The Brief

As California becomes the first state to publicly grapple with the complexities of reparations, a conflict has emerged between reparations advocates and some lawmakers backing bills to implement a state task force’s recommendations.

Leading Black lawmakers are advancing different sets of bills, raising questions about whether they have competing visions. But the chairperson of the California Legislative Black Caucus on Wednesday said there’s no rift between caucus members, just a strategic discussion over which bills to prioritize this year.

“I wouldn’t describe it as an internal dispute at all,” said Assemblymember Lori Wilson, a Democrat from Suisun City in the outer Bay Area and chairperson of the coalition.

Even so, some advocates say the caucus is backing bills that don’t go far enough to address systemic inequities.

In January the California Legislative Black Caucus introduced a slate of 14 reparations bills. But Sen. Steven Bradford, a member of the state reparations task force, has introduced his own set of more ambitious bills, most of which are not listed by the caucus as part of their priority reparations package.

Bradford said last week the caucus’ package of bills is a great start, “but there’s much more heavy lifting that will be needed to be done in the years to come.”

For instance, some of Bradford’s bills are tailored specifically for the descendants of enslaved persons, which opponents say may raise constitutional issues. Some of the caucus-backed bills are not as narrowly focused.

Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who was also on the task force, is sponsoring another bill not included in the caucus’ slate that would create a funding mechanism aimed at narrowing the wealth gap between white and Black communities in California.

“All of the bills are important,” Jones-Sawyer said Wednesday. “Taken in totality; it’s not just inching this or inching that. All of these bills have a significant impact on moving forward with closing the wealth gap.”

With the nation watching, Black California lawmakers are facing pushback from reparations advocates who argue the caucus’ measures fall far short of addressing the full scope of systemic injustices.

The conflict leaves lawmakers in a tough spot. They want to build on the momentum the first-in-the-nation reparations task force created by writing bills that will gain enough of their colleagues’ support to become laws this year.

“We are so mad at them,” said Chris Lodgson, an organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, a reparations advocacy group. “We’re mad at them in a hopefully productive way.”

Will California voters support reparations?

Aside from activists’ dissatisfaction, lawmakers face a budget deficit that could balloon to more than $70 billion and a lack of public support for reparations.

Nearly 60% of California voters oppose reparation payments for Black residents, according to a poll published in September by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. Republicans overwhelmingly reject the concept, with 91% opposed, while 43% of Democrats approved of it.

In 2020, the police murder of George Floyd set off a nationwide racial reckoning. In its wake, California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber, then an assemblywoman, championed a bill establishing the California Reparations Task Force that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law.

For two years the task force traveled up and down the state, conducting hundreds of hours of public hearings and listening to residents and researchers. It released a more than 1,000-page report with its findings and more than 100 recommendations.

Some of the public enthusiasm for racial justice has since waned. Meanwhile, key legislative deadlines are approaching in late April and early May. For bills to stay alive this session, they must pass their first chamber by May 24.

Some of Bradford’s proposed legislation would establish a new state agency called the California American Freedman Affairs Agency to administer reparations and help people research their ancestry.

Another of his bills would establish homeowners’ financial assistance to help descendants of enslaved people buy, insure and maintain their homes, and another would create a fund for reparations in the state budget.

His homeowners’ assistance bill passed the Senate’s Housing Committee last week, and his proposal to establish the Freedman Affairs Agency passed the Senate’s Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

“You have to eat the elephant one bite at a time,” Bradford explained in an interview with CalMatters last week.

But Bradford, 64, who is in the last year of his final term, is taking a bigger bite of the elephant than his colleagues, advocates say.

“He is our hero right now,” said Lodgson. “Because if it weren’t for him, I don’t know, this would be very, very ugly.”

Black caucus priorities

Members of the California Legislative Black Caucus say their slate of bills is only the first step in a multiyear effort to right the wrongs of slavery and racism.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan speaks at a California Legislative Black Caucus press conference in Sacramento on Feb. 21, 2024. The caucus proposed 14 of the more than two dozen bills seeking various kinds of redress for the state’s role in chattel slavery.

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Wilson said the caucus considered about 26 bills that were based on the task force’s recommendations and voted on which ones to prioritize this year, while “recognizing the budget environment we’re in.”

“We ended up coming up with 14 bills that everybody was ‘all in’ on,” Wilson said. For the other bills not in the slate, it “doesn’t mean it’s not a reparations bill. It doesn’t mean that members aren’t supporting it.”

She noted even she has a bill modeled after the task force’s recommendations that was not included in the coalition’s slate this year. That measure is aimed at reducing the disproportionate maternal mortality rate of Black women and was introduced with state Attorney General Rob Bonta.

The differing sets of proposed laws underscore a broader debate over the extent and form of restitution necessary to redress the historical wrongs. The United Nations defines reparations as including compensation. The task force made about 115 recommendations.

The Black Caucus’ reparations slate includes proposed laws that would limit solitary confinement in state prisons, provide property tax relief in redlined communities and prompt a formal apology from California and Newsom for the Golden State’s history of slavery and anti-Black racism.

“It’s almost insulting to call their bills reparations,” Lodgson said of the slate.

One of Bradford’s bills is included in the caucus package. That measure would create a database of California residents whose land was taken through the racially motivated use of eminent domain. The bill would be a first step in returning what was taken.

How to pay for California reparations

None of the bills — neither the caucus’ nor Bradford’s — includes the direct cash payments recommended by the task force. Not yet, Bradford says.

“I’m still not of the belief that we have come that far as a state, let alone a nation, to truly embrace and understand the obligation,” said Bradford.

He said the possibility of cash payments isn’t off the table. One of his bills aims to create a fund for reparations in the state budget.

“There’s not enough money in the state’s budget or in the national budget to make descendants of slavery whole in this country,” he said. If he had to start somewhere, though, he would start with the wealth gap between average African Americans and whites, pegged at around $370,000.

Jones-Sawyer said one major hurdle to overcome is how to pay for the various reparations measures. He said his proposal would tax the same products that brought wealth to other races through slave labor — gold, cotton, tobacco, wine, olives, cane sugar, rice and coffee beans.

“A group of people gave free labor for 400 years. These commodities benefited greatly from that. We need to be able to figure out a way to excise money so that it can be brought back into the Black community,” he said. “It’s really a crawl back on the ill-gotten wealth that faceless and nameless individuals and corporations acquired from slave labor, who never earned a wage or benefited from their work.”

Recognizing the uphill battle lawmakers face, Bradford noted some Republicans won’t even vote in favor of acknowledging slavery existed.

Many Republicans did not cast a vote on the recently proposed resolution to “acknowledge the harms and atrocities committed by representatives of the State of California who promoted, facilitated, enforced, and permitted the institution of chattel slavery and the legacy of ongoing badges and incidents of slavery that form the systemic structures of discrimination.”

Assemblymember Diane Dixon, a Republican from Newport Beach, said even though California in its early days “enacted a number of laws that intentionally discriminated against African Americans,” she was abstaining from voting in favor or against the measure because “today, we can be proud that California, in the second half … of the 20th century became a national leader in extending civil rights to African Americans and others.”

Dixon, 72, made her comments when the proposed legislation was before the Assembly’s judiciary committee on Feb. 20, adding she looked forward to “growing our knowledge in reading the reparations report.”

Forced labor in California

Some of the proposed legislation in the caucus’ reparations package were bills that previously failed, such as the measure to remove an exemption in California’s constitution that allows for forced labor. Critics say requiring incarcerated people to work, often for low pay, is a form of slavery, but state officials say prison workers save the state tens of millions of dollars.

Bradford said he urges all lawmakers to read the task force’s report or at least the executive summary. Several lawmakers say more education and public outreach are needed before some reparations measures can become a reality.

“We spent two years of our lives on this,” Bradford said, adding it cost taxpayers nearly $1 million for the task force hearings, research and report.

“And now, for legislators not to read it, I think it does a great disservice to taxpayers’ dollars that we went through this effort and the individuals who are now responsible for implementing what the report says are just ignoring it.”

Lodgson said that’s also where his group draws its sense of urgency.

“Two years of our lives, going to every hearing, hundreds of community meetings. We’re all volunteers. We come, and we spend our own money. We’ve got people breaking up with their girlfriends because they spend so much time on this,” he said. “Then to come to this year, and we’ve got bills like ‘We’re gonna get (California corrections officials) to tell us what books they’ve banned. We’re gonna apologize’… It’s not enough.”

Kamilah Moore, a reparatory justice scholar and attorney who served as the task force chair, said she supports all the bills — both the caucus’ and Bradford’s and other lawmakers — because every step in the right direction is positive.

“With all of these bills’ passage, it just creates a solid foundation for eventually a direct cash payments bill, maybe in the next legislative session,” she said.

Lawmakers say progress on the caucus’ slate is inching ahead.

In the last few weeks, Assembly and Senate committees took up several bills from the reparations slate.

One was a bill that would expand California’s original 2019 CROWN Act, barring hair discrimination in competitive sports.

Speaking before the committee the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Akilah Weber, described instances across the nation where Black teenagers have been told to cut their hair to continue playing soccer or softball.

“These are incredibly dehumanizing events,” said Weber, a Democrat from San Diego. “Our hair is a symbol of who we are.”

Assemblymember Akilah Weber speaks during a press conference led by the California Legislative Black Caucus at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Feb. 21, 2024. Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer introduced AB 3089, a bill that seeks a formal apology for the state’s role in chattel slavery.

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Weber said the legislation is personal because her son is beginning to consider how he wants to style his hair.

California lawmakers enacted the original CROWN Act (which stands for Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) in 2019 to prevent discrimination based on hairstyle and hair texture in schools and workplaces. It was the first such legislation passed at the state level. Since then 22 states have followed California’s lead, but similar federal bills have failed.

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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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.