The Brief

Last month, California lawmakers passed a bill that would have opened jobs in the state’s higher education institutions to students who are undocumented. Then, earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed that bill, in part because he said the legal liabilities were too high.

But left the door open for reconsideration, saying that the courts could vouch for its legality.

In the campaign to open up those jobs, the issue is whether state agencies have to follow a 1986 federal law that compels federal and private employers to confirm employees’ authorization to work in the U.S.

Some legal advocates say there is no language in the law compelling state employers to follow that edict.

Newsom wrote in his Sept. 22 veto statement that he wants the legal theory tested:

The veto of the proposed law may prove to be the final nail on the coffin of the movement. But advocates of the policy said Newsom is leaving an opening.

“I don't believe that the governor is shutting the door on it. He is saying that he wants a court to bless the legal interpretation underlying it before moving forward,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a professor of immigration law at UCLA who is one of the bill’s most prominent advocates.

That idea puzzles other legal scholars, however. They say Newsom’s suggestion that the University of California go to the courts — to seek a judgment known as “declaratory relief” — would require a law or policy to be in place; and they say that’s not the case here.

What is declaratory relief?

Declaratory relief has been part of the federal legal system since the first half of the 20th century.

Some call it “preventive justice” because a party seeking declaratory relief wants a court to rule on the legality of a law or policy before it’s challenged.

“Declaratory relief is kind of a… rare thing to do,” said Dan Croxall, a professor at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.

He’s talking about a common shape civil cases take: one party alleges that a law or policy caused some kind of harm that’s already happened.

“Declaratory relief allows a party to go to a court if there's a threat of future litigation, and say, ‘we're not sure or not clear what our rights are here or what our obligations are here,’” Croxall said.

Is Newsom’s suggestion legally sound?

The U.S. Justice Department says declaratory relief is not available to resolve problems that are “hypothetical, academic, or theoretical.”

“What is perplexing to me is, I don't understand how, in the absence of either a state law or a firm university-wide policy, how you can get a declaratory relief or some sort of advice from a state court as to the legality of such a policy,” said Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional law and immigration law at the University of Colorado.

The University of California regents have so far declined to pass such a policy.

Asking the courts to rule on a controversy where there is no law or policy adopted yet amounts to seeking an advisory opinion from the courts. Croxall said federal and state courts do not do that.

“It would be really nice to be able to go to a federal judge and say, ‘Hey, can I do this?’ And they would basically be giving you legal advice,” Croxall said.

LAist asked Newsom's office to address skepticism that declaratory relief is an option. A spokesman replied: "The veto message speaks for itself."

In response to a request to clarify declaratory relief as it was described in the Governor’s veto message, a spokesperson for the Judicial Council of California, the policymaking body for the California courts, said the council is “prohibited from providing legal interpretation on such matters.”

The L.A. County Bar Association and the Orange County Bar Association did not reply to a similar request.

What happens next?

Newsom's veto has already received pushback.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, the author of the vetoed bill, has said he will re-introduce it in the next legislative session, while the activists who have been pushing for the change criticized the veto hours after it was issued.

“It felt to me like [Governor Newsom] was passing the buck,” said Arulanantham, the UCLA professor. “Because you don't actually need to test this in court. If California passes a law that says that the universities have to allow their undocumented students to fully participate in the university, then they can do that."

The bill's timeline

Incumbent Mayor Rex Richardson has raised more than $336,000 in contributions for his reelection bid, while his four declared challengers have not yet reported raising any money, according to campaign finance filings.

This comes as the field for the mayoral race, the marquee local race, is nearly finalized ahead of the filing deadline on Friday, March 6.

Richardson, looking to secure his second term, will so far face four contenders: former Marine and National Guardsman Joshua Rodriguez; Lee Goldin, a nonprofit worker; Rogelio Martinez, who gained notice for calling upon gangs to “take back” the city from ICE; and childcare specialist Terri Rivers.

None has held elected office in Long Beach before. The city has not voted in a mayor who hasn’t first sat on the City Council since Beverly O’Neill’s inaugural victory in 1994.

Outside of Richardson, only Rivers has filed to form a campaign fundraising committee, which is required if they plan to receive over $2,000 in contributions. None of the challengers has reported making any expenditures. Richardson has so far spent $138,000, mostly on campaign consultants.

Any candidate that earns more than 50% of the vote in the June 2 primary election will win outright; if no candidate gets a majority vote, the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election on Nov. 3.

Experts say such a large gap in fundraising is a strong indication of how the election will likely turn out.

Winning against a local incumbent like Richardson is “extremely difficult,” barring a major scandal or instance of corruption, said Matt Lesenyie, a political science professor at Cal State Long Beach.

“The strength of the incumbent can scare off quality candidates,” he said. “And then, should somebody take them on, they’ve got this machine with inertia that is going to push back against them mightily.”

Behind Richardson is a donor coalition of labor and business groups, politicians like Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, two sitting Long Beach council members in their own re-election races and L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna, formerly Long Beach’s police chief.

Beyond that, analysts who spoke with the Long Beach Post say Richardson holds the advantage in experience, name recognition and backings than his less well-heeled competitors.

The power of the mayor includes running council meetings, advocating on a regional, state and federal level, providing budget recommendations, among other duties. The measure of a good candidate, in many ways, is their ability to drive momentum around a plan.

Winning the seat, Lesenyie said, requires strong name recognition, a sizable war chest, and tight-knit backing from business associations, unions and other civic leaders. Winning candidates also need a track record that shows wherever they previously served, success was left in their wake.

Before it was destroyed in last year’s fires, the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates was a rare piece of beachfront real estate. The mobile home park provided affordable housing to families unable to buy one of the multi-million dollar homes more typical of the neighborhood.

“This was like paradise,” said Rashi Kaslow, a sailboat rigger who had lived at the property for 17 years. “There's nowhere else I want to be.”

Kaslow has been living on a boat since his Palisades Bowl home was lost in the fire.

Now that affordable housing could be permanently lost, with owners of the destroyed property now quietly seeking new buyers.

In a confidential offering memorandum obtained by LAist, the former 173-lot mobile home park is being pitched to investors as “a rare blank canvas for transformative development.”

Former residents are still fighting to return to the rent-controlled lots where they hope to rebuild new manufactured homes. But they say the owners have not been clear about the park’s future.

“A lot of our residents are already traumatized and still grieving,” said Jon Brown, president of the Palisades Bowl Community Group, an organization formed by displaced residents.

“Without the park owners communicating with us, we don't really know what's going on,” Brown added. “We can only remain confident that our government is going to continue to try to protect us.”

Rashi Kaslow stands in a beach parking lot across from the Palisades Bowl mobile home park, where residents' burned cars still haven't been removed.

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No price disclosed

The Palisades Fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates.

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Myung J. Chun

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Matthew Wenzel, a broker with the firm Marcus & Millichap, did not share the price the owners are asking for the 861,181-square-foot property. When asked about the former residents, he told LAist, “The owner is exploring all options for future use of the property.”

LAist contacted park co-owner Colby Biggs for comment, but did not receive a response. We also received no response after emailing the attorney for co-owner Loretta Biggs.

According to the sales document, the land is zoned to allow single-family homes with minimum lot sizes of 40,000 square feet.

Muhammad Alameldin, senior policy advisor at the pro-housing group California YIMBY, said at that size, fewer than two dozen homes could fit on the property. He said redevelopment could involve replacing former residents with much fewer — and much wealthier — homeowners.

“It's a shame that these fires happened, they destroyed people's lives, and now the existing local rules say the only thing that can be built is mansions,” Alameldin said. “This is one of the last parcels of affordable home ownership in the Palisades area. That's going to disappear.”

What rights do residents have?

Mobile home residents have a unique relationship with park owners. Unlike most renters, they own the structures they live in. But unlike most homeowners, they don’t own their land — they rent lots from park owners.

Clemente Mojica, president of the affordable housing nonprofit Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, said legal protections are often lacking for mobile home residents after natural disasters. He said mobile home parks have rarely been rebuilt after past California fires.

“Rebuilding isn't a choice for residents, but for the park ownership,” Mojica said. “In the case of the Palisades Bowl, the park ownership clearly does not intend to rebuild, which means that the next best option we see is a sale to the residents.”

Former residents have hung signs on the chain-link fence outside the Palisades Bowl mobile home park.

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Former residents say the Palisades Bowl owners should continue to honor their tenancies, which were subject to the city of L.A.’s rent control laws.

“They're hoping that somebody with a lot of money comes along, and maybe they don't do their due diligence,” said Lisa Ross, who lived at the Palisades Bowl for 33 years.

Since the fire, her family has been renting a Marina Del Rey apartment, but insurance money for rent has run out.

“I don't know what they possibly think,” Ross said of the owners. “I do know that we have people behind us in government officials who are adamant.”

State lawmakers worry about displaced seniors

State Sen. Ben Allen has introduced Senate Bill 1092, which would require mobile home park owners to give residents the chance to put in competitive bids to buy properties with the help of nonprofits or local governments.

“This park has been home to hundreds of seniors and families over the years,” Allen said in a statement to LAist. “The idea of deliberately and permanently displacing these residents, in such opportunistic fashion, puts a bad taste in all of our mouths.”

But even if Allen’s bill is signed into law, it likely wouldn’t take effect until 2027. Palisades Bowl residents worry a sale could be finalized before then. Allen said that if the sale goes through in the near future, residents should be legally entitled to relocation payments.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the neighborhood’s on the L.A. City Council member, told LAist she supports preserving the property’s use as a mobile home park. L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents the Palisades, said elected leaders are working to get the residents back to their former homes.

“After surviving one of the most devastating wildfires in our nation’s history, residents of Palisades Bowl should not be facing new uncertainty about their homes,” Horvath said.

Giorgi Antinori and her husband stand at the edge of Will Rogers State Beach.

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Sellers say park is a ‘generational offering’

The firms CBRE and Marcus & Millichap have been circulating the confidential sales document to institutional investors and developers. They’re positioning the property for high-end development. Just across Pacific Coast Highway from Will Rogers State Beach, the property is described as “a prime asset in a highly coveted, supply-constrained market.”

The document notes that the neighborhood’s average annual household income is north of $350,000, and average home values are above $1.9 million. It states that the Pacific Palisades is “one of Los Angeles’ most exclusive residential enclaves,” with “high barriers to entry,” such as “strict zoning regulations.”

Residents worry the plans are designed to stop them from ever returning.

Giorgi Antinori lived at the Palisades Bowl for five years with her husband. Their 3-year-old daughter was born in their home. Antinori, a Santa Monica native, said she and her husband spent years looking for affordable housing on L.A.’s Westside before discovering the Palisades Bowl.

Addressing potential buyers, Antinori said: “I would want them to really understand the heart of this place, and appeal to them to rebuild this for what it actually is and what it was. It was beautiful.”

In November, Californians will vote for “the second-hardest job in the state behind the governor.”

That’s according to someone who has held the job twice: John Garamendi, who was the state’s first elected insurance commissioner in the 1990s and served again in the early 2000s. Garamendi, now a U.S. congressman, said the commissioner job is “complex, hard, detailed work.”

“There is no other task in any office in the state of California, except the governor, that has such significant power and the necessity to use the power to regulate the industry,” Garamendi said.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is nearing the end of his second four-year term. In the past seven years, California experienced the biggest and most destructive wildfires in its history, which were a factor in insurance companies canceling homeowner policies or refusing to write new ones. With the insurance market out of whack, Lara last year put in place new regulations that include provisions insurers have long sought. Availability in the state is beginning to improve, though the commissioner said recently that he expects the recovery to take a few years.

The next insurance commissioner will have to balance availability with affordability. Premiums are rising. Many survivors of last year’s Los Angeles County fires are struggling to rebuild; they have sued insurance companies; and they have called for Lara to step down because they don’t think he has done enough to hold insurers accountable for delaying or denying their claims. Some insurers are still canceling policies. Many homeowners are continuing to turn to the last-resort FAIR Plan, which has seen a 146% increase in the number of policies since 2022.

“Affordability is only one piece of the very complicated puzzle,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. She said the insurance business is more complicated today partly because of new technology and participants in the market, such as third-party administrators for insurers and non-admitted carriers, which among other things are not subject to rate reviews by the Insurance Department.

If all that doesn’t sound like enough responsibility, California’s insurance commissioner also regulates auto, health, pet, ride-hailing and life insurance, as well as workers’ compensation.

Among the candidates who have thrown their hats into the ring are state Sen. Ben Allen and former state Sen. Steven Bradford, former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Jane Kim and Patrick Wolff, a financial analyst with experience in the insurance industry.

New rules and fire aftermath 

Lara recently told the state Assembly Insurance Committee that the new regulations he put in place last year are showing signs of working — that insurers are writing policies in California again.

Those regulations include speeding up reviews and approvals of insurers’ requests to raise rates, and allowing them to factor in reinsurance costs and catastrophe models when setting rates in exchange for writing a certain percentage of policies in areas with high wildfire risk. Insurance companies including Mercury, CSAA and USAA have requested higher rates under the new rules and have received them, Lara told the committee.

He credited the rules with the availability improvements the department has seen so far, despite the deadly, multibillion-dollar disasters that were the L.A.-area fires.

“The market stabilized at a moment when it could have collapsed,” he told the committee last month, referring to the fires as the “event that reshaped everything.”

Lara told the committee that he expects his so-called sustainable insurance strategy — and the recovery from the fires — to take three to five years, and that California is already a year into that timeline.

Policyholders have also complained about delays and denials of claims with their insurers, prompting the insurance department to investigate market leader State Farm, as well as the FAIR Plan, over their handling of claims. Lara has backed new legislation and policies to address some of the problems fire survivors have experienced, including lack of smoke-damage standards and underinsurance.

So the next commissioner will have to handle the continuing aftermath of the fires, and either work with or modify the regulations Lara put into place.

‘Brutal’ balancing act

That will require engaging with competing interests: insurance companies, lawmakers, consumers and consumer groups.

Early in his tenure, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Lara accepted donations from the insurance industry despite promising not to; he apologized and returned those donations. Since then, he has been accused of continued coziness with the industry and criticized for his overseas travel.

Former insurance commissioner Dave Jones, a Lara critic, said the next insurance commissioner needs to have “integrity” and “a seriousness of purpose.” Both Jones and Garamendi told CalMatters the commissioner must protect consumers while ensuring a viable insurance market, which almost everybody needs – whether they’re current homeowners, renters, business owners or property owners, as well as those who need insurance to buy a property.

Lara has often defended himself by saying he needs to communicate with the insurance industry that he regulates, and has criticized his predecessors as “armchair insurance commissioners.” He was not available for an interview, according to department spokesperson Gabriel Sanchez, who did not want to respond to the commissioner’s critics for this story.

Joel Laucher worked for the insurance department for more than three decades, focusing on insurers’ conduct — including briefly under Lara. He said the incoming commissioner will have to be diplomatic but firm with the industry.

“Even if you’ve had a nice conversation with them, that shouldn’t hold you back from enforcing consumer protection laws, including levying fines or taking them to hearings,” said Laucher, who is now a program specialist at United Policyholders.

Robert Herrell worked at the insurance department for several years. He is now executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, another nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

His group and others have asked Lara to withdraw regulations that make it harder for intervenors — any members of the public who under California law can challenge insurers’ requests to raise premiums — to have an impact on the insurance department’s rate reviews. The commissioner has said the new rules, which the industry supports, are meant to improve efficiency and speed up rate reviews; the consumer groups say the rules are “designed to impede effective consumer participation.”

“It’s exactly the opposite direction of the way you ought to be going,” Herrell said.

Bach, of United Policyholders, signed onto those joint comments submitted in November by consumer groups, unions and others. But she said some of Lara’s critics are a bit too tough on him.

She said the commissioner has to be the “bad guy” on rate increases; hold insurers accountable while encouraging them to keep writing policies in the state; and communicate to consumers that the insurance department can be helpful but doesn’t have the capacity to give them individualized legal aid.

“We’ve never seen a market like this,” Bach said. “The balancing act is so brutal.”

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

California and 23 other mostly Democratic states on Thursday sued the Trump administration over its new justification for the president’s wide-ranging tariffs.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta is co-leading the lawsuit with the attorneys general of Oregon, Arizona and New York. They say President Donald Trump’s use of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — which he invoked after the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 20 ruled that his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was unconstitutional — is also illegal.

Trump immediately issued 10% tariffs across the board after the Supreme Court ruling that struck down most of the tariffs he imposed last year.

“He’s desperately grasping at straws,” Bonta said in a virtual press conference Friday. “The president’s rationale for these unlawful tariffs has gone from unreasonable to ridiculous.”

The group filed the lawsuit in the Court of International Trade. It says that Section 122 has never been invoked and can be used only under limited circumstances, such as to deal with “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits” and to prevent an “imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar,” and that the president’s justifications do not meet those requirements.

“The President is using his authority granted by Congress to address fundamental international payments problems and to deal with our country’s large and serious balance-of-payments deficits,” White House Spokesperson Kush Desai said in an email. “The Administration will vigorously defend the President’s action in court.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was also at the press conference, said the president “conflates the balance-of-payment deficit with the trade deficit. They’re two distinct issues.”

The 35-page lawsuit explains that the balance of payments — the record of all transactions between U.S. and foreign residents that includes goods, services, income, assets and liabilities — consists of more than just the trade deficit.

Section 122 also requires that tariffs be applied evenly across products, which the lawsuit says the administration is not doing because Trump’s tariffs proclamation includes exemptions of goods from Canada and other countries, and many product exceptions.

The attorneys general also mentioned that Trump’s tariffs have raised prices for U.S. consumers and businesses. A recent Yale Lab study estimated that tariffs have cost the average household about $1,000 a year.

“President Trump ran on the promise of making life more affordable for families, yet here he is breaking the law to make life more expensive for Americans,” Bonta said.

In California, tariffs have disrupted businesses and industries including agriculture and wine, whose exports have fallen, according to a Public Policy Institute of California analysis.

The other states that brought the lawsuit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday, a judge for the Court of International Trade ruled that companies that paid broad tariffs under the previous law cited by Trump are due refunds.The United States collected more than $264 billion in tariffs in 2025, according to the Tax Foundation. More than $130 billion of the tariffs collected were under the law the Supreme Court ruled the president did not have the authority to use.

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