The Brief

President Donald Trump has taken aim at students and professors at California’s elite institutions, such as UC Berkeley and UCLA, but community colleges, which enroll the majority of the state’s students, have largely avoided the administration’s ire.

Until recently. The U.S. Department of Education announced on March 27 that it was stopping California universities and colleges from using federal funding to “provide services to illegal immigrants.” The education department is specifically referring to federal TRIO programs, which provide various forms of financial aid and counseling to low-income, first-generation students.

California schools don’t track how many of their students lack legal status. Although exact figures are hard to capture, some estimates, such as the number of applications for in-state aid, suggest that there are thousands of students without legal status, most of whom are attending California’s community colleges.

More than 100,000 students in California are enrolled in a TRIO program, said Dalia Hernandez, the president of a professional association that works closely with these programs. Informally, colleges know that some students in these programs lack legal status. Now campus TRIO officials are grappling with the president’s order and wondering if they are going to have to start documenting citizenship.

Although non-citizens aren’t eligible for federal financial aid, in 2022 the education department granted California special permission to enroll them in TRIO programs’ academic services through September 2026.

Now the administration is revoking that permission.

In a Zoom webinar a few days after the education department’s announcement, Hernandez’s organization, the Western Association of Educational Opportunity Personnel, told college leaders that they could keep serving students in their programs, regardless of immigration status. However, moving forward, schools would need to reject any suspected non-citizen, she said. The federal education department has yet to provide any additional guidance about how to interpret the TRIO policy change.

“I've been in 1,000 meetings talking about every executive order that comes out, and every meeting is like, ‘Well, we don't know what's going to happen and it's probably going to get blocked by a federal judge, so just hold on,’” said Brian Boomer, the director of grants at the West Hills Community College District in California's Central Valley. “This was a little different because they actually gave a directive.”

Outside of California, it’s easy to see why some might argue these federal dollars should only serve U.S. citizens, Boomer said. But in Fresno and Kings counties, where his community college district is located, he said many immigrants are embedded in the community, work in nearby farms, and send their children to the region’s schools and colleges. “That’s the population you serve,” he said. “Our area feeds the country.”

Coalinga College is one of the two schools in his district. More than 70% of its students identify as Latino, and many are current or former farmworkers or children of farmworkers. The college’s largest TRIO program, called Student Support Services, has just under 200 low-income, first generation students enrolled, said Lissette Padilla, who oversees it.

Some of those students likely don’t have legal status, she said, but it’s not clear how many.

A ‘heartbreaking’ change for one student

As a low-income student with a learning disability and the first in his family to attend college, “J” knew he needed help navigating Oxnard College, a community college in Ventura County. He applied to one of the TRIO programs in 2021 but he said he was rejected because program administrators suspected he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. CalMatters has agreed to withhold his name because he fears drawing attention to his legal status.

“I thought this was going to be for all first-generation students,” he said. “I felt like I was abandoned.”

Two years later, after the state got special permission from the federal government, the director of the program reached out to J again, this time to encourage him to reapply. As part of one of the TRIO programs, J got one-on-one guidance with campus counselors who helped ensure that he was on track to meet his academic goals and transfer to a four-year university. The TRIO staff also took him on trips to visit various colleges, including Cal State Northridge, Chico State, and Cal State Long Beach.

Last summer, he enrolled at Cal State Channel Islands, ready to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Many Cal State and University of California campuses offer TRIO programs to their students, but Channel Islands isn’t one of them. “It’s very disappointing,” he said because he was hoping to stay enrolled in one of the TRIO programs.

Even if the university began offering TRIO programs, he won’t qualify if colleges enforce the Trump administration’s policy change. J said it’s “heartbreaking” that students without legal status will no longer have that opportunity to enroll.

In the first few days after the Trump administration’s announcement, schools received little guidance about how to respond and looked to Hernandez, the regional association president, for guidance. She said her interpretation is that TRIO programs are only required to evaluate a student’s eligibility when they first enroll. As a result, she said schools do not need to kick out any students who are currently enrolled, but they shouldn’t register any new students who may lack legal status.

She also recommended that schools revise their intake forms so that students can only identify as male or female. “We’re protecting the programs and the funding that we have,” said Hernandez, referring to Trump’s executive order on gender identity, which prohibits the U.S. government from recognizing gender expansive terms such as non-binary.

Padilla said she’s concerned that Coalinga College may, at some point, need to pull counseling services away from students without legal status who are in the program. She said the contingency plan is to move those students into similar programs that are funded by the state and which don’t ask for proof of citizenship.

Lizette Navarette, the president of Woodland Community College near Sacramento, said she was wary of the initial decision to allow students without legal status to receive services through a federal program. “There was some concern about how safe the student data would be because it’s a federal grant,” she said. For over a year now, her college has been directing those students to state programs, which she said often have more capacity and which don’t share data with the federal government.

Will TRIO get cut?

In 2021, the national association for TRIO administrators, the Cal State University system, the UC system, the California Department of Education and more than 80 other organizations signed a letter addressed to the U.S. Department of Education, calling on it to allow students without legal status to enroll in TRIO programs.

But over the years, support has waned.

The federal government allowed California to expand access to TRIO programs as part of a pilot, which was slated to end next year. In 2023 and 2024, when the U.S. Department of Education discussed expanding access in other states and in a more permanent way, California’s institutions once again voiced their support. But the national association was silent, said Antoinette Flores, the director of a higher education research team at the think tank New America.

She said the association, known as the Council for Opportunity in Education, fears that allowing students without legal status to participate could elicit more scrutiny from the Trump administration and put the entire program at risk. The association didn’t respond to CalMatters’ request for comment.

“We have had, over the years, very strong bipartisan support for federal TRIO programs,” said Hernandez, who also serves as the regional representative of the national association. But she acknowledged that nothing is certain. “There is rhetoric from the current administration about dismantling these federal programs.”

She said her regional association still wants to include all low-income, first-generation students in TRIO programs, including students without legal status, but other colleges and universities outside the state may have a different perspective. “California is one of the very few states in the country that has resources and support earmarked for undocumented students and youth. Others may not have as much.”

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

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display