State of Emergency Declared As California Prepares for Potentially Historic El Niño Event

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, September 22, 2026

• With a potentially historic El Niño brewing, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency Monday ahead of winter storms and high tides that could wreak havoc across the state. 
• Governor Newsom is signing a package of bills placing new regulations on data center development. 
• It’s less than a month away from when ballots will hit Merced County residents’ mailboxes, and officials are urging voters to drop off their ballot in–person. The county is providing more ballot drop boxes to avoid using mail delivery. 
• The Trump administration’s current mass deportation push has echoes of a long-ago immigration campaign, when roughly a million people were sent to Mexico. That’s according to a historian who spoke at UC Berkeley recently.

As a potentially historic El Niño continues to build, Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency on Monday ahead of winter storms and high tides that could wreak havoc on the state. 

Forecasters predict that much of California could have above-average precipitation and temperatures this winter. The potential storms could pile on top of El Niño-induced higher sea levels and record-high king tides.

As a result, Newsom is directing state agencies to begin preparing vulnerable communities and roads, stage emergency supplies and work in at-risk areas to reduce flooding potential. He has also directed state agencies to fast-track permitting and cut red tape to ready the state for El Niño effects. “We are preparing for this El Niño early because every Californian deserves to be safe in their home, connected to their community, and protected when severe weather comes,” Newsom said in a statement.

El Niño forms when tropical trade winds weaken or reverse, allowing warm ocean water near Asia to slosh toward the Pacific Coast. That warming can reshape the jet stream and bring stormier weather across California while disrupting the ocean’s nutrient-rich upwelling, heating coastal waters, raising sea levels and stressing marine life. National forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that the natural climate phenomenon is strengthening, with a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event and a 75% chance of a historic event this fall and winter. Exactly what the weather will look like this fall and winter is — quite literally — still up in the air. But similar events in past El Niño years have brought torrential downpours, coastal flooding, mudslides, power outages and giant waves.

“Climate-driven El Niño conditions could mean months of dangerous weather, heavy rain, strong winds, deep mountain snow, flooding, and Californians should understand this clearly,” said Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the California Office of Emergency Services. “Storms are among the deadliest disasters we face here in California, and one of the greatest dangers is still people underestimating the power of water.” To prepare for what might happen, the emergency proclamation mobilizes resources in support of the state’s flood-risk-reduction efforts. The California Department of Water Resources has staged 4.4 million sandbags, 400,000 tons of rock, 68 stockpile locations, eight warehouses and 211 flood material containers across the state. State leaders have not yet put a price tag on the flood work.

Data center developments in California will face new hurdles under legislation signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday amid rising concerns about the facilities at the heart of the nation’s artificial intelligence boom. 

The seven bills signed by Newsom include provisions aimed at preventing data centers from passing on their electricity costs to other ratepayers and a new requirement for developers to disclose their projected water usage. “With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense,” Newsom said in a statement.

The governor vetoed the water-reporting proposal last year, citing a need to further understand impacts on data center businesses and consumers. Since then, opposition to data centers has intensified; local governments across California are considering bans or moratoriums on the projects, and Newsom has promised his administration would be “leaning in” on regulations.

Two bills signed by Newsom, Senate Bill 886 and Assembly Bill 2383, would require the California Public Utilities Commission to create new power rates for data centers to cover the cost of connecting the facilities to the grid and providing them with electricity.  “These are some of the nation’s strongest data center ratepayer protections — stopping Big Tech from sticking California families with the bill for their data centers while ensuring all local voices have a say on these projects and they comply with our air, water, and climate standards,” said Sen. Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, who wrote SB 886.

The bills passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and Assembly largely on party-line votes, in the face of opposition from business groups such as the Data Center Coalition, whose members include Google and Microsoft. Opponents said the bills would prevent California from capitalizing on economic growth from data center construction.

Ballots will soon be mailed out to California voters for November’s mid-term election. In Merced County, officials are urging residents to drop off their ballots in-person, as the county is providing more secure ballot drop boxes.

The move comes after changes last year in the US Postal Service delayed mail delivery. Earlier this year, an analysis by KVPR found nearly 3% of returned mail-in ballots from Merced County were late during the special election in 2025.

Melvin Levey, the Merced County Registrar of Voters, urged voters to get their ballots directly to a ballot drop box. As a result, Levey said the county is providing more than double the required number of 10 drop boxes. “We want to make sure that we’re giving voters as many options as possible to have a drop box, a secure drop box, directly to Merced County elections close by to them,” he said.

There will be 21 drop boxes placed throughout the county, and all of them will have increased security measures.

It was a campaign of mass deportation, with immigration authorities engaged in racial profiling and disregarding the rights of the people they arrested, many of whom were in the United States legally. 

That’s a charge that’s been leveled at President Donald Trump’s current enforcement efforts, with agents detaining people they perceived as immigrants without legal status on the streets of cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, frequently without warrants and referring to them by racial slurs. 

It also describes a little-known chapter of U.S. history: the “Mexican Repatriation” that began amid rising xenophobia in the 1920s and gained steam during the Great Depression, said historian Marla Ramírez, who spoke about the parallels at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies last week. 

An estimated 1 million people were sent to Mexico in the period between World War I and World War II, and the majority of them were U.S. citizens, according to Ramírez, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of a recent book, “Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation.” “What happened during the interwar period and what’s happening now is that we have this stereotypical image of an immigrant that’s always rooted in who’s white and who’s not white,” she said. “We see U.S. citizens of non-white phenotypes being questioned, being arrested even, because they’ve been imagined to be immigrants, even when they’re U.S. citizens.”

Recent lawsuits have alleged — through officer bodycam footage, witnesses and individual testimonies — that agents have denied some people the opportunity to produce proof of legal status during their arrest, speak to an attorney while detained or present their case to an immigration judge before they are deported. The current environment echoes the immigration policing of a century ago, Ramírez said, and it poses a danger not only to immigrants but to society as a whole. “Whenever we are willing to turn a blind eye to the civil rights and constitutional rights of a group, it becomes a dangerous, slippery slope,” she said. “It gives [the government] permission to ignore those same rights for other groups.”