September 2025 Updates

As heat soars in the Inland Empire, a community group steps up to save lives. From CAL Matters, Deborah Brennan

As the Inland Empire braces for an extreme heat warning this week, a community group is helping residents in the hottest parts of the desert manage scorching weather. The nonprofit Comité Civico del Valle has distributed air purifiers, air conditioning devices and water purifiers to families living around the Salton Sea, through a weather resilience program that GoFundMe.org launched.

“This program’s about fairness, safety and dignity for our residents,” Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comité Civico del Valle said at a press conference last week. “It’s not just about handing out equipment. It’s about making sure that vulnerable residents, especially seniors, people with health conditions and low-income families are not left behind when extreme heat strikes.” The National Weather Service is warning of extreme weather conditions in inland desert areas this week, with temperatures forecast at 106 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Weather conditions, it stated, will be “dangerously hot” and pose a “major heat risk” of illnesses including heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

But triple digit temperatures are the norm in summer for desert communities in eastern Riverside and Imperial County. And aging homes aren’t equipped to protect against those conditions. Many families live in mobile homes, including old, aluminum trailers without insulation that are “like being inside a can,” said Esther Bejarano, director of health programs for the organization. “Imagine living inside that trailer where it’s 30, 40 years old, and you have a non-working inside window unit… to cool the house,” she said.

In 2022 Imperial County had more than 100 heat-related emergency room visits per 100,000 residents: the highest rate in the state. Last year the county recorded 196 heat-related medical incidents, including 11 deaths. This year so far it has reported 65 illnesses and no deaths. Neighboring Riverside County, which also includes parts of the Salton Sea, recorded 1,627 emergency room visits and 65 deaths due to heat-related illness in 2024 and 550 heat-related emergency department visits and two deaths this year.

GoFundMe.org introduced a pilot program to reduce those risks. It provided half a million dollars to Comité Civico del Valle to provide the devices to people who lacked air filtration or cooling systems, or couldn’t afford to use them. “I knew people who lived in manufactured homes, which they called trailers. They had to go to the Circle K, the Arco, or the public library, to get cooled off, because they didn’t have air conditioning,” said Rodrigo Palma, a 72-year-old Brawley resident, who received help through the program.

The goal was to provide 100 families with updated cooling systems. So far the program has installed 72 cooling systems, 389 air purifiers and four reverse osmosis water filters, said Amanda Brown Lehrman, executive director of GoFundMe.org.“While these interventions do not replace the need for systemic change, they do provide families with tools to protect their health and manage the everyday challenges a little bit more faithfully and a little bit more affordably,” Lehrman said.

The weather resilience program hit some snags, Bejarano said. The cooling systems, called mini-split air conditioning units, are ductless systems designed to cool individual rooms quickly and efficiently, she said. “They’ve been very popular and sales have skyrocketed, because people cannot afford to turn on the AC if they do have one to cool the entire house,” she said. But contractors hired to install them found that permits cost as much as $900 per unit, she said. “We’ve had a lot of hurdles with the very high cost of permits for these homes and families that need it the most,” she said. “That’s something we need to do some policy work on.”

Newsom deploys ‘crime suppression’ teams statewide while mocking Trump’s threats. From CAL Matters, Alexei Koseff

As he publicly mocks concerns that crime in California is out of control, Gov. Gavin Newsom is also surging law enforcement resources across the state. Newsom announced Thursday [August 28] that he would deploy new “crime suppression” teams of California Highway Patrol officers to partner with local officials in six regions: San Diego, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, the Central Valley, Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s an escalation of a strategy that Newsom has already tried in cities such as Oakland and Bakersfield, sending in state officers to assist with cracking down on retail theft, stolen vehicles and drug dealing. And it appears closely related to political considerations, as President Donald Trump ramps up threats of military action to “clean up” Democratic-led cities across the country. During a press conference in his executive office overlooking the state Capitol, where he was flanked by high-ranking CHP officials, Newsom held up flyers showcasing Republican politicians whose states have higher murder rates than California. “Perhaps the president could deploy the National Guard in every corner of Mississippi. The murder rate’s out of control there. Carnage,” Newsom said. “This is if they care about the issues of crime and violence.

Crime has again become a hot-button national topic. Earlier this month, Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. and took control of its local police force, arguing that federal intervention was needed because of unsafe conditions in the city — though reports of violent offenses are at their lowest in three decades. Since then, Trump has publicly mulled expanding the operation into numerous other cities that he claims Democrats have destroyed, including San Francisco and Oakland. Newsom has denounced the idea on social media and in interviews, referring to it on Thursday as “authoritarian.”

Newsom and Trump are also in the midst of an ongoing struggle over the president’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines into Los Angeles earlier this summer to quell fierce protests against immigration enforcement. The governor sued to stop what he alleges was an illegal military action, and though most of the troops have since been demobilized, a potentially precedent-setting case is still ongoing. This latest “crime suppression” program provides Newsom an opportunity to get ahead of Trump and show that California is already taking action with an approach that the governor claims is highly effective. Last year, CHP officers made more than 9,000 arrests, recovered nearly 5,800 stolen vehicles and confiscated more than 400 firearms in Bakersfield, Oakland and San Bernardino, according to the governor’s office. The announcement touted a 34% decrease in homicides and a 25% reduction in robberies in Oakland in 2024, while shootings in Bakersfield dropped to their lowest since before the coronavirus pandemic. “Whatever the crime is, when we come in and do just enforcement that leads to good police work, that crime goes down,” CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said during the press conference.

Magnus Lofstrom, who researches crime for the Public Policy Institute of California, said it’s plausible that strategy contributed to lower crime, though it’s hard to attribute it as the main reason. Among the eight largest cities in California, which include Oakland, three saw slight increases in violent and property crime rates last year, while San Francisco experienced a drop on par with Oakland. “It’s difficult to pinpoint any specific factor that’s behind them,” he said in an interview. Duryee said the new “crime suppression” teams would be at least 12 to 15 officers and focus on problems flagged by local officials, which could include illegal street racing and open-air drug markets.

Newsom denied that the expansion was a reaction to Trump. He said his administration was “trying to be responsive to the people we serve,” who want to see more done. “You still have people whose cars are broken into. You still have crimes being committed. You still have murders,” he said. “I’m not arguing to defend the status quo. Quite the contrary. We think we can do better still.”