Tag: california

California Gets 80% Of All Federal Cash For Illegal Immigrant Families: Report

California is home to the lion’s share of illegal immigrant families in the United States with children who received federal welfare assistance in 2024, according to a federal report published on June 10.

More than 80 percent of all nationwide cash assistance allocated to such households was spent in California. The report tracked $759 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) spent in 2024 on families headed by a parent living in the country illegally.

In those cases, the child qualified for federal welfare, even though the parent was excluded from the federal program because of immigration status.

“These cases receive relatively little public attention, yet … data show that they are far from a negligible part of the program,” wrote authors David Swegle, director of the Office of Family Assistance at the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Alex J. Adams, assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, in the report.

Nationally, the federal government paid 85,000 households with qualifying children receiving assistance who were living with their illegal immigrant parents in the U.S. in 2024.

“Although the benefit is formally paid on behalf of the child, it still supports a household that includes an immigration-status-ineligible parent,” the authors stated. “The significance of these cases therefore cannot be judged solely by the fact that the adult is not the formal recipient.”

The cases are also significant because they don’t have to adhere to the TANF rules requiring work expectations, such as regularly applying for jobs, and the payments aren’t limited to the federal 60-month lifetime limit, according to the report. The illegal immigrant families, therefore, can receive federal welfare until the child turns 18 years old.

Low-income American families are held to the federal welfare restrictions that require work participation and are restricted to a 60-month lifetime limit, the authors said.

The number of TANF cases involving an illegal immigrant parent reached nearly 850,000—or 10 percent of all cases—in 2024, up from nearly 6 percent in 2001.

Keep reading

These Are The Six States Celebrating America 250 By Raising Your Gas Tax

The final countdown for America’s 250th birthday is on. Families will be planning road trips, parades, vacations, reunions, and cookouts to celebrate the greatest nation in history. But in six states, politicians have a different idea for the party: raise taxes.

Beginning July 1, drivers in California, Washington, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Mississippi are scheduled to see higher state gas taxes. In other words, as the country prepares to celebrate casting aside a tax-heavy king in favor of freedom, these states will use the occasion to fatten government coffers one gallon at a time.

The worst offenders will be no surprise. California, Washington and Illinois  — we’ll call them the Axis of Glut.

Their governors are often the first to fake outrage when gas prices rise. They blame oil companies. They blame “price gouging.” They blame world events. They blame everyone except the politicians who keep piling taxes, mandates, and regulations onto every gallon drivers buy.

Yet these same states already have some of the worst gas prices in the nation, some of the highest gas taxes in America, and now they are getting ready to raise those taxes again.

California’s gas tax is already the highest in the country and is scheduled to climb again on July 1, from 61.2 cents to 63.4 cents per gallon, under the state’s annual inflation adjustment. The same report noted California’s average price for regular gasoline was nearly $6 per gallon in early June.

Illinois is no better. The state says its motor fuel tax will rise on July 1 because the law requires an annual inflation adjustment. Washington joined the club with a gas tax increase last year and then baked in automatic increases going forward. Starting July 1, 2026, the state’s fuel tax rises by 2% every year unless lawmakers change the law.

This is the dirty hustle behind inflation-indexed taxes. Politicians get to raise taxes without holding a press conference to admitting it. They pass the law once, then every year drivers get mugged by a formula.

As of June 8, the national average for regular gas was $4.164, down 38.2 cents in a single month. That is welcome relief for families, workers, small businesses and anyone trying to get through summer. But the national average would look even better if it were not being anchored down by tax-heavy states that treat drivers like a rolling ATM.

The problem is not limited to the six July 1 tax-hike states. Seven of the ten most expensive states for gas are run by Democratic governors. That is not a coincidence.

Taxes play a major role in the high-price reputation of many of these states. So do their regulatory regimes, special fuel rules, anti-energy policies and climate mandates that make fuel harder to produce, refine, transport and sell.

The result is predictable.

Families, small businesses, truckers, and farmers all pay more. Then the same politicians who helped drive up the cost pretend they are shocked by the bill.

That is not compassion. That is government gluttony.

Supporters claim the money goes to roads and infrastructure. But that excuse only goes so far. Every tax increase is sold as necessary. Yet somehow the burden always lands in the same place: on the people who drive to work, school, church, the grocery store or a summer vacation.

That is what makes the timing so perfect, and so insulting.

America’s 250th birthday should be a celebration of freedom, independence and the rejection of government overreach. The American Revolution was born from the idea that people should not be treated as endless revenue sources for rulers who never seem to have enough.

Nearly 250 years later, millions of drivers will pull into gas stations in California, Washington, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Mississippi and get a reminder that some politicians still have not learned the lesson.

The country is moving toward a better energy future: lower prices, more production, more reliability and less punishment for the people who keep America moving. But these six states are choosing a different path.

America 250 should remind us why this country was born: because free people eventually get tired of being treated like revenue.

Keep reading

4 California School Districts Under DoJ Review Over Gender Ideology, Sex Ed Policies

Four California public school districts face federal inquiries into whether their policies and practices regarding instruction on sexual orientation and gender ideology violate students’ civil rights.

The districts under Justice Department review are all in Northern California, with three in Monterey County—Graves Elementary School District, Santa Rita Union School District, and Soledad Unified School District—as well as San Francisco Unified School District. Their students range from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

The reviews will determine whether the districts notify parents of their right to opt their children out of instruction on sexual orientation and gender ideology, also known as SOGI, and whether district practices align with federal protections against sex discrimination.

“This Department of Justice will not tolerate local school authorities trampling on the rights of parents concerning the education of their children,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division said in a June 8 statement.

“The Supreme Court’s recent decisions in ‘Mahmoud’ and ‘Mirabelli’ have put all school districts on notice: policies that keep parents in the dark about sexuality and gender ideology in the classroom must end now.”

California law mandates sex education to encompass these topics, and state provisions give parents the right to opt their children out of the instruction on these subjects, either entirely or in part.

The San Francisco Unified School District has previously told its teachers that neither parental permission nor notification is needed to teach or discuss SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) topics in the classroom.

In addition, SOGI topics “appear to be embedded in California’s social studies and history classes,” according to the DOJ statement.

The reviews will also cover policies permitting access to single-sex intimate spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms, in addition to girls’ sports teams, based on a student’s perceived gender identity rather than sex. The Justice Department will decide whether these policies are in compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The four districts all receive federal taxpayer funding, subjecting them to Title IX’s prohibitions on sex discrimination in education programs and activities.

The department will evaluate whether the districts have enacted changes in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Mirabelli v. Bonta.

“Plaintiffs alleged that California’s policies permitted disclosure of a student’s gender transitioning at school only if the student consented,” the ruling states.

“Plaintiffs claimed that these policies violated their rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“We conclude that the parents who seek religious exemptions are likely to succeed on the merits of their Free Exercise Clause claim.”

Keep reading

California Marijuana Regulators Unveil New AI Tool To Prevent Product Packaging That May Appeal To Kids

California cannabis regulators are rolling out a new AI tool to help businesses identify marijuana product packaging may appeal to kids in violation of state rules.

The Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) on Monday announced that licensees can now utilize a Cannabis Product Image Analyzer (CPIA) that was developed to aid in preventing the market launch of potentially problematic packaging that violates state statute by enticing minors.

Marijuana business licensees can “simply snap a photo using their smart phone or mobile device, screenshot or any other supported file format and upload to the CPIA tool,” DCC said. “The image will be analyzed and provide a summary of its findings.”

DCC said it won’t retain images uploaded to the CPIA database, or the summaries of findings that it produces. Rather, the goal is to “assist licensees in their independent evaluation of whether packaging or labeling may be attractive to children.”

That includes packaging and labels that depict:

  • Images of minors or anyone under 21 years of age
  • Cartoons
  • A likeness to images, characters, or phrases that are popularly used to advertise to children
  • Images that are any imitation of candy packaging or labeling and
  • Images with the terms “candy” or “candies” or variants in spelling such as “kandy” or “kandeez”

“The CPIA uses artificial intelligence technology to review images submitted by a user to identify issues that may indicate attractiveness to children for further evaluation,” DCC said in a notice. “The CPIA may not identify all concerns an image may present, or that the Department may find attractive to children.”

Regulators stressed that licensees should not “rely on the CPIA’s output, as it does not establish definitively whether advertising or marketing violates” state rules. And if the tool finds that an uploaded image is likely compliant, that alone “does not preclude a finding by the Department or a factfinder in a disciplinary or administrative action from determining the uploaded image violates the regulation.”

“Because artificial intelligence systems evolve, update, or produce variable outputs, the CPIA’s evaluation may change from day to day, even when reviewing the same image. The quality, clarity, angle, lighting, or completeness of an image uploaded by a user may affect the CPIA’s review and assessment. Users are solely responsible for ensuring uploaded images accurately depict the product’s labeling.”

Cannabis licensees are being encouraged to provide feedback on the AI tool through an online survey.

Keep reading

California Was a Paradise, Then Newsom Happened

People talk about the California disaster, but I don’t think we fully appreciate the severity and the manifestations of it. And the best barometer to discover that is how many people are leaving. It’s estimated that somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Californians left in ’25, ’26. 

Now, the problem with that is they’re not leaving a barren state. They’re not leaving a cold Alaska. They’re leaving the most beautiful state in the country that for years under a bipartisan system of Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and to some extent Arnold Schwarzenegger, it had wonderful governance. 

So, why are they leaving? Why have 11 to 12 million people, a quarter of the present population, left California?  

Well, the Reason Foundation just did a comprehensive study of all the roads in all the states and ranked them according to congestion, quality of roads, bridges, everything. California was 49th, 49th in the country. 

In terms of school scores, it’s down to about 40 to 41 in the nation, even though it’s 13th in the amount of money it spends. It’s got one-third of all the homeless people, maybe up to nearly a half in some studies.  

It’s got a third of all the welfare recipients. Twenty-two percent of the people live below the poverty line. 

Think of this. It has the highest gasoline taxes in the nation and the highest gas prices, and that’s a combination. It refuses to tap its considerable fifth-in-the-nation oil and natural gas reserves to the full extent that it could. 

It shut down the timber industry. It shut down the mining industry. 

So, we’re paying because of our green fanaticism on oil blends, and we’ve been driving out oil refineries, and we have these high taxes. 

We’re paying $7 to $8 a gallon right now for gas. We have the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. Only Hawaii has it higher. Think of that.  

We have some of the highest property crime rates in the country. San Francisco, until recently, was the highest property crime rate city per capita in the nation. 

Our sales tax is among the top 10. We have the highest income taxes. Now, we know why this is the problem.  

We know why, why this all happened. We haven’t had a Republican governor in nearly 20 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger left. We have no statewide offices that are Republican, no attorney general, no lieutenant governor, no state controller, nothing. 

We have 52 seats in the Congress. We only have seven, you know, it’s like 12% … We only have seven Republican congressmen, and yet Donald Trump almost got 30%, 40% of the vote. So, we have less than a third of what we should be proportionally represented in Congress.  

All of the state and local judges, after 20 years of governance by left-wing [officials], are left-wing themselves. 

So, the judicial, the executive, and the legislative branches are all one party, supermajorities in both legislatures. No statewide officer that’s a Republican.  

What do you do about it? Well, who is the iconic victim? Who has been at the center of this maelstrom for the last 30 years? One man, Gavin Newsom. 

Keep reading

FOX News Contributor Guy Benson Responds to Sunny Hostin’s Claim That it’s ‘Not Possible’ for California to Count All the Votes in One Night: ‘WHAT?’ 

Sunny Hostin of ‘The View’ is one of the latest media figures to defend California for taking days or even weeks to count all of the votes in their elections. During a recent broadcast of the show, Hostin said that it’s just ‘not possible’ to count all of the votes in one night.

Her comments are absolutely absurd.

California used to count all of the votes in one night all the time. It only takes a long time now because California has completely changed the rules and allows the counting of mail-in ballots for days after an election, a process that makes it possible for the Democrats to win almost every single time.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

FARAH GRIFFIN: Florida has a lot of mail-in and they get their results the same night. It makes people feel like, ‘oh, there’s something off,’ but it’s not. It’s how their rules are, they’re dumb rules.

[Crosstalk]

HOSTIN: I feel the exact opposite. I think if someone is taking their time to count the votes, I think if someone is looking at every single thing, because in California, it’s the most populous state. We all know that. (…) And so, it does take a long time to be right, to do it well.

FARAH GRIFFIN: Why can Florida do it right in one night though?

HOSTIN: I don’t think you can do it when you have 23 million registered voters! It’s just not possible!

Keep reading

Calif.: Man pleads guilty to ‘doxing’ ICE lawyer

A California man pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge for doxing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyer.

According to a Friday press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Gregory Curcio, 68 years old, shared personal information about an ICE attorney on social media.

The office defined doxing as “publishing private or identifying information about an individual on the internet with malicious intent.”

“In February 2025, Curcio created a Facebook post in which he identified the victim — an ICE attorney — as an ICE agent, posted her home address, and directed others to ‘swat’ her at that address,” the release stated.

“Curcio also posted the victim’s home address on another social media account with instructions to swat her,” it continued.

It noted that “swatting” is a form of harassment that often includes a false emergency call being made that is meant to provoke a “significant” response from law enforcement.

According to previously filed court documents, the victim said Curcio was a former resident at her mother’s apartment building in Santa Monica, California, per the release.

“The victim said she never met Curcio, but that he had harassed and threatened her mother for years and engaged in a campaign to harass the victim and her family beginning from at least January, 2024,” the office stated.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for August 21st, and Curcio could face up to five years in federal prison.

Keep reading

Nick Shirley Tracks Down a ‘126-Year-Old California Voter’ With Record of 51 Elections — What He Found Raises Serious Questions About State Voter Rolls

This is the Democrat Party’s idea of “secure” elections in their one-party utopia.

Investigative reporter Nick Shirley — the same journalist whose explosive February 2026 video we reported on here at The Gateway Pundit — knocking on doors and exposing the rotting corpse of the state’s Democrat-controlled election system, and the latest clip is pure fire.

Meet Doris. She lives in California. According to the California Secretary of State’s own voter rolls, she is 126 years old and has cast ballots in 51 elections.

There’s just one small problem.

Doris is not 126 years old. She was born in 1940. That makes her roughly 86 years old. She’s never voted in 51 elections. And when Nick Shirley showed up at her door to ask about it, she was stunned.

Nick Shirley and his team went straight to the address listed on the official rolls to confirm what the Democrat-run bureaucracy is hiding.

Keep reading

The Facts About the California Primary and Its Lack of Integrity

As always, the media says Republicans are spreading conspiracy theories about the California primaries. However, there are many documented reasons to distrust California’s election system.

California held its statewide primary on June 2, 2026. Under the state’s top-two jungle primary system, adopted in 2010 and in use since 2011, the two highest vote-getters in any primary advance to the general election regardless of party, meaning the November ballot can feature two democrat candidates with no republicans.

In the 2026 governor’s race, that scenario remains live. Republican Steve Hilton leads Democrat Tom Steyer by less than half a percentage point for the second spot, with roughly one-third of ballots still uncounted.

California voters could arrive at the polls in November and find two Democrats, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, and no Republican.

The level of support currently shown for a Republican candidate in California is itself unusual and suggests that many Californians are growing weary of Democratic leadership.

Apart from the top-two system, Republicans point to numerous concrete facts to support their claims that California elections are vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

California does not require voters to show identification at the polls in most circumstances, and a 2024 state law signed by Gov. Newsom prohibits local governments from imposing their own ID requirements.

Keep reading

Female player promised full ride to San Jose State for volleyball stuck with full-year tuition bills after trans player takes her spot

Former San Jose State volleyball player Elle Patterson was promised a full athletic scholarship that was not fully honored to her, as her transgender-identifying biological male teammate continued to receive his scholarship.

Patterson was originally committed to Fairfield University on a full athletic scholarship before following her recruiting coach, Todd Kress, to San Jose State. She said she was told she would again receive a full scholarship offer.

“I had a phone call with Todd and he said, ‘yes, it will be a full ride again,'” Patterson explained to Fox News. “I was an out-of-state kid, so I didn’t want to have to be paying a lot for my school when I went somewhere to get it paid for. So he confirmed that to me verbally.”

Patterson, however, never actually saw that money from the scholarship. Her family was forced to pay out-of-pocket for her freshman year as she played back-up for a transgender-identifying teammate. Her family wasn’t prepared for the financial burden, but they made it work with the belief that the scholarship would take effect next year. Patterson said Kress told her, “We will not be covering your first year. But we will be covering your last three.”

But when the first year ended, she never received the scholarship. Patterson then claimed that as she continued to play, she realized Kress wasn’t who she thought he was.

“He didn’t seem like the type of coach and the person who recruited me when he was actually coaching at San Jose,” Patterson said. “The way in which he went about certain situations and just playing was more along the lines of just completely tearing you down as a person and not building you back up. But it definitely felt like he had certain people, one being the man on our team, that he would have done anything for… but it didn’t feel like he had the support and belief in some of the other girls on our team.”

Patterson said she was then told she wouldn’t receive her scholarship and was told it was due to an injury that required her to miss a few games.

“We go through the entire season. I get to my end-of-the-year meeting with them. And that is when I was sitting in the office with him and the assistant coach at the time and they said that they weren’t going to give me a scholarship anymore,” Patterson said.

“They tried to say that it was because of [my injury]. And because I wasn’t like back to where I had been before.”

However, trans-identifying teammate Blaire Fleming, who was also injured and missed even more games than Paterson, was able to keep his scholarship, according to the Department of Education’s written findings of its Title IX investigation into SJSU in 2025 and 2026.

Keep reading