The Brief

Irvine city leaders passed a resolution at a recent council meeting that would require the residents of the yet-to-be-built Gateway Village community to sign away their rights to sue the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill unless Orange County — the operators of the landfill — acts in “negligence or willful misconduct.”

As the owners of Gateway Village, Irvine will also disclose to future homeowners and renters the proximity of the landfill and the potential traffic impacts of living near it. With one of three landfills in Orange County set to close in 2026, operations at the Bowerman Landfill are anticipated to increase.

According to a staff report, truck traffic along city streets has a negative impact on quality of life in the North Irvine area “including traffic, noise and pollution.” Because of this, a new off-ramp directly from the 241 Freeway to the landfill is being proposed.

Can residents sue the landfill because of health issues?

Residents will not be able to sue the landfill for issues that arise from regular operations. However, City Manager Oliver Chi said they can sue over any health issues that may result from the landfill. For example, in Los Angeles County, residents living near the Chiquita Canyon landfill have filed lawsuits against the operators of that landfill over “rotten egg” odors that have caused health issues, like nausea and headaches.

Chi added that operators of the landfill are required to ensure “undue nuisance issues” like odors and that landfill operators currently use various measures like using dirt instead of tarp as a cover on trash cells, as well as the installation of gas extraction wells “to suck the odors out of the trash.”

The All American Asphalt plant acquisition

In the past, the city came under fire for not disclosing to property owners — who had recently migrated from China — that they would be living near an asphalt plant that had long been a source of complaints from residents. Odors from the plant, residents said, affected their quality of life and caused health concerns.

The Gateway Village project came about as a result of Irvine’s recent purchase of the All American Asphalt plant. In order to pay for the $285 million purchase, the city acquired land to convert into the Gateway Village development consisting of anywhere from 800 to 1,200 new homes. Sales and rentals of the new homes would cover the city’s costs.

Councilmember Tammy Kim says the Bowerman Landfill has been operational for years and has not caused any significant concerns for residents in the vicinity other than odors in the wintertime.

The county, she said, likely asked for the Irvine disclosure resolution because of what happened with the All American Asphalt plant. The homes surrounding the plant were not sold with proper disclosures but with the development of the Gateway Village, the city’s new resolution would ensure proper disclosures are in place.

Verizon’s $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications is a done deal after the agreement closed Tuesday, kicking in a slew of digital equity requirements and infrastructure investments for California.

The California Public Utilities Commission’s recent approval included a slew of digital equity requirements, such as expanding affordable internet and new fiber optic projects.

The merger comes as the federal government pulled back $2.75 billion in funding by slashing the Digital Equity Act.

CPUC Commissioner John Reynolds said requirements from the deal will benefit Californians and align with the state’s mission to expand affordable connectivity.

“California isn’t just approving a merger, we’re securing real commitments that will connect communities, lower costs for families who need it most, and strengthen workforce and supplier diversity protections,” Reynolds said in a statement.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, in a statement, celebrated the approval.

“Our greatly expanded footprint will enable us to provide more value to more households and businesses in more regions, driving our growth and benefitting our customers and our shareholders,” Schulman said.

What is required of Verizon in this deal? 

The closed merger means Verizon must expand affordable voice and broadband plans. That includes providing free broadband service to qualifying low-income families for at least 10 years. And for at least the next five years, Verizon can’t raise rates on its affordable plans.

The state also reported that Verizon must invest in 75,000 new fiber locations and build 25 new wireless towers that will reach rural areas.

The decision also adopts multiple settlement agreements that include additional commitments related to affordability, service quality, labor protections, infrastructure deployment and $500 million in spending with small businesses.

Verizon must fulfill its commitments or face fines and other penalties from the California Public Utilities Commission, according to the agreement.

Are there concerns? 

Some concerns remain about what these mergers could mean for customers, according to Lindsey Skolnik, manager at the California Alliance for Digital Equity.

“Recognizing that declining competition in the marketplace ultimately leads to increased concentration of power over broadband pricing and service offerings, this potential outcome is deeply worrisome, especially in the midst of California's affordability crisis,” Skolnik said in a statement.

Much of California’s broadband prices are driven by the Big 5 providers that include Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Cox and Verizon-Frontier. They service around 97% of the state’s 10.7 million broadband subscribers, Skolnick said.

In the coming years, the Big 5 could shrink to the Big 4 if the merger between Charter Communications and Cox Communications closes. Charter announced in May 2025 that it had offered to acquire Cox for around $34.5 billion, consolidating two of the largest cable companies in the country.

No details yet on when the agreement may close.

Just 10 years ago, the annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was less than $6 billion — notably smaller than other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security. But ICE's budget has skyrocketed during President Trump's second term, becoming the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with $85 billion now at its disposal.

The windfall is thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted last July. After hovering around the $10 billion mark for years, ICE's budget suddenly benefited from a meteoric spike.

"With this new bill and other appropriations, it's larger than the annual budget of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined," said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute.

ICE is now the lead agency in President's Trump immigration crackdown, sending thousands of agents into U.S. communities. As its funding and profile has grown as part of those efforts, ICE has come under increasing criticism for its officers' actions, from masked agents randomly stopping, questioning, and detaining people and thrusting them into unmarked vehicles to the recent killing of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis.

A cycle of more migrants, more money and a larger ICE mission

ICE's sudden growth spurt follows roughly two decades of relatively modest funding since 2003, when the agency was created by merging the U.S. Customs Service with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2015, for instance, Congress approved a budget of around $5.96 billion, which was nearly $1 billion less than then-President Barack Obama had requested.

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, border control officer's encounters with migrants attempting authorized entry to the U.S. spiked. Those numbers then plummeted as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted invocation of the Title 42 public health law, allowing CBP to expel migrants more quickly, with restricted pathways to asylum.

Encounters rose sharply under former President Joe Biden and soared above 3.2 million in 2023, when Biden lifted Title 42. By late 2024, fewer migrants were arriving at the border, due to U.S. asylum limits and Mexico bolstering enforcement.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he sought to empower immigration authorities to quickly remove migrants and announced a crackdown led by ICE.

Under the 2025 law, ICE has a $75 billion supplement that it can take as long as four years to spend, along with its base budget of around $10 billion. If the agency spends that money at a steady pace and current funding levels continue, it would have nearly $29 billion on hand each year. That essentially triples ICE's total budget from recent years.

To give that large number a sense of scale, consider that the Trump administration's 2026 appropriations request for the entire Justice Department, including the FBI, stands at a little over $35 billion.

The Trump administration has set lofty goals for ICE, aiming to deport 1 million people each year. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act also allocates $45 billion for ICE to expand its immigration detention system — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last June that the agency will be able to hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily. By comparison, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently holds over 153,000 inmates.

As of Nov. 30, 65,735 people were held in immigration detention, according to the data tracking project Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

With those metrics in mind, ICE went on a hiring spree in 2025, fueled by its bigger budget. In just one year, the agency says, it "more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000." (The Office of Personnel Management, which tracks federal workforce statistics, is only updated through Nov. 30 and does not reflect any hiring made by the DHS in the last quarter of the year.)

According to the DHS, ICE received 220,000 applications in 2025, thanks in part to a generous incentive package with perks like a signing bonus of up to $50,000, disbursed over the course of a five-year commitment, and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment.

ICE is still on that hiring spree, looking to hire deportation officers in at least 25 cities around the U.S., according to a job listing on the USA Jobs website that will remain active through the end of September. The starting salary for an ICE deportation officer in the Enforcement and Removal Operations division, or ERO, ranges from $51,632 up to $84,277.

The dramatic growth came in the same year that the Trump administration sharply reduced the number of federal workers, firing thousands of employees and inviting many more to resign.

What else will the new funds be spent on? 

With base level funding for DHS and ICE due to expire at the end of January, Democrats in Congress are calling for changes to how ICE operates. It comes after a year in which deaths of people in ICE custody spiked to the highest levels in decades, with ICE reporting seven deaths in December, and three more in 2026, as of Jan. 16.

ICE's increased budget makes sense to Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group advocating for lower levels of immigration. He says the funding boost " is directly commensurate with the size of the task the agency is addressing."

"ICE exists to find and remove people who are in the country illegally," Mehlman said, referring to a category that grew when the Trump administration stripped legal status from 1.6 million immigrants in 2025.

The focus of the new spending reflects President Trump's emphasis on arrests and removals, said Margy O'Herron, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center's liberty and national security program who worked at the DOJ in the Biden administration.

O'Herron said she agrees with the idea that, for years, a reasonable case could be made that DHS agencies such as ICE and CBP needed more money. But other parts of the immigration system aren't getting as much help, she said.

"All of the money is going to enforcement to arrest, to detain and to deport," she said. "It's not going to things like immigration hearings or immigration judges, to conduct additional review of whether or not somebody should be in the country. And that is a real problem for the system."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Two years after a wave of public benefit thefts that left low-income Californians scrambling to pay rent and afford food each month, Gov. Gavin Newsom is touting a significant decline in the reported amount stolen.

The thefts still amounted to more than $4 million a month last fall in both the CalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits programs, according to a press release from Newsom’s office. That’s down from two years ago, when public benefits recipients were reporting $20 million a month stolen from their accounts. The state uses taxpayer money to reimburse victims when they report theft.

Newsom credited the reduction to the state’s rollout of anti-fraud technology such as more secure electronic benefit (EBT) cards with electronic chips.

“In California, we’re leading the way by turning innovation into action by stopping theft and ensuring benefits reach those who truly need them,” he said in a press release.

Newsom’s office announced the improved theft numbers last week after the Trump administration ramped up threats to California over allegations of fraud in public benefits. The president has used a wave of prosecutions over social services fraud in Minnesota, some of it allegedly by immigrants, as a reason to send immigration agents to conduct aggressive raids in Minneapolis.

Earlier this month the Trump administration froze some federal social services funding to five Democratic-led states, including California. A judge halted the freeze, which included funds for the CalWorks cash aid program, for now.

The kind of fraud in which Newsom was touting reductions is not traditional “welfare fraud” perpetrated by recipients of public benefits, but rather theft by a third party. Local social services officials have said fraud by recipients is relatively uncommon.

Thieves have been taking advantage of California benefits recipients by using hidden “skimming” devices to steal card numbers from EBT cards loaded withCalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits. They then duplicate the cards and drain them of cash or make large purchases using CalFresh, before the recipients have a chance to spend their own benefits.

California was particularly susceptible because of the size of the state’s social safety net, with roughly 300,000 families receiving cash aid and 3 million receiving food assistance. CalMatters reported in 2023 that the state, previously focused on detecting fraud committed by recipients of the benefits, had also ignored warnings and delayed a proposal to introduce chipped EBT cards.

When the pandemic brought new benefits from the federal and state governments, such as boosted unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, thieves wielding card skimmers followed the money. EBT cards, which contained only a magnetic strip at the time, were among the most vulnerable to theft. Nearly 200 people have been charged across California in the EBT schemes, Newsom's office said.

Since 2023 the state responded to the skimming crisis by issuing chipped EBT cards and introducing an app allowing recipients to freeze their EBT accounts to prevent withdrawals. Last year, Newsom said, the state began using a computer model to detect fraudulent withdrawals and forced resets of some CalWorks’ recipients EBT card PINs.

But local welfare fraud investigators said the Newsom’s numbers paint too rosy a picture of the theft.

Gregory Mahony, president of the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association, said he believes the state’s reported thefts are undercounted.

The figures are based on how much the state reimburses county welfare departments each month to return victims’ benefits. But some recipients don’t bother making a report, or report months of thefts but only get some of the money reimbursed, Mahony said.

He also criticized the California Department of Social Services for dropping a requirement in 2023 that victims file police reports each time their benefits are stolen in order to get a reimbursement. That’s hurt the state’s tracking of theft and fraud, Mahony said.

“This is not a systemic victory,” he said in a statement. “It is a delayed and partial mitigation of a crisis long allowed to grow unchecked.”

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