Topline:
EdSource followed the progress of 12 seniors as they dealt with the aftermath of COVID-19 school closures during high school and their first year of college.
Read on... to learn about each student, their struggles and their first semester of college.
Tatiana Torres had everything stacked against her. She spent most of her time in high school learning from home after an accident left her with persistent headaches and sensitivity to light.
She had just returned to Heritage High School in Brentwood full-time when the COVID pandemic closed schools. Despite these challenges, she will transfer this fall as a junior to UC Berkeley to major in political science. She had completed her general education credits in just one year at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg.
Torres graduated from Heritage in June 2022 and enrolled in Los Medanos College after she was unable to get into any of the universities she wanted to attend. She was accepted into an honors program there and flourished, despite taking many of her classes online.
“Academically, it wasn’t too difficult,” Torres said. “However, this year was much more difficult than I anticipated because of life challenges. It caught me off guard and I struggled for a bit, but I was able to bounce back.”
Torres is one of 12 California high school seniors from the Class of 2022 that EdSource followed through graduation and their first year as an adult. Five attended a university, five attended a California community college, one took a job and one student — who planned to sleep in his car while attending UCLA because he couldn’t afford rent — could no longer be reached.
Graduating from high school and going to college, or beginning a career was particularly daunting for the Class of 2022, which had spent more than a year studying from home during COVID pandemic school closures.
The new adults struggled academically, especially with math, and socially due to their prolonged time out of school. Some of the students interviewed changed long-held plans to attend colleges far from home, and one decided not to attend at all.
They are not alone. A newly released national survey of 1,500 seniors in the Class of 2023, by ACT Research, shows that nearly half said the pandemic affected their decision on at least one college or career-related choice. More than a quarter of the students said the pandemic changed their mind about which college to attend and 1 in 10 reported the pandemic made them question whether to attend college at all.
Although most of the students changed their decisions about college or career because of financial difficulties, declining grades and doubt about college tied to the pandemic, others changed course because the school closures gave them time for self-reflection or to discover new interests and priorities, according to researchers.
Torres took advantage of her time at home to start a nonprofit to help younger children struggling with mental health issues during the pandemic. She created the website calm-4-you after talking to a 5-year-old neighbor who felt confused and guilty over not being able to be with her friends and classmates.
Three of the other 11 seniors who were part of the EdSource Class of 2022 project started businesses, some with a goal of creating multiple streams of income for themselves after they graduate from college and start careers.
“We were all at home during our most important years of high school. Because of this, a lot of students have this independent go-getter mindset,” said Gannon Peebles, a 2022 graduate of Edison High School in Fresno. If I don’t know how to do something, I’m going to try to figure it out before I ask someone.”
After more than a year of distance learning, many of the students found holes in their knowledge and struggled to keep up with their studies — particularly in math — when they arrived at college. Some students had problems scheduling their classes or learning the needed study habits to get them through college coursework.
Miles Fu’s problems started after his first semester at American River College in Sacramento, when he was unable to get an appointment with a counselor to discuss which classes he should take in his second semester. He struggled to choose classes, picking them without first considering things such as the length of time in class each day. On Thursdays, for example, he scheduled classes from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. He found himself exhausted after two-hour classes and couldn’t keep up with the required reading.
“The whole year is foggy in my brain,” Fu said. “I did not pass all my classes, and there has been a lot of scrambling to figure out what I need to do next.”
Fu can’t say whether school closures during the COVID pandemic contributed to his difficulties in college.
“I may have absorbed my high school material better and that may have carried into college,” he said. “I may have learned study habits sooner. It’s possible I would have been better off (if the closures never happened).”
College wasn’t all bad this year for Fu. He discovered an interest in rangeland ecology after talking to people who manage rangeland and natural preserves. He would like to earn an internship that allows him to learn more about the career.
Despite the struggles of adapting to college and catching up academically, the new freshmen were ready to make up for everything they had missed out on socially during high school.
Peebles said the pandemic experience made him more outgoing when he moved to New York to attend Columbia University last fall. He enjoyed his time there so much he returned to Fresno for only a quick six-day visit before returning to New York earlier this month to take summer classes and a coveted summer internship with Sumeru Equity Partners, a private equity firm with offices across the country.
Even the thick smoke from a fire burning in Canada didn’t stop Peebles from jumping on public transit and enjoying all that New York had to offer when he returned.
“There is never a dull moment in this city,” he said.
Peebles, a straight A-student at Edison High, faltered in math his first semester at Columbia. He attributes his problems with math to not having a full year of in-person calculus during high school.
“It’s actually the opposite of what I thought,” he said of his expectation for college. “Going into college I thought academics would be doable and social life would be challenging. Will I be able to have a friend group and have fun? Looking back on it, my friends turned out amazing and academics the first semester were challenging, but went well.”
Jennifer Tran, a political science major at UC Berkeley, is active in student government and is often either traveling or on Zoom calls advocating for bills she has written either as a member of GENup, a student-led social justice organization, or the Youth Power Project, a nonprofit educational advocacy organization. Tran also is helping to launch the National Student Board Member Association.
Despite the busy schedule, Tran understands work-life balance and has set the weekends aside for fun. She recently moved out of the dorm and into a house with six other students.
“I definitely am getting the whole college experience,” she said. “COVID restrictions are getting a lot looser now. I do feel a little more free.”
Victor Contreras of Elk Grove broke his ankle in November when he was hit by a car while bicycling near San Diego State University, where he attends college. After the fracture healed, he was back on his bike as part of the university racing team and took a spot on an intramural basketball team.
Contreras said the COVID pandemic school closures made him more excited about leaving Elk Grove and meeting new people in college. He dived into the social life on campus with enthusiasm, although he struggled with math and other subjects during his first year. He expects he probably would have done better in college academically if it hadn’t been for the COVID school closures.
“Now, I’m more outgoing, definitely more active as a result,” Contreras said. “I feel like my sense of humor has been impacted (positively).”
Making friends and fitting in on campus was a major concern for Payton Zarceno, who had attended Mt. SAC Early College Academy in West Covina before moving to The Hill at UCLA, the university’s residence halls.
Zarceno decided to make the pandemic a learning opportunity. She spent the majority of her first year in college working with student organizations on student retention.
“(This) allowed me to learn more about the issues students face at UCLA that had been exacerbated by the pandemic,” she said. “Getting involved with these organizations really impacted me socially and personally because these organizations introduced me to so many new friends and faces.”
Tran found her niche as an education advocate during the pandemic school closures. She wrote or advocated for more than a dozen legislative bills to aid California students as the policy director for GENup while attending Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove. Now she is making her mark at UC Berkeley, where she is studying public policy. Tran is planning to add education as a second major next semester.
She recently became one of two Berkeley undergraduates selected for a Travers Fellowship at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this summer. The Commonwealth Club is the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum, according to the university website.
Tran said the COVID pandemic prepared her for the University of California strike that pushed students back into distance learning for weeks, as well as for the virtual lobbying she has been doing as part of her work with GENup and the Youth Power Project.
“It definitely changed how I think of education,” she said. “I think it’s kind of normal for me to miss classes now. I am able to catch up virtually.”
As part of the Youth Power Project, Tran also helped to write a bill that would offer a Presidential Award for civic engagement to U.S. students, as part of the President’s Education Awards Program. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has signed on as author of the bill.
Peebles is confident the Class of 2022 is moving beyond COVID and is back on track.
“I think people have figured it out,” he said. “I think that by now it is more normal. We have all kind of evened out academically.”
EdSource is an independent nonprofit organization that provides analysis on key education issues facing California and the nation. LAist republishes articles from EdSource with permission.
Topline:
Roughly 600,000 Californians still lack access to safe and reliable drinking water supplies. The problem will cost billions to fix. So why is the Newsom administration considering a climate overhaul that could gut a key source of funding?
Why it matters: A critical piece of California’s clean water funding is linked to the state’s carbon market, which sets a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions that oil refineries, power plants and manufacturers can meet by buying and trading carbon credits.
Why now: The cuts began in September, when Newsom and lawmakers struck a deal to reauthorize the state’s carbon market after weeks of tense and chaotic negotiations — renaming it “cap and invest.”
Read on... for more on what this means for clean drinking water in the state.
Seven years ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law to bring safe and affordable drinking water to the state’s most disadvantaged communities.
Last week, Newsom celebrated the program’s accomplishments.
“Over 1 million people that didn't have access to clean, safe drinking water today have access to clean, safe drinking water,” Newsom told a conference room filled with California’s water leaders, to a round of applause.
“I'm not saying that to impress you, but to impress upon you real progress. A lot more work to be done.”
But that work could lose critical funding as the Newsom administration overhauls its source: California’s carbon market. The changes to the program’s funding priorities and revenue threaten efforts to bring clean drinking water to schools, homes and communities across California.
“If that funding goes away,” said Sherry Hunter, who has long battled the arsenic leaching into the water supply in the historic Tulare County town of Allensworth, “Oh my god, I can’t even imagine.”
A critical piece of California’s clean water funding is linked to the state’s carbon market, which sets a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions that oil refineries, power plants and manufacturers can meet by buying and trading carbon credits.
Lawmakers tap this fund for environmental efforts, like combatting unsafe drinking water in rural communities.
In 2019, Newsom signed a law that gave rise to the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience, or SAFER, drinking water program at the State Water Resources Control Board. The law called for funding it with $130 million a year from carbon market revenues through 2030.
It can be a risky source of funding, subject to the rise and fall of credit auctions. But the law came with a promise: When the proceeds fell flat, the state’s general fund would make up the rest.
This isn’t the only pot of money that California draws on for its safe drinking water efforts, but it’s the most versatile, paying for emergency and other types of assistance that bonds and more restrictive funding can’t.
When Newsom and California lawmakers don’t budget enough to provide bottled water for households and schools with dry or dangerous taps, this fund covers the costs.
When low-income communities can’t pay for the technical expertise to manage their water systems or compete for grants needed to drill new wells and connect to safer water, the safe and affordable drinking water fund can help bridge that gap.
Thousands of households and dozens of schools rely on this money for emergency supplies — like Hope Elementary School in Porterville, where the taps flow with elevated levels of nitrate. The contaminant is linked to cancers, pregnancy complications and a life-threatening condition in infants known as “blue baby syndrome” when consumed in high enough quantities.
More than $83,000 has been awarded from the fund since 2021 to supply the school with bottled water and roughly $110,000 for technical assistance as the school district works to connect to safer supplies, according to the water board.
The funding lets school officials put their budget to work in the classroom.
“Thank goodness,” said Melanie Matta, the school district’s superintendent and principal. About three-quarters of the students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, Matta said. “That water can get expensive, right? We're already running on a pretty tight budget.”
Matta has a message for Newsom: She’d like him to tour her school, and witness why this money is so important.
“When you meet our kids and walk our small school community, you’ll see exactly why this fight matters and why this funding must be protected,” Matta said in an email. “Safe water is not a gift. It’s a promise. And we need your help to keep that promise.”
The cuts began in September, when Newsom and lawmakers struck a deal to reauthorize the state’s carbon market after weeks of tense and chaotic negotiations — renaming it “cap and invest.”
The new laws deprioritized funding lawmakers had promised to safe drinking water, clean air, fire resilience, affordable housing and other programs — shifting their priority behind $1 billion for high-speed rail and $1 billion for lawmakers to direct through the budget.
The laws removed the 2030 expiration for the safe and affordable drinking water program. But they also dropped the original promise to make up any funding shortfalls from the carbon market — putting $100 million at risk through 2030, according to a Department of Finance forecast in January.
Assemblymember James Gallagher, a Republican from Chico, called the new priority system “unfortunate” and “misplaced” at a budget subcommittee hearing in March.
“If you ask these Central Valley communities, these rural communities, ‘What would you prefer? Would you want safe drinking water coming out of your faucet, or do you want a high-speed rail in your community?’” he said. “I'm pretty sure I know the answer.”
Now, climate regulators on the California Air Resources Board — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — are proposing to overhaul the carbon market in ways that could cut revenues in half.
If adopted, the changes could leave no funding at all for safe drinking water and other third-tier programs as soon as the 2027–28 fiscal year, according to legislative analyst Helen Kerstein — though, Kerstein added, the forecasts are uncertain.
Sanchez, who was Newsom’s top climate advisor before leading the air board, defended the staff proposal at a Senate oversight hearing last week.
“Do you believe the Legislature intended to eliminate funding for affordable housing, transit, drinking water, wildfire prevention and clean air programs with the reauthorization?” Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, a Democrat from San Bernardino and chair of a Senate budget subcommittee, asked Sanchez.
Sanchez said the staff proposal didn’t specifically call for defunding those programs.
“Let me stop you for a moment. That will be the effect,” Reyes said. “There's nothing left … and those are the most important programs that have served the community.”
Newsom deflected, pointing to the Legislature.
“Any suggestion that California is ‘trading away’ clean drinking water ignores both the current budget proposal, and the Legislature’s ongoing role in funding these priorities,” spokesperson Anthony Martinez said in an emailed statement. Martinez hinted at, but did not specify, what’s coming in Newsom’s May budget revision Thursday.
Roughly 613,000 people still rely on water systems that fail to meet state requirements for safe and reliable drinking water. Regulators at the state water board deem another 661 water systems serving nearly 2 million people “at risk” of failure.
Still, almost one million more people have safe drinking water than in 2019 — which state water officials attribute to the safe drinking water program and its unique, flexible pot of money.
“When we were relying on the community to spend its own time and money to get ready, many of them got left behind,” said Darrin Polhemus, who leads the state water board’s Division of Drinking Water. “The safe drinking water fund has allowed us to prepare communities to do long-term projects, faster.”
The program, which draws from other state and federal funding sources, has awarded more than $1.8 billion in grants for disadvantaged communities. It’s helped around 320 water systems serving 3.3 million people come off the state’s failing list, even as other, at-risk suppliers stumble onto it.
The safe and affordable drinking water fund also has helped pay for emergency repairs, technical assistance, bottled water supplies and even some construction costs in communities from San Bernardino to Tulare, Monterey and Sutter counties — all contending with aging and contaminated water systems.
“We could not have done it without them,” said Sherry Hunter in Allensworth, which started work on a new well and storage tank in January to bring clean water to a town struggling with arsenic and other water problems for over a century.
“There's a lot of other smaller disadvantaged communities that depend on them as well,” Hunter said.
The costs for fixing these water systems and household wells could hit billions of dollars in the coming years, according to a 2024 water board analysis. And Polhemus said the challenge will grow — even as funding shrinks — as water suppliers face new limits on contaminants like hexavalent chromium.
“If we’ve started and committed to a project, we’ve got the funding reserve to see it through,” Polhemus said. “It’s just, we won’t be starting new projects.”
Federal money is also running out. A Biden-era funding boost ends this year, slashing another, more restrictive fund for drinking water infrastructure projects from hundreds of millions of dollars to tens of millions, according to federal and water board data. Congressional earmarks could eat into what remains.
Tami McVay, emergency services director for the nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, which connects rural communities to affordable housing and safe drinking water, is worried.
Her program provides bottled water to more than 3,000 households in the San Joaquin Valley, and trucks water to refill storage tanks at roughly 700 more. Her team helps replace domestic wells and test their water. And it relies on state funding.
Seeing the potential cuts, she said, “it definitely made our mouths drop a little.”
Polhemus said he understands communities are nervous.
“We're going to work with the funds we're given to continue the program as best we can, because we know the need still exists,” he said. “The question of how much of it exists, of course, comes out of our hands and into the political arena.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Topline:
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing further budget cuts and expanding the state’s reserves despite a recent surge in tax revenue — an attempt to balance the books in anticipation of a looming long-term deficit in the coming years.
Tackling the state's budget deficit: In a presentation Thursday, Newsom released his last budget plan as governor. He proposed a $350 billion spending plan that would zero out the state’s budget deficit for two years and cut longer-term budget gaps in half.
The context: Newsom had pledged not to leave his successor with a giant structural deficit. He proposed slashing general fund spending by $1.8 billion, primarily by further cutting Medi-Cal, including by raising monthly premiums on undocumented immigrant adults by $20 and reinstating Medi-Cal asset tests. His proposal would also shore up the rainy day fund by transferring $3.6 billion to the account and setting aside nearly $10 billion more for fiscal year 2027-28.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing further budget cuts and expanding the state’s reserves despite a recent surge in tax revenue — an attempt to balance the books in anticipation of a looming long-term deficit in the coming years, he said.
In a presentation riddled with criticism of the Trump administration and featuring memes including an image of President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as “Dumb and Dumber,” Newsom released his last budget plan as governor on Thursday.
He proposed a $350 billion spending plan that would zero out the state’s budget deficit for two years and cut longer-term budget gaps in half. Newsom had pledged not to leave his successor with a giant structural deficit.
“I’m not trying to get out of Dodge,” Newsom said. “This is a balanced budget structurally for the next 18 months after I’m gone.”
He proposed slashing general fund spending by $1.8 billion, primarily by further cutting Medi-Cal, including by raising monthly premiums on undocumented immigrant adults by $20 and reinstating Medi-Cal asset tests.
While Newsom wants the state to continue withdrawing $7 billion from the state’s reserves this year, his proposal would also shore up the rainy day fund by transferring $3.6 billion to the account and setting aside nearly $10 billion more for fiscal year 2027-28.
The governor’s presentation is an updated outlook at the state’s finances since January, when Newsom’s administration projected a “modest shortfall” of $2.9 billion that would grow to a $22 billion deficit in fiscal year 2027-28.
Since then, the state’s tax revenue has grown faster than anticipated, thanks to a robust stock market and California’s robust AI-driven technology sector. Newsom projects that the state will see $16.5 billion more in revenue over a three-year budgeting window than expected in January.
A graphic shown during Gov. Gavin Newsom's presentation of his revised 2026-27 budget proposal in Sacramento on May 14, 2026. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters But Newsom said the state’s financial outlook remains ominous, attributing much of the uncertainty to Trump’s policies, including a spending plan the president calls his “one, big beautiful bill.” It could strip 2 million low-income Californians of health insurance coverage, and the war in Iran, which has sent gas prices skyrocketing nationwide.
“We have a president who … doesn’t particularly give a damn about the financial situation of the average American,” Newsom said.
It’s unclear how long California’s revenue boon would last. The recent spike in tax collection suggests that the stock market is reaching “bubble territory” and could head toward an “eventual bust,” said the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises the state Legislature. “The state should be prepared for revenues to be tens of billions lower within one or two years.”
California’s spending has continued to outpace revenue growth. Since fiscal year 2019-20, spending has grown by more than $100 billion, primarily from maintaining and expanding K-14 education, according to the LAO.
“We need to tighten our belt, and we need to focus on the outcomes,” he said.
But Newsom is proposing new spending in some areas, including $300 million to subsidize private healthcare for low-income and middle-class Californians as well as money to offer paid pregnancy leave for TK-12 and community college employees and to cut filing fees for roughly 250,000 new businesses in half.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Topline:
Puerto Rican food is not abundant in L.A. But cookbook author and MasterChef alum Monti Carlo feels it should be given a bigger place at the table. She'll be talking to LAist's Gab Chabrán at a Cookbook Live event at The Crawford Forum on May 21 to celebrate her debut cookbook Spanglish: Recipes & Stories, a collection of Puerto Rican recipes shaped by a life lived between the island and the mainland.
Why it matters: Puerto Rican food remains one of the most underrepresented cuisines in SoCal, and Spanglish makes the case that cocina criolla deserves a bigger table — not just in restaurants, but in home kitchens across L.A.
Why now: Carlo will be in conversation with LAist food and culture writer Gab Chabrán, with a live cooking demo to follow. Tickets are available at laist.com/events.
In L.A., we tout ourselves as having one of the best food scenes in the world, with cuisines from nearly every corner of the globe available to sample.
And yet a few still occasionally fall through the cracks. Blame geography, or the lack of a sizable population to sustain such establishments. Either way, the gap is real.
Puerto Rican food is one of those cuisines. Despite a handful of restaurants scattered throughout the Southland, cocina criolla remains largely underrepresented. For me, it's personal.
My grandfather was Puerto Rican, born on the island and eventually settling in El Paso, Texas, where he met my grandmother — who was Mexican — before shipping out to fight in the Korean War. He came back, but the family didn't hold. He and my grandmother split when my dad was young. And yet his spirit has always loomed in the family background.
I'm always looking for ways to connect with that side of my heritage, which is why, when I heard chef and writer Monti Carlo was writing a cookbook called Spanglish: Recipes & Stories, I invited her to appear at our next Cookbook Live event on May 21 as an opportunity to dig deeper.
Monti Carlo has been working in food media for the past 15 years, first appearing on Season 3 of MasterChef, where she placed fifth. Since then, she's served as an advisor for the James Beard Foundation.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she spent much of her youth in Texas — navigating what many of us know as a hybrid identity, that particular life lived between cultures. Hence the title: Spanglish is a term used by many whose families come from Latin American countries but who grow up speaking English, often mixing both languages in the same sentence, sometimes in the same breath. For Carlo, it's also an act of reclamation — taking back a word that's long been used to marginalize Puerto Ricans in the diaspora.
When discussing the recipes in her book, Carlo keeps coming back to one dish in particular: pastelón.
It's a dish that encapsulates the cuisine — sweet fried plantain slices layered with picadillo, a beef mince made with raisins and olives, bound together with egg, and blanketed in cheese.
"It's salty and sweet," she said. "That's our favorite flavor."
And that distinction matters. Puerto Rican cuisine, she's quick to note, isn't built around heat the way Mexican food is. It's subtler than that, rooted in a balance of contrasts — and no ingredient embodies that better than the plantain, which Carlo describes as the most foundational ingredient in the cuisine, even though it wasn't originally native to the island, having been brought by enslaved people from Africa.
"My goodness, what a plantain can do," she said. "From being eaten green to being eaten while it's surrounded by fruit flies."
To her, that full arc — starchy and firm at one end, deeply sweet and soft at the other — is a portrait of Puerto Rican cooking itself.
Carlo's version in the book is vegetarian, using mushrooms instead of ground beef, while keeping two of the cuisine's foundational bases intact: recaíto and sazón. Recaíto is a pureed aromatic blend — green peppers, herbs, and recao (also known as culantro) — that gives dishes their distinctive green hue. Sazón is a dry seasoning made up of garlic powder, oregano, coriander, annatto, and ground turmeric.
Puerto Rican food exists in SoCal — you just have to know where to look. As someone who's always on the lookout for a plate of pasteles or a bowl of mofongo, a few spots have stood the test of time, including Señor Big Ed's in Cypress and Mofongos in North Hollywood.
Señor Big Ed's has been open since 1982 — though it didn't start as a Puerto Rican restaurant. It opened as a Green Burrito, a local Mexican fast food chain that was later purchased by the company that owns Carl's Jr. The name comes from an item on the original menu, and it stuck even after the previous owner, Rafael Rodriguez, originally from San Juan, added Puerto Rican food to the menu in 1990.
Yolanda Coronado has cooked at Señor Big Ed's since day one and bought the restaurant in 2003. Her daughter Veronica, who helps manage day-to-day operations, said the name still catches people off guard.
"The restaurant is named after a burrito," she laughed. But the food is unambiguously boricua — and Coronado makes sure of it, offering free pastelillos to anyone who walks in looking for a taco. "As soon as I see someone trying to order a taco or a burrito, I'm like, hey, have you tried the Puerto Rican food?"
For the Puerto Ricans who find them, the reaction is often immediate. "They get emotional when they see the flags," she said. "They start smelling the sofrito and the garlic. It reminds them of grandma's cooking."
In North Hollywood, Augusto Coën, the owner of Mofongos, has been making the same case since November 2009. "When I started the business, there weren't any Puerto Rican restaurants in Los Angeles County," he said.
Nearly 17 years later, he's built a following that includes Jimmy Smits, Luis Guzmán, and Cardi B — though Coën is quick to note the restaurant is as much for an electrician as an actor. Awareness, he says, is growing slowly, with some help.
"The popularity of people like Bad Bunny has made people curious about things that are Puerto Rican — that really helps out," he said.
And the search extends further than you might expect. Out in Perris — some 70 miles from downtown L.A. — Olga Gonzalez runs a cottage kitchen out of her home, selling homemade Puerto Rican empanadas fried or frozen for pickup. Olga Gonzalez inherited the business, Olga's Empanadas, from her late mother Ana, who started it in the San Gabriel Valley. While also working the graveyard shift at a warehouse, Gonzalez has grown the menu to 16 flavors, drawing customers from Beaumont, Temecula, and Hemet — and as far as Watts and Compton, making the reverse trek.
"I have so many customers just saying like, we don't have any of this out here," Gonzalez said. "That's why I'm cooking."
Carlo comes to The Crawford on Thursday, May 21, at 6 p.m., and she's not coming empty-handed. She'll be cooking — a passion fruit hand cake, to be exact — and if you're wondering what that means for me, she's already warned me that it's arms day (those egg whites don’t whip themselves). Tickets and more information at laist.com/events.
Topline:
The Trump administration is suspending a requirement that foreign visitors from countries that have qualified for the World Cup and have bought tickets for the soccer tournament pay as much as $15,000 in bonds to enter the United States, the State Department said yesterday.
The backstory: The department imposed the bond requirement last year for countries that it said had high rates of people overstaying their visas and other security issues as part of the Republican administration's broader crackdown on immigration.
Why does it matter: Travelers to the United States from 50 countries are required to pay the new bond, and five of those countries have qualified for the World Cup — Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Tunisia. Citizens from those five countries who have purchased tickets from FIFA are now exempt from the visa bond requirement.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is suspending a requirement that foreign visitors from countries that have qualified for the World Cup and have bought tickets for the soccer tournament pay as much as $15,000 in bonds to enter the United States, the State Department said Wednesday.
The department imposed the bond requirement last year for countries that it said had high rates of people overstaying their visas and other security issues as part of the Republican administration's broader crackdown on immigration.
Travelers to the United States from 50 countries are required to pay the new bond, and five of those countries have qualified for the World Cup — Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Tunisia.
Citizens from those five countries who have purchased tickets from FIFA are now exempt from the visa bond requirement. World Cup team players, coaches and some staff already had been exempt from the bond requirement as part of the administration's orders to prioritize the processing of visas for the tournament.
"The United States is excited to organize the biggest and best FIFA World Cup in history," Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mora Namdar said. "We are waiving visa bonds for qualified fans who bought World Cup tickets" and opted in to the FIFA Pass system that allows expedited visa appointments as of April 15.
The waiver is a rare loosening of immigration requirements under the administration and will ease travel burdens for at least some visitors to the U.S. for the World Cup, which begins June 11 and is co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to restrict immigration in ways that critics say are incongruous with the type of unifying message that a global sporting event such as the World Cup is supposed to project.
For instance, the administration has barred travelers from Iran and Haiti, though World Cup players, coaches and other support personnel are exempt. Travelers from Ivory Coast and Senegal, face partial restrictions under an expanded version of that travel ban, even without the visa bond exemption.
Foreign travelers also had faced potential new requirements to submit their social media histories, although that policy from U.S. Customs and Border Protection had not gone into effect. Also, the administration had deployed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at airports recently when Transportation Security Administration personnel were not being paid during a partial federal shutdown.
Those measures prompted Amnesty International and dozens of U.S. civil and human rights groups to issue a "World Cup travel advisory" that warns travelers about the climate in the U.S.
In a report this month, the main advocacy group for U.S. hotels blamed visa barriers and other geopolitical issues for "significantly suppressing international demand," leading to hotel bookings for the soccer tournament that are far below what had initially been anticipated.
The American Hotel & Lodging Association said travelers are concerned about potentially lengthy visa wait times and increased fees, along with uncertainty about how they're being processed to enter the U.S.
The bond requirements are part of the administration's larger effort to clamp down on migrants who travel to the U.S. on temporary visas but then overstay them. Visa applicants from the affected countries are required to pay $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 in bonds, which will be refunded if the traveler complies with the terms of the visa or if the visa application is denied.
As of early April, the number of World Cup fans affected by the bond requirement was believed to be relatively small, perhaps only about 250 people, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. But they said that number was changing rapidly as more people buy tickets and some with tickets opt against traveling.
FIFA had requested the waiver, which had to be approved by the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, and was the topic of discussion at multiple meetings at the White House and elsewhere in Washington for several months, the officials said.
Copyright 2026 NPR
