This is the aftermath of a strong weather event in Tennessee a number of years ago. Now Humboldt County is also a disaster zone because of the weather. Photo by Kelly via Pexels.
Somehow this only just now rose to our attention. Maybe it hasn’t risen to yours yet. In any case, know that you, Humboldt County taxpayer, officially have an extra month to file your taxes this year.
This is due to the recent winter storms that nearly flattened every standing structure in the area. [Shhhh… — Ed.] Humboldt County is one of 41 California counties that have been declared disaster zones due to the pummeling we took from the atmospheric river earlier this month. Because of this, the IRS and the state Franchise Tax Board have magnanimously given us until May 15 to file, allowing us time in the meanwhile to forage for canned foods underneath the rubble of the post-apocalyptic hellscape we all inhabit.
Erwin, an immigrant who is seeking a California driver’s license, sits in his car at Lake Miramar in San Diego on Jan. 8, 2023. Photo by Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters.
On a recent night, by the Miramar Reservoir in San Diego County, a man named Erwin sat at a picnic table scrolling through dozens of texts from his wife. He read aloud her warnings about police patrolling a road near their home.
“‘There’s a lot of cops out tonight,’” he read. “Cops everywhere.’ ‘Be careful; lots of cops.’ ‘Too many cops.’
“Every time I want to get a burger or juice or anything like that and I leave the house, she will text me ‘There’s a lot of cops. Be careful,’” Erwin explained. “It’s a reality that we live in. We adapt our life and our every day to it.”
Erwin, who asked not to use his last name for fear of deportation, is a 27-year old business manager, husband and father of a 6-month-old baby girl. He’s also a Congolese immigrant whose visa expired. His wife, a U.S. citizen, fears what would happen if police stop him.
Although California is a sanctuary state — with protections for immigrants who lack documentation authorizing them to be in the United States — there are loopholes and law enforcement sometimes works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Beyond that, Erwin worries a traffic stop might escalate. “Believe me, in my country, I would never have to worry about getting pulled over and being scared that they’re going to shoot me,” he said.
Erwin wants to swap his foreign driver’s license for a California one.
“Before I didn’t have a family, so I could risk it,” he said, “but now I have my family and I drive my kid everywhere we go. So I decided to get right and get the driver’s license, so it’s less of an issue if I get pulled over.”
A license to drive
Erwin has made multiple attempts to obtain an AB 60 driver’s license. It’s a special license that lets undocumented California residents legally drive, but with federal limitations.
Proponents say the special license was a boon to immigrants and the state’s economy. But critics, and even some immigrant advocates, say it has drawbacks and risks, since law enforcement and immigration officials can access it. Nevertheless the state is expanding its flexibility, giving IDs to more undocumented residents.
California lawmakers first passed AB 60, called the Safe and Responsible Drivers Act, in 2013, as part of a broad effort to adopt more inclusive policies toward immigrants, to decriminalize their daily lives and maximize their contributions to the economy, experts said.
Since the law took effect in 2015, more than a million undocumented immigrants, out of an estimated 2 million, have received licenses, and more than 700,000 have renewed them.
Besides California, 18 other states have followed suit.
‘I feel like that’s a very important psychological piece, in the sense of ‘This is who I am. I have an ID to show you who I am.’ — Shiu-Ming Cheer of California Immigrant Policy Center
“With AB 60, what we did was recognize the needs of many hard-working immigrants living here and contributing so much to our great state,” said Luis Alejo, the former Assembly member from Watsonville who authored the bill. Now he is a county supervisor for Monterey County.
Undocumented immigrants in California contribute $3.1 billion a year in state and local taxes; nationally they contribute $11.7 billion in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington D.C. research entity.
New legislation signed in September will make other California ID’s available in January to undocumented immigrants who don’t drive or who can’t take the driver’s test. Backers of that measure say residents most likely to benefit are the elderly and people with disabilities.
“IDs are needed for so many aspects of everyday life, from accessing critical health benefits, to renting an apartment,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of programs and campaigns at the California Immigrant Policy Center, a sponsor of the law.
Experts say more flexible ID laws may do more than help people on an individual level. Eric Figueroa, a senior manager at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said licenses enable undocumented immigrants to look for better jobs and gain better protections from employers trying to steal or withhold wages.
“It helps build the economy broadly — by unlocking people’s potential — and it helps the workers by giving them more options,” he said.
Erwin uses family connections to remotely renew his Congo license — a privilege he noted not everyone has. Being able to drive allowed his family to move to a better neighborhood and him to find better employment in a suburb about 25 miles away, he said.
‘With AB 60, what we did was recognize the needs of many hard-working immigrants living here.’ — Luis Alejo, former Assembly member from Watsonville
No one has studied how many people have garnered better jobs as a result of the special licenses. Alejo said many of his constituents describe “profound economic impacts,” but he agrees more research is needed.
Some opponents of the licenses say their economic benefits are likely negligible. Instead it is encouraging illegal migration to California, they say, which further strains the state’s budget to provide education and other services.
More than that, it makes undocumented residents too comfortable, critics argued.
Before the special licenses, immigrants said they feared routine traffic stops and drunk-driving checkpoints, where their vehicles could be impounded for not having a driver’s license. Many also could face deportation proceedings after being contacted by police.
“Community members used to share that they always used to have to buy beat-up cars because they always knew it would get impounded,” said Erin Tsurumoto Grassi, policy director at Alliance San Diego, a community organization focused on equity issues.
“Folks were always losing their vehicles because they didn’t have a license. They didn’t have the ability to have a license,” she said.
Accident trends
Some opponents of the special license law claimed it would make roadways less safe, because some immigrant drivers wouldn’t be able to read traffic signs in English.
But a 2017 study by the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University showed those safety concerns were speculative. The rate of total accidents, including fatal accidents, did not rise and the rate of hit-and-run accidents declined, which likely improved traffic safety and reduced overall costs for California drivers, researchers said.
The study, which documented a 10% decline in hit-and-run accidents, ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2017.
“Coming to this as scientists, we were immediately shocked by the absence of facts in this debate,” said Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford political science professor and co-director of the lab. “Nobody was drawing on any evidence; it was more characterized by ideology.”
Other research by Hans Lueders, a postdoctoral research associate for the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University, found AB 60 did not improve insurance premiums nor increase the share of uninsured drivers.
Are license holders safe?
Questions persist about whether the special licenses make recipients easier targets for immigration enforcement.
Some immigrant advocates initially opposed the new licenses because they looked different from other driver’s licenses. On the front of the cards’ upper right side is “Federal Limits Apply” instead of the iconic gold bear of California. On the back the cards say: “This card is not acceptable for official federal purposes.”
Alejo said legislators had intended to protect people from immigration enforcement, so they wrote certain protective measures into the original AB 60 bill. They added language prohibiting state and local government agencies from using the special license to discriminate against license holders or for immigration enforcement.
Yet some advocates point to reports of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessing the databases of state and local law enforcement agencies and of state departments of motor vehicles.
In December 2018, the ACLU of Northern California and the National Immigration Law Center published a report detailing multiple ways federal immigration agencies get access to motor vehicle records. After that, the California Attorney General’s Office implemented new protocols to protect immigrants’ DMV information from ICE and other agencies.
A chilling effect
Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said there is always going to be a risk someone will misuse data on undocumented people.
“I wouldn’t say that people should feel 100% safe,” he said.” I would just say that the risk has been lessened quite a bit … but that does not mean the risk has totally gone away.”
In recent years there has been a large drop-off in the number of immigrants applying for AB 60 licenses. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, 396,859 immigrants applied for the licenses in fiscal 2014-15, but only 68,426 applied in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2022.
Advocates said that may be because most people who wanted a license applied for it already, or because education and outreach about the law have lessened over the years.
Cheer said news of ICE accessing California databases could have a chilling effect on immigrants’ willingness to interact with government.
“It does create more of a trust deficit with government agencies whenever there is a story about ICE having access to California databases or information in California databases,” she said.
Being seen
On the other hand, there’s an added benefit to the new licenses, Cheer said: immigrants now have a feeling of being included and acknowledged as residents of California.
“I feel like that’s a very important psychological piece, in the sense of ‘This is who I am. I have an ID to show you who I am,’” she said.
Erwin said he carefully weighed the possibility that he would be effectively giving ICE his home address against wanting to have the proper paperwork, so there would be no excuse for a police officer to escalate a traffic stop with him. He decided one risk was worth reducing the risk of the other.
For some immigrants, the passage of the license law didn’t come soon enough.
Dulce Garcia, an immigrant rights advocate and attorney, at her office in San Diego on Dec. 28, 2022. Photo by Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters
Dulce Garcia, an attorney and advocate for immigrants, recently described at a San Diego public forum on immigration enforcement what happened when police stopped her brother who was undocumented.
Police cited Edgar Saul Garcia Cardoso for driving without a license and when he appeared in a courthouse in January 2020 to face the consequences, ICE detained and deported him, within hours, to Tijuana, she said.
There he was kidnapped, held for ransom and tortured for eight months, Garcia said.
In May 2021, he returned to the United States and received asylum protections. But he never recovered from the trauma, Garcia said. He died of unknown causes in September 2022.
“I wish there was a way you could see through my eyes the harm you have caused by colluding with ICE,” Garcia told law enforcement officials at the forum. “Edgar was loved, and his life mattered.”
A photo of Edgar Saul Garcia Cardoso sits on a bookshelf in Dulce Garcia’s office in San Diego on Dec. 28, 2022. Photo by Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters
###
CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
HUMBOLDT TODAY: $46 million has been rewarded to an out-of-area construction firm for a major Highway 101 project, controversy erupts over who should control a local school, the latest on a major housing project in Arcata and more on today’s newscast with John Kennedy O’Connor.
Mainstem Klamath River juvenile Chinook salmon outmigration monitoring. | Photo via USFS, Creative Commons License CC BY 2.0
Joint press release from the Karuk Tribe, Ridges to Riffles, the Yurok Tribe and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations:
Klamath Basin, CA – Despite the wet winter, the Department of Interior has announced plans to cut Klamath River flows up to 30% below the minimum mandated by the Endangered Species Act to protect listed coho salmon. River flows will drop below 750 cubic feet per second (cfs) for the first time in decades. This could prove disastrous to juvenile coho salmon along with other species including Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, and Pacific lamprey. The Yurok Tribe and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations have already filed a 60-day Notice of Intent to sue the federal government.
“We know from experience that flows this low lead to massive fish kills. It happened in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2004,” said Yurok Vice Chairman Frankie Joe Myers. “This plan is reckless and it disregards the best available science.”
In 2002, similarly low flows led to the infamous Klamath Fish Kill when tens of thousands of adult salmon died as they tried to make their way to their spawning grounds. In 2004, similarly low flows caused a massive juvenile fish kill which in turn led to a collapse of the entire west coast salmon fishery.
“Thousands of fishing industry jobs are at stake,” said Glen Spain, Pacific Northwest Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “This plan could lead to another fisheries disaster that will cost local coastal communities hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.”
Work begins this year on the removal of the lower four Klamath dams. While this will provide some relief to beleaguered salmon runs, fish still need adequate flows to survive. Klamath River flows are largely a function of how Upper Klamath Lake is managed further upstream from the dams. Upper Klamath Lake is a natural lake that was drained, rerouted and dammed in the early 20th century to allow federal regulators to divert water from the Klamath River to the 225,000-acre Klamath Irrigation Project.
Upper Klamath Lake is also home to two species of ESA listed sucker fish, known as koptu and c’waam. Department of Interior officials claim that the cut in flows is necessary to meet Upper Klamath Lake levels needed for the recovery of these species. However, current weather forecasts suggest there will be enough water to meet ESA requirements of both suckers and coho salmon without cutting river flows.
“This is an uncalled-for risk to the health of the river and west coast fisheries,” said Amy Cordalis, Director of Ridges to Riffles and attorney for the Yurok Tribe. “Salmon runs desperately need a good water year. Mother nature is providing that but federal agencies are taking it away.”
Cordalis notes, “For millennia suckers and salmon thrived together in the Klamath. The problem is the water management choices that Interior is making, not the competing needs of different fish species.”
“The Department of Interior should be focusing on Klamath Basin-wide restoration plans, including the upper basin marshes and lakes, not proposing plans that threaten the future of one of America’s greatest salmon fisheries,” said Karuk Chairman Russell ‘Buster’ Attebery.
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
On Jan. 24, 2023, at about 4:16 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a business on the 400 block of Machi Road in Shelter Cove for the report of a disturbance.
According to employees at the business, 41-year-old Elena Elaine Stanley, reportedly entered the business in distress. When an employee attempted to console Stanley, she became violent toward employees, throwing store items at them and causing approximately $1,200 worth of damages to the business.
Deputies located Stanley in a parking area at the boat launch nearby. Stanley was determined to be under the influence of alcohol and was arrested without incident.
At approximately 6:53 p.m., a Shelter Cove resident contacted the Sheriff’s Office to report a vandalism and burglary of their home on the 500 block of Muskrat Circle earlier that afternoon. The victim provided deputies with surveillance footage from the residence which showed Stanley forcing entry onto the property and into the home. While inside the residence, Stanley reportedly caused over $11,000 worth of damages.
Stanley was booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of vandalism (PC 594(b)(1)), burglary (PC 459/461(A)) and disorderly conduct under the influence (PC 647(f)).
Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
On Jan. 25, 2023, at about 11:18 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies on patrol in the Willow Creek area conducted a suspicious vehicle investigation on an occupied vehicle parked in a pullout on Highway 299.
Deputies contacted the driver of the vehicle, 53-year-old Joseph Richard Bartholomew, and observed drug paraphernalia in plain view. Deputies detained Bartholomew and conducted a search of the vehicle. During the search, deputies located over 8 grams of methamphetamine and an unsecured loaded firearm.
Bartholomew was arrested and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of convicted felon in possession of a firearm (PC 29800(a)), possession of a controlled substance while armed (HS 11370.1(a)), possession of a controlled substance (HS 11377(a)), carrying a loaded firearm not registered to the individual (PC 25850(c)(6)) and possession of a controlled substance paraphernalia (HS 11364).
Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
A law passed in 2020 compels the state Justice Department to investigate all incidents in which a police officer shoots and kills someone who is unarmed.
But the department isn’t investigating all of the incidents law enforcement agencies are referring to it — in at least 17 cases to date, the state has opted not to investigate.
The exact number and details about those cases are a bit of a mystery, CalMatters has learned. The Justice Department said it had not been tracking each report it received and could readily provide details only for cases in which its agents visited the scene or opened an investigation or reports. After CalMatters began raising questions in November, the department managed to track down some information on the 17 rejected cases, and acknowledged there were more.
CalMatters launched its own tracker to follow the police shooting cases the Justice Department is investigating, which number 31 and counting.
The department now says it has reversed course and begun tracking every report that comes in.
“Given the mandate and the need to rapidly implement a major new statewide initiative, our office focused on…qualifying events,” a Justice Department spokesperson wrote in an email to CalMatters Jan. 20. “We did not previously consider tracking calls for non-qualifying events. However, we are now tracking the information on our end and we’re more than happy to provide updates on those figures as needed…”
Under the new law, whenever a police department or sheriff’s office thinks one of their officers has shot someone who could be considered unarmed — including those carrying Airsoft rifles or other weapons not considered deadly — they’re compelled by law to report it for review.
The law says: “A state prosecutor shall investigate incidents of an officer-involved shooting resulting in the death of an unarmed civilian. The Attorney General is the state prosecutor unless otherwise specified or named”
There were 31 open investigations into the shootings of unarmed people as of Wednesday, but it’s impossible to know what percentage that represents of the total number of calls the department has received.
But sometimes a lot hinges on the definition of “unarmed.” The Justice Department may opt not to investigate a case if it determines the person killed was, in fact, armed in some way. For example, if the slain person was in a car, the deputy attorney general making the call might determine that person was using the car in a manner that constituted potential deadly force.
In any event, when the Justice Department doesn’t take a case, it also hasn’t been publishing an explanation as to why.
The review process for the shooting of unarmed people is public record, and the Justice Department has maintained a page recording the names and locations of the people shot and the officers suspected of shooting them.
Failing to report the original calls from law enforcement agencies — whether the person they shot was unarmed or not — makes analyzing the decision-making by the Justice Department more difficult. This was, after all, a law enacted in the wake of the George Floyd shooting to create a layer of state oversight.
For instance, there were 31 open investigations into the shootings of unarmed people as of Wednesday, but it’s impossible to know what percentage that represents of the total number of calls the department has received. They have logged at least 66 total calls since July 1, 2021.
The legislation creating the program to investigate deadly police shootings does not explicitly mandate how the Justice Department will maintain records. The Justice Department told CalMatters that the program’s operations are up to them.
“Oh it’s absolutely troubling, but I’m just a lawyer, I’m not the family who lost a loved one,” said Izaak Schwaiger, an attorney representing the family of Pelaez Chavez in a federal lawsuit against the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and the deputy who shot him. “And for those folks out there who are relying on some oversight … to just get turned a cold shoulder like this is indefensible, and it’s a misapplication of the attorney general’s duty under the law.”
In that case, even the Sonoma County District Attorney has complained that the state Justice Department needed to be more transparent about its decision to not investigate.
The two authors of the original bill creating the program refused to comment on the way the Justice Department has been handling cases. One is Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, the Sacramento Democrat whose spokesperson said he would soon introduce legislation expanding the Justice Department’s mandate to investigate all deaths at the hands of law enforcement. The other is Attorney General Rob Bonta, a former legislator who now heads the Justice Department.
Other legislators heavily involved with policing also refused to comment. A spokesperson for Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat and chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, said he would issue a statement, then stopped returning calls and text messages.
No one, it seemed, wanted to talk: A number of the groups who were registered supporters of the original legislation creating the Justice Department program didn’t return calls or emails from CalMatters, or declined to comment. One person who wouldn’t be quoted by name said that the groups worried that publicizing each call from a law enforcement agency would make the agencies less likely to report their shootings in the future.
“There should be some record, a digital record, that a telephone call was made,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. “Incoming and outgoing calls, even if it’s only to record … the fact that a call was made should be (available). I mean, my cell phone bill has a record. Every call that came in and out of my cell phone, that’s a record that exists. I can’t believe that the state doesn’t have a similar record.”
Shot shoeless in a creek
One of the calls the Justice Department chose not to investigate came from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.
At about 7:30 a.m. on July 29, Sonoma County dispatchers took a call about a man breaking a house’s window with a rock. Deputies found 36-year-old David Pelaez Chavez in a hilly area and tried to communicate with him in Spanish, according to body camera footage released by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.
The deputies did not tell Pelaez Chavez in Spanish to drop the hammer and tiller he was holding in one hand, and the rock he held in the other. As he bent over, standing shoeless in a creek, a deputy shot and killed him.
A screenshot from body-camera footage of the fatal deputy-involved shooting of David Pelaez-Chavez in Geyserville on July 29, 2022 shows Pelaez-Chavez (left) as he is confronted by Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputies. Screenshot via YouTube
In a Sept. 7 letter to Bonta, Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch questioned the lack of transparency after the state turned down a potential investigation, noting:”It would be helpful to have a written explanation of how the determination was made to decline participation in the investigation…”
“I was concerned that the decision had been made without enough evidence and it was a little preliminary given the situation,” Ravitch told the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa.
CalMatters has found that the Justice Department has struggled to meet the goals set by the police shooting law — including the attorney general’s own pledge to complete investigations in one year. Internal emails indicate that Justice Department employees were worried that the new workload would overwhelm them. Department officials also have complained that the Legislature slashed in half their original $26 million budget request to cover these investigations.
Police shootings are politically charged, and Schwaiger, the plaintiff’s attorney in the Sonoma County case, said the lack of funding means Bonta’s office has less time and fewer resources to investigate cases with little upside to the department: Push for charges against police officers and you’ll enrage one set of constituents; fail to bring charges and you’ll upset a different set of voters.
“There’s no more labor intensive investigation that can be done than the investigation of a police officer involved in some kind of a killing,” Schwaigert said. “And there might be something to the fact that they don’t have the manpower or the money to do it.
“I think their earlier position upon the adoption of this law was that they’ll make it work, no matter what. The truth is, they haven’t.”
Investigations into police shootings of unarmed people throughout California begin when the law enforcement agency itself calls in the shooting to a Los Angeles-based 24-hour call center — these are the calls that the Justice Department has just started tracking.
The call center contacts an agent at the Department of Justice, who then confers with department attorneys into whether the incident could qualify as a fatal shooting of an unarmed person.
If the Justice Department agent finds there is enough cause, the department will send a Deputy Attorney General to the scene of the shooting. This had happened 49 times as of Jan. 16. After processing the scene, Justice Department attorneys then decide whether to take up the case.
###
CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
