The Brief

A federal judge has found top California prison officials in civil contempt for failing to hire enough mental health professionals to adequately treat tens of thousands of incarcerated people with serious mental disorders.

Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller on June 25 ordered the state to pay $112 million in fines at a time when the state is trying to close a multibillion-dollar budget deficit. The fines have been accumulating since April 2023, after Mueller said she was fed up with the state prison system’s inadequate staffing despite years of court orders demanding that the state address the issue.

“The sanctions imposed here are necessary to sharpen that focus and magnify defendants’ sense of urgency to finally achieve a lasting remedy for chronic mental health understaffing in the state’s prison system,” Mueller said in her order in the long-running class-action lawsuit.

The ongoing harm “caused by these high vacancy rates is as clear today as it was thirty years ago and the harm persists despite multiple court orders requiring defendants to reduce those rates,” she added.

Mueller ordered the state to pay the fines within 30 days and said they “will be used exclusively for steps necessary to come into compliance with the court’s staffing orders.” She ordered California to keep paying additional fines for each month the state remains in violation of court orders.

The ruling was unwelcome news for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is struggling with a budget deficit that’s forcing reductions in numerous state programs.

The contempt finding “is deeply flawed, and it does not reflect reality,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a Newsom spokesperson. “Amid a nationwide shortage of mental health therapists, the administration has led massive and unprecedented efforts to expand care and recruit and retain mental health care professionals.”

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terri Hardy said the state will appeal Mueller’s order. Prisoners “often have greater access to mental health care in custody than what presently exists for people outside” because of the state’s “extraordinary steps to expand access to mental health care,” Hardy said.

Mueller’s contempt finding comes as Newsom, a Democrat, has prioritized improving mental health treatment statewide, partly to combat California’s seemingly intractable homelessness crisis. His administration has argued that Mueller is setting impossible standards for improving treatment for about 34,000 imprisoned people with serious mental illnesses — more than a third of California’s prison population.

Attorneys representing prisoners with mental illness vehemently disagree.

“It’s very unfortunate that the state officials have allowed this situation to get so bad and to stay so bad for so long,” said Ernest Galvan, one of the prisoners’ attorneys in the long-running litigation. “And I hope that this order, which the judge reserved as an absolute last resort, refocuses officials’ attention where it needs to be: bringing lifesaving care into the prisons, where it’s urgently needed.”

As part of her tentative contempt ruling in March, Mueller ordered Newsom personally, along with five of his top state officials, to read testimony by prison mental health employees describing the ongoing problem during a trial last fall.

The other five were the directors of his departments of Corrections and Rehabilitation, State Hospitals, and Finance; the corrections department’s undersecretary for health care services; and the deputy director in charge of its statewide mental health program.

Mueller limited her formal contempt finding to Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber and two aides, Undersecretary Diana Toche and Deputy Director Amar Mehta.

“Fundamentally, the overall record reflects defendants are following a ‘business as usual’ approach to hiring, recruitment and retention that does very little if anything to transform the bureaucracy within which the hiring practices are carried out,” Mueller wrote.

Mueller had ordered state officials to calculate each month what they owe in fines for each unfilled position exceeding a 10% vacancy rate among required prison mental health professionals. The fines are calculated based on the maximum annual salary for each job, including some that approach or exceed $300,000.

The 10% vacancy limit dates to a court order by Mueller’s predecessor more than 20 years ago, in 2002, in the class-action case filed in 1990 over poor treatment of prisoners with mental disorders.

The $112 million in pending fines for understaffing is one of three sets of fines Mueller imposed.

She imposed $1,000-a-day fines in 2017 for a backlog in sending imprisoned people to state mental health facilities. But that money, which now tops $4.2 million, has never been collected, and Mueller postponed a planned hearing on the fines after prisoners’ attorneys said the state was making improvements.

In April 2023, Mueller also began assessing $1,000-a-day fines for the state’s failure to implement court-ordered suicide prevention measures. A court-appointed expert said his latest inspection of prisons showed the state was not in full compliance.

California lawmakers made major changes to the state’s car-buying rules this year, including a controversial rewrite of the state law that allows buyers to get their money back if they are sold a defective vehicle and a right to return a used vehicle within three days.

After an intense lobbying push this year from automobile companies, dealers and consumer groups, more legislative battles over California vehicle purchases could follow in 2026. Sky-high car prices show no signs of falling, and a Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration have sought to thwart Newsom’s goal of having 100% of new cars sold in California be zero-emission by 2035.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat representing the El Segundo area, said he expects California’s Democratic-controlled Legislature will likely push back against national Republicans’ attack on California’s vehicle policies in some form next year, though he said it wasn’t yet clear how.

“We’re very committed to this path, so stay tuned, but clean air is a priority for our state,” said Allen, who chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Transitioning to a Zero-Emission Energy Future.

In the meantime, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Allen’s Senate Bill 766, creating a first-in-the-nation policy that allows a buyer to return a used vehicle for a full refund within three days if the purchase price was less than $50,000. Dealers can charge a restocking fee.

The law, which takes effect in October, also contains other protections for buyers intended to prevent them from getting suckered.

Car dealers will have to tell a potential buyer — including in advertisements and initial written communications — the actual price of a vehicle instead of an unrealistic advertised price. Potential buyers will also have to be informed of the full financing costs and lease terms. 

The law also prohibits dealers from charging for add-ons that have no benefit to the buyer, such as free oil changes for electric vehicles — which don’t need oil changes.

“That is a huge deal,” said Rosemary Shahan of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, which championed the bill. “It’s historic. It’s going to make cars more affordable.”

Allen said he came up with the idea for the bill after shopping for a used car in 2024. He said he wanted to see what it was like trying to buy a used car in California and didn’t tell the various dealerships he visited that he was a state senator.

“I was kind of shocked by the hustle and the extent to which prices were quoted online and that ended up not really being truthful,” he said.

He ended up buying a 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E, an electric vehicle.

Newsom blocked document fee increase

Most bills take effect immediately the year after they are signed, but lawmakers delayed the implementation of Allen’s bill until October to give dealers time to change their paperwork, amend their contracts and change their signs to meet the new law’s requirements.

Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, said the law should make buying a used car more transparent and easier for consumers.

“The bill certainly is a net positive in terms of more transparency about the total price and advertising,” he said.

But he said the new law “clearly imposed more responsibility on dealers,” which is why Maas said his group was extremely frustrated Newsom vetoed its bill that would have allowed dealers to raise document-processing fees by $175.

Senate Bill 791 would have raised the fees dealers can charge to process Department of Motor Vehicles and other paperwork from the current cap of $85 to up to 1% of the purchase price, capped at $260.

Maas said dealers were frustrated by Newsom’s veto message which said the fee increase wasn’t necessary because the state had imposed “no new state requirements” on car dealers.

Maas said it was “especially frustrating that the veto message somewhat cavalierly said there are no new state requirements when the governor signed just such requirements a week earlier.”

Before the veto, SB 791 passed the Legislature overwhelmingly and with bipartisan support. The California New Car Dealers Association has donated at least $3 million to legislators since 2015, according to the Digital Democracy database.

Maas said there are so many forms car buyers must fill out, almost all of them stemming from a law the Legislature passed, they’re getting to be like click-through agreements on websites that everyone just agrees to without actually reading.

“You shove form after form after form in front of consumers,” he said. “Consumers just tune it out, turn it off, and say, ‘You know what? I just want to know what my monthly payment is, what’s the interest rate, what the total price of the car is. And then let’s go. Why do I have to sit in here for a half hour or an hour and fill out all these forms?’ ”

Consumers face a watered-down lemon law

Newsom also signed Senate Bill 26, a bill that allows car manufacturers to opt out of changes to the state’s lemon law that gives consumers a right to get their money back if they buy a defective vehicle — sometimes referred to as a “lemon.”

The result is that California car buyers have different legal protections under the state’s lemon law depending on which brand they buy.

The bill Newsom signed was in response to a law lawmakers hastily passed at the end of the 2024 legislative session, watering down the state’s 55-year-old landmark lemon law. Some

auto companies, namely GM and Ford, were being sued so often for allegedly selling so many lemons that state courts were clogged with lawsuits.

The companies and some attorney groups persuaded lawmakers and Newsom to pass legislation in 2024 that shrank the length of time a car buyer could sue under the lemon law to just six years instead of the entire life of a vehicle’s warranty

Last year’s legislation also puts more onus on car owners to initiate claims, not auto companies.

But other companies that don’t get sued as often for selling defective vehicles, such as Toyota and Honda, opposed the rule change. Those companies said the new law didn’t give them time to prepare their best defense

Newsom ended up reluctantly signing the 2024 bill, but he urged the Legislature to come back with a new bill in 2025 that would allow companies to opt out of the changes. SB 26 passed overwhelmingly and Newsom signed it.

Meanwhile, several car companies, including Ford and GM and dozens of RV and motorcycle manufacturers, opted in to the 2024 law this year.

Toyota and Honda, as expected, did not.

Household waste increases 25% between Thanksgiving and New Years — according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Dan Hoornweg, an energy engineering professor at Ontario Tech University, said people should check with their local recycling policies when sorting through holiday trash. Rules vary by municipality, including what belongs in recycling bins and what should go in the trash.

Hoornweg cautioned residents to pay close attention to what they are throwing away.

"A lot of people get engaged at Christmas and a couple of times we've had to try and find a diamond ring," Hoornweg said. "Which really is a needle in a haystack in the garbage."

Here's some general rules:

Gift packaging

Hoornweg said cardboard is a major source of holiday waste, built up largely by orders from big box stores.

"The more people can squash them down and put them out either in separate bins or separately tied up, the better," he said.

That cardboard can include gift boxes and empty paper tubes of wrapping paper.

While some wrapping paper may be recyclable, multilaminate material like paper coated in metallics, wax or glitter can't be recycled. Neither can styrofoam.

Christmas trees

Many cities offer Christmas tree recycling programs. Gerald Gorman, assistant superintendent of waste reduction in Boston's Public Works Department, said trees can be chipped up and reused as mulch for gardening in the spring.

"They need to be completely free of ornaments, plastic bags, Christmas tree bases, all that type of thing," Gorman said.

Most items removed from trees should not go in recycling bins, he said.

"You can imagine Christmas tree lights getting wrapped around a conveyor belt and jamming the conveyor belt up," Gorman said. "Other things not belonging in there may cross contaminate with good recycling material."

Food waste

In many municipalities, food waste can be composted. Americans throw away 30-40% of the food supply.

Hoornweg says it's best to be proactive in addressing food waste.

"Typically as much as possible, it's avoiding the waste in the first place," Hoornweg said. "So buying a 12 pound turkey instead of 20, if that's all you need, if you're just going to throw out the rest."

Copyright 2025 NPR

To outside observers, parishioners at the Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles might seem less pious this year. In the summer, attendance at the Catholic church plummeted, according to the Rev. Brendan Busse, Dolores Mission’s pastor, who said the pews were about half as full as usual.

The disappearance of a substantial portion of the faithful was not altogether surprising: It came just days after the Department of Homeland Security launched immigration raids across the city in June — followed by others around the country — at the behest of President Donald Trump.

Almost immediately, social media feeds and then television news reports brought the initial immigration raids to life: Masked federal agents tackled and arrested Latinos in parking lots, on street corners and at workplaces. Those detained looked like they could be part of Dolores Mission’s overwhelmingly-Latino parish.

Dolores Mission is in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, an unmistakably Mexican American area where vibrant Chicano murals adorn public walls, music from Jalisco often rings out in Mariachi Plaza and 93% of residents are Hispanic or Latino.

Following the raids, some Boyle Heights residents were afraid to leave their homes. Many worried that they too might get swept up by one of the armed government agents roaming their neighborhoods, grabbing people off the streets and forcing them into unmarked vehicles.

That fear was compounded when it became clear that immigrants were being transported to far-off detention centers that have racked up human rights complaints — including places such as the so-called Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades and the much-criticized prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The impression of being under siege in Boyle Heights speaks to a larger disconnect in heavily Latino and predominately Catholic communities across the country.

Despite winning 55% of Catholic voters in the 2024 presidential election, Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement has disproportionately affected many Catholic communities and organizations around the country. It has also resulted in sudden drops in church attendance, according to Catholic officials in various parishes.

That may be because even though Catholics represent fewer than 20% of U.S. adults, they make up 61% of the population at risk of deportation, according to a March report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the National Association of Evangelicals, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and World Relief. In 2022, about 43% of U.S. Hispanic adults considered themselves Catholic, according to Pew Research Center.

Rev. Brendan Busse stands outside his church after leading a Spanish-language Mass.

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In the months after the raids began, multiple Dolores Mission congregants told Capital & Main that their friends or family members were detained by DHS and later deported.

Among them were two nephews of Dolores Mission’s pastoral assistant; they didn’t return home from their work as gardeners one day, Busse said.

By the time church members tracked them down days later, they were at separate ICE detention centers in California, and were later deported to their home country of Guatemala, according to the pastoral assistant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of being targeted by authorities. DHS did not respond to Capital & Main’s questions regarding both nephews’ detainment and deportation.

“Everybody here, no matter who they are, has felt the impact of fear and anxiety that has kept people from feeling safe in the streets,” Busse said.

In response to questions from Capital & Main about the impact of immigration enforcement on Catholic communities across the country, Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said that “lawbreakers should unquestionably be living in a climate of fear and anxiety that they will be caught and sent home,” meaning the countries in which they were born.

Mass deportations

A news release on the DHS website claimed that as of Oct. 27, the agency had carried out more than 527,000 deportations during Trump’s second term.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the vast majority of deportation flights during the first several months of 2025 were to countries whose populations are predominantly Catholic, such as Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

The sometimes violent tactics used to detain and later deport immigrants have convinced some to abandon the United States. That includes Juan González, a longtime Catholic resident of Southern California who attended St. Andrew Church in Pasadena and earlier this year chose to move back to his home country of Mexico after three decades.

As for church attendance, Boyle Height’s Dolores Mission is far from the only heavily Latino parish to see faltering numbers as a result of immigration enforcement.

Parishioners walk past a shrine depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe in Dolores Mission Church.

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In Chicago, the Rev. Carmelo Mendez, pastor of St. Oscar Romero Parish on the city’s South Side, told NPR in November that attendance at Mass had fallen by 40% since enhanced immigration enforcement operations began in the city in September.

In Washington, the Rev. Emilio Biosca Agüero, pastor at Shrine of the Sacred Heart, estimated that one out of five parishioners had stopped going to Mass after federal agents were deployed on the city’s streets, the Religion News Service reported in August.

At St. Thomas Mission in Brownsville in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, the Rev. Joel Flores told the New York Times that he too has seen a significant drop in the size of his flock in recent months.

The climate in California’s Southland is such that Bishop Alberto Rojas excused parishioners in the Diocese of San Bernardino from Mass if they feared immigration enforcement.

McLaughlin, who has spoken about her own Catholic faith, said that “ICE does not raid churches” but added that the Trump administration will “not tie the hands” of federal agents, clarifying that “there may be a situation where an arrest is made” inside of a church.

In Southern California, Christmas parades and other events have been canceled for fear of ICE raids targeting Latinos. Dolores Mission Church alone canceled numerous gatherings — including an annual community volunteer picnic, a women’s conference and a series of public religious services called “Misas del Barrio” (Neighborhood Masses) — to protect the community.

Parishioner Alejandra Benavides summed up the situation as she sees it: “Immigration enforcement is kicking our ass and breaking our hearts.”

Cafeteria Catholics

Trump has claimed to “stand for everything … that the church stands for,” and has selected Catholics to some of the nation’s most powerful positions: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, border czar Tom Homan and Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In January, Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, defended the Trump administration’s deportation policy by invoking a Catholic theological concept called “ordo amoris” (Latin for order of love), asserting that people should love their families before loving strangers. The claim was quickly rebuked by Pope Francis, who wrote that true ordo amoris is discovered by meditating on love “open to all, without exception.”

In February, soon-to-be Pope Leo also publicly challenged Vance’s interpretation, sharing an article titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” on his X account.

A recent survey conducted by the right-wing Catholic media organization EWTN News and conservative pollster RealClear Opinion Research found that 54% of Catholic voters surveyed supported “the detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants on a broad scale.”

In contrast, many Catholic leaders now say that some of the administration’s policies — such as the targeting of immigrants and the defunding of humanitarian programs — run directly counter to deeply held Catholic teachings.

“What they confused for Christianity is a white nationalist vision of racial purity and national purity that should be called out by anybody of faith as a real heresy,” Dolores Mission’s Busse said.

Good works

Catholic organizations that have long mobilized to support vulnerable communities, including immigrants, have in some cases ramped up such efforts in response to Trump’s policies.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, hardly known for liberal beliefs when it comes to issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, seemingly stayed the course when the the nation’s bishops elected conservative Archbishop Paul S. Coakley as their new president in November.

But nearly all of those same bishops — 96% of those who voted in a fall assembly — took aim at the Trump administration’s immigration policies in a Special Message, the first such message it has agreed upon in more than a decade. In it, the bishops called for an end to Trump’s “indiscriminate mass deportation” and “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.”

“To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26),” the statement said. “You are not alone!”

The conference also praised and encouraged many activist Catholics to continue their work on behalf of immigrants.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest in the country, is also trying to adapt.

Isaac Cuevas, the archdiocese’s director of immigration and public affairs, said parishioners who normally run food pantries are now combating hunger by delivering food to the homes of immigrants who are too afraid to go out in public.

The archdiocese has also provided court accompaniment training to about 180 priests, deacons and religious sisters. The hope, Cuevas said, is that by accompanying immigrants to court hearings, judges, bailiffs and clerks “all understand that that moral presence is there,” and that legal officials will be “as graceful as they can when dealing with these cases.”

Despite such actions, some Catholics feel the church has not taken a courageous enough humanitarian stand to protect immigrants.

Silvia Muñoz, who runs the department of social action at the Pedro Arrupe Jesuit Institute in Miami, is trying to pick up the slack.

Silvia Munoz sits at her home in Doral, Florida

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“I’m in contact with other Catholic women who are as passionate about the rights of immigrants as myself, to try to do something in South Florida to wake up a silent church,” Muñoz said.

Every Wednesday, Muñoz, who arrived in the United States as a Cuban refugee in 1961, joins other activists outside the ICE detention center in Miramar, Florida, to accompany immigrant families as they wait to learn the fates of their loved ones.

Muñoz has also attended interfaith vigils in front of Alligator Alcatraz — where Amnesty International has accused guards of subjecting detainees to cruel treatment “which may amount to torture,” such as confining shackled prisoners to an outdoor cage smaller than a standard dryer for hours — calling for operations at the site to be halted.

DHS did not respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment on alleged abuse at Alligator Alcatraz.

Despite being 79, Muñoz said, “I cannot sit at home and do nothing. I believe this is a calling from God that I, even at my age, need to do.”

On Nov.13 — the feast day for St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants — Muñoz helped organize a procession and prayer service in front of the immigration courthouse in downtown Miami.

That event was part of a national day of action spearheaded by the Ignatian Solidarity Network, a nonprofit Catholic organization dedicated to social justice advocacy.

Christopher Kerr, executive director of the network, told Capital & Main that the purpose of his organization’s public advocacy events is to “demonstrate that the church stands with immigrant people and that our faith, to be Catholic, is to uphold the dignity and humanity of immigrant people.”

Kerr said the gatherings are increasingly important now that the Trump administration has drastically cut funds that many Catholic organizations and institutions relied on to facilitate humanitarian services such as refugee resettlement.

On the first day of his second term, Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program — which just last year awarded the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its affiliates more than $62 million — and froze its funding. The move forced hundreds of layoffs of church employees and halted humanitarian services such as housing assistance and migrant child foster care for thousands of refugees across the country.

Trump later allowed his then-special adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. That action decimated Catholic Relief Services, which was the largest recipient of USAID funds, receiving about half of its $1.5 billion annual budget from the agency.

“The Trump administration has … reduced the funding so drastically that none of the organizations that were settling refugees are really able to sustain their operations,” Kerr said.

People in the pews

At Dolores Mission Church, Busse said the pews have been fuller recently.

December — with Advent, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Christmas — is usually the busiest time of the year. But he said he sees increased attendance as more than just a sign of a loyal flock.

Busse leads a well-attended Mass during Advent — the period leading up to Christmas.

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To Busse, a well-attended church is its own defense against the immigration enforcement activities that he said many local Catholics are enduring like “a terror campaign.”

“When people are together, there’s less fear,” Busse said. “When a community actually shows up, the [ICE activity] falls apart” — not just because it becomes harder to carry out on a logistical level, but also because the community’s solidarity shows that the enforcement actions are clearly against the will of the people.

For Busse, protecting immigrants is one of the most foundational manifestations of his faith.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that Catholics fundamentally believe that God’s self is kind of an immigrant, that the act of hospitality, of welcoming others in our homes and in our hearts is the central precept of Christianity and the Catholic faith,” Busse said. “It’s not just a nice thing to care for immigrants, it’s really the most sacred thing we can do.”

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.

All photos by Jeremy Lindenfeld.