The Brief

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, California’s three days of paid sick leave for full-time workers was not enough to cover quarantines or vaccine side effects. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring companies to offer as much as 80 hours of supplemental sick leave for employees.

The temporary measure was restored in early 2022 due to the Omicron surge, but expired at the end of the year.

Now, advocates are urging state lawmakers to increase paid sick leave and expand who can receive it to promote public health and equity.

It’s one of a series of bills before the Legislature that supporters say would improve work-life balance for Californians. Opponents, however, say the bills are an unreasonable burden to put on small businesses.

Newsom wouldn’t say Monday whether he would sign the sick leave bill if it’s passed. He did say that he broadly supports doing more for families, but also recognizes the cost.

“We have a parents’ agenda, and paid sick leave is certainly part of that,” he said after a bill signing event. “We look forward to doing more in the future. We just have to sort of balance those priorities against others in the short term.”

Senate Bill 616

Senate Bill 616 would raise the number of paid sick days that can be used by employees from three to seven days per year and expand how sick days are accrued and used. Under existing law, employees can accrue as many as seven days per year. This bill would increase the total to 14 days a year, and allow seven sick days to roll over to the next year, up from three days.

The bill, approved by the state Senate on a 27-9 vote and by an Assembly committee, is before the Assembly appropriations committee. Since being introduced, about 150 organizations have come out in support of the measure, while more than 60 groups oppose it.

According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, “paid sick leave guarantees are seen by many public health experts as one of the strongest tools in stopping the spread of infectious diseases,” while the Economic Policy Institute finds that low-wage workers are particularly susceptible to having limited paid sick leave.

“COVID-19 presents a perfect example of why expanding paid sick leave is not simply good public policy, but a dire necessity,” bill author Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Long Beach Democrat, said in a statement included in the bill analysis. She added that “studies have found that, for those without earned sick days, missing three and a half days of work equates to losing a family’s entire monthly grocery budget.”

In 2014, California became the second state in the nation to adopt a paid sick leave policy, but now provides less paid sick leave than 15 states and many of its own cities, including San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.

The California Work & Family Coalition, a co-sponsor of the bill, argues that it is “a commonsense change…ensuring that California workers do not have to choose between their health and paying the bills.”

However, a coalition of organizations said in an opposition letter that many small businesses have not recovered from the pandemic and are now dealing with inflation.

The opposition coalition includes the California Chamber of Commerce, which has placed the bill on its 2023 “job killer” list because it “imposes new costs and leave requirements on employers of all sizes.”

The Chamber supported another bill, which failed in committee, that would have increased paid sick leave from three to five days — instead of seven — and would have allowed employers to ask for documentation from workers. “The more than 100 percent expansion is something that really not all businesses can afford to do,” said Ben Golombek, the Chamber’s executive vice president for policy.

Jenya Cassidy, director of the Work & Family Coalition, says that depriving basic rights and dignity to workers should not be a strategy used by small businesses to grow.

“Your business grows when your workers can thrive, care for their families and care for themselves while keeping their jobs,” Cassidy said in an interview. “We just need to normalize people not working themselves to death.”

Expanding family leave

Another bill would expand who can take as long as eight weeks a year in paid family leave to include “chosen family” — loved ones whom people consider family but without a legal or biological relationship. Assembly Bill 518 would also allow an employee to take paid time off to care for an elderly neighbor, cousin or friend, for example.

Currently, family members who can receive paid leave are children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, or domestic partners. The leave can be to care for a baby or a seriously ill person, or during a military deployment.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 82% of American households depart from the traditional nuclear family structure, and the number of multigenerational and LGBTQ homes is increasing.

“California’s current Paid Family Leave program reflects an outdated nuclear family model and only allows workers to receive partial income replacement to care for certain narrowly defined family members,” Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who authored the measure, said in a statement included in the bill analysis. “This definition leaves out both chosen family and extended family members such as aunts, uncles and cousins.”

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks poses for a photo with her newborn baby on the Assembly floor after her request to vote remotely was rejected on Aug. 31, 2020.

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Anne Wernikoff

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CalMatters

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Wicks has history on this issue. She became a national symbol of work-life balance in 2020, when she had to bring her infant to the Assembly floor to vote on a parental leave bill because she wasn’t allowed to vote by proxy.

Proponents argue that the bill is important for California’s low-paid workers, who cannot afford to take unpaid leave to care for their chosen and extended family. They also say that this bill adopts definitions that are inclusive to aging adults and LGBTQ families who rely on a wide network of caregivers and multigenerational households, which people of color are more likely to live in.

Craig Pulsipher, legislative director at Equality California, a statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, says that recent public health crises have shaped the policy in this bill: During the mpox outbreak last year, some gay men lost their income because they contracted the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, or because they had to care for someone with it.

“These experiences reinforced for me how important protections are for the LGBTQ community, many of whom don’t have close family members or biological children,” said Pulsipher.

According to a study by the Center for American Progress, fewer than half of LGBTQ Americans are likely to rely on their biological family for support when sick, while fewer than one-third are likely to rely on a spouse to whom they are legally married.

While there is no federal law that guarantees the right to paid leave for caregiving responsibilities, states including New Jersey, Washington, Connecticut, Oregon and Colorado have adopted expansive definitions of family in their paid family and medical leave policies.

More than 80 groups publicly support this measure, while two groups oppose it, including the Sacramento-based California Landscape Contractors Association, which advocates for landscape contractors, architects, designers and their vendors.

The group argues that the bill’s use of the term “designated person” is vague and ripe for misuse by workers who can claim the leave benefit for potentially anyone they know.

In an opposition letter to the bill, the association wrote that “small businesses often do not have or can’t afford full-time human resource professionals to manage and track all the various requirements coming from new Sacramento employment regulations,” referring to the provision in the bill that allows the “designated person” in need of care to be identified by the employee at the time the claim for benefits is filed.

Sandra Giarde, the executive director of the organization, said that it is not opposed to making room for LGBTQ and multigeneral relationships by adding to the relationships already codified into state law.

“But “designated person” and “family-like relationship” — those are very broad and ambiguous, and that’s where the crux of our opposition lies,” Giarde said.

Supporters say that the terminology used in the bill was put into law last year, giving employees the right to take leave to care for a “designated person.” The bill currently being considered extends that law by offering paid leave while they care for their chosen family.

Protecting caregivers from discrimination

The rights of caregivers continue to be on the minds of legislators as the Senate labor committee is set to hear a bill Wednesday that would prohibit employment discrimination based on family caregiver status. To stay alive this session, the bill needs to get through the committee by Friday.

AB 524, also proposed by Wicks, would add “family caregiver status” to the list of protected characteristics such as race, sexual orientation and religion, meaning that caregivers could not be discriminated against when applying for or holding a job.

“On top of the emotional and physical toll that can be associated with caregiving, caregivers also face discrimination in the workplace,” Wicks said in a statement in the bill analysis, pointing out that demand for caregivers will increase as the population ages.

Discrimination against caregivers disproportionately impacts women, people of color, and low-wage workers.

More than 63 million Americans care for at least one child under 18, and 40.4 million Americans provide unpaid care to someone aged 65 years or older, according to federal data. The term “sandwich generation” has been coined for caretakers — the vast majority of whom are women — who care for their aging parents and minor children at the same time.

Though the bill was amended to clarify that employers are not expected to provide special accommodations for caregivers, more than 110 organizations are opposed, including the California Chamber, which calls it a “job killer” and warns it could lead to more lawsuits.

Opponents argue that “family caregiver status” is very broad and “family member” is not limited to an actual relative in the bill.

“The employer has no ability to dispute an employee designating themselves as having family caregiver status,” said a coalition of the bill’s opponents, including over 60 chambers of commerce, in a statement in the bill analysis. “Any dispute would open the employer up to costly litigation.”

However, research from the Center for WorkLife Law found that the four states with similar laws — Alaska, Delaware, Minnesota, and New York — averaged one lawsuit per state per year.

Golombek of the Chamber said that New York’s law includes clearer language, defining caregiver status as providing “direct and ongoing care” instead of California’s language of “contributing to the care of.”

More than 50 organizations support the bill, including the California School Employees Association which represents 250,000 school staff across the state.

“Most of our members are women of color, and women are often tasked with the role of caregiver in their family,” the association said in a statement in the bill analysis. “We strongly believe no one should be denied job opportunities based on their status as a family caregiver.”

CalMatters politics reporter Alexei Koseff contributed to this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it work?

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

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

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

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

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

How to prepare

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

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

Those include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now he has.

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

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

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

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

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

Responding to the potential loss of relief

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

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

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

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

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Courtesy

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Hedy Torres

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

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

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

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

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

Building trust 

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

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

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

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

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

He decided to trust her.

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

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

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

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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‘A sense of freedom’  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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