The Brief

During a summer that has already shattered temperature records, the 340,000 drivers, dispatchers, and warehouse workers currently in contract negotiations with UPS — the United States’ largest unionized employer — have made climate change and extreme heat a headline labor issue. And if they don’t secure a contract by July 31, they are poised to initiate the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history.

On summer days, the back of a delivery truck can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When Viviana Gonzalez, a package delivery driver for United Postal Service in Los Angeles, pulls open the back of her truck, she often thinks: “Am I going to pass out back here? Will anybody find out that I’m here in the back of the truck?”

Gonzalez is all too aware of how dangerous her job can be. Since 2015, UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Last year, one of her co-workers, Esteban Chavez, died of heat stroke in his delivery truck after delivering his last parcel. “I’m a single mom,” said Gonzalez, “and being able to provide for my son means I have to suck it up.”

While climate change is making summers hotter and even more dangerous for delivery workers, Moe Nouhaili, a UPS driver in Las Vegas, told the Guardian that it’s the working conditions that make the heat so deadly. “It’s how they’re making us work, expecting us to meet these unrealistic productivity numbers even through the weather,” he said.

UPS often requires drivers and warehouse employees to work six days a week and more than 12 hours a day in the heat, and the company measures worker productivity by surveillance cameras and sensors inside trucks. Drivers say these tactics make it harder to take breaks. “The same amount of work that would be done in, say, 30 routes is now being forced to be done in 20 or 25,” said Nouhaili. “Less people get more work done.”

An increasing portion of the work is also done by part-time drivers who are paid less than full-time employees, as well as gig workers who often need to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet.

That’s why the UPS workers, who are part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, have tied their heat-safety demands to other key issues: higher wages for all workers; more full-time jobs with full benefits; an end to forced overtime, surveillance, and harassment from management; and elimination of a two-tier wage system that pays part-time workers and newer employees differently for the same work.

According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, many of these benefits and protections form the basis of climate justice at work and can better protect workers from the heat.

“Workers who are fighting for better health care benefits are going to be more physically able to deal with excessive heat, because they can address other underlying health problems,” she said. “An increase in pay might mean workers can spend time at home without having to take on a second job to support their family, eat healthy food, or afford to get an air conditioner in their house and really cool down and recover from the heat during their off-hours.”

She also argues that part-time employment, piece-wage and contract pay structures, and low-grade wage tiers can affect workers on the margins to a greater extent than others.

“These workers, who are overwhelmingly Black workers, immigrant workers, and women, literally can’t afford to take breaks or lose time to take care of their health,” she explained. By pushing for more full-time direct employees and fewer contractors, Christman said, workers build solidarity and make sure that certain job classes don’t disproportionately face environmental harms like extreme heat.

UPS workers negotiate a new contract once every five years, and the strike authorization in June was the result of a yearlong campaign on behalf of the union to build leverage at the bargaining table. The strategy appears to be working: In the last month, with the strike threat looming, UPS agreed to install air-conditioning systems in each of their delivery trucks, end the secondary wage tier that allows them to pay newer drivers less, and do away with mandatory overtime.

“UPS Teamsters have strategically navigated this process for maximum leverage against this multibillion-dollar corporation,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. “At every step, we are forcing them to do what they don’t want to do, which is give our members more money and better protections at work.”

UPS drivers practice picketing outside a warehouse in preparation for a potential strike at the end of the month.

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International Brotherhood of Teamsters

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While air-conditioning will indeed offer welcome relief to UPS drivers in the heat, experts argue that at a global scale, energy-intensive cooling systems pale as a long-term climate-justice solution. Air-conditioning units burn more fossil fuels, increase ambient temperatures in cities, and are inaccessible to most outdoor workers — and most of the global population.

On its own, the company’s concession also doesn’t address the growing issues of pay, contracting, and worker productivity that drive workers to heat exhaustion.

So despite the gains, UPS workers are still not satisfied. The biggest remaining issue is pay: They are looking to raise the starting hourly wage for part-time workers from $15.50 to $20. And they have repeatedly said that if UPS does not meet their baseline wage demands, they will be forced to strike to win them.

In recent years, restaurant workers at Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon; a McDonalds in Detroit; a Jack in the Box in Sacramento; and a Hooters location in Houston have collectively walked off the job to protect themselves from extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is in the process of developing a federal workplace heat standard, has acknowledged that taking collective action can help workers stay safe on the job and has developed a legal framework “to obtain the best possible relief for employees” when they choose to do so.

“The suggestion box sitting in the break room is not really the place to address the dangers of systemic heat exposure,” said Christman, the National Employment Law Project analyst. “When workers come together, they build power to really make changes at the workplace.”

The Teamsters union has plainly stated that this campaign will be an example for workers across the country. “What we do in these negotiations,” said O’Brien, “is going to set the tone for the entire country, the entire labor movement, moving forward. The UPS fight today may be your fight tomorrow.”

“It’s time for UPS to feel the heat,” said Rick Jordan, another delivery driver in Southern California. “We feel it all the time.”

Federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations tried to track down Rochester, N.Y. resident David Streever last month and give him a warning notice alleging that he had potentially violated the law when he wrote a harsh email months earlier to the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Now a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C. argues Streever's January email was protected speech and the federal agents' and their superiors violated Streever's First Amendment rights.

NPR reported last week about HSI agents trying to contact Streever first at his home and later at a hotel over an email that Streever wrote to Todd Lyons, who stepped down as the acting director of ICE at the end of May.

FIRE's lawsuit says the First Amendment protects Americans' rights to speak out against police but says the "Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively threatening that freedom, tracking down and retaliating against speakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States."

The suit goes on to say, "Our Constitution does not tolerate such a brazen abuse of authority."

Streever wrote to Lyons' government email address on Jan. 26 after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizen observers during the immigration enforcement surge there.

The three-paragraph note compared Lyons to a Nazi and predicted that Lyons would be tormented by his own conscience. It has the subject line, "What's next."

Five months later, on June 23, two HSI agents rang the doorbell of Streever's Rochester home and then left a document with Streever's wife for him to sign. It was labeled "WARNING NOTICE" and "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. The notice said ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility had identified an email to Lyons that may violate federal law and the office "is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

The bottom of the form reads, "Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."

Streever was taking his 7-year-old daughter on a vacation to a Finnish theme park when the agents visited his home. He and his daughter landed at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport two days later and made their way to a nearby airport hotel to sleep.

That evening, Streever was told by the hotel front desk that a federal agent from the Department of Homeland Security had come to see him and had left a business card. His wife had not told the agents which hotel he would be staying at, raising questions about how Streever had been tracked to that location.

"Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something," Streever said in a statement. "Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night."

The lawsuit names three federal agents who tried to contact Streever as defendants along with Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and ICE officials.

The suit argues the federal agents' actions have caused Streever to self-censor his views, and alleges they violated a First Amendment bar on the government threatening people over protected speech.

The lawsuit asks for the court to find that Streever's email was protected by the First Amendment, and to bar defendants "from taking any further actions, formal or informal, to coerce, threaten, retaliate against, or intimate repercussions directly or indirectly to Plaintiff Streever for his protected speech and petitioning activity."

The suit also asks the court to declare the warning notices federal agents are issuing people are "sufficient" to chill free expression protected by the First Amendment.

"ICE's issuance of formal "WARNING NOTICE" documents to critics who engage in protected speech—and its decision to have federal agents deliver those warnings in person—can have only one purpose: to systemically chill ICE's critics and coerce them into silence," the suit reads.

DHS initially responded with the same statement that it provided last week when NPR first asked about Streever's case. "ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations."

Later on Monday DHS sent an additional statement. "Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to 'squash' free speech is categorically FALSE," it reads.

"Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, child sex abusers, and rapists. They are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them and facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them, a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats."

NPR has not verified the statistics shared by DHS.

"Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences," the statement concludes.

Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at FIRE, said in a statement the government's delayed response to Streever's January email undermines its investigation.

"If someone is really threatening a government official, you don't wait five months to act on it," Steinbaugh said in the statement. "The fact that authorities didn't respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple."

Poll worker given the same warning notice

The lawsuit mentions that the same day HSI agents visited Streever's home on June 23, they also confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse resident who was working at a polling place for the New York primary election that day, about an Instagram post.

While Gonyea was at Syracuse's Central Library working the polls, an HSI agent left her a voicemail that said the agents had just visited her former apartment and were calling "in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January."

Doxxing typically refers to releasing sensitive information about a person online.

Gonyea called the agent back. She said the agents had wanted her to come outside the polling place to speak with them but she told NPR she did not trust them, and had told them to come talk to her inside the polling place when there was a lull in voters.

Local election officials later said the federal agents should not have gone inside, given that police are not supposed to enter polling places unless there is an emergency and a recently enacted New York law bars federal immigration officers from voting sites.

Video captured by fellow poll workers shows two agents with badges speaking with Gonyea inside the library and delivering a warning notice that said her Instagram account may have violated the law. Gonyea said the agents did not tell her which of her posts had prompted their visit but they had confirmed it was a post about Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis.

Gonyea denied to NPR and other news outlets that she had ever doxxed Ross and had said she thought the agents were referring to a post she made that identified Ross by name after the Minnesota Star Tribune had reported it, and called for Ross to be indicted. That post is still visible on her Instagram account.

But after NPR and other media outlets wrote about the encounter, DHS released a statement that said Gonyea "committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online." The statement continued, "Doxxing federal law enforcement officers is a federal crime that puts their lives and their families in serious danger…If you doxx our officers, we will investigate you, and you will be brought to justice."

DHS did not respond to requests from NPR to provide evidence that Gonyea had doxxed Ross. But the department did share with the Associated Press a redacted screenshot taken from a cell phone of a different Instagram post that looks like it was posted from Gonyea's account.

The post that was shown to AP is a photo of Ross with text that reads, "The killer's name is Jonathan Ross of" and the rest is redacted, presumably by DHS. The post does not currently appear on Gonyea's Instagram account. The screenshot shows it was taken six hours after the post went up but does not show a date.

Gonyea told NPR she had the opportunity to review the screenshot of the post but she did not believe she had posted it.

"Based on everything I know, I do not believe that I made that post, and I have no independent recollection of ever creating or publishing it," she told NPR in a text message.

"There is additional context that I believe is important, and I look forward to addressing those matters through the appropriate process rather than in the press," she wrote.

"What has not changed is my concern about the broader constitutional issues raised by my experience, including free speech, due process and government accountability."

Steinbaugh from FIRE told NPR last week that a social media post that shares a person's address alone is not a criminal offense.

"What the law criminalizes is publishing an address or sharing an address with the intent to convey a threat," Steinbaugh said. "So if you post an address and say, 'Hey, gang, at 5:00 tonight, we're going to all meet up here with our pitchforks and torches,' that puts you more in the ballpark of a threat."

He said some social media posts that publicized Ross's address were in the context of a broader public debate about whether federal immigration officers can wear masks and refuse to identify themselves "and essentially [act] almost as a secret police." He said for that reason, some posts that shared information about Ross were a form of protest.

"People might think that that is speech that people should not engage in, but it's still protected and it can't be criminalized," Steinbaugh said.

Gonyea and Streever are the first two people who have made public that they received warning notices from Homeland Security agents about their online communications.
Copyright 2026 NPR

California’s dozens of private gambling halls can continue offering blackjack and other table games after a San Francisco judge ruled last week that Attorney General Rob Bonta overstepped when he tried to ban them.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Darwin ruled that Bonta’s Bureau of Gambling Control didn’t have the legal authority to issue statewide rules severely restricting the games at cardrooms.

The ruling, which followed Darwin’s temporary order in May, is the latest defeat for the state’s casino-owning Native American tribes. They have spent years and tens of millions of dollars unsuccessfully appealing to courts, voters, the Legislature and California regulators to put their only in-state competitors out of the blackjack business.

The tribes contend cardrooms have unscrupulously violated state laws prohibiting anyone but tribal casinos from offering “house-banked,” Las Vegas-style table games including blackjack, the most lucrative.

Cardroom operators say the ruling once again proves their business model is legal. It also ensures taxes that cities receive from blackjack revenues will continue to support local government services and cardroom jobs.

“For more than a year, we have said this case is about far more than gaming — it is about whether the attorney general and his regulators can bypass the Legislature and unilaterally rewrite decades of established law,” Kyle Kirkland, a Fresno cardroom owner and president of the California Gaming Association, said in a statement. “The court delivered a clear answer: they cannot.”

James May, a spokesperson for California Nations Indian Gaming Association, didn’t return an interview request.

Bonta’s office said in an email that officials were disappointed in the ruling and are reviewing their options.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For decades, Californians have generally said that immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population and a third of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.

Now, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present a stark choice to voters in the race to be the next governor at a moment when public support for the state’s generous safety net is starting to fray.

Both frame the choice as an economic one.

Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, has said it would be “foolish” to exclude the poorest immigrants from routine care and push them into expensive emergency rooms on the taxpayer’s dime. Hilton, a conservative commentator backed by President Donald Trump, has promised to eliminate their coverage and has echoed national Republicans who have skewered California’s expansions to bolster their claims of fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.

With voters nationwide worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, some Californians might feel less inclined to provide full healthcare coverage to those lacking legal status. What the state does next could have profound implications for its healthcare system and sprawling economy.

Over the past decade, California lawmakers used state dollars to expand Medi-Cal, offering all low-income residents comprehensive coverage regardless of immigration status. But enrollment surpassed initial projections, as did the cost. Medi-Cal coverage of immigrants without legal status costs the state roughly $10 billion a year, according to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, more than double the initial estimates.

California lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who championed the program, have approved major rollbacks of benefits for those residents. They said the state can’t afford ballooning healthcare costs amid massive federal cuts from the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the California Health and Human Services Agency projected up to 3.4 million Medi-Cal enrollees could lose coverage and the state could lose more than $30 billion a year in federal funding under the law, causing major disruptions in the safety net health program.

Medi-Cal’s budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year is $217 billion, and the program serves more than 14 million Californians.

Meanwhile, many legal U.S. residents and citizens have seen their health premium payments skyrocket this year after Congress let enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of December.

As the state grappled with a deficit last year, a majority of likely voters in California said — for the first time in nearly a decade — that they opposed providing health insurance to immigrants without legal status, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“The state faces major challenges, and healthcare is one of the major expenditures,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC survey director. “People have become more selective about how they want to see those limited healthcare dollars spent.”

Hilton, running on a platform of affordability and lowering taxes, has seized on the sentiment, casting health coverage for immigrants without legal status as deeply unfair and a direct threat to the state’s ability to help citizens.

“Stop taking money from California taxpayers who can barely afford their healthcare to give free healthcare to citizens of other countries who shouldn’t even be here,” Hilton said in a Facebook video the morning of the June 2 primary.

In campaign stump speeches, Hilton promised to use the savings to lower healthcare costs for other Californians without detailing how. Hilton did not respond to requests from KFF Health News for comment.

“Their messaging is very, very simple: It’s an us vs. them,” said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who represents a coalition of healthcare advocates who argue providing coverage to people who can’t afford it strengthens the workforce and, as a result, the economy. “It’s just a question of convincing the average voter that it’s much better economically.”

A son of immigrants, Becerra for decades pushed to extend safety net benefits in Congress and has made a similar pitch in his campaign for governor. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Immigrants, whether documented or not, work hard. They pay taxes, and sometimes they get injured on the job or their children get sick,” Becerra said during a debate in May. “It would be foolish to tell a family that they don’t have access to the pediatrician or the family doc.”

Becerra, who could become California’s first elected Latino governor, objected last year when Newsom and legislative leaders decided to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for adults without legal status, cut benefits, and impose monthly premiums.

"Stop treating coverage as a budget variable that expands in good years and contracts when revenue dips,” Becerra wrote in May in response to an Orange County Register candidate questionnaire. He has vowed to pursue new, steady revenue to fund basic services, such as by upping taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians.

In 2023, California was home to about 2.3 million people without legal status, representing roughly 8% of the state’s labor force, according to the Pew Research Center. And 1 in 5 California children live in a family that includes at least one member without legal status, according to the California Department of Education. Healthcare economists say giving people access to preventive healthcare saves taxpayers money in the long run by keeping the workforce healthy and relieving pressure on an overburdened system.

That, Baldassare said, wasn’t a hard argument to make during the covid pandemic, when immigrants were celebrated as essential workers and the link between individual well-being and public health was more obvious.

But Medi-Cal costs to cover roughly 1.4 million immigrants have ballooned, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Health Care Services. Because only some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, states like California that cover other populations must do so exclusively with state funding.

California’s budget experts have warned that maintaining full Medi-Cal coverage for immigrants without seeking additional revenue would destabilize the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.

In a legislative hearing last year, Republican Assembly member Carl DeMaio questioned whether California taxpayers would prioritize the expansions, saying he doubted “illegal immigrant healthcare in the general fund would be at the top of their list.”

After lawmakers approved the spending reductions, support for immigrant health coverage dropped, Baldassare said. Democratic lawmakers and Newsom agreed to delay several Medi-Cal cuts until July 2027, leaving decisions for the next governor.

David Hayes-Bautista, who has spent his career studying the economic contributions of Latinos and immigrants, said Californians without legal status have higher labor force participation and tend to work in industries and occupations that don’t offer employer-based health insurance. As a result, many resort to Medi-Cal, saddling the state with the healthcare costs instead of employers.

“California, as a state, has the world’s fourth-largest GDP, which is true thanks to Latinos,” said Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA. Without contributions from Latinos, many without legal status, it drops to eighth place, about the size of Italy’s economy, he added.

Immigrant advocates hope to have a more vocal champion in Becerra, the favorite to become governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1.

“He will fight, he will push back, he will do all that he can,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a former labor leader who has championed the immigrant healthcare expansions. “That’s the most we could expect.”

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