Media Clips

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, who arrived before Gov. Jerry Brown for a Vatican climate event organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, dined on Thursday with Argentinian Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who helped put together Pope Francis’ encyclical letter on the environment.

De León, previewing the speech he will give today, said he will highlight his Senate Bill 535, which directs a quarter of the proceeds from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to projects that benefit disadvantaged communities.

Last week, federal immigration officers in Texas stopped an ambulance at a Border Patrol checkpoint and followed the ten-year-old patient inside—Rosa Maria Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant with cerebral palsy—to the hospital, where she had an emergency gall bladder operation.

Kevin de León, in a speech to world-renowned climate scientists at the Vatican, assailed the “fake news and alternative facts spewing out of Washington” in arguing that California’s economy is thriving in large part because of its emphasis on enacting sweeping environmental legislation.

“We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress – at the height of our historic diversity, scientific advancement, economic output, and sense of global responsibility,” de León, leader of California’s Senate, said.

Pope Francis might support the fight against global warming, but he hasn’t been a fan of cap-and-trade programs like the one in California, which was extended in July by state lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown. 

“It may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors,” he wrote in 2015.

Jerry Brown’s father was the 32nd governor of California. Kevin de León didn’t know his father at all.

Yet they are California leaders working on an issue both see as the most pressing of our time, speaking over the weekend on climate change at the home of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

De León, “humbled” to address renowned climate scientists in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica, confronted Pope Francis’ apparent criticisms of cap-and-trade systems as benefiting moneyed interests.

It took them until 2 a.m. Saturday morning, but lawmakers finished this year's session with landmark legislation on immigration, climate change and poverty headed to the Governor's desk. State Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon argued this was one of the most "accomplished legislative sessions in California history." State Government Reporter Ben Bradford gives a wrap up of the bills now sitting on the Governor's desk awaiting signature.

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California state legislators ended their annual session the way they began it — building a wall to protect undocumented immigrants from President Trump. Not an iron wall, as Trump promised to erect along the U.S.-Mexico border, but a legal barrier to prevent local police and sheriffs from teaming with the president’s agents to enforce federal immigration law.

The legislators did a lot of other things, too, before adjourning early Saturday until January.

California lawmakers approved a bill that would make the state a so-called sanctuary state. Kevin de León, a state senator from Los Angeles explains how the bill is meant to add further protection to immigrants in the country without documentation.

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Within a day of President Trump’s election last November, California's top Democratic lawmakers responded with a joint statement that contained an audacious promise. It was their state, not Washington, D.C., that would be the "keeper of the nation's future."

An artistic rendering of that vow, with looping calligraphy and a roaring Grizzly, is now on display in the offices of Senate leader Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. In the wake of Trump's win, the words seemed to be a sort of foundational document — California's declaration of resistance.

Ripping into Donald Trump in the final hours of this year’s legislative session, California lawmakers passed measures urging Congress to censure the president, bucking his immigration policies and seeking to force him to release his tax returns. They also formally called on Trump “to publicly apologize to all Americans for his racist and bigoted behavior.”