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Catch up on Bay Area news today, including high-stakes NCAA basketball games at Chase Center, a lawsuit to protect legal aid for immigrant children, and new federal legislation targeting wildfire damage to vineyards.
Here is our human-produced daily news roundup for the 12 hours from 4:00 AM Thursday 3/27 to 4:00 PM Thursday 3/27:
San Francisco is hosting two games at Chase Center on Thursday in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship tournament.
At 4:39 p.m., University of Florida, which is the No. 1 seed in the West region of the tournament’s bracket, plays No. 4 University of Maryland. That game will be followed at 7:09 p.m. by a matchup between No. 3 seed Texas Tech University and No. 10 University of Arkansas.
The winners of those games, which are part of the Sweet Sixteen round of the tournament, will then play Saturday at Chase Center in an Elite Eight matchup to decide the winner of the West region that will then move on to the Final Four next week.
This is the second time that Chase Center — home of the Golden State Warriors National Basketball Association team and the soon-to-debut Golden State Valkyries team in the Women’s National Basketball Association — is hosting NCAA men’s tournament games after previously hosting in 2022.
Before that, San Francisco had not hosted games from the tournament since 1939 when the city hosted games at the California Coliseum on Treasure Island.
Eleven nonprofit legal services organizations, including one in Berkeley and another in East Palo Alto, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco seeking to preserve funding for the legal representation of children in immigration matters.
The plaintiffs allege that last Friday, “without warning,” they received “cancellation orders” from the U.S. Department of the Interior ordering them to immediately stop work representing “unaccompanied children” in immigration cases. They asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order that would rescind the cancellations until the court can hold a full hearing on the lawsuit.
Unaccompanied children are foreign-born minors who arrived in the United States without parents or caregivers, often under tragic circumstances.
The plaintiffs say in their complaint that the most common reasons they are unaccompanied is “because they were separated from their parents on their way to the United States, because they were trafficked to the United States, because they were separated from their families by immigration authorities after entering the United States, or because they fled their home countries without their parents.”
The representation of unaccompanied children is contracted to a network of 89 legal services organizations in 159 offices around the country. The plaintiffs ask the court to block the cancellations, noting that on the date of cancellation, the plaintiffs and others in the network were actively representing 26,000 children.
A new bill in Congress proposes to use federal funds to research the impacts of wildfire smoke exposure on grapevines and vineyards, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said when the bill was introduced earlier this month.
The Smoke Exposure Research Act requests $32.5 million to fund the U.S. Department of Agriculture to work with University of California, Davis, Oregon State University and Washington State University to research the effects of smoke exposure on viticulture and winemaking practices.
All three universities are in the country’s largest winegrowing states. The three states combined have approximately 669,000 acres of planted vineyards, according to the USDA and Oregon Wine Board.
The proposed Smoke Exposure Research Act is co-sponsored by Padilla, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and U.S. Reps. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale.
California, Oregon and Washington have all experienced major wildfires in recent years, often during the fall, when vineyards are flush with grapes ready to harvest.
At least one died in a pile-up on eastbound Interstate Highway 80 in Contra Costa County early Thursday morning, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The CHP said that around 3:50 a.m., patrol officers were alerted to a multi-vehicle collision on I-80’s eastbound lanes near the Carquinez Bridge and the eastbound Pomono Street off-ramp in the unincorporated town of Crockett.
Patrol officers said at least four vehicles were involved in the collision, including a big-rig.
According to the CHP, a coroner was called nearly an hour after the crash, which shut down eastbound lanes of the freeway west of the Carquinez Bridge.
A 37-year-old man has pleaded not guilty to vehicular manslaughter, hit-and-run and other charges for a collision that killed a woman in Brisbane earlier this week, prosecutors said Thursday.
Hector Delatorre-Jiminez is accused of causing a collision that killed 59-year-old Lodi resident Rosa Baez early Monday morning, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.
Shortly before 5:15 a.m., Baez was driving to work in a blue Honda on Bayshore Boulevard at the intersection with Van Waters and Rodgers Road and had a green light to make a left turn when Delatorre-Jiminez allegedly ran through a red light in a Chevrolet Tahoe and struck Baez’s vehicle, pushing it into a light pole, prosecutors said.
Delatorre-Jiminez’s vehicle then struck a second vehicle, injuring its driver. Baez was taken to a hospital and died there, while the victim in the second vehicle is expected to survive.
Prosecutors said Delatorre-Jiminez allegedly ran from the collision scene and went to his workplace in Atherton, but the crash was caught on surveillance video and investigators eventually determined he was the driver. Officers went to his workplace, where he allegedly admitted to what he had done.
The family of Baez has created a GoFundMe site to raise money for funeral expenses. The GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/HelpRosasFamily had raised $1,700 as of midday Thursday.