The Brief

L.A. Metro riders experienced significant delays on more than 25 bus lines Friday as the agency dealt with staffing shortages from a possible “sickout” by drivers protesting the recent violence on the transit system.

L.A. Metro confirmed that more staff called out sick than usual. The agency also said on social media it's deploying as many people as possible to try and make up for the missed service on the most affected routes.

“We appeal to our operators to reconsider the impact their plan to call in sick will have on some of the most vulnerable people in the county,” the agency said in a statement.

About the delays

The bus delays multiplied as Friday wore on, jumping from six lines shortly after 5 a.m. to nearly 30 by around 2:30 p.m.

The routes stretch across the transit system, including Lincoln Heights, Playa Del Rey, and Hollywood.

A Reddit user posted early Friday that their bus operator had warned regular riders that a lot of staff wouldn’t be showing up to work because of “the lack of concern for their safety” from L.A. Metro.

The user wrote that they didn’t believe it until four buses didn’t arrive and they ended up taking an Uber.

Metro responds

The transit agency said in a statement that bus operators are the “lifeblood” of Metro, and those who intentionally plan to call in sick put customers at risk.

“We understand their and their families’ fear in the face of the senseless assaults some have experienced primarily resulting from the twin crises of untreated mental illness and drug addiction,” L.A. Metro said in a statement. “We share their frustration and have expedited the installation of barriers to keep them safe, as well as the re-deployment of safety and security personnel on board buses to deter assaults. At the same time, we are working on longer term plans, which include the addition of even more dedicated transit security bus riding teams.”

The transit agency added that a sickout is a violation of their collective bargaining agreement.

SMART-TD, the union representing thousands of bus operators and mechanics, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Recent violence

Metro reports that assaults on operators have nearly doubled since 2019 — from 92 to 160 assaults last year.

Just last month, a bus driver was stabbed in Willowbrook, a woman was killed at the Universal City/Studio City station, and one person was injured after an argument led to a stabbing outside a Metro bus in University Park.

The agency is planning on installing new shatter-proof, tempered glass barriers on buses to protect drivers, starting with those that have experienced the most operator assaults within the past year.

Kent Wong, a labor attorney with the UCLA Labor Center, told LAist there’s been a lot of violence on the public transportation system, which is a grave concern for both riders and the workers whose lives and safety are on the line.

“We just celebrated last week, Worker Memorial Day, and this is a holiday each year that commemorates workers who have either been killed or injured on the job,” he said. “So with regard to worker dissatisfaction, if workers are subjected to unsafe or dangerous work conditions, that has, in many instances, prompted collective action by the workers on the job.”

Wong said there’s been a remarkable string of strikes over the past few years, from Los Angeles Unified School District to Hollywood, as more people organize.

“The rise in labor activism and strikes in the summer of 2023 by and large resulted in substantial increases in wages and improvements in working conditions, and as a consequence, this will inspire other workers to organize, to form and join unions, but also to engage in collective action, including strikes,” he said.

California’s dozens of private gambling halls can continue offering blackjack and other table games after a San Francisco judge ruled last week that Attorney General Rob Bonta overstepped when he tried to ban them.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Darwin ruled that Bonta’s Bureau of Gambling Control didn’t have the legal authority to issue statewide rules severely restricting the games at cardrooms.

The ruling, which followed Darwin’s temporary order in May, is the latest defeat for the state’s casino-owning Native American tribes. They have spent years and tens of millions of dollars unsuccessfully appealing to courts, voters, the Legislature and California regulators to put their only in-state competitors out of the blackjack business.

The tribes contend cardrooms have unscrupulously violated state laws prohibiting anyone but tribal casinos from offering “house-banked,” Las Vegas-style table games including blackjack, the most lucrative.

Cardroom operators say the ruling once again proves their business model is legal. It also ensures taxes that cities receive from blackjack revenues will continue to support local government services and cardroom jobs.

“For more than a year, we have said this case is about far more than gaming — it is about whether the attorney general and his regulators can bypass the Legislature and unilaterally rewrite decades of established law,” Kyle Kirkland, a Fresno cardroom owner and president of the California Gaming Association, said in a statement. “The court delivered a clear answer: they cannot.”

James May, a spokesperson for California Nations Indian Gaming Association, didn’t return an interview request.

Bonta’s office said in an email that officials were disappointed in the ruling and are reviewing their options.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For decades, Californians have generally said that immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population and a third of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.

Now, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present a stark choice to voters in the race to be the next governor at a moment when public support for the state’s generous safety net is starting to fray.

Both frame the choice as an economic one.

Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, has said it would be “foolish” to exclude the poorest immigrants from routine care and push them into expensive emergency rooms on the taxpayer’s dime. Hilton, a conservative commentator backed by President Donald Trump, has promised to eliminate their coverage and has echoed national Republicans who have skewered California’s expansions to bolster their claims of fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.

With voters nationwide worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, some Californians might feel less inclined to provide full healthcare coverage to those lacking legal status. What the state does next could have profound implications for its healthcare system and sprawling economy.

Over the past decade, California lawmakers used state dollars to expand Medi-Cal, offering all low-income residents comprehensive coverage regardless of immigration status. But enrollment surpassed initial projections, as did the cost. Medi-Cal coverage of immigrants without legal status costs the state roughly $10 billion a year, according to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, more than double the initial estimates.

California lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who championed the program, have approved major rollbacks of benefits for those residents. They said the state can’t afford ballooning healthcare costs amid massive federal cuts from the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the California Health and Human Services Agency projected up to 3.4 million Medi-Cal enrollees could lose coverage and the state could lose more than $30 billion a year in federal funding under the law, causing major disruptions in the safety net health program.

Medi-Cal’s budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year is $217 billion, and the program serves more than 14 million Californians.

Meanwhile, many legal U.S. residents and citizens have seen their health premium payments skyrocket this year after Congress let enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of December.

As the state grappled with a deficit last year, a majority of likely voters in California said — for the first time in nearly a decade — that they opposed providing health insurance to immigrants without legal status, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“The state faces major challenges, and healthcare is one of the major expenditures,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC survey director. “People have become more selective about how they want to see those limited healthcare dollars spent.”

Hilton, running on a platform of affordability and lowering taxes, has seized on the sentiment, casting health coverage for immigrants without legal status as deeply unfair and a direct threat to the state’s ability to help citizens.

“Stop taking money from California taxpayers who can barely afford their healthcare to give free healthcare to citizens of other countries who shouldn’t even be here,” Hilton said in a Facebook video the morning of the June 2 primary.

In campaign stump speeches, Hilton promised to use the savings to lower healthcare costs for other Californians without detailing how. Hilton did not respond to requests from KFF Health News for comment.

“Their messaging is very, very simple: It’s an us vs. them,” said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who represents a coalition of healthcare advocates who argue providing coverage to people who can’t afford it strengthens the workforce and, as a result, the economy. “It’s just a question of convincing the average voter that it’s much better economically.”

A son of immigrants, Becerra for decades pushed to extend safety net benefits in Congress and has made a similar pitch in his campaign for governor. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Immigrants, whether documented or not, work hard. They pay taxes, and sometimes they get injured on the job or their children get sick,” Becerra said during a debate in May. “It would be foolish to tell a family that they don’t have access to the pediatrician or the family doc.”

Becerra, who could become California’s first elected Latino governor, objected last year when Newsom and legislative leaders decided to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for adults without legal status, cut benefits, and impose monthly premiums.

"Stop treating coverage as a budget variable that expands in good years and contracts when revenue dips,” Becerra wrote in May in response to an Orange County Register candidate questionnaire. He has vowed to pursue new, steady revenue to fund basic services, such as by upping taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians.

In 2023, California was home to about 2.3 million people without legal status, representing roughly 8% of the state’s labor force, according to the Pew Research Center. And 1 in 5 California children live in a family that includes at least one member without legal status, according to the California Department of Education. Healthcare economists say giving people access to preventive healthcare saves taxpayers money in the long run by keeping the workforce healthy and relieving pressure on an overburdened system.

That, Baldassare said, wasn’t a hard argument to make during the covid pandemic, when immigrants were celebrated as essential workers and the link between individual well-being and public health was more obvious.

But Medi-Cal costs to cover roughly 1.4 million immigrants have ballooned, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Health Care Services. Because only some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, states like California that cover other populations must do so exclusively with state funding.

California’s budget experts have warned that maintaining full Medi-Cal coverage for immigrants without seeking additional revenue would destabilize the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.

In a legislative hearing last year, Republican Assembly member Carl DeMaio questioned whether California taxpayers would prioritize the expansions, saying he doubted “illegal immigrant healthcare in the general fund would be at the top of their list.”

After lawmakers approved the spending reductions, support for immigrant health coverage dropped, Baldassare said. Democratic lawmakers and Newsom agreed to delay several Medi-Cal cuts until July 2027, leaving decisions for the next governor.

David Hayes-Bautista, who has spent his career studying the economic contributions of Latinos and immigrants, said Californians without legal status have higher labor force participation and tend to work in industries and occupations that don’t offer employer-based health insurance. As a result, many resort to Medi-Cal, saddling the state with the healthcare costs instead of employers.

“California, as a state, has the world’s fourth-largest GDP, which is true thanks to Latinos,” said Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA. Without contributions from Latinos, many without legal status, it drops to eighth place, about the size of Italy’s economy, he added.

Immigrant advocates hope to have a more vocal champion in Becerra, the favorite to become governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1.

“He will fight, he will push back, he will do all that he can,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a former labor leader who has championed the immigrant healthcare expansions. “That’s the most we could expect.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Trump administration's sweeping effort to slow down the rate of legal migration has affected a group traditionally immune from such efforts: spouses of U.S. citizens.

The administration has implemented a slew of policy changes since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, ranging from pausing immigrant visas for people from 75 countries to imposing greater scrutiny of applicants at green-card interviews and widening the scope of who is a target for deportation. The changes have hit all immigrants hard, including those who sought to enter and stay in the country through marriage.

Some non-U.S.-citizen spouses have been separated from their American loved ones and are afraid to engage with the U.S. immigration system, according to lawyers and NPR interviews with affected families.

"Life has become a lot more difficult for Americans who are married to somebody who is not born in this country," said Ashley DeAzevedo, executive director of American Families United. The organization advocates for U.S. citizen spouses and immediate family members of those engaged in various immigration processes.

The organization's membership has grown over the last year as more people are affected by the rapid policy changes, she said. Now there are about 1.4 million people seeking the group's support in the U.S., and about 300,000 outside the country — made up of people who have left the U.S., as well as those who want to come in.

"We saw so many of our members make the decision to self-deport, to leave the country for fear of this indefinite detention," DeAzevedo said. "We saw some members who had their spouses detained — and that was something we had not experienced previously because there was always this prioritization of who was going to be detained."

Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the United States government has always vetted and scrutinized immigrants who sought to stay in the U.S. through marriage.

However, while applying to stay, spouses of U.S. citizens were generally not swept up in broader immigration enforcement efforts.

"This group of individuals have always had a special place under the law," Dalal-Dheini said. "Spouses of U.S. citizens aren't subject to the immigrant quotas. They don't have to have a cap. Spouses of U.S. citizens don't [have to have maintained] their legal status here in order to adjust. And so the law has considered them to be a privileged class.

"But this administration is treating them like all other immigrants."

The administration says prior presidents should also have scrutinized such marriage-related applications more closely, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is just complying with the law.

In a statement to NPR, USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said verifying identities and personal histories of all people seeking immigration benefits, like a green card or citizenship, requires a rigorous process — "one that prioritizes the safety of the American people by more thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens."

He said just marrying a U.S. citizen and beginning the petition process does not protect someone from deportation.

"A pending or approved Form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, does not confer any immigration status. All aliens are expected to comply with U.S. immigration laws," Kahler said. "Those who entered without inspection or who remain in the United States beyond their permitted stay are illegal aliens who may be subject to immigration enforcement action."

Family and fiancé petitions make up nearly half of green-card approvals

Immediate family sponsorship, including for spouses and fiancés, is one of the top ways U.S. citizens interact with the immigration system.

The latest data released by the Homeland Security Department, from 2024, shows that about 343,000 people received their green cards through their spouses — about a quarter of all green-card approvals. For about a decade, the number has hovered somewhere between 200,000 and 340,000 people.

The number of approved green cards doubles when accounting for other immediate family members who can provide sponsorship for immigrants, like children and parents. That suggests how important this pathway is for U.S. citizens and their immigrant family members.

The average processing time for each petition was 13 months for family members, and seven months for fiancés — largely in line with wait times from early 2025, before Trump's policies took effect.

In the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, 167,401 immediate family relative petitions were approved, and 8,612 fiancé petitions were approved.

The number of petitions approved has generally increased and decreased across administrations.

Chaos for U.S. citizens, including military members

The data may mask other ways noncitizen spouses could be affected. That's particularly true for those from one of over 70 countries that face holds for a wide range of travel and immigrant visas.

One such case is Es', a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen. She was born in one of the 39 countries subject to a travel ban to the U.S., which was implemented last year. The pause means that although she has been in the country for three decades, her application for citizenship filed last year has not yet been reviewed.

There is no exception to the travel ban, even for spouses of U.S. military members.

The last few months have thrown the couples' lives into chaos.

"We are due to [move] to Germany," Es said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because her husband is in the Army and her immigration case is pending. "We were actually due to leave in July but had to push it to October to see if we can get [my citizenship] done."

The couple is now grappling with what to do with the house they own, whether they would have to travel separately, and what Es' lack of citizenship means for their two young U.S. citizen children — as well as their belongings.

"That'll mess up his readiness [for military service]," Es said in an interview. "He'll be thousands of miles away and he has to think about his job and will be worried about us and that is just not fair." A federal judge ruled the pause was unlawful, but her case has still not moved.

"This is not impacting people who have done anything wrong. This is impacting everyone," she said.

It's not just the bans and pauses. Several people told NPR that delays at the consulates are also contributing to strain, and leaving some spouses or fiancés without any legal status at all.

"People who are marrying U.S. citizens often are no longer in status, whether they came in legally and then their status expired or their status was terminated, like if they had [temporary protected status]," Dalal-Dheini said.

"And then there's extra scrutiny being applied to them now," she said, in reference to the USCIS approach to all applications.

Chilling effect on engaging with the process

Advocates say recent policy changes have amped up scrutiny of all immigration applications and chipped away at families' willingness to engage with the government.

USCIS officers are instructed to conduct more interviews. A memo last month encouraged officers to consider if someone had returned to their home country to apply for a green card when reviewing their application; those who stay in the U.S. may face longer and more intrusive vetting. Trump has also asked financial institutions to review the bank accounts of those in the U.S. without permanent status.

Eric Welsh, an immigration attorney in California, said clients must prepare for questions about when and how they applied for a green card, including providing evidence of "good moral character" and other information — something that previously wasn't required for those seeking to gain permanent residency or U.S. citizenship through marriage.

"What's important to keep in mind is that spouses are vulnerable," Welsh said, noting that while there are some pathways to be granted something like a green card or citizenship, it's not guaranteed. "There's no absolute right to remain and there's no absolute right to be afforded adjustment to status. And so I think that's something that most people don't commonly understand, especially not the U.S. citizens."

He and DeAzevedo have seen some families hesitate to move forward in their immigration cases.

"[This] has had an absolute chilling effect on many people in this country and their desire to put their spouse in that position," DeAzevedo said.

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