The Brief

California’s soup kitchens, homeless shelters and preschools can continue to serve those without legal status, at least temporarily, according to a decision today by a U.S. district court judge in Rhode Island.

In July, four federal departments — Education, Justice, Health and Human Services and Labor — directed California to deny many immigrants access to federally funded public services, including health care, education and job training. The new policies apply to certain classes of immigrants, including those without legal status as well as those who have it, such as asylum seekers or those with student visas.

California quickly joined 20 other states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit, arguing that the policy changes were illegal. The ruling today, which is a preliminary injunction, means that the federal government can’t enforce the new policies in these states until the lawsuit is decided, which could take months or years to resolve.

“With today’s decision, vital education, nutrition, and health programs like Head Start — and the families who rely on their services — can breathe a sigh of relief,” said state Attorney General Rob Bonta. Head Start offers free preschool to low-income children across the state.

“The Trump Administration continues to pull the rug out from under California families just trying to get by, but we’re fighting back,” he said. “We’re grateful that a District Court has put a stop to this cruel new directive while our litigation continues.”

The four federal departments said in July that the new policies were an effort to fulfill one of Trump’s executive orders, which claims that public benefits fuel “illegal immigration.” The executive order asks federal departments to ensure that “no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens.”

A lawyer for the Justice Department, Sean Skedzielewski, said the new policies also reflect the proper interpretation of federal law, despite the fact that the Justice Department has used a different interpretation for nearly 30 years.

In her written decision issuing the preliminary injunction, U.S. district judge Mary McElroy said she’s skeptical of Skedzielewski’s legal argument. “The (federal) Government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly thirty years that it has been the law. In its view, everyone (from every past administration) has misunderstood it from the start—at least until last month, when the right way to read it became clear to the (federal) Government.”

McElroy wrote the new policies, which are now paused, would mean that “fewer people will get critical antipoverty resources due to immigrant communities avoiding services but also because, generally, people living in poverty at times lack government identification.”

Who qualifies for public benefits? 

In 1996, Congress passed a law restricting most federally funded public benefits to U.S. citizens or those with certain legal statuses, such as a green card. Later, when clarifying the law, the federal government carved out certain exceptions.

Any person, regardless of their legal status, can access a crisis call center and any neglected or abused child can receive public assistance because these services are “necessary for the protection of life and safety,” according to federal guidance from 1996, which clarified the meaning of that year’s law. Homeless and domestic violence shelters, public hospitals and programs that support mental health or substance use recovery are also available to all.

As a result of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, the federal government allows all students under 18 years old, regardless of legal status, to attend public school. Immigrants without legal status are also able to access Head Start and to enroll in adult education classes, which include English as a second language and high school equivalency programs.

In Santa Clara County, which encompasses San Jose, roughly 40% of residents are foreign-born and more than half of all children in the county have a foreign-born parent. The county receives about $3.7 billion in federal funding each year, most of which supports its public hospital system, according to a court declaration by Greta Hanson, the chief operating officer of the county.

Verifying patients’ legal status isn’t feasible, she said, but even if it were, it would “have extremely detrimental impacts and deter individuals from seeking much needed care.” If an individual has a contagious disease but avoids seeking care, for example, they could jeopardize the health of their entire community.

Although the new policies went into effect in July, the health system has yet to turn away any patients. The states in the lawsuit and the four federal departments came to an agreement that they would delay enforcing the new policies until Sept. 11. Because of today’s preliminary injunction, it will now take months or years before the policies are enacted, and if the judge ultimately rules in favor of California, the policies may never take effect at all.

It’s just one of many lawsuits California has filed against the Trump administration regarding the treatment of immigrants. In an attempt to implement a different presidential executive order, which asked federal departments to stop “waste, fraud and abuse,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) asked California to share private data about people who receive food stamps.

In July, Democratic attorneys general, including California Attorney General Rob Bonta, sued the USDA, saying it’s an attempt to target mixed-status families, where U.S. citizens may have a non-citizen relative. California has also sued the Trump Administration over its deployment of the National Guard after federal immigration raids led to protests in Los Angeles this summer.

All told, California has sued or joined other states in suing the federal government roughly 40 times since the president’s inauguration. During the first Trump administration, California sued the president 123 times and won about two-thirds of those cases.

Many of the lawsuits filed this year have already led to preliminary injunctions, temporarily halting the Trump administration’s new policies, but advocates for immigrants say the president’s actions have had an impact nonetheless.

Many Californians, including those with legal status, are shying away from public services out of fear. Some are afraid to leave their house at all.

At an adult school in Huntington Beach, principal Steve Curiel said few immigrants are showing up for English-language classes this summer. He said he’s heard that other schools across the state are seeing the same trend.

Education reporter Carolyn Jones contributed to this story

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

If you celebrated Christmas this year, there’s a good chance you still have a live tree sitting at home.

It’s OK to drag your feet on taking down the decorations — but there are deadlines coming up if you want to get rid of your Christmas tree the responsible way.

Most cities and counties offer some form of free curbside pickup or drop-off, but it’s only for a limited time. Here’s your rundown of how it works.

L.A. County

There are a couple of things to keep in mind regardless of where you are. Don’t bag or wrap trees prior to recycling. Remove all decorations and stands. If you place it curbside, put it next to your bins (not in front), and if it goes inside a bin, make sure the lid closes completely.

Some rules can vary, though, so you should check with your waste hauler for certain details. You may be required to cut your tree if it’s above 6 feet, or dispose of it differently if it’s a flocked tree (coated with fake snow). For example, the city of Los Angeles says to put that in the black bin, while Long Beach can recycle it (more info on that below).

City of L.A. residents have three options for tree disposal: curbside collection, mulching and drop-off.

Curbside collection works for residents in houses and apartments through Jan 31. To use it, follow these steps:

• Cut your tree into pieces and place them inside your green compost bin.
• If your tree is too big (or you can’t cut it), place it on the curb next to your green bin on trash day. 
• If it’s larger than 6 feet tall, schedule a bulky item pickup through MyLA311.
• If you’re in an apartment or condo, just place your tree on the curb on your neighborhood’s trash day.

Mulching service is also available at the following locations:

• Open through Jan. 15: Harbor Safe Center at 1400 N. Gaffey St., San Pedro
• Open Jan. 2 to Jan. 31: Lopez Canyon Environmental Education Center at 11950 Lopez Canyon Rd., Lake View Terrace (Place trees in the the rolloff bin by the entrance.)

Drop-off sites will also be available for at least the first couple weeks of January, depending on where you go. Long Beach is also encouraging drop-off, so here’s a map of sites for both areas:

If you can’t drop it off in Long Beach, the city will have a special collection for trees on Jan. 10. For deadlines in other cities and unincorporated communities, see this list from CleanLA.

Orange County

Orange County is serviced by multiple waste haulers, which handle Christmas tree recycling. They have different timeframes and requirements based on your city. You can see a list of each provider here. We’ve included some examples below.

For Anaheim residents: Republic Services is picking up trees through Jan. 16 on trash day — just put it next to your bins. You can also recycle it by cutting it into small pieces and putting them in your brown or compost bin. After Jan. 16, you can have it picked up through Republic Services’ bulky item pickup.

For Irvine residents: Waste Management is also picking up trees through Jan. 16 that are left curbside on trash day. After this date, you can cut the tree into pieces and put it in your green bin, or schedule a bulky item pickup.

For Santa Ana residents: Republic Services is picking up trees through Jan. 13. A different truck does this work, so it’s important to put yours on the curb no earlier than noon on the day before your trash collection. After this date, you can cut the tree into pieces and put it in your green bin.

For Huntington Beach residents: Republic Services will pick up trees curbside from Jan. 5 to Jan. 9, as long as it’s outside by 7 a.m. Flocked trees go inside your trash bin or can be picked up with a bulky item request. This trash service also has a few drop-off locations available through Jan. 10.

Tech companies that create large, advanced artificial intelligence models will soon have to share more information about how the models can impact society and give their employees ways to warn the rest of us if things go wrong.

Starting January 1, a law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom gives whistleblower protections to employees at companies like Google and OpenAI whose work involves assessing the risk of critical safety incidents. It also requires large AI model developers to publish frameworks on their websites that include how the company responds to critical safety incidents and assesses and manages catastrophic risk. Fines for violating the frameworks can reach $1 million per violation. Under the law, companies must report critical safety incidents to the state within 15 days, or within 24 hours if they believe a risk poses an imminent threat of death or injury.

The law began as Senate Bill 53, authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, to address catastrophic risk posed by advanced AI models, which are sometimes called frontier models. The law defines catastrophic risk as an instance where the tech can kill more than 50 people through a cyber attack or hurt people with a chemical, biological, radioactive, or nuclear weapon, or an instance where AI use results in more than $1 billion in theft or damage. It addresses the risks in the context of an operator losing control of an AI system, for example because the AI deceived them or took independent action, situations that are largely considered hypothetical.

The law increases the information that AI makers must share with the public, including in a transparency report that must include the intended uses of a model, restrictions or conditions of using a model, how a company assesses and addresses catastrophic risk, and whether those efforts were reviewed by an independent third party.

The law will bring much-needed disclosure to the AI industry, said Rishi Bommasani, part of a Stanford University group that tracks transparency around AI. Only three of 13 companies his group recently studied regularly carry out incident reports and transparency scores his group issues to such companies fell on average over the last year, according to a newly issued report.

Bommasami is also a lead author of a report ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom that heavily influenced SB 53 and calls transparency a key to public trust in AI. He thinks the effectiveness of SB 53 depends heavily on the government agencies tasked with enforcing it and the resources they are allocated to do so.

“You can write whatever law in theory, but the practical impact of it is heavily shaped by how you implement it, how you enforce it, and how the company is engaged with it.”

The law was influential even before it went into effect. The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, credited it as the basis for the AI transparency and safety law she signed Dec. 19. The similarity will grow, City & State New York reported, as the law will be “substantially rewritten next year largely to align with California’s language.”

Limitations and implementation

The new law falls short no matter how well it is enforced, critics say. It does not include in its definition of catastrophic risk issues like the impact of AI systems on the environment, their ability to spread disinformation, or their potential to perpetuate historical systems of oppression like sexism or racism. The law also does not apply to AI systems used by governments to profile people or assign them scores that can lead to a denial of government services or fraud accusations, and only targets companies that make $500 million in annual revenue.

Its transparency measures also stop short of full public visibility. In addition to providing the transparency reports, AI developers must also send incident reports to the Office of Emergency Services when things go wrong. Members of the public can also contact that office to report catastrophic risk incidents.

But the contents of incident reports submitted to OES by companies or their employees cannot be provided to the public via records requests and will be shared instead with members of the California Legislature and Newsom. Even then, they may be redacted to hide information that companies characterize as trade secrets, a common way companies prevent sharing information about their AI models.

Bommasami hopes additional transparency will be provided by Assembly Bill 2013, a bill that became law in 2024 and also takes effect Jan. 1. It requires companies to disclose additional details about the data they use to train AI models.

Some elements of SB 53 don’t kick in until next year. Starting in 2027, the Office of Emergency Services will produce a report about critical safety incidents the agency receives from the public and large frontier model makers. That report may give more clarity into the extent to which AI can mount attacks on infrastructure or models act without human direction, but the report will be anonymized so which AI models pose this threat won’t be known to the public.

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

Flu season is off to a rough start this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the virus arrived as expected, cases are rising faster, compared with previous years.

Last week, more than 19,000 patients with influenza were admitted to hospitals, up about 10,000 from the previous week, according to new CDC data. To date, the CDC estimates at least 7.5 million people have been sickened, and over 3,100 people have died from the flu.

The surge seems to be driven primarily by a new strain of the virus — subclade K of influenza A(H3N2) — that emerged in Australia over the summer.

"Anywhere we detect this virus, you can see a large surge of influenza cases coming afterwards," says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In the U.S., "the timing is not that much different from other flu seasons, but the number of cases, and how quickly those cases are increasing is something that is not usually seen this time of year."

New York has been hit especially hard, with state health officials announcing over 71,000 cases last week — the most cases ever recorded in a single week in the state. But other states are seeing high levels of flu activity, particularly in the northeast, midwest and south.

"The map is mostly red," says Pekosz, indicating high levels of disease that will likely increase over the coming weeks.

"When you're in the middle of seeing the curve start to go up, we just don't have any sense of where it's going to stop," he says. "That's the big concern in most of the medical communities right now."

What's driving the upswing?

So far, there's no indication that this new strain is more severe, or even more contagious than previous years, says Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

But there have been changes to the virus that may allow it to get around our immune defenses, he says. "There's less immunity to it, and that's allowing the virus to spread very quickly and extensively."

There are some concerns that this season's flu vaccine may not be a perfect match to the new strain, given it emerged after the formulation was decided last February. "I think we're going to have a mismatch between the strain circulating and the vaccine," says Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC until he resigned in August. "But the vaccine is still the best protection we have, even if it's imperfect protection."

Preliminary data from the United Kingdom, which saw an early surge of flu this year, suggests the vaccine is about 30 to 40% effective at preventing hospitalization in adults. "Those numbers are in line with what you would typically see," says Krammer, though he stresses those are preliminary estimates.

What about the flu shot?

Flu vaccines only offer protection if people get them and in the U.S., only 42% of adults have gotten a flu shot this year. That leaves many people unprotected in face of a likely bad flu season, says Daskalakis. He'd like to see the CDC do more to encourage vaccination.

"You're not seeing the robust communication that you would expect," he says. "Usually you'd expect to see more alerts coming out of CDC, more recommendations to be vaccinated."

In response to that criticism, a CDC spokesperson said, "the CDC is strongly committed to keeping Americans healthy during flu season. CDC launched a new national outreach campaign designed to raise awareness and empower Americans with the tools they need to stay healthy during the respiratory illness season," adding "the decision to vaccinate is a personal one. People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines."

In an interview with NPR, Lisa Grohskopf, a medical officer in the CDC's influenza division emphasized the importance of vaccination. "It's definitely not too late to get a flu vaccine if you haven't done it already," she says.

What else can I do to avoid the flu?

"If you're using public transportation, if you're in the room with a lot of other people, if you're in a healthcare setting, it's really smart to wear a mask," says Krammer, especially higher-quality masks. "I was taking the subway yesterday in New York City. I was wearing an N95 mask."

Social distancing, especially when you or someone in your household is infected, can help minimize the spread too.

If you get infected, there are effective treatment options, especially when started with 48 hours of infection. "If you get an infection with influenza, that's really a reason to see a physician, get diagnosed, and then take next steps," says Krammer. "It's not an infection that you should take lightly."

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