-pressed-up-to-the-glass feeling."

It also set a certain standard for Christmas songs that are about nostalgia, about some lost Christmas past. (Think, for example, of another enduring hit that came shortly after Berlin's smash: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sang in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, and which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.)

But there's other stuff going on too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.

That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood): "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway ... but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

Rosen said most people listening to "White Christmas" are missing additional subtext. He said that much of that nostalgic vibe in "White Christmas" — all that longing for a pristine, innocent Christmas of yore — is a reference to explicitly racist minstrel songs like Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home," sung by Al Jolson and others — music that was still a staple in Berlin's day.

Foster was inspired by the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the song, hailed by Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson, was meant to be empathetic to the abolitionist cause — the narrator is longing to be reunited with his wife and children, but their family has been torn apart by slaveholders. It later became a popular tune at minstrel shows, with its saddest lines omitted and its meaning twisted.

In "Old Kentucky Home," Rosen said, "You have, grotesquely, the freed Black man longing for life back below the Mason-Dixon line, back on the plantation. Here, instead of a Black man in the north longing for the sultry south, we have a well-to-do white person longing for the wintry north."

But the racial dynamics of "White Christmas" aren't just a matter of subtle references to older songs. Irving Berlin had great commercial expectations for "White Christmas." He built a whole movie around it: 1942's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

Holiday Inn is stuffed with racist stereotypes and an entire blackface number. (That scene is usually excised from TV broadcasts today, but the whole film is available to stream online.) As Crosby and his love interest, played by Marjorie Reynolds, prepare to perform a song about Abraham Lincoln, Crosby spreads greasepaint on her face, as the orchestra plays "White Christmas" underneath. Not only is "White Christmas" the movie's biggest hit, it's also the film's romantic theme.

Blackface on stage and on screen was very much a recent memory for 1940s audiences, said scholar Brynn Shiovitz. She's the author of the book Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Holiday Inn, Shiovitz said, "We get a pairing of nostalgia for Christmas, but also nostalgia for blackface, because so many of the people that were watching Holiday Inn when it premiered in the theaters grew up watching vaudeville, grew up watching their parents maybe even perform in blackface."

Audiences loved the song "White Christmas" and its spotlight in Holiday Inn — and American GIs stationed abroad during World War II clamored for the Armed Forces Radio Service to play the song. "White Christmas" was so sturdily successful that Hollywood made another movie centering the song in 1954 — also called White Christmas — this time starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen.

Since then, legions of musicians have recorded their own versions of "White Christmas" — including The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop and Sabrina Carpenter. And of course, each generation adds new layers of meaning to the song as it is stitched into our holiday season each year, said Shiovitz.

"With all of these other memories that people have of Christmas, whether it's being piped in while you're shopping, or it's playing on the radio in the car as you're driving to visit family — it's easy to kind of separate it from its history. People develop new memories with it. People have their own ideas of what the song represents, so it's just incredibly complex," Shiovitz said.

Today's audiences and artists don't necessarily hear or even know about the song's racist history, Shiovitz said — but that doesn't mean it's not there.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.
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