A bill with the potential to worsen California’s already-frosty relationship with the Trump administration passed the Legislature on a near-party-line vote in late August and was presented to Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature last week.

Senate Bill 349, by state Sen. Ricardo Lara (pictured), D-Bell Gardens, is a direct response to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s embrace of the tactic of detaining unauthorized immigrants when they come to state courthouses to deal with matters in the California criminal justice system.

Exact statistics are not provided by ICE on its detentions. But there have been regular reports of ICE raids at state courts and their parking lots in California – especially in the Fresno area – as well as in Arizona, Texas and Colorado within the last year.

ICE officials issued a formal notice in January of their intent to go after targeted individuals when they have scheduled appearances in state courts. Some have said they moved to adopt new policies after the California Legislature adopted and Gov. Brown signed “sanctuary state” legislation last year limiting state cooperation with federal immigration officials.

Lara’s bill would specify that state court officials have the authority to block activities that interfere with the proceedings and operations at state courts. It would require federal immigration agents to have a warrant before they can enter schools, courthouses and state buildings to arrest or question people. It would ban civil arrests in courthouses and authorize the state Attorney General’s Office to pursue civil claims against individuals who violated SB349’s provisions.

The legislative aides who wrote the analysis of the bill cited historical evidence that the practice of not picking up people at courthouses for offenses unrelated to their visits – known as “the common law privilege for civil arrests” – goes back hundreds of years and far predates any controversy over illegal immigration.

Brown and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra have been joined in their sharp criticism of ICE’s tactics by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. In a statement issued last month, she blasted arrests at state courts as “disruptive, shortsighted, and counterproductive … . It is damaging to community safety and disrespects the state court system.”

Some sheriffs want more cooperation with feds

Nonetheless, conservative sheriffs in some counties who oppose “sanctuary” policies are supportive of ICE’s aggressive tactics, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times. Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims is openly looking for ways to increase her department’s cooperation with ICE in spite of the state law.

That suggests that even if Lara’s bill is signed by Brown, some police agencies may be far less enthusiastic about enforcing it than others. Court battles over what exactly “sanctuary”-style laws compel these agencies to do seem likely.

At issue is the scope of the generally accepted doctrine that the federal government cannot compel state law enforcement agents to enforce federal regulations and that state laws prevail unless they directly conflict with federal laws.

Historically, conservatives in the post-Reagan era and Southern Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s have had more of a “states’ rights” approach to interpreting this doctrine, while liberals have leaned more toward the idea that the federal government deserves deference in gray areas open to different interpretations.

In the Golden State, these political roles have been swapped in the Trump era.

While sharply critical of the Trump White House on many immigration issues, Brown has not commented specifically on Lara’s bill. He has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it and the hundreds of other passed bills he has not yet made a decision on.

Lara is the Democratic candidate for state insurance commissioner on the November ballot. He is running against Steve Poizner, who is now an independent after serving as insurance commissioner from 2007-2011 as a Republican.

The meeting was the latest development in an ongoing battle between California and the Trump administration over its sanctuary policies. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state earlier this year and the disagreement is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court.

The main law in question, Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, prohibits local law enforcement from diverting resources to assist federal immigration authorities and detaining citizens past their normal detention at ICE’s request. It’s backed by other laws, such as one that requires private companies to warn employees in advance of immigration inspections.

Since the announcement of the federal lawsuit, many municipalities, such as Orange County and the city of Los Alamitos, have expressed their opposition to sanctuary policies and tossed their weight behind the lawsuit.

Among those in attendance at the meeting: mayors from Los Alamitos, Barstow, San Jacinto and Escondido, Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez (CA-67), El Dorado County Sheriff John D’Agostini, and Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel. On the federal side, Department of Justice Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Director of ICE Thomas Homan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

While supporters argue that the legislation makes the public safer by improving trust between police and immigrant communities, many in attendance pointed to public safety concerns as the reason for their opposition to sanctuary laws. 

“When Jerry Brown cares more about illegal criminals than he cares about the Hispanic community and the American citizens, this is insanity, and this is unconstitutional,” said Escondido Mayor Sam Abed. “This is personal to me. I’m going to work hard to make sure our community is safe.”

In response to the meeting, Gov. Jerry Brown tweeted that the president “is lying on immigration, lying about crime and lying about the laws of CA. Flying a dozen Republican politicians to flatter him and praise his reckless policies changes nothing. We, the citizens of the fifth largest economy in the world, are not impressed.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday authorized the deployment of 400 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border at the request of the Trump administration.

But it came with one caveat – that the guards would not be used for federal immigration enforcement.

“But let’s be crystal clear on the scope of this mission,” Brown wrote. “This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.”

The National Guard deployment is part of President Trump’s plan to protect the integrity of the southern border until a physical wall is constructed – but it’s a structure that is still years away from becoming a reality.

“Your funding for new staffing will allow the Guard to do what it does best: support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, the coast and throughout the state,” Brown continued. “Combating these criminal threats are priorities for all Americans – Republicans and Democrats.”

Under the plan, the guardsmen are not permitted to interact with migrants or engage with any illegal border crossers that are detained by the U.S. Border Patrol. Instead, they will serve in a more administrative role – including tasks like clearing roads.

Troops have already been deployed in Arizona and Texas.

Not surprisingly, Brown struck a tone of defiance in his statement, as California has positioned itself at the center of the resistance against President Trump’s immigration agenda in Washington.

“Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California,” Brown added. “Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California).”

According to the U.S. Border Patrol, there were 303,916 apprehensions along the Southwest border in 2017 – a drop from around 408,000 in the year before and down from a high of 1.6 million in 2000.

The state has become a flashpoint on larger issues like sanctuary cities and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, sparking high-profile legal and political fights.

“We’re also glad to see California Governor Jerry Brown work with the administration and send members of the National Guard to help secure the southern border,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during Wednesday’s briefing. 

“The census determines federal funding for the next ten years and drives reapportionment and redistricting,” the California Secretary of State office said in a statement on Twitter. “We must stay vigilant. The citizenship question is just the latest red flag.”

The U.S. conducts a census every 10 years with its stated purpose of providing “current facts and figures about America’s people, places, and economy.”

But the most notable purpose is determining each state’s population to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, as that number is set at 435.

Illegal immigrants are included in the population count but the census has not asked a citizenship question since the early 1950s.

While the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau takes every year to gain a better understanding of changing social and economic climates, does ask a citizenship question, the ACS is not used for apportionment purposes.

And despite the Census Bureau being bound by a confidentiality requirement regardless of whether a new question is added, progressives fear that undocumented immigrants will still choose not to answer to avoid admitting their undocumented status.

Mike Levin, a Democrat running for the congressional seat in California’s 49th district, said the move was more evidence of “Trump’s policy war on California.”

Furthermore, the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, recently received a letter from a group of Democratic lawmakers calling the request “deeply troubling.”

“This chilling effect could lead to broad inaccuracies across the board, from how congressional districts are drawn to how government funds are distributed,” the letter read.

But the Department of Justice argues that a question on citizenship would lead to better enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“To fully enforce those requirements, the Department needs a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected,” the December 12th letter, written by DOJ general counsel Arthur Gary and obtained by ProPublica, reads.

“The U.S. Census Bureau is evaluating the request from the U.S. Department of Justice and will process it in the same way we have historically dealt with such requests,” a bureau spokesman told CalWatchdog. “The final list of questions must be submitted to Congress by March 31, 2018. Secretary Ross will then make a decision. Our top priority is a complete and accurate 2020 Census.”

Currently, California holds 53 congressional seats, the most in the country.

The request is just the latest installment of the conflict between California and the Trump administration, as the Golden State is continuing to place itself at the center of the so-called “resistance” against the president’s larger immigration agenda.

The case became the center of a larger conversation about immigration and “sanctuary city” policies in the U.S., even spawning legislative proposals like Kate’s Law, which would increase prison sentences for immigrants caught repeatedly entering the U.S. illegally.

Garcia Zarate had been deported from the U.S. five times prior to Steinle’s 2015 death.

The 45-year-old faced a second-degree murder charge, but jurors were also able to consider convicting on first-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

The gun Garcia Zarate used to kill Steinle belonged to a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger. It was stolen from his parked SUV about a week earlier.

At issue was whether or not he intended to kill the 32-year-old Steinle or whether the gun discharged accidentally, as the bullet ricocheted on the pier’s walkway before it struck Steinle, killing her, as she died in her father’s arms, a set of the facts the defense did not dispute.

Prosecutors argued Garcia Zarate was “playing his own secret version of Russian roulette” and intentionally fired into an unsuspecting crowd on San Francisco’s Pier 14.

Defense attorney Matt Gonzalez told jurors that Garcia Zarate found the gun at the pier and when Garcia Zarate unwrapped it, the Sig Sauer .40-caliber handgun accidentally discharged.

The verdict will likely only fuel a larger national discussion about the risk of sanctuary city policies, an issue President Trump repeatedly mentioned on the campaign trail and has continued to focus on since taking office.

Garcia Zarate was released from a San Francisco jail just three months before the tragedy after prosecutors dropped a marijuana charge, despite a request by federal authorities to detain him for another deportation.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to crack down on such jurisdictions as part of the administration’s immigration agenda.

“The president has rightly said, ‘disregard for law must end,’” the attorney general said earlier this year. “In his executive order, he stated that it is the policy of the executive branch to ensure that states and cities comply with all federal laws, including immigration law.”

Sanctuary cities do not comply with federal authorities in holding criminal illegal aliens on ICE detainers, an effort critics say allows illegals to avoid deportation and puts public safety at risk.

Sessions’ vow to tie a city’s sanctuary status to its federal funding is a move that could affect over $4 billion in grants that are set to be dispersed by the Department of Justice in the coming years.

However, it’s a move that faces significant legal hurdles, as a federal judge recently blocked the order in a lawsuit from San Francisco and Santa Clara counties.

New Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have rolled out across Southern California, roiling state officials and triggering rumors of broader actions. But though the Trump administration has focused on expanding the scope and strength of enforcement, the current raids trace back to planning conducted at the tail end of President Obama’s term in office. 

“Immigration arrests across Southern California over the past week were planned before President Trump took office and could be compared to similar operations the occurred last summer, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said,” Fox News noted. “A decade ago, immigration officers searching for specific individuals would often arrest others found along the way, a practice that drew criticism from advocates. Under the Obama administration, agents also carried out arrests but focused more narrowly on specific individuals.”

Political pushback

But while California Democrats have felt more uncertainty and anxiety around immigration in the early days of the Trump administration, they have also felt a greater latitude to object to federal enforcement. “Democrats have complained about getting little or conflicting information about who was targeted in the raids that have panicked many in the immigrant community,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Democrats in Congress say Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told them Thursday the agency plans to employ a broader brush in making immigration arrests, armed with a new executive order from President Trump. Democrats and Republicans in House leadership met in a closed-door meeting with Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan to talk about last week’s immigration raids in Los Angeles and other cities, which netted nearly 700 people across the country last week.”

Fraught nerves have spread throughout areas of the state where support for so-called sanctuary cities, and opposition to the new administration, is high. “Rumors that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up undocumented residents throughout the Bay Area are just that — rumors, according to a spokesman for the federal agency,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. “One of those rumors resulted in an ‘urgent notification’ Tuesday to parents of students at a charter school in San Jose, said James Schwab, a spokesman for the federal agency. Similar rumors have circulated in El Cerrito, Oakland, Richmond and San Pablo. All of them have been false, Schwab said.”

Continuity and change

But confusion has persisted, and not only in California, over exactly how ICE has altered its approach to the current round of enforcement. “Under Obama, ICE agents mainly picked up what they called criminal aliens from jails around the country. But with this operation, you’re seeing these immigration agents fanning out into streets and neighborhoods,” John Burnett reported from Texas on NPR. “And that’s what left people so alarmed. I spoke with the Mexican consul here in Austin, Carlos Gonzalez, earlier today. The numbers he gave me was he says 49 Mexican nationals were picked up Thursday, Friday and today. He said that’s a significant increase over the usual apprehensions of undocumenteds here in Austin. And, of course, that doesn’t even include Central Americans or other nationalities that would’ve been picked up.”

The Obama administration’s official trigger for action, a so-called “threat to the community,” was not always applied by ICE this time around. Jorge-Mario Cabrera, communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, told LA Weekly that an unofficial “sense of respect for families and immigrants” was “not always respected” by the previous administration, but did color its approach to enforcement and deportation. ICE senior spokeswoman Virginia C. Kice, told the paper the current actions were consistent with past practices. “Kice points to a series of targeted enforcement actions taken under the Obama administration in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015, which netted 10 to nearly 20 times as many arrests as occurred last week,” the Weekly noted. 

With contending pieces of legislation now up for consideration in Congress, California has returned to the national spotlight on one of the most contentious immigration issues — special visas granted by the federal government to attract foreign talent.

Long critiqued by economic nationalists, including some Democrats, the H-1B visa program has been accused of undercutting qualified candidates in key industries who are U.S. citizens. “The H-1B program offers 65,000 visas each fiscal year, with an additional 20,000 reserved for foreign workers who have advanced degrees from U.S. colleges and universities,” according to Ars Technica. “The visas are awarded by lottery each year. Last year, the government received more than 236,000 applications for those visas.”

With the prestige, economic importance and compensation level attached to those jobs, they have become a focus of reform for allies of President-elect Donald Trump. “Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the highest-profile Republicans in Congress and a supporter of Mr. Trump, said Wednesday in a statement on his website that he is reintroducing a bill designed to ‘stop the outsourcing of American jobs’ and ensure laws are not ‘abused to allow companies to outsource and hire cheap foreign labor from abroad,'” The Wall Street Journal reported. The bill would seek to achieve that outcome by hiking “required salaries for positions granted under the H-1B scheme that replace American workers from $60,000 to $100,000 per year,” according to the Journal.

Bipartisan frustration

In a sign of the cross-cutting partisan interests shaking up some established battle lines on immigration, Issa boasted a Democrat, fellow Californian Rep. Scott Peters, as the co-sponsor of the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act. Silicon Valley, where political allegiances at the end of the Obama era have begun to shift in new ways, has come under attack for its use of H-1Bs. “In 2013, the top nine companies acquiring H-1B visas were technology outsourcing firms, according to an analysis by a critic of the H-1B program,” Ars Technica recalled, noting that Microsoft rounded out the list’s top 10. “The thinking goes that if minimum H-1B salaries are brought closer to what high-skilled tech employment really pays, the economic incentive to use it as a worker-replacement program will drop off.”

But other big California corporations have not been left out of the criticism. “It’s specifically required that there be a shortage” in qualified candidates, Issa said of Southern California Edison, which he attacked for asking “employees being laid off to train their replacements,” as U-T San Diego noted. 

“Edison said at the time of the layoffs that it was ‘not hiring H-1B workers to replace displaced employees. Any H-1B visa workers SCE does hire for its own workforce are paid a wage comparable to SCE’s domestic workforce. Disney and a handful of other California companies have been criticized in recent years for similar moves.”

Dueling drafts

Issa and Scott’s path forward has been complicated, however, by legislative competition from one of his fellow California delegates to Congress. “Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Santa Clara County Democrat, warned Thursday that she believes Issa’s bill could undermine Silicon Valley’s job market,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “That’s because tech companies in a location such as Silicon Valley, where software engineers can command a starting wage of $140,000 a year, might still have incentives to use foreign workers for $100,000, Lofgren said.”

Casting her alternative as a return to the original intent of U.S. visa laws to attract the so-called best and brightest, Lofgen recently announced the details of a draft bill that will circulate formally in several weeks’ time. “Under her plan, employers who pay as much as 2.5 times to three times the prevailing wage in their metro area would get first preference to hire people through the H-1B visa program,” according to the Mercury News. Lofgren has suggested that Issa’s intended fix could leave some problems intact. “Raising the wage from $60,000 to $100,000 would do nothing to prevent the sort of outsourcing abuse we’ve seen under the H-1B visa program,” she warned, according to the paper.

Driven by rising out-migration and falling birth rates, California’s population growth has stalled, leading analysts to consider a possible forecast of a so-called “no-growth” period in the future.

Although Americans nationwide have been flooding south and west for years, the Golden State has become an exception. Nearly 62 percent of Americans lived in the two regions, Justin Fox observed from Census figures. “That’s up from 60.4 percent in the 2010 census, 58.1 percent in 2000, 55.6 percent in 1990 — and 44 percent in 1950. The big anomaly is California, which is very much in the West, yet has lost an estimated 383,344 residents to other states since 2010.”

“The state’s birth rate declined to 12.42 births per 1,000 population in 2016 — the lowest in California history,” the San Jose Mercury News noted, citing a state Department of Finance report. “In 2010, the last time figures were compiled, the birth rate was 13.69 per 1,000 population.”

Changing habits

Cultural and economic changes — familiar to Californians who have followed the debate around jobs, families, adulthood and the millennial generation — were responsible for the dip, Finance Department demographer Walter Schwarm told the Mercury News. “There are a lot of people who could be having children but are choosing to do something else,” he said. “People want to establish careers. They’re looking to pursue degrees, they’re getting out there and finding their place in employment,” and, in the case of couples hoping to start families into their 30s, it becomes “harder and harder to conceive.”

Relatively speaking, however, California’s figures have remained strong. The state hit its in-state birth low at a time when the United States experienced “the lowest rate of population growth of any year since the Great Depression,” the Washington Post recently reported, referencing other Census figures that show deaths reaching a 16-year high. “The nation grew by 0.695 percent between 2015 and 2016 to 323.1 million, down from 0.732 percent the previous year — the lowest increase since the 1937-1938 period, when it was 0.60 percent,” according to the paper. 

“Immigration also declined, though for the past three years immigration levels have been higher than they were since before the recession of 2007-2009. But the fall in the natural increase, from 4.07 to 3.84 per 1,000, reflecting fewer births and more deaths, is the lead cause — and the trend is likely to continue, Frey said.” 

Global ripples

But the immigration issue has not abated politically as flows of labor and patterns of conflict have morphed over the years. In a reminder of California’s place at a nexus of increasingly global migration, Mexico’s own authorities have strained in recent months to cope with an influx of African and Caribbean migrants to borderland cities. Baja state governor warned last month that the situation in Tijuana was “becoming overwhelming. Just in the last two weeks a large group of people from Haiti arrived, at the same time that the United States reduced the number of interviews for asylum,” he lamented, according to Mexico News Daily.

An uncertain balance

Taken together, the large demographic trends of the past several years have changed the impact of California’s population on social services budgets, with benefits for the elderly increasing in demand but others sinking in the aggregate. “The state’s public schools are seeing no growth in their overall student population, and some districts are seeing declines,” Dan Walters observed at the Sacramento Bee. “Were we growing at a 1980s clip, we’d need three times as many new housing units.” 

But the uneasy balance could be upset by a sharper slowdown in the immediate future. The state’s current growth rate, Walters added, “is scarcely a third of the nation’s fastest-growing state, Utah, which posted a 2.03 percent gain between 2015 and 2016. It’s also less than half of the rate in rival Texas.”

Trump splits Silicon Valley

Good morning. Let’s talk about Trump. Now that voters have chosen Donald Trump as president, the country is wondering what it will mean for things like climate change, immigration, politics, the Republican Party — the list goes on.

So far, Trump has divided the Republican Party, taken large numbers of voters away from Democrats, and infused some Americans with optimism but others with despair.

Now, he has also laid bare latent political fractures within Silicon Valley, often seen as a more monolithic culture than it is. 

While some leading tech figures have been supportive or tolerant of Trump and his movement, others have responded to his election by expressing the strongest possible opposition — including a call for secession.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• How will a Trump presidency affect CA’s climate-change efforts? “Experts say it’s about to become a country within a country, moving sharply in the opposite direction of the White House and Congress on climate change and environmental policy, as California sets its own agenda with sympathetic states and countries,” writes The San Jose Mercury News. 

• “Making California housing affordable again will require new laws, more avenues to build,” writes The San Jose Mercury News/The Orange County Register. 

• What will a Trump presidency mean for Mexican immigrants? The Orange County Register has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @CelticsLife

As early ballots arrive in mailboxes this week, Golden State voters will arrive at a symbolic and substantial demographic landmark: a so-called majority-minority electorate. 

“For the first time, non-Latino whites will fall below 50 percent of the state’s eligible voters,” as the California Civic Engagement Project predicted in 2014. “From 1980 to 2014, the state’s Latino and Asian American populations grew by 230 percent and 331 percent, respectively, while the white population fell about 6 percent,” the Orange County Register noted, citing a January report from the Civic Engagement Project. 

Despite a clear trend since the 1990s toward political dominance by Democrats, the longer term implications of the demographic shift have remained shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, in-state Republicans have weathered a period of fracture likely to end eventually in a new but familiar rough equilibrium between the two major parties. On the other hand, nonwhite voting patterns, especially in recent immigrant families, have in some respects had a limited impact on California politics. Many nonwhite residents, according to the Register, “are too young to vote or otherwise not registered. So far, the voter rolls haven’t made the minority-majority jump. A Field Poll found that 59 percent of California’s registered voters are white, down from 83 percent in 1978.” 

Low enthusiasm

Another complicating factor involves voter enthusiasm and turnout. Voter rolls have swelled tremendously, with a surge of new registrations pushing the current total to over 18 million. “The new data show California now has more registered voters than the population of 46 states,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Yet registered voters have not coalesced around a consensus political agenda. “Republicans trailed Democrats in registration by more than 18 percentage points,” the Times continued, but decline-to-state voters, “known in California as those who have ‘no party preference,’ were a close third and made up more than 23 percent of the statewide registration.” 

For Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters alike, showing up at the polls has not always been an easy sell — despite consistent measures from Sacramento designed to make voting as easy and popular as possible. (“In California, no law requires voters to show ID. They soon will be registered to vote automatically. Their vote will be counted even if it shows up three days after the election,” as the Sacramento Bee noted.) Many Democrats have rested easy in the knowledge that their party will prevail even with low turnout. Although Loretta Sanchez would be the first Latina U.S. Senator if elected to replace Barbara Boxer, for instance, her candidacy has not ratcheted up projected turnout in November. Republicans, traditionally more likely to vote, have faced sharp intraparty conflicts in recent years, sometimes leaving state and local elections effectively uncontested. Voters who have soured on both parties, meanwhile, have not always had an opportunity to make a decisive difference in election day outcomes. 

Wedge issues

Nevertheless, the determined push by California officials for de facto amnesty for unlawful and undocumented immigrants has only sharpened as an electoral wedge issue. In Santa Ana, as the New York Times recently observed, transformative changes around immigration have raised political questions even as Latino political power has increased only modestly. “Immigrants living illegally in California are entitled to driver’s licenses. Their children can receive state-funded health insurance. Local law enforcement officials generally do not provide information to federal immigration authorities, as they do in many other parts of the country. On a smaller, if no less symbolic, level, the first thing the Santa Ana City Council did when it went all-Latino in 2006 was pass a law requiring simultaneous translation of all of its meetings to Spanish,” the Times reported. 

“The power and presence of Latinos in this community in Orange County — itself once a bastion of Republicanism — is echoed up and down the California coast. Latinos now make up just under 40 percent of the state’s population, projected to increase to 47 percent by 2050. The leaders of both houses of the Legislature are Latino, as is the secretary of state, the current mayor of Los Angeles and the previous mayor.”