The Brief

Boom.

Ronda Deplazes had just gotten out of the shower and placed curlers in her long blond hair when she heard something slam against her front door.

Boom.

Outside, her son — a man who could fix anything, who loved his family, who never remembered these incidents but always apologized later — was yelling and swearing as he pulled large gray river rocks from the planter beds and hurled them at the front of his parents’ suburban Concord home.

Boom.

Deplazes heard a woman scream.

Later she learned her 38-year-old son had ripped a branch from a crepe myrtle in the front yard, leapt over a retaining wall and fallen onto the sidewalk. CalMatters is not naming Deplazes’ son, who lives with psychosis and addiction and could not be interviewed for this story.

Police arrived within minutes that August evening. They found Deplazes, hair still in rollers, in bed cuddling her shaking 17-year-old Labrador, Farley.

This was not the first time officers had visited the family’s home.

“What happened with CARE Court?” one officer asked.

Deplazes offered her assessment of a program she’d once seen as an answer to her prayers.

“They did nothing,” she said.

More than three years have passed since Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced the concept of CARE Court. Standing at a lectern in front of a San Jose treatment center in March 2022, he described a new court system that would steer hard-to-treat individuals down a pathway of housing and services. He called it “a completely new paradigm, a new approach, a different pathway.”

“I’ve got four kids,” he said that day. “I can’t imagine how hard this is …It breaks your heart. I mean, your life just torn asunder because you’re desperately trying to reach someone you love and you watch them suffer and you watch a system that consistently lets you down and lets them down.”

Family members of people with serious mental illnesses told CalMatters they breathed a sigh of relief that day. So many struggled for years to find help for loved ones who seemed to slip ever deeper into psychosis.

While disability rights advocates decried the program as a threat to the civil liberties of people with mental illness, and counties protested that they didn’t have the necessary resources or time, family members described feeling a twinge of something that had long eluded them: Hope.

Finally, they thought, someone heard them.

Finally, their loved ones would get help.

With the vocal support of many of these families, Newsom shepherded CARE Court through the Legislature. That October, he signed it into law. A year later, the program rolled out in an initial cohort, reaching the entire state by December 2024.

Now, many of the same family members who embraced CARE Court say it has fallen short of their expectations. In dozens of conversations with CalMatters, they described loved ones who continue to cycle between jail and homelessness. Some said their loved ones were dropped because they failed to participate in voluntary treatment plans. Others said counties had lost track of them entirely.

Some of the disappointment is a matter of scale. Newsom had initially projected that as many as 12,000 people could be eligible for the new program.

Two years of data from the state’s judicial council shows that, as of October, courts had received 3,092 petitions for CARE Court. Almost half were dismissed. Thus far, these petitions have translated into just 706 CARE plans and agreements.

Ronda Deplazes at her home in Concord, on Oct. 27, 2025.

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Florence Middleton

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Catchlight/CalMatters

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A photo of her son, now 38, riding a motorcycle in their backyard as a child, long before his mental health diagnosis. “His love of life,” she said, referring to dirt bikes and how her son has been a risk taker since childhood.

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Florence Middleton

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Catchlight/CalMatters

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County and state officials say it’s too soon to pass judgment on the program. They point to the uncounted individuals who received help without ever enrolling in the program, and to those who have made incremental progress, perhaps working with a substance use counselor for the first time. They also say buy-in from vulnerable people takes a long time to achieve, but that the voluntary nature of the program is essential for lasting recovery.

Some officials acknowledge a significant disconnect between what many families expected, and what the law actually prescribes.

In Contra Costa County, where Deplazes lives, Judge Melissa O’Connell said she meets with participants who tell her they now have stable housing or are preparing for their first job interview. Such accounts buoy her.

“That’s how I view CARE,” she said. “It is helping people that would not be helped if CARE did not exist. It’s not helping everyone. I get that.”

But many families who have spent years or decades begging for help have lost patience.

In Ronda Deplazes’ case, she’s going to war.

“That’s my mission,” she said. “We have to stop CARE Court.”

Years of desperation

Anosognosia.

It’s a word people struggle to pronounce, even as they describe how profoundly it has upended their loved ones’ lives. It means an inability or refusal to recognize a defect or disorder that is clinically evident.

Ronda Deplazes knows it as a Catch-22.

Her son is sick but doesn’t believe he’s sick. Who would voluntarily accept treatment for an illness they don’t think they have?

The conundrum dates to 1967, when California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short law. Prior to the law, it had been far too easy for family members to force loved ones into mental health treatment. Civil rights violations were rampant. Conditions in state hospitals were dismal.

The landmark law established strict criteria for involuntary treatment. It imposed specific timeframes for confinement and limited who could be subjected to holds: only people deemed a danger to themselves or others, or gravely disabled.

These civil rights protections are still widely considered imperative. But desperate family members say the law has at times made it difficult for them to get their loved ones life-saving treatment.

Many families pinned their newfound hope on Newsom’s initial comments, in which he said individuals who weren’t willing or able to follow through on their CARE plans might be moved “into a different category of care and support, more traditional along the lines of what we have today, through the (Lanterman-Petris-Short) conservatorship system.”

Several family members CalMatters interviewed interpreted that to mean CARE Court could compel their seriously mentally ill loved ones to get help.

“We get so pumped up with hope,” Deplazes said.

“I think the frustration and disappointment is more than a person can bear. That's the truth of it. That is the bottom line,” she said.

In an interview with CalMatters, California Health and Human Services Undersecretary Corrin Buchanan said CARE Court was never intended to be another form of conservatorship. She emphasized what she considers unique facets of the program – families can directly petition the courts for help, county behavioral health departments face increased accountability and they are getting state support to develop the “three-legged stool” of treatment, medication and housing.

She said she’s heard from many families whose loved ones have benefited from the program, which can provide tools to meet the needs of “the right person, who’s the right fit for the model.”

Growing up, Deplazes’ son loved baseball, tinkering and spending time outside.

In retrospect, the first signs that something was wrong were the risky behaviors — leaping from the second story window onto the trampoline, doing donuts with his truck. By the time he was 19, he had received three DUIs. At one point, neighbors filed for a restraining order against him.

A pillow rests on an armchair at Ronda Deplazes’ home in Concord, on Oct. 27, 2025.

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Florence Middleton

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CatchLight/CalMatters

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Deplazes, a preschool teacher who regularly volunteers through her church, and her husband, Roger, who runs a family solar electricity business, met in middle school and have been together since their teens. They tried everything they could think of to help their son. They paid to send him to a high-end rehabilitation center. Staff told them their son was hearing voices. Eventually, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition marked by symptoms of psychosis as well as mood disorders.

Deplazes was familiar with the implications of that diagnosis: Her mother, sister and brother had all suffered with similar illnesses. She and her husband found their son a psychiatrist. He thrived for a while, with professional help, a girlfriend and a part-time job.

Then, during the pandemic, Deplazes said her son went off his medication because he didn’t like the way it made him feel.

Things spiraled.

He lived with his parents until violence fueled by fentanyl use made the arrangement untenable.

In 2022, court records show, Deplazes filed for a temporary restraining order.

Her son started sleeping in strip malls near their home.

Inspired by Newsom

After hearing Newsom describe his plans for CARE Court, Deplazes felt inspired to participate in transforming the mental health system. She signed up for a class to help other families navigate mental illness.

In that class, she learned about Contra Costa County’s assisted outpatient treatment program — a court-ordered mental health treatment program that predated CARE Court. Upon her referral, he was accepted, she said; she hoped county mental health workers could convince him to participate in treatment.

One summer day in 2024, Deplazes pulled her car into the parking lot of an abandoned Dollar Tree where her son sometimes slept. She initially didn’t recognize the unconscious body surrounded by trash, grease caked into the neck, face and arms.

When she finally managed to shake her son awake, he was weak and trembling. She moved him to the shade and ran to get water, Gatorade and food.

She called the county behavioral health team.

“You have to help me,” she said.

County workers brought him food and water, she said, but her son wasn’t willing to accept additional help.

“‘Don’t worry,’” she remembers them saying. “‘In December you can apply for CARE Court.’”

Deplazes spent three days filling out paperwork ahead of CARE Court’s rollout in Contra Costa County. It was so complicated, she said, and required so much information that she eventually had to seek help: first from a volunteer from the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, then from staff at the local law library. But she got the petition submitted, and in late January, her son was approved.

High expectations, then disappointment

The first CARE Court hearing for Deplazes’ son was on the morning of Feb. 7 of this year. She and her husband arrived at the Martinez courthouse at the appointed time. Their son did not.

In the coming months, Deplazes continued to find him crumpled up in strip malls a few blocks from her home. She had to stop frequenting those shopping centers. It was too hard to see him like that.

Sometimes, in the cold and rain, he would appear on her doorstep barefoot and freezing. He might lie there for days, barely moving. She’d contact the CARE Court team to alert them to his location. On some occasions, she said, they came out and did their best to help him. But most times, he was gone before they arrived.

She cut back on work, spending hours each day on the phone.

He kept getting arrested. Police would drive him to the county jail in Richmond. Often, Deplazes said, they discharged him in the middle of the night and he would walk until he could borrow a phone to call home. Her husband, worried for their son’s safety, would drive 25 miles to pick him up. CARE Court workers often weren’t even aware he was behind bars, Deplazes said.

Deplazes and her husband stopped going anywhere, fearing a crisis would emerge in their absence.

“You can’t have a life when you have a kid like this,” Deplazes said.

By March, she was already convinced that CARE Court wasn’t going to save her son.

She started reaching out to everyone she could. The county behavioral health department. The public defender. The district attorney.

“Dear Secretary Welch,” she wrote in a March email to the deputy secretary of behavioral health at the California Health and Human Services Agency, “This is a desperate plea to save our son’s life as now we are being told that CARE Court is also 100% voluntary…my son is deteriorating rapidly and being arrested on a regular basis for extreme and escalating behaviors….Secretary Welch please let me know if this CARE Court petition is futile and I should go another route. We love our son. He is smart, sweet and worth saving. We will never give up on his recovery. Please send guidance before it is too late for our family.”

She followed up with a second email, but never heard back.

“I’m giving up,” she told a reporter one morning soon after. “Honestly, I’m giving up.”

Instead, she began begging the county to let her son out of CARE Court, reasoning that he would get more treatment through the criminal courts if he was not constrained by his participation in the program.

Welch, in an interview with CalMatters, offered a message to parents like Deplazes:

“We’re listening,” she said. “We’re trying to better understand how we can be helpful. There’s lots of tools in the toolbox and CARE wasn’t necessarily a panacea.”

'It was my baby'

Not long into her CARE Court experience, Deplazes was introduced to a former police officer named Sam Figueroa. The two instantly bonded over their shared desperation.

During his 25-year career, Figueroa said he had specially trained to help people in mental distress. By his own estimation, he had placed thousands of people on involuntary holds.

In 2023, he said someone called to tell him they heard screaming from his son’s Los Angeles area apartment. Figueroa immediately flew south, arriving to find his son emaciated and lying in the bathtub in a urine-soaked sleeping bag. Feces and rotting food coated the apartment.

“I thought I was in a nightmare,” he said. “And it was my baby.”

His son had recently graduated magna cum laude from UC Santa Cruz. Now, doctors told Figueroa that the sooner he intervened, the more likely he was to save his son’s life.

Despite his years of experience, Figueroa couldn’t convince anyone to place his son on an involuntary hold. Not after the young man tried to break into someone’s home. Not after he jumped from a moving vehicle.

Like Deplazes, Figueroa had started out optimistic about CARE Court. Like her, he soon grew angry. The clock was ticking.

“Doctor says ‘He doesn’t know he’s sick, he needs treatment now.’ CARE Court says ‘He doesn't know he's sick, he has to volunteer,’” he said. “I don’t understand that language. And I barely got high school, but that sounds very stupid.”

Gigi Crowder, CEO of Contra Costa’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — an organization that represents family members — said she had initially felt hopeful about the new program. She remembers telling parents that CARE Court represented a new opportunity.

“We have failed this community of individuals,” she said recently. “We just have. We continue to do it when we offer false hope.”

Ronda Deplazes at her home in Concord on Oct. 27, 2025.

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Florence Middleton

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Catchlight/CalMatters

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By last summer, Deplazes had had enough.

One June morning, she came before Judge O’Connell, who oversees the county’s assisted outpatient program, conservatorship proceedings and CARE Court.

Deplazes’ health had deteriorated from the constant stress. Her son seemed to be getting worse.

Irate, she begged the judge to remove her son from CARE Court before he ended up dead.

“I said ‘let him out. I need to find him help and he’s not getting it here,’” she said.

In retrospect, Deplazes wishes she had been more tactful.

But, at that moment, she just didn’t care.

The hardest days

O’Connell is not oblivious to the pain of families like the Deplazes.

She and others in her courtroom are acutely aware that many have submitted petitions only after decades of heartache.

The hardest days are the ones when she has to tell family members that CARE Court is not going to help their loved ones.

“As a parent, when you feel like our systems have failed your loved one time and again, that can be devastating,” she said. “That’s never lost on us in CARE. But I know that doesn’t help make someone feel better about it.”

Prior to being sworn in on Jan. 8, 2024, O’Connell spent years working for the Northern California Innocence Project. A psychology major in college, she was excited to take on her new role.

About six or seven months into the county’s CARE Court rollout, she became concerned about the apparent disconnect between what the law described and what community members expected. She edited the county’s CARE Court webpage to better emphasize the program’s voluntary nature.

“I would never want to give someone false hope,” she said. “The only way you can try to avoid that is by being good at communicating and managing expectations.”

As of October, Contra Costa County had received 69 petitions for CARE Court, 28 of which had been filed by family members. Twenty-four of these petitions had since been dismissed, 11 led to CARE agreements with four more agreements pending. Seven individuals had exited the program to enter the Lanterman-Petris-Short conservatorship system, the county said.

Marie Scannell, Contra Costa County’s mental health program chief, and Elyse Perata, the mental health program manager, describe the challenges they’ve faced in rolling out CARE Court. Their staff members spend countless hours searching for hard-to-locate individuals, they said. They then make multiple visits over several months to gradually gain these individuals’ trust.

Then there are the families.

Perata, a therapist, said she empathizes with families frustrated that their loved ones can’t be compelled to participate. But she also emphasized the importance of a client’s buy-in in order to achieve “longstanding success.”

She and Scannell described the dedication of their staff, and the warmth of O’Connell’s courtroom – where participants are greeted with snacks and support.

For some people in the community, they said, the program has worked well.

One 31-year-old man, who asked that his name not be used for privacy reasons, told CalMatters he had participated in the county’s CARE Court program for several months. Prior to that, his father had referred him to a mental health treatment facility after he went off his medication, fell into psychosis and poured water into his gas tank, ruining his car.

He appreciates the help he’s received connecting with job training, as well as the program’s more intangible aspects – moral support, reassurance, a positive outlook.

“I didn’t expect it to be this life-changing,” he said.

After CARE Court

In July, Deplazes’ son was released from CARE Court. Deplazes said the judge told her it was because the CARE Court team couldn’t locate him.

In August, on the evening he was found throwing river rocks at the front door, police arrested him for repeatedly violating his parents’ restraining order, Deplazes said.

In September, she said, a criminal court judge ordered her son placed in 180 days of inpatient treatment, along with domestic violence classes and antipsychotic medications.

“My son, we finally got him criminalized,” Deplazes informed her friend, Figueroa, as the two sat together on the leather couches in her living room.

“God bless,” he said.

Figueroa remained worried about his son. He had brought him back north and put him up in a nearby hotel for nine months, he said, until the young man was kicked out for frightening the staff.

Homeless, his son had wandered into a neighboring county. His county responded by closing his son’s CARE Court case, he said.

Now, Figueroa was trying to track his son’s Instagram posts to make sure he was still alive.

In the meantime, the days of the involuntary hold the judge had ordered for Deplazes’ son were slipping away. She was still desperately trying to find a long-term placement her son would be willing to accept. She knew he longed for his freedom.

“And there's no talking to him,” she said. “Because remember again, in his mind, he's not sick.”

The two talked briefly about a new law that will take effect this January. It promises to expand the grave disability standard as laid out by the Lanterman-Petris-Short law. Many families hope it will open a new pathway to conservatorship.

“But again, it's a law,” Deplazes said.

Implementation, she said, was another question entirely.

This project story was produced jointly by CalMatters & CatchLight as part of our mental health initiative.

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

The number of Californians without health insurance could double from 2 million today to 4 million by 2030, according to a report from the state Legislative Analyst's Office. It’s the state budget office’s preliminary attempt to quantify how federal legislation known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will reshape healthcare access statewide.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is driving nearly 90% of the projected coverage loss, according to the LAO report. It's mostly Medi-Cal enrollees who are expected to be dropped when new work requirements take effect in 2027. The remaining 10% are largely people leaving the state's health insurance marketplace, Covered California, after enhanced federal premium subsidies expired last year.

What's the impact to coverage?

L.A. County officials estimate that recent Medi-Cal changes could put coverage at risk for hundreds of thousands of residents and cost the health departments about $800 million a year. A UC Berkeley Labor Center analysis projected more than 1 million Medi-Cal enrollees could lose coverage by 2028.

The LAO report also warns that county indigent health programs for uninsured residents will soon face a surge in demand they’re not prepared to meet. Those county programs had enrolled about 850,000 people statewide before the federal government expanded Medicaid coverage in 2014. Total enrollment is currently 10,000 statewide, but the trend is going to reverse, according to the report.

What's the impact to health-care providers?

More uninsured people means hospitals and clinics provide more services without getting paid. The LAO projects that uncompensated care costs at hospitals could grow by several billion dollars statewide by 2030. Clinics face steeper losses because they run on smaller budgets and depend more heavily on Medi-Cal revenue.

The LAO also projects premiums on the individual health insurance market will rise as healthier people drop coverage.

What are proposals to help?

The LAO itself doesn’t recommend new spending and instead urges lawmakers to track what happens to hospitals, clinics and county programs before taking action. But both L.A. County and state officials are pushing tax efforts to combat federal cuts.

L.A. County voters will decide June 2 on Measure ER, a half-cent sales tax that would generate about $1 billion a year for hospitals and clinics. ANovember statewide ballot initiative would impose a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth over $1 billion and direct 90% of proceeds to Medi-Cal.

California regulators say State Farm has illegally delayed, underpaid and denied claims from policyholders affected by the 2025 L.A. fires — something fire survivors have said for months.

The California Department of Insurance announced Monday that it has taken the first step in the process to bring the allegations to a public hearing before an administrative judge. That could result in the state’s largest home insurer paying up to about $4 million in penalties, and suspension of its license for up to a year, meaning it could not write new policies in California during that time.

“Our investigation found that State Farm delayed, underpaid, and buried policyholders in red tape at the worst moment of their lives,” state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said in a statement.

The state analyzed 220 randomly selected claims — out of more than 11,000 filed with State Farm in response to last year’s fires — and found hundreds of violations in more than half them. Attorneys for the state called it a “troubling pattern” in their filing.

State Farm denied the allegations and called the state’s move “politically motivated” in a lengthy statement posted to its website.

Every Fire Survivors Network, a coalition representing thousands of L.A. fire survivors, pressured the state for months to investigate State Farm’s handling of wildfire claims.

Joy Chen, who co-founded the group after her home was damaged in the Eaton Fire, said the state’s action is far from enough.

“It’s just very disappointing to see our regulator issue a report that shows his own failures over the last 16 months,” she told LAist.

Only a few dozen homes have been rebuilt so far in both Altadena and Pacific Palisades since the fires destroyed more than 16,000 buildings, mostly homes, in those communities and nearby areas.

A survey by the nonprofit Department of Angels last year found that nearly three-quarters of L.A. fire survivors reported delays, denials and low payouts of their claims across all insurers.

“What we need is for all State Farm contracts to be enforced so that Los Angeles families can have the money that we need to move forward with getting back home,” Chen said.

The state’s alleged violations carry a fine of up to $5,000, and up to $10,000 if the violations are found to be willful. The case will be heard by a state administrative law judge, who will provide a recommendation to Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on a possible penalty.

The Insurance Department said people with homeowners policies from any insurer can report problems with their claims at insurance.ca.gov or by calling (800) 927-4357.

Yes, you could put a screen in your backyard and call up your friends to watch a particularly compelling World Cup game after the tournament begins June 12.

But FIFA is turning each game into a public celebration, sponsoring 10 outdoor Fan Zone watch parties with large viewing screens across L.A. County through the final on July 19.

Details were released on Monday, including locations, dates and prices.

The Fan Zones open in a staggered schedule from one day to four days each, starting with the Original Farmers Market on June 18 - 21, and then popping up across the region until the glorious end on July 19 in downtown Burbank.

Ticket prices range from free (City of Downey, Union Station L.A., “Magic” Johnson Park, Whittier Narrows) to over $300 for a VIP experience with a viewing lounge and a concert at the downtown Burbank Fan Zone on the day of the World Cup final match on July 19.

Fan Zone kick off

At the first Fan Zone, at The Original Farmers Market from June 18 for four days, entry will cost you $5 per day or $17 for all four days. Kids age 3 and under are free. (FIFA says the zones are family friendly).

You’ll be able to see four matches there each of the four days, including Mexico vs. South Korea on June 18 at 6 p.m. and USA vs. Australia on June 19 at noon.

FIFA World Cup 2026 scarves are displayed during the ribbon cutting for the LAX/Metro Transit Center rail and bus public transportation station at LAX on June 6, 2025.

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Patrick T. Fallon

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Getty Images

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You won’t have to squint to find your favorite player or catch the goals. The Farmer’s Market will include a 30-foot viewing screen as well as a 15-foot secondary screen to watch the games. There will be beer gardens, and you can purchase food from the Market's dozens of establishments.

Other Fan Zones

The West Harbor L.A. Fan Zone will give people an opportunity to experience the newest major development along the San Pedro waterfront, a 42-acre waterfront district that’s been years in the making.

The Union Station L.A. Fan Zone on June 25 is free and includes match viewing, music, food, and immersive fan experiences, featuring live DJs.

The final Fan Zone opens July 18 and 19 in downtown Burbank for the World Cup’s last two matches. FIFA says it’ll include “an adjacent international street fair filled with global flavors and cultural experiences.” Tickets range from $25 to over $300

The full list of the Fan Zones is here.

This of course, isn’t the only opportunity to watch World Cup matches with groups of people in SoCal. The city of L.A. will host its own watch parties.

Up against a massive court backlog that can drag their cases for years, asylum seekers face steep costs when pursuing their dreams of college in California.

Asylum-seeking students in California often face a double blow: they are charged higher tuition for nonresidents and excluded from most financial aid. For students and their families, this can mean thousands of dollars paid out of pocket and years of financial stress as their immigration cases remain unresolved.

Before establishing residency, asylum-seeking students are charged non-resident rates, which are about three times what state residents pay for public universities and roughly eight to 13 times more for community colleges, depending on the district.

All asylum seekers are disqualified from federal financial aid. The few who qualify for California’s state aid may never know their options, or face hurdles in obtaining it due to a patchwork of financial aid processes.

The state’s higher education systems are not mandated to track asylum seekers, making state budget impacts nearly unquantifiable during legislative attempts to expand financial aid eligibility.

“I only see them struggling,” said Eric Cline, social services program director at OASIS Legal Services, which supports LGBTQ+ asylum seekers across the Bay Area and Central Valley. “I’m always surprised (when) a few clients tell me 'I just graduated from college.’ I think, ‘Wow, how did that happen?’”

Policy changes stoke uncertainty for asylum seekers

Asylum seeking is one of the least-protected immigration statuses in the U.S. Asylum seekers, who’ve fled their home countries fearing persecution and are asking the U.S. for protection, differ from refugees, whose status is granted before they enter the country. Asylum seekers apply upon arriving in the U.S.

Applicants can stay as their cases remain pending for years, though experts say the Trump administration is expediting deportations for numerous asylum seekers and ending cases before they can receive a full hearing.

As of February 2026, a little over 2.3 million immigrants are awaiting asylum hearings nationwide, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal activity. The most recent data shows California alone had about 169,000 pending asylum cases in its immigration courts by the end of 2023 — the second-largest backlog of any state. The average wait for an asylum hearing in California was 1,412 days at that time.

The Trump administration paused asylum cases in November, creating even further delays. The administration has now allowed cases to resume for applicants from all but 40 countries. In the San Francisco immigration court system, which is popular among asylum seekers due to higher acceptance rates, a combination of firings by the Trump administration, retirements and relocations whittled the 21 immigration judges to two, according to reporting in Mission Local. Left behind is a caseload of nearly 119,000 immigration cases, the highest of any immigration court in California.

President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” also established new fees for asylum seekers, placing additional pressure on an already low-income population. Applicants must now pay an initial $100 application fee plus $100 per year while their case is pending, $550 for a work permit, and $745 each year to renew the permit. In addition, a new rule proposed by the Department of Homeland Security would effectively end the ability of asylum seekers to obtain work permits at all.

Royce Hall on the UCLA campus

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Los Angeles Times

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As they await a decision, asylum seekers are excluded from federal aid and some state financial aid programs, including Cal Grants under California law.

For one asylum seeker, Carol, being ineligible for financial aid meant she had to take time off from school to work to make ends meet. CalMatters is not using her full name because she fears speaking publicly may jeopardize her asylum case.

Carol did speak before the Assembly Higher Education Committee in 2023 urging lawmakers to pass AB 888, which would have expanded Cal Grant eligibility to certain asylum seekers. The bill ultimately did not pass.

She said she arrived in the United States at 17 and had spent more than six years waiting for her case to move through immigration courts, a period during which she said she was ineligible for financial aid.

“I’ve had to delay my educational journey several times, including going part-time and even taking a semester off from school to work,” Carol told lawmakers.

Without access to aid, she said she experienced homelessness, couch surfing and at one point slept on a mattress topper on a hardwood floor because she could not afford a bed. She worked multiple jobs at a time, skipped meals and attended class without the required course materials.

Her story, she said, was not new. Carol told the committee that four years earlier her brother had testified with a nearly identical experience on behalf of a previous bill that was ultimately vetoed, a cycle she argued could have been prevented.

“Had California taken action then, I wouldn’t have had to face the harrowing experiences that I shared with you today,” she said.

Despite the barriers, Carol graduated from Cal State Long Beach and worked as a caseworker with the International Rescue Committee, helping resettle refugees and asylum seekers. She told lawmakers she hopes to pursue a law degree and become an international human rights attorney.

The narrow path to college aid for asylum-seeking students

Many asylum seekers arrive eager to continue studies they began abroad, but quickly run into what Cline calls “a brick wall."

“All of our clients are low-income … they’re almost never eligible for generalized financial aid,” he said. “When you take away the financial aid aspect, it makes (college) pretty inaccessible.”

For California residents, annual undergraduate tuition is $15,588 at the University of California, $6,838 at the California State University and about $1,380 for 30 units at a community college. Students classified as non-residents — including some asylum seekers before establishing residency — can pay $54,858 at a University of California, about $20,968 at a Cal State before campus-based fees, and roughly $10,140 to $13,560 for 30 units at a community college, depending on the district. These figures do not include campus-based fees, housing or living expenses.

Even when students do manage to establish residency, the cost is still steep. For the many asylum seekers who arrive in the United States as adults, they may not have attended a California school previously, barring them from qualifying for state financial aid.

AB 540, the 2001 law that exempts undocumented students from paying non-resident tuition, only applies if the student attended a California high school or community college for three years.

Those who qualify through AB 540 can fill out the California Dream Act Application for state financial aid, such as Cal Grants, university system-specific grants, state loans, and the state’s middle class scholarship.

The application process can still be confusing for asylum seekers whose status is not fully accounted for in the design of the application. For example, asylum seekers often have Social Security numbers for work authorization, but affirming so while answering the financial aid pre-screening questions leads to undetermined eligibility because the questions don’t take into account the nuances of applying as an asylum seeker.

Stickers and flyers on a table in the Undocumented Community Center at the College of San Mateo in San Mateo, on Nov. 28, 2023. At this center, undocumented students can access financial and legal aid as well as guidance in navigating grant applications.

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Amaya Edwards

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CalMatters

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Asylum seekers often require extra help from financial aid counselors, but even counselors may not know how to help navigate eligibility rules. Students often wind up seeking help from undocumented student resource centers on public campuses, which are designed to help students who lack legal residency and those from mixed-status families find aid and academic support.

Kaveena Singh, the director of immigration legal services at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, which provides legal services to low-income immigrants, noted that she herself has written letters to financial aid offices to help explain the in-between nature of the few asylum-seeking students she has served.

As an asylum-seeking student in his mid-20s, L. ended up qualifying for state financial aid through AB 540. However, he misunderstood for six years exactly what aid he qualified for. L. wished to withhold his name and the names of the institutions he’s attended for fear of negative impacts on his pending asylum case.

Initially, community college didn’t cost him anything — but when he transferred to a large four-year university, the cost of college soared. He went to his university's financial aid office for help so often that all the staff there knew his name. It was a "big relief” when he was finally able to successfully fill out the California Dream Act Application, and obtain financial aid for his summer and fall quarters.

L.'s asylum case has been pending for nine years. He, his dad, mom and younger brother arrived in the United States in the winter of 2016, claiming asylum under fear of political retribution. His father organized political assemblies in China, and his mother was forced to have an abortion under the one-child policy.

“I just wish I could go home and visit family and friends and catch up for a good few weeks in the summer here and there to reconnect with my past,” L. said. “It's like there's two separate lives, like two entities being artificially cut.”

L. worked throughout high school and college, and worried about affording school.

Most days, the combination of family trauma and the limbo of waiting for his case means L. survives through “constant compartmentalization.”

In the meantime, he tries to carry on — he studies politics, and is interested in international relations and human rights.

"As rough as all that's happened, the silver lining is that one day hopefully I get a passport and a green card," L. said. "To help other people avoid such a hassle will be just as fulfilling for me."

Previous legislative efforts have failed

Legislative bills to extend state financial aid eligibility to asylum-seeking students have been introduced at least twice in recent years but have failed.

One attempt came in 2019, when Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat from El Segundo, introduced SB 296, a bill that would have extended Cal Grant eligibility to students with pending asylum applications. The measure passed the Legislature with some bipartisan support, but was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said that it would "impose costs on the General Fund that must be weighed in the annual budget process."

“That was frustrating, but I understood it,” Allen told CalMatters. “The real issue is that we don’t have good data. Our schools don’t track asylum seekers, so we can’t easily calculate the cost.”

UC data on asylum-seeking students is protected due to privacy policies, according to Stett Holbrook, a UC spokesperson. The Cal State system reports it has less than 500 students with "asylum status," which includes both those who have an asylum granted and asylum seekers, according to Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith. The numbers are self-reported during the admissions process.

In spring 2025, 13,507 students self-identified as “refugee/asylee” across the California Community Colleges — up from 11,537 the prior semester — per the CCC DataMart. The data does not include a category for just asylum seekers. Students can self-identify their immigration status while applying, but asylum seekers are not specifically tracked, according to the college system’s spokesperson Melissa Villarin.

Four years after SB 296 failed, Democrat Sabrina Cervantes — then representing Riverside in the Assembly and now as a state senator — revived the proposal through AB 888, introduced in 2023. Like Allen’s earlier bill, AB 888 sought to make Cal Grants accessible to students with pending asylum applications by creating a direct eligibility pathway outside the AB 540 residency requirements. The bill passed the Assembly unanimously but was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee last September, effectively ending its chances for the year.

Cervantes declined an interview with CalMatters. “My Assembly Bill 888 would have created a new pathway for pending asylum seekers in California to apply for Cal Grant financial aid in pursuit of their higher education,” Cervantes wrote in a statement.

Newsom’s office declined to say whether he would support a future version of the proposal, pointing instead to his brief 2019 veto message.

“There’s nervousness around anything that involves new expenses," Allen said. “... We’re going to have to spend some time seeing what information we can get with regards to better data to get better estimated costs. I think that will help to better inform the conversation."

Andrea Baltodano and Chrissa Olson are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

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