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Local volunteers patrol schools for ICE agents. They need more help.
Julie Gill, a volunteer legal observer and school patrol coordinator with YARR, speaks to Santa Cruz Local for an interview. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
LIVE OAK >> On a recent Thursday afternoon, Julie Gill stood watch from a sidewalk on Capitola Road across from Live Oak Elementary School. She wore a high-visibility yellow jacket, and a whistle hung around her neck.
She was carefully watching for immigration agents, as she’s been trained to do as a legal observer and school patrol coordinator with local pro-immigrant rapid response group YARR, or Your Allied Rapid Response.
“ We came here because the immigrant families in this neighborhood requested it. They were afraid to walk in and walk out” of school, Gill said. The group has maintained daily patrols at Del Mar and Live Oak elementary schools and Shoreline Middle School since January.
Gill was one of close to a dozen volunteers on call that day, monitoring the roads for immigration agents as children got dropped off and picked up from school.
If immigration agents arrived, she would alert people nearby by blowing on the whistle, a tactic that has spread as activists respond to immigration crackdowns throughout the country. YARR also has a phone list of hundreds of trained legal observers who would be alerted and asked to show up if immigration agents were present.
YARR formed in 2017 during the first term of President Donald Trump as a hotline to call if ICE agents were seen. The group posts on its Instagram and Facebook pages whether reports of ICE are true or false, and has expanded its work to include proactive patrols like the school patrols.
As the school year ends, the group is hoping to grow its capacity over summer to maintain and expand its school patrols at Live Oak and start patrolling schools in Santa Cruz, especially Gault Elementary where many immigrant families send their children.
A group unaffiliated with YARR had previously established school patrols in Watsonville, Gill said.
To grow its capacity, YARR is seeking more volunteers to get trained and sign up for shifts, and hopes to train parents to volunteer at their kids’ schools.
School patrols have popped up throughout the country in the wake of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security lifted a ban on immigration detentions and raids in schools, hospitals and churches, stoking fear amongst already vulnerable communities.
Gill said she was hardened in her resolve to step up and volunteer with YARR after seeing the federal actions in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, including the killing of two Minneapolis residents who were protesting the immigration enforcement surge earlier this year.
School patrols are meant to serve as an early warning system for families in the event immigration agents, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, are present near schools. The fear of detention has many immigrant parents staying home, too fearful to drop their children at school, go grocery shopping or even seek medical attention.
Volunteer patrols can lead to higher attendance at schools and improved mental health of students, school leaders across California told EdSource in a Jan. 16 article.
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YARR’s presence at the two local schools has also served to quickly extinguish false reports of ICE presence at least twice. Misinformation and fake reports on social media can quickly spread unnecessary panic among immigrant communities.
Gill said several months ago, a post on Facebook claimed that ICE was in front of Live Oak Elementary.
“ Nothing was happening. It was just completely fabricated,” she said. “ We were able to knock that rumor down, because we do have a social media and we inform the folks that are scared it’s not ICE.”
Legal observers with YARR where high-visibility vests and a whistle to alert nearby residents in case immigration agents were present. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Being able to inform people that immigration agents are not present has been as important as being ready to inform people if immigration agents were there, Gill said.
When YARR started patrolling the Live Oak schools, some parents and staff were confused. But after several weeks of consistent presence, they began to greet the volunteer patrollers and several times brought them snacks. It took time, but eventually volunteers gained the trust of families, Gill said.
“ When we started here, we weren’t sure how it was going to go,” she said. “We had reached out to the superintendent and stuff, and they were kinda iffy about it.”
A representative of Live Oak School District didn’t respond to requests for comment by publication.
Two volunteer patrollers that Santa Cruz Local spoke with asked to be identified by their first names only, due to concerns of political repression of activists.
Janet said she started volunteering after hearing of the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
“This is my neighborhood. This is my community. And I’ll do whatever it takes to protect the parents and the kids,” Janet said. “ Not a lot has happened, obviously, which is a great thing. But I think it’s really great that we all stay pretty vigilant and aware.”
Janet, who asked to only be identified by her first name, patrols around Live Oak Elementary School in Live Oak on May 21. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Another volunteer, Anita, echoed the sentiment.
“It’s our neighborhood. So [we are] supporting our community and our neighborhood,” Anita said. “ YARR as it currently is, I think has to be really changeable, responsive, and be able to adapt basically to whatever’s gonna come down the line.”
Since the federal surge in Minneapolis and the departure of leadership within the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Customs and Border Protection, other cities haven’t seen a similar intensified crackdown.
“I think tactics are going to start to change, and so I think we need to be really adaptive for that,” Anita said. “Long term, I think it’s building community and I hope that goes on.”
One of the next big fights for pro-immigrant groups in the area is the proposal for an immigration detention facility in Gilroy which is under construction and faces opposition from local leaders.
In the meantime, YARR leaders hope to continue training legal observers, and maintain and expand its school patrols.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Gill said.
To learn more about YARR and how to get involved, visit their website.
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There are no good billionaires—but a couple are better than others
It is a very, very good time to be a billionaire. With the Trump administration paving the way for plutocrats to plutocrat extremely hard, it’s been a veritable orgy of wealth accumulation, with these titans of … whatever they are titans of … seeing their net worth absolutely skyrocket. So surely all these members of the Three Comma Club have gotten much more generous with their riches…
Here are my demands
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The Delaney Hall Strikers Are Hitting GEO Group Where It Hurts
It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.
What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.”
The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones.
While work is supposedly voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings.
“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.”
The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay.
While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings.
“Engaging in, or inciting a group demonstration” is also a “high offense” and “prohibited act.” And, the detained strikers wrote in their June 3 letter, they have been “subjected to reprisals, discrimination, mockery, mistreatment, and threats” since their strike began.
People detained in Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.Derek French/Zuma
“They are trying to force us to work in all areas of the facility (cleaning, kitchen, maintenance, laundry, floor polishing)” they wrote, adding that GEO Group staffers threaten “to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another” if they refuse to work. “They tell us we have no rights here.”
“They don’t have cleaning staff, they don’t have kitchen staff,” said Cat Adorno, an organizer with Cosecha. “Those jobs, the detainees are the ones that do that.”
“We’re hearing that the place is becoming really dirty, that it started to smell like feces, that the guards have become incredibly aggressive, threatening them that if they don’t resume their work, they’re going to get transferred or get additional charges,” Adorno added.
The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.”
Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.” Since then, several courts have ruled that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to people detained by ICE. But the legal battle isn’t over: there are now more than a dozen lawsuits making their way through the courts regarding involuntary work for unjust pay in ICE detention.
GEO Group staffers did not answer questions about the strike, or about whether Delaney Hall cleaning and kitchen staff can sustain the facility without the labor of detained people.
“In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel…to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Facilities like Delaney Hall are profitable in part because they can compel detained people to work for otherwise illegal rates.
For more than a year, a group of union activists calling itself “Labor Eyes On ICE” has held monthly vigils at Delaney Hall—and on Sunday, members of at least 12 unions, including the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers, picketed on a dusty road just under half a mile from the building, prevented from getting within detainees’ earshot by barricades and lines of police.
Teachers and librarians showed up to chant and picket, as did Amazon warehouse workers and university clerical staff. In a nearby tent, masked medics wearing red-tape crosses on their arms handed out goggles to protect people from tear gas—and told me quietly that in their day-to-day lives, many of them are unionized medical professionals.
Mitch Israel, an organizer with the Teamsters at Amazon, had the ties between that company and ICE on his mind outside Delaney Hall this week: “Amazon actually loses money on its package delivering business most years,” he said, “and it funds that by using its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to get huge contracts with ICE, with Palantir, and other groups that allow it to fund its abuse of workers. There is a direct connection between these things.”
The Delaney Hall detention facility has seen a surge of protests as detainees hold a hunger and labor strike over allegations of mistreatment and poor facility conditions. Riley Harty/Zuma
“This fight actually goes beyond Delaney Hall and back to our employers and our workplaces,” said Isaac Jimenez, a member of the administrative workers’ union at Rutgers University. At his employer, students, staff and faculty “have been calling for a sanctuary campus for over a year.”
“We’re supporting and uplifting the demands of the striking detainees and calling for this place to be shut down, calling on our governor, Mikie Sherrill, to meet with the strikers, and to help shut this place down as well,” Jimenez added. “I know it’s only really gotten to a head in the past 10 days, but this movement’s been growing for over a year, since Delaney Hall’s been reopened.” On Thursday, 13 days into the strike, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for legal services—enough to fund legal aid for “all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.”
By withholding their labor, Free said, detained people “are in a real way hitting GEO where it hurts.” They are undermining the company’s revenue, “which is why the repression is so harsh.”
But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”
Defense tech, AI, and fundraising take center stage at StrictlyVC Los Angeles on June 18
The White House Just Made Medicaid Work Requirements Even Worse
On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its interim final rule on Medicaid work requirements, mandating that everyone who seeks Medicaid support has to prove they are unable to work to a greater extent, even if they have already been diagnosed with a debilitating condition like sickle cell disease—and even if they are already on Medicaid.
Federal Medicaid work requirements are being implemented as part of President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a budget and spending bill which is also cutting nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid’s budget over the next decade.
In states with Medicaid expansion, an Affordable Care Act provision that allows more low-income people to access Medicaid, the legislation mandated that work requirements be implemented, but didn’t resolve certain details of how and who would be targeted—questions the Department of Health and Human Services has now answered in the most restrictive possible way. The Urban Institute estimates that between 4.9 and 10.1 million fewer people could be enrolled in Medicaid by 2028 as a result of work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. The interim final rule is likely to yield a figure at the high end of that estimate. Medicaid work requirements have to be implemented in all states with Medicaid expansion by January 1, 2027, though some Republican-led states have opted to do so ahead of schedule.
“Congress compelled states to impose Medicaid work requirements on the expansion population,” said University of Pittsburgh health policy and management professor Miranda Yaver, “but it wasn’t entirely clear from the legislation to what extent states’ hands were going to be tied…there were a lot of open questions about how much discretion there would have.”
Under the interim final rule, people with certain conditions who are already on Medicaid will no longer be automatically considered “medically frail,” a classification that exempts them from work requirements; they must provide further proof, beyond their diagnosis, that they are “greatly impaired” from working. The new federal rule is notably stricter than what was implemented in Nebraska, a GOP-dominated state that voluntarily enacted work requirements eight months before the deadline—but which at least retained a list of conditions considered automatically exempt from work requirements for those on Medicaid.
State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities‘ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me.
“We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”
While the federal interim rule is harsh, it is not final: there is a 60-day public comment period, after which states have until the end of the calendar year to implement (or, in Nebraska’s case, modify) their Medicaid work requirements.
“It’s going to be very costly in terms of time as well as money,” Wagner said, “and, realistically, states are not going to be able to do this accurately by January 1.”
There is no way to implement Medicaid work requirements without disabled and chronically ill people losing their access to the program, despite the claims of Republican politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.).
“There are going to be so many disabled people and chronically ill people who lose access to their health care and other kinds of supports that Medicaid provides,” said Maria Town, the President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities.
Town is also extremely concerned that Medicaid-supported employment for disabled people is not considered to be meaningful “community engagement,” another stipulation for Medicaid coverage under the new rule. “It’s just a way of saying that disabled people’s labor shouldn’t be compensated,” Town told me.
The new administrative burdens will push people off of Medicaid, as when Medicaid work requirements were implemented in Arkansas during the first Trump administration, leading to 18,000 people losing Medicaid coverage in the state.
“People who had lost Medicaid benefits were worse off—they were more likely to have medical debt and have delayed important healthcare due to concerns about cost,” University of Colorado, Boulder economics professor Chloe East said in an interview.
Yaver, of the University of Pittsburgh, is also concerned that places that serve more Medicaid patients, like federally qualified health centers, will not be able to keep up with paperwork requirements to prove medical frailty.
“Writing attestations of medical frailty would almost assuredly fall under the umbrella of non-billable hours,” Yaver told me, “and this is going to be a large share of their patient population.”
Not only do Medicaid work requirements not increase employment, according to multiple studies, but a majority of adults on Medicaid already work.
“It’s hard not to think that the cruelty of the policy is the point,” East said. “Adding work requirements to Medicaid is part of a massive shift in our safety net in this country under this administration to make it as small and hard to access as possible.”
California’s slow ballot count makes it a target for critics; it doesn’t mean elections are rigged
Days after the state’s primary, California voters are in a familiar position – waiting to find out which candidates will go on to the general election in their most high-profile races, for governor and Los Angeles mayor.
It’s not surprising those have yet to be resolved, along with several closely contested congressional races, because the state routinely takes days, or even weeks, to fully tally races. Nor is it unusual for President Donald Trump to complain about the pace of the count and allege fraud, as he did Thursday. It’s something he’s done repeatedly in the past.
What was unusual was that Trump announced that his Department of Justice was investigating the count: “Why the vote counting DELAY???,” the president posted on his social media account.
He suggested that the state’s Democrats were somehow cheating so two candidates he favors — Republican Steve Hilton in the governor’s race and Spencer Pratt in the nonpartisan mayor’s race — would be bumped from the top two slots and therefore ineligible for the November general election.
“You see what’s happening in California, they’re rigging the election,” he told reporters during an Oval Office gathering Thursday.
Trump’s posts prompted a response from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose press office posted a clip of a CNN video explaining how the nation’s most populous state prioritizes accuracy and accessibility over speed, drawing out the count.
“For the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Newsom’s office posted.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment about whether it was investigating the ballot counting.
Slow count designed to ensure accuracy, but opens door to election liesThe law in California practically mandates a drawn-out count. Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter — some 23 million of them — and the state has permissive rules for returning them. They will be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at an election office within seven days.
Only after the polls have closed and most of the country has gone to sleep can local election workers begin the lengthy process of verifying the legitimacy of the late-arriving mail ballots and then start to tabulate them.
If a voters’ signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t match what’s on file, election officials are required to give those voters a chance to come in and prove their identity so the ballot will count, delaying a final tally further.
County Clerk Tricia Webber (right) training election officials at the county government building Tuesday. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
“We might not like how California administers its elections (and I don’t),” wrote Stephen Richer a former Republican election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, on the social platform X. “But that doesn’t make it fraud.”
Last year, Newsom signed a bill requiring the vote count to be completed within 13 days, rather than the previous 30 days. To get an extension, counties must inform the Secretary of State’s Office that they have a reason for a delay.
That’s not quick enough for the president: “The Dumocrats are at it again!” the president wrote on his social media platform. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”
State Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat who wrote the bill to accelerate ballot counting, said Trump’s comments were disappointing and “a lie.”
“While Trump is laser focused on lying about our elections and undermining voters’ faith in our democracy, so that Republicans can then try to pass policies like Voter ID laws that make it harder for people to vote, our priority is to make sure that every validly cast ballot is counted,” he said in a statement.
Many Democratic voters waited until the last minute to cast their ballotSome experts warned that the count from Tuesday’s primary might take even longer than after previous elections.
“What compounds things this time around is that Democrats have been holding on to their ballots,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor.
The state’s millions of Democrats this year were exceptionally slow to send in their ballots, apparently waiting until the last minute to make a selection in the ever-evolving governor’s race. The state operates a primary in which the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, move on to the general election, and Democrats had been fretting for months that having so many Democrats in the race would splinter the vote in such a way that two Republicans would claim the top two spots.
Democratic voters appeared to wait until the end to see which of their candidates were emerging as favorites. The high number of late ballots will likely make the delay in getting final counts even greater.
While millions of ballots have been counted by now, it’s the uncounted ones that loom largest for close races.
Despite being an overwhelmingly Democratic state, California has featured some of the nation’s closest congressional elections, sometimes decided by just a few hundred votes, so there’s often no way to determine a winner until the weekslong ballot count has concluded. In 2024, one House race wasn’t called until December.
Things get even more complicated in a primary election, such as Tuesday’s. That’s because the news isn’t just the top vote-getter but also the second place finisher. To know the true outcome of any race, enough votes need to be tallied to know for certain who finished in first and second.
Later ballots skew toward Democrats, feeding conspiracy theoriesAnother side effect of the enormous crush of late mail ballots that get tallied last is that the final vote gets more and more Democratic. That’s because Republicans are more likely to return their ballots early or vote in person, on Election Day. Those ballots get counted first.
The gradual shifting of the vote to Democrats as ballot counting goes on has sparked all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Republicans have long complained about the California count, even though the GOP did well in close House races in the state in 2024. The Republican National Committee filed lawsuits in other states challenging the legality of counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day and the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule on the issue sometime this month.
But worries about the California vote count aren’t only a partisan issue. Voting advocates have urged state lawmakers to better fund local election offices so they can process the avalanche of late-arriving ballots faster.
“The Legislature needs to throw a lot more money to get the count quicker,” Hasen said.
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Kennedy Center: 1; Trump’s ego: 0
President Donald Trump’s name is set to be removed from the facade of the iconic Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, restoring an American treasure to its rightful condition. The office for the center’s general counsel circulated a memo to staffers on Thursday, ordering them to remove Trump’s name after a judge ruled against the administration late last week. The Kennedy Center was named…
Take your name down!
Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Judge says Kennedy Center board broke law putting Trump’s name on building…