The Brief

With former president Donald Trump set to return to the White House, state and local leaders in California say they’re determined to use their political office to resist his policies.

But what has Trump proposed to do on key issues facing Californians like housing, the environment, health care and the border? And what could local leaders do in overwhelmingly Democratic cities like Los Angeles to thwart his campaign promises?

LAist interviewed experts on these topics to get a sense of what’s in store for L.A.

The border and immigration

Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign, and promised on his first day in office to close the U.S. border with Mexico and restrict migrants from seeking asylum.

Those policies, if carried out, have the potential to profoundly disrupt daily life in L.A. County, where one-in-three residents are immigrants and 8% lack legal authorization, according to USC Dornsife’s 2024 State of Immigrants report.

“We can expect Trump's approach to the border to include policies and practices that intentionally seek to foment chaos,” said Monika Langarica with the UCLA School of Law’s Center for the Immigration Law and Policy.

But Langarica said California has already enacted local policies to limit cooperation between federal immigration officials and local law enforcement, who would need to play a crucial role in scaling up deportation efforts to meet Trump’s goals.

Deportations of millions of migrants would be unlikely to happen right away. Such a large-scale effort could first require massive government spending and coordination.

Trump’s former senior advisor Stephen Miller has said mass deportation could involve building staging grounds near the border. And Trump has said he would rely on local police to work with the federal government’s 6,000 Enforcement and Removal officers.

“In California there are already important protections built in,” she said. “There is a lot more that can be done by way of state policies to further limit the ability of the federal government to come in and seek to collude with local law enforcement agencies to seek to carry out these so-called mass deportation plans.”

Niels Frenzen, director of USC’s Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, said Trump could also try to end a program that extends authorization to live and work in the U.S. to those who arrived in the country illegally as children. About 64,000 people in the L.A. area currently have authorization under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

Under Trump’s first administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his efforts to dismantle the program.

Another possibility: California officials who resist Trump’s immigration policies could find themselves threatened with losing federal resources, Frenzen said.

“In Trump campaign rallies, he said if Newsom doesn't get in line, the federal government is not going to provide FEMA assistance for wildfire recovery,” Frenzen said. “Then it's just a question of, does the state have the political and the financial capability of resisting those pressures from the federal government?”

Housing affordability

Deportation has also been a cornerstone of Trump’s message on housing affordability, with the former president saying expelling immigrants would free up more housing and reduce costs for others.

But housing analysts in California say the more likely outcome from such efforts could be ballooning construction budgets that translate into steeper rents.

“[Deportations] will cause massive pain and hardship for the people who are affected. And a lot of the folks getting deported are actually critical for housing supply,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. “Most of the [construction] workforce these days is being made up of immigrants, including many who may not have all their citizenship or legal documentation perfected."

Trump’s plans to raise tariffs could also cause the cost of imported homebuilding materials, such as lumber and steel, to spike, Metcalf added.

“One could imagine 20% tariffs massively raising the cost and decreasing the availability of the materials that are needed to build homes,” he said. “Those would be huge drags, I think, on forward supply in California.”

LGBTQ+ communities

Trump repeatedly took aim at LGBTQ+ communities on the campaign trail, airing ads that disparagingly said Vice President Kamala Harris’ positions on issues affecting transgender people showed she was for “they/them” while he was for “you.”

Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute, said California has maintained an affirming policy environment, and she expected that to continue under state law.

“What we might see in California is that LGBT people would retain many of the same rights that they have enjoyed under the Biden administration, or any administration,” she said. “But what would happen is we would expect some significant conflict with the federal government.”

For example, in education, California has a number of laws protecting LGBTQ+ students’ rights to participate in sports and use gender-affirming restrooms. Redfield said those aren’t directly threatened by a Trump administration.

“The federal government, under a conservative administration, might narrowly define Title IX and prohibit, for example, the inclusion of trans youth in sports that match their gender identity, or prohibit schools from allowing trans youth to use bathrooms that match their gender identity,” Redfield said. “The main result there is the risk of losing funding.”

Reproductive rights

In the 2022 mid-term election, about two-thirds of California voters decided to guarantee the right to an abortion and contraception in the state’s constitution following a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Proposition 1 inserted language into the state constitution saying, “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual's reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

But with conservatives soon to control the White House, the Supreme Court and potentially both houses of Congress, could the federal government override California’s protections? That’s unlikely. Even abortion opponents say they are not expecting big changes in the state.

“California already has such strong protections for the abortion industry that a Trump administration would not change anything, really,” said Mary Rose Short, the director of outreach for California Right to Life. “There is a lot of talk about, what if Trump signed a national abortion ban, or something like that. But that would require that to be presented to him by a majority of the states. And that is not feasible in the next four years.”

Jodi Hicks, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said in a written statement on Trump’s victory, “Planned Parenthood health centers in California will continue to be open for any person seeking care — even for those who do not call California home — and we will fight like hell to ensure it stays that way.”

Environmental protection 

During Trump’s first term in office, climate goals became a central point of contention between the federal government and California, which often leads the U.S. on environmental standards.

Trump took aim at the state’s ability to set stronger tailpipe emission limits for cars back in 2019. A federal court decision earlier this year upheld California’s right to set these standards.

Julia Stein with the UCLA School of Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment said these disputes could come roaring back with Trump returning to power.

“California will need to think of creative ways to continue to regulate in that space without a federal partner,” Stein said.

Stein added that the world is at a critical tipping point for addressing climate change, and other countries around the world will be looking to see what happens in the U.S.

“California kind of stepped up to fill that void last time,” Stein said. “Being able to make progress on these issues is incredibly important, and to be seen as a strong leader globally — not just domestically — on these issues is also hugely important.”

Health care costs

Trump has talked about lowering the expenses Americans face when seeking medical care and prescription drugs, but has not provided specifics on his health care policy priorities. During the presidential debate in September he said he had “concepts of a plan.”

Trump has said recently that he won’t try to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which a majority of Americans rate favorably, according to recent polling data.

His administration will face a decision next year on whether to back an extension of enhanced premium subsidies for ACA insurance plans. Those expanded subsidies were passed under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and will come up for renewal next year.

Geoffrey Joyce, health policy director at USC’s Schaeffer Center, said getting rid of the subsidies would mean big changes locally.

“It would have a huge effect on California,” Joyce said. “Anytime you cut subsidies, you make it less attractive. More people would decide not to get insurance.”

A federal judge has ordered Los Angeles to pay more than $1.8 million in attorneys’ fees and costs to the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights and other organizations that sued the city over what it deemed an inadequate response to the homelessness crisis.

The city is appealing the decision.

The details

L.A. Alliance is a group of business owners and residents who sued the city and county of Los Angeles in 2020 in an effort to push both governments to provide more shelter to unhoused people in the region.

The city of L.A. settled with the plaintiffs in 2022, and U.S. District Judge David O. Carter is overseeing the city’s progress in keeping up with the terms of that agreement. The judge found the city breached its agreement in multiple ways in a ruling last summer.

Specifically, the judge found that the city did not provide a plan for how it intends to create 12,915 shelter beds, as promised, by 2027. The court also found the city “flouted” its responsibilities by failing to provide accurate, comprehensive data when requested and did not provide evidence to support the numbers it was reporting, according to court documents.

In addition to $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees and $5,000 in costs to L.A. Alliance, Carter awarded about $200,000 in fees and $160 in costs to the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and Los Angeles Community Action Network.

The organizations are considered “intervenors” in the suit, representing people experiencing homelessness on Skid Row. Their attorneys include those from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Why it matters

In his order, released Tuesday, Carter compared the recent award to the millions of taxpayer dollars city officials agreed to pay an outside law firm representing L.A. in the settlement.

Carter wrote in the order that the attorneys' fees and costs to L.A. Alliance and others “is reasonable, especially in light of the approximately $5.9 million that the City’s outside counsel is charging.”

LAist’s housing and homelessness coverage was cited several times in the order.

“It has fallen to plaintiff, intervenors, and journalists to point out the deficiencies in the city’s reporting,” Carter wrote, referring to data the city is required to report to the court as part of the settlement.

“Plaintiff and intervenors must be compensated for this,” he said.

The city’s response 

Attorneys representing the city filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday.

L.A. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto’s office did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment by phone or email.

Shayla Myers, senior attorney with the Unhoused People's Justice Project at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, told LAist the intervenors participated in the case without compensation “because it's incredibly important given what is at stake in these proceedings that unhoused folks have a voice.”

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for L.A. Alliance, told LAist he’s thrilled the court is imposing accountability on the city, including sanctions for violating the settlement agreement. But Umhofer said he’s saddened that L.A. Alliance is going to have to keep fighting to hold the city to its promises.

“The obvious city strategy here is hire a big, good law firm to fight on absolutely every front in hopes that the plaintiffs, the intervenors or the court will ultimately give up trying to hold the city accountable,” he said.

What's next

The parties are scheduled to appear in federal court in downtown L.A. on Monday, when a hearing will resume to determine whether the judge will hold the city of Los Angeles in contempt of court.

Carter has said in documents that he’s concerned “the city has demonstrated a continuous pattern of delay” in meeting its obligations with court orders under the settlement and that the “delay continues to this day.”

Every January, the open-air downtown food fair reopens after its winter break and announces new additions to its carefully selected group of regular vendors.

This year’s new vendor class demonstrates the resilience of L.A.'s independent food scene, ranging from a Grammy-nominated producer's Persian-influenced pizza to Southern fried fish celebrating Black American culinary traditions, to an LAist 2025 Tournament of Cheeseburger heavyweight contender.

The reopening also marks the start of Smorgasburg LA's 10th anniversary year, and will feature 41 returning vendors, who've helped build the regular event into a fun, family-friendly opportunity to try new, often cutting-edge food you may not be familiar with.

Doors open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at DTLA’s The Row, with free entry and free parking for the first two hours.

A new year

General manager Zach Brooks said this is his favorite time of year. "We add the new vendors at the beginning of the new year, everyone's excited."

Vendors apply through Smorgasburg's website, and the team meets with every applicant to taste their food before acceptance. Brooks said it's not a vetting process like "Shark Tank" but rather a matter of seeing if it's a good fit. Competition remains fierce, with many more applicants than available spots.

"I think it's just a testament to L.A. and the resilience of people who love this business and have a passion for it, and are going to continue to persevere and start their businesses and want to be out there selling food," Brooks said.

Here are a few highlights:

Viral orange chicken sandwich 

Long Beach-based Terrible Burger becomes Smorgasburg's new permanent burger vendor after standout appearances at LAist's Tournament of Cheeseburgers and the market's rotating Smorgasburger Stand. The smashburger pop-up, run by husband-and-wife team Nicole and Ryan Ramirez, specializes in burgers that draw from pop culture and global influences. They've made waves with a Korean barbecue burger topped with bulgogi barbecue sauce and a viral orange chicken sandwich, previously available only at their Tuesday night residency at Long Beach's Midnight Oil, making its L.A. debut Sunday.

Terrible Burger's viral orange chicken sandwich makes its LA debut at Smorgasburg after being available only in Long Beach.

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Courtesy Terrible Burger

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"We have been big Smorgasburg fans for a really long time before we even started Terrible Burger. We would go to Smorgasburg on dates, just eat and hang out. And it was just always a little dream of, "oh, what if we ever sold food here?" Nicole Ramirez said.

Crispy fried snapper and thick-cut fries 

Orange County-based Hot Grease, run by Asha Starks, is among four vendors graduating from residencies to permanent status. The Southern fried fish pop-up celebrates Black American history through food that honors Starks' family heritage.

"Folks often forget that there are Black folks in Orange County. My family came to Orange County during the second wave of the Great Migration, and they settled in Santa Ana... my food is very cultural. And the story, I feel like, is just as important to highlight," Starks said.

Hot Grease's crispy buttermilk fried snapper with thick-cut fries and "Ill Dill" tartar sauce.

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Courtesy Hot Grease

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Hot Grease serves crispy buttermilk fried snapper with thick-cut fries and small-batch sauces like "Ill Dill" tartar. Honoring the fish fry's history as a site of mutual aid, Starks directs 3% of sales to the Potlikker Line, Hot Grease's reproductive justice mutual aid fund. For January, she's added fish and grits, black-eyed peas and collard greens.

Pizza with a Persian twist

Mamani Pizza brings studio-born energy to Smorgasburg LA with pies featuring Persian-inspired creativity.

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Courtesy Mamani Pizza

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Mamani Pizza, from the Grammy-nominated producer Farsi, part of the music production team Wallis Lane, started making Neapolitan-style pizzas at his West L.A. recording studio a year ago. What began as late-night pies for friends and artists became an underground hit. Most pizzas are traditional, but Farsi adds Persian touches like The Mamani, topped with ground wagyu koobideh, roasted Anaheim chilis, Persian herbs and pomegranate molasses.

Other new vendors

Banana Mama - Asian-inspired pudding
Barranco's Yogurt - Oaxacan fruit yogurt
Franzl's Franks - Austrian sausages
Melnificent Wingz - Gourmet chicken wings
Piruchi - Peruvian street food
RuRu's Golden Tea - Karak chai
Stick Talk - vegan corn dogs
SouuLA - Taiwanese breakfast concept
Unreal Poke - Hawaiian poke
Zindrew Dumpling Shop - Spicy wontons