The Brief

Companies are already successfully making the switch to electric after California passed a landmark law last year requiring the trucking industry to transition to electric and hydrogen fuel over the next two decades.

Big rig trucks that serve the ports have to transition first — their fleets have to be 100% carbon-free by 2035.

There are more electric trucks on the road, but the lack of charging stations has been a source of major pushback from the industry against these new statewide rules.

Over the last year, there have been gains in building that infrastructure, including the launch of what’s now one of the largest truck charging depots in North America. It’s in Lynwood, right off the 710 Freeway, a major trucking corridor, and just down the road from the nation’s busiest ports.

The depot has 65 chargers and can serve up to 200 trucks at a time in a lot that’s less than an acre. Operating since March, the depot primarily serves electric trucks deployed by shipping giant Maersk.

Jonathan Colbert, VP of Marketing for charging depot builder Voltera.

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“For the industry and for fleets that want to electrify, this is literally the silver bullet of what they've been asking for: How do you take a site that's in close proximity to a port, electrify it, and quickly,” said Jonathan Colbert, vice president of marketing for Northern California-based company Voltera, which built the charging station.

Voltera is also building another charging depot in Wilmington. It’s one of several companies leading the effort to build truck charging depots along major shipping corridors in the state.

Why it matters

The push to electrify trucking and build the infrastructure needed to support that transition has been led by communities living nearest to major trucking corridors. That’s because medium- and heavy-duty trucks, mostly diesel fueled, are some of the largest sources of pollution that contribute to higher asthma and cancer rates, as well as global heating.

Medium- and heavy-duty trucks make up only 6% of the vehicles on the road, but spew nearly 50% of the pollutants that form smog and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which regulates these emissions.

So electrifying those trucks is an important piece of improving public health and addressing human-caused climate change. Bruce Tuter, a supervisor with CARB, said that diesel trucks have gotten a lot more efficient and less polluting over the decades, but it’s still not enough.

One of 65 chargers at the new Lynwood heavy-duty truck charging depot. It takes about three hours for a truck to fully charge.

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“Diesel particulates are really highly toxic,” said Tuter. “It's the most toxic air contaminant that we know of. So it's absolutely critical that we get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.”

A driver’s perspective

Former long-haul diesel truck driver and school bus driver Kenneth Phillips said the experience of driving the trucks is also better for the drivers themselves. He said electric trucks have the same performance as diesel, but are more comfortable to drive because they’re far quieter, smoother and don’t have smelly — and dangerous — fumes.

"That takes a toll on your body," Phillips said.

The Compton native now works for electric trucking company BYD, which has a manufacturing facility in Lancaster. Another big perk is the impact on pollution, he said.

“We have to do something to change what's going on and this is the way to do it,” Phillips said. “It may not solve it, but it will most definitely close the gap.”

Phillips said that it’s only been in recent years that more companies have turned their focus to all-electric technology.

“The future is now because the competition is here,” he said. “When I first started [at BYD], a lot of other companies were going to more fuel efficient, but now everybody is into electrical vehicles. There’s only so many alternate [fuels] that you can do. Electric…it's just the way.”

Kenneth Phillips, a Compton native and former long-haul truck driver and school bus driver, works for electric truck company BYD.

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He took me on a short drive in one of BYD’s lithium-battery powered trucks that has a 200-mile range. We drove through a neighborhood and past a high school. But the families and kids there weren’t breathing any dangerous diesel pollution from this truck.

“Just knowing you're making a difference for Mother Earth, it's just outstanding,” Phillips said.

Challenges to building more infrastructure 

The Lynwood charging depot is a bit of a unique case where all the necessary pieces came together to launch the depot in a timely manner, said Colbert.

Electric trucks showcased at ride-and-drive event at a new heavy-duty truck charging depot in Lynwood.

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The real estate was there, in a perfect location near the 710 Freeway and the ports, in an industrial-zoned area, and Southern California Edison had existing infrastructure nearby that they could upgrade and hook up relatively quickly to the site, which has a whopping 7.7 megawatts of power. The project was done in about 18 months.

But that’s not the norm.

“The two problems that you're going to hear are permitting and getting the power utility interconnection,” said Colbert. “We're asking for, in some situations, more than a skyscraper's worth of power in an acre or two-acre footprint, so they're not really accustomed to being able to bring this amount of power online and quickly.”

The need to upgrade equipment, primarily transmission and distribution lines to service the voltage needed at these sites, can slow a project by months, years and in some cases a decade or more.

“The challenge is not getting the power generated as much as it is getting the power delivered to the infrastructure built,” said Jeff Monford, a spokesperson for Southern California Edison (SCE). “Every one of these construction projects is unique.”

One of 65 chargers at Voltera's Lynwood heavy-duty truck charging depot.

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Monford said SCE has completed more than 80 projects supporting more than 2,000 medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and has 250 project applications in the pipeline that could potentially support another 6,000 electric medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

Still that's a drop in the bucket for the estimated need: the state expects to need at least 114,500 chargers by 2030 to support 157,000 electric or hydrogen-fueled medium- and heavy-duty trucks.

More truck charging depots are in the works and coming online, but the pace of building out the grid and connecting these projects to it, is still too slow to meet the rising demand.

Last year, state legislators passed two laws — SB 410 and AB 50 — to figure out how to pick up the pace. And the California Public Utilities Commission issued a ruling last month to set specific timeframes, but industry and environmental experts alike say it doesn’t go far enough.

Political uncertainty

Another wrench in the electric truck transition is the upcoming presidential election. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has yet to grant a waiver to approve California’s new truck electrification law and who wins the election could affect whether it gets granted at all.

Quick background on that: According to the nationwide Clean Air Act, air pollution from vehicles is a federal issue, but the federal government has for decades granted California waivers to regulate its own emissions because Southern California’s car culture has made air pollution a particularly long-running issue here (learn more about that history here). More than a dozen states have adopted California’s stricter car rules, as well as more recent truck rules. The rules have led to and are expected to lead to cleaner vehicles across the nation and the world.

The Trump Administration tried to revoke that power, the Biden Administration restored it, and now a future Trump presidency could put that waiver at risk again. Trump has also said he will rescind any unspent dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides funding to boost electric truck adoption and the needed infrastructure.

So some trucking companies have paused on buying electric trucks, Colbert said.

Community college students learn about the electric-powered Volvo semi-truck at an industry expo in Anaheim in 2023.

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But major players in the industry, including Voltera, as well as major truck manufacturers, are betting on electric no matter the outcome of the election.

“I think the election has made some folks wait and see what's going to happen, but we're bullish that no matter what…we're going to see a continued push to get fleets to electrify,” Colbert said. “I don't think that it benefits any administration to back down off of what's coming already.”

The delay on the EPA waiver has also made it so California can’t enforce its own law. More than 1,000 diesel trucks have been added to the registry to serve the ports despite the law, which went into effect at the beginning of the year, not allowing that.

CARB released a letter last year stating that they have the right to enforce the law from its official start date of Jan. 1, 2024, once the waiver is granted.

“As far as the state of California is concerned, there is a regulation in place,” said Tuter. “It's the law in California. We're just waiting right now to enforce it.”

If Donald Trump wins the election, there’s a possibility the waiver may not happen, but Tuter said there are other legal avenues that California can pursue to still enforce the rules.

Edwin Buenrostro was one of Quality Custom Distribution's first drivers behind the wheel of an electric truck, delivering to Starbucks across Fontana. The large distribution company is committed to an electric future.

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Still, Tuter said, despite the waiver not yet being granted, he’s not seeing much of a slowdown in applications for California’s main electric truck financing incentive program, called HVIP.

“A lot of people are waiting and taking the chance. Some people are not taking the chance,” Tuter said. “Personally, I think the smart money is on don't take the chance.”

Learn more about electric trucking

• Electric Trucks Are Making Their Way In California. We Took A Ride To See What It’s Like
  
• California's groundbreaking clean fuel laws mean big changes for polluting trucks and trains. Why it matters
  
• Mandates On Zero Emission Vehicles Are Changing California's Job Market. What You Should Know
  
• California Strikes Deal With Truck Makers To Move Forward On Electrification Plans

In Los Angeles, the soundtrack is familiar. Car horns, the whine of leaf blowers.

But in the middle of Chinatown, another sound cuts through the din: the rhythmic hum of washers and dryers from a trailer parked outside the Alpine Recreation Center.

Chinatown hasn’t had a laundromat for as long as anyone around can remember. This mobile setup – run by the nonprofit The Laundry Truck LA – has become the neighborhood’s de facto laundromat, offering the service for free to locals, twice a week.

For 70-year-old Sam Ma, it’s been a relief.

Ma, a retired construction worker, picked up freshly-laundered items — two pairs of pants, a hat, and some socks, bundled in a white garbage bag for the bus ride home.

He usually washes his clothes by hand. But about two weeks ago, he was hit by a car. Bruises and cuts cover his hands, making it difficult to scrub heavier items.

“The things I can wash, I wash,” he said in Mandarin. “But these are too thick. It’s too hard.”

Rebel Fox of The Laundry Truck L.A. hands a garbage bag filled with newly-laundered sheets to a local.

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Nearby, Laundry Truck employee Rebel Fox checked him out with a clipboard after handing him his load.

“We help a lot of seniors out here,” Fox said. “And we offer folding services, too. It really helps people who don’t have the dexterity in their hands.”

The Laundry Truck started out in 2019 providing laundry services to people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles and has expanded to high-need communities, like Eaton Fire survivors.

In February, the nonprofit started operating in Chinatown under a year-long contract with Council District 1, showing up every Wednesday and Thursday at 9 a.m.

A sink or bathtub

Chinatown advocates say the lack of a laundromat is especially hard on low-income tenants living in older, neglected buildings.

“These landlords aren’t doing much to keep it updated,” said Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance.

Maintaining laundry rooms may require major plumbing upgrades and hookups that many landlords avoid.

Newly-constructed residential buildings are typically being constructed with in-unit laundry.

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Advocates say in buildings that do have shared coin-operated machines, they may be broken or in constant use. Many residents decide to launder clothes by hand — in sinks or bathtubs.

“In one building, the sinks were so small, people had to cut their sheets in half just to wash them,” Trinh said. “They’d wash one half, then the other.”

A reversal of access

Those who could benefit from a laundromat include seniors on fixed incomes, and workers living paycheck to paycheck, including garment workers and home health aides.

“You’re talking about low-income, financially-stressed households,” Paul Ong said.

Ong, who studies urban inequality at UCLA, says Chinatown reflects a broader pattern: as neighborhoods change, basic services can disappear.

Each pile of dirty clothes is labeled with customers' names.

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The neighborhood’s last full-service grocery store closed in 2019 after the property was sold to a developer. Meanwhile, new market-rate housing has gone up, catering to higher-income residents with amenities like parking and in-unit laundry.

“The irony is that historically, laundry was bread and butter for the Chinese community,” Ong said.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants built livelihoods around laundry work — one of the few industries open to them at the time.

Nowadays, laundry options have become hard to come by.

Seeking a lasting fix

Residents without access to machines have to leave the neighborhood entirely to find a laundromat in Lincoln Heights or Echo Park, which has seen its own laundromats disappear.

Laundry can be spotted drying on balconies across Chinatown.

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“The long-term, permanent solution is that a laundry service opens up,” in the neighborhood, said Council member Eunisses Hernandez, who represents Chinatown.

Hernandez says constituents have asked for a laundromat from the time she was knocking on doors as a City Council candidate.

Hernandez, who is up for re-election this year, says the neighborhood could benefit from a community-run laundromat offering affordable services.

“If private industry is not making that investment in Chinatown then perhaps it’s up to the city – and the people of that neighborhood – to build something for them,” she said.

In the meantime, Hernandez has directed about $250,000 from her district — using TFAR payments from developers building larger projects — to cover a year of mobile laundry services.

The contract with the Laundry Truck runs through next February.

After that?

“We’ll keep filling the gap until we get to a permanent solution,” Hernandez said.

Could that solution be combined with housing?

Some community advisors to a new affordable housing project being developed on the northwestern edge of Chinatown have been pushing for a self-service laundry that would be open to other neighborhood residents, says Eugene Moy who sits on the advisory board of New High Village.

But any fix will take time. That project, Moy said, could be two years out from even breaking ground.

Taking a load off 

Back at the truck, the machines continue to spin. By mid-afternoon, nearly 18 loads of laundry are done.

The trailer for the LA Laundry Truck is set up outside the Alpine Recreation Center, across from Castelar Elementary School.

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Two months in, there are kinks to work out. How to get more residents to take advantage of the unit's capacity? Its machines can churn out 40 loads per shift.

There is also the question of whether some seniors are physically able to transport their laundry even a few blocks.

But the service is starting to get regulars. One woman on her second visit stood by the trailer, cradling just-washed clothes in her arms while clutching her daughter's teddy bear, now a sparkling white.

"If it keeps going, I'll keep coming," said the woman who gave her last name as Mo. "It's very convenient."

Her apartment building doesn’t have a laundry room. Sometimes she asks a friend next door if she can use theirs. With three children, the cost adds up quickly.

Thinking aloud, she calculated how much she saved that day.

About $8, she estimated — money she said could now spend on her kids.

There’s a fair amount of recreational activities Angelenos can do in and around the Los Angeles River like biking, walking, even kayaking, but did you know you can also dance in the dry river bed of a Los Angeles icon?

Adam Weiss, founder of the Gratitude Group leans over and DJs a set at his Los Angeles River dance party.

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Dancing in the sun

Adam Weiss is the founder of the Gratitude Group, a club that hosts various events across Los Angeles like dance parties at the River, a screen-free reading club at the Central Library and meditative sound baths at Elysian Park. That’s just this weekend alone.

Weiss has been hosting the free dance parties for about two years now. The locations vary. Previously he’s held them at the Elysian Park helipad.

“Everybody wants to dance, they're just waiting to be invited to dance, and then if you're a good DJ, you just keep the floor packed,” said Weiss, who also deejays these events. Lately it's been a lot of disco, funk and soul. Weiss also likes to keep the gatherings dry, meaning no drugs or alcohol. He thinks it makes people engage with each other more.

“So the focus really is on connection and dancing,” Weiss said.

Attendees of the Los Angeles River dance party move to the music.

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Ariana Valencia lives in Burbank and attended last month's dance party, also at the L.A. River. She says dancing in the middle of the concrete riverbed made the city feel like a playground that she could explore.

“I’d never been to the L.A. River prior to that. You think it’s just a little swampy little pond, but it was actually really full,” said Valencia. “I would have never thought that was in the middle of the city.”

Uniquely Los Angeles

Weiss says part of the appeal is not just getting people outside but to get them to experience Los Angeles differently.

At the last event, people walking or biking along the river path joined on a whim — some even brought their kids. Weiss says that’s exactly the kind of reaction he hopes for.

“ I want it to be family friendly. I want it to feel welcoming. I want it to be inclusive,” Weiss said. “My main thing is I just want people to actually dance. I think it feels good to dance.”

A woman and two children join in on the dance party.

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For Valencia that inclusiveness is part of the draw. She says she’ll be joining again this Sunday.

“Even though it wasn’t advertised as a dry event I think the fact that it was a family friendly kind of thing was appealing to me,” said Valencia.

Join the party

After the last dance party went viral, Weiss says more than 1,500 people have RSVP-ed for tomorrow's event. This compelled him to close reservations.

Weiss plans to hold the event every other week this Spring and Summer — taking place either at the River or the Elysian Field Helipad with its amazing view of the city.

Weiss wants to start branching out too, and is eyeing the Culver City Stairs as a possible location.

“ I just wanna bring people to cool interesting places to dance,” Weiss said.

At Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona, a mural depicts the now-disgraced farm worker leader from the waist-up, in a serene, almost Buddha-like pose. To his left, a lady justice figure holds the scales of justice and on the right, there are images of farm workers toiling in a field. Chavez looks like a saint.

One of five murals at Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona, painted by Paul Botello.

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“And that's what people thought he was,” said Pomona Mayor Tim Sandoval as he stood in front of the mural.

But after several women stepped forward accusing the late labor icon of sexual assault, that view has radically changed. Now there are calls to remove his image from public spaces, widely impacting Southern California, which has a large concentration of murals, plaques, street names, and statues dedicated to him.

But do the entire murals have to be removed, or can there be a more nuanced approach to the re-evaluation of Chavez’s legacy — a re-evaluation that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?

This week, the artist Paul Botello, Pomona Mayor Sandoval, and Pitzer College Emeritus Professor José Calderón, a former activist who was involved in getting the murals painted, met up at the park, in the shadow of the busy 57 freeway, to discuss how to go forward.

The story behind the murals

In the early 2000s violence between Black and Latino gang members gripped Pomona.

“When a young Latino was killed, we actually did a march all the way from City Hall to what is now this park,” said Calderón.

Calderon helped organize that march. He said activists were inspired by something Chavez liked to say, that when you get angry, don’t take it out on others — organize.

So they lobbied for the park, which was filled with trash and syringes, to be cleaned up and made family friendly. And because they used his quote, it was named Cesar Chavez Park.

Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona was dedicated after activists lobbied the City of Pomona to help curb gang violence.

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Muralist Paul Botello was chosen to create five murals at the park that depicted Chavez from youth, through his service in the U.S. Navy during World War Two, to key moments during his farm worker activism.

Today, while he feels betrayed by Chavez, he’s also keen to preserve parts of the murals which tell the bigger story of the exploitation of farm workers and the fight to improve their conditions.

While California state law says an artist must be consulted if there are any proposed changes to a mural, the ultimate decision will be made by Pomona City Council.

Sandoval said he has not received calls or emails at City Hall. But people in his various social and civic circles have told him, he says, that Chavez’s images should be removed.

Paul Botello holds mock-ups of changes he'd like to make to his murals of Cesar Chavez at a park in Pomona.

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Botello had brought mock-ups of the alterations he’d like to make to each mural. For the mural which depicts Chavez in a Buddha-like pose, for example, he wants to replace his face with the face of a farmworker wearing a hat.

He also wants to keep much of another mural, which depicts Chavez as a teenager in a suit surrounded by boys and girls sitting on rows of tilled soil. His one change is to turn the image of Chavez into a Zoot Suiter, a rebellious Mexican American youth from the mid 20th century.

A mural by Paul Botello depicts Cesar Chavez and children on a farm.

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“ 95 percent is going to be there because it just represents all the youth who also toil in the field to help their parents,” he said.

Calderon agrees with these more targeted changes. He fears painting over the murals entirely would erase the neighborhood activism that led to the creation of this park.

He’s also concerned their removal would give fuel to people who oppose Latino activism and the growing movement in public education to require the teaching of Latino history.

“The right and the white supremacists are already using it to say, ‘see this is what we told you about Cesar being anti-immigrant’”, he said. “But now they're going a little bit further and they want to wipe out ethnic studies”.

A mural at Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona.

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While Botello wants to keep the mural of Chavez serving in the U.S. Navy, because he believes it's important to show that Latinos have contributed to this country's military, he’s keen to make a change in the fifth mural.

It depicts a young man and woman above the phrase “Sí se puede,” the famous farmworker slogan, “yes, we can.”

The young man is clearly Chavez. Botello says he wants to replace it with the face of Dolores Huerta, the woman who led the United Farm Workers with Chavez and has accused Chavez of rape.

Mayor Sandoval says he plans to bring up Botello’s proposals at the next city council meeting.

The immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles has placed dozens of people in solitary confinement each month since June, according to the most recent data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In May 2025, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center had 14 people in isolation. When the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort revved up in June 2025, the number of detainees in solitary confinement there more than tripled. By July, it was 73; by August, 105.

The most recent data available shows that number went down slightly in January, to 74 people.

Ranked by percentage of the detainee population in “segregation,” as it is called at immigrant detention centers, Adelanto is among the U.S.’s top 10 facilities as of January, according to an LAist analysis of the most recent ICE data.

The data shows that of 229 ICE facilities that reported holding people since October 2024, between 50 and 60 usually reported putting at least one person in segregation in a given month. Out of the facilities that did place people in solitary confinement, Adelanto tended to do so less often than others until June 2025. (The facility held just a few people from October 2024 into January 2025.) When ICE’s presence increased in L.A. in June, the number of people sent to isolation in the facility also shot up — three to five times as many people have been isolated in Adelanto compared to the average facility that used any solitary confinement.

Since June, only two facilities have sent people to solitary confinement more times than Adelanto: one southwest of San Antonio, the other in central Pennsylvania.

Both of those facilities held twice the number of detainees as Adelanto on average from October 2024 through September 2025; but the number of people held in Adelanto since then has tripled, growing larger than either of the other facilities to hold an average of 1,800 people a day since October.

More on solitary confinement  

According to ICE, detainees may be placed in segregation for “disciplinary reasons,” or because of:

• “Serious mental or medical illness.”
• Conducting a hunger strike.
• Suicide watch.

The agency also says it might place detainees “who may be susceptible to harm [if left among the] general population due in part to how others interpret or assume their sexual orientation, or sexual presentation or expression.”

Not only is ICE holding more people in solitary confinement, but the agency's data also shows that detainees across the country are being isolated for longer periods of time. Detainees ICE considers part of the "vulnerable & special population" spent an average of about two weeks in solitary confinement each time they were isolated in 2022, when ICE first made the data available. By the end of 2025, the average stay in isolation had risen to more than seven weeks straight.

The GEO Group Inc., a private company that operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, has not responded to requests for comment.

How isolation can affect immigrant detainees  

UN human rights experts consider solitary confinement placements that last 15 days or more to be torture, though the U.S. Supreme Court has held that isolation doesn’t violate the Constitution.

The UN also maintains that solitary confinement should be prohibited for people “with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions would be exacerbated by such measures.”

In January, a coalition of immigrant rights groups filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of current detainees, calling for conditions at Adelanto to be improved. In addition to an unsanitary environment and a lack of healthy food and clean drinking water, detainees say solitary confinement is frequently used to punish those who speak out about conditions at the facility.

People held in immigrant detention centers are technically in “civil detention,” meaning that they are being detained to ensure their presence at hearings and compliance with immigration orders — not to serve criminal sentences.

According to the immigrant rights groups’ complaint, one detainee was placed in solitary confinement after complaining about the showers being broken. Another detainee said that, after asking a guard to “use more respectful language toward him, he was ridiculed, written up and given the middle finger by a guard who shouted, ‘Who the f--- do you think you are?’” Then, the detainee was placed in solitary confinement for 25 days.

Alvaro Huerta, the director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing detainees at Adelanto, told LAist that when people are placed in isolation at the facility, they’re typically in the same cell for 23 hours per day, unable to receive visits from their families.

For clients who are experiencing mental health challenges — especially those with suicidal thoughts — being placed in solitary confinement “can really exacerbate their condition,” he added.

In multiple statements to the media, ICE has said that the agency “is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.” The agency has also said that detainees receive “comprehensive medical care” and that all detainees “receive medical, dental, and mental health intake screenings within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility.”

Huerta called that “laughable.”

“We have countless examples of people who have said that this is not true, that they're not getting the medication that they're requesting, that they're not being seen for chronic conditions and emergency conditions,” he added. “And we know it's not true because 14 people have died in ICE custody this year alone.”