The Brief

Julián Castro was a student at Stanford University when California voters passed Proposition 187 — a ballot initiative to deny undocumented immigrants social and health services — in 1994.

“I remember the ads they ran with the grainy footage that said ‘They keep coming,’” recalled the newly-named CEO of the Latino Community Foundation and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development at a CalMatters Ideas Festival panel in Sacramento Thursday.

“It felt like a real affront to the Latino community.”

Widely seen as a turning point in California politics, the measure — endorsed by then-Republican-Gov. Pete Wilson and others — helped flip California blue.

Two decades later, could the rapidly growing number of young Latino voters again shake up the state’s political dynamics?

Nationwide, Latino voters are shifting rightward, and Democratic candidates’ margins of support among them have shrunk over the past three presidential elections.

Mike Madrid, a longtime GOP strategist and expert on Latino voting trends, said the change signals an “emergence” of new voters, partly driven by the rise of young Latino voters primarily concerned with the economy instead of immigration.

“The ethnic identity and the race anchor that immigration served for the past 30 years is no longer working for the fastest growing segment of the Latino electorate,” he said during the discussion, moderated by CalMatters senior editor Dave Lesher.

Castro, a Democrat, said it’s not a given, arguing younger voters may take issue with Republican stances on abortion and LGBTQ issues. But Democrats may have problems courting those voters, too: Both Castro and Madrid criticized President Joe Biden’s decision this week to close the southern border temporarily to asylum seekers — an action tried by former President Donald Trump.

“I think it’s a mistake,” Castro said, contending some Democrats thought the response to the border crisis could help them in the November election. “Do I get the politics of that? Sure. I also believe that they were bullied into a corner (to do) that, so now you are having to scramble a few months before an election to address it.”

The November election is another symptom of the political polarization that has taken shape for decades, according to former U.S. Representative Doug Ose, a Sacramento Republican, and Democrat Leon Panetta, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Voters must choose between Trump, the first former president in America to be convicted of felony crimes, and Biden, whose disapproval rate has steadily climbed since 2021, Panetta noted.

The presidential debates — the first of which is scheduled for June 27 — may be “chaotic” and “embarrassing,” Panetta and Ose agreed during an earlier discussion, moderated by CalMatters Editor-in-Chief Kristen Go.

“The problem today… isn’t about governing. It’s about stopping the other side,” Panetta said.

The solution, Ose said, is to elect “problem-solvers,” not “flame-throwers.” “It’s almost like we go to the people who are the loudest … as opposed to the most effective,” he said.

Since fall 2025, the Trump administration has moved to make it more challenging for people to become U.S. citizens.

In the past, candidates for naturalization studied the answers to 100 questions issued by the federal government. During their civics test, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers would ask 10 questions from the list; to pass, candidates had to answer six correctly. Now, candidates must be prepared to answer 128 questions, and more correct answers are required to pass.

The Department of Homeland Security has also reintroduced “neighborhood investigations” into aspiring citizens — a discretionary practice that had been shelved since the 1990s.

About a year since those changes were implemented, advocates in Southern California say they are seeing additional barriers, including delays in the scheduling of naturalization interviews and heightened scrutiny of applicants who request waivers for testing requirements due to a physical, developmental, or mental disability.

DHS has also proposed changes that could make it significantly more expensive to apply for naturalization; more expensive for candidates to appeal denials; and eliminate fee waivers and reduced fees for low-income applicants.

The agency has said that these changes are needed to cover the cost of adjudicating naturalization applications.

For Dahni Tsuboi, CEO of the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, this claim rings hollow.

“When you compare the $240 billion that have been invested by Congress in the last 18 months on the enforcement side, and then, for the people who are taking all the steps to become citizens, we're just making that much harder, I think that's very alarming,” she said.

A sharp drop in naturalization interviews

In recent months, local immigrant advocacy groups have seen a drop in the number of people getting scheduled for naturalization interviews.

At the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, “we still have folks who applied before the [changes to the civics tests were implemented last October] that are still awaiting an interview,” said staff attorney Shawntel Williams.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California has been doing naturalization work for 40 years, Tsuboi said. Typically, 5 to 10 of their clients get scheduled for naturalization interviews every month. Since April 2026, that number has dropped to zero.

According to the nonprofit, the total number of naturalization adjudications per month — including approvals and denials — went from 78,379 in September 2025 to 37,832 by January 2026.

Tsuboi fears that naturalization rates could drop even further if DHS’s fee changes are implemented.

The changes, she said, could have an outsized impact on Asian Americans communities, who make up the largest share of naturalized U.S. citizens. At the nonprofit she represents, Tsuboi added, “75% of the individuals who apply for naturalization use the fee waiver or the reduced fees.”

How advocates are responding to changes  

To support immigrants navigating the evolving naturalization landscape, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles’s Shawntel Williams and her colleague, Eugenia Kim, have been hosting free citizenship education workshops at the nonprofit’s offices in Westlake.

They also offer free pre-screening clinics for people who are interested in determining their eligibility.

For people with a physical, developmental, or mental disability, Kim said “we strongly recommend — more than ever — that if you believe that you qualify to apply for an N-648." The form is a medical certification that's completed by a doctor who has personal knowledge of your disabilities and has actually treated you over the years.

"We also recommend that applicants have that completed N-648 reviewed closely by an attorney,” Kim said.

She and Williams plan to continue hosting their legal clinics for the foreseeable future.

For aspiring U.S. citizens, Williams added, legal advice has become essential, as news of all the changes to the naturalization process could be discouraging.

“We don't want people to count themselves out,” she said.

El seis, they call it.

That day in June of last year when armed federal immigration officers descended on a garment shop in Los Angeles’ Fashion District, arresting and shackling more than a dozen employees before whisking them away in unmarked vans. The raid on Ambiance Apparel became one of the defining images of the June surge in Los Angeles.

For the family and friends of detained workers from Ambiance Apparel, who gathered for an anniversary press conference this summer, the date had become so ingrained in their minds that it earned the Spanish shorthand for “the sixth.”

An organizer assured the apprehensive crowd that they had permission to be there but cautioned that, if anything happened during the event, they should walk calmly to their cars. When a helicopter hovered overhead a few minutes later, a woman in the crowd glanced up and winced. High-profile raids have given way to a quieter era of enforcement, but arrests and removals are still happening at high rates across Southern California and, during a national surge in late June, officials detained more than 10,000 people in five days.

“We’re still afraid,” said Francisco, a longtime garment worker in the crowd who works for a different company and asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons. After that day, he said, the Fashion District became “a ghost town.”

The financial impact of the raids was swift and devastating across the region.

But commercial corridors near enforcement sites got hit especially hard. In the Fashion District, where a majority of workers and shoppers are Latino, foot traffic tanked, falling almost to pandemic-era levels.

Businesses near nine immigration enforcement sites saw a steep decline in visitors, accumulating an estimated $3.16 million in losses in the two weeks after the raids began, according to a July study from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, which analyzed cell phone location data. Hardest hit of all was the Fashion District — a business zone so dense researchers tallied more than 550 businesses within a half mile of Ambiance — which lost an estimated $1.52 million in two weeks.

The Fashion District bleeds into the Piñata District, where papered figurines of ICE agents are on display.

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And that estimate is conservative, said Ariana Valle, one of the authors of the report, who noted the figure accounts only for formal businesses, not the many street vendors in the district.

Researchers interviewed several business owners this spring, Valle said, including some in the Fashion District whose sales declined so drastically after the raids that they had to take out loans and cancel expansion plans. Others were considering closing their businesses and many spoke of the day of the Ambiance raid in still-fresh detail.

One respondent recalled the collective clang of dozens of roll-down metal security gates on storefronts slamming down, Valle said, and some business owners said even whispers about the possibility of another raid severely erode their sales.

“They are hurting,” said Valle, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Davis. “It’s been a very unsteady and unstable recovery for many of them.”

Anthony Rodriguez, chief executive of the Fashion District’s business improvement district, said that although the area is seeing a gradual recovery, many business owners told the group they’re still working to regain customers.

On a Saturday morning this spring, vendors had set up stands on a sidewalk in the Fashion District.

A man was selling knockoff Lululemon leggings for $10, and a mother-daughter duo hawked World Cup totes for $4. An influencer walked backward holding a tripod with an iPhone facing her.

“We’re coming to you live from L.A.’s Fashion District!” she said. “Let’s go find some deals.”

The 107-block district, home to retail and wholesale shops and clothing factories, is a key apparel hub for the Western Hemisphere due to its proximity to the ports in the region. Wholesale buyers travel from across the globe to visit showrooms downtown, searching for wedding gowns or street-style sneakers to resell in their shops.

The district encompasses Santee Alley, a bargain bazaar, and bleeds into the Piñata District, where a longtime staple — papered figurines of President Donald Trump — was joined last summer by a newly popularized design: an ICE agent.

But on this Saturday morning, the busiest stand was the one with the woman selling fresh orange juice and $5 chorizo and potato burritos. Almost every other shop along one stretch had a “For Lease” sign taped to its glass door.

Outside a closed storefront, a woman browsed a metal rack, lingering on a zebra-print halter dress.

“For $1?” she asked the woman working the stand.

“No, I can’t,” the employee said.

“Come on.”

“I can’t. $5?”

The shopper walked away without the dress, and the employee shook her head.

A few weekends later, foot traffic was even slower. The streets were quiet save for the thump of a norteño-sax song blaring from a speaker outside V&C Casual, a shop in the Stanford Wholesale Mart.

The shop’s owner, Regino Tirado, sipped his coffee as he waited for customers. But everything had been slow, he said, since “El Seis.”

“After that day, no one wanted to come to the Fashion District,” he continued, panning toward the sidewalk. “Look, it’s empty.”

Regino Tirado stands outside his store in the L.A. Fashion District.

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Tirado has worked in the Fashion District for more than 25 years through several other lean times, including the Great Recession and pandemic lockdowns. But the past year has been the hardest.

“El peor de los peores,” he called it. The worst of the worst.

A shop across from him closed two months earlier, he said, and another in the plaza shuttered a month before that. Tirado’s business, which sells women’s puffer vests and jackets, had dropped by nearly 60% since a year earlier, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can stay open.

“It’s day by day,” he said.

A feverish demand for Mexico apparel during the World Cup had brought some reprieve. Tirado sold more than 2,000 jerseys to his wholesale buyers for around $10 a piece, but even that put him below the $25,000 in sales he used to bring in most months. These days, he’s lucky to make $10,000. And that’s before paying employees and the $5,000 rent.

His wholesale buyers, some of whom live in Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia, used to visit twice a month to check out new merchandise. Now they come every other month, he said, and sales have increasingly moved to transactions made over WhatsApp.

“The main shoppers are Latino,” Tirado said, “and now everyone is scared.”

That fear is still palpable for Francisco, the longtime garment worker.

The 62-year-old, who specializes in sewing undergarments, spends his shifts picking up reams of fabric from vendors in the Fashion District and always keeps an eye out for parked SUVs, wondering if they might be unmarked ICE vehicles. He has stopped offering to pick up friends at LAX or taking occasional trips to visit his nephew in the Bay Area.

Some fellow garment workers now take Ubers home from work to avoid the bus stop, where officials have made arrests, and others switched to night shifts to evade raids. His roommates — a couple and their young children — now hole up inside on weekends, and although it pains him, he understands. He had stopped going for Saturday morning runs himself.

He followed news reports about the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens and the January killings of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, as well as the recent fatal shootings by ICE officers of immigrant men in Texas and Maine. The cases transported him to his childhood in the highlands of Guatemala, where he grew up during the nation’s brutal civil war, in which the government orchestrated the torture and killing of thousands of civilians, many of them indigenous Mayans like Francisco.

“It never crossed my mind that this would happen in the United States,” he said. “I came here to escape this.”

Francisco, whose first language was Kʼiche’, learned Spanish around age 8. As a teenager, he found work at a factory in Guatemala City sewing shirts for an American menswear brand. He eventually moved to Mexico, where he got a job in another warehouse, and then to Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

He worked a variety of jobs, including for a flooring contractor, and started taking English classes. But when work dried up after the 2008 financial crisis, he returned to his roots, taking on sewing gigs in the Fashion District. He eventually got a job sewing masks at Los Angeles Apparel, the site of a massive workplace outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was exposed and got so sick he spent two weeks in the hospital.

Francisco, a garment worker who is identified by his first name only for safety reasons, at work near downtown.

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After his release, his roommates were afraid of getting infected and asked him to move out. With financial help from the Garment Workers Center, an organization that advocates for workers, he moved into a hotel room for a time. He feels deeply grateful, he said, to have weathered that turbulent period.

“But,” he said, referring to the ongoing immigration crackdown, “another wave came.”

The national surge of detentions in late June exacerbated fears that had slowly dissipated in the community, said Francisco, adding that four of his friends were detained in the June 6, 2025, raids across the region, including a fellow Guatemalan from his soccer team. That morning, Francisco had been a few blocks from the Fashion District when a friend messaged him to avoid the area.

“Me escapé por un pelito de rana,” he said, using a Spanish phrase similar to escaping by the skin of one’s teeth.

During the June 6 press conference outside Ambiance, family members of detained workers stood not far from the spot where they had a year earlier peered past yellow police tape, watching their loved ones get loaded into vans. Other workers were detained from a separate location tied to Ambiance, whose representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the workers were ultimately released from immigration detention, including a man who introduced himself to the crowd as Lázaro.

“What was a normal day — a day like any other — turned into a painful nightmare,” he said.

A few minutes earlier, the crowd cheered as Ming Tanigawa-Lau, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, walked to the lectern. She had represented and helped secure the release from custody of another Ambiance worker.

“What took place last year was just a preview of what we would experience. Not only in L.A., but across the nation,” she said. “It tore families apart and left entire communities living in fear.”

In the crowd, Leslie Quechol nodded, cradling her newborn daughter to her chest.

A year earlier, she had been scheduled to go to her first OB-GYN appointment since finding out she was pregnant when she heard chatter about a raid at Ambiance. She cancelled her appointment and rushed to the shop, where she saw workers in a line with shackles around their wrists.

One of them was her cousin, whom she considers an older brother. She screamed his name, but he couldn’t hear her.

Quechol thought immediately of his wife and three children, especially his middle son, who has autism. He had recently made some big developmental progress. What would happen now, she wondered? And how would they make ends meet without their breadwinner?

“I knew everything was going to go downhill,” said Quechol, who added that, in spite of their ordeal, the family took deep solace in the support of fellow members of the Zapotec community. Her cousin told a community organizer who served as a media liaison at the event that he and his family were too afraid to speak with a reporter.

The Ambiance building in the Fashion District, where immigrantion officers detained more than a dozen workers.

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Jeremy Lindenfeld

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As the crowd dispersed, some family members stayed behind to dance to live music, and Francisco stood on a nearby sidewalk taking in the scene.

He reflected on the many jobs he’d had in the Fashion District — on the warehouse bosses who paid by the number of pieces sewn instead of hourly and how he sometimes earned as little as $300 a week. He had worked his way out of that place and into a more fulfilling, stable job where he has more autonomy.

He could finally afford to have fewer roommates and no longer thrift all his clothes. Sometimes, he said, he even treats himself to a coffee from the trendy shop near his job, reminiscing over all the years he exclusively visited the corner store downtown to get a cup for $1.

“It had more water than coffee,” he said with a chuckle.

And yet, for the first time in almost three decades, he is considering moving back to Guatemala.

He misses his sisters and often thinks about the tiny home they grew up in and how he’d like to help maintain it now that their mother is gone. He knows it hasn’t been easy for his friend, the soccer companion, who got deported back to Guatemala. But the constant unease is wearing on him.

The same search for a feeling of freedom that pulled him to the U.S. years ago was now pushing him away.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main.

Turner’s Outdoorsman on Mohawk Street in Bakersfield, California, sits on a busy intersection across from an oil drilling site. Over the past three years, this sporting goods store sold more than 16,000 firearms — and also appeared hundreds of times during criminal investigations as the source of guns found at crime scenes.

In Bakersfield alone, law enforcement traced 83 guns to the store from 2023 to 2025, according to newly-released data from the California Department of Justice (CADOJ). That was the highest number for a store with an active firearms dealer license in any of the state’s 10 most populous cities.

The Trace reported in May that the Turner's Outdoorsman chain, which has more than 30 locations across California, accounted for a disproportionate share of crime guns recovered in the state. CADOJ defines crime guns as those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed.

The latest data adds a new dimension, showing the number of crime guns traced to individual stores by law enforcement in the state’s biggest cities.

The Turner’s on Mohawk Street has been in operation since late 2020. The business that previously occupied that storefront, Second Amendment Sports, which is no longer an actively licensed dealer, had 100 sales traced to recoveries in Bakersfield. All together, that means 183 firearms sold at that location were later recovered by law enforcement as crime guns in the same city during this three-year window. That number is higher than the combined total of the top 5 dealers for any other city in the data, including Los Angeles, Oakland, or San Diego.

In Bakersfield, outreach workers are making links between the store and violence in the city. Juan Avila, of the community violence intervention group Garden Pathways, said crime guns came up at a recent meeting between the Bakersfield Police Department and local CVI groups. "Many of those were being traced to Turner's," Avila said.

He said that tracking crime guns was a newer metric for the city’s violence intervention workers. “That's really what grabbed my attention is to see how many guns actually can be traced back to a local shop,” Avila said.

In response to a request for comment, Bakersfield police spokesperson Sally Selby said the department is “unaware of there being any illegal firearms sales or transactions that are occurring.”

Turner’s outlets are among the top firearms dealers tied to crime guns in Los Angeles, Fresno, Anaheim, and Long Beach. One Sacramento-area store, just outside city limits, was connected to 38 crime guns recovered by law enforcement in the capital.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty said that the prevalence of guns from that store, and from the dealer connected to the most crime guns for Sacramento, River City Gun Exchange, merit scrutiny from state and local law enforcement “to see if there's any shortcomings in background checks and procedures to make sure that guns aren't getting in the wrong hands.”

Experts, including former ATF agents and researchers, said a mix of factors may be behind the number of guns traced to a store, including location, inventory, prices, clientele, and nearby competition.

One chain, 8,500 crime guns

The Turner’s Outdoorsman chain remains the biggest source of crime guns across California, according to the report released in July. From 2023 to 2025, law enforcement in the state traced more than 8,500 crime guns to Turner’s.

The retailer is California’s largest gun seller, and its sale of 540,000 firearms makes up a significant percentage of all sales in the data’s three-year time period: 21.8% . The chain makes up an even greater share of guns sold and traced during the time span: 25.9% .

The outsize share of crime guns alarms those who track these trends.

“Turner's is doing something on a corporate level — or they're not doing something on the corporate level — to prevent this,” said Christian Heyne of the gun safety group Brady United. “They have been a rash on this report for the last four years.”

Other large retailers like Bass Pro Shops and Sportsman’s Warehouse don’t top the list, he said, and see smaller percentages of their sales recovered as crime guns. Statewide, Turner’s locations in Southern California occupied the top 8 spots in the list of traces.

“People are being killed by the guns Turner’s sells, and it demands investigation and action,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn told The Trace about the new data. Hahn called for a probe into the company following the Trace’s initial reporting. Brady later joined Hahn in urging investigation.

Turner’s Outdoorsman attracted national attention this spring, after Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly attempted to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, was revealed to have been armed with a shotgun he purchased at a Turner’s in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance.

Turner’s Outdoorsman did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a statement in June to the right-wing outlet The Daily Caller, a Turner’s executive said the company had a “proven commitment to regulatory compliance” and that data on traces “does not indicate wrongdoing by the retailer.” ATF occasionally inspects gun seller operations and called one Turner’s store recordkeeping “meticulous” in a 2015 report.

The new report shows state inspectors found a number of violations at the Turner’s locations inspected in 2025. Many were for minor issues, but an inspector identified a possible straw purchase violation at the San Bernardino location. The San Bernardino store was connected to more crime guns than any other dealer in the state: 781 from 2023 to 2025.

In the new data, guns sold at Turner’s stores showed up at crime scenes at a rate higher than guns sold at other dealers in the state.

The crime guns traced to the chain also wound up at crime scenes quickly — less than a year after purchase — 36% more often than guns from other dealers. Regulators consider a “time-to-crime” of less than one year an indicator of trafficking.

Guns take several paths to crime scenes. Some are stolen from their owners. Others are bought through straw purchases — the act of illegally buying a gun on behalf of someone else — or trafficked into the underground market. And some are legally purchased by a person who later commits a crime.

No other U.S. state publishes data on the stores connected to crime guns, and Congress has prohibited the ATF from sharing retailer-level data since 2003.