The Bay

Sixteen year-old Crista Ramos was in her high school Zoom class when her family got some stressful news: A federal court ruled in favor of ending the humanitarian protection known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The program allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants who fled their home countries, including Crista’s mom, to work and live in the United States. For more than two years, Crista...

Suburbs are some of the most diverse spaces in America. It's one reason why — more and more — they’ve become the backdrop of tensions between police and communities of color. That friction is at the center of a protest over policing in Antioch, where activists went on a hunger strike for five days and are camped out in front of the local police department. Guest: Sandhya Dirks, race and equity rep...

When KQED photojournalist Beth LaBerge woke up to orange skies in San Francisco Wednesday morning, she rushed out the door to document the extraordinary moment. In a year with the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice protests and wildfires, Beth has been on the frontlines documenting it all. And in some ways, it helps her process all that’s been happening. Guest: Beth LaBerge, photojournalist for...

The pandemic has set off a chain of events that will make this year’s election in California different from years past. For one, the state can’t bet on its most reliable poll workers — older Californians — to volunteer. On top of that, many traditional polling places have been closed because of the risk of an outbreak. So now the state is mailing all registered voters a ballot. And while that will...

Uncle Bobby Johnson, also known as the People’s Uncle, has been standing up to police brutality ever since his nephew Oscar Grant was shot by a BART police officer in 2009. He's also spent a lot of time supporting families who've lost loved ones to police violence. And today he sees a movement that is much bigger than when he first became an activist more than a decade ago. Guest: Cephus Johnson,...

For the last eight years, Uber and Lyft have successfully beaten state and local attempts to change its core labor model: treating drivers as independent contractors instead of employees with benefits. Then the pandemic hit. And now, California’s public officials — including state attorney general Xavier Becerra — might actually have the political will to force gig companies to change how they tre...

Soon after the pandemic started and Californians began to lose their jobs, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued what he called an 'eviction moratorium' to protect those who couldn’t make rent because of COVID-19. But there are a lot of vulnerable people who were never protected by that order. And since March 4, at least 2,000 California households have been kicked out of their homes. Guest: Matt Levin, housin...

Fire season doesn't have to be this bad. There are lots of things we can do to prevent more and more extreme wildfires. It'll take a big shift in the way we do things. California has spent decades reacting to and suppressing natural fires, which is one reason why the wildfires we're currently dealing with are so extreme. But it's still possible to rethink our relationship with fire and change our...

California is low on firefighters at a really bad time. It’s partially because the state released thousands of incarcerated firefighters to prevent the spread of Covid-19. But it’s also because this system of relying on incarcerated people to help fight fires — which we’ve had since after World War II — isn’t sustainable. Guest: Kevin Stark, KQED science reporter Recommended reading: Rare Honors T...

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that could ban WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, from operating in the United States.  But this potential ban would also have ripple effects on local politics in San Francisco, where about one in five residents are Chinese. Many use the app to talk with family and do business, but also to reach voters and organize around...

Back in 2017, Quinn Jasmine Redwoods saw a long line of people at a food distribution center in Oakland. Nobody in line had a mask, even though the most deadly and destructive wildfires in Californian’s history were spreading pollutants into the air. So Redwoods picked up 300 masks at a local store, and created Mask Oakland, a trans/queer led grassroots organization to distribute masks to mostly u...

People across the state lost power with almost no warning over the weekend, and there’s a risk it could happen again soon. The California Independent Systems Operator instituted rolling power shutoffs to prevent an uncontrolled loss of power, and is asking people to limit how much electricity they're using. But why is this even happening in the first place? Guest: Dan Brekke, KQED editor and repor...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jesus Guillen overheard a woman ask why those being held on the Grand Princess cruise ship docked at the Oakland Port with COVID-19 couldn’t just be sent to an island somewhere. It reminded him immediately of another crisis he lived through: The HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, where discrimination and stigma was made worse by the government’s inadequate r...

A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered a privately-run immigrant detention center in Bakersfield to stop transferring people to the facility and to provide weekly COVID-19 tests to those inside. Now more than a dozen people detained at the Mesa Verde facility have COVID-19. Meanwhile, calls to get people out of immigration detention centers are overlapping with calls to abolish prisons amid...

Sen. Kamala Harris will be the first Black woman and person of Indian descent to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. Many Americans got to know her when she ran for president last year. But we here in the Bay Area have known her for a lot longer. Not just because she was born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, but because her political career started in San Francisco. Now she's joined...

Many senior care homes in the Bay Area are in fire risk areas, according to a KQED investigation. These facilities are supposed to have emergency plans for disasters like wildfires in order to evacuate the mostly older people with medical conditions who live in them. But with dangerous fire season months approaching, and a pandemic in full swing, some worry that many assisted living homes aren’t p...

Almost all Bay Area schools are required to start the school year remotely to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 this fall. In response, many families are starting their own small, in-person "learning pods" instead. But not everyone has access to one. Some parents are paying extra just so their child can get access. And there are also fears that these pods will exacerbate inequities that have...

A secret clique of Vallejo police officers commemorate killings by bending the tips of their star-shaped badges — and the city’s top leaders did nothing about it. That's according to Open Vallejo, a recently launched non-profit news organization. For many locals, the story only confirmed their mistrust of a department they feel continues to act with impunity. Last week, police Chief Shawny William...

Last week, Congress questioned leaders of four of the largest tech companies in the world - Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple - about just how much power they’ve gained over the years. Today, we're revisiting an episode from December about how Amazon's race to be the biggest and fastest is hurting the employees doing the work. Will Evans, reporter with The Center for Investigative Reporting You c...

Some doulas are seeing an uptick in business during the pandemic. Hospitals are limiting the number of people who can be present at births, and many families are looking for options outside of traditional healthcare facilities. We'll hear from Sumayyah Monét Franklin who is a birth rights activist, doula and owner of Sumi's Touch. She talks about working during a pandemic and why she is especially...

From November of 2019 to January of 2020, two Black mothers occupied a vacant West Oakland property without permission from the company that owned the house, Southern California-based Wedgewood Properties. Since then — after a lot of public pressure — Wedgewood agreed to let them stay. The Oakland Community Land Trust will purchase the home and least it back to the moms. Today, we're revisiting th...

On October 14 of last year, Native people from across the West Coast gathered in San Francisco for a ceremonial canoe journey to Alcatraz Island. Each canoe represented a territory, tribe, community or family. They paddled to celebrate culture and values on Indigenous Peoples' Day, and to commemorate the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz. This episode originally published in October 2019. Learn more abo...

Ashanti Branch started Ever Forward Club because he wanted the young men in his classroom to have what he didn't have as a student: a safe place to be themselves. After Ashanti gave them that, he saw them start to succeed. Mindshift, from KQED, focuses on stories about the future of learning. Today we're sharing the first episode of Season 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad...

Jason Mai didn’t know why his father was taken to jail when he was 12 years old. As a kid growing up in the Bay Area, he was told by his Chinese family to avoid má fan, which meant burdening or inconveniencing others by sharing the family secret. Only as an adult did Jason start to process his childhood trauma by learning about the intersections between incarceration and Asian American culture. To...

We've produced more than 300 stories about the Bay Area. Today, we're taking a break from the headlines to revisit a show from March (before shelter in place orders) where we traveled to three of our favorite spots around the Bay Area. Guests: Alan Montecillo, Ericka Cruz Guevarra and Devin Katayama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices