Views reflected are my own and not representative of the Orange County Fire Authority

It had been three and a half weeks since I had my son Luke, and I was preparing to return to work as a firefighter at the OC Fire Authority. I had never been away from work that long—after ten days I start to feel antsy and as though I am lacking purpose. This time was different. All I wanted to do was hold my baby and not let go. My partner assured me that Luke was going to be ok, and I knew there were no better hands for him to be in than hers. I grabbed some breakfast and coffee and ran out the door.

I had recently transferred to a new fire station—a move that came with additional responsibilities. There was a lot to learn, which was perfect, because I wanted to stay as busy as possible to keep my mind off missing my son. As soon as I got to the station, the tones went off, indicating that there was a call. There was an explosion at a school, cause undetermined; we had 60 seconds to get dressed and go.

We got to the school and the walls were blown out. A huge water heater had exploded but fortunately no one was injured or killed. While we were dealing with the explosion, I could feel under my uniform that my breasts were getting hard, and it was time to pump.

Once we got back to the station, I tried to figure out the best place to get this done. First and foremost, I wanted to be discreet and not in anyone’s way. I decided the restroom would be my best bet. There was electricity, a table and sink—I got this! At any moment we could get another call. I needed to get this milk out of me.

The fire station had two restrooms that were both multi-user, rather than one men’s restroom and one women’s restroom. I entered the multi-user restroom and locked the door. I couldn’t find a chair, so I sat on the sink. There was a radio playing Metallica, and the lighting was so bright it reminded me of being in a dental office. I took off my shirt and started hooking up my pump. I felt so exposed, but I was going to make this happen. While I was pumping, someone tried to come into the restroom. The door slammed against the lock, and I felt a surge of adrenaline rush through my body. I felt so vulnerable with my shirt off, and I was hoping this machine would just hurry up. Five minutes later, someone tried to come in again. I remember wondering if the surge of stress hormones would affect my breast milk negatively. I finally finished and put my milk in my bag. Mission accomplished—but that really sucked. And I was going to need to pump again every two hours.

This process was so stressful because there was no designated women’s restroom or lactation room—around 25% of fire stations in the OC do not have a dedicated women’s restroom. I often think what would happen if you went to a restaurant, and there was no women’s restroom. People would be outraged and there would be a lawsuit within the first week. But in the fire service, it is commonplace. Oftentimes, after fighting a fire, the women wait until the men finish showering to use the bathroom, marinating in carcinogens from the fire.

Gender discrimination in fire departments is evidenced by the structure of the stations themselves—no women’s restrooms, no lactation room, and equipment and uniforms made for men’s bodies. The fire station was not built with women in mind, because the assumption for decades has been that only men were firefighters. This remains true across the country: the U.S. Department of Labor reports that only 4% of firefighters are women. The statistic is even lower in the OC, where only 2% of firefighters are women. Even as women’s participation in other male-dominated industries has seen a steady rise, firefighting has remained stagnant. This reflects a multitude of problems from recruitment and hiring, to discrimination and harassment, to the lack of spaces like women’s restrooms and lactation rooms.

I decided that there had to be a better way. Firefighter mamas should be considered part of the fire family, too. I worked in collaboration with the ACLU SoCal to educate management on the applicable laws and the importance of creating designated lactation rooms and separate women’s restrooms in all fire stations. OCFA authorized the building and designation of lactation rooms and women’s restrooms in every fire station in the county, and I served as the auditor to guide the fire authority on how to achieve this goal.

Today, OCFA is one of the first fire departments in the country to put a lactation room in all 77 of its fire stations. We still have a long way to go to ensure that firefighting is a safe, healthy, and welcoming job for women, but building rooms for people to pump breastmilk is a huge step in the right direction.

Lauren Andrade is a firefighter for the Orange County Fire Authority.

When the City of Lancaster and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department banished J. to the Mojave Desert, she came close to paying with her life.

Left to fend for herself in the blistering summer heat, J. was forced to tote five-gallon containers of water from the nearest convenience store, which was miles away. Before long, she fell ill with heat sickness and crawled into her tent. Her phone battery ran out of charge, and she began rationing her water. As the days passed, she waited to die.

Like J., most unhoused community members in and around Lancaster must somehow find a way to navigate the perils of the high desert, where triple digit heat in the summer and freezing temperatures in the winter are the norm.

But instead of ensuring that unhoused people have access to life-saving housing and services, an investigation by the ACLU of Southern California finds that city officials’ primary response has been to stop, cite and jail people for being unhoused and banish them to the high desert, where they are quite literally left to die.

Inside city limits, unhoused residents face a draconian police state that is impossible to avoid. Although people who are unhoused make up only about one percent of Lancaster’s population, they represent almost half of all stops by Los Angeles County sheriffs to enforce the city’s municipal code.

As described in our report, “Banished and Abandoned: Criminalization and Displacement of Unhoused People in Lancaster,” most police harassment targets people simply for being unhoused in public. Officers bulldoze encampments, destroying tents and discarding crucial belongings like medication. They target Black people, citing them for resting or camping in public at disproportionately high rates. They tell unhoused people to keep moving if they stand, sit or lie down in public, and issue them criminal citations if they rest in the shade for as little as three minutes. One unhoused resident, a veteran who uses a wheelchair, estimated that police approach him up to 14 times a day. He said the cartilage in his shoulders has worn down because he must regularly wheel himself away from deputies who order him to leave.

If relentless police harassment does not convince unhoused people to leave the city, officers banish them to the high desert in unincorporated Los Angeles County, where, like J., they are far removed from life-saving resources like food, water and medical care.

Once banished, people have limited ability to fight back. Since they are technically no longer city residents, they lose the right to vote in city elections, preventing them from voting for or against the officials responsible for their banishment. “The city left us with no vote and no voice,” said Melissa Ivory, who was banished to the high desert by sheriff’s deputies. “We are like a piece of wind that carries a voice, but it’s not heard at all.”

The law enforcement tactics uncovered by the ACLU SoCal investigation are not only immoral and life threatening; they also violate a number of civil rights, including the rights to due process, freedom of movement and free speech.

J. survived her harrowing brush with death. Her daughter, unable to reach J. by phone, became alarmed and set out to search for her. By luck, she found J.’s tent and nursed her back to health.

But Lancaster and Los Angeles County officials should have never placed J. in danger in the first place. Our local governments must unequivocally reject the forms of state-sanctioned violence described in the report . Instead, we must demand that Lancaster and Los Angeles County officials treat homelessness as a human rights violation and humanitarian crisis.

The report calls for immediate city and county reforms, including cessation of criminalization and banishment, elimination of laws and policies that criminalize homelessness and provision of restitution, compensation for losses and rehabilitation for targets of criminalization and banishment.

Officials should start by immediately meeting the survival needs of unhoused people and treating them with the dignity and respect to which we are all entitled.