The Brief

Mina Manzano is the sole breadwinner in her Azusa household.

She supports a disabled husband, an elderly father and a teenage son with a rare genetic disorder. At 4 in the morning, she rouses to administer her son's first tube feeding of the day before heading to her nursing job caring for developmentally disabled adults.

Her youngest brother in the Philippines has offered to give her much-needed respite. Like thousands of immigrants across Southern California who've petitioned for loved ones to come to the U.S., her family has been anxiously waiting for his visa application to come through.

"I'd have someone to help me in order to survive,” Manzano, 52, said.

It’s now been 10 years since his application was submitted. A huge visa backlog, only exacerbated by the pandemic, has forced applicants to wait years, sometimes decades — a limbo that some policymakers say is unduly cruel and is renewing calls to revamp the visa system.

Mina Manzano works as a licensed practical nurse taking care of developmentally disabled adults.

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Courtesy of Mina Manzano

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Manzano’s family is in particularly dire straits. Her mother, who petitioned for her brother, died. He had cleared all the application hurdles and only had an interview left to do at the U.S. embassy. Now the family was back at square one, all those years of waiting seemingly amounting to nothing.

Limited spots, lost hope

Manzano’s mother, a legal permanent resident, in 2013 started the process to bring her son over. There is a limited number of visas and through the quirks of the U.S. immigration system, it’s faster for a parent who's a legal permanent resident to apply for a child than for a U.S. citizen to sponsor a sibling.

The family waited, and waited. Meanwhile, immigration lawyers noticed that paperwork required by the federal government had become more onerous under former President Donald Trump, stretching out timelines. Then, the pandemic hit and shut down consulates, which then had problems staffing up again.

Next thing Manzano knew, more than nine years had passed. Then last year, Manzano’s mother died of a cardiac arrest, she said.

The petition for her brother Apolonio Francisco, Jr. was automatically canceled, they learned. If Manzano were to file a petition for him, she could expect to see him in 21 years or so, the estimated time it takes to bring a sibling from the Philippines.

“We lost hope," Manzano said. "Even my brother."

Taking on risk

Jonathan Fung, an immigration attorney who directs legal services at the Immigration Resource Center of San Gabriel Valley, said he’s seen too many applications languish when something unforeseen strikes like death or illness.

“It's unfortunate that we ask immigrants to plan their lives decades ahead of time for how and when they're going to reunite with their family members in the U.S. when nobody else is expected to perform that kind of mental task,” Fung said.

Mina Manzano's youngest brother, Apolonio Francisco Jr. (far left) has offered to move to the U.S. to help his sister Mina Mazano (fourth from left), but his application is now in limbo.

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Courtesy Mina Manzano

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He said the basis for the backlog is a system that uses per-country caps. No more than 7% of visas in each family category can go each year to applicants from any one country.

Fung said this rule has a disproportionate impact in parts of the world where demand for visas outstrips availability, such as Latin America and Asia.

"You start to hit that 7% pretty quickly, especially for countries with huge populations like China or India, or countries with really strong ties to the U.S. such as the Philippines, a former American colony," Fung said.

Applicants from Asia make up more than a third of 4 million people mired in the family-based immigration backlog, according to the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Unused visas by the hundreds of thousands

Meanwhile, other countries, such as those in northern Europe might not hit any caps.

“The thing that really irks me is that actually we have so many unused visas,” said California Rep. Judy Chu, who represents West San Gabriel Valley.

The result is that less than 75% of 226,000 available family-based visas were allocated during the last fiscal year. Chu, a Democrat, said this is an improvement over past years, but not enough of one.

Chu chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which sent a letter last month calling on President Joe Biden to open up hundreds of thousands of visa slots that have gone unfilled over the last 30 years and add them to family and employment-based visa categories. The caucus also wants Biden to expand the use of family reunification parole, which allows visa applicants to live in the U.S. while they wait for the backlog to clear.

Both are proposals in Chu's Reuniting Families Act of 2023 and would benefit not only families but the labor market, she said.

“When family comes, they support each other,” Chu said. “So if there is child care that needs to be done, that family member can take care of it instead of having the family suffer, and perhaps one worker int that family from having to drop out."

Solo parenting in a backlog

The president has not formally responded to the letter but Chu said his administration has talked about the possibility of recapturing unused visas through congressional action.

Congress, though, is at an impasse over immigration reform. (Exhibit A: the Reuniting Families Act has been introduced and re-introduced since 2008).

Rep. Judy Chu. who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, speaks in the Reuniting Families Act in 2019.

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Mark Wilson

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Getty Images

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With no clear relief in sight, Chu's office hears from constituents from across her district who are stuck in the visa bottleneck.

One constituent wants only to be identified by her first name Sylvie because she's concerned anything hindering her effort to bring her husband from Lebanon.

A legal permanent resident who lives in Pasadena, she first came to the U.S. with her parents in 2017, leaving behind her boyfriend. She returned to Lebanon to marry him during a visit. But then the pandemic struck and she didn’t return to the States until mid-2020, while pregnant with their son. Weeks after his birth, she petitioned for her husband to join them in a country that she feels offers stability and opportunities.

Her immigration lawyer had told her in a 1 and 1/2 years, they’d all be reunited. More than three years later, it hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, Sylvie’s fears about her husband’s safety grow because of regional unrest related to the Israel-Hamas war.

"We waited all this time," she tells her disheartened husband. "So let's just be patient a little bit more and we're going to be together."

Privately, she despairs as she parents their son on her own while working as an auditor.

"Every December, we say hopefully this Christmas we're going to be together," she said. "But it's never happening."

Humanitarian exception

Mina Manzano also needs help now.

Fung, of the Immigration Resource Center, has taken on her case as a supervising attorney working with staff attorney Bree Salthouse. The team is trying to keep her brother’s application alive by seeking a so-called humanitarian reinstatement through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“It's really up to the officer who is looking at the application to determine under their own judgment, whether or not something is going to meet the definition of hardship,” Fung said. “Ultimately, it’s just who you get.”

And it could take years to get a petition reinstated. The last humanitarian reinstatement Fung filed for another family took more than two years to attain.

Meanwhile. the pressure has only been mounting on Manzano. She now has college costs to cover: She has an older son who is a freshman at UC Irvine, studying computer science. When he talks about getting a job to help support the family, his mother gently rejects the idea.

“I can still manage, my son,” Manzano tells him. “So just concentrate on your [studies]. God will provide.”

Every day she prays her brother can come to the States and her son can finish his studies. She just needs to hold on, she says, because that’s all she can do.  

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article. 

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is hosting a buyback event Sunday where people can exchange their e-bikes and e-motorcycles for up to $1,000 in gift cards. The goal is to reduce the number of illegal bikes on the road, and give parents an incentive to get dangerous vehicles out of kids’ hands.

“These vehicles are not child’s play, and the consequences are incredibly dangerous and increasingly deadly,” DA Todd Spitzer said in a news release announcing the event.

Communities in Orange County have been grappling with a surge in e-bikes and e-motos on the road, including among young kids, and an accompanying increase in serious crashes.

“Our area has pretty much the highest concentration of e-bike injuries and e-bike accidents in the country,” said Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Takeuchi said  just over 70% of the children treated at the hospital for e-bike injuries had some level of head injury, “from a simple concussion to devastating brain damage, brain bleed and skull fracture."

A lot of those injuries are among teenagers not wearing helmets, he said. Plus, many e-bikes on the market are too heavy and fast for children to control, Takeuchi said.

Besides safety concerns, tensions have flared with other drivers, pedestrians, and neighbors in areas with heavy concentrations of e-bikes.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District became one of the first districts in the country this year to restrict e-bikes to high school campuses only. District leaders say the policy is working to disincentivize young students from riding e-bikes to school. But at one middle school, students with e-bikes have opted to ride them anyway, parking in the surrounding neighborhood and raising the ire of homeowners.

The DA’s approach

The DA’s office has started to target parents who allow their children to ride e-bikes and e-motorcycles that have been illegally modified for high speeds, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April, the district attorney filed child endangerment charges against a mother from Aliso Viejo after her 14-year-old son struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest. The boy was riding an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 mph.

Details of the buyback program

The e-bike and e-motorcycle buyback program is part of the DA’s plan to address safety concerns with e-bikes. Local police departments, hospitals and the California Office of Traffic Safety will also be onsite with information booths.

People can bring in functioning or non-functioning e-bikes, e-motorcycles, e-scooters and pocket bikes and exchange them for gift cards worth up to $1,000 — while supplies last.

The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 13, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

An appeals court issued a ruling Friday that strikes down a federal government effort to block a lower court’s order requiring the construction of 2,550 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

The long-running case, brought forward by disabled veterans struggling with homelessness in the L.A. area, has centered on the use of the sprawling 400-acre VA campus.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had previously scrutinized leases for the private Brentwood School’s athletic facilities, a parking lot company, an oil drilling enterprise and UCLA’s baseball stadium.

Ruling that the campus was meant to aid veterans, Carter ordered the VA to not renew the leases and quickly build 750 units of temporary housing and 1,800 units of permanent housing.

But Carter’s September 2024 order has been on hold ever since the defendants asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Case returns to lower court

On Friday, more than two-thirds of the court’s 29 judges ruled against the VA’s petition for a rehearing.

“It's a historic day for veterans,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs.

“The government has been fighting their veterans, who went to fight on behalf of the nation,” he added. “They've been fighting them like they are the enemy. They went to the district court to fight. They lost.”

Rosenbaum said he’s pleased to see the case return to Carter’s courtroom after a long appeals process. Carter, himself a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, took an active role in pushing the VA to address a homelessness crisis that has thousands of former service members experiencing homelessness on any given night in L.A. County.

Could the VA pursue further appeals? 

Carter has also ordered the VA to stop using veterans' disability payment benefits as a reason to make them ineligible for supportive housing programs due to income restrictions.

But Rob Reynolds, an Iraq War veteran who advocates for L.A.’s veteran community, said the federal government’s attempts to win an appeal could continue.

“The government can still appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Reynolds said.

When veterans involved in the case first heard today’s news on the 9th Circuit ruling, he said they immediately asked about the potential for further appeals.

“All of us are really hoping that the government stops this fight, and that we can get housing built for our veterans and end this madness once and for all,” Reynolds said.

A spokesperson for the VA declined to comment on the ruling, saying the department does not discuss pending litigation.

Jenny Yang, a comedian from L.A., has been traveling across the country turning immigrant grocery stores into comedy hubs. Now she’s back in L.A. getting ready to start a mini-residency in Highland Park, tape her first one-hour special and share moments from the tour.

Yang kicked off her Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour in June in L.A., then took it to 15 cities across the country. She told LAist the decision came as a way to cope with the grief from her dad’s death, 10 failed in vitro fertilization treatments between 2020 and 2025 and seeing the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread across the country.

She said the idea to tour grocery stores was a way to reclaim those spaces, after immigration enforcement left many afraid to go out and do simple tasks like buying groceries.

“If we cannot laugh in front of a wall of instant ramen around our bok choy," Yang said, "then what is the American dream for?"

Her routine wove in stories about her fertility struggles and the challenges of having to be a “good egg” growing up as the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. Her hope for the tour was to connect with people, to make jokes and help people feel lighter after.

The tour proceeds went to local nonprofits serving immigrant communities, and Yang said those organizations helped recruit the grocery stores. She said some stores said no at first — they felt overwhelmed by ICE activity in their city, had lost staff or worried about drawing attention.

“That's part of the story of the tour is it's one thing to want to imagine this beautiful world where you can tell jokes inside of immigrant grocery stores," Yang said. "It's another thing to know what those obstacles are, and I think that's still very telling for where we are as a country.”

One moment stood out to Yang: performing at Shuang Hur Supermarket in Minneapolis. It’s near the memorial for Alex Pretti, the nurse that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed in January as federal agents carried out immigration enforcement in the city.

“I was able to talk to Henry, the owner who’s a Chinese American uncle. [He] was so proud of being able to help his regular patrons, who for the most part even though it was an Asian centered grocery store, were majority Latino,” Yang said. “I was able to bear witness to their resilience as a community, what they did to take care of each other.”

Now she’s back in L.A. and is doing a mini-residency at the Outside In Theater at 5317 York Blvd. in Highland Park. Her first show is 6 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by shows on Sept. 19 and 26 at the same time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can find them at Outside In's website.

In February 2027, Yang will be taping her first one-hour special at Rancho Meat Market #1 in Lincoln Heights. She describes it as a love letter to Los Angeles that’s endured so much, from the ICE raids to the January fires.

You can follow Jenny Yang’s work here.