As President Donald Trump rushes to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, State Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh is urging him to carve out options for essential workers.

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.”

More than 100 students were set adrift when the Inland Empire Job Corps Center in San Bernardino abruptly closed in May.

Southern California Congress members want them back in class.

The program, which offered free job training and education to low-income teens and young adults, shut down at the end of May on just a few days' notice.

Inland Empire Democratic Reps. Norma Torres, Raul Ruiz, Pete Aguilar, and Mark Takano, and  Rep. Judy Chu, a Pasadena Democrat, wrote to U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on July 17, demanding that she reinstate the students and program. 

When the campus closed at the end of May, they wrote, “staff were not given prior notice, and students were left hanging out to dry. Many students lived on the Inland Empire Job Corps campus and were forced to leave and find other accommodations within a few days.”

The Congress members called on Chavez-DeRemer to reopen the center and allow students to return to campus and resume their programs.

Similar program closures caused chaos elsewhere, including in San Diego, Voice of San Diego reported.

California State Attorney General Rob Bonta sued a group of property management and real estate holding companies with extensive holdings in the Inland Empire for alleged violations including cockroach and rodent infestations, leaking roofs and overflowing sewage. 

The lawsuit, filed last month, targeted companies owned by Southern California rental-housing tycoon Swaranjit “Mike” Nijjar and his family members.

“PAMA and the companies owned by Mike Nijjar and his family are notorious for their rampant, slum-like conditions,” Bonta stated in a press release.

Nijjar operates more than 22,000 housing units throughout California in low income communities across Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Kern counties, Black Voice News reported. 

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