The Brief

The Trump administration is transforming the agency known for processing green cards and citizenship requests into one of its strongest anti-immigration policing arms.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, is one of the three branches of the Homeland Security Department that deals with migration.

Traditionally, its more than 20,000 employees have focused on the various ways people can lawfully immigrate and stay in the U.S. — be that applying for asylum, a green card, citizenship, work visa, or another legal pathway.

Since January, administration officials have taken an axe to that traditional mission by encouraging early retirements, shuttering collective bargaining agreements and drastically cutting back on programs that facilitate legal migration. New job postings lean into the rhetoric of hiring "homeland defenders" and tackling fraud.

During his Senate confirmation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow proclaimed that "at its core, USCIS must be an immigration enforcement agency."

The efforts come as President Trump seeks to curb illegal immigration but also reduce legal ways to get to the U.S. and stay here, especially for certain nationalities.

It's rocking the agency from the inside, crushing morale and prompting resignations, according to current and former agency employees.

With the recent changes, at least 1,300 people took the "Fork in the Road" resignation offer for federal employees, while others have left on their own. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection employees were not allowed to take the offer.)

And it's catching immigrants and their families, lawyers and advocates off guard.

"'Am I going to get arrested?' … That's a question, regardless of their past," said Eric Welsh, an immigration attorney in California who helps his clients apply for various USCIS programs.

"There really is a lot more fear and there is a lot more concern about, should we do it at all?," Welsh said, about people applying for legal status.

Rapid changes after deadly shooting

The changes have been rapid. In recent weeks, the White House said it would re-review all approved refugee claims under the Biden administration.

After an Afghan national was charged for shooting two National Guard members in late November, the administration also halted processing green card and citizenship applications from nationals of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, and ordered retroactive reviews of already-approved applications.

"I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover," Trump wrote on social media after the shooting. "Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation."

USCIS stopped processing many immigration applications entirely, including for asylum.

"USCIS' role in the nation's immigration system has never been more critical," Edlow, its director, said in a statement last week announcing a new vetting center that will conduct interviews and re-review already approved immigration applications.

"Under President Trump, we are building more protective measures that ensure fraud, deception, and threats do not breach the integrity of our immigration system."

Recent policies come after a swath of other changes this year. Policy memos have emphasized that the priority for refugees is admitting those who can easily assimilate into the country, with the target demographic being white Afrikaners from South Africa.

The White House also capped refugee admissions for this fiscal year at 7,500, the lowest since the modern refugee program started in the 1980s.

The agency has unveiled a longer, tougher citizenship test. It has also moved forward with a rule that would allow officers to consider an immigrant's legal use of public benefits, such as food stamps and healthcare, as a reason to deny status.

Reports of arrests and detention following routine USCIS interviews and appointments have increased fear among immigrants.

"They're reaching deeper into the weeds of immigration policy, and they may be more successful in slowing legal immigration, which at least some members of the Trump administration have stated is their goal," said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. "That's a pretty different stance towards immigration than we've seen over recent decades."

In Trump's first term, the changes did not significantly curb legal migration, but that may be changing.

"Some people, if they have a green card, might just wait to naturalize and see if they can wait for a new administration," Gelatt said.

USCIS leans into enforcement and policing tactics

The new administration has prioritized the agency's law enforcement work.

For example, USCIS has promoted a new role: "homeland defenders."

It is unclear exactly what these positions are responsible for. USCIS said they will be "interviewing aliens, reviewing applications, and identifying criminal or ineligible aliens."

The posting also specifies this position is expected to provide direct support to CBP and ICE, two agencies leading the effort to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.

The roles also seem to cater to those with backgrounds in traditional law enforcement, contrary to a background in immigration law and administrative government work that is more typical for USCIS.

USCIS said it received some 35,000 applications for the role of "homeland defender" and has made "hundreds" of job offers, including to former law enforcement officials and veterans, according to a November USCIS press release.

"USCIS is cutting bureaucratic red tape to hire fiercely dedicated, America-first patriots to serve on the frontlines and hold the line against terrorists, criminal aliens, and bad actors intent on infiltrating our nation," the release stated.

It also created USCIS special agents, who have law enforcement authority to carry firearms, and investigate, arrest and prosecute immigration cases. In the past, much of this would be the work of ICE or CBP, according to the release announcing the new workforce.

"Certainly the immigration enforcement side of things that are happening has sent a message that anybody who isn't a citizen in the United States could be arrested and put into ICE detention and potentially deported," Gelatt said. "That has a real chilling effect on people's willingness to interact with the government generally, and with USCIS as well."

USCIS workers defend past enforcement

The changes are having an impact inside the agency, as workers feel out of the loop about the direction and pace of changes.

Michael Knowles was an asylum officer for 34 years and currently serves as the executive vice president of the union that represents 15,000 USCIS employees. He says morale is some of the lowest he's seen in his tenure, thanks to the termination of the union contract, a haphazard back-to-office mandate that has employees working in makeshift desks, and a lack of communication from agency leadership.

"There are questions about what will be our mission, what will be our focus? And to that extent, we are alarmed by rhetoric," Knowles said. He said the agency has always enforced the nation's immigration laws when it processes applications.

One USCIS refugee officer who recently departed the agency after nearly a decade said the speed of the changes "overwhelmed" employees, and recent changes were the last straw. The person spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity out of concern of retaliation from the agency they hope to return to.

USCIS staffers say they have always worked hard to ensure people don't get benefits they do not qualify for, and also look for people who may be breaking the law.

So employees were upset by the administration's implication that they hadn't been doing their jobs properly for the last five years, after the White House announced all refugees admitted under in the Biden era must be reinterviewed.

"It's going to cause a lot of confusion. It's going to cause a lot of chaos. It's going to cost a lot of money," the employee said. "It seems impossible."

USCIS said it has paused the approvals while it "works to ensure that all aliens from these countries are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible," the agency said in an emailed statement.

Not "an adversarial office"

Beyond policy and rhetoric changes, there's been subtler signs of transformation.

Signs inside USCIS offices urge people to leave the country, mirroring the tone of a detention center, rather than that of an immigration office, according to Welsh and other lawyers.

"USCIS is not designed to be an adversarial office," he said. "They're not the enforcers. They're not looking to reduce."

Now, he said, his clients are concerned with needing to have proof of a good moral character by providing church attendance or charitable donation history, for example.

"It's now certainly not the kind of friendly atmosphere that we used to experience with the agency," Welsh said.

Lawyers fear all the changes would further curb legal migration of the kind the U.S. had previously welcomed.

"We have borders and we have benefits. So for people who deserve them or people who have earned them for various reasons, we provide them," Welsh said. "If we just go into a pure enforcement mindset, then there's no happy place to be."

The agency did not respond to a question about whether immigrants will be deterred from pursuing legal pathways to permanent status.

"The safety of the American people always come [sic] first," the agency said in its statement.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigators had no insider tipsters, no witnesses and no independent analyses from forensic experts when they approached a local judge and asked to take the unprecedented step of seizing hundreds of thousands of ballots.

Instead, the evidence they showed Judge Jay Kiel were claims from a group that one independent elections expert described as the equivalent of “flat earthers” alleging possible voter fraud. The county’s top elections official says their claims of miscounted ballots are based on flawed and incomplete data.

Kiel, whom Bianco endorsed when he was running for the bench, signed the search warrants anyway, allowing the sheriff to take the highly unusual step of seizing 650,000 ballots from California’s 2025 election amid his own campaign for governor.

Until this week, the warrants were secret with Bianco, a Republican, contending they reflected “normal law enforcement” and Kiel keeping them under seal.

That changed Wednesday when a different Riverside County judge and the California Supreme Court ordered them opened after CalMatters and other news organizations petitioned for their disclosure.

After reviewing the documents, experts had mixed opinions on whether Bianco’s investigators had enough evidence of probable cause to justify the raid. Some said the lack of evidence in the investigators’ affidavits raises troubling questions about how easy it was for Bianco to seize the ballots with the appearance of judicial oversight.

Bianco said he didn’t care what independent experts had to say about his investigators’ warrants, and he blamed the media and California Attorney General Rob Bonta for trying to politicize the sheriff’s investigation.

“We took the information to a judge, and the judge agreed; it's really as simple as that,” he said. “Why not just get to the bottom of it and see what the difference in the numbers were?”

Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former prosecutor who heads the nonprofit Prosecutors Alliance Action, said she was troubled by how much the sheriff relied on an activist group’s claims without trying to first verify them before obtaining the warrants.

“This entire course of conduct concerns me,” said Soto DeBerry, whose group advocates for criminal justice reform. “Elections are a sacred institution in this country. We have not seen sheriffs seizing ballots in this country until 2026 and it is being done in a very casual, procedural manner instead of with the kind of care that I’d expect we would use around something so important. And I think that applies to everybody who was involved here.”

Carl Luna, director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego, criticized the citizens’ group that deputies cited in the warrants and questioned Bianco’s integrity.

“They are the political equivalent of flat earthers who refuse to look at any facts that do not support their unsupportable views,” said Luna in an email to CalMatters. “The fact that Sheriff Bianco, an elected representative of the people of Riverside County, is using this group’s baseless allegations of fraud as what amounts to a campaign stunt is … evidence to question his fitness to lead the state.”

But Paul Pfingst, a former San Diego County district attorney and the former president of the California District Attorneys Association, said he thought the information presented in the affidavits was enough to meet probable cause.

“I think it exceeds it by a lot,” he said, pointing to the court paperwork, which says the county registrar of voters had not answered questions from an activist.

“In the absence of an explanation by the registrar of voters,” said Pfingst, “and unless someone can explain how … such a large discrepancy could occur, it is reasonable for law enforcement to determine whether the discrepancy is the result of electoral fraud or ballot fraud.”

Pfingst said it wasn't necessary for investigators from the sheriff’s department to get an explanation from county election officials before seeking the warrants.

Art Tinoco, the county’s registrar of voters, publicly rejected the activist group’s claims. He told county supervisors on Feb. 10 – before Kiel signed the last two of the warrants – that the activist group making the allegations didn’t understand the data they were looking through.

“Did the Nov. 4, 2025, statewide special election have a 45,896-ballot discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted?” Tinoco told the supervisors, according to the Riverside Press Enterprise. “The answer to that is no.”

CalMatters requested an interview with Tinoco on Thursday. County Chief Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen responded with a statement saying that no county officials would comment due to the pending litigation.

A spokesperson for Riverside County Superior Court said Kiel couldn’t comment due to rules prohibiting judges from discussing pending cases.

Court halted Bianco's investigation

The search warrants were unsealed on Wednesday, the same day that the California Supreme Court halted Bianco’s ballot investigation, which he previously characterized as a “fact-finding mission” intended “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise.”

That ruling was in response to legal challenges from Bonta and UCLA Voting Rights Project contesting the seizure and recount.

In lawsuits, Bonta argued that Bianco failed to show that probable cause or evidence of a crime existed — a step that’s required to obtain a search warrant. He called it an attempt to undermine public confidence in elections.

Bonta’s office responded to an interview request Thursday with an emailed statement saying the office is working to “prevent the misuse of criminal investigative tools for partisan fishing expeditions.”

“Our focus is on the sheriff’s responsibilities under the law — to provide sufficient evidence of probable cause in obtaining criminal search warrants, to allow (the) Riverside (registrar of voters) to retain physical custody of the ballots as required by the elections code, and to follow the Attorney General’s lawful directives, all of which he failed to do,” the email read.

Claims from outside group

The newly released records show that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was in contact with a citizens’ group that believed they found possible voter fraud after surfacing a roughly 46,000-vote discrepancy between the number of ballots cast versus the number ballots certified, according to Riverside County Sheriff Department investigator Robert Castellanos in a sworn affidavit.

The last of the three warrants Kiel signed was filed on March 19, roughly three weeks after the state Justice Department ordered the Riverside County Sheriff Department to pause its work and share any information that could substantiate its concerns. By that point, the sheriff’s department had already recounted 12,561 ballots, according to Castellanos’s affidavit.

Castellanos’s affidavits do not have a signature from a prosecutor at the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, suggesting prosecutors may not have reviewed the sheriff’s office warrant requests. It’s a common practice in California for a deputy district attorney to review local law enforcement search warrants to ensure investigators are on sound legal footing before presenting their evidence to a judge. The DA’s office didn’t return a message from CalMatters Thursday.

In an interview, Greg Langworthy said he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist and insisted his group, which calls itself the Riverside County Election Integrity Team, found enough evidence of vote-count discrepancies to warrant further investigation based on the registrar of voters’ own records.

“There’s no doubt that there is a discrepancy, and that's supported by his own records,” he said. “That’s why we say the sheriff is duty bound to investigate. I think all of them are duty bound to investigate.”

Allegations of voter fraud in Trump era

Groups like Langworthy’s are increasingly common, as President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement spread unfounded allegations of rampant voter fraud.

Across the country, there’s been “an increasing appetite for seizing materials for the sake of simply seizing materials,” said Stephen Richer, the Republican former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. Richer was running his county’s elections office in 2020, when Trump falsely accused him of overseeing a “rigged election,” leading to death threats.

“I have a lot of experience with independent election fraud hunters and they almost universally have no experience in election administration,” he said. “I think it’s also important when ethically and responsibly submitting an affidavit for probable cause that you assess the credibility of the witnesses.”

Leonard Moty, a former Redding police chief and Republican supervisor in Shasta County where similar allegations of election impropriety have become common, described the warrants as “pretty light” after reviewing them at CalMatters’ request.

He said he would have liked to have seen a more specific allegation with supporting evidence in the warrant before taking the matter to a judge.

Instead, the warrants focused on allegations from activists.

“Statements don’t really mean much, particularly with this issue where on both sides people are saying what they want to say,” Moty said. “I would have wanted to see some actual evidence of votes not being counted.”

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat from Santa Ana who used to be a federal prosecutor, also reviewed the warrants at CalMatters request.

He said he’d never seen warrants before that didn’t identify a specific law investigators suspected may have been broken, nor did they present evidence that investigators had verified the reliability of the group making the allegations.

After reading the warrants, Umberg said he was considering writing legislation “to make sure that elections are not interfered with, that ballots are not seized based on some conspiracy theory.”

“This election is going to be a test of our democracy,” Umberg said. “And if it doesn't go the way the president thinks it should go, I am gravely concerned that he will use whatever levers of power he has, federally as well as locally, to undermine that election.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

CalMatters Deputy Editor Adam Ashton contributed to this story.

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

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

As many as 100,000 people are expected to watch Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G headline this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this weekend. But some of the other stars making an appearance are Eastside eateries.

With more than 100 food vendors, at least four Eastside food spots are making their way to the desert.

Carmen Santillan operates Cena Vegan, a plant-based eatery in Lincoln Heights alongside her husband, Mike Simms and sister, Marcy Velazquez. Back for its 6th year, Cena Vegan has become a plant-based staple at Coachella.

If you’re attending, check out the Eastside eateries serving at the festival.

Cena Vegan

Some of the Cena Vegan crew at Coachella 2025.

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Known for its burritos and nacho boats, founder Santillan will be focusing on a new concept, “Taco Party,” a unique take on some of Taco Bell’s classic menu items, available at the Street Food Alley station. The team will also debut a “plant-based bacon-wrapped hot dog” at both locations.

What they’ll be serving:

Indio Central Market:

• The Big Vegan Burrito
• The Nacho Boat

Street Food Alley:

• Crunchwraps
• Crunchy tacos

Cafe La Vecindad

When Gracie Esparza and her brother Jonathan Esparza first started their mobile coffee business in 2023, one of their goals was to be a vendor at Coachella. Now three years later, they’re making it happen. What makes it even more special is being able to vend together with their aunt Carmen from Cena Vegan, who is also part-owner of the mobile coffee cart.

“We’re bringing three concepts together, which is a huge task to undertake, but we’re up for the challenge,” Gracie Esparza said. “It’s truly a family effort, and we’re proud to put our mobile cafecito on the map together.”

What they’ll be serving: 

Street Food Alley:

• Café de olla latte topped with cold foam and dusted with cinnamon
• Matcha horchata with cold foam
• Refreshing espresso sparkling yuzu tonic

Delmy’s Pupusas

Delmy’s Pupusas can be found at farmers markets around Los Angeles, including the LAC+USC Medical Center Certified Farmers Market in Boyle Heights. According to Coachella, they were the first to bring pupusas to the festival.

What they’ll be serving: 

Mojave location:

• Pupusas

Villa’s Tacos

After making headlines with a feature in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, Highland Park’s own Villa’s Tacos is heading to Coachella, serving up tacos at the festival’s Indio Central Market.

What they’ll be serving: 

Street Food Alley:

• Villa’s Trio (three tacos made with blue corn masa tortillas, your meat of choice, topped with cilantro, onion and an option to add cotija cheese). 
• House-made agua frescas, including their cucumber fan favorite. 
• Vegetarian options are also available. 

Flying by the moon, witnessing an eclipse, and traveling farther from Earth than any humans have before: The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis II mission have hit many milestones since launching from Kennedy Space Center nearly 10 days ago.

Now, if all goes according to plan Friday, they'll have completed their most important one: making it home.

The crew's Orion space capsule is scheduled to enter the atmosphere at 7:53 p.m. ET, (4:53 p.m. PT) just southeast of Hawaii. About 13 minutes later, it should splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

To make it there, the spacecraft will first have to punch through the Earth's atmosphere at about 25,000 miles per hour and experience temperatures upwards of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

As mission pilot Victor Glover put it: It's like "riding a fireball through the atmosphere."

The trip home

The Artemis II crew — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — have been preparing for the return home for the past few days, which includes packing up equipment and reorienting the spacecraft for an ideal trajectory that will land them safely in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. ET (5:07 p.m. here on the West Coast.)

On return day, the crew will wake up at 11:35 a.m. and begin reconfiguring the Orion capsule for reentry. They will make an additional course correction to fine-tune the return trajectory at 2:53 p.m.

Before entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft will need to ditch its service module — which housed thrusters, solar panels and other spaceflight hardware for the mission. Orion will separate from the service module at 7:33 p.m., which will then fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.

Orion, if all goes well, will avoid that fate. The spacecraft is set to begin its 13-minute plunge through the atmosphere at 7:53 p.m. During that time, it's expected that the crew will lose communication with Mission Control for about six minutes.

As the capsule makes its return, it will deploy a series of parachutes that will slow it from about 25,000 miles per hour to just 20 miles per hour upon splashdown.

The USS John P. Murtha is stationed near the splashdown zone and will help recover the crew. A team will head out to the floating capsule and install an inflatable raft just below Orion's side hatch. The crew will be examined by a flight surgeon, then helped out of the capsule. From the transport ship, they will hitch a ride back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Risk of reentry

There's always risk when returning from space. Glover said that he has been thinking about this portion of the mission since he was selected for it back in 2023, and he's been looking forward to it ever since.

"We have to get back," he said from the Orion capsule Wednesday. "There's so much data that you've seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us. There's so many more pictures, so many more stories, and, gosh, I haven't even begun to process what we've been through."

To get back, the capsule must hit the atmosphere at a precise angle.

"Let's not beat around the bush," said Jeff Radigan, Artemis II's lead flight director. "We have to hit that angle correctly. Otherwise, we're not going to have a successful reentry."

All eyes will be on the heat shield — this is the piece of hardware beneath the capsule that protects the crew from the extreme temperatures during reentry. NASA tested it out on Artemis I, the previous, uncrewed mission, and found that the heat shield wasn't performing as designed.

NASA mission planners and the Artemis II team worked on a way to mitigate that risk. Instead of "skipping" through the atmosphere like Artemis I, this mission would hit the atmosphere steeper and faster, limiting the time the spacecraft spends in those fiery, energetic moments of reentry.

"It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right," said Radigan. "I have a whole checklist in my head that we're going through of all the things that have to happen."

Mission success

The Artemis II mission is a key flight test for Orion, and thus far, mission managers have been pleased with the results. The spacecraft has taken humans farther from Earth than they've ever been, breaking a record set by Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

The crew tested the manual control of the spacecraft, which will be needed for future missions that will dock with a lunar landing system. The mission tested the spacecraft's life support systems and ability to keep four astronauts comfortable within the confined space.

Artemis II returned humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program over 50 years ago. And while some astronauts back then did see the far side of the moon, the Artemis II crew was able to observe it from a vantage point never before seen by humans. Their images and geological notes will help better determine what the moon is made of and where it came from.

While some of the astronauts' observations may help scientists understand the distant past, others will help mission managers better plan for the future. Case in point: The crew tested out the very first toilet to go to the moon, and it quickly ran into issues during flight. Multiple times during the trip, the crew had to use manual urinals instead. The issue, NASA said, was not with the toilet itself, but the system that dumps the urine overboard when it gets full.

The Orion capsule will return to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the mission, where engineers will examine the spacecraft after its flight, including a closer look at the spacecraft's plumbing. The team will be picking apart the spacecraft to see how it performed — and make any necessary changes ahead of the next mission, Artemis III, set to launch next year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Last year, Long Beach made a deal with an oil-drilling company. The company would convert some of its land into public wetlands in exchange for the right to drill somewhere else. Then a state law meant to keep wells away from homes and schools thwarted the company’s plan for more drilling. Now that pact has become fodder for the Trump administration’s war against California Democratic energy policies.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright traveled to the property, owned by Synergy Oil & Gas, on Wednesday with a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom: state policies are increasing costs for Californians, and the Trump administration will be challenging them.

Wright’s visit to the Synergy site comes just a week after a U.S. district court denied the U.S. Department of Interior’s request to stop enforcement of California’s setback law while a broader legal challenge is pending.

“When you make energy expensive by importing it and putting ridiculous regulations on it, you not only make it more expensive to pay your bills, but you make it so businesses that consume energy aren't going to locate (in) your state,” Wright said, standing between lines of Synergy-owned oil jack pumps near coastal wetlands.

Wright’s visit points up the active fight on multiple fronts between California and the White House over energy prices, especially gasoline. The state’s gas prices are the highest in the nation, a gap that has widened in the wake of global oil market disruptions following U.S. military strikes on Iran.

“California’s gas prices were stable – and below $5 a gallon – for about two years before Trump launched his reckless war on Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent crude oil prices through the roof in red and blue states,” said Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for the governor. “Today, (Wright is) in California pointing the finger to distract from the fact that Americans have paid $10 billion more on gasoline since the start of this war.”

California’s setback law 

Announced nearly a year ago, Long Beach and Synergy intended a deal to be mutually beneficial. Synergy would be able to drill new wells nearby and the city would gain public space and a cut from Synergy’s new revenue.

But a recent setback law – which bans new oil wells within six-tenths of a mile of homes, schools and other populated areas – has made it nearly impossible to get permits, said Synergy owner John McKeown. The site where Wright spoke should be capable of extracting 6,000 oil barrels daily. It is only producing 100 barrels because of state limits, he said.

“What I'm trying to do is save 35 employees, and I'm trying to produce (the oil) we own,” he said on Wednesday.

The Synergy Oil and Gas production site in Long Beach on April 8, 2026.

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Long Beach Councilmember Kristina Duggan, who helped reach the agreement with Synergy, said the setback law harms city finances. The city gets 8.5% of local revenue from oil production, funds designated for coastal infrastructure.

“We have wells off of the coast of Long Beach on our oil island where we can't drill new wells, and it is so far from sensitive areas,” Duggan said. “It really makes a difference. We rely on oil production for revenue in Long Beach.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration sued California over the setback law, arguing it illegally blocks business that the federal government oversees. The administration cited two land management laws, the Mineral Leasing Act and the Federal Land and Policy Management Act, that authorize public lands for oil, gas and coal development.

While the lawsuit is pending, the U.S. Department of Interior requested a preliminary injunction that would bar the state from enforcing the setback law. A U.S. district court judge denied that request, and called California’s setback law “reasonable environmental regulation” that doesn’t bar alternative methods of accessing oil in the state.

The U.S. district court judge said the U.S. Department of Interior has so far not demonstrated it’s likely to succeed in proving the law conflicts with federal law.

The judge is also weighing whether to let community groups, represented by Earthjustice, and the Center for Biological Diversity to intervene in the case.

Synergy Oil and Gas production site in Seal Beach on April 8, 2026.

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Ariana Drehsler

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The setback law's reach extends beyond private landowners like Synergy. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, it would make invalid about a third of federally authorized oil and gas leases in California.

The setback in California “has absolutely nothing to do with public health,” Wright said on Wednesday. “These setbacks get set at the number that will kill the industry.”

Newsom caught in the middle

The setback law is just one front in a wider political battle that has put Newsom in an increasingly difficult position.

Newsom has sought to blame the White House for gas price increases, arguing that Trump’s actions are responsible. At the same time, he has pushed back against growing criticism that California’s own environmental regulations are contributing to the cost of fuel. But his administration’s actions tell a more complicated story.

Oil companies have shut refineries in recent months, causing the state to lose nearly 20% of its refining capacity. In response, California has increasingly relied on importing more crude oil and gasoline. The governor last year orchestrated a deal to boost production in California’s oil-drilling hub of Kern County. The California Energy Commission also quietly set aside a law that gave state regulators the power to cap refinery profits and penalize oil companies for price gouging.

Newsom in 2024 pushed to delay parts of the oil well setback law, arguing regulators needed more time to implement it. Lawmakers approved a compromise extending the deadline to monitor wells near homes and schools for leaks by three and a half years, to July 2030, while keeping the core buffer-zone restrictions in place. Newsom signed the measure, delaying leak detection at oil wells.

Rising federal pressure

The Trump administration has shown no interest in giving Newsom room to maneuver. It’s pushing to expand oil production in California, including plans to revive offshore drilling along the coast at the site of the 2015 Refugio oil spill, where a pipeline, now owned by Houston-based Sable Offshore Corp., ruptured.

Secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy Chris Wright speaks to Synergy employees at the Synergy Oil and Gas production site in Long Beach on April 8, 2026.

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Wright invoked the Defense Production Act to order the restart of operations — overriding local courts — arguing the oil was 'vital to our national security and defense. Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued Wright arguing he overstepped his authority.

Wright said he hopes to meet Gov. Newsom in the next few weeks to make his plea for more oil production in the state.

A blueprint for wider battles

The stakes of that legal confrontation extend well beyond a single pipeline.

Even if the Sable project itself wouldn’t meaningfully change California’s oil supply, legal experts say the bigger story is what precedents the fights establish. The case could open a window on how far federal officials can go in using national security or emergency powers to override state authority — not just for pipelines, but for new oil development more broadly.

“I have no doubt they're going to now extend it to try to apply the same theory about a national emergency, about national security, to leasing everywhere,” said Deborah Sivas, a Stanford environmental law expert. “They're going to use that same rationale.”

But Ethan Elkind, a climate law expert at UC Berkeley, said that strategy faces long odds in California, where the politics of oil and gas have shifted sharply against new development.

“California has really been going in the opposite direction,” said Elkind. “The idea of trying to really expand oil and gas production in the state, is really at odds with where the politics are and the economic realities are in the state at this moment.”

In Long Beach, work to remove old wells on Synergy Oil & Gas property continues. For Kristina Duggan, the city councilmember, the larger battles are secondary. She's still watching the city's bottom line.

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