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CLEARER and more dry conditions will settle across the area this weekend with some particularly cold mornings with lows near freezing. Conditions will slightly warm and moisten next week with increasing chances of wetting rain late in the week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): An overcast 46F this Friday morning on the coast. Mostly sunny they say thru the weekend. Currently we are looking at some showers next Wednesday but the forecast keeps changing so stay tuned weather fans.
THE UKIAH HIGH SCHOOL Varsity Cheer team captured top honors at the JAMZ Cheer and Dance Cali Championship last weekend, Ukiah Unified School District officials announced.
LOCAL SEED EXCHANGES ~ Bring Seeds ~ Take Seeds
- Sat, January 31 - Laytonville Book Shop (Old HS) 12-3 (Long Valley Seed Savers)
- Sat, Feb 14 - Manchester Grange - 11-2pm (Market day!)
- Sat, Feb 21 - Hopland Ext. Center, Farmers Convergence - 9-5
- Sun, February 22 - Willits, Little Lake Grange - 10-12 pm (during pancake breakfast)
- February 28th - Fort Bragg Library Seed/Plant exchange 2-4 pm (Co-sponsored with Going to Seed)
- Fri, March 13 - Covelo: Round Valley Library 1-3 pm - Seed Giveaway (Farmers Market)
- Sat, March 14 - Anderson Valley Grange-- Seed & Scion Exchange- 10-4pm hosted by Anderson Valley Foodshed
- Sat, March 14th - Humboldt Seed/Scion Exchange, Arcata Community Ctr -11 -4pm
- Sat, April 11 - Humboldt Grange #501 - 10 to 4pm
- TBA - Bachelor Valley Grange
PATRICIA ANN SAAVEDRA
Pat Saavedra, age 79, passed away at home surrounded by her family.
She attended school in Hopland and worked as a beautician and cook. She was known as someone who would give the shirt off her back to anyone in need.
Pat was preceded in death by her parents, Melba and Ernest Hardin, and her daughter, Janice Jojola.
She is survived by her children, Barbara PeopDelValle, Marc Saavedra, Natalia Saavedra, and Nick Saavedra; her sister, Deloris Hardin; her brother, Rex Hardin; her grandchildren, Elysia, Raymond, Janice, Amber, Athyna, Marc Angelo, Nadel, and Aiyana; and her great-grandchildren.
She will be deeply missed.
AV WINEGROWERS
The International White Wine Festival returns to Anderson Valley this February.
A full weekend dedicated to white wines, producers, and tasting experiences in one of California’s most unique wine regions.
Tickets are available now.
DAVID HENRY LEVERONI III
David Henry Leveroni III, of Novato, California, passed away peacefully at home on the ranch where he was born 90 years earlier, on January 15, 2026.
David was a devoted husband to Joyce Leveroni for 69 years and a loving father to their three children. A hardworking and dedicated dairyman, he spent his life living and working at the family dairy, Leveroni Brothers, where his commitment to the land and his family’s legacy was evident every day.
Each year, David eagerly anticipated the annual hunting trip to Canby with family and friends. He was a long-time member of the Wilson Gun Club and enjoyed the camaraderie and camp life that came with it. He also cherished weekend trips with his family to the Bettinelli Ranch in Yorkville, where he could truly relax.
David had a well-known sweet tooth and loved making homemade ice cream using milk straight from the milk tank–a special treat treasured by all of his grandchildren. His neighbors, the Joe Corda family, especially loved his lemon meringue pies. After retiring, David found joy in spending time with his family, tinkering around the ranch, and riding his side-by-side to make sure everything on the ranch was just as it should be.
He was a proud member of the Petaluma Elks, Novato Druids, Nicasio Native Sons of the Golden West, and the Marin County Farm Bureau.
David was preceded in death by his parents, David Leveroni II and Ida Leveroni; his brother, Bob Leveroni (Maradee); and his daughter, Laurie Figone (Dan). He is survived by his sons, Paul Leveroni (Lisa) and David Leveroni IV; his son-in-law Dan Figone; his grandchildren Garret Medeiros, Amy Fadelli, Ashley Huizingh, Stacy Leveroni, Sabrina Figone, Randi Leveroni, and Shannon Leveroni, step-grandchildren Christopher Sepulveda and Kyle Sepulveda, and 11 great-grandchildren, as well as many nieces, nephews and cousins.
A rosary service will be held Monday, January 26th at 6:30 p.m. at Parent-Sorensen Mortuary in Petaluma.
A Funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11 a.m. Tuesday, January 27th at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Petaluma. A reception will follow at Petaluma Elks Lodge #901.
In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to the North Bay Dairywomen Scholarship Fund or your favorite charity.
THE TAX COLLECTION MESS: ESCAPES AND DELINQUENTS
by Mark Scaramella
Property taxes collected by the County are the primary funding source for schools, special districts and the County. The majority of the County’s share of property taxes goes to law enforcement. When a core function like tax collection isn’t attended to, all those entities suffer.
In September of 2023 when the Supervisors met on the Coast, Coast realtor Dierdre Lamb had a rather lengthy exchange with the Board. Lamb tried to tell the uncomprehending Board that the Supervisors should increase the Tax Collector staff. “I sell luxury homes,” said Lamb, adding that her clients “want to pay their taxes” but many of them have not even been billed. Ms. Lamb said she advised her clients to set aside money for the day when a big bill for accumulated back taxes came in the mail.
Instead of pursuing this low-hanging revenue windfall, the board abruptly switched gears, citing the budget bump they gave the Assessor’s office the prior year, which of course did nothing to address the understaffed Tax Collector’s office.
Remember: the Tax Collector’s office had suffered a major staffing setback in March of 2022 when long-time Tax Collector Schari Schapmire and her long-time senior assistant Julie Forrester retired prematurely when the Board rashly consolidated the Tax Collector’s office with the Auditor’s office against the considered advice of Schapmire and Auditor Chamise Cubbison (and many others). (They are now in the process of belatedly “deconsolidating” those offices.) The office suffered a further blow the following month when the Board vindictively suspended the Treasurer-Tax Collector/Auditor-Controller on what turned out — 17 months later — to be bogus misappropriation charges filed by the DA.
The Tax Collector’s office thus had no one left with significant tax collection expertise. At the time the state had paused some property tax collections during the covid interlude which was the beginning of a burgeoning backlog of uncollected taxes. And here was Mendo suddenly without any experienced tax collection staff. Mendo has not conducted a tax lien sale since 2019 and when asked in 2022 for the list of properties to be sold for back taxes, the County said they had no list.
On top of the covid pause, there are a variety of ways property taxes can go uncollected. They fall into two basic categories: “Escapes” and “Delinquencies.”
Escapes occur when properties (commercial and residential) go unassessed, are under-assessed, and, according to the state tax collector, “escape bills” are issued when the County somehow discovers unreported assessed value changes like new construction, change of ownership, or assessment errors, covering taxes due for prior years. These bills for back taxes are triggered by events like adding a room, unreported ownership transfers, business audits, or market conditions, resulting in a new, higher valuation. Escape collections are essentially corrections of past errors and oversights. They are not classified as an unpaid tax bill. And they are not quantified because the County only knows about them if or when they are “discovered.”
Delinquencies are unpaid tax bills. Unpaid taxes are easier to quantify because they are the difference between what a property owner is billed and what they pay.
Each year the County calculates the amount of unpaid tax bills in a given fiscal year and calculates a percentage and puts it into the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. The property tax base assessed value has increased over the last ten years due to inflation and upward assessments. But the collection rate has gone down leaving millions of accumulated dollars uncollected. In the last ACFR (for 2024) the County reported that in that fiscal year there was $9 million in unpaid (delinquent) tax bills, up from $7 million the year before. But what about the late payments, the payment plans, the penalties and interest that came in late? How much was that worth? In a footnote to the ACFR delinquency chart the County’s outside auditor says, “No data available. Collections in Subsequent Years are not available from the County’s current property tax system.”
In the recent $800k state Audit report, the State Auditor said:
“We asked the county whether it has taken longer than four years to complete assessments [after four years most uncollected taxes have to be written off], but the county was unable to provide an answer based on data from its property tax system. The county provided us with workload reports showing that its staff had more than 7,300 assessments to perform. However, after meeting with the county’s staff and comparing information in these reports to other information in the county’s property tax system, we determined that the workload reports could not tell us or the county how long these assessments had been pending completion. In other words, the reports the county can produce from its property tax system cannot help the county manage its workload in a strategic way.
“Strategic” meaning giving priority to larger unpaid tax bills that are at risk of becoming uncollectable.
“In the absence of being able to rely on more useful reports from the system, the assistant assessor provided examples of annotated work reports some staff create to triage their work, and the assistant assessor explained that other staff just work their assigned items in batches.”
That was just the Assessor’s office. The State Auditor then switched to the Tax Collector’s office:
“Compounding these problems, the assistant treasurer-tax collector indicated that the issues with the property tax system have distracted efforts to collect past due taxes from property owners. The list of properties in default status as of December 2025 that the county provided to us identifies that taxpayers owed $30.6 million in uncollected property taxes, penalties, interest, and fees pertaining to about 4,200 properties. $17.5 million of this owed amount was attributable to tax years 2023 through 2025. The assistant treasurertax collector explained that she and her staff spend time developing solutions to issues with the property tax system, and that issues related to the property tax system cause delays to billings, payment plans, and other tasks.
“We noted that data published by the State Controller’s Office (SCO) demonstrates that Mendocino has had declining property tax receipts when compared to the total taxes charged over the last few fiscal years. Specifically, the county received 97.7 percent of the tax revenue it charged in fiscal year 2021–22 within that fiscal year, but that percentage declined in the following years, reaching 94.3 percent in fiscal year 2023–24.”
On the plus side, in November of last year Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison told the Supervisors that the County had received about $4.1 million more in property taxes than was expected. But nobody knew where that surplus came from. Ms. Cubbison suspected at least some of it came from the above mentioned escapes due to some back taxes being paid late. But the county’s computer tax collection system shortcomings made it difficult to say.
The County doesn’t know how much delinquent taxes have been paid, they don’t have reports on the status of assessments, they don’t know how much is owed or how much is interest and penalties, they can’t generate a list of which delinquent taxpayers they should focus on, they have at least $30.6 million in accumulated unpaid taxes…
Yet the Supervisors say time and again that they have a multi-million dollar structural deficit that requires major staff cuts.
What a mess!
How hard would it be for the Supervisors to at least ask the Tax Collector for a report on tax collection status and offer the tax collector whatever reasonable revenue-generating staff or outside assistance she needs? Apparently that’s beyond this Board’s limited ability because nobody disagreed back at that September 2023 Coastal meeting when lame-duck Supervisor Dan Gjerde replied to Ms. Lamb, “We have dealt with Assessor staff increase and higher wages in her department. We have given more assistance to the Assessor to help them catch up. So we are doing everything we can.”
Neither Gjerde nor his colleagues mentioned offering assistance to the Tax Collector’s office.
Astonishingly, Supervisor Williams finally mused: “Maybe we should have an agenda item on how do we collect the taxes that are due and unbilled?”
(Former) Supervisor McGourty agreed, with one of his classic idiotic pearls of wisdom: “You can’t get anywhere unless you have a plan, correct?,” said McGourty, adding, “At some point we need to take action.”
But, as usual, nobody “took action.” Instead they accepted CEO Antle’s hilariously lame remark: “I have met with the Assessor and we are looking at how to improve the process.”
That was more than two years ago. So they’ve they’ve known about the problem and haven’t done anything to address it. They shouldn’t have needed the State Auditor to tell them that they were delinquent in collecting tens of millions in taxes due.
Since that time, neither CEO Antle nor Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison have reported on the results of whatever Antle was “looking at.” And not one Supervisor has suggested an agenda item on the subject, not even after the State Auditor highlighted the problem.
In our next installment, we will discuss the implications of this tax collection mess on the Teeter Plan, the tricky accounting procedure that requires the County to pay schools and special districts their large property tax allocations based on the tax bills sent out, and which is supposed to let the County recoup those taxes with penalty and interest that the County gets to keep — if they are paid.
FRED GARDNER:
As I strolled out one evening
To visit with Susan B.
I came unto her sister
The fair Elizabeth C.
She said Why is it you never dare
To ask me for a game?
I confessed I’m afraid of losin’ Susan
And she said But we’re one and the same
I heard that she’d beaten masters
And I’d been beaten by fools
I offered a sacrifice castle anyway
And your interpretation of the rules
And so we set up our pieces
They were neither black nor white
On squares the varying shades of red
Distinct as morning and light, heavy and right
I tried my old king’s gambit again
I should have known it was wrong
The king may wield the power but nowadays
The queen’s the piece that’s strong
She looked at me forgivingly
And said, You can take back your moves
Who wins this one doesn’t matter as much
As which of us improves (Oh, God)
There’s war reports in the sports section
And comics now tell you who’s engaged
They’ve got movie reviews passing for news
And chess problems on the women’s page
And those who suppose that life is a game
Will never get the moral of this or any song
Anyway morals are but the rules of life
Changing as we play along
For as I walked out one evening of late
To visit with Elizabeth C.
I came unto her sister, Sue,
The one and only Susan B
She said Why is it you don’t come calling
On me, man, do you feel ashamed?
I confessed it just got too confusin’, Susan,
And she said You’re not entirely to blame.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, January 22, 2026
JOSE AGUILAR-HERNANDEZ, 47, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, paraphernalia.
LINDA ALMOND, 67, Ukiah. Disobeying court order, failure to appear, probation revocation.
DAKOTA BAILEY, 31, Hoopa/Ukiah. Controlled substance, possession of over 600 obscene images of minor in sexual act, possession or control of matter depicting sexual conduct of person under 18.
CECILLIA BLOYD, 24, Clear Lake/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
RODERICK BROWN, 74, Westport. Brandishing, criminal threats.
CHRISTIAN ESTRELLA, 31, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury.
KARINA FLORES-OSORIO, 31, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Suspended license for reckless driving.
WILLIAM FUNDERBERG, 37, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
KARLY HAWTHORNE, 29, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence, controlled substance, probation revocation.
ANNA KENNY, 35, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
OCTAVIO LOPEZ, 22. Ukiah. Domestic battery, probation revocation.
PATRICK SCHUETZ, 54, Ukiah. County parole violation.
TRINITY STEFFEN, 27, Sacramento/Ukiah. Domestic battery, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, controlled substance.
THOMAS THORSON, 40, Nice/Ukiah. Probation violation, resisting.
FORMER ROHNERT PARK OFFICER CONVICTED OF POSING AS FED AND ROBBING DRIVERS GETS REPRIEVE IN FEDERAL COURT SENTENCING
Joseph Huffaker to be sentenced Feb. 4 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco
by Colin Atagi
A federal judge granted a reprieve Wednesday in the sentencing of a former Rohnert Park police officer who a jury convicted six months ago in a scheme to steal cannabis and cash from drivers while posing as a federal agent.
Joseph Huffaker will be sentenced Feb. 4 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco unless he finds a new attorney who can provide Judge Maxine Chesney an acceptable timeline to prepare for sentencing. Proceedings had been rescheduled from Dec. 3 to Wednesday after he fired his previous attorney, Richard Ceballos, in November.
Still representing Huffaker on Wednesday, Ceballos requested sentencing be delayed until Huffaker finds a new attorney. Chesney asked why Ceballos was fired. Citing the matter’s confidentiality, he only said “There are a number of issues.”
Officials said a potential replacement had been identified and should be available Feb. 4. In approving the delay, Chesney noted the complexities of the case and her concern a new attorney would need time to get up to speed.
“It’s not just a five-second bank robbery; this is a matter that goes on for a protracted period of time with more than one player,” she said.
Rescheduling will likely delay sentencing of Huffaker’s co-defendant, Brendan “Jacy” Tatum. The former Rohnert Park sergeant pleaded guilty in December 2021 and testified against Huffaker in exchange for a light sentence. As of now, Tatum is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 18.
His potential sentencing is unclear. But in Huffaker’s case, Ceballos and federal prosecutors submitted sentencing memorandums in case Wednesday’s proceedings went as scheduled.
Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of 63 months in prison plus three years of supervised release and $23,000 in restitution. Noting Tatum’s involvement, Ceballos recommended Huffaker be sentenced to 12 months under home confinement with one year of supervised release plus conditions that, among other things, would prevent Huffaker from working in law enforcement or security.
Probation officials recommended a lower sentence because Tatum is considered more culpable in the case, Huffaker has no previous convictions, cooperated during pretrial release, and his family would be financially impacted while he’s incarcerated. Prosecutors balked at this notion and added leniency is unwarranted even with “a significant number of supportive letters” submitted by Huffaker’s friends and family.
“Despite significant familial and community support that many defendants don’t have, as well as a solid job and relative financial security, (Huffaker) engaged in criminal activity based seemingly on greed and a desire to exert power over those within his domain,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo.
The trial grew out of a years-long scandal involving Rohnert Park’s drug interdiction team, a now-defunct unit disbanded in early 2017 after California legalized recreational cannabis. Prosecutors said Huffaker and Tatum used their training to pull over drivers, pose as agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and seize marijuana and cash that was later sold for profit. Much of the activity occurred along Highway 101 near the Sonoma-Mendocino county line.
Tatum resigned in March 2018 after an internal investigation began. Then-Public Safety Director Brian Masterson abruptly retired soon after. Huffaker was later found to have violated department policy and left the force in 2019 with a $75,000 settlement in exchange for his resignation.
In July, a jury convicted Huffaker after deliberating for 90 minutes.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
SF GIANTS OUTFIELDER JUNG HOO LEE BRIEFLY DETAINED AT LAX
by Laurence Miedema & Justice De Los Santos
Giants outfielder Jung Hoo Lee's return to the Bay Area for this weekend's FanFest tour stop hit a snag at Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday evening, with the South Korean native being temporarily detained by Customs and Border Patrol officials.
A Giants source confirmed around 6:30 p.m. that Lee had been released from customs officials at LAX.
Lee is scheduled to appear at City Center Bishop Ranch in San Ramon on Saturday, along with new Giants manager Tony Vitello and pitchers Logan Webb, Spencer Bivens, Erik Miller, Landon Roupp, and mascot Lou Seal.
"Earlier today, Jung Hoo Lee experienced a brief travel issue at LAX due to a paperwork issue," the Giants said in a statement Wednesday night. "The matter was quickly clarified with the appropriate authorities, and he has since been cleared to continue his travel. We appreciate the professionalism of all parties involved."
Details of Lee's detainment were first reported by The SF Standard.
Foreign players have long endured delays arriving for spring training because of visa issues, but Lee's situation drew more attention because recently some foreign athletes have been denied entry into the U.S. as a result of the Trump administration's anti-immigration policies.
A group of Ethiopian runners were reportedly denied entry earlier this month as they sought to compete in the World Athletics Cross Country Championships. Last July, a Venezuelan teen baseball team was denied entry for the Little League's Senior Baseball World Series. Two weeks later, a team from the same country was allowed to enter the U.S. to play in the Little League World Series.
Some counties have expressed concerns for their athletes ahead of the men's World Cup soccer tournament being played in North America this summer.
Before his flight to the United States on Wednesday, Lee met with reporters in South Korea and confirmed his plans to represent his country in the upcoming World Baseball Classic.
He told reporters, "I will participate in the WBC. A decision was made around early January, but I couldn't speak about it then due to a team event. I will do my best to bridge the gap between veterans and younger players in the national team. Representing the team is an honor, and I will strive to achieve good results in (the first-round games in) Tokyo."
Earlier this month, Lee gave a Giants contingent that included president of baseball operations Buster Posey, new manager Tony Vitiello and CEO Larry Baer a tour of his home country while they were promoting the Giants in the region.
Lee is entering his third season with the Giants after signing a $113 million, six-year contract in December 2023. He missed most of his rookie season after suffering a shoulder injury, but last season hit .266 with eight home runs, 55 RBIs and 149 hits in 150 games.
A request for comment by CBP was not immediately returned.
(AP)
AFTER EIGHT DECADES IN OBSCURITY, DIEGO RIVERA’S S.F. MASTERPIECE IS GETTING ITS MOMENT
by Sam Whiting
For more than 80 years, Diego Rivera’s monumental fresco “Pan American Unity” has never had a permanent home in San Francisco worthy of its scale and artistic significance. The turning point for the masterpiece will come this week at City College of San Francisco.
Will Maynez, a retired City College lab manager who has been the mural's self-appointed guardian for 25 years, came to campus Tuesday just to look through a gap in a construction fence and watch an excavator grade a vacant lot. Behind that fence will rise the Diego Rivera Performing Arts Center, and the lot was being smoothed for the ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday afternoon.
For Maynez, 78, the ceremony will celebrate more than the new building: It will signal the fulfillment of a vision for “Pan American Unity,” 74 feet wide and 22 feet tall, which arrived on campus in 1942 and will finally be properly showcased and lighted in the lobby of the new theater.
The fresco, which the famed Mexican painter created for the Golden Gate International Exhibition of 1939-'40 on Treasure Island, was installed as an afterthought in the lobby of the now-closed and destined to be demolished Diego Rivera Theater. When the new performing arts center opens, the mural will be installed in a grand glass-front lobby facing Frida Kahlo Way, down the block from Archbishop Riordan High School.
Lit at night behind the glass frontage, the artwork will be clearly visible from the street and also from the steps that form a central axis leading down from the original science building.
“You can come down the stairs from the main entrance and cross the street and there’s the lobby with the mural,” said Maynez, who retired 14 years ago from his job as a physics department lab manager. “You will get an unobstructed view of it. This will be better than the original installation on Treasure Island.”
Created onsite by Rivera as an artist-at-work exhibit during the world expo, “Pan American Unity” was intended for City College from the start. After the fair it arrived in 10 panels on steel frames.
In 2021, it was packed up and moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a display lasting two and a half years. Its return in 2024 was complicated by a lawsuit over which institution would pay for it. After that dispute was resolved, the mural was disassembled, and has been sitting in storage at an undisclosed location on campus.
It will remain there for two and a half more years during construction of the performing arts center, which will include a 600-seat theater, a recital hall, a black box theater seating 150, and the grand lobby.
“It’s really inspiring to me that the community and college have stuck with it to the point that it will now actually break ground,” said Sam Miller, of LMN Architects, who is traveling from Seattle for the occasion. LMN was selected in 2005 as the design architect in partnership with TEF Design of San Francisco. Since then, the plan has withstood the recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, along with continuing financial challenges at City College. During that time, the planned performing arts center was downscaled from 100,000 to 77,000 square feet, with the budget set at $181 million, financed by a 2020 bond issue.
By its estimated 2028 opening, the more compact building will have evolved to “a welcoming and inspiring space for the students and also the larger community,” said Miller, “to appreciate both the mural and the music and drama that occurs within.”
Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony will be held in the STEAM Building (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics), next to the Rivera site. Attendance is limited, and registration is full.
During his remarks, Maynez will draw on his experiences among the 600,000 visitors who saw “Pan American Unity” during its free display at SFMOMA. Some visited multiple times, but none more than Maynez: He walked from his Mission District home to SFMOMA five days a week, up to four hours per visit, for the entire three-year run.
“This mural is a snapshot of San Francisco at the end of an incarnation that started with the rebuilding after the earthquake of 1906 and came to a close with the advent of World War II,” he said. “People are thrilled to see this masterpiece.”
Maynez has met many other Rivera enthusiasts, including Donald Cairns, believed to be the last survivor among all the San Franciscans depicted in “Pan American Unity.” Cairns was 5 when his likeness was portrayed.
“He’s my one degree of separation from Diego Rivera,” said Maynez, who plans to introduce Cairns, now 90, at the ceremony. “He posed for Diego and he remembers it. Donald is a living artifact.”
SOME ‘AMERICAN’ WINE LEGALLY CONTAINS CHEAP FOREIGN JUICE. CAN CALIFORNIA CLOSE THAT LOOPHOLE?
by Esther Mobley
A bottle labeled “American wine” may not contain entirely American wine. Under current U.S. law, up to 25% of the liquid in that bottle could come from another country.
This labeling loophole has become a major talking point within the California wine industry over the last two years. Advocates of California grape growers argue that the current laws aren’t merely unclear, running the risk of misleading consumers, but also harmful to the local industry. When a big California winery buys cheap bulk wine from Chile to round out its red blend, the neighboring vineyard — which likely is struggling to sell its grapes during this wine downturn — misses out on selling its grapes to that winery.
Now, California lawmakers are seeking to close the loophole. Last week, state assemblymembers Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, and Rhodesia Ransom, D-Stockton, introduced AB 1585, which would require that any wine with an “American” designation on its label be made from 100% American-grown grapes. It would apply to any wines produced or sold in California.
“It’s a truth-in-labeling issue,” said Michael Miller, director of government relations for the California Association of Winegrape Growers, which co-sponsored the bill. “Ultimately, if consumers can’t trust the label for American wine, then it challenges the integrity of all wine in the system.”
Wine labeling may sound bureaucratic, but it’s key to the product’s value. Location is everything when it comes to wine: Because it’s understood that a vineyard’s soil, topography and climate — what we often call terroir — influence the taste, a Cabernet Sauvignon grown in Napa Valley will taste different (and will be priced differently) from one grown in Sonoma Valley.
Domestic wine producers are increasingly relying on imported wine to bring down their costs. In 2025, more than 37 million gallons of bulk wine were imported into the U.S., according to the Gomberg Fredrikson Report, a leading wine industry analysis, an increase of 24% over the previous year. Ninety percent of that came from Australia, Chile or New Zealand. It tends to be used to round out inexpensive wines, including bag-in-box.
This imported bulk wine represents a significant savings potential for the producer. Bulk wine from Australia and Chile cost the equivalent of $566 per ton in 2023, according to the Gomberg Fredrikson Report. That’s finished wine, ready for the bottling line. California grapes, on the other hand — which still need to be crushed and fermented — cost an average of $1,194 per ton in 2023.
Some California wineries importing this bulk wine are transparent about where it was made: If you look at the fine print, it’s easy to spot “Product of Chile” or “Product of Australia” on boxes of Franzia, ostensibly a California winery. But others may simply say “American Cabernet Sauvignon” or “American red wine,” and those could secretly include up to 25% of foreign wine.
There have been plenty of attempts in the past to mislead consumers about a wine’s place of origin in the name of saving costs or commanding a higher price. Most famously, Two Buck Chuck founder Fred Franzia wanted to use inexpensive Central Valley grapes for his labels Napa Creek, Napa Ridge and Rutherford Vintners, despite a California law that any wine labeled “Napa Valley” must contain at least 75% Napa-grown grapes. The California Supreme Court ruled against Franzia in 2004.
In 2008, a coalition of groups including the California Association of Winegrape Growers submitted a petition to the federal government advocating for a 100% American-grape requirement for American-labeled wines, but the petition was unsuccessful.
Right now, California-specific labeling requirements are stricter than American ones. Any wine bearing a “California” label must be produced solely from California-grown grapes. The main circumstance under which a winemaker would use “American” instead of something more specific like “California” or “Napa Valley” would be if they were blending it with grapes from another state, such as Oregon or Washington.
A number of industry groups have expressed support for AB 1585, including co-sponsor Family Winemakers of California, Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, Lodi Winegrape Commission and Sonoma Alliance for Vineyards and Environment. The Wine Institute, the main lobbying arm for the state industry, has not yet taken a position, spokesperson Julie Berge wrote in an email.
If big wineries want to continue to buy cheap bulk wine from other countries, Miller, of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, said his organization wouldn’t try to stop them. “That’s just a marketplace dynamic. We can’t change that in this bill,” he said. “We’re just saying if that is a practice that people want to do, then label the wine accurately.”
WE ASKED 300 PEOPLE ABOUT HEALTH CARE COSTS. THE NUMBERS ARE SHOCKING.
by Tracie McMillan
When Congress allowed the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of December, my monthly health insurance bill went up by about $200 a month. That’s a good chunk of the $25,000 I expect to earn, after business expenses, in 2026.
I am not alone in paying more for health care. More than 300 readers responded to a January invitation to share their experience of rising health care costs. They included a cancer patient who shifted care mid-recovery to a new insurance plan that doesn’t cover all her doctors. A mother who began skipping birthday parties to avoid the cost of a gift. A small-business owner who closed his doors. Many readers shared accounts of relying on retirement funds to pay for insurance. More than one Republican voter said they now regretted voting for that party. I am sharing a selection of these stories below, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Recently, 17 Republicans joined with House Democrats to vote to reinstate the subsidies. The issue now rests with the Senate, though President Trump says he might veto any legislation to extend them. Senators should keep in mind these stories, which show just how untenable health care costs have become, fueling distrust, fear and anger across incomes and political persuasions. Lawmakers should restore the subsidies, which will provide much-needed relief to some 20 million Americans. It is the least they can do.
Lance Loewenstein, 57, Parkville, Mo.
Job: Attorney, private practice
Household income: $144,000
2026 monthly bill: $3,698.67 for 2 people, up from $1,785.72 in 2025
2026 premiums + maximum out-of-pocket cost: $61,984.04
I am a self-employed attorney, and my wife runs a small nonprofit. Before the Affordable Care Act, my wife had considerable pre-existing conditions that made us uninsurable without an employer plan. The Affordable Care Act was a lifeline.
Between the increase in health care costs and my wife’s cancer diagnosis, I’ve had to raise my hourly rates by almost 10 percent, and my wife has cashed in her retirement account. Add on to that an 80 percent increase in property taxes for our building in Jackson County, Mo., and we are barely able to cover the increased cost of living.
These geniuses in Washington don’t get the number of self-employed small-business owners (mostly Republicans, like me) who are using these plans. I’ve passed on the extra cost to my clients and I’ve told them why. I have been a donating, volunteering Republican for 30 years, usually voting a straight ticket. That ended last year, when I voted for exactly one Republican statewide. Who does this to people, increasing their costs 100 percent without warning, glide path or alternative?
MaryBeth Bognar, 36, Westerville, Ohio
Job: Nonprofit consultant
Household income: $111,000
2026 monthly bill: $1603.09 for 3 people, up from $775.09 in 2025
2026 premiums + maximum out-of-pocket cost: $37,537.08
We had a baby and we bought a house in 2024. We’ve always been responsible with money, and these were life decisions we made based on a sense of our income and bills. Spending nearly $1,000 more a month, that’s not something we factored in.
My son was born with a chronic health problem and needed surgery. When we needed the children’s hospital, the only one in our area, we learned that it was not in network. At first, I was frustrated with myself, like, “Oh my gosh, why didn’t I check that?” Then everyone I talked to was like, “Wait, that’s a thing?”
I think we were up to like $40,000 in bills. After many months and many phone calls by me following up with many people, they did cover the surgeries at least. So I think now we are at around like $15,000 that’s all just pending.
I’ve definitely lost sleep and just felt anger that I don’t want to be feeling because we tried so hard to do the right thing. That’s the thing that’s so frustrating. We really tried to do the research, but it really just feels like it doesn’t matter. You’ll lose and lose.
Caroline Hanssen, 57, San Anselmo, Calif.
Job: Writing specialist
Household income: $75,000
2026 monthly bill: $0 after dropping insurance, down from $406.47 in 2025. It would have been $1,122.99 for 1 person if Ms. Hanssen kept her plan.
2026 premiums + maximum out-of-pocket cost: Unlimited
I’m sort of proof of the theory that healthy people are going to drop insurance. I’m hoping I can just skate through until this gets figured out. Kind of on a wing and a prayer.
The subsidies brought my payment down last year to about $400, which was manageable. This year, I lost my subsidies entirely. My premiums jumped to more than $1,100. California offered me a dollar a month in subsidy. Thanks anyway!
When prices are so inflated that it costs $1,100 a month for a healthy person to have bronze-basic coverage, that’s not my fault. But it prices me out of health insurance. When you make the premium that astronomical and out of reach, then you’re not playing along with me, right? You have all the cards, insurance company, and I am a financial victim of your basically predatory scheme.
The total of my premiums and out-of-pocket max would have been $20,000. What’s going to happen to me that’s going to cost that much? I don’t know. If I go two or three years without insurance, I can save that money, and I can be prepared. But if some sort of chronic illness crops up, well, then I’m concerned.
William Thompson, 52, Charlottesville, Va.
Job: Consultant
Household income: $270,000
2026 monthly bill: $2,932.39 for 6 people, up from $2,275.43 in 2025
2026 premiums + maximum out-of-pocket cost: $50,188.68
We’re going to pay between $40,000 and $50,000 a year for medical costs. Do I want to pay that much for insurance? No. But do I want to pay $100,000 in one month because I had a knee surgery? No. So this is the deal. We’re investing in insurance to keep some catastrophic thing from happening. We’re privileged to be able to make that choice. But all the while I have no idea how to save for retirement. I have no idea how to move forward.
Even though I didn’t qualify for a subsidy last year, I still saw my premiums spike by more than $650 a month this year. That’s because insurers have been raising rates to make up for the fact that so many healthy people are dropping coverage in response to losing their subsidies.
Even with insurance, we had to pay tens of thousands in out-of-network costs when we were dealing with a serious health crisis. I work as a chef on the weekends. I take outside catering gigs, I’ll do speaking, anything I can. My wife and I are both working all the time. We’re choosing slow debt over catastrophic debt. I don’t think that I’m, like, some sort of victim here. It’s just astonishing to me that as hard as it is for us, it is so much harder for other people.
Lynn Weidner, 43, Allentown, Pa.
Job: Home caregiver
Household income: $51,000
2026 monthly bill: $680.36 for 1 person, up from $401.52 in 2025
2026 premiums + maximum out-of-pocket cost: $16,714.32
I work as a full-time caregiver for my partner, who is on Medicaid. I make $14.11 an hour and I work 79 hours a week. There are no benefits included. I make too much money to get any medical assistance, but don’t make quite enough to get what I need. I have medical debt all the time. I just roll over whatever new bill that I incurred onto my payment plan. I never get to zero. There’s like $2,800 right now.
I have pre-existing conditions, so when I tried to purchase private insurance before the Affordable Care Act, the high-risk pool costs were too high for my income. I just didn’t have insurance. I didn’t go to the doctor. It was pretty awful, honestly. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had iron-deficient anemia, so I was really run down. I attributed it to depression and my working literally from sunup to sundown. I didn’t know I was sick until I was able to get on the Affordable Care Act and get blood work done.
I researched moving out of the country, but home care isn’t one of those skills that other countries are looking for. I was like, well, I guess I’ll just have to try to make our broken system better. Now I work with my union to push for better health care policies.
BIG RICK:
First off, don’t be a wage slave. That’s how they get you. Those jobs are for kids anyway that way they can learn how horrible it is to be a wage slave, get off their ass and make their own business.
Think of a service or an item that people need in your area and develop your own business around that idea? It doesn’t have to be weed related, it doesn’t have to be some trinket nobody wants to buy, can be a service that somebody needs constantly around you. Find an item you can resell as a middle man to a corporation at a lower price than they are currently obtaining it.
Start your own llc, charge people for your service. Actually put effort into building your business and work harder than your employees, if you even have any. Always make sure to put 150% into your effort to making the customer happy. Actually try. That’s the important part. TRY.
If you end up not making it in your local area, branch outwards to areas that have more money. Offer your service in expensive places where you have to travel (napa, bay, Tahoe, San Diego, etc) and charge those rich people more money and don’t feel bad about it because they don’t care about money. There’s literally nothing stopping you from making $500 an hour except your own willingness to put effort into your own life.
If you have to, leave. Move to an area that generates a lot more money for your business and save money so that you can move back some day.
Nobody’s going to think your own thoughts for you. It’s really not that hard to generate money.
DOROTHY PARKER
She was found dead with just $20,000 in debt, a typewriter, and an estate she left to Martin Luther King Jr.—a man she'd never met.
Dorothy Parker spent her entire life writing words that made people laugh, think, and occasionally clutch their pearls in shock. She died alone in a New York hotel room in 1967, with almost nothing to her name.
But what a life she lived getting there.
Born in 1893 to a Jewish father and Protestant mother, Dorothy grew up feeling like she belonged nowhere. Her mother died when she was five. Her stepmother—whom Dorothy despised—died when she was nine. Her father sent her to a Catholic school despite the family being Jewish.
She learned early that the world wasn't built for her. So she built her own weapon: words.
By 19, she was selling poetry to Vanity Fair. By 25, she was the only female critic at Vogue, then the theater critic at Vanity Fair—until she got fired for writing reviews so brutally honest they made producers weep.
One review simply read: "The House Beautiful is the play lousy."
Another: "Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
She didn't just critique plays. She eviscerated them with surgical precision and devastating wit.
But her real power emerged at the Algonquin Round Table—the legendary daily lunch gathering of New York's literary elite in the 1920s. Dorothy was the only woman who consistently held her own among the men who dominated American letters.
She was the one they quoted. The one they feared. The one who could silence an entire table with a single sentence.
When someone at the table challenged her to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, she didn't hesitate: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
When told that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked: "How can they tell?"
Someone once told her that a famously promiscuous actress was pregnant. Dorothy's response: "I assume she's going to have an abortion. She hasn't had her appendix out yet."
This was the 1920s. Women were supposed to be demure, modest, grateful just to be in the room. Dorothy Parker was none of those things.
She drank heavily. She had affairs. She attempted suicide multiple times. She married twice—both disasters. She was bisexual in an era when that could destroy your career.
And she wrote like her life depended on it. Because it did.
Her poetry could break your heart:
"By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying."
Her short stories were masterclasses in capturing human cruelty and longing. "Big Blonde" won the O. Henry Award in 1929 and remains one of the most devastating portraits of a woman trapped by society's expectations ever written.
But here's what makes Dorothy Parker truly remarkable: she wasn't just witty. She was furious.
She used her platform to fight for causes that could have—and did—get her blacklisted. She was investigated by the FBI for her left-wing politics. She raised money for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
When the House Un-American Activities Committee came for Hollywood during the McCarthy era, Dorothy refused to name names. It cost her everything. She was blacklisted, couldn't get work, lost most of her income.
She could have saved her career by betraying her principles. She refused.
By the 1950s, the literary darling of the Jazz Age was broke, drinking too much, unable to sell her work. The woman who'd once been the highest-paid writer in Hollywood was struggling to pay rent.
But she never stopped writing. Never stopped fighting.
When she died in 1967 at age 73, she left her entire estate—what little there was—to Martin Luther King Jr. They'd never met. She'd never even spoken to him. But she believed in what he was fighting for, and she wanted her legacy to support that fight.
After Dr. King was assassinated the following year, her estate eventually went to the NAACP.
Think about that. A Jewish woman born in 1893, who grew up feeling like an outsider, left everything she had to the civil rights movement.
Because Dorothy Parker understood something fundamental: outsiders recognize each other. And they fight for each other.
Today is her birthday. She would have been 132 years old.
Most people don't know who she is anymore. Her books are out of print. Her name doesn't appear in most American literature curriculums.
But her words? Her words are everywhere.
Every time someone delivers a perfectly timed comeback, that's Dorothy Parker's legacy.
Every time a woman refuses to make herself smaller to make men comfortable, that's Dorothy Parker.
Every time someone uses humor as a weapon against injustice, that's Dorothy Parker.
She famously suggested her own epitaph: "Excuse my dust."
As if she were just passing through. As if she hadn't changed American literature forever. As if her words weren't still cutting people down to size a century later.
Dorothy Parker lived messy, drank too much, loved the wrong people, and died nearly broke.
She also wrote some of the most perfect sentences in the English language.
She proved that women could be brilliant and difficult and complicated and still deserve to be heard.
She showed that wit isn't just entertainment—it's survival. It's resistance. It's power.
So today, on her birthday, let's remember the woman who could break your heart and deliver a punchline in the same breath.
The woman who wrote: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
The woman who, when told she was outspoken, replied: "By whom?"
The woman who looked at a world that didn't want her and said: "Excuse me, I have something to say."
Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker.
You taught us that the best response to injustice isn't always righteous anger.
Sometimes it's a perfectly placed bon mot that leaves them speechless.
And sometimes, that's revolution enough.
BOOKS
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.
— Billy Collins (1988)
GARY MARCUS ON THE MASSIVE PROBLEMS FACING AI & LLM SCALING
On this episode of The Real Eisman Playbook, Steve Eisman is joined by Gary Marcus to discuss all things AI. Gary is a leading critic of AI large language models and argues that LLMs have reached diminishing returns. Steve and Gary also discuss the business side of AI, where the community currently stands, and much more.…
https://youtu.be/aI7XknJJC5Q?si=ST52RND-cXL9Iycu
LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT
TikTok Strikes Deal for New U.S. Entity, Ending Long Legal Saga
‘Enough Is Enough’: Hundreds of Minnesota Businesses Take Stand Against ICE
3 People Arrested Over Protest of Minnesota Pastor Linked to ICE
Voters Are Split on Deportations but Disapprove of ICE, Poll Finds
More Than 160 Million People Are in the Path of the Storm Set to Sweep the U.S.
What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.
Oscar Nominations: ‘Sinners’ Breaks Record With 16
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The Fed is a fake organization to allow bankers to control our economy. It is completely and totally anti-constitutional, and should have been shoveled into the dustbin of history a long time ago.
THE MOTHER DEPORTED WITHOUT HER KIDS
When Maribis Beleño was sent back to Venezuela, she was desperate to bring her kids. Instead, they were left behind—and ended up in the care of a Trump-voting pastor with a plan to get them home.
by Carrie McKean
When Maribis Beleño was sent back to Venezuela, she was desperate to bring her kids. Instead, they were left behind—and ended up in the care of a Trump-voting pastor with a plan to get them home.
When Maribis Beleño boarded the chartered deportation flight in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2025, she remembers frantically scanning the rows of seats. During her month in the detention facility, she says, she had reminded the guards and immigration officers—anyone who would listen—that if she was going to be deported, she couldn’t leave without her three young children, who had entered the United States with her.
“Each day, I gave them the address of my cousin who was looking after my children,” Maribis, 27, told me, through an interpreter. She says she’d write directions to the small apartment in Dallas on any scrap of paper she could find. “Each time the guards told me, ‘Don’t worry! When you are deported, your children will meet you at the airport.’”
She told me the immigration judge at her final hearing had told her the same thing.
But when she got to the airport, her children—who are 5, 10, and 12—weren’t there. And they weren’t on the plane, either.
“I was crying, hysterical,” Maribis remembers. “They told me to calm down.”
She says she was not the only parent on the plane who had been expecting to find their child on board—and some of the others were making a scene. “People were shouting: ‘But my children! They aren’t here!’” Maribis recalls. “But no one listened.”
Instead, she told me, the immigration officers on the plane threatened to shackle anyone who refused to settle down—and said those who resisted deportation would be charged with a felony and sent to “solitary confinement in a cold room”—where they’d be unable to communicate with their families.
The stricken parents, Maribis said, had no choice but to take their seats and fasten their seatbelts. “I didn’t want to lose contact with my children,” she told me. She returned to Venezuela without them. She told me there was no indication that anyone within the U.S. government was planning to deport the kids; no evidence that anyone within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was concerned about where they might be, even though they had no legally appointed guardians in the U.S.
Maribis says she had no idea how to get her kids back: The children didn’t have passports, and she didn’t have enough money for their plane fares. There have not been direct commercial flights to Venezuela from the U.S. since 2019, because of the political tensions that have recently exploded, and her kids were too young to navigate a connecting flight alone. And Maribis had been banned from reentering the U.S. for the foreseeable future; even if she could find the money, she couldn’t fly to the United States to pick up her children herself.
I asked DHS about all of Maribis’s claims; they confirmed her date of deportation but did not comment on her description of how immigration officers behaved on her deportation flight, nor on what U.S. officials had told Maribis would happen to her children. But in November, in response to similar allegations, a spokesperson for DHS gave The New York Times a statement: “ICE does not separate families,” it read. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.” According to internal guidelines, the policy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requires that “enforcement actions do not unnecessarily infringe upon the legal parental or guardianship rights and obligations” of immigrants.
And yet the U.S. immigration system does have a history of separating children from their families, sometimes leading children to become “permanently orphaned” if parents are deported without them. It’s been documented since at least 2011, when Barack Obama was president. And in 2018, during the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan outrage in response to pictures of kids separated from their parents at the border being kept in cages in Texas. “Nobody likes seeing babies ripped from their mothers’ arms,” said Kellyanne Conway, then an adviser to the president. “As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has got a conscience . . . I will tell you that nobody likes this.” Indeed, a poll found that two-thirds of American voters oppose the separation of children from their parents at the border.
Shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated, he criticized the practice and signed an executive order to reunite families. But he also oversaw a border policy that most Americans now recognize as far too permissive: During his tenure, an unprecedented number of people crossed the southern border, flooding an already overwhelmed and under-resourced system—and a lot of children went missing. With the return of Donald Trump came the return of hyper-strict immigration policies, which many Americans supported in the voting booth.
But now, that support is waning, because the way in which some of these policies are being executed has troubled even those who are in favor of strong immigration reforms.
One man who lives with this tension on a day-to-day basis is Elias Rodriguez, 56, an evangelical pastor who was born and raised in West Texas and spent his childhood going back and forth across the border to visit family in Mexico. Elias is conservative in every way; he’s pro-life and thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman. He has supported Trump each time he’s been on the ballot. When it comes to immigration, Elias is in favor of tough border laws, and he thinks it’s obvious who’s responsible for the border crisis. “This would not have even happened if people hadn’t been motivated to come, especially under the Biden administration,” he told me. “We’re dealing with a problem that wouldn’t have happened if [immigrants] had not been invited in.”
But Elias also comes face-to-face with the human beings caught up in this crisis: For decades, he has led a Spanish-speaking evangelical mission called Hope En Accion with outposts and churches in several Mexican border towns, as well as in Midland, Texas—where I live.
In 2022, on a trip to Juárez—just across the border from El Paso—he says he noticed that the crowd of migrants camping near the border was growing larger and larger while the weather grew colder and colder. Elias told me he felt called by God to help them—and led an effort to renovate an abandoned building into a migrant shelter, providing hot meals, a warm place to sleep, showers, and bathrooms to those in need.
In the years since, he’s gained a reputation for giving aid to migrants who are in trouble.
That’s how he crossed paths with Maribis.
While Maribis was detained last summer, then deported, her kids stayed with her cousin in Dallas. But by September, that cousin was reaching the late stages of a high-risk pregnancy. She called Maribis to say she was going to be hospitalized for the remaining weeks of her pregnancy and that the three kids were home alone. Desperate and more than 2,000 miles from her children, Maribis reached out to Elias, who she’d heard about through an acquaintance but never met.
Then came the miracle: The pastor and his wife, Sandy, agreed to drive five hours across the state to pick up the children.
“I do not see a nameless immigration problem,” he told me. “I see these three children. I see their mother. I see individual people.” And his faith compels him to help them.
According to DHS, Maribis was deported after having been arrested for shoplifting and pickpocketing multiple times. “I’m totally for the United State government deporting people who have broken our laws and have committed crimes,” Elias told me. “But at the same time: Why are we penalizing children who are 5 and 10 and 12 for anything that they are not involved in?”
With the support of church members, Elias and Sandy took the kids into their own home. That’s where I met them, nearly three months ago.
I’m sitting at a folding table in late October, listening to Maribis tell her story. She’s in Venezuela, speaking through WhatsApp, which she uses multiple times a day to video-chat with her children. It’s been four months since she last saw them; they’re here in Midland, Texas—sitting in the room with me.
Maribis has two daughters and a son. Her littlest girl, Victoria, is 5. She’s clutching a doll that’s almost as big as she is. Her older brother Moisés, 10, steers a remote control car in circles, smiling mischievously as he tries to goad one of his sisters into shrieking. The eldest, Carliannys, who’s 12, teeters precariously between being a child, a teen, and a full-blown substitute mother. She watches TikTok videos on her cell phone and chews her nails. When her little sister trots past, she reaches out to pull her close—straightening her hair and wiping a smudge off her cheek. She nervously chews her lip, trying to keep tears at bay, as she listens to her mother speak to me.
“I am emotionally lost right now,” Maribis is saying. “I cannot work. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. All I can do is think about getting my children back to me.”
Maribis told me she is part of a support group in Venezuela for recently deported mothers whose children are still in the U.S. They host demonstrations to raise awareness of their plight, begging both the Venezuelan and American governments for help getting their kids back. It’s hard to know how many parents are in this position. When I asked Elias last month, he said: “A person working for the Venezuelan government told me that, as of November, they know of 80 mothers whose children were left behind when they were deported from the United States.” He added that many of those mothers have several kids.
Though each person’s situation is unique, a lot of these parents decided to make the dangerous and expensive journey to America because they were seeking a better, safer, more prosperous life for their children. Since 2013, when the recently-arrested Nicolás Maduro ascended to the presidency, everything from violent crime to inflation has ballooned in Venezuela—and roughly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country. That’s about a quarter of the population. In 2021, Venezuelans were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the U.S., meaning it was deemed not safe to deport them back to their home nation. Though many migrants arriving in the U.S. may not have been in immediate danger, many of them claimed asylum upon crossing the border, because it was effectively their only path to legal immigration.
This is what Maribis says she did, in 2022—along with approximately 264,000 other Venezuelans.
Maribis told me she wanted her kids to have better lives, away from the corruption and poverty of their native Venezuela. (Her children’s father lives in Spain, and Maribis said he hasn’t been involved in the family’s life for many years.) And so, she said, she banded together with some other Venezuelans and traveled to Colombia, then spent 12 days crossing the Darién Gap, a roadless stretch of rainforest in southern Panama, before traveling on to Mexico. She says 1-year-old Victoria was in a backpack the whole time.
Maribis arrived in the United States on August 14, 2022, and says she immediately turned herself and her three children into authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, claiming asylum. DHS confirmed the date but said Maribis “illegally entered the United States near Big Bend, Texas” and “was RELEASED into the country by the Biden administration.” (The capital letters were the spokesperson’s own.)
After someone claims asylum, they can freely and legally move about the country until their court hearing. Maribis headed to New York City, she said, to work.
“Although Maribis used the asylum process, which is the only path she had available to her, I think she was really an economic migrant,” Elias told me. In other words, she’s exactly the sort of immigrant that Trump, and supporters of his policy, believe shouldn’t be allowed to enter or stay in the country.
Elias agrees with the president. “Not everyone who is poor or has a hard life can come to America. No country can absorb that many people,” said Elias. Sending a message that this kind of immigration is feasible, which he believes the Biden administration did, “hurts the migrants themselves,” he went on. “They cut themselves off from their families and communities. So many of them are very lonely.”
Maribis says she settled her kids into one of the publicly funded hotels that served as migrant shelters in New York City, and started selling food from a street cart. Business didn’t boom, she told me, so she moved on to Montreal, Canada, but only lasted eight months (“too cold and rainy; my children were sick all the time”) before returning to the U.S., crossing at border checkpoints by foot both times. She says she moved back to the shelter in New York and did odd jobs—delivering food via bicycle, housekeeping at a hotel—but began to hear rumors that ICE was going to start emptying New York’s migrant shelters and sending people home. So in January 2025, she told me, she left for Dallas, where she moved in with her cousin—who had four children of her own and was expecting a fifth—and borrowed a car from an acquaintance so she could work as an Uber Eats delivery driver, using a friend’s account. For six months, she says, she made a decent living.
Then, on July 8, 2025, Maribis was arrested at a Walmart in Irving, Texas. According to the local police department’s report, she was caught along with another Venezuelan woman attempting to steal $176 worth of shoes, clothes, leggings, shirts, and pajamas. In an email, a DHS spokesperson told me: “Following her arrest by Irving Police Department for theft in July 2025, she was turned over to ICE law enforcement.”
When Maribis was detained, she says, her elder two children were at summer school—and only found out what had happened when they got back to her cousin’s apartment that evening. “When I think about it, I cry,” is all Carliannys could say.
Her mother remembers spending about two weeks in the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, about 200 miles west of Dallas, before being transferred by bus to Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, and then flown to El Paso. Here, Maribis says, she “slept 14 days on the floor in the white tents” at Camp East Montana before being deported. According to DHS, “an immigration judge issued her a final order of removal on October 10, 2024. She received full due process.” Maribis told me she was one of 259 deportees on a GlobalX Airlines flight that went directly from El Paso to Caracas, Venezuela.
It’s not easy to verify Maribis’s story. She told me she’d had very few belongings on her person when she was detained in the U.S. and that when her deportation flight landed, the Venezuelan government confiscated them—so that she lost her cell phone, various important documents, and any record of her A-Number, which is the identification code that U.S. immigration services issue to non-citizens so they can keep track of their cases. Maribis did not have an immigration lawyer to corroborate her story. (This tracks with the experience of other migrants: The American Immigration Council has observed that many deportees lose their belongings in the chaos of being bounced between authorities, which leaves them vulnerable; in 2024, it was reported that about 70 percent of migrants are unable to find a lawyer to represent them.)
When I asked DHS officials if they could provide any comment to help make sense of Maribis’s story, the department did not answer any questions regarding the whereabouts or well-being of her children, only stating that Maribis is “a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela with multiple arrests for larceny, theft, and pick pocketing.” (The emphasis was their own; there was no mention of any conviction.) When I asked DHS for information about what—besides the shoplifting incident in Irving—Maribis had been arrested for, they provided me with no further information.
This raises the question: Is her family’s punishment proportionate to her alleged crimes? Not according to Elias. “Even if the issue is that she shoplifted or pickpocketed, in the scheme of things, what would be the greatest evil?” he said. “Her crimes? Or depriving her children of the right to their mother?”
Leaving them without a guardian, he added, “makes them even more vulnerable to people who do have evil intentions.”
The DHS regulations would appear to agree. According to ICE’s own internal protocol, agents must secure a written or sworn statement from a parent being deported without their kids, affirming that the parent wishes to leave their children behind. Agents also have to ensure the kids are left in the custody of a specific person or organization, such as a child welfare agency. “At the end of the day, the law states that you cannot leave children without the care of an adult because that would be considered child abuse,” Elias said. As The Free Press has previously reported, many unaccompanied migrant children end up in the hands of criminal gangs, and suffer horrors ranging from a lack of food to sexual assault.
In the email it sent me, DHS said: “Just like American citizens who break the law, illegal alien parents who have criminal histories may have their children placed in the custody of someone else for the children’s safety.” But the agency did not respond to questions about what steps it had taken to guarantee the safety of Maribis’s children. There’s no evidence that DHS knew where they were, or who was looking after them.
“I thought America was better and more careful than this,” Maribis told me. “I understand that the United States has the right to deport us. But at least deport us with the children that we arrived with. It is our children who suffer. It is not just or righteous that they separate us from our children.”
In Venezuela in late September 2025, Maribis got the call she’d been dreading: Her cousin said she was going into the hospital, at that moment and possibly for several weeks, and had left Maribis’s kids alone in her Dallas apartment—having told 12-year-old Carliannys to look after her two younger siblings and asked a neighbor to check on them. Someone needed to come get them, fast.
Maribis says she could only think of one person to call on. A mutual friend had told her about another Venezuelan man named Rolando who—upon arriving in the U.S.—had stayed with a pastor in Midland, a city 330 miles west of Dallas. Not knowing what else to do, she called Rolando, who called the pastor, and asked: Could he drop everything and drive five hours to pick up three children he’d never met and take care of them indefinitely?
“At the beginning, I was not gung ho about it,” said Elias. “I knew they could be with us for a long time, and what a big responsibility. But then I heard the Lord say, ‘You have to go pick them up,’ and I had no other choice.”
Back when he started setting up migrant shelters, he said: “God told me, ‘Do not ask me why they are here. Ask me, What should I do now that they are here?’” The answer to that question has always been clear to him, found in Matthew 25: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”
The same conviction led him to get in the car and go pick up the children. Meanwhile, his congregation and the broader community rallied. This is a deep-red county. Most people here want expansive immigration reform—strict border enforcement, deportation of criminals, an overhaul of the asylum and TPS system to prevent abuse, and an annual cap on visas. Yet people who heard the story of these children looked for ways to help: donating clothes and toys, making meals, paying expenses, even offering to help care for them. When I met the children, I asked Carliannys what it had been like, living with the pastor and his wife for a month, being part of the Midland community. “I feel safe here,” she said, in Spanish. “But I really miss my mom.”
Elias shakes his head sadly as she speaks. “It’s been too long,” he said. “Children need to be with their mothers. It isn’t good for their hearts or souls to be separated like this.”
But American authorities had apparently washed their hands of the kids. “Many people who hear what happened, they want the government to solve it,” Elias told me. “They ask: Shouldn’t immigration have a way of sending them back?”
To this, he says: “I understand that the government should do it, but guess what? They are not doing it. So what is the church going to do? Are we just going to stand idly by and watch children and mothers hurt?”
When I first met the children, Elias was hashing out an unlikely plan to reunite them with their mother. He told me he was going to drive them to Miami—which takes 24 hours from Midland—to avoid possible hiccups with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on a domestic flight. Then he would chaperone them all the way home, flying first to Curaçao, the Dutch Caribbean island, before going on to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. (American citizens can’t easily get the visa required to enter the country, because of political tensions, so Elias planned to travel on his Mexican passport.)
Elias asked friends in Midland to help pay for the family’s travel expenses and quickly raised close to $6,000 to sponsor the trip. When he set off, a few days before Thanksgiving, those who had helped waited anxiously for updates. No one was sure if the plan would work. Would the emailed travel documents Maribis had managed to get issued in Venezuela get them onto an international flight? Would the children, even though their mom had been deported, be allowed to leave the country in the company of a non-relative?
At each juncture, a flurry of celebratory texts was exchanged—the kids were allowed to check in; they’d boarded in Miami; they’d successfully changed flights in Curaçao.
“When we were waiting for the flight, Moisés began to pray that angels would protect the plane so that they could see their mom again,” said Elias. On the LASER Airlines plane to Caracas, Elias says, he spoke to the chaperones of four other children on the same flight who were being returned to parents who had been deported without them. In each case, he said, the children’s families or friends had fortunately had the resources to arrange the trip.
When they finally landed in Caracas, Elias and the kids had to wait for more than an hour while immigration authorities checked their documents and confirmed Maribis was waiting for them on the other side of customs. With each passing minute, Elias said, the children grew more anxious and excited.
“After that, the doors opened,” he told me. “Moisés took off running and when he saw his mother, he jumped into her arms and she began to weep uncontrollably.” It had been nearly five months since she’d seen her children.
“Victoria came next and wrapped her hands around her mama’s leg, and when Carliannys got to her, all four of them fell to the floor and they all began to cry,” Elias remembers. “Maribis was saying, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you. This is the greatest miracle I’ve ever received. I get to have you in my arms again.’”
Word has spread in Venezuela about the Texas pastor who might be able to help get children back to their parents. Elias told me his phone keeps ringing, desperate calls coming from mothers in Venezuela.
He told me about two children—both under 10—who spend hours alone in an apartment in Tennessee; their mom was deported and now they live with a young man, a friend of hers, who works all day. He also told me about a 9-month-old and his 10-year-old sister in Chicago, living with an aunt after their mother—her C-section scar still raw—was deported a month after giving birth. Two new children arrived at Thanksgiving here in Midland, living with another family that volunteered to host them—a 5-year-old girl and her 1-year-old little sister, who was born in the United States. Elias told me that their parents were deported to Venezuela last year, and are trying to get travel documents for the kids, but it’s more complicated than it was for Maribis because their baby is a U.S. citizen.
The pastor has spoken to so many mothers who are as desperate and frantic and stubbornly hopeful as Maribis was just a few months ago. Since Maribis was deported, the Trump administration has moved to end TPS for about 600,000 Venezuelans. (On January 14, a federal appeals court heard arguments about whether to uphold a lower court’s decision to block this action, but no ruling has been issued yet.) This begs the question: Are a lot more parents about to be deported without their kids? With increased instability in Venezuela, Elias is unsure what the future holds, and whether he’d be allowed to make the same trip again, to take more kids home.
“I’m available to help, as the Lord opens doors,” he said. Last week, he drove to San Antonio to pick up a 5-year-old boy who has autism; his Venezuelan mother was deported to Mexico four months ago, Elias told me, and the child had been staying with her former neighbor ever since.
While he was there, Elias said, he discovered that the boy’s 3-year-old cousin was staying with the neighbor, too—her mother had also been deported without her, but to Venezuela—so he brought her back to Midland as well, at her mother’s request. “I’ll take the boy to be with his mom in Mexico soon,” Elias says. He’s not yet sure how to get the little girl back to her mother in Venezuela.
In the meantime, there are people in Midland helping to care for these kids. “These are the angels God sent to help me get my children back,” said Maribis. “Now I hope these will be the angels who can help the other mothers.”
(The Free Press)
Uncollected Property Taxes:
“the Tax Collector’s office had suffered a major staffing setback in March of 2022 when long-time Tax Collector Schari Schapmire and her long-time senior assistant Julie Forrester retired prematurely when the Board rashly consolidated the Tax Collector’s office with the Auditor’s office against the considered advice of Schapmire and Auditor Chamise Cubbison (and many others).”
It is not the CEO, or board’s job to come up with a plan to collect unpaid property taxes. That is the elected Tax Collector’s job. The board controls the purse strings of the Tax Collector’s office, and it should be the CEO’s job, with direction and oversight by the board, to work with the elected Tax Collector to establish the appropriate needed funding for the Tax Collector’s staff.
This seems so simple. It is a matter of knowing the difference between what needs to be done, and how it is to be done.
Indeed. All the political and bureaucratic ranting and rangling obfuscates issues and gets in the way of getting the real work done. It seems the embedded County way of life, each BOS meeting giving us lots of words and little clarity. The same dynamic happened often in the lower reaches of the County, where division meetings offered up the same blather and waste of time.
When “Pan American Unity” was on display at MOMA, I took my Mom down to see it. She was in her 90’s then. As we took in it’s magnificence, she said, “On, I remember this.” When Diego was making the mural on Treasure Island her father had taken her out there to see it. Diego believed that art belonged to the public and the entire process of him bringing that mural to life was open to the public at no charge. It truly is an amazing piece of art, well worth your time to see it in person when it finally happens.
A perspective from the north county, another element to the uncollected property tax situation: with the collapse of the cannabis green rush I see a lot of essentially abandoned properties. Nobody living there, trash, broken down cars, the plastic falling down on hoop houses. For example, one property that I know about has numerous established code violations, and yet the county has no mechanism or ordinance in place to force compliance, levy any fine, compel a sale, and so consequently the property just sits there, abandoned, no tax collected, becoming a magnet for more trash, broken down cars, squatters, on and on. This situation needs to get fixed, and the responsibility is spread between the tax collector, the code enforcement section of building and planning, county counsel and the supervisors. Many cities have in place methods to force a scofflaw landlord to either repair or lose the property. Why not Mendocino? Our part of the County is slowly turning into a trash pile and nothing is being done by local government to address the situation, collect the property tax or force a sale to a responsible new owner.
The Bossa meme may be true, may be false,
I see a lot of stuff like that out there attributed to athletes
(Just because he’s a Trumper and maybe agrees with the meme,
chances are he never said it…)
Jack Smith is an American hero.
+1, if that means I wholeheartedly agree.
+2
+3
Amen.
My wife loves to read Dorthy Parker poems. She memorized one of the most famous:
Resume
Razors pain you
Rivers are damp
Acids stain you
Drugs cause cramp
Guns aren’t lawful
Nooses give
Gas smells awful
You might as well live