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.

The immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles has placed dozens of people in solitary confinement each month since June, according to the most recent data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In May 2025, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center had 14 people in isolation. When the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort revved up in June 2025, the number of detainees in solitary confinement there more than tripled. By July, it was 73; by August, 105.

The most recent data available shows that number went down slightly in January, to 74 people.

Ranked by percentage of the detainee population in “segregation,” as it is called at immigrant detention centers, Adelanto is among the U.S.’s top 10 facilities as of January, according to an LAist analysis of the most recent ICE data.

The data shows that of 229 ICE facilities that reported holding people since October 2024, between 50 and 60 usually reported putting at least one person in segregation in a given month. Out of the facilities that did place people in solitary confinement, Adelanto tended to do so less often than others until June 2025. (The facility held just a few people from October 2024 into January 2025.) When ICE’s presence increased in L.A. in June, the number of people sent to isolation in the facility also shot up — three to five times as many people have been isolated in Adelanto compared to the average facility that used any solitary confinement.

Since June, only two facilities have sent people to solitary confinement more times than Adelanto: one southwest of San Antonio, the other in central Pennsylvania.

Both of those facilities held twice the number of detainees as Adelanto on average from October 2024 through September 2025; but the number of people held in Adelanto since then has tripled, growing larger than either of the other facilities to hold an average of 1,800 people a day since October.

More on solitary confinement  

According to ICE, detainees may be placed in segregation for “disciplinary reasons,” or because of:

• “Serious mental or medical illness.”
• Conducting a hunger strike.
• Suicide watch.

The agency also says it might place detainees “who may be susceptible to harm [if left among the] general population due in part to how others interpret or assume their sexual orientation, or sexual presentation or expression.”

Not only is ICE holding more people in solitary confinement, but the agency's data also shows that detainees across the country are being isolated for longer periods of time. Detainees ICE considers part of the "vulnerable & special population" spent an average of about two weeks in solitary confinement each time they were isolated in 2022, when ICE first made the data available. By the end of 2025, the average stay in isolation had risen to more than seven weeks straight.

The GEO Group Inc., a private company that operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, has not responded to requests for comment.

How isolation can affect immigrant detainees  

UN human rights experts consider solitary confinement placements that last 15 days or more to be torture, though the U.S. Supreme Court has held that isolation doesn’t violate the Constitution.

The UN also maintains that solitary confinement should be prohibited for people “with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions would be exacerbated by such measures.”

In January, a coalition of immigrant rights groups filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of current detainees, calling for conditions at Adelanto to be improved. In addition to an unsanitary environment and a lack of healthy food and clean drinking water, detainees say solitary confinement is frequently used to punish those who speak out about conditions at the facility.

People held in immigrant detention centers are technically in “civil detention,” meaning that they are being detained to ensure their presence at hearings and compliance with immigration orders — not to serve criminal sentences.

According to the immigrant rights groups’ complaint, one detainee was placed in solitary confinement after complaining about the showers being broken. Another detainee said that, after asking a guard to “use more respectful language toward him, he was ridiculed, written up and given the middle finger by a guard who shouted, ‘Who the f--- do you think you are?’” Then, the detainee was placed in solitary confinement for 25 days.

Alvaro Huerta, the director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing detainees at Adelanto, told LAist that when people are placed in isolation at the facility, they’re typically in the same cell for 23 hours per day, unable to receive visits from their families.

For clients who are experiencing mental health challenges — especially those with suicidal thoughts — being placed in solitary confinement “can really exacerbate their condition,” he added.

In multiple statements to the media, ICE has said that the agency “is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.” The agency has also said that detainees receive “comprehensive medical care” and that all detainees “receive medical, dental, and mental health intake screenings within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility.”

Huerta called that “laughable.”

“We have countless examples of people who have said that this is not true, that they're not getting the medication that they're requesting, that they're not being seen for chronic conditions and emergency conditions,” he added. “And we know it's not true because 14 people have died in ICE custody this year alone.”

Lori Rovner of Manhattan Beach is a big sports fan, so there was no question that when tickets for the Olympic Games went on sale, she'd be signing up.

She scored a slot in the first ticket drop, which launched Thursday, and logged on right at 10 a.m., hoping to score tickets to the Opening Ceremonies and some finals too. After battling her computer to get through "access denied" screens and a lost shopping cart due to a 30-minute time limit, she bought 16 tickets.

It was only when she was about to purchase that she noticed the service fees, which were around 24% of each ticket. One $2,100 ticket had a $505 service fee, bringing the total cost to $2,604.63.

"It's insane," she said of the fee. "I don't understand what the service is."

As the locals-only sale kicks off and Southern Californians have their first chance to buy tickets to the Olympic Games, some fans are wide-eyed at the high fees on all tickets and the prices in general, which start at $28 but go up to more than $5,500 a pop. Opening Ceremony tickets start at $328.68

The service fees aren't a surprise add-on. The price fans see when browsing the site is the total cost, including the fee. Still, some who bought in the first phase of sales were surprised when they saw the fees add up.

One user on Reddit of shared their cart of 10 tickets, which added up to $11,264. That included $1,038 in fees alone. Commenters responded in shock and awe.

Service fees are standard in ticket sales, but the percentage they charge can vary widely. High fees have been a source of ire for music and sports fans for years. A 2018 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the average fees on a primary ticket market were 27%.

LA28 did not respond to LAist's requests for details on the service fee, like what it pays for or why it's a percentage rather than a flat rate.

Not everyone seemed bothered by the prices. Some people LAist spoke with opted for only $28 or similarly priced tickets, even if it meant missing some of the biggest Olympic events. One user on Reddit said they purchased 18 tickets for around $550.

"I went with all $28 tickets," they wrote in the online forum about the Olympics. "I got women’s soccer, gymnastics, beach and regular volleyball, track and field, baseball and a few others."

For some, the ticket process, the prices and the dense web of events to choose from made it too hard to pull the trigger.

Jeff Bartow of Sierra Madre made a spreadsheet with some competitions he was interested in seeing before he logged on to buy tickets Friday.

"So many times, so many schedules, so many events," Bartow said. "I think I initially thought I was going to go to a bunch, but thinking about how crazy it's going to be … I might be a little more limited."

This is just the first ticket drop. There will be more opportunities to buy tickets in the months to come — and on a resale market that launches in 2027.

Some ticket-buyers told LAist they already were contemplating which tickets they'd keep and which ones they'd re-sell, just minutes after buying them.

In the more than two months since the Department of Justice released its latest batch of files on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, prosecutors have not brought any new charges based on the documents, despite federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle continuing to demand accountability.

The more than 3 million pages of documents include accusations by alleged victims of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's abuse and thousands of emails and photos showing Epstein associated with prominent figures. The files indicate that many of these people maintained contact with the disgraced financier long after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to sex crimes that involved minors. Appearing in the files is not necessarily an indication of criminal wrongdoing.

The release of the Epstein files came after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which forced the Justice Department to make public all documents it held related to Epstein.

Epstein died in prison about a month after a 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. Maxwell was convicted on sex-trafficking charges in 2021 and is serving a 20-year sentence. Since the release of the files in 2025 and 2026, there have been no related arrests in the U.S. However, the disclosures have led to some resignations and other reputational repercussions for some high-ranking Americans.

The lack of arrests in the U.S. contrasts to the fallout in the U.K., where investigators have pursued charges related to corruption, not sexual abuse, in their dealings with Epstein. Two former government officials — former Prince Andrew and ex-ambassador Peter Mandelson — were arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, has denied wrongdoing and has not been formally charged. Mandelson has also not been charged, and lawyers for Mandelson have said that the arrest was prompted by a "baseless suggestion."

In the U.S., top Justice Department officials have said that they found no evidence compelling enough to pursue further charges related to Epstein, and that the public can make their own assessments based on the disclosed documents.

In a statement to NPR, Justice Department spokesperson Katie Kenlein said that "there have not been additional prosecutions beyond Epstein and Maxwell because there has not been credible evidence that their activities extended to Epstein's network. However, if prosecutable evidence comes forward, the Department of Justice will of course act on it as we do every day in sexual trafficking and assault cases across the count[r]y."

On Thursday, President Trump announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi is out of the top job at the Justice Department, following bipartisan criticism over her handling of the Epstein files.

NPR asked four former prosecutors and one former law enforcement officer why there may not have been enough evidence to levy additional charges. Here's what they said.

Prosecutors must prove guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt"

Prosecutors must prove to a jury that a person committed a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt," according to Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

"One of the biggest misconceptions people have is how difficult it is to charge and convict somebody for a criminal case," said McQuade, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

A prosecutor's ethical responsibility is to charge cases only if they believe there is enough evidence for a conviction, McQuade said. Documents, including emails, jokes, and even plane itineraries, can be a place to start, but, alone, they are not enough to prove guilt, McQuade said.

"What you would need [is] rock solid evidence," McQuade said. "You can't charge someone for a crime without sufficient evidence, and I have yet to see evidence of a crime involving an Epstein associate that has gone uncharged."

Based on his understanding of the case, Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law, said he agreed that prosecutors who investigated Epstein's alleged associates "may have believed that they couldn't persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt." He said problems with witness credibility or certain forensic evidence can prevent a case from moving forward.

The U.K. cases are focused on corruption 

In the U.K., the two people arrested are being investigated on suspicion of "misconduct in public office." McQuade said the U.S. does not have a single equivalent federal law. Instead, the U.S. prosecutes public corruption through statutes that focus specifically on crimes such as bribery and extortion.

After the release of the latest files, British police began investigating Andrew's correspondence with Epstein when Andrew was a U.K. trade envoy. At that time, Andrew allegedly shared government itineraries, investment plans and notes from official foreign trips with Epstein. The information may have been covered by the United Kingdom's Official Secrets Act.

Similarly, Mandelson has been accused of passing confidential government information to the late sex offender when Mandelson was a U.K. Cabinet minister.

Meeting the burden of proof is especially challenging for sex crime cases

Victim statements are essential for establishing basic elements, such as the timeframe of events, required to build sexual assault cases, said Diane Goldstein, a retired police lieutenant from California and the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. But a victim may be reluctant to come forward because of a fear of retaliation, not believing the police can help, believing it is a personal matter, or not wanting to get the perpetrator in trouble.

McQuade noted that in some sex trafficking cases, especially those in which a perpetrator is in a position of power, victims may experience intimidation or threats that prevent them from speaking out.

Victims also may be hesitant to move forward with allegations because they fear having to testify at trials where defense attorneys may attempt to poke holes in their allegations, McQuade said.

Goldstein said that for sex crime cases to advance, investigators need to follow certain policies and procedures. "If you don't have a legitimate police investigation to start, you're not going to get any type of criminal filing," Goldstein said.

Other potential charges are also a difficult path

Prosecutors may have considered pursuing charges of criminal conspiracy related to sex trafficking against people associated with Epstein, said Jessica Roth, a professor at Cardozo School of Law. FBI documents in the files relating to its investigation into Epstein's crimes identify certain people as "co-conspirators."

But Ankush Khardori, a senior writer and columnist at Politico magazine who worked as a federal prosecutor on financial fraud cases, told NPR those identifiers are not "formal accusation[s]" and are simply part of "interim documents."

"The FBI does not determine who is a co-conspirator," Khardori said. "That is a legal judgment that prosecutors make."

But for those conspiracy cases, "criminal intent," in particular, is difficult to establish, said Roth, who worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York for seven years. Criminal conspiracy charges "would require knowledge and intent on the part of each individual who was charged," Roth said. If a person who communicated with Epstein had some suspicion that he was engaged in illegal activity, that alone would not be sufficient evidence to press charges, she said.

Investigators may have considered charges related to criminal tax violations, McQuade said. But the statute of limitations has likely ended on those cases, she said, meaning that prosecutors can no longer bring charges.

The current evidence lacks context

Legal experts say the haphazard way the documents were released and redacted makes it difficult for the public to understand why no additional charges have been filed.

Roth, the Cardozo law professor, said the information is in "isolation," without the appropriate context. "We'll see an individual photograph that looks perhaps incriminating. We'll see an email that looks incriminating, but we don't necessarily have everything that was said before and after that email and that exchange," Roth said.

One document that could explain why no charges were pursued, according to Butler, is a heavily redacted DOJ memo naming "potential co-conspirators" of Epstein. "The parts that should indicate why the department declined prosecution on any alleged co-conspirators other than Ghislaine Maxwell [are] redacted," said Butler, the Georgetown law professor and a former federal prosecutor.

Butler said those redactions are "unusual" because they do not appear to follow the permissible reasons for redactions in the Epstein documents. Those reasons include confidentiality for Epstein's alleged victims, or anything that would compromise an ongoing investigation, Butler said.

"When the Justice Department grudgingly releases information when pressed by politics or forced by Congress, it also creates the impression that they have something to hide," Butler said. "That there is some cover-up going on."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nearly 30% more students in Los Angeles County experienced homelessness from 2022-23 to 2023-24, making it the county’s highest rate in the past five years and far outpacing the rate of homelessness across the state in the same timeframe, as the resources to identify and support this student population have decreased.

The UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools published two reports on Wednesday on the state of student homelessness in the county: “Rising Numbers, Fading Resources: Students Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles County” and “Hidden in Plain Sight: Fear, Underidentification, and Funding Gaps for Housing-Insecure Students in Los Angeles County.”

Researchers found that Norwalk-La Mirada Elementary Unified School District had the highest rate of student homelessness in the county — 1 in 3 students, meaning that over 4,700 students were identified as experiencing homelessness during the 2023-24 school year out of a total cumulative enrollment of about 15,600.

The city of Norwalk, where the district is located in the eastern region of the county, was sued by the state in 2024 for banning emergency shelters and other support services for people experiencing homelessness. Last year, the state reached a settlement with the city, which was forced to overturn the ban and put $250,000 toward building affordable housing.

Student homelessness is defined differently under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that requires every public school to count the number of students who are living on the street, in shelters, in motels, in cars, doubled up with other families, or moving between friends’ and relatives’ homes.

As a result of this expanded definition, McKinney-Vento includes doubled-up students in the count of homelessness. Doubled-up is a term used to describe children and youth ages 21 and under living in shared housing, such as with another family or friends, due to various crises.

There were a few other patterns seen in the L.A. County data analyzed by the UCLA researchers:

• Latino students were disproportionately more likely to experience homelessness: they represent 65% of the county’s student population, but 75.5% of student homelessness
• A third of homeless students were in high school
• Many districts with the highest rates of homelessness had higher school instability but lower dropout rates

While McKinney-Vento has an expanded definition that includes more types of homelessness than several other definitions, identifying students remains difficult.

The second report from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools focuses on the lack of dedicated funding for school staff to identify and support homeless students. Students and families facing homelessness do not always self-identify, whether due to fear, shame or being unaware that their housing situation is considered homelessness under McKinney-Vento.

“A lot of these young people are dealing with a lot of trauma, so they don’t want to be identified. They don’t want to be pointed out; sometimes it’s scary for them, because they think we’re going to report them to the Department of Children and Family Services,” said L.A. County Office of Education staff interviewed for this report.

School staff, known as homeless liaisons, who work with homeless students received a historic influx of federal funds during the Covid-19 pandemic — $98.76 million for California, out of $800 million nationwide, from the American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth.

That funding has since ended, and there is no other dedicated, ongoing state funding set aside solely for the rising number of homeless students. This has led districts in California to “heavily depend on highly competitive and unstable federal streams,” the UCLA researchers wrote. Those federal streams have become increasingly precarious as the federal administration last year sought policy changes that would shift how they are structured.