Chloe Lynn, 20, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student double majoring in applied mathematics and operations research and management science, at her home in Berkeley on Aug. 5. Lynn recently presented a poster for her project in optimization theory that she keeps displayed on her bedroom wall.
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Florence Middleton
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CalMatters
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Topline:
Despite years of investment and public attention, women remain significantly underrepresented in key STEM fields in California, with only modest gains in engineering and computer science degrees and even declines in math-related fields. It's a gap experts warn could take a long time to close at the current pace.
Slow progress in degrees: State and federal initiatives have boosted funding and awareness, but women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in engineering has only risen from 19% to 25% across more than a decade, while computer science saw a smaller increase and math degrees for women have declined in recent years.
Underrepresentation starts early: Fewer girls take advanced high school courses like AP computer science. Women, though 42% of California’s workforce, make up just a quarter of STEM professionals, with some fields, like math, seeing fewer women employed now than 10 years ago.
Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.
As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering, and math, known by the acronym STEM.
Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees hardly has improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.
“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.
“It’s not nothing, but at this pace, it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.
Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.
“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.
Science and technology spur innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color, as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”
Chloe Lynn, 20, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student, points to a poster she presented summarizing her mathematics research in Berkeley on Aug. 5, 2025.
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Florence Middleton
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CalMatters
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She said recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology, and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.
Over the past eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues, and health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June, a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.
More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now, the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.
‘The cultural conversation has changed’
In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.
Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor's degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.
On July 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order, saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: The state can, and should, support everyone.
But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.
In 2018, the Legislature agreed to put $10 million each year into a new initiative, the California Education Learning Lab, to “close equity and achievement gaps,” including the underrepresentation of girls and women in science and technology. But two years later, the state imposed large-scale cuts to the initiative due to the pandemic. As the state faced more fiscal challenges in 2024, lawmakers cut its budget to about half its former size.
This year, Newsom proposed cutting the Learning Lab altogether. After negotiations with the Legislature, Newsom agreed to fund the initiative through next year, at which point, it’s set to close unless new funding is secured.
Gov. Gavin Newsom addresses the media during a press conference unveiling his 2024-25 January budget proposal at the Secretary of State Auditorium in Sacramento on Jan. 10, 2024.
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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.
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CalMatters
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“While I think women are faring better in college generally, I would be skeptical that we can say ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of achieving parity for women in STEM undergraduate degrees,” said Lark Park, the director of the Learning Lab, which uses public money to provide grants to schools and nonprofits. “I think we’ve just gotten distracted, and the cultural conversation has changed.”
Private and corporate foundations fund numerous nonprofit organizations that support girls and women in STEM, but grant recipients say some money has moved toward other, more popular topics or less controversial ones.
“Funders focus on trends, and they’re very trendy in how they give,” said Dawn L. Brown, president of the EmpowHer Institute, which offers education programs to girls and women across Los Angeles County.
One of her programs provides a free, five-week summer camp to girls, including a trip to Catalina Island, where they learn about environmental science and climate change. Since Trump took office, some corporate funders have pulled back support for the organization’s programs, which may be perceived as supporting “DEI,” she said. “The words ‘women,’ ‘girls,’ ‘climate change’ — those are banned words.”
Supporting women in math
When Chloe Lynn, a rising junior at UC Berkeley and a double major in applied math and management science, started taking higher-level courses, she noticed a trend in her math classes: fewer women.
“I’ll be one of three girls in a 30-, 40-person class,” she said during an interview at the university’s division of equity and inclusion.
UC Berkeley has a center dedicated to promoting diversity in STEM, known as Cal NERDS, which features cozy study spots, a high-tech makerspace and various multi-purpose meeting rooms. The center receives much of its funding from the state but has a few grants from the federal government, some of which currently are on hold.
On a Thursday last month, Lynn was one of 10 students who came to present their summer research in one of the multipurpose rooms. More than half of the presenters were women or non-binary, and the rest were part of other underrepresented groups in STEM, including Hispanic, Black, and LGBTQ+ students. She stood in front of a large poster, waiting for people to stop by and ask about her work.
“Say you’re at an auction, and say there’s 'n' bidders and 'k' identical items,” she said as another student approached. Over the next two hours, fellow mathematicians, classmates, friends, and family stopped by, listening as she explained her formula for allocating resources in an optimal way. Some understood her work and asked questions about her variables, formulas, or 3-D models. The rest nodded in admiration.
Chloe Lynn at her home in Berkeley on Aug. 5, 2025.
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Florence Middleton
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CalMatters
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By the end of the event, many students had abandoned their own posters in order to learn about their friends’ research. In her free time, as the vice president of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate math association, Lynn has been trying to build this kind of community among other female math majors by organizing events where students can meet each other. Her end goal is graduate school, either in applied math or industrial engineering. Women also are underrepresented in those graduate programs.
“Creating an inclusive and uplifting community is so important for anyone that’s underrepresented,” she said after finishing her presentation.
How STEM helps people
The lack of women in STEM has nothing to do with ability. In fact, women who major in STEM at California State University campuses are more likely than men to graduate, according to data from the college system, and in biology, women are overrepresented. Over 64% of biology bachelor’s degrees awarded in California during the 2022-23 school year went to women, according to analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Brown said some female alumni of EmpowHer have said that college advisers push biology over other science, engineering, or math courses, claiming it’s “easier.” Better advising could create more parity, she said.
Rosser, who trained as a zoologist before becoming a college administrator, said women’s shift toward biology was a slow process, beginning in the 1970s.
“Women are particularly attracted to STEM when they can see its usefulness, particularly to help people,” she said.
Biology is often “an entryway to the health care professions,” she added, many of which are predominately female. She recommends that professors promote the application of their research as a way to increase the percentage of women in these fields.
In her studies at UC Berkeley, Lynn said she’s struggled with the relevance of her research.
“There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and I feel called to help,” she said. “Even though I did theory research this summer, I’ve been thinking about ways to apply this theory to real-world applications I care about.”
In particular, she wants her research to help her community in the Bay Area, where she grew up.
“Say you’re an architect and you’re in charge of reinforcing San Francisco’s concrete structures in the event of an earthquake,” she said. “You want to minimize cost in San Francisco, and that’s going to help you choose which building you’re going to reinforce.”
It’s just another resource allocation problem, she said, so it could be solved with a similar formula.
“It does hit close to home,” she said. In fact, the UC Berkeley campus lies on a fault line.
Frank Meyer will perform at Old Towne Pub on Dec. 3.
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Mario Luis
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In this edition:
DTLA’s last art night of the year, tree lightings, former NY Attorney General Leticia James at Writers Bloc, National Cookie Day and more of the best things to do this week.
Highlights:
Few people have been in the news the past few weeks more than New York Attorney General Letitia James. Fresh off the dismissal of the cases against her and former FBI director James Comey, James is coming to Writers Bloc for a conversation with No Lie podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen.
Downtown lights up for the annual Grand Illuminationsopening celebration. It’s free, and there are events from 12 p.m. all through the evening. Afterwards, wander over to…
… the last Downtown L.A. Art Night until 2026. Grab a jacket and stroll through the various galleries around downtown, many of which have new exhibits open for the holiday season.
Whether you’re an avid knitter, embroiderer, weaver or just a dabbler, head toStitchStop LA for their free Fiber Night event in Sherman Oaks. Adults and kids can swing by to learn more about fiber arts and participate in hands-on demonstrations of all kinds of crafts, including crochet, pompom-making, needle-felting and even a special tufting gun demo from Tuft House L.A.
And grab a free McCormick x Milk Bar Eggnog English Toffee Cookieif you’re one of the first 50 customers at the Los Angeles Flagship location.
I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the recent headline that fire season in L.A. is all but over. Forget Dodgers season tickets — I can’t think of a better holiday gift for this city.
Music-wise, ease into December with Lady Blackbird at the Blue Note on Monday. Our friends at Licorice Pizza also recommend RuPaul’s Drag Race all-star Alaska 5000’s A Very Alaska Christmas Show at the Regent on Tuesday and superstar rapper Blxst’s first of four nights at the Roxy (he’ll also be there Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday). On Wednesday, Twin Shadow is at the Regent, and on Thursday, our personal faves, Public Service Broadcasting, are also at the Regent.
Wednesday, December 3, 11 p.m. Old Towne Pub 66 N. Fair Oaks, Pasadena COST: $10; MORE INFO
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Mario Luis
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Frank Meyer has been playing the L.A. punk scene for decades. Founder of West Coast punk legends Streetwalkin' Cheetahs, Meyer (he might look familiar also because his brother is actor Breckin Meyer), has collaborated with folks like James Williamson (Iggy & the Stooges), Wayne Kramer (MC5), FEAR and Eddie Spaghetti (Supersuckers). He’ll play from his debut solo album at Old Towne Pub in Pasadena — get all that post-Thanksgiving rage out with some punk jams!
Writers Bloc presents NY AG Letitia James with Brian Tyler Cohen
Thursday, December 4, 7:30 p.m. The Ebell Lounge 743 S. Lucerne Ave., Mid-Wilshire COST: $35; MORE INFO
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Writers Bloc Presents
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Few people have been in the news the past few weeks more than New York Attorney General Letitia James. Fresh off the dismissal of the cases against her and former FBI director James Comey, James is coming to Writers Bloc for a conversation with No Lie podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen. No doubt this will be a topical and exciting evening at the Ebell.
World AIDS Day: Artists and Activism, co-presented by Artillery
Wednesday, December 3, 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Oculus Hall at The Broad 221 S Grand Ave., Downtown L.A. COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy The Broad
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Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and a group of incredible artists — including Rubén Esparza, Ken Gonzales-Day, Joey Terrill and photographer-documentarian Judy Ornelas Sisneros — will join journalist Carolina A. Miranda for a conversation about artists, social justice and the history of arts amid the AIDS crisis at the Broad. Across their long careers, the speakers featured have worked to shape how we view the AIDS crisis, LGBTQ+ equality and other issues.
Grand Illuminations
Wednesday, December 3, 12 p.m. The Yard at Cal Plaza 350 S. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A. COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy DTLA Alliance
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Downtown lights up for the annual Grand Illuminations opening celebration. It’s free, and there are events from 12 p.m. all through the evening, with a holiday marketplace curated by The Goddess Mercado, live entertainment from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and the community tree lighting at 5 p.m.
Last DTLA Art Night of the Year
Thursday, December 4, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Various locations (see map), Downtown L.A. COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy DTLA Artnight
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It’s the last Downtown L.A. art night until 2026, so grab a jacket and stroll through the various galleries around downtown, many of which have new exhibits open for the holiday season. We recommend checking out the opening of Airbrush to AI: Fifty Years of Reinvention: A Retrospective by Patti Heid at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
Fiber Night
Thursday, December 4, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. StichStop L.A. 13270 Moorpark Street, Sherman Oaks COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Sharon Waldron
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Unsplash
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Whether you’re an avid knitter, embroiderer, weaver or just a dabbler, head to StitchStop LA for their free Fiber Night event in Sherman Oaks. Adults and kids can swing by to learn more about fiber arts and participate in hands-on demonstrations of all kinds of crafts, including crochet, pompom-making, needle-felting and even a special tufting gun demo from Tuft House LA (whose awesome rug classes we’ve featured here before!). Just in time for homemade holiday gifting.
Holiday Undie Run
Thursday, December 4, 6:30 p.m. The Penmar 1233 Rose Ave., Venice COST: FREE; MORE INFO
MeUndies (who else?) is sponsoring a holiday-themed Undie Run at Rose Ave. hotspot The Penmar. Snag free holiday undies (and sport them on the fun run around the public golf course), as well as other gifts, tacos and a “Naughty Santa” photo op.
Brazil: Director's Cut
Monday, December 1, 9:30 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse 700 W. 7th Street, Ste. U240, Downtown L.A. COST: $22.68; MORE INFO
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Twentieth Century Fox
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OK, so it’s probably the least “holiday” movie I could find, but you don’t want to miss a chance to see Terry Gilliam’s most chilling work, Brazil, on the big screen at Alamo Drafthouse downtown. Take a trip into a pretty dark timeline of future social and political upheaval in this Orwellian masterpiece about bureaucracy gone wrong.
Castanea x Washington Square Pizza
Wednesday, December 3, 6 p.m. 31 Washington Blvd., Venice COST: $20; MORE INFO
Grab a “Memento Box” of pastries, snacks and surprise goodies from Castanea Sicilian Cafe and Washington Square Pizza at Washington Square Pizza for one night only. The event is free, but the box is $20 of yum.
National Cookie Day
Thursday, December 4, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. McCormick x Milk Bar 7150 Melrose Ave., Melrose COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy McCormick
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Join McCormick, Milk Bar and Christina Tosi are celebrating National Cookie Day with free giveaways of the limited-edition McCormick x Milk Bar Eggnog English Toffee Cookie. The first 50 customers at the Los Angeles flagship location will receive a free limited-edition cookie. If you’re late, don’t fret: The cookies will be on sale for $4 through Dec. 31.
Robert Garrova
is on LAist's Explore L.A. team. He also covers mental health.
Published December 1, 2025 5:00 AM
El Patron is located in the burn zone and has fought to survive after the Eaton Fire destroyed many nearby businesses and neighborhoods.
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Robert Gauthier
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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Topline:
L.A. County officials have launched a holiday gift card program to support businesses still reeling from January’s firestorms.
The details: Shoppers who pick up gift cards through the shoplocal.la website will get extra gift card funds paid for by the county through a public-private partnership.
Buy a $20, $50, or $100 gift card and get a corresponding bonus gift card worth $10, $25 or $50.
Gift cards can be used at approved businesses impacted by the Palisades and Eaton fires. The program is funded in part by a $100,000 contribution from L.A. Care Health Plan, the county’s publicly operated health insurance.
How businesses can apply: Businesses with fewer than 100 employees — including restaurants — can fill out an online form to be included in the program. The brick-and-mortar stores must be located within communities including: Altadena, Palisades, Topanga, North Pasadena, Malibu and West Santa Monica.
Check out the businesses: You can check out which businesses are participating in the holiday gift card program in the Recover Local Directory here.
The Food and Drug Administration intends to get tougher on vaccine approvals, as top officials raised concerns about the risk of COVID vaccines for children.
Why now: Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency would no longer "rubber-stamp new products that don't work," claiming it made a "mockery of science."
Background: Makary's comments came the day after FDA's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, told his team the agency would change its annual flu vaccine framework, update vaccine labels to be "honest," and make other changes to how it reviews vaccines, according to contents of an internal email reviewed by NPR and reported on first by a PBS News Hour correspondent and later byThe Washington Post.
The Food and Drug Administration intends to get tougher on vaccine approvals, as top officials raised concerns about the risk of COVID vaccines for children.
Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency would no longer "rubber-stamp new products that don't work," claiming it made a "mockery of science."
Makary's comments came the day after FDA's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, told his team the agency would change its annual flu vaccine framework, update vaccine labels to be "honest," and make other changes to how it reviews vaccines, according to contents of an internal email reviewed by NPR and reported on first by a PBS News Hour correspondent and later byThe Washington Post.
Prasad wrote that the FDA would also no longer authorize vaccines for pregnant women without stricter requirements. And for pneumonia vaccines, manufacturers will have to prove they reduce disease rather than show they generate antibodies. He also raised questions about giving multiple vaccines at the same time, which is standard practice.
The changes could make it much more difficult and expensive for vaccines to get approved, further limiting the availability of vaccines, which are considered among the safest and most effective tools for protecting people against infectious diseases.
While all vaccines carry some risks, most public health experts argue the current process for vetting vaccines before marketing has long assured that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks. Studies required after vaccines are approved and surveillance systems, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), also flag potential safety issues once vaccines are in use.
FDA says an analysis links COVID shots to some deaths
Makary said on Fox News that 10 children had died from the COVID shot during the Biden administration, but did not offer specifics about how the FDA came to that conclusion. Millions of children have received the vaccine.
Officials with the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the COVID analysis and changes to vaccine review standards.
According to the FDA email from Prasad, he told the agency's biostatistics and pharmacovigilance team to analyze 96 reported deaths from 2021 to 2024, and they determined 10 children died "after and because of" the COVID vaccine. But Prasad said the true number was likely higher.
"Because he doesn't provide any evidence, he is asking us to trust him on an important issue," Office said. "All this will do is scare people unnecessarily. At the very least, he should provide all the evidence he has so that experts in the field can review it and decide whether he has enough data to prove his point."
Dr. Jesse Goodman, a professor at Georgetown University who held Prasad's job at FDA from 2003 until 2009, said in an email that the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccine approval, has been "recognized globally as a gold standard regulator." Goodman defended "immunologic endpoints like antibody levels" for the accelerated approval of pneumonia and influenza vaccines. He said science supports their use and they are confirmed with studies after approval: "These approaches have helped provide children and adults with timely access to safe and effective vaccines, saving many lives."
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, reviewed the email from Prasad and challenged his statement that "COVID-19 was never highly lethal for children." Osterholm also questioned the FDA's latest analysis of adverse event reports attributing the 10 deaths to COVID vaccines.
"Prasad's email is filled with factual mistakes and misrepresents both the severity of COVID in children (1597 deaths in 2020-2022) and how the US responded to the first signals of possible vaccine-associated pediatric deaths in May 2021," Osterholm wrote in an email to NPR.
"While Prasad's email notes 10 such deaths, these cases have never been presented for review by the medical and public health communities or published in the medical literature," Osterholm continued. "Given the record of this Administration to misrepresent scientific data regarding vaccines, until these cases have been reviewed by an expert third party, like the National Academy of Science[s], we can not accept the fact they are vaccine-associated deaths."
Surveillance system collects vaccines reports
The FDA makes public data from the VAERS surveillance system co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the FDA cautions, "it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause and effect relationship has been established." In his email, Prasad wrote that "with case reports, causality is typically assessed on a subjective scale. In this scale ranging from certain to unlikely — certain, possible/likely, and probable are broadly considered as related to the product."
Makary said on Fox News that when the COVID shot was first rolled out, it was "amazing" for people at high risk of coming down with severe disease, but things have changed.
"Back in 2020, we saw a reduction in the severity of illness and lives saved, but now recommending that a 6-year-old girl get another 70 million COVID shots — one each year for the rest of her life — is not based on science. And so we're not going to just rubber stamp approvals without seeing some scientific evidence."
The claim is the latest move by Trump administration health officials questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and how the government has regulated them. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned vaccines.
The FDA restricted eligibility for the updated COVID vaccines in August after announcing the agency planned to require more evidence about the shots' safety and effectiveness going forward.
CDC committee will meet to review vaccine policies
The FDA email on vaccine policy comes just before the CDC convenes a crucial two-day meeting of that agency's influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Dec. 4-5. The committee is in the process of conducting a major review of how children are inoculated against dangerous infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.
Many public health experts are concerned the committee will upend the childhood vaccination schedule. It could move to delay the timing of some inoculations, space out vaccinations and call for the reformulation of some vaccines. Taken together, the moves could result in fewer children getting protected and the resurgence of once-vanquished diseases.
Asked about Makary and Prasad's claims that the COVID vaccine caused deaths among 10 children, Moderna, whose COVID vaccine is approved for children as young as 6 months old, pointed to a statement it made in September. The company says that multiple published, peer-reviewed studies from a variety of sources show its shot is safe and that it is "not aware of any deaths in the last year or pertinent new information from prior years."
Moderna says it monitors its vaccine's safety along with regulators in more than 90 countries. "With more than one billion doses distributed globally, these systems — including in national health systems across Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the U.S. — have not reported any new or undisclosed safety concerns in children or in pregnant women."
Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Copyright 2025 NPR
Josie Huang
is a reporter and Weekend Edition host who spotlights the people and places at the heart of our region.
Published November 30, 2025 7:22 AM
Afghan evacuees at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany in 2021.
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Armando Babani
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
The Trump administration’s sudden freeze on all visa and asylum decisions for Afghan immigrants has left many of them in Orange County — one of the country's largest hubs for Afghans — in limbo. Local groups are preparing to support the immigrants even as they await clarification from federal authorities.
Why it matters: California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Afghan immigrants, many of them now grappling with the Trump administration’s abrupt visa and asylum freeze.
Read on ... to learn more about the Afghan population in Orange County and guidance from one O.C. immigration official on what could come next.
California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Afghan immigrants, many of them now grappling with the Trump administration’s abrupt visa and asylum freeze.
Friday’s announcement by the White House followed the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington, D.C. a couple days earlier by a suspect who had immigrated from Afghanistan.
In Orange County, where many Afghans have settled as their immigration applications pend, local officials are gearing up to help them navigate the change, even as guidance is scant from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Jose Serrano, director of Orange County's Office of Refugee and Immigrant Services, said the goal is to provide the “most up-to-date information so they can continue on towards their pathway towards citizenship here in the United States.”
“The Afghan population in Southern California, specifically in Orange County, is one that is really important to the DNA of who we are,” Serrano said. “Let's continue to stay together and strong and reimagine a place for belonging for everyone.”
As they await more information, Serrano advised visa and asylum seekers to:
stay on top of updates from USCIS and the Department of Homeland Security
contact their local office of immigrant and refugee affairs
connect with organizations that work closely with immigrant and refugee populations, such as resettlement agencies and legal aid groups
Hundreds of Afghan households have settled in Orange County, Serrano said, making it one of the state’s hubs for Afghan immigrants alongside San Diego and Sacramento.
Serrano said a big draw for immigrants to Orange County is Little Arabia in Anaheim, a regional destination for Middle Eastern food, culture and community life.
Serrano, who spent more than a decade working with immigrants at World Relief Southern California and the state's refugee programs bureau, said entering Afghan homes means being offered large meals. One family had prepared a whole feast for a Time Warner cable worker, he recalled.
“They didn't understand why that person couldn’t stay to dine with them,” he said. “That’s the type of people that are here in Orange County, folks who are so committed to being a part of civic engagement, to connecting alongside other communities.”
Visa applications in limbo
Serrano said many of the Afghans who resettled in the county are Special Immigrant Visa holders, a program created for Afghan nationals who helped the U.S. government during the war in their home country.
That program has now been frozen by the State Department.
Serrano said immigrants who entered the U.S. as refugees and have since become green card holders could see their cases reopened.
For Serrano, the current screening process is rigorous and involves multiple organizations aside from USCIS, such as the U.S. Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and counterterrorist organizations.
Applicants undergo health screenings and multiple fingerprinting appointments, he said.
“They're constantly doing an assessment to verify that you are a good-standing citizen,” Serrano said. “One of the things that I think we should be very proud of within the United States is that there is an in-depth screening process for anyone who is seeking a protection.”
