The Brief

In May 2019, police entered a 12th-floor room at a Residence Inn near the Los Angeles International Airport and found various tools for credit card theft and duffel bags holding more than $930,000 in cash.

The room had been rented by Jawuan Gibson, who eventually pled guilty in Sacramento County Superior Court to grand theft and identity theft.

The case caught the attention of the California Department of Social Services. Gibson had been accused of sending mass text message scams to trick cash aid recipients into giving away their Electronic Benefits Transfer card information. He then stole their money, withdrawing the cash from duplicated cards.

At the time, the amount reported stolen from EBT users was in the tens of thousands of dollars a month — a small fraction of the millions the department sent out in cash assistance each month that year to more than 350,000 poor families. When recipients were victimized, they could generally get the money back, albeit with some delay.

But officials feared the case indicated more theft was coming. So in early 2020, the department came up with a plan to hire investigators specifically focused on EBT theft.

Separately, a group of county welfare fraud investigators said they asked the social services department to add security chips to EBT cards, a layer of fraud protection commercial bank customers had already been enjoying on debit and credit cards for years.

The state did neither.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it would come an influx of public aid and a tsunami of benefits theft that hit recipients of everything from stimulus checks to unemployment aid. The state, facing a potential economic downturn, in the spring of 2020 abandoned a $565,000 plan to bolster EBT theft investigations, according to Social Services’ public budget documents.

By the time the Department of Social Services quietly resurrected the plan two years later in April 2022, California was losing nearly $2 million a month to EBT thieves, according to figures released by the department. Now thieves were also stealing food stamps, a benefit used by nearly three million California households, and purchasing expensive items like pallets of energy drinks to resell.

Both cash and food benefits are largely federally funded, but California must pay out of its own funds to reimburse theft victims.

The delayed plan raises questions about whether the state missed an opportunity to stem the theft. The Department of Social Services said it responded appropriately with some security measures to the Sacramento County case, but that it only prevented scams, while theft skyrocketed thanks to fraudsters’ use of hidden devices to steal card numbers, known as skimming.

Between July 2021 and this March, taxpayers paid $87 million for this theft. Throughout the current fiscal year that began in July, the department is expecting to pay $178 million, according to budget documents.

In 2019 and 2020, lawmakers introduced a bill requiring social services to examine weaknesses in the EBT system for online transactions and come up with solutions. Both years the bill died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee via the suspense file process by which lawmakers kill numerous bills in one hearing without explanation.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration committed this year to making California the first state to use EBT cards with chips, public benefits were being stolen to the tune of $10 million a month.

Chip cards, which payments industry experts say could significantly cut the thefts, would allow recipients to use EBT cards without being as vulnerable to their card numbers being stolen. The state has earmarked $50 million for the upgrades. The soonest those upgrades will go into effect is May 2024, at least six months from now.

Few policies in place to protect theft victims

Guadalupe Rosales found herself in a panic on a recent Saturday morning.

It was the second of the month, the day California typically deposits cash assistance onto the El Monte single mother’s EBT card. Rosales checked her account in preparation for a trip to the ATM. But the money, all $1,300, was gone, withdrawn by someone else at an ATM in another city.

Rosales relies on CalWorks, the state’s cash assistance program for poor families, to support her three children as they get back on their feet after experiencing domestic violence.

It was the second time Rosales’ benefits had been stolen. She had bills to pay and a car to fill up to take the kids to school. Her oldest son had senior portraits to take, and she could barely afford tickets to his football games.

Worse yet, it was Labor Day Weekend. By the time the Los Angeles County welfare office opened the following Tuesday for her to request a reimbursement, rent and utilities were past due. She’s since gotten the money replaced, but not before paying a slew of late fees and borrowing money.

“I feel like I’m in more debt than I was,” she said.

California initially appeared to be at the forefront of protecting public benefits recipients.

In 2013, the state began reimbursing welfare recipients who have their benefits stolen electronically. In 2020 it was the first state to extend reimbursements for victims of food stamp theft even if they didn’t lose their EBT card.

That’s the case for most EBT theft, investigators say. Victims are either scammed into giving away their card numbers, or the numbers are stolen through a method called skimming, which involves installing a hidden device at checkout counters, ATMs or gas pumps to record the card numbers of those who swipe the magnetic stripes.

In December 2018, the welfare fraud investigators association’s legislative and policy chairman Glenn Allen said the group met with Social Services leaders and asked the state to add security chips to EBT cards, but were told that would be “too expensive.”

“We told them, ‘You need to chip the cards now,’” Allen said.

Meeting notes provided by the association say the group’s then-president Guy Christian told officials including then-director Will Lightbourne that the cards needed security upgrades. Among the issues they discussed, according to the association’s notes: the department’s concern about growing “cloning/skimming of cards” and “the lack of sophistication such as ‘chipped’ cards.”

California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel declined to comment on the meeting. He said chips were not considered prior to 2023 because earlier waves of EBT theft were primarily theft from scams, such as the one in the Sacramento County case. Skimming targeting EBT cards, he said, “did not fully emerge until fall of 2021.”

In the summer of 2019, the Department of Social Services gave a presentation at a national conference about the rising concern of EBT theft. It cited two cases — one in Sonoma County and the Gibson case, which was cracked by Sacramento County welfare fraud investigators and the Department of Justice, who teamed up to find patterns in the victims’ accounts and watch ATMs where withdrawals were being made.

A copy of the presentation, obtained by CalMatters, spells out what the department saw as the problem: Numerous state and federal policies designed to curb fraud in the welfare system were all directed at either the government or public benefits recipients. There weren’t enough policies to prevent “third-party fraud,” in which the recipients are the victims.

“The theft of benefits by those outside the system has not been a significant part of the welfare fraud prevention framework,” the presentation said.

The department recommended adding three-digit card verification value codes to EBT cards, strengthening the EBT call center’s security and limiting when PINs can be changed.

The following January, the department proposed spending $565,000 to hire four investigators to examine EBT theft statewide.

“These occurrences involving EBT theft could be mitigated using data analytics and may have been identified earlier if (the California Department of Social Services) had the staff dedicated to monitoring suspicious EBT transactions,” the proposal said. “Due to the lack of investigative resources statewide, including county, state and federal investigators, there is an operational need for California to employ its own investigators to prevent, identify, and help recover these significant losses of public assistance funds.”

In an emailed response to questions from CalMatters, Montiel said the social services department dropped the plan a few months later because of a projected revenue shortfall due to the pandemic, which prompted departments statewide to cut budget requests.

But the department did not resubmit the plan later that year when it proposed other new spending, or the following year when revenues came in higher than expected — even as it issued more benefits to recipients’ cards thanks to pandemic federal aid. Montiel did not answer why.

The investigative unit was proposed again in April 2022 and approved by the Legislature. Montiel said the team was created in March 2023, hiring a supervisor, two officers and an investigator. It’s currently “providing intelligence and support to local, state, and federal investigation teams and is assisting with detecting and deterring theft,” he wrote.

Gerry Bonilla, division chief of program compliance at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, said an earlier statewide effort could have helped counties.

Bonilla’s welfare fraud investigative staff primarily handle cases involving recipients getting benefits for which they’re ineligible, which he said “is not very widespread.” They investigate 800 to 900 of these cases a month, “most of which come back negative,” and look into them by parsing through each client’s income statements and other paperwork.

By contrast, Bonilla said anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 Los Angeles County residents now claim their benefits were stolen each month. In recent arrests, police point to organized crime groups with international ties.

“It would have certainly been helpful to have a team deployed to that,” Bonilla said. “Our investigators are not equipped to handle that type of investigation.”

Other investigators said they haven’t seen the department take a major role in theft prevention, despite many cases that cross county lines.

Heather Tallent, a board member of the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association and supervisor of the welfare fraud division in the Ventura County District Attorney's Office, said she receives historical data from the state of ATMs where cards are cashed out, but less help with live surveillance of suspicious transactions.

“From what I can see, there's no proactive investigative response to skimming,” Tallent said. “I haven't seen it. And it's not necessarily a criticism, it may be a resource issue for (social services).”

Not everyone believes social services departments should beef up their law enforcement arms. The term “welfare fraud” is fraught among advocates for the poor, evoking 1990s-era stereotypes about people cheating to get public assistance that many anti-poverty organizations blame for burdensome bureaucratic hurdles for people to get aid and unnecessary scrutiny on recipients.

Earlier this year, advocates supported the state dropping a requirement for EBT theft victims to file a police report in order to get their benefits reimbursed, which welfare fraud investigators said was a bad idea.

Upgrades at least six months away

With a more generous social safety net than most states, California has been particularly hard-hit in the EBT theft wave.

Thieves who had initially targeted the simple debit cards of state stimulus check recipients moved on to the similarly vulnerable EBT cards, said David Babcock, a senior investigator on the L.A. County District Attorney’s Cyber Investigation Response Team.

“Some of these crews that were deploying these skimming techniques started to recognize that the only cards they’re gonna get successfully skimmed are cards without chip technology because people still have to swipe those cards,” Babcock said, calling EBT cards “the last cards without chip technology” in the state.

The social services department has been slow to release more detailed and up-to-date monthly tallies of the theft in response to public records requests from CalMatters, saying in September that it would not produce the data until December.

“These are the most vulnerable people in our community,” Bonilla said. “It’s really just mushroomed.”

In October, the county board of supervisors approved creating its own investigative unit in the D.A.’s office just to focus on this type of theft.

Chip card upgrades are more than six months away at the earliest.

In the meantime, the Department of Social Services said it will launch a mobile app this fall, ebtEDGE, that would allow cardholders to freeze their cards or block online or out-of-state transactions.

Until the chip cards arrive, local departments have shifted staff to process a flood of reimbursement requests while recipients try to remain vigilant, changing their PINs and checking their accounts. The state this year has also budgeted more than $30 million in administrative funding for counties to process reimbursements.

Federal rules also in play

In June 2022, the department added the three-digit CVV codes, which Montiel said cut scamming theft by 90%. It was no match against skimming, and overall benefits theft has only skyrocketed since then.

Chips have been developed since the 1990s and were common in Europe before being widely adopted in the U.S. eight years ago. That’s when the card companies Mastercard and Visa set a deadline for American banks to issue chip cards and merchants to accept them, or bear the liability for theft and fraud.

Though credit card fraud still happens, Jason Bohrer, executive director of the payments industry group Secure Technology Alliance, said it’s largely done by getting access to users’ accounts online through methods far more sophisticated than skimming. Adding chips to credit cards in the U.S. has nearly eliminated fraud that takes advantage of users’ physical cards, he said.

Other California departments have already taken the security measure. In 2021 the Employment Development Department said it would start rolling out chip cards for unemployment benefits recipients.

But no state yet puts chips on their EBT cards. Payments experts say it’s always been a cost-benefits consideration.

“Until the cost of the fraud outweighs the cost of issuance, there's not a lot of incentive to make the transition,” said Tracy Kitten, director of fraud and security at the financial security firm Javelin Strategy & Research.

Federal regulations direct states to use a payments industry standard that limits the delivery of food benefits to cards with magnetic stripes only, Montiel said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and California are working to modify the restrictions to allow for chip and tap cards, both departments said.

There are also back-end technological upgrades needed before chip cards are rolled out, because EBT transactions run through different systems than commercial banks.

“Incorporating chip cards requires significant changes to the underlying infrastructure on which the EBT system is built,” Montiel wrote. “Without these underlying, back-end technological upgrades, a transaction using a chip/tap EBT card would fail.”

In one other response to the theft wave, California fell behind.

A year ago, Congress passed a spending bill to reimburse states for paying recipients back up to two months of stolen food benefits. California pays theft victims back, but only for one month.

California in October became the last state in the country to get its reimbursement plan approved by the USDA. Other states had been approved as early as February. The federally-paid plan goes into effect in California in December. Neither federal nor state agency would explain what caused the delay.

It’s frustrated recipients like Marshall Epstein who have been victims of theft multiple months. Epstein, a Los Angeles resident, said he had $1,400 worth of food assistance funds on his EBT card when it was skimmed earlier this year. After filing a report he only got about $200 back.

He scans the news frequently, waiting to find out when he’ll get a card with a security chip.

“I'm not looking for extra money, just to get my benefits back,” he said.

Imagine a sprawling network of roomy bike lanes, generously landscaped to calm relentless traffic. Think Amsterdam with newer buildings and fewer waterways. That’s been Long Beach’s goal anyway.

Instead of wide post-war boulevards, roads would become slower and leaner, transforming Long Beach into a top-five global cycling city, said former city traffic engineer Paul Van Dyk. “Some of that is tongue-in-cheek, but if you shoot for the moon you land in the stars.”

Long Beach has been working toward this vision since it adopted its bicycle master plan 25 years ago, now with mounting urgency as auto-related fatalities rise. The biggest project so far – the Studebaker Road Transformation Project – is bringing this vision to the doorstep of Studebaker Road residents.

It has drawn mixed reviews.

'The intent of the design is malicious'

“The intent of the design is malicious — it’s immoral,” said Joey Schilling, who drives the road six days a week and wrote a social media post criticizing the project that drew almost 1,000 comments. ”It’s people who do not use the road trying to tell other people how to use the road.”

Amid red cones and barriers, a woman and her dogs navigate the construction zones at Studebaker Road and Willow Street in Long Beach on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.The $65 million project runs over five miles from Second Street all the way up to Carson Street. It includes bike lanes, greenways and stonescape with fiber-optic cable running underneath. It is crucial to the city’s long-term plan of knitting together 300 miles of bikeways by 2040 to bring bicycle culture to Long Beach, as well as create safer streets.

The massive project funded from 13 federal, state and local agencies, gives a glimpse of what’s to come for Long Beach thoroughfares. The Clark Avenue work is in progress. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue “backbone” plans are on deck. Now Studebaker Road, the biggest, longest and most expensive, is well underway, spending the most dollars and, arguably, drawing the most resident anger.

Schilling, who lives near Studebaker Road actually does ride his bike to work in Seal Beach and said he is OK with bike lanes in general. However, he says the project is not practical in a community where he says most drive to work. “It’s not a reasonable solution. It’s not even for the greater good, that would be to appease the 95 percent who use their cars. The cost and the benefit do not match up. The cost is too high, the benefit too low.”

Wider lanes, sturdier medians

The Studebaker project features raised bus stops and wider bike lanes than have been seen previously. No more flimsy bollards separating bikes from cars, said Van Dyk, the city traffic engineer who helped usher in the bikeway and traffic-calming street plan before he went on to consult on other urban bike projects.

The green bollards seen on Bellflower Boulevard and Studebaker before the redo often get hit by cars and can resemble thick blades of stomped grass. “People do not like the way they look, and I agree with their frustrations,” said Van Dyk. “That’s why we moved towards those concrete medians.“ He said planners “learned a lot of lessons along the way.”

Studebaker will feature roomier bike lanes – 9 feet wide compared with the old 6-foot-across version. Wider lanes will allow riders to travel two abreast for a better ride, Van Dyk said. It also makes them easier to clean. Debris-filled lanes are a sore spot with bikers.

The old bike lane sweeper the city used to clean narrow paths was notoriously difficult to move and use. (Fourth District Councilmember Daryl Supernaw joked that sightings of the small sweepers were less frequent than Bigfoot.) But a regular street sweeper can get into the broader lanes where it can’t on Broadway and Bellflower south of Atherton. (They actually set a street sweeper in a bike lane before planning and pouring the concrete to make sure it would fit.) Still, protected bike lanes are harder to clean than lanes merely separated by paint and “swept” by passing cars.

David Raslevich, a 41-year-old cyclist who frequently rides on the new lanes on Clark, said he has noticed branches, leaves and other debris. “I feel safer riding with the traffic, because they (cars) move debris out of the way for you.”

Buses stop in traffic, not turnouts

One new component of Studebaker and the other newer lanes are raised bus stops. The new stops designed to accommodate bikes and buses are about five inches off the ground and separated from the road by a curb. Buses will stop in the No. 2 lane, halting traffic behind them, and pick up passengers, instead of easing out of a bus turnout.

Van Dyk said that change evolved from talks with Long Beach Transit, which revealed that buses would sometimes get hit when pulling into traffic. Planners reasoned it’s better to have cars waiting for a bus to pick up passengers instead of forcing a bus waiting to pull into the No. 2 lane.

“It’s math my second grader can do: What’s better, 40 people on a bus wait or four people in cars,” Van Dyke said. “Which is the greatest cost to society? The bus is going to be more efficient.” He also contends the new system is safe; there is less ambiguity as a bus will slow down in front of a car, so the car would be more likely to stop instead of zipping around a protruding bus bumper.

It is too early to know how this plan will play out – the new bus lane curbs on Clark show missing chunks already from drivers that likely didn’t see them. Raslevich said he has seen cars turn into the curb by the raised bus stop. “They don’t know that there’s an island there, so they’re hitting that island, pretty much daily.”

Councilman Supernaw, whose district encompasses the $65 million project, had reservations about the price tag before ultimately supporting it.

'All anyone asked for is a repave'

“All anyone asked for is a repave, to get rid of potholes and have a smooth surface to drive on,” Supernaw said. “Should we just forgo the bike lanes and do a straight repave? The answer was no, we wanna use the grant money for the bike lanes.”

The city saw it as a grander vision, weaving together a puzzle of state and federal grants along with $8.5 million in local sales tax money for new transit stops, sidewalks and curb ramps that improve how all people can move through the city.

“It’s not just ‘I wanna ride a bike for fun.’ People need it to get to work,” said Jocelin Padilla, a spokesperson for the city’s Public Works Department.

'Communication via spraypaint'

A series of community meetings were held in 2024, drawing limited feedback. But when residents later saw painted pavement markings showing the planned curbs and bike lines, “they got involved in a big way,” Supernaw said.

“We call this communication via spraypaint,” said Supernaw. “Constituents see lines marked out and contact the council office.”

Aside from the cost and the bus islands, some residents are frustrated by the execution. Leslie Goldman, who lives near Studebaker and Stearns, said large piles of dirt – at times higher than cars – have blocked residents from crossing the street or seeing oncoming traffic. Some concerns were addressed, including a bus shelter that was added due to feedback from residents.

“We’re not saying we don’t want construction done ever, that’s life in the big city,” she said. But Goldman contends the “assembly line” construction approach, as opposed to the work done in shorter phases, is leading to more “noise, vibration, dust, traffic, blind spots, trash, roadblocks, … All at sporadic intervals unknown to residents. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a hardship.”

A 'once-in-a-generation' timeline

Padilla of Public Works acknowledged the hardship, but said the benefits would outweigh the short-term pain. She said doing the work in shorter segments would increase costs and project timelines – not a good thing when it needs to be finished by the Olympics. “This is a once-in-a-generation project,” she said.

Not all residents are wary. “Studebaker is gonna be awesome when it’s done,” said Dan Olsen, who lives near Studebaker and Atherton. “It’s new, it’s fresh, the neighborhood is going to benefit. It’s been a total pothole disaster for so long. … Even though there are catches and hooks, it’s still worth it.”

Long Beach still isn't Amsterdam

Long Beach is not yet Amsterdam; it’s still a patchwork of protected lanes and unprotected ones of varying degrees of newness. But Studebaker should be done in 2027. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue are next. The bike lanes and streets won’t uniformly connect, but there will be more of them – Artesia Boulevard to service Jordan High, Clark Avenue near Long Beach City College and now Studebaker. “Long Beach’s cycling network is reaching critical mass,” Van Dyk said.

Van Dyk and other bike proponents say it’s a long game. Amsterdam itself was car-dominated until the 1970s when the Stop de Kindermoord movement was launched in response to the high number of child deaths. “It’s a generational effort; it took multiple generations to give us the infrastructure we have today,” he said.

Will any of this make the streets safer?

Will they help make transportation safer for cars and bikes? The city racked up 53 traffic deaths in 2025, the highest in a decade, and 32 bike/pedestrian and e-scooter deaths. This year has seen 36 traffic deaths through mid-September. The city is also trying other tools; speed cameras are being installed, and tickets will go out this fall.

It’s not yet any safer to ride through Long Beach than it was 10 years ago, “but it’s not safer to do anything in Long Beach,” said Kurt Canfield, a cyclist and organizer for Car Lite Long Beach, a bike advocacy organization. He often rides the Broadway bike path, which he considers a success despite debris in the lane and other issues.

“They wanna bike, they wanna walk, people are driving 300 horsepower crossovers. We’re in conflict for the same space,” he said. “But this infrastructure gives us the ability to be safer.”

A grand piano, hauled in on a Ford F-350, will make its way next weekend to Griffith Park.

Then, right below the Hollywood sign, the flatbed will unfold into a stage for a recital by pianist Hunter Noack, who has played everywhere from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park.

His Sept. 26 and 27 performances are all part of In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild, organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. (The show is sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist.)

For a decade, Noack has hauled his Steinway — the same model used at Carnegie Hall — through rough terrain to perform in unusual places: 370 concerts and counting.

The piano has survived fire, wind and 112-degree heat

"We've had the piano lid be ripped off by the wind. We've had the piano trailer tires catch fire on Highway 1. We've almost driven off the side of Mount Bachelor. We've played in 112-degree heat and negative 2 degrees in the winter," Noack said. And the piano has come out unscathed, including after it was towed down the washboard gravel along Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho — the only thing that happened was that it went out of tune.

How the show actually works

Among the pieces on the program at Griffith Park is "Nature Boy," the song Eden Ahbez wrote while living outdoors under the first L of the Hollywood sign. The song was later made famous by Nat King Cole.

Audiences at the Griffith Park show will be provided with wireless headphones for concert-hall quality sound, he said. "Some people just set up their picnic chairs or blankets right near the stage. Other people lay down," Noack said. "When there's so much else that's happening visually ... the music kind of automatically becomes a soundtrack, and we all get to experience that together."

The philosophy behind the series' name

The series is named after "In a Landscape," a piece by John Cage, who believed any sound could be music — even "somebody crinkling on a bag of chips," Noack said.

During his first show in 2016 at the Columbia River Gorge, Noack was midway through a soft Schumann piece about a delicate flower when 40 Harley-Davidsons on a memorial ride rolled up and circled the piano.

Rather than pack it in, he answered with Frederic Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," a piece built to mimic the aggressive clatter of a cotton mill. "It was a conversation between the piano and these roaring Harleys," he said.

California saw the largest share of immigration arrests of people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, a new tracker shows.

More than 25% of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took place in California, home to the country's largest Asian population, followed by Texas and New York.

The findings come from the new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker launched by Stop AAPI Hate.

These communities are often missing from the national debate over immigration enforcement, said Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate during a briefing on the tracker.

“Asian and Pacific Islander communities deserve better than to be an afterthought in this crisis," Choi said. With the tracker, "we are aiming to ensure we cannot be ignored any longer."

The data shows that ICE actions targeting Asian immigrants rose much faster than enforcement against groups overall between January 2025 and August 2026.

Arrests were up 436% compared to a similar time period during the Biden administration; detentions up by 512%; deportations up by more than 1,100%.

The number of arrests peaked this past July with 1,1950 recorded nationwide.

In California, there have been more than 5,300 arrests of Asian immigrants and more than 11,400 detention stints, which includes separate stays at different facilities during a single detention.

As for deportations, they were not broken down by state.

The largest numbers involved people from India and China, the countries of origin for the largest Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.

Stephanie Chan, Stop AAPI Hate’s director of data and research, noted that a rise in anti-Indian rhetoric centered on H1-B visa holders and truck drivers.

"You see a lot of elected officials saying things like, 'Indians are coming to take the jobs,'" Chan said.

Researchers also found that people from smaller communities — such as those from Laos and Uzbekistan — were arrested at rates far disproportionate to their share of the Asian noncitizen population.

The tracker draws from ICE records obtained through public-records requests by the Deportation Data Project at UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Leaders at Stop AAPI Hate said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is not only harming the people being swept up by ICE. Chan said the group’s annual survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found more than half have felt the effects.

“That includes things like fearing that their status will be questioned,” Chan said. “That they will be arrested, detained, or deported.”

Choi drew parallels with how Asian Americans were scapegoated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who joined the briefing on the tracker, said the findings felt "very personal" because of the state’s large share of arrests.

A member of the Republican-led congressional China Committee focused on U.S. competition with the Chinese government, Khanna predicted Democrats would win the mid-terms and shift the tone of that panel.

"It's going to be much more about a celebration of Asian Americans — and documenting that — than the demonization of other countries," Khanna said.

Richard Foreman's home is stranded in the middle of the beach.

The stairs were ripped away by waves years ago, so there's no way in or out anymore. The house is 20 feet into the air, on stilts that were designed to protect it from hurricane storm surge. But there haven't been any big storms recently, just the rising ocean eating away at the sand year after year.

Just six years ago, the house was still a popular vacation rental in Rodanthe, North Carolina. Like many beachfront houses, it had a nickname: Sea 'n Delight. Today, the name is gone, and the house is uninhabitable. At low tide, the Atlantic Ocean laps at what used to be the driveway. At high tide, the ocean runs beneath the entire house.

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Foreman knows it will collapse eventually. Four neighboring homes have fallen into the ocean in the last two years. And more than 100 homes on North Carolina's barrier islands are at risk from erosion and sea level rise in the next decade, according to the National Park Service, which manages the area as part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

At least half a dozen of those houses are in imminent danger. In June, a high tide coupled with large waves was enough to bring down another house.

Yet there is no plan to remove most of the threatened houses or to empty them of personal belongings, because of perverse incentives created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Bill King, the president of the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, has traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for federal rule changes that he thinks could save homes from collapsing in coastal North Carolina.

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FEMA provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before. That means owners stand to lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by tearing down a doomed house before the ocean takes it.

"The homeowner is incentivized to wait for collapse and get a payout," says John Ryan-Henry, a policy analyst at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of coastal state governments, including those along the Great Lakes.

And when homes collapse, they pollute the water and leave wreckage on the shore.

"Unfortunately, there's a lot of debris that comes with these collapses," says Lisa Sharrard, a longtime flood insurance agent in North Carolina who previously served as the chair of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which is the trade group representing state flood-policy officials. "It leaves a legacy of hazard on the beach. It's almost impossible to get everything."

The National Park Service says it collected more than 480 tons of home debris from the area in the last 18 months alone, some of which washed miles down the North Carolina coast.

As sea level rise accelerates erosion around the U.S., there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. Here, a damaged porch hangs precariously over the sand on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

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Foreman's stranded house hasn't been emptied out.

"It looked like we had just left for dinner. I mean, everything is still in there," says Foreman. The couches, the refrigerator, every steak knife and beach towel — it's all waiting to fall into the ocean.

"If they would settle with me for the insurance, I would have it torn down tomorrow," he says.

As sea level rise from climate change accelerates erosion around the country, there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. More than 30 homes have fallen into the sea in coastal North Carolina alone since 2020. Neighborhoods in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia and California are facing similar threats. Just last week, erosion exacerbated by a storm caused catastrophic damage to multiple homes in Southern California.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. "That is just not a smart way to deal with the reality of climate change."

FEMA says it cannot change the rules for threatened properties unless Congress amends the laws that govern the National Flood Insurance Program. Such a bill was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in 2025, but it is stalled in the House of Representatives.

FEMA did not respond to questions from NPR about the cost to taxpayers of letting homes collapse.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before.

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Plenty of warning, but no good option

Erosion is an inescapable problem for waterfront communities. Waves remove sand and rock from some areas and deposit them in others.

Climate change is accelerating that natural erosion unevenly. Although global warming affects the entire planet, sea levels are rising more quickly in some regions because of ocean currents and the complex dynamics of melting glaciers and ice caps. Some of the fastest sea level rise in the world is occurring on the East Coast of the United States.

Coastal areas are constantly changing. Barrier islands, like the ones that form the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are particularly prone to erosion, as the ocean removes sand from some areas and deposits it in others. Even stable-seeming dunes can disappear as the ocean shapes the land.

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In North Carolina, where thousands of homes sit on narrow, sandy barrier islands, sea levels are rising faster than the global average, and the rate is accelerating.

Rising seas exacerbate the erosion that usually happens on barrier islands, says Reide Corbett, a climate scientist at East Carolina University. In the last six years, hundreds of feet of beach have disappeared in Dare County, N.C., the current epicenter of erosion-related home collapses in the United States.

"There is no way to maintain homes where they currently are," Corbett says. He has delivered the same message directly to county residents at multiple public meetings in recent years. "The only solution is to back off that front line."

Clarke Lattimore, 8, looks out the window of his family's beach house in Buxton, N.C., in May. His great-grandfather built the house behind two rows of dunes. Now, it is threatened by the ocean.

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But removing homes from the front line is expensive. Tearing down a house costs at least $30,000, according to local contractors, and the price tag is even higher if the house is very large or difficult to access. The other option is to move homes farther away from the water, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most homeowners do not have that kind of money. Many of the at-risk properties in Dare County are vacation homes, and their owners rely on rental income to pay for the mortgage, taxes and insurance. As the ocean encroaches, many houses get damaged and become uninhabitable, saddling owners with high bills and no income at the very moment they need cash to prevent their homes from collapsing.

Michael McDaniel is in that situation with his house in Buxton, N.C., nicknamed the Sea Star. He purchased it for about $500,000 in 2011, when he retired from the Navy. He planned to eventually move there full time with his wife.

When he bought the house, about 250 feet of dune were between the front porch and the Atlantic. For years, the house seemed like a good investment. The property value rose and hit nearly $1 million just two years ago. But the beach eroded, and today the home is uninhabitable.

McDaniel says he can't afford to move the house, which would be his first choice, or to demolish it. The house has a flood insurance policy that will pay out $250,000 if it collapses, plus up to $100,000 for lost belongings.

"If it's teetering, you've got to sit and wait for it to fall in the ocean," he says.

Foreman, whose house is stranded in the middle of the Rodanthe beach, is in a similar bind.

Extra sand has bought extra time for the owners of homes damaged by waves in recent years in Dare County, but the long-term problem of beach erosion persists.

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"Environmentally, it would be far better if they would allow me to tear it down on a beautiful day where all the debris is in one spot," he says. "But by requiring the waiting game for it to fall, it's going to fall in a storm, and it's going to be scattered for miles."

Taxpayers are on the hook for increasingly expensive cleanups. Federal and county governments together estimate that they have spent more than half a million dollars cleaning up debris in coastal North Carolina since 2020. Those figures do not account for the economic costs of closed beaches and polluted ecosystems.

County officials say they are frustrated by the federal government's approach.

"If there are waves breaking under the house, that's clearly threatened," says Dare County Manager Robert Outten. "It's money they're going to spend either way. It's cheaper to tear it down."

Their frustration is even greater because they say the federal government created a solution to the problem nearly 40 years ago — and then killed it.

Homes in Buxton were originally built behind multiple rows of dunes. Today, those dunes are gone.

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The solution that Congress hated

In the mid-1980s, Congress stepped in to help homeowners with threatened homes.

The result was called the Upton-Jones Amendment to the National Flood Insurance Program. The law, named for lawmakers from the erosion hot spots of Michigan and North Carolina, allowed homeowners to access flood insurance payouts before a home fell, to pay for demolishing it or moving it.

The law took effect in 1988, and homeowners immediately started using it to get their houses out of harm's way, according to partial claims records obtained from FEMA through a public records request and analyzed by NPR. More than 400 homes in 27 states were demolished or moved under the policy.

People fish off the pier in Avon, North Carolina.

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But Congress was not happy with the results.

The goal was to avoid having houses fall into the water. But in a series of congressional hearings, experts told lawmakers that some property owners were purposely waiting to remove their houses.

"They have chosen to repair the building as it stands, get another season's rent and then look toward the possibility of demolition at a later date," explained Spencer Rogers, who managed Upton-Jones claims for North Carolina, at a June 1990 congressional hearing. "There is no particular incentive that I can see for any early action."

Lawmakers and FEMA officials expressed frustration that there was no penalty for such inaction. The longer the owner of a doomed home delayed, the more likely it was that the home would be damaged by waves or storms, leading to an expensive insurance claim. And if the house fell before the owner removed it, they could still collect their full flood insurance payout.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. Here, homes in Buxton stand over the waves in May.

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"Policyholder benefits come at the government's expense," said then-Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska at another 1990 hearing about Upton-Jones.

Lawmakers were also concerned that the policy could bankrupt the National Flood Insurance Program if every eligible home took advantage of it. After years of debate about whether Upton-Jones could be fixed, Congress repealed it altogether in 1994.

Now, Congress is considering reinstating a version of the same policy.

Under pressure from homeowners and local governments, a bipartisan group of lawmakers last year proposed resurrecting a version of the Upton-Jones law.

"For some homeowners in vulnerable coastal areas, relocation or demolition may be the safest and most practical option," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, one of the bill's co-sponsors. She says the bill "is about giving people that option before disaster strikes, not after everything is already lost."

The new bill attempts to address some of the problems identified in Upton-Jones back in the 1990s. If a homeowner fails to remove their threatened house before it collapses, they may not get their full insurance payout. And the process for determining whether a house is in imminent danger from erosion is simplified.

But the bill has not gotten enough support to move forward. The Trump administration's efforts to slash FEMA's workforce and budget have made it harder for popular bipartisan efforts to reform the agency to find traction in Congress.

Brian Harris runs the Buxton Civic Association in Buxton. In recent years, he has been pushing the state and federal governments to change rules that make it difficult to protect waterfront homes and to remove them before they collapse.

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FEMA never analyzed the full cost of Upton-Jones

Upton-Jones retains its reputation as a failed and expensive program three decades after it was repealed. But it's unclear how accurate that reputation is, because FEMA never conducted a full analysis of its cost-effectiveness. "There was never a really robust postmortem," says Ryan-Henry, of the Coastal States Organization.

FEMA's complete data on flood insurance claims are private, making it impossible to know how Upton-Jones ultimately compares with other federal programs for removing threatened homes.

But narrower claims data obtained by NPR through a public records request offers a clue. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost to demolish a home was roughly the same as the cost of a federal home buyout, in which the government purchases repeatedly damaged homes in flood zones at market value and pays to demolish them.

In higher-cost areas, Upton-Jones could even be cheaper. The proposed program would cap payouts at $250,000, while the separate, existing buyout program pays full market value. More than 90% of the homes that have fallen in Dare County since 2020 were assessed above $250,000.

Without long-term solutions available, many local and state governments are relying on expensive alternatives such as beach nourishment and seawalls.

Removing homes before they collapse costs tens of thousands of dollars. A bill pending in Congress would let homeowners access money through their flood insurance policies to help foot that bill.

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In Maine, a project is underway to build a jetty to slow erosion near houses in the threatened community of Camp Ellis in the town of Saco. And Dare County, N.C., has two multimillion-dollar projects underway: an $8.6 million jetty repair and a roughly $15 million beach nourishment project that will pump more than 2 million cubic yards of sand in front of the most threatened houses. The sand from the last beach nourishment in the area lasted less than three years.

"Beach nourishment is temporary," says Corbett, the climate scientist at East Carolina University. "You're buying sand to buy time. You can't simply buy time and not plan for what is next."

And not every neighborhood is getting sand or other protections. At this rate, Richard Foreman doesn't see a path to either protecting or removing his stranded house in North Carolina. "Which leads you to believe they're really just hoping [the homes] will fall instead," Foreman says. "It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts."

Additional editing by Neela Banerjee. Molly Enking of Maine Public, along with Sarah Knight and Katie Daugert of NPR, contributed reporting.
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