The Brief

As President Joe Biden today bowed to the growing chorus of elected Democrats and Democratic voters calling for him to exit the 2024 race, everyone is taking another good hard look at Kamala Harris.

“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala Harris to be the nominee of our party this year, ” Biden wrote in a social media post, calling his selection of Harris to be his vice president “the best decision I’ve made.”

Vice presidents rarely get much attention. What attention Harris has gotten on the job hasn’t been particularly positive. Counter to the reputation she cultivated early on in her career as a pragmatic politician and sharp-minded prosecutor, public opinion on Harris soured in the summer of 2021 and has mostly stayed sour.

That was in part thanks to the White House saddling her with a series of unenviable and intractable tasks. Beyond that her role, like that of most vice presidents, has been high on profile, but low on actual responsibility. It’s a job perhaps best described by fictional Veep Selina Meyer as the political equivalent of being “declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine.”

Nor was Harris faring much better with voters in her home state. Last year 59% of California voters in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll said they would not welcome her on the top of the ticket.

But now that Harris is being considered as the most likely substitute for Biden, more voters seem to be warming to her. A fresh Washington Post poll found that the vast majority of Democratic voters nationwide would be “satisfied” with Harris at the top of the ticket. The same poll found her narrowly beating Trump in a head-to-head election among registered voters.

And so the nation is catching itself back up to speed on all things Harris — and that means catching up on a life of accomplishment and controversy here. More than any other vice president in generations, Kamala Harris’ biography is singularly Californian.

Born in Oakland, bussed to school in Berkeley, tested by San Francisco’s cutthroat municipal politics and propelled onto the national stage as the state’s top law enforcement officer and then its first female senator of color, Harris’ approach to politics and policymaking were honed here.

Now that voters are reconsidering whether Harris has what it takes to be president of the United States — and as Donald Trump and JD Vance train their oppo-machine upon her — we’re resurrecting this look at her California years and career. Here are nine ways that California shaped Kamala Harris, and that Harris shaped California.

A child of Berkeley

In a state full of transplants, Harris is a lifelong Californian.

She was was born in 1964 in Oakland — the hospital a little over a mile from the city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her short-lived 2020 bid for the presidency. Born to immigrant parents who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley, she spent her childhood in Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is from India. The couple split when Harris was 7, and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother, who died in 2009.

In the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Harris famously skewered Joe Biden — then her campaign rival — for his past opposition to federally mandated busing to desegregate public schools. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.”

Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills. This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord.

After the debate dust-up, Harris clarified that she does not support federally mandated busing, a policy stance not so dissimilar from the one she needled Biden over.

Traversing back and forth between different strata of society — black, white and Asian; well-off and working-class — is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography.

“It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.”

Vice President Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986. Her graduating year photo is in the bottom row, second from right.

Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington D.C. but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.

Until her most recent move to Washington, she called California home.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco district attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state attorney general in 2010. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

The influence of king/queen-maker Willie Brown

Former state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of Gov. Gavin Newsom). Harris got a boost from Brown, too.

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” Brown had a reputation for dating much younger women. In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.

Willie Brown and Kamala Harris in 1994.

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico.

The speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards — the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later.

Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. More — much more — poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas and other noble houses of the Bay Area.

But from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability — a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. In the first run to be San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former speaker and mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

As for Brown, he recently told a reporter, regretfully, that he and Harris are no longer in touch.

A lack of clarity

You saw it in the presidential race. You’ve seen it in her as vice president. As the New York Times once put it: “the content of her message remains a work in progress.” We saw it before in California.

While running the California Department of Justice, Harris was often loath to wade into the political battles taking place just a few blocks away in the state Legislature.

There was the bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings. She did not take a formal position (though she did tell a reporter it would be bad policy). The bill died.

There was the proposal to force police departments to gather data on the ethnicity and race of the civilians they stop. Harris also declined to take a position. It passed anyway.

And on the biggest criminal justice overhaul in California in a generation, Harris also kept mum.

Prompted by a judicial decree that the state had to dramatically cut the population of its overcrowded prison system, “realignment” was a package of state policies passed in 2011 that shifted tens of thousands of inmates out of state custody and into county jails or onto the rolls of local probation systems.

Despite in many ways reflecting the lessons described in her book “Smart on Crime,” which argued that non-violent criminals can be redirected into less punitive systems without jeopardizing public safety, Harris, the state’s top law enforcement officer, was silent on the policy.

That earned a rebuke from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, which wrote in its endorsement of her 2016 Senate candidacy that Harris “has been too cautious and unwilling to stake out a position on controversial issues, even when her voice would have been valuable to the debate.”

What some critics call prevarication or flip-floppery, her supporters call pragmatism. Those are just two ways of describing the same quality, said Corey Cook, a political scientist and provost at St. Mary’s College, and a longtime observer of San Francisco politics.

“She’s not an ideologue,” he said, meaning rather than stake out the boldest, ideologically-coherent agenda, she tends to focus on individual fixes to specific problems. Hence the “3am agenda” of her presidential campaign, a collection of policy changes designed to address the problems that keep the average voter up at night.

“The idea that she would have consistent positions on issues informed by ideology isn’t who she is,” said Cook. Harris may appear to pick her battles, he said, because for her “the only lasting solutions are going to be the ones that are able to sustain a majority coalition of support.”

Making a mark: sex crimes, domestic violence, child abuse

Harris has never shied away from the “tough on crime” label when it comes to a certain class of criminals: domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers.

After nearly a decade in Alameda County and a short stint as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco (she left, calling the leadership there “dysfunctional”), in 2000, Harris joined the San Francisco city attorney’s office under Louise Renne.

Renne said she was looking for someone to head the office’s Child and Family Service unit, which investigates child abuse cases. This was not considered a prestigious post. Prosecutors inside the unit had taken to calling it “kiddie law.”

Renne thought Harris, who had focused on child abuse and sexual exploitation cases in Alameda County, would be a good fit.

That instinct was confirmed on Harris’ first day on the job, Renne said, when a number of children who had been separated from their parents were formally adopted into new families.

“She comes into my office and says ‘Come on, Louise, we’ve got to go over to court. There are going to be adoptions today,’ and she had all these teddy bears,” Renne recalled. “She knew the occasion. She knew it was an important one and it should be celebrated.”

Harris’ focus on the victims of abuse and exploitation continued after she was elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney.

“I don’t know what the term ‘teenage prostitute’ means. I have never met a ‘teenage prostitute.’ I have met exploited kids,” Mesloh, then Harris’ communications director, recalls her boss saying at her first all-staff meeting. Harris then ordered her prosecutors not to use the term in court. A year later, Harris sponsored a bill putting the crime of human trafficking into the state criminal code.

Some Democrats say Harris’ prior life as a prosecutor with a focus on sex crimes would be a key advantage in a potential general election contest against Trump, who has been found liable in a civil case for sexual assault and recently became the first former president to be convicted of a felony. In that case, the 34 counts were related to the falsifying of business records in connection to an alleged sexual encounter with a pornographic film actress.

But using the full force of the law to penalize pimps, traffickers and other abusers has earned Harris some criticism from civil libertarians and from advocates for sex workers.

In one of her final acts as California’s attorney general, Harris had the CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, arrested on pimping charges. Backpage was an online classifieds site known for its “adult services” section, which prosecutors had long warned served as a marketplace for sex traffickers.

The arrest was based on a contentious legal argument that pit anti-trafficking fervor against the First Amendment. Since Backpage was merely a platform for ads, its lawyers argued, it was protected by the same law that protects Google from being held liable for illicit websites listed in its search results. A superior court judge agreed and threw out the case, though an amended charge, pursued by Harris’ successor, then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, led Ferrer to plead guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and to the shuttering of the site.

The Harris mantra: ‘Smart on Crime’

One of the reasons Harris became known as a rising-star District Attorney was her focus on prevention, which she explained in her book, Smart on Crime, written in 2009, the year before she ran for attorney general.

“Public health practitioners know that the most beneficial use of resources is to prevent an outbreak, not to treat it,” Harris wrote. “Instead of just reacting to a crime every time it is committed, we have to step back and figure out how to disrupt the routes of infection.”

Kamala Harris as San Francisco District Attorney on June 18, 2004.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez

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Harris’ “Back on Track” program, considered the most successful implementation of this idea, redirected first-time, non-violent drug offenders into supervised education, job training courses, therapy sessions and life skills classes. It was a modest program, but a novel one compared to what most other big city law enforcement officers were doing in 2005.

“In that time period, I think that she was a radical,” said Mesloh. The program has since been emulated by cities around the country. When Harris became attorney general, she launched a similar pilot program for Los Angeles County.

Harris’ focus on prevention produced some of her key accomplishments as district attorney. But in the context of the 2020 presidential primary, some of those same accomplishments struck many critics on the left as overly punitive.

The year after launching Back on Track, Harris introduced an anti-truancy initiative. Based on a statistical correlation that chronic class skippers are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of homicide, Harris’ office began threatening the parents of persistently absent students with prosecution.

Harris has been quick to point out that the “stick” in this carrot and stick approach only came out after a series of escalating interventions, including mandatory meetings with school staff and social workers. No one went to jail under the program, though a handful of parents were fined. Within a few years, city truancy rates fell by a third and Harris took credit.

In 2010 her office sponsored a bill to take the program statewide. In the hands of other district attorneys, the statute was used in at least a handful of cases to put parents behind bars. Critics have said that the policy has been disproportionately wielded against poor parents of color.

In a 2019 interview, Harris said she regretted any “unintended consequences” of the state law.

Harris has (almost) always opposed capital punishment

Her opposition to the death penalty has been one of the most controversial stands in her career, but it’s also an example for those who criticize her lack of consistency.

On April 10, 2004, three months after her inauguration as San Francisco’s new district attorney, 29-year-old police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down by a 21-year-old with an AK-47. Three days later, Harris made good on a campaign promise and vowed not to seek the death penalty for the shooter. David Hill was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The decision engendered a predictably fierce backlash from the police union and rebukes from politicians. “This is not only the definition of tragedy,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at Espinoza’s funeral, “it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The assembled officers cheered while Harris remained seated.

Some of Harris’ critics say she has wavered in tougher political circumstances.

In 2014, when a federal court judge ruled that California’s administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional, Harris appealed the decision as state attorney general, arguing that it was “not supported by the law.”

Harris later said that she was obligated to defend capital punishment as the legal representative of the state. Many have pointed out that she was happy not to defend a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that voters passed in Proposition 8 when it was challenged a year earlier. Harris’ response: She was merely reflecting the position of her client, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

She also explained that the judge’s ruling, which held that the long delays between sentencing and execution in California amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment,” could be used to justify speeding up the state’s system of capital punishment.

Prosecutorial overreach controversies

Both as district attorney and as state attorney general, Harris led offices that criminal justice advocates say was overly aggressive in pursuing convictions and lacked transparency in a way that belies Harris’ brand as a “progressive prosecutor.”

In March 2010, just as Harris was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, San Francisco authorities shut down a police department crime lab in the city’s Hunters Point naval yard. A technician named Deborah Madden was accused of skimming drugs, raising broader questions about the lab’s ability to appropriately handle evidence in criminal cases. (Madden later pleaded guilty).

Harris immediately dismissed 20 drug cases, but the number eventually grew to over 1,500 after documents showed that prosecutors within Harris’ office had known about Madden’s potential unreliability months before the lab was closed, but had neglected to tell defense attorneys.

A superior court judge later excoriated Harris’ office, writing that the violations infringed on the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Afterward, Harris formed a unit to handle the sharing of evidence with criminal defense attorneys. She has also said that she did not know about the problems at the crime lab until after the scandal blew up.

But that hasn’t done much to assuage the concerns of critics who say Harris had a tendency toward prosecutorial overreach, which continued once Harris became the state’s attorney general.

Kamala Harris is sworn in as California’s attorney general on Jan. 6, 2011.

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Office of the Attorney General of California

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In 2015, for example, lawyers for an inmate convicted of murder attempted to have the case thrown out after new evidence suggested that Riverside County prosecutors lied on the stand during the initial trial. Harris’ office, representing the state prison system, resisted, only backing down after footage of one of her deputies being eviscerated by three federal judges went viral.

A spokesperson for her since-abandoned presidential campaign said Harris ordered her office to drop the challenge as soon as “she became aware” of the case.

Critics point to other examples. There was her office’s decision to defend a molestation conviction that local prosecutors had secured with a false confession.

Asked about that case, the spokesperson said that it was “long-standing practice” for prosecutors within the Californian Department of Justice to file legal motions without the express approval of the Attorney General, implying that, again, Harris was not aware that her office was making the argument. But in this case, the spokesperson added, state prosecutors believed “the original case…was valid and that the victim in the case deserved justice.”

Another example: her office’s refusal to take over a 2011 Seal Beach mass shooting case after a judge recused the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office for widespread prosecutorial misconduct. Harris defended her decision: “it was being handled at the local level.”

Such a track record is to be expected of any prosecutor, said Sally Lieber, who worked with Harris on human trafficking legislation while representing Mountain View in the state Assembly.

“It is an adversarial system and so she was filling a particular role, but I think that she was able to do it in a very sophisticated, smart and responsive way,” she said.

As California’s AG: Playing hardball

Harris’ biggest accomplishment while California’s attorney general was to secure a financial settlement with some of the country’s largest banks accused of illegally foreclosing on homeowners.

In September 2011, Harris pulled out of ongoing negotiations between attorneys general from nearly every US state and the five banks, calling the proposed deal of $2-to-$4 billion “crumbs on the table.”

Harris was not the first attorney general to walk away, but the departure of the country’s largest state seemed to have its intended effect.

A few months later, with California back in the mix, a new deal was struck. This time, California got $20.2 billion in debt reductions and direct financial assistance.

Still, some consumer groups and outside experts were critical of the deal, arguing that the banks would have been forced to write off much of that bad debt eventually. “All sizzle, no steak,” is how Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin put it.

But Harris’ willingness to play hardball did result in a bigger settlement, said Rob McKenna, former Washington attorney general who was part of the negotiations.

“It’s possible for states to overstate the impact they had on the final settlement. The former New York Attorney General (Eric Schneiderman) would sometimes make claims about the settlement and improvements he had obtained,” he said. “But it’s fair to say that Attorney General Harris negotiated and obtained some improvement in the settlement for California.”

Kamala the campaigner

Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign high on fanfare and hype, only to flame out less than a year later before even making it to Iowa. It was a historically stark underperformance from a candidate that many Democratic insiders believed would be a formidable contender.

In California, Harris’ electoral track record has been mixed.

Her first spin on the campaign trail was a superlative success. In her 2003 race for San Francisco District Attorney, she pushed out a two-term incumbent and won more votes than any other candidate running for a city-wide office that year.

Harris’ first run for statewide office didn’t go quite smoothly. Her race for Attorney General against Republican Steve Cooley wasn’t called until weeks after Election Day. Yes, Harris won. But she did so by less than a percentage point.

Now, after 18 years in which not a single Republican has won statewide office in California, it’s easy to look back at that nail-biter of an election and see an early sign of Harris’ weakness as a candidate. But at the time, the calculus was a little different. Cooley, a relative moderate, was considered the favorite to win against Harris, a San Francisco liberal. This was 2010, which proved to be a historic landslide election for the GOP. The fact that Harris eked it out despite those headwinds, and as the first woman and person of color to hold that office no less, cemented her status as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris talk as they assess the damage during the Creek Fire at Pine Ridge Elementary on Sept. 15, 2020, in Auberry.

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Gary Kazanjian

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Also rising was Gavin Newsom. The two were San Francisco friends and ran in the same social circles even before their political careers ignited. They share the same political consultants. And when the two most prestigious California elective offices opened up — for governor and U.S. senator — they sidestepped a ballot rivalry when she successfully ran for the Senate, as did he for governor.

Newsom has said — and recently reiterated — that he would not challenge Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. Although Newsom’s name frequently appears on lists of hypothetical Biden replacements, she is already on the ticket and is seen by many as the heir-apparent.

Regardless, both are publicly saying now, again and again, that they are backing Biden.

This story incorporates prior reporting and interviews from CalMatters’ 2020 election coverage.

In recent years, some Southern California cities have tried a new approach to softening the blow of large rent hikes. When landlords raised rents beyond what tenants could afford, cities required them to give those tenants thousands of dollars in relocation assistance.

But that strategy had one major problem. According to recent court decisions, it was illegal.

Following legal victories by landlord groups, the cities of L.A. and Pasadena have deleted guidance about those relocation payments from their websites and officials are no longer enforcing the requirement.

Whitney Prout, who works on legal affairs for the California Apartment Association, said the landlord advocacy group successfully argued that Pasadena's requirement illegally imposed heavy costs on landlords who raised rents to levels allowed by state law.

“It was a consequence that was imposed for exercising a legal right,” Prout said. “That is effectively the same as limiting the right that exists. And you're not allowed to do that.”

No more payments to ‘cushion the blow’

A California appellate court ruled in December 2025 that Pasadena’s relocation requirement due to rent hikes was illegal. In April, the California Supreme Court declined to review the decision. A separate case brought against L.A. later used the Pasadena case as precedent to strike down a similar requirement in that city.

Tenant advocates said the decisions mean that renters getting pushed out of their homes by large rent hikes will now have to shoulder the cost of finding new housing entirely on their own.

“It was a new attempt to protect tenants that wasn't as legally tried and tested,” said Ryan Bell, a coordinator with Tenants Together and a member of the Pasadena Rental Housing Board. “The idea was to help cushion the blow of displacement. And now that doesn't exist anymore.”

Who was getting relocation aid?

Pasadena’s relocation requirement was created by Measure H, the November 2022 ballot initiative that nearly 54% of voters passed to implement rent control and eviction protections.

Pasadena landlords would have to pay relocation assistance if they increased rents by more than 5% plus the amount of the city’s current rent control cap. Today, that limit would be 7.25%. If tenants informed their landlords that they could not afford increases above that amount, they would be entitled to relocation payments.

The protection wasn’t designed for Pasadena tenants living in rent-controlled apartments. Landlords cannot legally raise rents that much in units covered by those caps.

Instead, the relocation payments were geared toward tenants living in other kinds of housing not covered by local limits, such as single-family homes, condos and apartments built after Feb. 1, 1995.

A separate state law caps annual rent increases — currently at 8% in L.A. County — in many homes not subject to local rent control caps. But not all housing is covered by that state law.

Relocation payments still required in some cases

Though landlords no longer need to pay relocation fees when tenants are pushed out by large rent hikes, they still must pay tenants who are evicted through no fault of their own, such as in cases where landlords want to move a family member into the tenant’s unit.

The amount of relocation assistance Pasadena requires landlords to pay varies based on how many bedrooms the unit had, how long a tenant lived there, and the tenant’s age, parental status and disabilities. The payments range from $8,340 to $40,210.

The rules have worked similarly in the city of L.A., where relocation payments currently range from one month’s worth of rent up to $27,400. The rule requiring relocation payments due to “economic displacement” was created by the City Council in 2023 as the city began ramping down its COVID-19 pandemic tenant protections.

What’s changing now

Santa Monica has also required relocation payments in situations where tenants can’t afford large rent hikes. The city still lists that requirement in online documents. LAist reached out to city officials to ask if they have changed their approach to enforcing the requirement in light of recent court rulings. We did not receive a response.

In guidance on tenant protections published this month, the city of L.A. dropped information about relocation payments triggered by rent hikes. Pasadena officials removed details about the rent-hike relocation rules after LAist asked if they planned to drop the requirement, which was still described in detail on the city’s website earlier this week.

Prout, the California Apartment Association legal affairs expert, said the changes will be welcome news for landlords who felt blindsided when the rules first took effect a few years ago.

Many, she said, “were very surprised to learn that — despite the fact that they were not rent controlled — if they increased the rent more than the city wanted them to, they were facing a pretty significant potential financial consequence.”

A nonprofit law firm has created a resource to teach people who are in custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, or at the neighboring Desert View Annex, how to challenge their detainment.

Available in English and in Spanish, the information packet walks immigrant detainees through the process of filling out their own petitions for habeas corpus.

“Habeas corpus” means “you have the body” in Latin. In the U.S., this writ refers to a judicial order that forces authorities to bring the person they’ve detained before a federal district court and justify their continued confinement.

This provision — enshrined in Section 9 of Article I of the U.S. Constitution — is a safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center created its resource for people who meet two criteria:

1. The petitioner has an open case in immigration court or a pending appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals.
2. The petitioner was previously detained and released by immigrant officials. 

Once immigrant officials release a detainee — once they decide that the person in question is not dangerous and does not pose a flight risk — “they can't just arrest you again without proof of any change in circumstance,” said Sarah Houston, managing attorney of the law firm’s rapid response team.

An LAist investigation recently found that more immigrants are being held in detention without bond, and the increase in denials is steepest at Adelanto. Plus, given reports of unsanitary and unsafe conditions at Adelanto, along with a surge in deaths at ICE detention facilities across the country, Houston said her team is acting out of a sense of urgency.

“We don't want anyone to sit in detention for months and months, when they could potentially be drafting this and getting out,” she said.

How this resource helps immigrant detainees

Immigrant Defenders Law Center is based in downtown L.A. Each week, their attorneys make the trek to the long-term detention facilities in Adelanto, out in the Mojave desert.

“We have a great network [of pro bono and low bono lawyers],” Houston said, “but there is no way we have enough attorneys to meet the needs of [scores of detainees].”

At the same time, she added, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California was getting inundated with petitions for habeas corpus — so much so that it made a form for detainees who opt to represent themselves. In the legal world, self-representation is referred to as “pro se.”

Meanwhile, Houston and her team kept hearing about people who’d been re-detained at Adelanto. In response, they created their resource for these “pro se” litigants.

The nonprofit’s 24-page resource contains detailed instructions on how to file a petition for habeas corpus, but it’s meant to be uncomplicated, Houston said. When creating it, the law firm’s goal was to “make it as clear as possible,” while mitigating the possibility that petitioners might make a mistake.

Before sharing the resource widely, the law firm identified one detainee for a test case. A judge decided the government was holding that person in custody illegally. Then, another detainee used the resource to secure his release and that of five others, Houston said.

Now, when her team goes to Adelanto, they take packets of the resource with them to distribute widely among detainees.

“Our clients are so intelligent and so resourceful, and they will do anything to go back to their families,” she said. “Our job is to give them as much information as possible for them to be able to draft the best habeas.”

What happens if a petitioner makes an error?  

Even with detailed instructions, Houston acknowledged, detainees who file habeas corpus petitions “sometimes do make mistakes.” As a result, their petition might get rejected, forcing the detainee to refile. But in Houston’s experience, courts tend to be more lenient when people are representing themselves.

“If it's a minor error, they'll just go forward with it,” she said.

Under the second Trump administration, petitions for habeas corpus have skyrocketed.

A ProPublica report found that immigrants filed more of these petitions in the first 13 months of the second Trump administration than in the past three administrations combined — including President Donald Trump’s first. In parts of California and Texas, these petitions have been especially prevalent.

Houston underscored that the resource her team created is specifically geared at people who are both detained at Adelanto and who meet the criteria she outlined.

Habeas corpus is “so complicated that you can't make a resource like this for every type of person,” she said. “We wanted to start off where we know exactly what the case law is, where it's pretty clear cut.”

The law firm is currently working on translating the resource, to ensure it’s available to immigrants who speak other languages.

After 25 years of anticipation, the Burbank Public Library opened a time capsule monument only to find…nothing.

They were expecting to come across a collection of memories from 2001, when the monument was last opened. But the capsule was never created. And library officials don’t know why.

“It's a fun little mystery we got going on,” said Kathleen Zapata, marketing analyst for the Burbank Public Library. “Instead, we found the original time capsule that was placed in 1976 by the Burbank Bicentennial Committee who started off this whole time capsule project to begin with.”

The 2001 time capsule was never created, and library officials say they aren't sure why.

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Courtesy of Burbank Public Library

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The monument has four compartments, and while it says it was sealed in 1977, the original time capsule contents are from 1976.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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In 1976, the committee built a monument in front of the Central Library for four time capsules, according to officials. The idea was to open a time capsule, and add another into the monument, every 25 years for the next century.

But wires got crossed somewhere along the way. Zapata noted the committee’s instructions were “a bit vague.”

“Potentially, the 2001 crew just thought maybe that we were supposed to open the 1976 [capsule] every 25 years to maybe admire it? I don't know,” she said.

The library is now working on a 2026 time capsule for future generations — and officials want to hear from you.

Keeping up the tradition

Zapata said the new time capsule should represent life in Burbank today. They’re specifically looking for small, non-perishable items that will stand the test of time (and weather).

It could include movie tickets from all three of the city's AMCs. Or a yellow Porto’s Bakery bag. Or furniture instructions from Ikea, which Burbank boasts as the largest in the U.S.

“If anyone has an item that they could even donate to the time capsule, that would be fantastic,” she said. “We're open to absolutely any ideas that folks have … we hope that the community can join us in this collective brainstorm.”

For example, the original time capsule included photos of the committee who started the program, a book of utility rates that showed what people were paying for water and electricity decades ago and a menu from a long-closed restaurant.

The items were a blast from the past, including a telephone book and utility rates book that showed what people were paying for electricity and water decades ago.

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Courtesy Burbank Public Library

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The Burbank Bicentennial Committee kicked off the generational project.

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Courtesy Burbank Public Library

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A few photos of Burbank residents in the 1970s were tucked away in the time capsule.

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Courtesy Burbank Public Library

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The first time capsule was from 1976 and included items that represented the area at the time, including a nearby JCPenney.

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Courtesy Burbank Public Library

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You can submit ideas to the library’s form here through September.

Zapata is also hoping that anyone who knows why the last capsule was skipped will come forward and cue the library in, too.

What happens next?

Once complete, the library will put both the 2026 and 1976 time capsules safely in storage until its new Central Library location is built.

The new branch, which Burbank got a $9.95 million grant for a few years ago, is expected to open in 2029, according to Zapata.

You can find more information about the project and share feedback here.

If you want to see the original time capsule in person before then, the items will be on display at an open house later this year. Zapata said you'll be able to find the time and date on the library's website once those details are finalized.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered major changes to reported conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, granting a preliminary injunction that requires federal immigration officials provide people with clean drinking water and adequate medical care.

U.S. District Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes ruled that the detainees who brought the lawsuit “demonstrated they are likely to prevail” on their claims that conditions at the facility violate Fifth Amendment protections against inhumane conditions of confinement. While the case will continue to work its way through the courts, the judge issued the ruling now, finding that people being detained could suffer irreparable harm without court intervention.

The suit came after two deaths at the facility within weeks of each other last fall: Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient, and 56-year-old Gabriel Garcia-Aviles. Both deaths are still under federal investigation as scrutiny over the conditions inside immigrant detention centers in the Trump administration continues to mount.

In their lawsuit, lawyers for the detainees said Adelanto violated ICE detention guidelines by failing to provide clean drinking water, nutritious meals, sanitation, access to medical care and medicine, as well as medical intake screening upon arrival at the facility. They also alleged violations of rules around recreation time outside, visitation time for family, daily headcount to ensure detainees are alive, and accommodations for people with disabilities.

In response, Sykes ordered 24-hour access to clean drinking water, meals with a sufficient number of calories, and access to soap and hygiene products free of charge. The injunction also requires the facility to be cleansed daily and for mold to be identified and removed. Detainees are to be provided blankets and temperature-appropriate clothing, as well as access to recreational yard time outside for at least four hours every day.

The order prevents Adelanto, which is located about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, from limiting family visitation during regular business hours, including removing time restrictions and physical contact, such as hugging or holding hands, with family members. It also says the facility can not cancel a visitation if a family member needs to use the restroom during the visit.

The majority of people being held in immigration detention centers in California have not been accused of committing crimes, only of civil immigration violations.

The court ordered Adelanto to perform at least two headcounts every day, once overnight and once during the day, to ensure detainees are present and not incapacitated. The court also ordered restrictions on sending detainees to isolation, barring a life safety risk to staff or if the detainee requests it.

The ruling requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other named defendants to immediately provide detainees with the condition upgrades the judge ordered.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the ruling. DHS attorney Pushkal Mishra argued in court last week the federal government couldn’t be held liable for the actions of its contractor, GEO Group, which runs Adelanto and 18 other immigration facilities around the country.

In a motion to dismiss the case, DHS argued that it should not have “to take over the daily management of a federal contract from a private contractor.”

GEO Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Disability access in ICE facilities has been a recurring issue since the Trump administration took office for a second term. According to the complaint, one person described being placed in handcuffs and ankle chains for court appearances despite using a cane. Others alleged people with mobility issues were routinely assigned top bunks. The new court order requires the government to provide people with disabilities with reasonable accommodations.

The court has given the federal government 14 days to create a plan to address medical care and disability needs for detainees. The order requires all detainees to be given an intake screening upon arriving for physical or mental illnesses, ensure ongoing treatment and medication, and treat and segregate detainees to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. The order also mandates that every detainee must have access to primary, secondary, and tertiary medical care and be advised of their patient rights.

Sykes ordered that the government must provide two independent monitors for the duration of the lawsuit to ensure compliance with the court orders. Detainees must also be given the opportunity to submit grievances to the monitors in English or Spanish that are contained in a lockbox only accessible to the monitors.

A report by the California attorney general this year found that six people have died in detention facilities in the state since the start of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Nationwide, 22 people have died this year in immigration detention.

This week, the Mexican federal government called on state attorneys general to criminally investigate cases where Mexican nationals have died in ICE custody.