For their 2004 home opener, the San Francisco Giants invited a special guest to throw the ceremonial first pitch: Gavin Newsom, then just a few months into his first term as mayor of San Francisco.

As Newsom took the pitcher’s mound, wearing dress shoes and a button-down shirt underneath his custom Giants jersey, the announcer informed the crowd that “he played first base for the University of Santa Clara and was drafted by the Texas Rangers.”

The introduction was quickly overshadowed by Newsom nearly hitting a photographer with the ball. But it left a lasting impact on a few attendees that day — a group of former Santa Clara University baseball players who were struck by the glowing treatment of Newsom’s resume.

“It’s kind of the standing joke that Newsom played on the team,” said Vince Machi, who arrived at Santa Clara in 1985, the same year as Newsom, and played baseball for three years. “There’s always been kind of a joke between the guys who stay in touch.”

Twenty years later, as the Giants kick off their latest home season Friday, Newsom is now a national political figure — not just an outspoken champion of the Democratic Party but a potential future presidential contender. He regularly appears on cable news to discuss California policies and attack Republicans. Lately he has traveled the country as a leading surrogate for President Biden’s re-election campaign.

Through his rise over the intervening two decades, his baseball career has provided Newsom a triumphant narrative to push back on the perception that his upbringing was privileged and easy: The high school standout scouted by the major leagues, who overcame his dyslexia and academic shortcomings to earn a partial scholarship to Santa Clara University before an injury forced him to find a new purpose.

It has become so closely associated with Newsom that “Saturday Night Live” opened a show in March with a sketch where the Democratic governor, portrayed by Michael Longfellow, defends President Biden’s mental fitness by recounting: “The other day he was taking a nap and I whipped a baseball at him and he caught it like De Niro in ‘Awakenings.’”

Newsom told the story himself again in January on the podcast Pod Save America: Because of poor test scores, he was headed to community college until he got a call from the Santa Clara University baseball coaches. “It was literally the ticket to a four-year university. It changed my life, my trajectory,” he said.

But former coaches and teammates said that biography, repeated again and again through interviews and glossy magazine profiles and coverage of his 2021 baseball-themed children’s book on overcoming dyslexia, has inflated Newsom’s baseball credentials, giving the impression that he was a more accomplished player than he was.

Most notably, Newsom never played an official game for Santa Clara University; he was a junior varsity recruit who played only during the fall tryouts his freshman and sophomore years, then left the baseball program before the regular season began. He does not appear on the Broncos’ all-time roster or in media guides published by the athletic department to preview the upcoming season.

Mike Cummins, the assistant coach at Santa Clara while Newsom was there, said the governor has “embellished his baseball career a little bit at times.”

“He never played in a varsity game. He may have played in some scrimmages,” said Cummins, who is now the head baseball coach at California State University, East Bay. “He’s embellished it. It’s half-truths. He was recruited to Santa Clara, he was there in the fall, but he never played. He didn’t have a varsity career there.”

The misconception has been propelled as much by what Newsom doesn’t say as what he does — a polished sweep over his time at Santa Clara University that rarely gets more detailed than, “I played a little baseball. Just my first and second year,” as he told The Santa Clara, the student newspaper, in a 2008 interview.

Not for the first time in his career, Newsom has allowed a more flattering version of events to develop in the public discourse while being slow to clear up the inaccuracies. During his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018, he acknowledged that he never attended rehab, as was widely reported more than a decade earlier after he pledged to seek treatment for problems with alcohol.

Some Broncos players from the era, who said they still regularly get asked about Newsom when people find out they played baseball at Santa Clara, wanted to correct the record.

“He didn’t earn it. He didn’t earn the right to say it,” said Kevin Schneider, who pitched for two seasons and now runs a pitching academy in San Francisco. “I worked my ass off. So did everyone else on that team. For him to just go all these years, to say he did something he didn’t that takes not just talent but also dedication and effort and sacrifice, it’s not right.”

Spokespeople for Newsom rejected multiple requests to interview the governor about his baseball career. They said Newsom had never exaggerated his experience at Santa Clara University and that it was not his job to fix whatever mistaken assumptions the public may have developed.

“He’s been very honest and consistent about what happened to him in college and more personable than you would get from most politicians,” spokesperson Bob Salladay said. “He is not responsible for other people’s impressions or interpretations of him and his life. He is doing his job, and he cannot spend his entire day correcting people when they make errors about him. He’s moved on.”

Newsom speaks about his baseball journey with “emotional, real truth that is visceral to him,” said Nathan Click, another spokesperson for the governor. “We all go through life and remember the emotions we feel about things, not, you know, facts.”

“He chooses to talk about the emotional side of it, because he thinks that is the place that young people in particular, who are going through struggles, people with dyslexia, can find themselves in his story,” Click said. “That matters way more than, you know, whether he was a rostered player or what his stats were in the fall ball, JV, freshman year, Santa Clara University season.”

From high school standout to Santa Clara University

By all accounts, Newsom was a talented baseball player at Redwood High School in Marin County, where he was also a star on the basketball team before graduating in 1985. His name appears in the San Francisco Examiner’s prep coverage from the time — banging home runs, hitting a game-winning single in the Marin County Athletic League championship his senior year and being named to the all-league first team.

Publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Marin Independent Journal and Men’s Journal have reported over the years that the Texas Rangers drafted, recruited or showed interest in Newsom in high school. In 2009, a Newsom spokesperson clarified to the San Francisco Chronicle that he had merely been scouted, not drafted.

Newsom was among the hundreds of high school players across the country whom the Rangers organization looked at while preparing for the annual amateur draft, according to a spokesperson for the team.

Spokesperson John Blake wrote in an email that the Rangers’ chief California scout from the time “said that we did watch Governor Newsom play in high school, but he doesn’t remember us specially scouting him.” He said major league teams are very thorough in scouting California and “it is likely there were several players on this particular high school team that our scouts had interest in seeing, including Governor Newsom.”

Newsom spokesperson Click said the governor received business cards from those scouts after they watched him play, which he has spoken about in past interviews. “They made a point to come up to him and introduce themselves, which means something,” Click said.

Newsom headed down the Peninsula to Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit college where he was a freshman in the fall of 1985. Having struggled in high school, with a reported SAT score of 960 out of 1600, Newsom has long credited baseball with securing his admission.

“I had a pretty severe learning disability, dyslexia, struggled academically, and the only reason Santa Clara University would have ever accepted me was because I was a left-handed first baseman who could hit fairly well,” he told The New York Times in 2019.

Newsom also had help from several well-connected alumni.

Bill Connolly, a San Francisco investment banker and associate of William Newsom who played baseball at Santa Clara in the 1960s, put the younger Newsom on the team’s radar, according to Cummins, the former assistant coach. Connolly died in 2017, and his widow could not be reached for comment.

Connolly “was a very good supporter of us at the time, money-wise,” Cummins said, and pushed the coaches to check Newsom out. “That was pretty normal at the time,” Cummins said, especially in a pre-internet era when recruiting was more regional and word-of-mouth. He said the baseball team was not a “backdoor” to admit Newsom into the university.

Click said Newsom does not remember his family asking Connolly to recommend him to Santa Clara University “and if it’s true, it would be news to him.”

Alongside then-head coach John Oldham, who died in February, Cummins eventually visited Newsom at home and recruited him to Santa Clara. The team had a junior varsity squad at the time, which it used as a “minor league,” Cummins said, so Newsom had a guaranteed spot in the program, but would have to perform well enough to play in varsity games.

He was offered a scholarship of $500 in October 1985, during fall quarter of his freshman year, according to a photograph of a section of the paperwork provided by Click, though it’s unclear if that’s the only payment he received. Click said Newsom was unable to locate the original document. The cost of attendance for Santa Clara University that year was $10,251, including tuition, room and board.

Eager to ensure his spot, Newsom’s family also solicited letters of recommendation from former Gov. Jerry Brown, who attended Santa Clara University for one year and appointed William Newsom to the Superior Court and the state Court of Appeal during his first term as governor, and from John Mallen, an attorney who served on Santa Clara’s board of regents at the time.

Mallen, who described William Newsom as “my best friend for 75 years,” said he did not frequently write letters of recommendation for applicants while he was on the board.

“In fact, I may not have helped anybody else get in,” Mallen said.

Though he does not have a copy of the letter anymore, Mallen said it was probably addressed to the president of the university and would have been a character reference for the younger Newsom.

“I mean, I’d known him since birth,” Mallen said. “He was a good athlete. That I remember.”

Mallen said it “absolutely” would have been “hugely influential” in helping Newsom gain admission to Santa Clara: “I think it was a big help.”

Click denied that the letters of recommendations played any role in Newsom’s acceptance.

“Baseball was the reason he got into university and the partial baseball scholarship shows it,” Click said.

College baseball cut short by elbow injury

Newsom has previously said he played baseball his first two years at Santa Clara University before injuring his throwing arm and reevaluating his path, a timeline repeated in major profiles of Newsom, most recently by Los Angeles Magazine in 2021.

“Ultimately, I had an ulnar nerve issue and threw out my arm and had a surgery and really didn’t come back,” he told WBUR, a Boston public radio station, in 2019. “And then I had to make that tough choice of, ‘What the hell do I do with my life?’ Because I was just so consumed by baseball.”

To report this story, CalMatters reached out to coaches and teammates listed on the Broncos rosters for the 1986 and 1987 seasons. They said Newsom played only during the fall tryout periods of his freshman and sophomore years, when prospective players trained and rotated into practice games against other local universities, and no official statistics were kept.

Several people recalled that Newsom was around for just the first few weeks, perhaps as much as six weeks, as a freshman. He did not make the 1986 roster, as reflected in the game program and media guide “The Boys of Spring.”

Newsom was not one of the standout prospects that year — “We would have known he was a big scholarship player who crapped out,” said Jim Flynn, who was a freshman pitcher — but no one interviewed by CalMatters disputes his athletic ability.

Victor Cole, a freshman in the 1986 season who split his time pitching and playing outfield for the varsity team and playing outfield for the junior varsity team, said Newsom “was a good athlete” and “he looked like somebody who could play college ball.”

“Everyone who was recruited had talent. So he had talent,” said Cole, who briefly played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992 and now coaches at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

Machi, who also arrived in 1985, said Newsom caught his attention because they were competing for the same spot, playing first base.

“I do recall him being a fairly athletic guy. It wasn’t like he was a fish out of water,” Machi said. “As a competitor, you’re always looking around.”

But within a few weeks, Newsom had “just disappeared,” Machi said. “He didn’t have any accolades on the field.”

Struggling with pain in his left elbow, Newsom underwent ulnar nerve surgery in late 1985 and took the rest of the season off, Click said. Dr. Michael Dillingham, an orthopedic surgeon in Daly City who was the team doctor at the time, confirmed to CalMatters that he performed the operation.

After the surgery, however, Newsom did not rehabilitate his arm through the Santa Clara baseball program, recalled Larry Donahe, then a freshman pitcher who also sat out the 1986 season recovering from an elbow operation for the same injury as Newsom.

“If he had a bad elbow and was hurt and was doing any sort of rehab, I probably would have seen him,” said Donahe, who had a full-ride scholarship and continued to play for the Broncos through other surgeries his sophomore and junior years. “He never came into the training room.”

Click said Newsom was in a cast and then physical therapy for several months and did not begin training seriously to return to baseball until the summer.

He tried out for the Broncos again in fall 1986 as a sophomore but “couldn’t make it work” because of continued elbow pain, Click said. Before the regular season began, Newsom gave up his beloved sport for good.

Players said Newsom was not particularly close to his teammates and they were uncertain of the circumstances of his departure. Many wondered if he lost interest in baseball because of the fierce demands of Santa Clara’s program.

Because the NCAA had not yet established limits on student-athletes’ time, players described the team in that era as a full-time job, even during fall tryouts: multiple games each week; practices that ran from the early afternoon until after the dining hall stopped serving dinner and all day on the weekends; extra training including 5 a.m. workouts; and vision strengthening and success visualization classes, where players laid on the floor with their eyes closed and imagined how to improve their technique.

“If you had a life, you chose to do something else. If you were a baseball lifer you loved it,” Matt Toole, who played baseball at Santa Clara from 1985 to 1989 and then two seasons in the minor leagues, wrote in an email.

Newsom “actually played well enough to make our team both years,” he wrote. “He had a lot of potential but he chose not to play.”

Click said Newsom may not have felt comfortable sharing his injury publicly at the time because he was ashamed not to live up to the success he experienced earlier in his baseball career.

“It was really a crushing moment for him,” Click said, “especially somebody who had been really hyped up by everyone around him in Little League, in high school.”

But the legend of Newsom’s feats on the diamond endured. In a 2010 story previewing the Giants-Rangers World Series, The New York Times contrasted the baseball careers of the mayors for the two teams.

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert joked about his brief stint playing junior varsity at Claremont McKenna College: “They put me in when it was time for the outfielders to do wind sprints.”

The Times called Newsom “more serious about the game,” noting the then-San Francisco mayor played for two years at Santa Clara University.

“I was your standard 6-foot-3-inch first baseman,” Newsom told the paper.

Say you work at a fast food restaurant or coffee shop that bears the name of a national chain. Under California law, you’re entitled to be paid at least $20 an hour starting Monday.

Say you work at one of those stores, inside a grocery store. The grocery store, your employer, is exempt under the law. You’ll keep getting your current wages.

But say you assemble burgers, scoop ice cream or prepare Frappuccinos at one of those stores, and it’s inside another store, but the bigger store isn’t a “grocery” because less than half of its revenues are made off groceries. What then?

According to the state of California, the store should be paying you at least $20 an hour, but only for the hours you work in the fast food portion of the store. If you spend part of your shift checking out customers or stocking the shelves in the rest of the store, you’re only entitled to the regular minimum wage of $16 for those hours.

That’s according to an 18-item FAQ the Department of Industrial Relations published in March as California businesses prepare for the fast food minimum wage to kick in on Monday.

It’s not the only situation that is confusing employers and workers alike.

To raise wages for fast food workers, the Service Employees International Union struck a deal last year with the International Franchise Association and California Restaurant Association that included owners of fast food chain locations but exempted those who operate independent restaurants.

The law covers all fast food restaurants that belong to chains with 60 or more locations nationally, roping in the unions’ targets: McDonald’s or Burger King and their franchise owners. More than 500,000 Californians — primarily women, immigrants and people of color — work in what’s known in the industry as “limited service restaurants.” Earlier this year SEIU estimated the law will apply to roughly 3,000 employers.

“The vast majority of fast-food locations in California operate under the most profitable brands in the world,” Joseph Bryant, SEIU’s executive vice president and a member of a new statewide fast food regulatory council, said in a statement today. “Those corporations need to pay their fair share and provide their operators with the resources they need to pay their workers a living wage without cutting jobs or passing the cost to consumers.”

But outside those national chains are numerous other food sellers and business arrangements, not all of which are directly addressed in the new law. Grocery stores and some bakeries are exempt, and this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a carve-out for fast food places at airports, convention centers and hotels.

According to emails obtained by CalMatters in response to a public records request, a range of employers have been trying to figure out if they must pay $20 ever since the law was signed late last September.

In October, the Department of Industrial Relations received two inquiries from franchise owners asking whether they must comply with the law. One employer owned an Auntie Anne’s and a Cinnabon and believed selling pretzels and cinnamon rolls qualified them for the controversial bakery exemption. The other owned an ice cream parlor.

“This clarification is imperative as to whether or not we will be financially able to open more locations at the proposed wage increase to $20 an hour,” the ice cream store owner wrote.

Both were forwarded to the department with a request for legal guidance by a staffer for Assemblymember Chris Holden, the law’s author. In recent weeks, Holden has been unable to answer reporters’ questions about why certain exemptions — such a carveout for some bakeries — were included in the law. The department redacted responses to those emails under a public records exemption for attorney-client communications.

The ice cream store owner, Gabriela Campbell, was featured this week in a KCRA report detailing how she contacted multiple state offices and still isn’t sure if the law applies to her.

By December, employers were lawyering up.

Attorneys for the Honey Baked Ham chain asked whether it would qualify. They described the stores as “retail meat stores” where customers primarily buy cooked hams and other “bulk proteins” and sides to eat at home, but acknowledged they also sell sandwiches that customers can eat at the restaurants or take to-go.

Attorneys also sought clarification over whether their clients would have to pay $20 if they own a chain of Papa Murphy’s “take and bake” pizza shops.

In late December, attorneys for an unnamed retail chain asked the department whether they would have to pay $20 in the fast food restaurants or cafes that are inside some of its stores. The attorneys noted the company’s stores sometimes sell groceries, but not primarily, and employees who work the fast food counters are often also assigned to other parts of the store.

Department attorney Ehud Appel said it did not respond to individual inquiries, instead answering to the companies with the FAQ this month.

In the FAQ, the state said: businesses are not exempt for selling ice cream, even though a national industry classification system excludes some ice cream shops from the definition of fast food, or “limited service” restaurants. To count as a bakery, the state said, the bread sold must weigh at least half a pound. And workers at a “store within a store” must be paid $20 for the hours they work in the restaurant portions of the stores.

The answers apparently created new questions.

The FAQ stated fast food managers can only be exempt from California’s overtime pay laws if they make more than twice the minimum wage — a threshold that is now higher for fast food employees. But attorneys for the retailer wrote in another letter to the department in mid-March that the stores’ managers only manage the fast food counters part time.

It’s unclear how the state will handle the confusion going forward.

Its FAQ directs workers who believe they’re wrongly being denied $20 an hour to file a wage theft claim with the Labor Commissioner’s Office — a process that is so backlogged amid a staffing crisis for the office that complaints can take years to resolve. The department did not immediately respond today when asked for further clarification.

The new fast food council may also take up the concerns, or they could end up in the courts to decide.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said today he supports President Biden’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, citing the “ongoing and horrific loss of innocent civilian life.”

“I support President Biden’s call for an immediate ceasefire as part of a deal to secure desperately needed relief for Gazan civilians and the release of hostages,” he wrote in a letter addressed to California’s Muslim, Palestinian American, and Arab American communities. “I also unequivocally denounce Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel. It is time to work in earnest toward an enduring peace that will furnish the lasting security, autonomy, and freedom that the Palestinians and the Israeli people both deserve.”

Newsom’s statement comes one day before the U.S. plans to ask the U.N. Security Council to back a ceasefire resolution, and follows other leaders shifting to more forceful calls for Israel to change its conduct of the war.

On March 3, Vice President Kamala Harris, the former U.S. senator from California, called for an immediate, but temporary ceasefire — the strongest statement from the Biden administration to that point.

Following his State of the Union address on March 7, when he announced a new effort to bring in humanitarian aid by sea, President Biden called for a six-week ceasefire and a hostage-prisoner exchange. And in a call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, the president expressed concerns about the civilian death toll and Israel’s blockade of aid delivery, according to a White House summary.

And on March 14, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official, called for new elections in Israel, saying on the Senate floor that Netanyahu is an “obstacle to peace” and “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”

The governor’s statement today, sent during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, comes after months of criticism by pro-ceasefire supporters that he wasn’t even-handed in his stance on the Gaza war.

But in California, views have been more mixed.

More than 60% of likely voters in California supported an immediate ceasefire in a poll released last month by the Public Policy Institute of California. But they’re more divided on whether to increase, decrease or maintain military aid to Israel and humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

Although the state’s Jewish Democrats have been split over calls for a ceasefire, Newsom’s move puts him at odds with those who have opposed the idea — including U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has advanced to the November election for U.S. Senate. Schiff said earlier this month that a ceasefire must be contingent on Hamas releasing hostages it kidnapped from Israel, and that “the obstacle to getting that temporary ceasefire is Hamas.”

Assembly Republicans have called for a resolution condemning Hamas. And in response to Newsom’s letter, Jim Stanley, Assembly GOP leader James Gallagher’s spokesperson, accused the governor of treating Israeli hostages as “an afterthought.”

In the letter, Newsom acknowledged the suffering of the Muslim community — particularly those who had lost family and friends in Gaza.

“The scale of suffering in Gaza is so vast that it seems few Palestinians across the world have been spared personal loss,” he said. “And now burgeoning disease and starvation threaten to deepen the devastation, especially among children. This is unacceptable.”

Newsom added that he will “always defend your right to take part in the California tradition of peaceful protest — to publicly express your opposition to any war or government decision you oppose, including the war in Gaza.”

Officials from California chapters of the Council on American Islamic Relations and other groups have been pushing the governor for months — including at a meeting in December, where community leaders and organizers from around the state asked the governor to call for a permanent ceasefire.

“We’re pleased to share that after many months of advocacy by various groups, including a meeting CAIR-CA convened with the Governor and Muslim leaders, this afternoon, Governor Newsom joined the resounding global call for ceasefire,” said CAIR California CEO Hussam Ayloush.

After the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the militant group Hamas, in which 1,200 were killed and at least 200 taken hostage, Newsom added a stop in Israel on the way to a climate change tour of China. While in Israel, he met with government officials and visited the parents of a Californian being held hostage. Newsom did not go to Gaza due to security issues, and his pledge of medical and humanitarian aid for Palestinians wasn’t fulfilled until weeks after similar aid was delivered to Israel, also due to security issues.

During a week-long pause in November, Hamas freed more than 100 Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for Israel releasing about 240 Palestinian prisoners, according to Reuters. Israel’s response to the attack has killed more than 32,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, and displaced 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, according to Human Rights Watch.

In addition to addressing the conflict, Newsom said his administration is focused on battling Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate. Since Oct. 7, Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities around the U.S. have seen increases in incidents of harassment, bias and sometimes physical assault.

Last October, the governor authorized expanding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which mosques, churches and synagogues can use to bolster safety and security.

He looks back on it as a turning point: Years in juvenile detention and a young adulthood spent dealing drugs culminated in a “bar fight gone sideways.” Charged with attempted murder, he pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon, according to court records.

In the following years, he took anger management classes, earned a GED and worked as a dishwasher after a higher-paying maintenance job offer fell through when his background check turned up with a violent felony, he said. Then an electricians’ union gave him an apprenticeship without caring about his record. Now he works nights, has his kids back and recently bought a house with his wife.

The final step Nick wants to take is to clear his record, the 37-year-old said on a recent Saturday morning, standing in line inside a south Sacramento church with nearly 200 fellow Californians with felony convictions.

He was waiting for a notary to scan his fingerprints, which would generate a record of his California arrests and convictions for a nonprofit attorney to review. He said he’s stayed out of trouble since the assault, which would likely make him eligible under a recent law to ask a judge to dismiss the case and seal it from public view. His record blocks him from certain job sites, such as government construction projects, he said, so he hopes an expungement would open more professional doors.

“It’s to show my kids that my past is my past, and that’s where it’s going to stay,” said Nick, who wanted to be identified only by his first name to avoid jeopardizing job opportunities if the expungement is successful.

California has allowed expungements of misdemeanors and some lower-level felonies, but not crimes that would be serious enough to send the offender to prison.

That’s no longer the case: Under Senate Bill 731, which went into effect in mid-2023, Californians with most kinds of felony convictions, including violent crimes, can ask for their records to be cleared. Sex offenses are the primary exception. To be eligible, applicants must have fully served their sentences, including probation, and gone two years without being re-arrested.

Passed in 2022 mostly along party lines, the law came after years of efforts to reduce the burdens that a criminal record still places on Californians’ job and housing opportunities. It was among the broadest expungement laws in the nation, including about one million residents with felony convictions, said Californians for Safety and Justice, the advocacy group that sponsored the bill.

The law goes even further, directing the state Department of Justice to automatically seal from public view non-serious, nonviolent and non-sexual felony convictions when the defendant has completed their sentence and not been convicted of another crime in four years. That provision was supposed to begin last year, but lawmakers agreed to delay it until this July.

In the meantime, those hoping to get their convictions cleared are turning to the courts, just as the public and some Democratic leaders have taken a tougher stance on crime. Applicants have since last year filed a trickle of expungement requests with the help of legal aid attorneys, public defenders and nonprofits such as the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, which provides prison re-entry services and offered the free fingerprinting in Sacramento this month.

“They served their time, and they’ve done their own internal work and diligence to come out the other side,” Elizabeth Tüzer, the coalition’s expungement legal project manager, said of her clients. “It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a job, or be able to survive or have housing.”

For these requests, judges have the ultimate say, and can consider evidence of rehabilitation as well as any opposition from prosecutors.

It’s not clear how many of these felony expungements have been granted. The state Judicial Council isn’t specifically tracking it, and most of the superior courts in the state’s largest dozen counties could not immediately distinguish them from other cleared cases. Since mid-2023, there have been 26 felony expungements in Sacramento County, 72 in Kern County and 48 in Riverside County, according to court spokespersons.

The Anti-Recidivism Coalition has helped clients file nearly 200 requests statewide, Tüzer said, with about half granted so far.

The expungements, which state law calls “records relief,” don’t erase the cases entirely.

The records will still be kept by the state justice department, which will share them with other government agencies, police and prosecutors if an ex-offender is arrested again, or with the state Department of Education if the ex-offender applies for a school job. Under the law, expungements also don’t allow someone to own firearms again, or avoid disclosing a conviction if they run for public office or apply for a job with law enforcement.

But they do mean local courts are required to block cleared cases from public searches and from the background check companies commonly used by private-sector employers and landlords.

Saun Hough, a manager at Californians for Safety and Justice, said the benefits extend beyond those with a job application on the line. Old criminal records hinder Californians from fully participating in society in a variety of ways, he said, from chaperoning their children’s field trips to holding positions in a homeowners’ association.

“Peace of mind, that’s the biggest of all the new doors that are open,” he said.

For Alexis Pacheco, a friend of Nick’s in San Francisco who told him he may be eligible, expungement provided psychological relief.

Pacheco, 39, recently won a judge’s order to seal an old felony that she said stemmed from a fight with an ex-husband. The conviction hung over her head in subsequent child custody disputes, she said, and for years after her release from jail, she worked at a storage facility in a job a relative helped her get. Her career was stagnating, she said, but she was “scared to go for more, scared they’ll run a background check.”

She now works at a nonprofit and attends college, hoping to one day enroll in law school. To ask for her record to be sealed, she said an attorney directed her to write a letter detailing how she’s turned her life around. A San Mateo County judge granted an expungement in December, according to a court order she shared with CalMatters.

“If people don’t know your story you’re just this person on paper,” she said. “When I got the letter, I cried. It’s no longer, you’re just this person.”

When the automatic felony expungement begins in July, about 225,000 Californians will qualify, said Californians for Safety and Justice, with more becoming eligible in the future as more time passes after their convictions.

Automatic expungement eliminates the need for defendants with lower-level convictions to find an attorney, pay filing fees or go before a judge. Criminal justice reform proponents have pushed for these “clean slate” bills across the country. They’ve cited a 2020 Harvard Law Review study that found few eligible ex-offenders apply for expungement, and argued it’s fairer to instead grant relief to everyone who qualifies.

California began automatically sealing old misdemeanors in 2022, in response to a prior law. In the first six months, state records show the Department of Justice directed county courts to shield 11 million cases from public view, helping six million defendants. The agency called it the “the largest record relief carried out over such a short time period in U.S. history.”

“Automatic record relief is ultimately about equity,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement emailed by his office Wednesday. “Individuals who have served their debt to society deserve a second chance, and they should not have to hire an attorney to get that second chance.”

As a state Assemblymember in 2018, Bonta authored a law to automatically clear cannabis convictions. He also supported the automatic misdemeanor sealing law.

To carry it out, his department booted up a computer program that every month scans through every criminal record in the state to identify those that have become eligible to be expunged. Then it sends a list of the cases to be sealed each month to the county courts where the charges were brought. The department also does this for some arrest records.

Starting in July, that program will begin to flag newly eligible felony convictions.

Prosecutors and police associations have been vocally opposed, saying in 2022 that it would pose public safety risks.

Jonathan Raven, assistant CEO of the California District Attorneys Association, said prosecutors’ offices have complained they sometimes aren’t given information about automatically expunged misdemeanors when looking up someone’s record. He did not cite specific examples, but said district attorneys don’t always have the resources to double-check the list of automatically sealed cases each month to ensure those defendants are not facing current charges.

“It’s a challenge to have to go through the list and review cases after the fact,” he said.

A spokesperson said the justice department hasn’t received reports from law enforcement agencies unable to view expunged records.

Hough said administrative problems remain for defendants. Some aren’t getting notified their old cases were sealed, he said, while some cases identified by the state haven’t been fully sealed by county courts.

It’s also not yet clear what effect automatic expungement will have on ex-offenders’ employment rates.

Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at RAND Corp. who has studied the issue, is skeptical. He said while there’s no doubt qualified job applicants face discrimination for having prior convictions, requiring a judge’s approval for an expungement sends employers a “reliable signal” that someone has proven their rehabilitation.

He pointed to research conducted after some states passed “Ban the Box” laws blocking employers from asking applicants upfront whether they have criminal convictions, that showed businesses instead discriminated on the basis of race.

With default expungements, “employers will start to realize that there’s a lot of people in their pool with no records that actually have records,” Bushway said. “They could potentially start to discriminate on other grounds.”

The same studies also showed those laws increased the chances that applicants with records get called back for interviews. California has had such a law since 2018. And a recent tight labor market has made some employers more open to hiring ex-offenders.

Employers’ groups such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses have in recent years steered clear of debating expungements. Neither took a position on the new law before it was passed. The federation declined to comment for this story.

Ashley Hoffman, the chamber’s senior policy advocate, said businesses are more concerned about a 2021 California appellate court decision that limits the ways private background check companies can search court records. But some employers under state or federal regulations on who can be hired, including those in the financial and healthcare sectors, are concerned about increasing expungements, Hoffman said.

“We have concerns about some of the movement that is really trying to get to a world where background checks for employees don’t exist or can’t exist,” she said.

At the Sacramento expungement event, Tüzer fielded a series of “what if” questions from a crowd of hopeful potential applicants.

No, the law wouldn’t seal convictions in other states. Yes, it could help them get security clearances to visit family members in state prisons.

Some occupational licensing boards may still be able to see the convictions, Tüzer said, but she advised the crowd to request expungement anyway, reasoning it would look favorable on future applications.

She encouraged them to gather documents for a judge: their own letter outlining how they’ve changed since their crimes; supporting testimony from family, community members and employers; and evidence they’d worked, taken classes or earned degrees since going to prison.

The Anti-Recidivism Coalition said it hasn’t yet had an expungement request be denied, but they have taken anywhere from three months to more than a year to be granted. For violent convictions, judges usually require a hearing or take longer to make a decision, she said.

“I think there is a public hesitancy to see these types of crimes expunged,” Tüzer said. “I think there’s not a whole lot of understanding of what it truly takes for a person who was convicted of a life sentence to come out and reintegrate and how difficult that is.”

Prosecutors have opposed some petitions, but Tüzer said that’s been rare so far. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told CalMatters it doesn’t have a policy on when to oppose petitions, and doesn’t track how many its prosecutors have filed.

For cases where judges hesitate, the coalition returns to a second hearing with further evidence of rehabilitation. That’s what they did for Anthony R., who was granted a felony expungement by a Los Angeles County judge last week, according to a court order he shared with CalMatters.

Anthony, who asked to be identified by his first name to protect his future job prospects, said after coming home from prison in 2016 he struggled to find an apartment and could no longer land the computer programming jobs he used to work. Though he found jobs in homeless services or counseling other ex-offenders, the pay is much lower.

“Anything white collar, I wasn’t going to get,” he said.

After a judge was hesitant to grant an expungement earlier this year, he said he supplied more documentation of ways he’s tried to improve his life, including a coding course he had recently taken. He hopes to work in his former field one day.

Getting the case sealed, he said, made him feel like a different person.

“I feel like I’m a part of society again,” he said.

That all changed on April 14, 2022. Jack had been sentenced to 32 months in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. After successfully petitioning to be paroled into the community, she just had to complete about three months at a state-funded reentry facility in El Monte known as Walden House and she’d be free.

Jack told her mother she loved the facility and the hints of freedom it offered — trips to the store, access to her phone and the small job she had helping out. She hoped to be reunited with her family in Louisiana soon.

Instead, Jack would be dead within months. She was 37.

In granting her the freedom she sought, the court released Jack into a public parole system so full of holes that Jack’s death was almost preordained, a review of thousands of pages of medical records and court documents reveals.

Jack was battling serious mental illness and coming off nearly a decade and a half of institutionalization. A psychologist for the state hospital warned that she “remains a danger” and was “psychiatrically and behaviorally unstable.” The Board of Parole Hearings denied Jack’s request to be freed.

Yet, after she appealed, a San Bernardino court released her from the state hospital’s care, meaning she couldn’t enter its outpatient program for people with mental illness. Instead, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sent Jack into a home focused on substance abuse to serve her parole.

RELATED: Newsom approves housing homeless at San Bernardino County’s Patton State Hospital

Left by state policy to navigate the complex mental and physical health care system on her own, Jack failed at nearly every turn. So did California’s parole system – and the contractors the Corrections Department paid with taxpayer money to operate it.

The state hospital discharged Jack with just 30 days of medication, giving her a month’s time to find a primary care doctor and psychiatrist in a new community and get her long list of prescriptions refilled.

When Jack did find a primary care physician, the medical records do not show that the doctor wrote her a new prescription for diabetes medication. The records do show that  tests revealed Jack’s blood glucose level had been nearly three times the normal range. Even when she did have prescriptions filled for her blood pressure, medical logs show that no one at Walden House recorded giving Jack her medication for many days at a time.

RELATED: Patton State Hospital Museum chronicles 125-plus years of the facility’s history

And when she ended up in the emergency room again and again, doctors sometimes attributed her physical complaints to mental illness and “drug-seeking behavior,” medical records show. By her last visit, she’d lost nearly 50 pounds in three months. When the hospital discharged her, records say she had no history of diabetes.

She died just 14 hours later. The cause: complications from Type 2 diabetes, according to the autopsy.

Sharon Jack, Fredreaka’s mother, received detailed updates from state hospital workers about Fredreaka’s mental health. But the autopsy report was the first she had heard of her daughter having diabetes, she said.

“I have never expressed to nobody how much this hurts,” Sharon said through tears. “I thought my baby was coming home to me. They took that opportunity away from me.”

As California has retooled the prison system to emphasize rehabilitation, it has invested more than $650 million in community-based reentry homes and facilities through a public program called Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming. The program supports about 8,500 parolees a year.

To run the program, the Corrections Department relies on private companies and nonprofits, but a CalMatters investigation found that the program has grown with little oversight from the department.

The department agreed to pay the Amity Foundation roughly $121 million over five years to oversee and review reentry homes in Los Angeles County, including HealthRight 360’s Walden House, located just east of downtown Los Angeles in El Monte. However, state records show Amity didn’t review the facility in 2021 or 2022 – the year Jack died, even though its state contract required annual site visits and reports.

Taxpayers paid about $5,200 a month per parolee for Walden House to offer a mix of housing, food, substance use disorder treatment, therapy and various other activities.

Three years before Jack’s death, during an unannounced visit, a state inspector from the Department of Health Care Services, which licenses treatment centers such as Walden House, found the facility to be deficient in several areas — including ensuring residents’ medication logs were accurate. HealthRight 360 told the state it fixed the problem and retrained its staff, and the facility was given a clean bill of health by the state.

From 2020 to 2022, more than a third of the 85 medical emergency calls from the facility were related to someone experiencing blood sugar complications, according to emergency service call records from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Neither the corrections department nor HealthRight 360 responded to questions about the calls.

HealthRight 360 closed Walden House in El Monte in 2023 because of a lack of demand, according to the corrections department, consolidating its operations with another location in Pomona. The company wouldn’t agree to an interview about Jack’s time at the facility.

HealthRight 360’s president and chief executive officer, Vitka Eisen, said in an email that the facility was licensed to provide residential treatment and detox. “All medical care, including primary care, and the prescribing of any medication would have been done via referral with a local community health center,” Eisen said.

The Amity Foundation declined an interview. “The Amity Foundation community is deeply, deeply saddened by the passing of Fredreaka Jack after being discharged from Greater El Monte Hospital,” wrote Chief Operating Officer Carmen Jacinto in a statement. “Our care team relies upon the professional medical expertise of hospitals who determine when a community member can be safely discharged into our care.”

In a statement, Corrections Department spokesperson Terri Hardy said parolees are responsible for their own health care once they enter the parole program.

“Individuals on parole are part of the community and access medical care as every other community member. CDCR does not oversee medical care for individuals on parole, nor does it monitor medication adherence for individuals housed in residential treatment programs as part of the Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming (STOP) contracts,” Hardy wrote in response to CalMatters’ questions. “Neither CDCR nor STOP providers force an individual to disclose medical information, utilize services, or take medications.

“Providers may assist and/or encourage an individual to seek medical and mental health treatment; however, each participant is ultimately responsible for their own medical care.”

No institution said it had investigated Jack’s case or its policies or practices.

In a final stroke of indignity, Jack was cremated against her wishes since her family couldn’t afford to bury her. Her mother has been unable to make the trip from Louisiana to California to claim her ashes. If she doesn’t do so by Nov. 2025, Fredreaka Jack will be buried among other unclaimed people who died in Los Angeles County.

How Fredreaka Jack ended up in prison

A daughter of Metairie, La., Fredreaka Jack had beaten the odds.

She’d grown up where addiction was rampant and spent time in the foster care system. Still, Jack got her GED and tested into Loyola University New Orleans, her family said. Her aunt, Penny Jack, called her a “gifted” child.

Jack lived on campus and completed one semester of college before she withdrew in 2005. The once vibrant dancer and pianist became overwhelmed with voices in her head, giving way to delusions and behavior that tormented her family.

Jack’s great-uncle Derrek Bush, who took her in after she left Loyola, said he hung cans on the door with fishing string so he’d be alerted when she got home. “You had to watch yourself with her,” Bush said. “She was really sick.” He said Jack talked to caterpillars and had a history of vandalizing things while she lived on campus. He was afraid to live with her.

“I just started not coming home too much,” Bush said. Then one day, she was gone. “We went in the French Quarter. We couldn’t find her, and after that everything went dead.”

She made it to New York City. By 2007, she was in California.

Like so many people with severe mental health issues, Jack’s psychoses soon pushed her down California’s mental-health-to-criminal-justice pipeline.

Her laundry list of charges included disturbing the peace, burglary, resisting arrest and assault, among other crimes she frequently committed in San Diego and Los Angeles.

The court and the corrections department often deemed Jack too mentally ill to face trial or be paroled into the community. She went to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino for the first time in 2008. Patton provides mental health care to people admitted by a criminal or civil court order, current prisoners and others. State hospitals can hold people like Jack indefinitely if the Board of Parole Hearings deems them “offenders with mental disorders” and the state court finds that the person’s mental health doesn’t improve by the end of their sentence.

Nearly 10 years after Jack left Louisiana, her family got its first clue into her whereabouts. A Google search of her name turned up a lawsuit filed by Patton State Hospital to force Jack to take her psychotropic medication.

Penny tried calling the hospital to connect with her long-estranged niece. “They said ‘we can’t give you that information,’” Penny said.

State hospital officials told CalMatters that patient privacy laws prohibit them from confirming or denying whether someone is or ever was in a state mental hospital.

It was another dead end for her family.

“I think they should have looked for us,” Penny said. “If a person is that mental, something is wrong and they have family. No one looked at all.”

How the family finally found her

After six years, Jack was released from Patton in 2018.

Within months, she was in legal trouble again for assault, burglary and intimidating business operators or customers. She took a plea deal. And this time, she was sentenced to nearly three years in prison.

Even then, she was insisting on California transferring her to New Orleans, according to her medical records. “I was born there. My family is there. They have to let me go back,” Jack said, according to the prison therapist’s notes.

After she served her time in the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, officials transferred her back to Patton, making psychiatric treatment a condition of her parole.

This time, her sister found her — again  — in the state hospital. Her mother called.

Sharon Jack wasn’t sure that the person on the other line, who called herself Cleopatra, was her eldest daughter. It took weeks of conversations before Sharon was convinced that she was talking to her “baby.”

The two apologized for their estranged relationship, Sharon Jack said, and picked up where they’d left off after nearly 15 years of separation.

“We talked every day,” she said. “Early in the morning, I would make them go get her up!”

Their conversations, Sharon Jack said, oscillated between convincing her daughter to take her psychotropic medication, their plans to see each other and Fredreaka Jack’s frequent requests for money to purchase things from the commissary.

After all those years, Sharon Jack wanted to spoil her daughter. So she provided a credit card for Fredreaka’s ‘90s R&B CDs and her junk food cravings, even if it meant missing rent, she said. Little did she know, her daughter was taking Metformin to help regulate her blood sugar and was under doctor’s orders to diet and lose weight, as her medical records show.

A state hospital spokesperson told CalMatters that the hospital’s nutrition services department does not have “any control over patient’s commissary purchases” and that the hospital only reviews canteen orders “for appropriateness” when there’s a court order restricting a patient’s diet.

When Jack was in state prison, tests rendered her blood sugar within normal range, according to her medical records and the Centers for Disease Control’s scale for diabetes. Once she moved to Patton State Hospital, her blood-sugar levels began to increase, according to her medical records. Jack’s recent state hospital records first mention her high blood sugar on July 12, 2021. Soon after, she began taking Metformin to combat pre-diabetes, her medical records show.

The Board of Parole Hearings ordered her to receive psychiatric treatment at Patton. However, she made her own choices about her physical health care, including what she ate.

During her time at Patton State Hospital, Jack took her psychotropic medications religiously because it was required as a condition of her parole. But her medical records show she sometimes refused blood tests, ignored dieting advice and often refused to wear a breathing machine when she slept, against nurses’ advice.

“I don’t want it. It makes me wheeze,” Jack once told her nurse.

Life in Walden House

After nearly two years in custody and over a year inside Patton, Jack petitioned the court in 2022 to serve her parole in the community instead, according to the corrections department. Months prior, a psychologist for Patton noted that Jack was “psychiatrically and behaviorally unstable” and “remains a danger beyond that which can be safely and effectively monitored in a less restrictive setting,” according to her medical records. The psychologist determined that she was not ready to be released. The state’s Board of Parole Hearings recommended against her release on Jan. 31, 2022, according to the corrections department.

But Jack appealed, and a court granted her wishes. She was paroled into the STOP program and sent to Walden House, a 72-bed facility for women parolees and their children in El Monte.

About a month before her release, the corrections department changed its medication policy, giving people leaving prisons a 60-day supply. The policy change came after attorneys in a long-running prisoner-rights lawsuit known as Armstrong argued that parolees were often at risk of running out of medications because of “delays with setting up Medi-Cal” and the “lack of assistance from parole agents in navigating access to health care.”

But Jack slipped through the cracks. That new policy did not apply to prison parolees who were released from the state hospital.

“This does seem like a gap in the system,” said attorney Ben Bien-Kahn, who represents plaintiffs in the Armstrong lawsuit. “Absent some slip-up in the policy, if she released directly from CDCR prison, she would have had double the medication.”

State hospital officials said the hospital doesn’t give newly released patients refills on prescriptions because the patient “will no longer be monitored by the hospital physician,” the spokesperson wrote. “Unmonitored prescription medication use can be dangerous or even fatal.”

Instead, Jack left Patton State Hospital with a 30-day supply of her medications even though her stay at the STOP program’s Walden House would be at least three months. In discharge summaries, the hospital noted Jack’s “grandiose delusions” and medical risks for “diabetes, cardiovascular, respiratory, and endocrine.”

At Walden House, STOP residents could leave the compound for up to six hours for shopping, medical appointments, looking for a job and more.

For medical treatment, Walden House referred residents to two hospitals and the Southern California Medical Center, according to records from the Department of Health Care Services.

However, medication logs frequently did not document that Walden House staff gave Jack her medication. In her first weeks there, for example, employees documented her taking only half of her Metformin, which is used to treat pre-diabetes, for 11 days.

By mid-June, she was at Southern California Medical Center, a non-profit community clinic in El Monte, complaining of knee pain and seeking to have her medications refilled and adjusted, according to her medical records from the clinic.

Jack wanted to know what medications “she should continue and what should be stopped,” according to the medical records. The doctor noted that she had not taken her blood pressure medicine “for weeks.”

Records say she was given two new prescriptions for her blood pressure medications and the doctors ordered several lab tests for her, which revealed her glucose level was 395. The normal range: 60-140, according to the blood test included in Jack’s medical records.

SoCal Medical’s chief medical officer and founder, Dr. Mohammad Rasekhi, said it’s the company’s policy to call patients after receiving their test results. Jack’s records from SoCal Medical, where the Walden House referred its clients for medical care, do not mention that anyone contacted her about the results. The records say the clinic filled some of her prescriptions, but do not indicate that she got a new prescription for Metformin or any other medication to treat diabetes.

Rasekhi said he depends on places like Walden House to contact the clinic, which caters to low-income patients, about follow-up visits and medication changes.

“We did our best,” Rasekhi said.

In July, Walden House employees didn’t record giving her the new blood pressure medications for 10 days.

The records do not indicate that staff gave Jack 11 morning doses of Haloperidol, an antipsychotic that she was supposed to take twice a day. No one signed the log for giving Jack her morning dosage on the day she died.

Neither the Amity Foundation, HealthRight 360, nor the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation responded to CalMatters’ questions about why Jack’s medication logs were missing signatures.

Jack also frequently ended up at the Greater El Monte Hospital’s emergency room, where Walden House sent its clients, complaining about vaginitis – a potential symptom of diabetes – and various types of pain and discomfort. In July, she went to the emergency room four times in 11 days and dropped nine pounds in 10 days.

On her first of five ER visits, three days after tests at SoCal Medical revealed Jack’s high blood sugar, doctors at the emergency room also found a high amount of glucose in her urine, said Victor Lange, the hospital’s risk management director. Medical experts told CalMatters the high glucose could be a sign that someone has diabetes.

Jacks’ emergency room records don’t indicate that anyone drew her blood during her many visits to the emergency room. Lange said it’s not standard care to draw blood on every patient who visits the emergency room.

“If blood pressure is normal, blood oxygen, and all of these factors are aligning properly, the doctor doesn’t need to order a blood draw,” he said. However, on Jun. 18, 2022, Jack was given a urine test, which revealed that she had a high amount of glucose in her urine, Lange said. “We recommended that she see a primary care physician.”

Jack went back to SoCal Medical on July 1, 2022, as an “er follow up,” according to her medical records. The clinic counseled Jack on managing her diet and referred her to a gynecologist. The medical records do not indicate if anyone checked her blood sugar again or gave her a new prescription for medication to treat diabetes.

By July 11, 2022, she was back in the emergency room, complaining of vaginal pain and itching. The emergency room doctor wrote that his clinical impression was that Jack had vaginitis, drug-seeking behavior and a history of substance abuse, medical records show.

By July, she’d lost 48 pounds, a red flag for diabetes symptoms, according to several doctors CalMatters spoke with for this story.

Around July 20, she was complaining to her mother, Sharon, of left arm spasms, which she attributed to a side effect of her new psychiatric medication. At Sharon’s urging, Jack went back to the hospital.

The emergency room doctor referred Jack back to her psychiatrist.

“Patient did not appear to be a reliable historian and has delusional speech,” the medical records state.

“She has a history of schizoaffective disorder, and this is her 4th visit to this emergency room this month,” the emergency room physician said in the hospital’s records.

The doctor’s notes say that Jack didn’t have a history of diabetes. The records also do not indicate that the hospital checked her blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, weight or temperature.

Emergency room records stated that there were “no vital signs available.”

Fourteen hours later, she was dead, according to the autopsy report.

On April 11, 2023, a SoCal Medical physician’s assistant reached out to Jack to schedule a follow up appointment for her hypertension, Rasekhi said.

She had been dead for almost nine months.

A mother searches for answers

As soon as Sharon Jack found out the cause from the autopsy report — diabetes complications — she blamed herself for giving Jack free rein at the commissary. And she blamed the state hospital for never telling her about Jack’s diabetes.

Sharon Jack realized she had been buying her daughter “all kinds of stuff a diabetic is not supposed to have.”

“I feel robbed,” she said. “It make me feel like I was killing my baby.”

Within weeks of Jack’s death, her sister, Frenada Jack, created a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for retrieving Fredreaka Jack’s body from the state and “put her to rest peacefully.”  “She would be so joyful being that she asked … not to be cremated and any donations will be fine and sincerely appreciated,” Frenada wrote.

The $10,000 campaign didn’t raise any money, and Jack was indeed cremated.

On a humid Louisiana afternoon in April 2023, nine months after Fredreaka Jack’s death, Sharon Jack was still searching for answers about what happened to her daughter. Inside her Metairie apartment, she rocked back and forth, sobbing and sweating as she stared at the small altar of mementos she created in honor of her daughter.

Sharon Jack pulled out stacks of papers and dozens of cards she’d received from people who lived in the facility with her daughter. “Rest in Peace you were like sunshine,” read one.

Six months after Jack’s death, Sharon’s only living daughter, Frenada, passed away too. Sharon created another altar, alongside Fredreaka’s.

“I’m so lonely. I gotta make it to heaven to see my two daughters again,” said Sharon through tears.

Some of the state’s most powerful legislators want Big Landlord out of California’s single family neighborhoods.

The Legislature will consider at least three bills this year to keep so-called institutional investors from gobbling up too many of the state’s widely coveted single-family homes.

Apartment buildings have long been an asset of interest for big investment companies, but the Big Money-owned single family rental is a 21st Century invention. During the Great Recession new companies began cobbling together rental empires out of the nation’s glut of foreclosed single-family homes.

Defenders of the business model applaud the role it played in propping up local housing markets and quickly filling homes that would have otherwise sat vacant and derelict. Critics liken these investors to financial vultures depriving would-be homeowners of a shot at the American Dream while hoarding the profits of the last decade’s run-up in national home prices and rents.

That debate ratcheted up again during the pandemic when millions of white collar renters, suddenly freed from the office, sought out more space further from the country’s urban cores. Today’s high interest rates have slowed that boom, but most analysts predict that the industry is here to stay, absent new restrictions.

California may be the first to enact some.

“Who are we fighting for? Are we fighting for the corporate interests?” San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward, chair of the Assembly’s housing committee and author of one of the three bills, said on the Assembly floor last month. “Or are we fighting for Californians, for their dream of homeownership?”

For all the debate, open questions about the industry’s size and its effect on the state’s affordability crisis abound. That’s in part because publicly available data about rental properties is scarce — something some state lawmakers have tried, but failed, to remedy in the past.

As lawmakers gear up to take on corporate landlords, here are seven things to know:

1. What would these bills actually do?

• Assembly Bill 2584, written by Assemblymember Alex Lee, a Milpitas Democrat, would ban an institutional investor from buying or investing in additional single family home properties and then renting them out.
• Senate Bill 1212, by Senate Housing Committee Chair Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat, would go a step further. It would ban institutional investors from “purchasing, acquiring, or leasing” a single-family home or duplex for any reason.
• Assembly Bill 1333, authored by Ward, would ban developers from selling homes in bulk to big investors. This is aimed at increasingly popular “build-to-rent” projects, in which developers build single-family subdivisions with the specific aim of selling them to single-family rental companies. This bill is backed by the state’s association of REALTORs, who have an interest in banning bundled sales that cut their members out of the buying and selling process.

2. What are “institutional investors” anyway?

It depends on whom you ask. Even the three bills described above use different definitions.

Lee’s bill uses the size of a company’s investment portfolio as the cut-off, deeming any “business entity” with at least 1,000 single family homes on its books as “institutional.” That would apply to just four companies who own a total of 17,300 homes, according to estimates compiled by the California Research Bureau, which conducts research at the request of state lawmakers.

Skinner’s proposed ban would apply to a broader category of investor: Any managed fund, including private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts , which are publicly traded companies that invest in real estate.

Ward’s bill uses Lee’s 1,000-property cut off, but also specifically calls out those trusts in his bill language.

3. Do corporate landlords own a lot of homes?

Businesses that own at least 1,000 single family homes own roughly 446,000 properties nationwide, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute, though the report’s authors concede that the “data and definitions are somewhat fuzzy.”

Nearly half a million homes is a big number on its face. It’s more than the total number of homes in San Francisco.

But compared to the housing stock as a whole, it’s less than half a percent. Even looking at just single-family rentals, the vast majority of which are owned by small and medium-sized landlords, the Urban Institute’s “large institutional” share makes up around 3%.

“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market,” said Daryl Fairweather, economist with the real estate listing website RedFin. “People want to blame someone for high home prices, and it’s easy to blame investors just because they’re, like, an opaque group of people…Really, the problem is just the lack of supply of housing.”

The industry’s critics counter that nationwide figures mask clustering in particular regions — and within regions, in particular cities, or even neighborhoods. They also say that the industry is growing.

Earlier this month, Redfin estimated that roughly 13% of all the homes sold in the final quarter of last year were single-family homes bought by investors.

That’s a sizable chunk, but again, the devil is in the definition.

Redfin labeled an investor as any buyer with one of a number of tell-tale corporate signifiers in its name, such as “LLC” or “trust.” That would likely include a lot of mom and pop landlords, who have opted to put their properties into corporate structures to shield themselves from legal liability.

4. What about in California?

Lists of top single-family rental markets vary, but Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida regularly come out on top. California does not appear to be a destination of choice for the nation’s largest investors. Less than 2% of single-family homes are owned by investors with 10 properties or more, statewide, according to the California Research Bureau.

What institutional investor-friendly markets have in common: Rapidly growing populations and relatively low real estate prices compared to rents.

“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.

When big investors do show up in California it’s disproportionately in the state’s quickly growing, still relatively affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.

Fresno is a bit of an unusual case, in that the largest single owner there, JD Home Rentals, is a local outfit whose portfolio of some 2,000 homes are clustered in that region.

Statewide, the largest single corporate owner is also the country’s biggest. Invitation Homes kicked off the corporate single-family rental rental trend when it started buying up distressed houses, rehabbing them and putting them on the rental market in 2012. Originally funded by the private equity giant Blackstone, the company has since become its own publicly traded company.  The company owns 84,567 homes, of which 11,862 are in California, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

5. Do corporate landlords cause rents to go up?

There are plenty of anecdotes of big investors sweeping into a neighborhood, only for rent hikes to follow. Do big investors cause rents to rise or do rising rents attract big landlords? When researchers have tried to disentangle those two trends, they’ve produced mixed results.

One national overview found that rising rents in a city reliably preceded an increase in single-family investor activity three months later. But they didn’t find that the reverse was true, implying that investors chase after rising rents, but don’t cause them.

But another study found that single-family areas with higher concentrations of corporate ownership did, in fact, see modestly higher rents than comparable neighborhoods. These companies were able to exploit their relative control over a neighborhood’s housing stock to extract higher than fair-market rent from tenants, the researchers found. But the researchers also found a second explanation behind the rental run-up: By beefing up security across a slew of properties in the same area, they were able to lower crime rates and “enhance neighborhood quality.”

Many larger landlords also use rent-setting algorithms designed to squeeze the highest rent possible from new tenants. Defenders of the industry say those programs simply allow landlords to find an area’s market rent, though renters,  prosecutors and federal regulators have argued that, at least in the apartment rental industry, it has amounted to illegal price-fixing.

6. Do big buyers take homeownership opportunities away from first-time buyers?

Every house that’s bought by a major investor and converted into a rental is one fewer opportunity for a would-be first-time buyer.

That zero-sum trade off is particularly acute in places where few new homes are being built.

A study out of Atlanta found that an influx of institutional investment in a neighborhood predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. A study in the Netherlands found that when cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, the number of first-time buyers shot up.

Defenders of the industry offer a counterpoint: So what?

In places where home prices are out of reach for the average person, putting more single-family houses on the rental market gives more people the opportunity to enjoy some of the trappings of the American Dream — a yard, a garage, maybe a better school district — even if they can’t afford a down payment.

The fact that major investors specialize in buying up homes in need of repair means they are often “competing for separate types of products” than first-time buyers anyway, said Goodman.

There’s also some evidence to suggest that allowing more rentals in single-family neighborhoods, no matter who the landlord is, makes those neighborhoods more economically and racially diverse. A study of the Dutch corporate landlord ban found a decline in the number of rentals, an overall rise in rents and an influx of older, richer and whiter residents in the neighborhoods in which those restrictions went into effect.

It’s unclear how relevant that all is in California.

“We sell 99% of our homes to individuals,” said Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, a trade group representing the state’s home builders.

For most first-time homebuyers in California, “it’s not like you are competing with a big institutional player, other than a rich, single person from the Bay Area.”

7. Are corporate landlords bad landlords?

It depends on what you mean by “bad.”

Large institutional landlords appear more likely to run by-the-book, standardized operations.

There are upsides to the corporate touch: Large corporations are more likely to operate 24/7 property management hotlines and have plumbers and electricians on retainer. Studies have also found that when filling a vacant unit, corporate landlords are more likely to use impersonal tenant screening systems, which are free of explicit (if not necessarily implicit) racial bias.

The downside: Corporate landlords can be ruthlessly efficient, with an emphasis on “ruthless.” One study, for example, found that they are significantly more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices as soon as they are legally allowed to.

And even companies with in-house legal teams might not always follow the law. In January, Invitation Homes paid $3.7 million in fines and restitution for hiking the rent on nearly 2,000 tenants in excess of what state law allows. In 2021, JD Home Rentals settled a class action lawsuit over habitability complaints.

“Relationships are much more formal when it’s Invitation Homes as opposed to the guy next door and there are pros and cons to that,” said Goodman, the Urban Institute economist. As an example, she noted that her adult daughter had a landlord who used to accept pizza as amends for a tardy rent check.

“You can’t send Invitation Homes a pizza,” she said.

The statute allows people between the ages of 18 and 25 convicted of certain crimes to seek parole at their 15th, 20th and 25th years of incarceration, except for people sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after the age of 18.

That was the case for Tony Hardin of Los Angeles, who was 25 when he robbed and killed an elderly neighbor 35 years ago.

A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and agreed with prosecutors that the crime was a “special circumstance” — in this case, the murder was committed during a robbery. The jury declined a death penalty verdict and sentenced Hardin to life without parole.

In 2013, the Legislature passed a bill that required parole hearings for people convicted as juveniles by their 25th year of incarceration, but made an exception for those sentenced to life without parole. In 2017, the Legislature expanded that law to include everyone convicted of an offense committed when they were 25 or younger, but once again left in the exception for people in prison for life without parole.

Hardin appealed his conviction in 2021, arguing that barring inmates like him from parole violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He argued that parole would be possible for a 17-year-old who committed a special circumstance murder, or someone his age who was convicted of the first-degree murder without a special-circumstance finding.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge rebuffed his appeal, but in 2022, Hardin found a sympathetic ear with a three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeals’ Second Appellate District, which ruled that he should be eligible for an evidentiary hearing in which he could introduce mitigating evidence related to his age at the time of the crime.

“​​The disparate treatment of offenders like Hardin cannot stand,” the appeals court ruled.

The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling, upheld that law and denied Hardin’s challenge in a 6-1 ruling. The high court ruled that the Legislature’s intent should be followed.

“Under California law, special circumstance murder is a uniquely serious offense, punishable only by death or life without possibility of parole,” Associate Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger wrote in the ruling.

“When it was considering whether to expand the youth offender parole system to include not only juvenile offenders but also certain young adults, the Legislature could rationally balance the seriousness of the offender’s crimes against the capacity of all young adults for growth, and determine that young adults who have committed certain very serious crimes should remain ineligible for release from prison.”

In a dissent, Associate Supreme Court Justice Kelli Evans wrote that excluding people like Hardin, who is Black, from parole hearings is indeed a violation of the equal protection clause.

“The (life without parole) exclusion offends the Legislature’s only express and articulated purpose of the youth offender parole eligibility scheme and lacks rationality,” Evans wrote. “The exclusion bears the taint of racial prejudice and perpetuates extreme racial disparities plaguing our juvenile and criminal justice systems.  Thus, I conclude it fails any mode of rational basis review.”

An end to billions of dollars in federal Covid relief funds, declining enrollment, staff raises, hiring binges and stagnant state funding should combine over the next few months to create steep budget shortfalls, with low-income districts affected the most.

“The fiscal cliff is going to vary,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “The districts that got the most Covid relief dollars, those that have the most low-income students, are going to face the biggest losses.”

In his budget proposal released in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom largely spared schools, keeping intact popular initiatives like transitional kindergarten, universal school meals, community schools and after-school programs. He proposed dipping into reserves and delaying some expenses to make up a projected multi-billion-dollar shortfall.

But the exact numbers are shifting. The Legislative Analyst’s Office predicted that the shortfall may be much higher than Newsom calculated and cuts will be unavoidable. Newsom will release a revised budget in May, and the Legislature has until June 15 to pass a final budget.

Meanwhile, federal Covid relief funding for schools will end in September. In a series of grants known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, the federal government gave California schools $23.4 billion to pay for everything from air purifiers to after-school tutoring.

That funding was distributed based on the number of low-income students districts have. Districts with lots of low-income students got more money, which means they’ll lose the most when the funding ends.

In the beginning of the pandemic, schools tended to spend the money on one-time expenses, like tablets and Wi-Fi hotspots for students attending school remotely. But as schools reopened, they started spending money on ongoing programs intended to help students catch up academically and recover from the mental health hardships of remote learning. That could include tutors, longer school days or summer and after-school programs.

San Bernardino City Unified used $8 million of its $230 million in Covid relief funds to beef up its after-school program. Thanks to the extra funding, the district has been able to offer free after-school activities, tutoring, transportation and mental health support at every school.

Keeping the ‘sparkle in kids’ eyes’

Mia Cooper, a parent with three children in San Bernardino City Unified, said her childrens’ after-school program has been a life-saver. In fact, it’s the main reason they want to go to school, she said.

They not only benefit from tutoring, but they get to enjoy ballet and acting lessons, field trips to science museums and Disneyland, robotics classes, performances by folklórico dance troupes and other fun activities.

During the pandemic, one of Cooper’s daughters was withdrawn and depressed, but the after-school program helped her reconnect with friends and fall in love with school again. Keeping the program intact should be a priority, Cooper said.

“The kids were exposed to so many different activities and cultural things,”  she said. “If a program is working for kids and we’re seeing good outcomes, I think it’s something we need to keep. … We shouldn’t lose that sparkle in kids’ eyes.”

A budget reckoning for some districts

But some district’s use of Covid relief funds could worsen their budget prospects, Roza said. Districts that invested one-time funds in ongoing expenses, such as new staff, raises and bonuses, might be headed for a reckoning. Nationwide, school staff increased 2% since the pandemic while enrollment decreased 2%, according to Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab.

Salaries for existing teachers have risen, too. Districts in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and Los Angeles – all of which have declining enrollment – agreed to hefty teacher raises and bonuses in the past year.

Still, the fiscal outlook is not as dire as it was during the 2008 recession, said Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. School funding generally in California has risen dramatically since then, lifting California from the bottom half of states in school funding to above the national average. In addition, the state’s shift to the Local Control Funding Formula a decade ago has provided more money for students with higher needs, although inequities persist.

But that doesn’t mean these cuts won’t hurt, Lafortune said, especially for students who were most affected by the pandemic. Low-income, Black and Latino students disproportionately bore the brunt of school closures, research has shown, because they were more likely to suffer economically from the pandemic, less likely to have adequate technology at home, and less likely to have a parent available to help them with distance learning.

“It’s not like the Great Recession, but I think the challenges are greater now,” Lafortune said. “A lot of the academic progress we made was erased by the pandemic.”

Roza worries that arguments over potential cuts in the next year will eclipse concern over learning loss. Potential school closures and teacher layoffs will inevitably elicit loud protests, but school boards should stay focused on services that directly help students, such as math tutoring and literacy, she said.

“Some districts will be focusing on staff retention instead of kids’ needs,” Roza said.

These decisions may be so divisive that Roza predicts a high rate of turnover among school administrators and board members unwilling to make unpopular decisions. She also expects to see some districts refuse to make sufficient cuts and risk insolvency or state takeover.

Planning pays off in Fresno

Fresno Unified is among the districts facing a double whammy of declining enrollment and a large loss of relief funds. The 70,000-student district received more than $787 million in state and federal relief money, one of the largest allotments in California.

But the district was careful to build reserves, rely on state grants when possible and not overly invest in ongoing staff salaries. Instead, it used most of its money to train teachers in math and literacy, extend the school day and provide a high-quality summer program. It also brought in social workers, restorative justice counselors, attendance specialists and other staff to boost students’ mental health.

The investments have apparently paid off. The number of students meeting California’s math benchmark rose almost 3 percentage points last year, even as the state average remained unchanged. And chronic absenteeism fell significantly, from 51% in 2022 to 35% last year.

Still, the district expects to make some cuts, probably affecting the district office but not schools directly — at least at first, said the district’s chief financial officer, Patrick Jensen.

“It’s like we’re in a boat and we can see a storm coming,” Jensen said. “We’re not going to be dashed against the rocks but we still need to find a safe harbor.”.

San Bernardino City Unified, among California’s lowest-income districts, also received a high  relief funding payout: $230 million for 46,000 students. But the district isn’t anticipating a financial disaster once the funding expires. It plans to shift some of its state block grant money to pay for programs funded with relief money, where necessary, and has been conservative with planning. It’s also closely monitoring the state budget and economic outlook, said Associate Superintendent Terry Comnick.

But there’s still likely to be some cuts, and the district will have to look closely at what programs have been effective and which didn’t live up to expectations. In addition to the after-school program, a “resident guest teacher” program had positive results, Comnick said. The district hired substitute teachers to work one-on-one or in small groups with students who were the furthest behind. The $4.5 million program, which was at every school, resulted in higher test scores among the highest-needs students.

So far, it looks like the district will be able to keep both programs, at least for the next few years, Comnick said.

“People call it a (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) cliff because the money just ends,” Comnick said. “But for us it will hopefully be a gentle slope.”

As one volunteer said, it feels back to “zero” in San Diego after a migrant reception center ran out of money, leading federal Border Patrol officers to begin dropping off hundreds of people at a trolley station over the weekend.

The so-called “street releases” in San Diego have touched off disagreements among federal, state and local officials about how to assist the new arrivals and who should pay for it. They also reflect a broader challenge President Joe Biden faces trying to manage unprecedented numbers of people arriving at the US-Mexico border.

Also see: Biden, Trump to make dueling trips to the Mexico border

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 2.5 million encounters with migrants along the southwest border from October 2022 through September 2023. More than 80% of those encounters occurred between official ports of entry — in remote desert areas or mountains in southeastern San Diego and elsewhere in California, Arizona and Texas.

In the past six months nearly 100,000 migrants have arrived in the San Diego region, county officials said, though most have moved on to other U.S. cities.

Many of the migrants who arrived over the weekend had been in Border Patrol custody but were released on what the federal government calls “humanitarian parole.” Some were disoriented and unclear about where they were, as they got off buses Saturday and Sunday at the Iris Street trolley station in San Diego. Some weren’t sure if they were still being detained.

They had no place to charge their cell phones, use bathrooms, eat a meal, or arrange travel to other parts of the United States. Many had received notices to appear in immigration courts in  other cities, some they had never heard of and couldn’t pronounce. Others had been separated from family members during the detention process and didn’t know what to do next.

“Where am I?” asked Juan Carlos Ortiz, a 28-year-old from Nicaragua, as he rummaged through his backpack for shoelaces that had been removed from his shoes while in custody. With a shoelace halfway through one shoe, he raced with his group to catch the next trolley heading for the San Diego International airport.

Another man who spoke Arabic called a friend in Egypt and pressed his phone into a reporter’s hand: “Is my friend still in custody?” asked the man on the phone, half a world away.

Border Patrol officials said they had no choice but to release the migrants on city streets, because its holding facilities were overcrowded and understaffed. The agency said it was working with local and federal partners to find a solution to the humanitarian challenges at the southern border.

The welcome center, which opened in October, closed Thursday night because of a lack of funds. Previously it bused people from a federal detention center to a former elementary school in San Diego, where migrants were given basic services, connected with loved ones through translators, and allowed to rest and arrange for the next leg of their journey.

Since October San Diego County has awarded $6 million to SBCS, the nonprofit formerly known as South Bay Community Services, which ran the center. The funds came from what’s left of $650 million the federal government sent San Diego County for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The nonprofit provided transportation, wifi, phone-charging stations, food, travel advice and other services. The group aimed to keep the center open through March, but Thursday was its last day because its “finite resources have been stretched to the limit” amid a significant increase in migrant arrivals, CEO Kathie Lembo said last week.

County officials said the center served 700 to 900 people a day last week. In total it provided services to more than 81,000 migrants since October, Lembo said.

“This temporary support was vital and prevented tens of thousands of individuals from being stranded in San Diego without the support needed to continue their journey, as 99.5% of the migrants we served traveled on to destinations outside of the county,” Lembo said in a statement.

What newly arrived migrants will do now that the center is closed is unclear.

Migrants who arrived last week came from China, Ecuador, Mexico, Egypt, Nicaragua, Guinea and Georgia.

“If you speak Spanish, please walk down the sidewalk this way,” volunteers shouted as group after group of migrants left the federal buses. “English, over here!” waved another volunteer.

Volunteers from nearly a dozen local and state nonprofits spread out from the Iris trolley station to the San Diego airport, trying to help direct people on the next leg of their trip.

“I’m going to show you a diagram of the trolley’s route. You guys are here at Iris,” volunteer Robert Vivar explained to a group of Spanish-speakers, showing them a map. “Where you’re going to go is where the star is — at the stop called Old Town. That’s where you’re going to get down.”

Volunteers used translation apps on cell phones to try to communicate with those speaking languages other than English, Spanish or French.

It was the same routine volunteers followed last fall before the migrant welcome center opened.

“It feels like we’re starting from zero again,” said volunteer Patricia Mondragon, who stressed the need for continued government assistance. Mondragon said local or state governments could provide bathrooms, cell charging stations and wifi to help disoriented migrants figure out where they are and where they’re going next.

“We really feel strongly there is a continuous role here for a whole-of-government approach, so we can be the welcoming region that we are known to be. We need to help people in a dignified manner,” Mondragon said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California cannot continue providing the same level of humanitarian services along the border it has in the past, not while facing tens of billions in projected budget deficits.

In the fiscal year that ended in June, the state allocated $150 million for sheltering services for migrants. That money is “fully committed” for the year, a spokesman said.

But Monday Daniel Lopez, the deputy communications director for Newsom’s office, said  California will continue “serving as a model of partnership for a safe and humane border.

“The state remains committed to supporting counties as they develop contingency plans to provide sheltering and other essential services for migrants,” he said.

California funds nonprofit organizations that temporarily house migrants who are separated from family members during the detention process. Lissette Gabelanez, 19 from Ecuador, was in that situation Saturday afternoon as she waited for her mother, father and 4-year-old brother to be released from detention.

“Should I just go back to the detention center,” she asked a volunteer, who told her she was free to make her own decisions but they recommended she wait at the trolley station.

“I’m just very worried about my family,” she told CalMatters.

At the Old Town trolley station Saturday morning, migrant travelers could take a free shuttle to the airport. But by midday Saturday, airport officials stopped migrants from boarding the free shuttles unless they could show proof that their airline ticket had already been purchased.

A couple from Colombia said they could only purchase their tickets in cash and decided to take a taxi from Old Town to the airport. About a dozen people gathered around a T-mobile booth at the train depot to ask the attendant to charge their phones, as they tried connecting with loved ones to purchase airline tickets. “We’ve been slammed all day,” said the cashier.

A spokesperson for the San Diego airport said migrants should not be arriving at the airport without tickets, or more than eight hours before their flights are scheduled to take off.

“The airport is not set up to provide services,” said Nicole Hall, an airport spokesperson.

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican, opposes using county funds to manage the street releases.

“The federal government must manage the mess they’ve created,” he said. “We need the border to be secure and the laws to be upheld, including asylum cases to be heard on a case-by-case basis, not just mass released. But, in the meantime, if the federal government allows this to take place, they must fund the chaos they’ve created.”

Some advocates have raised concerns about how funds at the migrant welcome center were spent and are calling for the county to investigate.

Invoices obtained by CalMatters through a Public Records Act request show that from October through December the organization spent $750,000 on personnel costs, $368,000 on transportation from the border patrol detention center to the welcome center, $461,800 on onward travel for migrants, $151,000 on operating expenses, and $330,000 to subcontractors, among other costs.

“It’s astounding that $6 million dollars have been spent in less than four months’ time and, as a region, we have absolutely no enduring welcoming infrastructure to show for it. This is unacceptable,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which had volunteers at the trolley station.

Toczylowski said her organization will have to “fulfill the mission that has been abandoned by the organization that received all of the county funds.”

Funding transparency is crucial, said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, another nonprofit that sent volunteers last weekend.

“Nothing can be done to get that money back, but we hope it serves as a lesson for the management of future funding so that it’s spent in a way that actually serves the community and focuses resources on the most vulnerable, ” Pinheiro said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Friday it would continue to “surge personnel, transportation, processing, and humanitarian resources to the most active and arduous areas throughout San Diego’s border region where migrants are callously placed by smuggling organizations.”

It added it will coordinate as much as possible with state, local and non-governmental partners, but “this situation is the latest example of the pressing need for Congress to provide additional resources and take legislative action to fix our outdated immigration laws.”

After considering a run himself, he endorsed Rep. Barbara Lee in the hard-fought U.S. Senate primary over fellow Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. He’s a co-chairperson of her campaign and calls her a “hero and an incredible voice” on progressive priorities.

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The Fremont Democrat said the reason Lee isn’t doing better, at least in the polls, is because she’s being vastly outspent. If the campaign money were even, he said he has “no doubt” she would make the top two in the March 5 primary and advance to November.

“She’s an underdog. She knows that,” Khanna said in a Zoom conversation today with CalMatters reporters and editors.

But he said Lee still has a shot as she gathers more support, including from celebrities like John Legend. If Lee doesn’t advance, but Porter and Schiff do, Khanna said he’ll make an endorsement decision after that.

On the election more broadly, Khanna sees it playing out on two different paths: The presidential race will be decided, as usual, by Pennsylvania and other swing states. But control of Congress will go through California and New York, where Republicans flipped seats to win back the House in 2022.

A Democrat prevailed in Tuesday’s special election to replace the disgraced George Santos in New York, meaning that the Republican majority will shrink to six. And Khanna said he believes Democrats can flip two or three U.S. House seats in California this year, and will be campaigning in those key races.

On the presidential race, Khanna campaigned for President Joe Biden in New Hampshire, even though he has been critical of the president for not calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza war. While Khanna said he’s “deeply saddened” by the “humanitarian catastrophe,” it’s a “no-brainer” to enthusiastically back Biden over former President Donald Trump.

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Khanna said while he wishes Biden would also support Medicare for All and free college, the president is a “bridge to a more progressive future.” Asked whether that bridge is getting too old and creaky, Khanna said that in his recent conversations, Biden was “very knowledgeable” and “fully mentally sharp.”

But Khanna acknowledged that public perception on the age issue matters as much as the reality. “It’s going to be a hard-fought campaign,” he said.