“”In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.
That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.
One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.
…
“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.
“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.
…
Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that ICE raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were “taking very good, long-time workers away” from those sectors, “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Trump later told reporters, “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.” He added, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted.
…
ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.
“However the 9th Circuit ultimately comes down on that question, any decision addressing the legal merits of Newsom’s argument will amount to a rejection of the Trump administration’s alarming position that the president has the authority to deploy National Guard troops at will, even without pretending to meet statutory requirements or citing any facts to support his decision. That argument would transform the National Guard, today’s version of the state militia, into a federal force that the president can use at his discretion, without regard to constraints imposed by Congress or the 10th Amendment.”
“California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035.
Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California’s targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent”
“The crowd near Los Angeles City Hall had by Sunday evening reached an uneasy detente with a line of grim-faced police officers.
The LAPD officers gripped “less lethal” riot guns, which fire foam rounds that leave red welts and ugly bruises on anyone they hit. Demonstrators massed in downtown Los Angeles for the third straight day. Some were there to protest federal immigration sweeps across the county — others appeared set on wreaking havoc.
Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has drawn a distinction between protesters and masked “anarchists” who he said were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.
Jonas March, who was filming the protests as an independent journalist, dropped to the floor and tried to army-crawl away.
“As soon as I stood up, they shot me in the a—,” the 21-year-old said.
“When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that’s not the people that we see here in the day who are out there legitimately exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” McDonnell said Sunday. “These are people who are all hooded up — they’ve got a hoodie on, they’ve got face masks on.”
“They’re people that do this all the time,” he said. “They get away with whatever they can. Go out there from one civil unrest situation to another, using the same or similar tactics frequently. And they are connected.””
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“the unrest has trained attention on a narrow slice of the region — the civic core of Los Angeles — where protests have devolved into clashes with police and made-for-TV scenes of chaos: Waymo taxis on fire. Vandals defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti. Masked men lobbing chunks of concrete at California Highway Patrol officers keeping protesters off the 101 Freeway.”
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“The LAPD arrested 50 people over the weekend. Capt. Raul Jovel, who oversaw the department’s response to the protests, said those arrested included a man accused of ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers and another suspect who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail.
McDonnell said investigators will scour video from police body cameras and footage posted on social media to identify more suspects.
“The number of arrests we made will pale in comparison to the number of arrests that will be made,” McDonnell said.”
“Trump’s proclamation says the National Guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting ICE officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.”
“According to a 2023 paper from the International Center for Law and Economics, as of 2020, despite sky-high property values and well-known wildfire risks, Californians “paid an annual average of $1,285 in homeowners insurance premiums across all policy types—less than the national average of $1,319.” When insurers need to raise rates to reflect risks and costs, they can only do so after extended hearings and a government review process designed to please voters, not to reflect economic reality. Unsurprisingly, well before the Los Angeles fires, insurers were limiting coverage and leaving the state.
Even Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara admits insurers “don’t have to be here, and when we try to overregulate, we’ll see what happened after the Northridge earthquake, when the legislature came in and tried to overregulate, and they no longer write earthquake insurance in California.””
Home insurance in California and Florida is up big thanks to climate change. Polluters get a massive subsidy through their pollution’s negative externality, and they spend the big bucks on lobbyists and propaganda to prevent environmental protection.
“Bots create AI-generated student profiles, apply for enrollment, and submit minimal online coursework—often AI-generated—to stay enrolled long enough to receive federal and state aid disbursements intended for low-income students. The scammers are known as “Pell runners,” who disappear after collecting the $7,400 federal grant.”