The Brief

The Imperial Irrigation District, which provides water to farmers in the southeastern corner of California, drew a figurative line in the sand earlier this month, calling for a halt to the conversion of agricultural fields into solar panel farms.

Noting that more than 13,000 acres of fertile land had already been converted, the water district asked the Imperial County Board of Supervisors to protect productive farmland.

“Our identity and economy in the Imperial Valley are rooted in agriculture,” Gina Dockstader, who chairs the district board, said in a statement. “Solar energy has a role in our region’s future, but it cannot come at the cost of our farmland, food supply, or the families who depend on agriculture. This resolution is about protecting our way of life.”

The Imperial Valley conflict is one manifestation of an increasingly sharp debate within California’s $60 billion agricultural sector — the largest of any state — over what should happen as the acreage devoted to crops and livestock shrinks.

The state Department of Conservation says that agricultural lands declined by more than 1.6 million acres between 1984 and 2018, averaging 47,000 acres a year. The most productive land experienced the largest decline. Urbanization — the conversion of fields into homes and businesses — accounted for most of the decline, but residential development has slowed in recent years, contributing to a chronic housing shortage.

Other factors, such as labor shortages, production costs and uncertain water supplies, have created what industry leaders say is a crisis. The Public Policy Institute of California has estimated that the recently imposed limits on tapping underground aquifers to irrigate crops will result in 500,000 acres of farmland being taken out of production.

More recently, President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs and a crackdown on undocumented immigrants have put more pressure on the agricultural industry.

As farmers, particularly the larger corporate growers, take land out of production, many believe that their economic salvation lies in solar panel arrays that generate the emission-free electricity that the state wants, as it phases out power fueled by hydrocarbons.

However, that doesn’t sit well with farmers who want to continue production, as the Imperial Irrigation District’s call for a solar moratorium implies.

Like many conflicts, this one has landed in the Capitol in the form of legislation. Assembly Bill 1156 would make it easier for farmers whose lands are contractually obligated to remain open space under the Williamson Act to avoid paying the heavy penalties required by law.

The Williamson Act, enacted six decades ago to slow the sprawl of urban development into farmlands, gives farmers hefty breaks on property taxes on land they maintain as open space. AB 1156 would specifically declare that farmers can replace crops with solar farms without incurring penalties if the owner is experiencing water shortages. The bill is backed by the solar power industry, environmentalists, labor unions and many large farmers.

The California Farm Bureau and family farm groups oppose it, arguing that it will undermine the Williamson Act because almost any farmer can declare a water shortage, given the chronic uncertainty of California water supplies. Emulating the Imperial Irrigation District’s stance, opponents say wholesale conversion of farmland into solar farms will devastate rural communities that depend on agriculture for jobs.

Politically, it’s a David vs. Goliath conflict. AB 1156, carried by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, has been moving briskly through the legislative process. It’s already cleared the Assembly and is likely to hit the Senate floor soon.

The solar farm displacement issue is only one of many factors that will determine the future of agriculture in California. The larger existential issue deserves more political attention than it’s getting.

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

As word of the damning sexual abuse accusations against César Chávez spread this week, California’s farmworking communities struggled to process and reconcile the disturbing details with the image of a labor icon and civil rights fighter many considered a hero.

Reached by phone, people described feeling stunned and disjointed after learning the news from a neighbor’s call, conversations with relatives, work meetings or social media.

“It’s almost too difficult to believe what is happening,” Maria García Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years, said in Spanish on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-year-old, who lives in Tulare County, said she and her parents benefited from Chávez's advocacy to include undocumented farmworkers in the last major comprehensive immigration reform in the 1980s.

“I still can’t quite believe it — that such a courageous person who fought for all of us to ensure we had shade, water, clean restrooms, better working conditions, that such a person, so dedicated to the people … could do that,” said García, who seeds and harvests plants in a job represented by the United Farm Workers, the union that Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded.

Huerta, now 95, revealed for the first time publicly that Chávez manipulated her into sex and raped her in the 1960s, telling The New York Times that the two encounters each left her pregnant. The Times’ multi-year investigation, published Wednesday, also detailed accusations by two women, daughters of union organizers, who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were children in the 1970s.

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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When Rolando Hernandez first heard about the allegations from coworkers during a job training meeting, the former agricultural worker was confused. He thought the discussion must be about someone else.

“Excuse me, but which César Chávez are you talking about?” Hernandez, 33, asked at the gathering. “Because I only know of one César Chávez who fought for farmworkers’ rights so that there’d be better wages and not so much injustice in the fields.”

“That’s the one,” came the response, leaving Hernandez speechless.

“It landed really heavy,” said Hernandez, an outreach educator for a Fresno-based farmworker nonprofit who began harvesting chile fields as a 14-year-old in Arizona before working with grapes and oranges in California.

The fallout from the revelations was almost immediate. California lawmakers announced they plan to rename the state holiday named after Chavez as Farmworkers Day. Cities, states and organizations, including the UFW, moved to postpone or cancel celebrations planned for March 31 in honor of the Mexican American labor leader’s birthday. Officials are considering renaming streets, parks, libraries, schools and other buildings named after Chávez.

For decades, Chávez and Huerta’s collaboration to advance farmworker rights has been celebrated in children’s textbooks, biographies, movies and parades. Now, mothers like García are troubled that more was not done sooner to prevent and respond to the alleged attacks.

“I feel for them; it really pains me in the bottom of my soul what happened to them,” García said. “But if what happened is true, why wasn’t it spoken of a long time ago? Why now?”

Chávez died in 1993. Huerta said she stayed silent for 60 years because she feared hurting the reputation of a man who became the face of the Mexican American civil rights movement, known for national boycotts, marches and strikes that achieved significant gains for thousands of farmworkers.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in a statement after the Times investigation was published. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Luz Gallegos, whose childhood experiences accompanying her parents to UFW pickets and marches inspired her to become a farmworker advocate, said she felt shattered by the revelations. Now the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant and farmworker nonprofit in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley, Gallegos praised the courage of Huerta and the other victims who carried their pain before choosing to speak up.

“We stand with our compañera Dolores Huerta and the survivors. What has been revealed is very painful and deeply disturbing,” said Gallegos, her voice cracking. “We know firsthand that silence has never protected our farmworker communities, and no movement or justice can ask people to stay silent about abuse — not then and not now.”

She, like others who spoke with KQED hours after hearing the news, said they want this moment of reckoning to help prevent similar abuses in the future. They hope the allegations against Chávez don’t undercut gains by the farmworker movement as a whole, built by many laborers and their families over decades.

“Right now, we are holding grief. I am holding so much pain in my chest, in my mind, in my heart,” Gallegos said. “At the same time, it’s a reflection that we cannot stay silent, we cannot let our movement end … reassuring our community that their voice matters and that no one should endure any type of abuse.”

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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García, who started accompanying her parents to work in agriculture at the age of 10, said sexual harassment by farm labor contractors and supervisors was rampant. She was fired from jobs, she said, as retaliation for not agreeing to men’s advances. But joining the UFW helped improve her job conditions and feel supported to complain if there were problems, she said.

García said that if union insiders or others knew of the allegations against Chávez but failed to investigate or willingly ignored the underage victims, there should be consequences.

“If those people are still around — if they are still alive — then they must be held accountable,” she said.

Outside a courtroom in Fresno, where the UFW is fighting a Trump administration plan to make it cheaper to hire temporary farm labor, union president Teresa Romero asked the public to respect the privacy of victims who came forward, according to CalMatters.

“We do not condone the actions of César Chávez,” Romero said. “It’s wrong.”

Three candidates for Long Beach City Council have joined forces in their bid to unseat the incumbents they’re challenging in the primary election this June.

Deb Kahookele, running for District 1; Tara Riggi, running for District 5; and Sequoia Neff, running for District 9, announced their combined ticket in a video published on social media earlier this month.

At a joint campaign event in front of around 100 people in Bixby Knolls on Wednesday, they reiterated their goal of “breaking up the 9-0 votes” they say are all too common on the mostly closely aligned Long Beach City Council, where it’s rare to see a narrowly-split vote.

All three are political newcomers, coming from careers in real estate.

They’ve claimed the grassroots lane this election, winning backing from resident groups like the Long Beach Reform Coalition that views itself as a check on City Hall power, occasionally suing — and winning — on tax issues.

Kahookele, Riggi and Neff say they feel disenfranchised from the current city government, something they emphasize in their slogan: people over politics.

They’re taking on three well-established incumbents: Mary Zendejas in the downtown area’s District 1, Joni Ricks-Oddie in North Long Beach’s District 9 and Megan Kerr in District 5 that extends east and west from Long Beach Airport. The three have already raised tens of thousands of dollars each for their reelection races and won endorsements from the mayor, other local politicians, labor and business groups.

Tara Riggi, center, and Sequoia Neff, left, talk with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on March 19, 2026. Riggi is running for the District 5 seat.

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Riggi said she decided to run for office after moving to the Cal Heights neighborhood and becoming president of the neighborhood association.

“My allegiance is to my community,” Riggi said at the event. “We are a truly grassroots campaign.”

Kahookele, who moved around a lot at an early age because her father was in the Army, said she found Long Beach home after moving to the city in 2010 and has since risen to prominent roles in several local organizations, including the Promenade Area Residents Association, Long Beach Pride and Long Beach Rotary.

“My votes aren’t going to be bought,” she said.

Deb Kahookele speaks with voters at a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. She is running for the District 1 City Council seat.

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Neff, a Poly High School grad and mother of six who founded a local youth basketball league and track club, owns a brokerage firm that operates in multiple states. Early this year, she held a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking in her district.

“North Long Beach has been unheard and overlooked for too long,” Neff said. “And it’s time we’re a part of the conversation, and I just want to step up and do that.”

At Wednesday’s campaign event, they repeatedly hit on the theme that current representatives aren’t doing enough to represent their constituents, and they vowed to dig into the city’s spending to remedy a looming $80 million deficit. They pledged to vote against the possibility of any new tax measures.

Sequoia Neff speaks with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. Neff is a candidate for the District 9 seat.

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North Long Beach resident James Murray said he showed up Wednesday to hear more from Neff after she attended a recent Starr King Neighborhood Association meeting, and he came away convinced.

“I think it’s time for a change,” he said.

Dan Pressburg, a longtime neighborhood organizer in the DeForest Park neighborhood, said the three candidates joining together was the right move: He wants people outside the current political structure to have a chance to rise to power.

You can see a full list of candidates who will appear on the June ballot here. The Long Beach Post will have continuing coverage, including a full voter guide to be published in the coming months.

The Trump administration has reshaped a lesser-known corner of the Justice Department to set immigration policy and escalate mass detentions and deportations.

An administrative court known as the Board of Immigration Appeals has published a body of immigration case law that significantly narrows the due process and relief from deportation available for immigrants, an NPR analysis of its decisions shows.

The White House has done that by shrinking the size of the board by nearly half — and stacking the remaining slate of 15 judges with President Donald Trump's appointees.

Last year, their decisions backed Department of Homeland Security lawyers in 97% of publicly posted cases; that's at least 30 percentage points higher than the average from the last 16 years.

The board has made it harder for immigration courts to offer immigrants bond in lieu of detention. It's made it easier to deport migrants to countries other than their own. And a new proposed regulation would make it harder for people to appeal their immigration decisions at all.

The board did this last year while quickly pumping out 70 published decisions, a record number of precedent-setting cases.

"The board has an impact on immigration law that is much, much bigger than the number of people that are on it," said Andrea Sáenz, a former board judge appointed by former President Joe Biden and terminated by Trump last year. "That's because they have this ability to set immigration precedents and rules for the whole country."

Immigration courts are housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, at the Justice Department and are not a part of the independent judiciary.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys appear before these courts to make their arguments about why someone should be removed from the country. Immigrants, meanwhile, appear before these courts to make their case about why they should be allowed to stay in the U.S.

The point of the Board of Immigration Appeals, former members and immigration attorneys said, is to catch mistakes made by immigration judges. After an immigration judge issues a decision, both the immigrant and ICE have a right to appeal that decision.

"The stakes are so incredibly high in the immigration proceedings and the law is so complicated and convoluted and difficult," said Victoria Neilson, supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project at the National Lawyers Guild. "Even assuming that [immigration judges] are acting in good faith, they're going to get things wrong sometimes because the laws are changing all the time."

Former BIA judge Katharine Clark had been at the DOJ for over 15 years and joined the Board in 2023.

She worked there until she received her reduction in force notice last year.

She said she reviewed thousands of cases in her role. These reviews were meant to catch overlooked details in an immigrant's case or testimony that could make the difference between approving or denying a deportation order.

"We lose an absolutely crucial method of catching errors by immigration judges who are absolutely flooded with cases," Clark said about the administration's gutting of the board. "In this situation, mistakes are essentially inevitable."

A DOJ spokesperson, who provided a statement sourced to the agency, said EOIR is "restoring integrity to the immigration adjudication system, and Board of Immigration Appeals decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of clear statutory language."

"President Trump and the Department of Justice will continue to enforce the law as it is written to defend and protect the safety and security of the American people," the spokesperson said.

"Under the leadership of Chief Appellate Immigration Judge Garry Malphrus, the BIA is now recommitted to following the law and fulfilling its core adjudicatory mission."

Trump changed the makeup of the board

Within a month of taking office, leadership in the new Trump administration moved forward with a reduction in force, cutting the number of appellate judge slots on the board from 28 to 15. The first to be dismissed were the most recent hires: those appointed by Biden.

Those had been there longer were also a part of the reduction in force or resigned soon after.

The changes in the workforce mirror a pattern seen across the federal government, especially immigration courts, where in the last year at least 100 judges were fired, and more resigned or retired. An NPR analysis last month found there are now a quarter fewer immigration judges than there were at the start of 2025.

Justice Department leaders have sent several memos and directives signaling to judges and appellate members that they want streamlined asylum and bond denials.

EOIR did not respond to a request for comment on the reduction in force. In the federal register notice announcing the reduction, the agency says a larger board wasn't more productive at reviewing more cases.

"Although many factors may have contributed to this outcome—including organizational and administrative challenges—the data demonstrate that increasing the Board's size has not brought about the hoped-for increases in productivity envisioned by prior expansions," the notice states.

Making rapid policy changes

BIA's public decisions set the precedent and tone for what immigration judges nationwide should do and how the general public should interpret immigration law and policy.

The number of such decisions has skyrocketed under Trump — as the board seeks to cement a particular interpretation of the law. An NPR analysis looked at BIA decisions over the past four administrations, going back to 2009.

It found that in 2025, the agency published 70 decisions. That is nearly as many as all of the decisions posted publicly under Biden and the single highest yearly total since 2009.

Judges that make up BIA panels reviewing appeals could consider tens of thousands of cases a year, but the vast majority are never made public.

"There are thousands and thousands of unpublished decisions that come out of the board every year that are your ordinary cases. And then normally, you'd maybe have two or three dozen precedents that are intended to explain a part of the law in more detail," said Sáenz, now with Co-Counsel NYC, a nonprofit immigration law organization. "And they're intended to be binding on the whole country and all immigration judges and [U.S. Citizenship and immigration Services] to say, this is how you actually follow this piece of the law."

ICE attorneys generally receive favorable orders in most cases against immigrants before the board, according to the data included in NPR's analysis; 2015 was the only exception, where immigrants won more cases than the administration did.

But in 2025 the government won 97% of the public cases brought before the board — a new high. In one of two cases in which the board did not side with DHS, DHS attorneys failed to appear at the initial hearing.

Already in 2026, NPR has tracked 21 decisions with DHS winning all but one of them, according to an NPR analysis of published decisions. The one case where the board ruled in favor of an immigrant involved the person withdrawing their appeal for asylum; they had already been granted another protection from deportation.

"Tangible effect on the lives of millions"

The administration "came in this time knowing we don't necessarily need to have immigration judges in place, we need to have the policy in place," said former BIA judge Homero Lopez, who was appointed by Biden and let go last year. "And the policy gets made by the board, not by the immigration judges."

Neilson, the attorney at the National Immigration Project, said recent decisions "have formed the backbone for how immigration judges" are allowed to consider asylum and bond cases.

"They've issued several decisions that make it impossible or nearly impossible for those who can seek bond from the immigration judge to even get bond," she said.

The BIA has made at least three decisions that limit whether an immigrant can be granted bond to be out of detention while their case plays out in the courts.

In one case, Matter of Yajure Hurtado, the board ruled that immigration judges have to deny bond and detain noncitizens who entered the country illegally. Several district court judges have rebuked the Trump administration's mandatory detention policy. Still, EOIR leaders in January instructed immigration judges to defer to Hurtado's case as precedent and to deny bond.

Federal appellate courts are now weighing in on the matter.

"The decisions that the board has made to take away the option of getting immigration bonds for various large groups of people has been by far the most impactful thing that has happened there since I left," said Clark, the former BIA judge. "It really has had a tangible effect on the lives of millions of people."

Other BIA decisions have paved the way for the government to more easily deport people to third countries — those countries other than their home country.

Proposed rule meant to curtail further appeals

At the start of 2026, the administration started phasing in more changes. A newly proposed rule would have shortened the window for immigrants' appeals to the board from 30 days to 10, and made it easier for appeals to the BIA to be dismissed before being heard.

The rule was aimed at reducing the BIA's pending backlog, which topped 200,000 cases as of the end of last year, according to EOIR.

Five immigrant rights organizations sued the administration, successfully arguing the rule would limit due process by straining legal services in order to meet the shorter deadlines.

A federal district judge last week blocked most of the new rule from taking effect, calling it unlawful and unenforceable.

Judge Randolph Moss on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the government offered only one reason why immigration attorneys might see a reduced workload thanks to the rule: they would "quickly lose virtually every appeal that they bring before the Board."

"Defendants' argument is like telling Habitat for Humanity that a rule limiting new home construction will help, rather than hurt, the organization because it will incur fewer costs acquiring lumber and nails," Moss wrote in his opinion.

The lawsuit is still ongoing. EOIR said it does not comment on litigation-related matters.

"If someone feels like they had their fair day in court and they just didn't meet the legal standard, people can kind of accept that," Nielson said. "But if you give up everything to follow the rules and then suddenly the rules disappear, that seems very un-American."

This story used artificial intelligence to help analyze 634 cases that were decided by the Board of Immigration Appeals from January 1, 2009 to March 18, 2026. For each case, the AI tool determined whether the panel had decided for the Department of Homeland Security or for the immigrant. NPR reporters tested and verified the accuracy of the tool's results, and an independent lawyer who manually tracked court cases for 2021 and 2015 reviewed the analysis and confirmed the results.

Copyright 2026 NPR