The California Report
Healthcare Company Focusing on Women’s Health Faces Scrutiny
A healthcare company with half a dozen clinics in Southern California is facing pushback for its quality of services.
Jul 28, 2026
Updated 9:30 am PT
Samantha Kennedy
A clinic in El Cajon. A healthcare company with half a dozen clinics in Southern California is facing pushback for its quality of services. (Becky Sullivan/NPR)
Here are the morning’s top stories for Tuesday, July 28, 2026:
- A healthcare company that has clinics in Californiathat focuses on women’s health is facing scrutiny after several patients have complained about the quality of care they received.
- The Department of Homeland Security was hit with a lawsuit that alleges the agency is illegally surveilling observers of immigration enforcement activities. DHS is accused of using surveillance tools to track people observing these actions.
- The federal government is dropping a charge against union leader David Huerta, months after he was arrested in June on suspicion of felony conspiracy to impede an officer. That was later lowered to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of a federal officer.
- Research from UCLA and CalTech outlines a new way of detecting when temporary land subsidence becomes permanent and irreversible.
The healthcare company Tia Inc., which has clinics in California, has told patients they weren’t pregnant – when they actually were – and were otherwise misdiagnosed. That’s according to a new investigation by the LA Public Press and The 19th, which outlines patients’ criticisms of the company
Madhri Yehiya, a contributing reporter with the Public Press who helped conduct the investigation, said that the company is billing itself one way while acting another way
“They are intending to promise something that is very different than the normal standard of women’s healthcare, and in actual execution, patients are finding that it’s a lot of surface level design and advertising and generally an aesthetic that draws patients in for that promise,” Yehiya said
The investigation found that at least three women had been incorrectly told by Tia providers that they were not pregnant. That’s in addition to other concerns patients have raised about the healthcare
A handful of patients said they had also been denied pain or anxiety medication, and instead were offered alternative natural remedies, according to the investigation
“So there’s a lot of false advertising that a lot of patients seem to be experiencing,” Yehiya said
DHS surveillance lawsuit
A lawsuit has been filed against the Trump administration, alleging that the federal government is illegally surveilling observers of immigration enforcement activities
The Department of Homeland Security is accused of using surveillance tools to track people who are legally monitoring these actions
John Davisson with the Electronic Privacy Information Center is a plaintiff in the case
“It’s really about challenging this attempt as part of a broader campaign by the administration to intimidate people who are engaged again in nothing more than peaceful legal observation and protest by collecting their data and in this case, punishing them by revoking their global entry status,” Davisson said
Those privileges allow people to go through expedited security screenings at U.S. points of entry
Federal government drops Huerta’s charge stemming from June arrest
The Justice Department has moved to dismiss its criminal case against a labor union leader who was arrested while protesting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in California
The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles filed a motion Monday to dismiss its case against David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California, which has more than 750,000 members including janitors, security officers and other workers. The government will seek to have the case permanently withdrawn within weeks if Huerta continues to comply with the terms of his pretrial release and stays out of trouble, prosecutors said
Huerta said in a statement that he was tackled, pepper-sprayed and detained for exercising his constitutional rights to protest and cast the case against him as part of a broader “weaponization of the judicial system.”
Sinking land research
Some farming towns in California’s Central Valley have sunk by more than 11 feet in recent years because of groundwater pumping, the extraction of water from underground aquifers using wells and electric pumps for drinking, farming and industry
While some land subsidence is temporary, excessive pumping can cause aquifers to permanently collapse, reducing storage capacity and damaging homes, roads, bridges and canals
New research from UCLA and Caltech has outlined a way to detect when temporary land subsidence becomes permanent and irreversible
The research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses satellite imagery to identify the “abrupt transition to irreversible damage.” Researchers hope this will give decision makers new tools to keep an eye on water re
“If you start seeing that the ground is subsiding this fast, like we’re seeing, we’re hoping this is really an early warning signal that, okay, something is wrong, we need to stop pumping groundwater right now,” said Stacy Larochelle, an assistant professor at UCLA
