But he's seen enough disastrous budget years now to know how readily -- and wrongly -- many people blame the state's problem on illegal immigration.

But illegal immigration didn't get California into its budget fix, and full federal payment -- an unlikely prospect -- wouldn't get us out.

Playing to the anti-immigrant chorus, even in a quest for federal money, undermines the message every Californian must hear: We cannot currently pay for those programs that we consistently list as our top priorities, including first-rate education, transportation and public safety, and it's not because of the size of the undocumented population. It's because of our appetite for services, the structure of our tax system and the dysfunction of our government.

He has been an outstanding spokesman in the fight to combat greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, dueling with the deniers on the weekend talk shows and touting California's policy progress around the globe.

But perhaps because his career has put him so directly in touch with the popular imagination, he also gives voice to the common wisdom of the day -- even if that wisdom is wrong, as it is when it assigns the state's troubles to public workers, welfare recipients and illegal immigrants.

Most Mexicans think their lives would be better in the United States, and one in three said they'd move to the U.S. if they could, according to the latest findings on Mexican attitudes from the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

Half of those who said they'd migrate north of the border said they would do so without permission, although recent data on immigration suggests that the flow of Mexicans north is slowing.

Lopez, who is national president of Mexican American Political Association and national director of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, said the charges against him were groundless and he and his attorney planned to fight the allegations.

Lopez has faced voter trouble in the past, including in 1996 for allegedly registering new citizens in the congressional district where Democrat Loretta Sanchez upset incumbent Bob Dornan.

A congressional investigation found some voters had cast ballots before their citizenship was finalized. The Orange County District Attorney’s office investigated the allegations, but no charges were filed.

Calling access to healthcare a moral and spiritual imperative, Los Angeles religious leaders and their flocks are urging congressional leaders to include illegal [aliens] in any healthcare reform plan.

The Roman Catholic Church, the nation's largest religious denomination, with 67 million members, considers healthcare a basic human right, a position articulated in a 1963 papal encyclical by Pope John XXIII. As a result, the church believes that illegal immigrants should be included in any health reform plan, according to Kathy Saile, director of domestic social development with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"If healthcare is a basic right, you can't start cutting people out," she said.

But some religious conservatives disagree. Richard Land, who heads the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, said that biblical exhortations to care for the poor apply to people of faith, not to governments, and should inspire private charitable efforts but not taxpayer-funded plans for illegal [aliens].

"It's noble and commendable to be charitable with your own money, but it's something different to be charitable with other people's money," he said.

For Josephina Dedoy, a 58-year-old Mexico native and legal U.S. resident, the debate is intensely personal. She and her husband, a naturalized U.S. citizen, have a daughter who has epilepsy and is undocumented, having been born in Mexico before her parents earned legal status.

A man arrested and charged with murdering a prostitute at a Garden Grove hotel is a gang member who has been deported to Mexico three times in the last decade, Garden Grove police said at a press conference this morning.

Cesar Gomez, 34, of El Monte, is scheduled to be arraigned on a murder charge Monday at West Justice Center.

He is accused of strangling Ashley Lilly, 24, of Inglewood, to death at the Crowne Plaza Anaheim Resort on Harbor Boulevard some time late Aug. 20 or early Aug. 21.

Lilly had been severely beaten in the face and choked by hand, and her room had been ransacked, police said. She had not been sexually assaulted, police said.

"We arrest these criminals, the DA does a good job prosecuting them, but beyond that our system is overwhelmed and broken," Polisar said. "Our borders are like revolving doors for these criminals. It's like sweeping back the ocean with a whisk broom."

Los Angeles prosecutors allege that Lopez registered to vote at the Boyle Heights office of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana - and voted in Boyle Heights - while living in Santa Ana last year. Lopez heads both HML and the Mexican American Political Association.

Lopez left the Democratic Party to join the Green Party in 2004.

Lopez faces charges alleging fraudulent voter registration, fraudulent document filing, perjury and fraudulent voting. If convicted on all charges, Lopez could be sentenced to a maximum of 3 years and 8 months in state prison.

Munoz said that a rift within the Green Party sent a vengeful party member to Secretary of State Debra Bowen with the voter fraud allegations.

Our immigration system is not broken, and we don't need immigration reform. It is our government that is broken, and we need government reform.

Let us have strong border control,

but let us also have legalization of long-term illegal immigrants

Remittances are a huge drain on the state and federal levels. The amount of money leaving the country is enormous.

Private charities provide spotty help at best. Taxes are the fairest way to spread the cost around.

Why is it that during times of economic crisis, the most vulnerable are blamed?

What about those of the legal population committing welfare fraud, Medicare fraud and Social Security fraud?

These vulnerable workers do pay taxes. When they purchase items, they are paying sales tax.

We cannot underestimate the significance of contributions these illegal immigrants make to the farming/agricultural/food processing/packaging business.

The standout in the recitation of costs because of illegal immigration is the portrait of Delia Godinez and her five children. The family receives $650 each month from the state's CalWorks program, $500 in federal food stamps and other vouchers and unmentioned thousands in public schooling benefits. This is for one illegal immigrant family.

Even parking becomes impossible when half of my neighbors are living nine people in a one-bedroom place with five cars outside.

As a member of Congress, I work hard to make sure that federal funding for school districts is maximized so this center and other area schools can best serve our students and communities.

About 100 students in caps in gowns – some illegal immigrant college students in Orange County – made up the more than 250 attendees who support the DREAM Act.

The act would allow undocumented students to apply for legal permanent resident status, protect them from deportation and make them eligible for student loans and federal work study programs.

Tuesday's crowd at the Teamsters Local 952 Hall in Orange cheered and others cried when a Santa Ana College student by the name of Abraham gave something of a testimonial in rap-song form.

"I still have a dream," said Abraham who only gave his first name. But right now, "We are doctors, teachers and lawyers, living in terror from ICE."

Students from Cal State Fullerton, Santa Ana College, UCI and other nearby higher-education institutions wore caps and gowns and signs – some reading "What now?" at the Orange ceremony.

Supporters of the bill have said that students find themselves without jobs after college due to their legal status.

Waving American flags and pictures of President Obama, thousands of protesters took to the streets Friday in May Day rallies in Southern California to promote immigration reform.

"We have a lot of hope," said Ricarda Garcia, an illegal [alien] from Mexico who has attended the marches for several years. But Garcia, 36, a housekeeper, said she also feels a sense of urgency because there is little work for her and her husband, a construction worker. "I feel more necessity now, " she said. "There aren't jobs."

Organizers blamed the relatively low turnout on the swine flu and the reluctance of many to take time off work.

Hector Gonzalez, 24, a student at Cal Poly Pomona, said he hoped that the Dream Act, intended to help illegal [alien] high school graduates, would be among the first legislative reforms.

With legal status, Gonzalez said, he could contribute more to the country's ailing economy.

"People like me are here to help Obama," said Gonzalez, who came to the U.S. as a toddler. "I just need a little step forward."

Although most immigrant rights protesters Friday called for an end to raids, arrests and deportations, a small but spirited group of mostly South Asians marching in Artesia said their biggest concerns were labor exploitation and racial profiling.

Sultan Ahmed, a 48-year-old mortgage broker, said Pakistani immigrants like himself are disproportionately pulled over for airport security checks and unduly delayed for citizenship application approvals.

A study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center has documented a change in trend: After years of rapid growth, illegal [alien invasion] is slowing down in California, with the state's share of the nation's estimated 11.9 million [illegal aliens] dropping to 22% from 42% in 1990, the study showed.

The state still has the largest concentration of illegal [aliens] in the nation, with 2.7 million -- a figure that has nearly doubled since 1990.

But, in a trend that began with California's recession in the 1990s, more migrants are bypassing the state for other areas of the country. The number of illegal [aliens] outside the nation's six traditional "first stop" states of California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York has increased sevenfold, to nearly 5 million in 2008 from 700,000 in 1990, according to Jeffrey S. Passel, the study's coauthor and a Pew Center senior demographer.

Nearly half of the households headed by [illegal aliens] have young children, twice the rate of native-born households. And nearly three-fourths of their children were U.S.-born citizens.

The children of [illegal aliens] make up about 10% of California students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The study, co-written by D'Vera Cohn, a Pew Research Center senior writer, found that three-quarters of illegal immigrants are Latino, mostly from Mexico. On average, they tend to work in low-skilled jobs such as farming and construction, earn markedly less than the median national income and have lower educational levels than U.S.-born residents.

For instance, 47% of illegal immigrant adults ages 25-64 have less than a high school education compared with 8% for U.S.-born residents. The immigrants' 2007 median household income was $36,000, compared with $50,000 for the U.S.-born, and they did not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they lived in the United States, unlike legal immigrants, the study found.

The nation's top two labor federations announced a framework Tuesday for comprehensive immigration reform, setting aside differences with the hope of pushing legislation through this year.

The agreement, supported by the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation, supports the legalization of the nation's 12 million [illegal aliens] and the formation of an independent commission to analyze the labor market's needs and assess shortages for the admission of future foreign workers. The unions oppose any new guest worker programs that would allow employers to bring foreigners in on a temporary basis.

[Illegal alien advocate] groups also plan to hold news conferences, town hall meetings and hearings across the nation to mobilize support for reform and to highlight what they say is the harm caused by a lack of legislation.

In addition, the unions included border security as a tenant of their plan but wrote in the agreement that enforcement should not be the responsibility of local law enforcement and should focus on "criminal elements."

The center is "regularly overcrowded, causing violence, safety hazards, and humiliation," while detainees are denied access to attorneys and courts and are rarely provided drinking water or a change of clothing...

Detainees are held at the center during the day and then shuttled to local jails at night and on weekends, which the suit said "effectively cuts detainees off from contact with the outside world" and deprives them of their basic needs.

"They are detaining people in inhumane conditions, grossly unsanitary and disgusting conditions," said Marisol Orihuela, a staff attorney at the ACLU.

During a tour of the processing center several months ago, Los Angeles assistant field office director Eric Saldana said the agency was doing its best to keep detainees there for just 12 hours at a time and quickly move them into facilities designed to hold them for longer periods. Sometimes, however, he said, detainees are kept longer or brought back for several days because of delays in accessing travel documents for deportation or because of limited space at local jails.

The processing center holds up to 250 detainees. There are six large holding cells surrounding a central area with desks, where the detainees are photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed. Each cell has a phone, a bathroom and a bench around the edge. There are also smaller cells for families or juveniles.

Detainees have access to medical staff and can ask to see a judge, Saldana said.

Sprinkler use would be restricted to two days a week under the proposal and, by summer, could be cut to one day a week if the drought continues, Villaraigosa said. The restrictions -- the first of six levels have been in place for more than a year -- and rate changes could be enacted by spring if approved by the City Council and DWP.

Water restrictions are nothing new in California, but since the last major drought in the early 1990s the state's population has grown by 9 million.

Court rulings to protect the delta smelt in the Sacramento Delta and a prolonged drought along the Colorado Basin also have reduced Southern California's water supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River.

She's an illegal immigrant, so she isn't eligible for most forms of state and federal financial aid. The University of California system, by policy, does not require applicants to disclose their citizenship status: Officials say their goal is to find the best students, not to enforce immigration law. UCLA officials say they aren't even sure how many undocumented students are on their campus.