The Brief

In May 2023, the policy-making body of the University of California, the UC Regents, voted unanimously to open campus jobs in the system’s 10 campuses for students who are undocumented.

It was a watershed proposal that relied on new — and untested — legal analysis of federal employment law put forward by UCLA faculty. It would have the potential to help tens of thousands of students earn money to pay for school.

But in January, regents did an about face and suspended implementation after UC’s president warned that such a change could lead to a loss of federal funding and open the university system and its staff up to lawsuits and other legal issues.

Lawmakers have responded with legislation to force the issue, possibly setting up a clash with top UC leaders.

Here’s the problem: The California constitution gives the legislature the power to pass laws to shape policies in much of the state’s higher education system — but not the University of California.

That means legislative workarounds to UC issues — like the employment options for undocumented students — often stop short of a mandate.

How did UC get this autonomy from state lawmakers?

You could say that University of California’s separate — some would say, elite — status was there at its infancy, when state legislators gave UC, then just one campus, the status of public trust...

The university's leaders insisted that autonomy would save the University of California "from the partisan politics and rampant corruption that marked California’s turbulent 1870s,” said UC Berkeley researcher John Douglass via email.

President University of California President Michael Drake

(

Elena Zhukova

/

Courtesy University of California

)

Bottom line: California legislators can pass laws to change the inner workings of the California State University system, and the California community colleges, but not the University of California.

What that autonomy means for undocumented students

After UC Regents unanimously approved the plan for undocumented students last year, UC President Michael Drake’s office stepped in to oppose it.

“[A]fter receiving advice from both inside and outside legal counsel, we concluded that there were considerable risks for the University and the students we aim to support,” saidMario Guerrero, Drake’s legislative director, in a letter to state legislators.

UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, which authored the legal analysis pushing for the change, said President Drake’s concerns are overblown.

Sacramento lawmakers step in to push UC to pass shelved plan

The first legislator to step in was Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes. On Feb. 27, she introduced ACA 20 — a constitutional amendment — to compel UC campuses to create these jobs for students who are undocumented.

“Like many, I was incredibly disappointed by the decision of the University of California Board of Regents to deny undocumented students at UC the same ability to seek employment at UC as their peers,” Cervantes said in an email to LAist.

Cervantes wants UC to open the jobs to students who are undocumented.

“ACA 20 is the only vehicle in the Legislature this session that would force UC to do so,” Cervantes said.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, meanwhile, introduced a proposal in April, AB 2586, which urges UC, CSU, and community colleges to open those jobs.

Who wins in a UC vs. Sacramento bout?

This isn’t the first time Sacramento has stepped in to challenge a controversial UC policy direction.

Lawmakers have recently tried to push the university system to enroll more students from California. The end result is more carrot than stick — promising tens of millions of dollars to adjust in-state enrollment.

Admission and tuition issues go back years.

“I am going to vote against the 5% tuition increase,” said then-Gov. Jerry Brown to UC’s President and Regents in 2014. The hot issue at the meeting was a politically unpopular proposal to increase UC student tuition to make up for a state funding shortfall.

“The plan needs to move forward,” UC President Janet Napolitano told Brown and others at the meeting.

Two implicit threats were in the air: Napolitano would push for a tuition increase if Sacramento didn’t increase funding, and Brown would hold up funding if UC approved a tuition increase.

California governor-elect Jerry Brown, a Democrat, speaks to supporters as he celebrates his win over Republican challenger and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

The outcome? Six months later Napolitano and Brown resolved their face-off as rising state revenue allowed Brown to increase UC’s budget. Napolitano supported a two-year freeze of student tuition.

The current face-off between UC policymakers and the state legislature is complicated by the divisions within UC leadership.

Drake opposes the campus jobs plan while a number of UC Regents support it, including Regent John Pérez, a politically connected former speaker of the state assembly who has supported immigrant rights policies.

Lawmaker Alvarez, for his part, wishes for a more collaborative solution than what happened with Brown and Napolitano.

“I don't operate in a world of threats,” he told LAist. “We're all in public service to do right by our community … I expect that the UC will, if this bill gets signed by the governor, that they will implement this with fidelity and do what's right.”

How healthy is the conflict?

The UC Regents have the power to hire and fire the president of the university system. But the Regents aren’t the only constituency Drake answers to.

“Any head of a [university] system has three bosses,” said USC emeritus education professor William Tierney. “One of them is Sacramento, and that's the governor and the legislature. A second is the faculty and students of the specific campus, and the third is the state and community."

Drake’s decision to oppose a policy approved by his bosses based on possible future financial repercussions wasn’t misguided, Tierney said, because as president of the entire university, Drake is responsible for the system’s finances.

Generations ago, Tierney said, many Californians felt a high regard for the UC system that led them to be deferential to how the system was run.

“The world has changed, not because the systems have changed, but I think the way the public looks at public entities is very different,” he said, and that’s led more people to want to hold UC to account because the state spends billions of dollars each year to help run the UC system.

The two legislative proposals to open up UC campus jobs for students who are undocumented, Tierney said, are attempts by Sacramento to micromanage the UC.

Some answer back that lawmakers are answering to a wider constituency.

“The legislature obviously has a rightful duty to hold the UC accountable,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, an LA-based nonprofit that lobbies policymakers to widen access to California higher education.

Siqueiros is in favor of the Opportunity for All proposal because it would help an underserved population of college students. She’s not surprised, she said, that Drake raised red flags.

“The tension is good,” she said, “and a healthy part of our democratic system of checks and balances.”

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

(

Courtesy

/

Hedy Torres

)

That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.