The Brief

The Aquarium of the Pacific is putting out a call for donations to raise $50,000 for a surgery to save the front flipper of its newest green sea turtle, Meatloaf.

The 240-pound turtle was taken to the aquarium in January after being found entangled in fishing line and rope in the San Gabriel River.

For two months, she has undergone rehabilitation and several surgeries to nurse her front-right flipper back to health. Dr. Lance Adams, the aquarium’s director of veterinary services, said the plan is to keep Meatloaf for at least another six months as they redress her wounds.

Dr. Lance Adams watches Meatloaf, a green sea turtle, swim in a rehabilitation tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Wednesday. The turtle was rescued from the San Gabriel River after she got tangled in fishing line and rope.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Wide as a manhole cover and several times the size of the facility’s former tenant, Porkchop, Meatloaf is the latest ward at the aquarium’s newly expanded turtle rehabilitation center — one of two able to care for them in Southern California.

Right now, Meatloaf’s swollen flipper is more than twice the size it should be. Adams said aquarium staff repeatedly have cleaned out the wound and used a number of methods to drain it. Past surgeries were done to remove scar tissue that had built up.

But Meatloaf’s fluid buildup, called edema, persists and likely will require reconstructive surgery. It’s hard to tell, Adams said, as turtles are slow to heal.

Turtles tended to at the aquarium include loggerheads, leatherbacks, ridleys and green sea turtles, which arrive on the coast and warmer waters each summer to mate, nest and battle natural and human-made threats: speedboats, water skiers, baited hooks, urban runoff, tons of garbage and harassment.

Green sea turtles like Meatloaf can grow up to five feet long and weigh 500 pounds. They typically have tropical haunts — sandy beaches along the Mexican coast where they lay eggs.

But in recent decades, the chunky oddballs have continued to wander upstream, usually in search of food, toward the San Gabriel River’s mouth in Long Beach. Aquarium officials say there can be a dozen to nearly 100 turtles in the river at a time.

They eat almost anything they can clamp their mouths on, including snails, eel grass and — to the ire of scientists — rotting garbage along the waterway floor.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance that volunteers with the aquarium’s Southern California Sea Turtle Monitoring community science program see on a weekly basis.

But it’s not all bad. Adams said workers have seen their most recent graduate, Porkchop, at least three times since the three-flipped turtle left their waters and ventured out on her own.

Each time, they’re sure to say hello.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using “coercive” and threatening language to convince unaccompanied immigrant children to agree to deportation, court documents show.

The judge said earlier this week that by using threats of prosecution and coercive language, the U.S. government violated a 40-year-old court order that bans immigration agents from attempting to coerce unaccompanied children to voluntarily leave the country after being detained.

In a separate order, the court also denied government lawyers’ request to end those same longstanding protections.

The two decisions were issued Monday by Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald, who wrote in the orders that the government’s threat of prolonged detention for immigrant children who choose not to self-deport “disturbingly mirrors the testimony” of Jose Antonio Perez-Funez, whose trial in 1985 led the court to first order the protections for children the following year. Perez-Funez and others in that class action case testified that they were not informed of their rights to apply for bail or asylum, leading them to involuntarily waive their rights while they were detained by immigration agents as children.

Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel has been representing immigrant children who were detained by the government for decades and helped win the 1986 court order in the Perez-Funez case.

He said the case has now shown new evidence that the Trump administration has no intention of respecting the rule of law.

The administration’s goal, as Rosenbaum sees it, “is to amp up [deportation] statistics of children who represent no threat to the national interest, who are among the least culpable individuals on the planet.”

LAist reached out to DHS for comment but has not heard back.

The language that has been banned

Last October, LAist reported that DHS had begun targeting unaccompanied children with a “voluntary option” to return them to their countries of origin. Through court documents in the current case, more has been confirmed about how this so-called “voluntary option” was actually presented to children.

Unaccompanied children who are detained for suspected immigration violations are first held by DHS, before generally being turned over to Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. At ORR, children are required by federal law to be provided a confidential legal consultation within 10 days, along with other support.

Court documents show DHS was presenting children with the option to self-deport, along with threats of prosecution and prolonged detainment if they refused, before they were transferred to ORR and guaranteed the chance to speak with an attorney.

Fitzgerald wrote that presenting this ultimatum to children violated the 1986 court order.

“It is difficult to imagine a scenario more coercive than the one faced by [unaccompanied immigrant children] in the 72 hours before they are transferred into ORR custody,” Fitzgerald wrote in court documents, “particularly for noncitizen children who likely do not know whether they possess any rights at all.”

According to evidence presented in court, children were told that if they did not accept voluntary deportation, they would be detained “for a prolonged period of time” and if they turned 18 years old while in custody they would “be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal.”

They were also told they may be “barred from legally applying for a visa” and that their sponsor in the U.S. “may be subject to criminal prosecution” if they didn’t agree to voluntary deportation.

This information was read to children or presented to them in a document DHS called the “UAC Pathway Processing Advisal”, but Rosenbaum told LAist he sees even the document’s name as misleading.

 ”It wasn't an advisal, it was a coercive document,” Rosenbaum said. The government has admitted it used the document since September 2025, according to the court order that now bans its use.

How did it come to this?

Rosenbaum said that after the 1986 court order, which also requires unaccompanied children to be allowed telephone access to relatives or legal support, organizations like Public Counsel and  the National Immigrant Law Center monitored the government’s compliance with the order.

Other than a few exceptions, he said, the injunction had been followed until recent years.

“  When the Trump administration began its immigration activities in the second term of the president,  that all changed,” Rosenbaum said, “and it changed in a hurry.”

Court records show that DHS notified the court last November that they would be asking for the 1986 court ordered protections for children in the department’s custody to be ended. When organizations monitoring compliance with the order saw this, Rosenbaum said they investigated and found that in nearly all circumstances, children were no longer allowed to talk to lawyers and were being coerced to take voluntary departures from the country.

Despite the court order, Rosenbaum said, children were “separated from family, separated from their communities and separated from their constitutional rights.”

Peter McGraw, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, told LAist that the court order was issued to specifically protect children’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

He said that when unaccompanied children arrive in the U.S., they don’t have an adult there with them to help them understand their decisions about whether to pursue a number of protections that may keep them from being deported.

“ What due process requires is that the government provide children with notice of their ability to apply for asylum or for other protections — withholding from removal or protection from removal under the convention against torture — to ensure that they are not sent back to countries where they would be in danger,” McGraw said.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Boyle Heights residents have seen it all when it comes to finding a place to park: cars in the red, blocked driveways, double parking and even people sitting in lawn chairs to save a spot. At times, disputes over parking spots have escalated into arguments between neighbors. 

The longstanding struggle for parking in the neighborhood only seems to be getting worse as more developments go up across the city — often with limited parking — and multi-generational households share space. Many people have memorized their block’s street sweeping schedules and no-parking zones to avoid a ticket. 

That frustration is showing up in the data.

A city of Los Angeles parking violation sits on the windshield of a car near Michigan Avenue and Cummings Street in Boyle Heights on Wednesday, March 18.

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Laura Anaya-Morga

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Parking tickets in Boyle Heights have increased at a rate much higher than the city of Los Angeles as a whole, making it one of L.A.’s most ticketed neighborhoods, according to an analysis of city data by Crosstown. Residents say they aren’t sure what could help remedy the issue but acknowledged that multiple parking tickets feel even heavier as gas and grocery prices rise. 

What the numbers show

Last year, Boyle Heights was the sixth-most ticketed community among the city’s 114 neighborhoods, receiving a total of 60,695 citations, an average of 5,057 per month. 

Between 2023 and 2025, the number of parking tickets handed out across the city of Los Angeles increased by 4.9%. In Boyle Heights, however, the rise was more than three times that — the 60,695 citations dispensed in 2025 was 17.6% more than two years prior, the Crosstown analysis of public parking citation data shows. 

A bar graph showing years 2023 through 2025 where parking tickets increase by year from 51,627 to 60,695.

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Courtesy of Crosstown LA

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That is likely an undercount, as city citation data is not available after Dec. 14, 2025 (the Los Angeles Department of Transportation was unable to identify why this happened or when it will be fixed). Even so, the increase in Boyle Heights surpasses that in some other frequently ticketed neighborhoods. Van Nuys registered an increase of 4.5% during that time, while citations in Hollywood fell by 9.6%.  

Some areas suffered even sharper rises: Tickets in downtown and Koreatown rose 21% and 33.5%, respectively.

Hernan Gabriel, who has lived in Boyle Heights for 10 years, said parking hasn’t always been easy, but tickets have been part of his routine. 

On a recent afternoon, he stood outside his home near Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street, keeping an eye on the time before street sweeping restrictions began.

“This is my first ticket of the year,” Gabriel said, as he pulled a $73 parking ticket from the dashboard of his truck that he received in February.

Hernan Gabriel received a $73 parking violation in February for failing to move his vehicle for street sweeping near Cesar E Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street.

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Laura Anaya-Morga

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Boyle Heights Beat

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But it hasn’t been his only one. In 2023, he racked up over $2,800 in parking tickets while working deliveries downtown.

“Since I received those tickets, I’ve been paying closer attention,” Gabriel said. While he has access to a parking spot at his home, many of his neighbors don’t. 

A disproportionate impact

Not only are tickets increasing in Boyle Heights, but residents are being cited at higher rates than in much of the city. 

People in the neighborhood of roughly 81,000 residents received 60,695 citations last year — about 0.75 tickets per resident. 

Citywide, the rate is significantly lower: 0.48 citations per resident, based on 1.87 million tickets issued across Los Angeles. 

The types of violations also mirror city trends but at higher concentrations.

Approximately one of every four tickets written in Boyle Heights is for parking in a street sweeping zone — a $73 infraction. Last year, 16,776 such tickets were issued.

The second-most frequent infraction is parking in a red zone — a $93 hit. In Boyle Heights, these made up 20.9% of the community’s total, well above the citywide rate of 12.4%.  

A pie chart showing types of parking violations in 2025.

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Courtesy of Crosstown LA

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Stephanie Sanchez, a lifelong Boyle Heights resident, has gotten used to the struggle of looking for a spot and avoiding parking tickets.

“It’s expensive,” she said. “I’ve noticed people from a couple blocks away coming to park here or people who live here going a couple blocks away just to park because it is so cramped.”

Last year, Sanchez received five parking tickets totaling over $350. 

“[I could] buy more groceries, lots of things for my day-to-day living. It would help with gas because gas is ridiculous right now,” she said.

What LA officials say

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) said the number of citations issued across L.A. is a “direct result of posted restrictions, driver behavior, and officer staffing.” According to the department, of the 502 traffic officers deployed citywide, 115 serve the Central Division, with 24 officers specifically assigned to Boyle Heights.

In response to community concerns regarding street congestion and parking, LADOT said in a statement, “street improvements require identifying specific locations and coordinating between multiple City departments. LADOT remains committed to collaborative solutions that address the needs of every neighborhood.”

A spokesperson from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office echoed the community’s sentiment about parking issues in the neighborhood and said Jurado is looking into addressing them.

Boyle Heights hot spots 

The most ticketed location in Boyle Heights is Cesar Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street, where 1,070 tickets were dispensed for illegally parking in a bus lane, a $293 infraction. 

Just south is the neighborhood’s second-most ticketed location. A 76-space public parking lot at 249 Chicago St. produced 669 citations in 2025. Most were for an expired meter.

On the stretch of Cesar Chavez between Boyle Avenue and Fickett Street, more than 3,200 bus-lane parking tickets were given out. On a recent visit to the area, there were no easily visible signs warning about bus zone infractions.

No easy fixes in sight 

For many residents, solutions feel limited while the problem gets worse. 

Maria Solis and Orlando Cervantes have lived in Boyle Heights for 30 years and said finding a spot to park in their neighborhood is harder than ever before. After 5 p.m., it is nearly impossible, Cervantes said. 

They suggested limiting how many cars a single person can have. 

Another more obvious solution would be for the city to create more parking lots but that comes with its own problems. “The more parking there is, the more cars you will see,” Solis said.

Sanchez echoed that concern. 

“Theres no space to even create like a parking lot, even then I feel like that would be expensive to pay for a spot,” she said.

Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — who is also a sitting L.A. City Council member — unveiled a homelessness policy platform Tuesday that calls for the city to prepare for a breakup with the region’s troubled lead homelessness agency and to scale back Mayor Karen Bass' signature Inside Safe motel program.

In Raman’s new homelessness policy platform, she vowed to build an effective homelessness response system in the city, arguing it’s something that hasn’t existed during her five years as a city official.

“ One of the most persistent challenges with homelessness is that no one is in charge at City Hall,” Raman told LAist. “ There is no centralized management or oversight over our homelessness response system at the city. What we have is a patchwork of programs that have very different outcomes and hugely differential costs.”

Raman, who represents Council District 4 stretching from Silver Lake to Reseda, argues only the Mayor’s Office has the authority to fix that fragmentation and deliver transparency.

She is among 13 candidates challenging Bass in the race for L.A. mayor in the June primary.

Homelessness is one of the top issues in the mayoral race. Los Angeles is home to nearly 44,000 unhoused residents and budgets about $1 billion a year for homelessness.

In response to Raman’s announcement, a spokesperson from Bass’ campaign defended the incumbent mayor’s homelessness strategy and noted Raman had supported it.

“Councilmember Raman has been on the City Council since 2020 and is Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, and frankly the most success she has achieved is voting yes on Inside Safe,” Alex Stack said in a statement.

Bass introduced Inside Safe through an executive order, with a goal of moving more unhoused residents from encampments into temporary shelter. Raman later voted with the L.A. City Council 13-1 to accept Bass’ 2023-24 budget, which included $250 million for the program.

Raman argues that L.A. should shift spending away from expensive motel-based programs like Inside Safe, toward lower-cost interventions like short-term rental vouchers and shared housing.

“What I'm proposing is to look across our shelter beds and really investing in what works and stretching every dollar as far as possible at a time when the Trump administration is about to cut funds for homelessness response here in Los Angeles significantly,” Raman told LAist.

The Bass campaign criticized Raman’s plan as impractical.

“The campaign plan she threw out there relies on private landlords turning over apartments to people living in tents — it's unrealistic and would increase homelessness,” Stack said.

The campaigns for other candidates, including Spencer Pratt, Rae Huang and Adam Miller, did not respond to requests on Tuesday. Each includes some homelessness policy proposals on their campaign websites.

Inside Safe 

Raman’s proposal took aim at Inside Safe, a city program designed to clear tent and vehicle encampments and move people into shelter, primarily hotel rooms.

The city of L.A. has spent more than $300 million on Inside Safe over the past few years. During that time, the program has moved more than 5,800 unhoused people indoors, according to the Mayor’s Office. Official data shows 40% of those people later returned to the street, as highlighted in a recent L.A. Times report.

The average Inside Safe bed, usually a hotel room, costs the city more than $225 a night, compared to an average nightly cost of about $86 at other shelter or “interim housing” options, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.

Raman called Inside Safe “the most expensive temporary housing intervention in the city by far,” estimating the program costs the city about $85,000 per motel room annually.

For the same money, the city could rent three apartments and provide services through its Time Limited Subsidy Program, she said.

That rental subsidy program costs about $24,000 annually per household, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.

Since Bass took office, L.A.’s overall homeless population estimates have declined by about 5%. The “unsheltered” population — those who live outside in tents or vehicles, instead of in homeless shelters or similar facilities — declined even more during that period, as Inside Safe moved more Angelenos living on the streets into hotel rooms and other shelters.

Bass’s campaign defended her approach.

“Mayor Bass launched L.A.'s first-ever comprehensive street homelessness strategy, driving street homelessness down nearly 18 percent, posting the first-ever consecutive-year decline in overall homelessness and achieving the first decline in homeless mortality since records have been kept,” Stack said.

As a candidate for City Council in 2020, Raman’s homelessness platform had called for eliminating “policies that criminalize people who are unhoused,” including sweeps of unhoused encampments led by the LAPD and sanitation workers.

Raman’s 2026 mayoral homelessness platform calls for “maintaining” the city’s “capacity for encampment resolution.”

"My approach to homelessness in my district would be exactly what I would be doing citywide, which is trying to ensure that we are using every single dollar and resource that we have to move people indoors as quickly as possible," Raman told LAist.

Accountability questions  

The L.A. City Council has been considering whether to redirect about $300 million in annual homelessness funding away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and, if so, whether to put the funds under city or county oversight.

As chair of the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman is expected to preside over that committee's final discussion on the issue, before it issues a recommendation and sends the issue to the full council for a vote.

Last year, L.A. County officials voted to move hundreds of millions away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and administer the funds itself through a new county homelessness department. That funding shift begins July 1.

Bass has publicly clashed with county leaders about their decision. She’s also said the city should be cautious about following suit.

“Withdrawing from LAHSA too quickly, without a plan and without the capacity, will no doubt cause unintended consequences that will leave more Angelenos to die on our streets,” Bass said in a statement last month.

Raman said her mayoral platform sets a framework for moving hundreds of millions in city homelessness contracts away from LAHSA.

“The city needs to be prepared to make significant changes including taking on direct contracting for some funds and potentially contracting directly with the county,” Raman told LAist. “The biggest challenge right now is that, despite my efforts, the city still doesn't have the capacity to manage this transition effectively.”

That’s what her plan is designed to build, Raman said.

Raman’s platform describes LAHSA as “plagued with scandal” and “may be on the verge of shuttering.”

Bass and Raman both point to the city’s Bureau of Homelessness Oversight, created last year within the Los Angeles Housing Department, which they say can help deliver accountability and oversight if scaled up.

According to Raman, that bureau has not yet hired a single person, but it is doing some data work using consultants via a private grant.

Raman criticized the current city approach to the 6,500 people living in cars and RVs as "haphazard" and "ineffective, vowing to develop a clearer strategy.

Raman wants more street medicine teams — funded through Medi-CAL reimbursements — to meet health needs in encampments.

She also proposes a citywide unarmed crisis response team to respond to mental health and substance use calls.

Other candidates

Spencer Pratt, a former reality television personality who lost his home in last year’s Palisades Fire, urges a “treatment-first” approach to homelessness, according to his campaign website.

“For years, the Homeless Industrial Complex has prioritized process over outcomes, warehousing over treatment, and press releases over results,” the site states.

His approach would redirect resources to mental health care, drug treatment and stabilization services, according to campaign material.

The Rev. Rae Huang, a community organizer and Presbyterian minister running to the left of Raman, has proposed a new “Mayor’s Office of Housing For All” to coordinate housing and homelessness efforts in the city.

On her campaign website, Huang promises to build more permanent supportive housing and to end “sweeps” or city cleanups of tent encampments.

Candidate Adam Miller is a tech entrepreneur who founded Better Angels LA, a nonprofit that distributes small loans to families facing eviction.

Miller’s campaign platform lists a range of proposals for L.A.’s homelessness system, including 50 more tiny home village sites, more enforcement of anti-camping laws and a better tech system for managing shelter bed reservations.

If no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the June Primary Election, the top two vote-getters will face off in a November runoff.