Ochoa Bogh, a Redlands Republican, wrote to Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, asking them to issue “expedited work permits to the millions of undocumented immigrants who are considered essential workers, such as farmworkers who provide critical services.” 

The effort marks a shift for Ochoa Bogh, who had long viewed immigration as a federal matter.

“For years I did not want to address immigration, and now I feel compelled to,” she told CalMatters. 

Republican Assemblymembers Leticia Castillo of Corona and Greg Wallis of Rancho Mirage, along with Republican and Democratic lawmakers from Southern California and the Central Valley, signed her letter urging a solution for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. including 2.5 million in California.

Some California Republicans have been trying to open lines of communication between the state and the White House. Last month Senator Suzette Martinez Valladares, a Santa Clarita Republican, asked Trump to focus immigration action on violent criminals and modernize the immigration process, in a letter with other Republican lawmakers including Ochoa Bogh.

“We need to advocate on the need for immigration reform and really talk about the issues that impact California,” Ochoa Bogh said. “I’m not sure that Democrats are actually communicating with the federal government.”

Trying to bridge that gap has been complicated by immigration raids that sparked conflict between California leaders and the Trump administration.

Protestors clashed with ICE agents and National Guard troops in Los Angeles last month. Perris Mayor Michael Vargas urged residents to stay inside following reports of ICE operations in the Riverside County city. And immigration enforcement on church property in San Bernardino County prompted Bishop Alberto Rojas to absolve parishioners from obligation to attend mass if they fear immigration action.

Restaurants throughout the state are closing temporarily as their workers and customers avoid immigration raids, CalMatters reported. ICE raids have ‘left crops rotting” on farms from Texas to California. 

“The system is broken,” Paul Granillo, President and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, told CalMatters. “So we need to look at how people get their vegetables, how people get served in restaurants, and look at construction, and appreciate that unless we have immigration reform, the average Californian is going to pay more for all these goods and services, because we don’t have enough workers.”

The fallout to farms, restaurants, hotels and home-building has prompted Trump to waver between plans for mass deportations and possible concessions to employers. 

Some federal lawmakers see an opening. Congressmembers Mike Levin, a San Juan Capistrano Democrat, and Youn Kim, an Anaheim Hills Republican, proposed a federal reform package called the Dignity Act of 2025, which would provide a path to legal status for immigrant workers. Ochoa Bogh said she’s trying to build support for the bill in Sacramento.

The U.S. has offered various work visas and permits over the last century. The Bracero program, started during WW II, recruited Mexican workers to help on farms and other war industries. The H-2 Visa program of 1952 allowed foreign farmworkers to hold temporary jobs in agriculture.

Ochoa Bogh’s parents and grandparents worked under the Bracero program, so she relates to immigrants who are seeking jobs: “I have compassion and empathy for that heart.” 

Guestworker visas expanded with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which also provided amnesty for established residents. In 1990, Congress added H-1B visas for skilled temporary workers, in a program that’s still widely used in the tech industry.

An effective work permit program should match foreign workers to labor market needs, Granillo said: “If you limit the number to smaller than the needs of the workforce, people are still going to come here, but will come illegally or overstay their visa.”

Stalled efforts to update those programs have left the country with an “outdated, slow-moving immigration system,” Ochoa Bogh wrote.

Fixing that would benefit employers, while protecting workers from unsafe work conditions and unfair pay, she said: “So that we’re able to have those folks stay here, and not work in the shadows. So that they are not subject to exploitation.”

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A New York jury deliberated for 9½ hours over two days before convicting Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

After the verdict, California’s Republican leaders quickly cast doubt on the verdict’s legitimacy and argued it would boost Trump’s chances of reelection in November.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said that Trump’s “only ‘crime’ is running against Joe Biden in 2024.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the California Republican Party, said the prosecution was “a politically motivated case brought by a far-left district attorney” and that the guilty verdict “never should have happened.”

San Diego-area Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) called the verdict and the trial “a disgrace.”

Democrats, by contrast, praised the verdict as proof of the American legal system functioning as it should. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for Senate, said that “the rule of law prevailed” despite Trump’s efforts to “distract, delay and deny.”

In California’s most hotly contested congressional races, though, few wanted to publicly tangle with the question of Trump’s conviction.

Representatives for Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach), Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita), David Valadao (R-Hanford) and John Duarte (R-Modesto) did not return requests for comment. Nor did representatives for Matt Gunderson, who is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) in coastal Orange and San Diego counties, or Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln, who is running against Rep. Josh Harder (D-Tracy) in the Central Valley.

A representative for Republican Steve Garvey, who is running for Senate against Schiff, said he had no comment on the verdict.

One exception was Scott Baugh, who is running to flip the coastal Orange County seat held by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine). Baugh, the former chair of the Orange County GOP, characterized Trump’s trial as a political prosecution and said the verdict “should surprise no one.”

“A politically motivated prosecutor and a hostile judge set the trial up for so many prejudicial errors,” Baugh said in a prepared statement. “President Trump will have his opportunity to appeal and I am confident that a fair hearing will expose and resolve these issues.”

And longtime Riverside Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who is fighting to retain his once-safe seat in a now-competitive swing district, said in a statement on Thursday evening that Trump’s prosecution was political — but his comment was more muted than the loudest GOP voices.

Calvert said that Americans who believe that “justice should be blind to politics” should be “concerned” by the trial’s outcome. He continued: “It’s alarming that our criminal justice system continues to be taken advantage of by partisan prosecutors who want to use the power of their office to influence our democratic elections.”

Whether to lock arms with Trump has been a fraught question for Republicans in California for nearly a decade, but especially this year. Republicans hold such a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that a handful of hyper-competitive races in the Golden State could determine which party controls the chamber. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated 10 California races as competitive.

Remaining silent on the verdict makes sense for Republicans in those competitive battleground districts, said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.

“You’ll notice that the loudest voices supporting Trump on this tend to be Republicans in very safe seats,” Schnur said. “Candidates who need to reach swing voters don’t have that luxury.”

One challenge for candidates, said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, is that partisan allegiances determine how voters viewed the trial.

Polling has found that Democrats overwhelmingly saw the trial as fair, while only a tiny percentage of Republicans agreed. Independents were evenly split. A Trump-like message about a rigged, unfair trial that might resonate with a candidate’s Republican base could also turn off independents, Kousser said.

“Anyone trying to win a November race in a competitive district needs to worry about both mobilizing their base through more Trump-like rhetoric, but also the cost of alienating the middle,” he said.

Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist who isn’t involved in any congressional races, said that while the verdict can be used as a tool by both parties to turn out voters in November, it’s a “touchy subject.”

“You may have independents in congressional seats who are indifferent to the verdict, but don’t necessarily want to see Republican incumbents defending Trump or decrying the verdict,” Stutzman said.

But Shawn Steel, who represents California on the Republican National Committee and is married to Steel, of Orange County, said the verdict will have “absolutely no impact” on California’s House races.

“The White House got the verdict they planned years ago,” Steel said. “The Manhattan jurors who convicted Trump did it out of malice and hate. Today’s verdict, along with the not-guilty verdict of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, proved the steep decline of trust in the American criminal justice.”

Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney who also represents California on the Republican National Committee and whose law firm represents the Trump campaign, said Californians are more concerned with quality-of-life issues, such as homelessness, crime and illegal immigration than they are with the trial.

“People are fed up,” she said. “People are much more motivated in this election to vote because things are getting bad here in California.”

While California Republican House candidates were largely quiet, some of their allies in other states, such as Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake and vice presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, were not.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”

The Biden campaign said Thursday’s verdict showed that the law applied to everyone, but warned that the only way to keep Trump out of the White House is voting in November.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on Day One’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.”

In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Democrats seized upon 23 vulnerable House Republicans who had endorsed the former president, including Duarte, Garcia, Calvert and Steel.

“House Republicans have continued to put Donald Trump first and the American people last,” said Courtney Rice, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Their districts deserve better than their cult-like adherence to a wannabe dictator. Each and every one of them should rescind their endorsement, but won’t.”

Trump’s trial, which began in April in New York City, was one of four felony cases that Trump was facing, though it was thought to be the only one likely to see a trial before the November election.

The verdict hinged on whether Trump falsified business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment that Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and, later, a witness for the prosecution — made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade prior.

Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg had to convince the jury that Trump not only commanded Cohen to make the payments, but that he did so in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, rather than to shield his family from the story. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the sexual encounter with Daniels; Cohen testified that he had been deeply involved in the scheme.

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Days after former President Trump’s advisors successfully convinced California Republicans to change the rules of the state’s GOP primary, his campaign confirmed Tuesday that he will visit the state next month.

Trump will speak at a luncheon on Friday, Sept. 29, at the California Republican Party’s fall convention in Anaheim.

“President Trump is looking forward to seeing California Republicans at their state convention and is confident of overwhelming success in the upcoming March primary,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign.

Other GOP presidential candidates are expected to speak at the convention. State Republican Party officials did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.

The state’s primary, which is scheduled to take place on March 5 with more than a dozen other states on “Super Tuesday,” is expected to draw significant attention because California’s 169 GOP delegates are the most of any state in the nation.

As protesters howled outside, the state party’s executive committee on Saturday altered how these delegates will be awarded. The state party had to overhaul its bylaws to comply with national GOP rules. But party leaders also chose a delegate-allocation plan backed by Trump’s campaign that angered backers of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who believe the California GOP deliberately undermined his presidential aspirations.

Under the new rules, if a Republican presidential candidate receives more than 50% of the statewide vote, he or she will receive all of the state’s 169 delegates. If no candidate reaches the benchmark, delegates will be awarded proportionally based on the statewide vote.

For much of the past two decades, delegates have been awarded by congressional district, which would allow candidates who don’t have the deep pockets to advertise in California’s expensive media markets to surgically target swaths of the state to collect delegates.

But now that the California GOP’s executive committee has changed the rules, party insiders expect the state’s primary — which many observers anticipated would be exciting and competitive — to closely mirror national polling.

California has not had a competitive Republican presidential nominating contest for decades. However, Trump’s appearance at the state party’s 2016 gathering in the Bay Area drew hordes of liberal protesters. The then-candidate had to clamber over a concrete barrier off the freeway and enter the convention site through a back door because protesters overwhelmed police in riot gear at the Burlingame hotel where the convention was taking place.

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