Topline:
To make crops resilient to climate change, scientists are exposing seeds to cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and low gravity.
The project: The “cosmic crops” project is the United Nations’ first foray into space breeding, part of a global effort to address rising risks of food insecurity stemming from shifting land use patterns, population growth, and climate change-driven extreme weather.
Read more ... to learn about what the scientists are putting these crops through.
In early April of last year, a white capsule the size of a small school bus detached from the International Space Station and splashed down off the coast of Tampa, Florida. On board were 4,300 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments, including samples of dwarf tomatoes grown in space; crystals that could be used to make semiconductors; and medical data on the astronauts working in the space station. Tucked away among these contents was a much smaller and lighter cargo: more than a million tiny orange seeds.
Half a world away in Seibersdorf, Austria, a town about 22 miles outside the capital of Vienna, Pooja Mathur waited eagerly for the seeds — from a plant called arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family — to arrive. Mathur, a plant geneticist, leads the Plant Breeding & Genetics Laboratory for the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, a collaboration between two United Nations agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
For over 60 years, the laboratory has studied whether nuclear technologies can be used to breed new and more resilient varieties of crops, and the seeds from the space capsule were its newest venture. They had spent nearly five months in low Earth orbit, exposed to cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and low gravity, which altered their DNA in unpredictable but potentially beneficial ways. Scientists like Mathur hope that a few of these seeds might sprout into plants that can survive changing conditions here on Earth, such varieties more resistant to drought or heat.
“It was a great opportunity to receive them,” Mathur told Grist over a video call from her office in Austria. “But there was also a nervousness — there are always these questions when you embark on something unknown.”
The “cosmic crops” project is the United Nations’ first foray into space breeding, part of a global effort to address rising risks of food insecurity stemming from shifting land use patterns, population growth, and climate change-driven extreme weather. Heat waves, droughts, floods, erratic rainfall, and worsening pest and disease outbreaks all threaten agricultural production around the world, and the effects are already being felt in many countries. Massive flooding destroyed at least 4 million acres of farmland in Pakistan in 2022, triggering a food crisis for more than 8 million people; in East Africa, extreme drought has pushed millions of people to the brink of famine in the past three years. In the United States, natural disasters, many made worse by climate change, caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses in 2022 alone.
While space breeding seeds was first attempted in the 1960s, the scientific endeavor is currently experiencing a golden age as space travel and research becomes more accessible for nations outside the U.S., Russia, and Europe. Chinese researchers have been at the forefront of this experimentation, developing more than 200 varieties of space-mutated plants since 1987. Other countries that have developed space programs in recent years, like India and the United Arab Emirates, are also among the most vulnerable to climate change, and have expressed interest in the technology.
But the joint FAO/IAEA center’s project, known officially as Seeds in Space, is the first such effort on an international level, which will help make the results of these experiments available even to nations that can’t afford to build rockets or extensive plant genetics laboratories. And it will help answer essential questions about what makes space mutations different from those done here on Earth, and where scientists should direct their efforts in order to adapt to climate change.
“[If] we can understand how plants mitigate stress [in a space environment], we can use that knowledge in our approach to global warming on Earth,” said Tapan Mohanta, a former agricultural researcher at the University of Nizwa in Oman who has studied the potential of space breeding for developing new crop varieties and was not involved in the FAO/IAEA mission.
The joint FAO/IAEA center was founded in 1964 amidst a post-war push to use atomic energy for peaceful means. Researchers at the time found that exposing plant material to radiation encourages mutations at a much faster rate than conventional breeding, a painstaking procedure that requires multiple generations to show changes in the plants’ phenotype, or outward characteristics. Mutations occur naturally as cells multiply by making copies of their genetic code; what starts as a random error in one strand of DNA can be replicated over and over again until the organism either repairs the damage or allows it to spread to all of its cells.
Hitting seeds with gamma rays, the most powerful form of radiation, speeds up this process, known as “mutagenesis,” by as much as 1 million times. Irradiated seeds which survive the high doses of radiation can grow into plants that show much clearer phenotype variations than their conventionally-bred counterparts; scientists can then test these new specimens to see whether they can withstand difficult conditions or produce a higher crop yield than currently existing varieties. This process does not make the seeds themselves radioactive, and the resulting crops are safe to eat, Mathur said.
By selecting and then further breeding the most promising candidates, researchers have produced over 3,400 new varieties of more than 210 plant species, according to the IAEA’s Mutant Variety Database. Farmers in more than 70 countries are already growing the resulting plants; the seeds are often crossbred with widely used “elite” varieties to better suit local conditions. Other mutations can be induced using chemicals, bypassing nuclear technology altogether.
Cosmic rays, which are emitted by distant space objects like the sun, other stars, and even black holes, offer a different way to trigger mutagenesis, Mathur said. One of the goals of the “cosmic crops” project is to determine whether radiation from space, which is lower intensity but applied over a longer period of time than in the lab, can create different results than experiments with gamma rays on Earth. Previous experiments by Chinese researchers have found that space radiation induces “useful” mutations more often than gamma radiation applied in a lab, according to the BBC.
“Mutagenesis is a very slow process on a day-to-day basis,” Mathur said. Space breeding “can accelerate the process to harness the power of natural changes at a much faster scale, considering that there is a dire need to have solutions in food and agriculture.”
Two types of seeds were picked for the experiment: arabidopsis, a weed that, while usually not edible, is a “model species” with a well-studied genome that researchers can quickly examine for the most obvious genetic changes and useful traits, and sorghum, a dryland crop that’s consumed by 500 million people around the world and is therefore useful from a food security standpoint, Mathur said. Half were kept outside the International Space Station, where they were exposed to the full range of cosmic radiation along with the extreme cold and zero-gravity environment of outer space; the other half stayed inside the station, under microgravity conditions but shielded from most radiation, to provide a point of comparison.
Because the mutations that occurred in space were random, scientists are taking two approaches to figure out what they look like: Since receiving the seeds in June of last year, Mathur’s lab has planted them and will now begin using DNA sequencing technology to study the arabidopsis seedlings and determine what changes took place at the genetic level. They plan to have results by summer or early fall. After that, researchers will screen the ones that seem to display positive genetic changes to determine whether they can actually better withstand harsh conditions like drought, salinity, and pest infestations. They’ll follow up by testing the sorghum, which takes longer to sprout and grow to maturity.
Mathur’s lab is sharing its results with countries that want to learn which techniques — encompassing everything from the length of time the seeds are in space to the way they’re grown once they return — produce the most resilient crop varieties. One such “coordinated research project,” which would compare mutations induced by cosmic rays with those applied in the lab, has attracted researchers from Australia, Burkina Faso, China, France, Ghana, India, Kenya, Niger, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
“The molecular variations in plants induced by space mutagenesis are largely unknown,” said Hongchun Xiong, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences who is working on the coordinated research project. Although Xiong’s previous research using space-exposed seeds has identified mutant varieties of wheat that are more tolerant to saline soil, which can prove useful as saltwater encroaches on agricultural fields thanks to rising sea levels, she hopes to identify others that are resistant to dry conditions or use nitrogen more efficiently.
“We believe this is important for [the] development of new wheat varieties for food security and climate change adaptation,” Xiong said.
Previous experiments with space breeding have already yielded results. China registered a new variety of wheat called Yannong 5158, which was developed using space mutagenesis, in 2007. Smaller than conventional wheat, with dark green leaves, this version proved more resistant to bacterial diseases and stem rust, a type of fungal infection, while also producing a higher yield. This variety has since been planted in several villages in the Fuyang prefecture in eastern China. The country also harvested its first batch of rice that had traveled to deep space — nicknamed “rice from heaven” by state media — in 2021, though it has not yet announced whether the resulting plants were more resilient in any way than their Earth-bred counterparts.
Experiments like these carry risks, Mohanta pointed out. Mutant DNA could potentially escape and contaminate wild species or other crops through cross-pollination, which could pose a threat to biodiversity or human health if the mutations are harmful in any way — a small possibility, but one that plant breeders developing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, also face. One genetically modified variety of corn, for example, was suspected of unintentionally introducing allergens into the U.S. food supply in the early 2000s and later had to be recalled, although officials could not prove that the GMO corn actually caused allergic reactions. And although contamination incidents are common, with nearly 400 recorded by Greenpeace between 1997 and 2014, researchers have found no definitive links between GMO foods and negative health effects.
While space-bred varieties are not GMOs, because the mutations that occur are random and not controlled by humans, the joint FAO/IAEA center still follows protocols to keep cross-contamination from occurring. But it can’t control what member states do once they have access to the technology and mutated seeds.
“Although developing plant varieties that thrive in microgravity and resist cosmic radiation may be an important goal for the scientific community, an undesirable mutation in the genome could have deleterious effects on other crop varieties,” Mohanta wrote in a 2021 paper in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. “Therefore, the conduct of such research should be subject to strict international regulations to avoid the possibility of unexpected results.”
Mathur emphasized, though, that despite the unknowns, space breeding has enormous potential, which scientists are only just beginning to unpack. She pointed to previous studies that found peppers exposed to cosmic radiation had a higher nutritional content, a promising feature given widespread deficiencies of iron, zinc, vitamin A, and other nutrients around the world. And although space experiments are still a very small component of plant breeding, the results of the “cosmic crops” project will help researchers decide whether to invest more into this technology in the future.
Mutation breeding “has been the cornerstone of agriculture for a long, long time,” Mathur said. “Agriculture is all about harnessing mutations … and mutation is very much a part of our evolutionary process.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/can-the-harsh-conditions-of-space-breed-more-resistant-crops-for-earth/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
Topline:
At the height of the Los Angeles fires in 2025, millions of residents were exposed in a 24-hour period to toxic lead levels from smoke that were 80 times higher than the typical background level, according to a new study. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology compared the chemical composition of smoke from the Eaton Fire with that of a wildfire and found that the urban plume had more lead, arsenic and halogens (which include chlorine and bromine) linked to burning vehicles, building materials and electronics.
Why it matters: “The main, key finding is really that wildfire smoke is very different fundamentally from the urban smoke,” said Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, an author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. With the new technology they used to measure what was in the smoke, they were able to “actually see the very detailed component of these particles that we are breathing.”
Health effects: Ed Avol, professor emeritus in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who has researched the health effects of air pollution for decades, said significant exposure to heavy metals is consistent with what he’d expect, “but certainly surprising because we haven’t been able to document this sort of thing.” “One of the real advantages of this study is that it had the opportunity to make measurements sort of hour-by-hour across the sampling network. And typically we make measurements of airborne particulates and so forth a couple of times a week, at best,” said Avol, who wasn’t involved in the study.
The backstory: The two wind-whipped infernos in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades that ignited on Jan. 7, 2025, killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, and everything in them — cars, paint, furniture, chemicals under sinks and more. Millions of people were exposed to smoke, which across the entire United States has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually. A recent study found that metal mixtures in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended.
At the height of the Los Angeles fires in 2025, millions of residents were exposed in a 24-hour period to toxic lead levels from smoke that were 80 times higher than the typical background level, according to a new study.
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology compared the chemical composition of smoke from the Eaton Fire with that of a wildfire and found that the urban plume had more lead, arsenic and halogens (which include chlorine and bromine) linked to burning vehicles, building materials and electronics.
“The main, key finding is really that wildfire smoke is very different fundamentally from the urban smoke,” said Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, an author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. With the new technology they used to measure what was in the smoke, they were able to “actually see the very detailed component of these particles that we are breathing.”
Co-author Haroula Baliaka said understanding the different chemical compositions of smoke from an urban versus a wildland fire helps bridge a missing gap in research. Wildfires are growing larger, more intense, faster-moving and more frequent largely because of drier and warmer weather associated with human-caused climate change. As urban growth and climate change push more fires into cities, researchers said monitoring and emergency response will have to adapt.
Ed Avol, professor emeritus in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who has researched the health effects of air pollution for decades, said significant exposure to heavy metals is consistent with what he’d expect, “but certainly surprising because we haven’t been able to document this sort of thing.”
“One of the real advantages of this study is that it had the opportunity to make measurements sort of hour-by-hour across the sampling network. And typically we make measurements of airborne particulates and so forth a couple of times a week, at best,” said Avol, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Thousands of structures burned, releasing toxic chemicals
The two wind-whipped infernos in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades that ignited on Jan. 7, 2025, killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, and everything in them — cars, paint, furniture, chemicals under sinks and more. Millions of people were exposed to smoke, which across the entire United States has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually. A recent study found that metal mixtures in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended.
During the fires, researchers measured trace elements of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, every hour reported by instruments in the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork ( ASCENT ), a relatively new network of air quality monitors across the U.S. that measures the size and chemical composition of these particulates in real time. Ng said ASCENT is the U.S.'s first measurement network able to measure the chemical composition of airborne particles in real time.
Researchers were able to see what chemicals were in the smoke, track how its composition changed over the fire’s course, and distinguish emissions coming from burning structures. From there, they estimated how many people across Los Angeles were exposed to the heavy metals, particularly lead, during the fire’s first days.
They compared the typical value of lead before the fires and the chemical makeup of smoke from a 2024 fire in Riverside County that burned mostly vegetation with data from the Eaton Fire plume. Contrasted with the wildfire smoke, the plume from the LA fire contained 50 times more lead, three times more arsenic, and seven times more halogens. At the peak of burning, about 7 million people were exposed for 24 hours to lead levels more than 80 times what’s typical.
Lead is a neurotoxin that can stunt children’s development, lower IQ scores and increase blood pressure in adults. Scientists still don’t know how short-term, high exposure to lead impacts human health. Arsenic exposure is associated with various cancers.
Yaguang Wei, assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who researches the health impacts of air pollution, wildfire smoke and severe weather, said their findings reinforced some conclusions of a recent study he co-authored that found, in part, that PM2.5 from wildfire smoke was more toxic than particulates from other sources.
“I think their findings are not surprising,” said Wei, who was not involved in the study. When fires burn properties, they’re also burning “a lot of lead on your wall paint and the plastics and electronics and those are very toxic” when they burn, he said.
Monitoring, policies and emergency response need to adapt, experts say
Wei said the study has “important policy implications.” He thinks governments should take stronger actions to protect public health during these fires by investing in more wildfire monitoring and public alerts, and having more prescribed fires.
For Avol, the study is a reminder of our “strange and increasingly dangerous new world” where urban and wildland intersect — and increasingly catch fire.
“It reminds us to be cautious and be concerned and, you know, think about what we can do to minimize this. We’re not going to stop using all these materials containing metals and halogens and so forth in our homes,” he said. “How do we protect people from being exposed to that?”
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
Topline:
The Los Angeles City Council voted, 13-0, Wednesday to phase out oil drilling, the final vote of approval needed to pass the citywide ban.
The backstory: The city of L.A. first moved to phase out oil drilling in 2022. That motion was later overturned after oil drilling company Warren Resources sued the city, arguing that only the state, not local jurisdictions, could. A state law passed last year explicitly granted cities the right to ban oil drilling, and the L.A. City Council again took up the cause.
Why ban drilling? Hundreds of active wells “sit just steps from homes, churches, parks, hospitals and other places that our residents visit and congregate on a daily basis,” Councilmember Adrin Nazarian said. Advocates living near wells also spoke to a host of health issues that they and their neighbors had experienced, including asthma and cancer.
What oil companies say: Some have already said they plan to fight the ban, arguing that the ordinance constitutes a taking of private property without compensation and a violation of their rights.
What’s next for the city: Council members and advocates pushed for the oil wells to be plugged safely.
Read on … to hear from advocates who rallied outside City Hall before the council vote.
The Los Angeles City Council voted 13-0 Wednesday to ban new oil wells and phase out all existing ones within 20 years, the final vote needed to pass the citywide ban.
For community residents and environmental advocates, this has been a long time coming — the push to enact this ordinance began over a decade ago.
“To every single one of us, this is what this means: That we hopefully will inherit a safer Los Angeles, a healthier city, not just for us, but for generations to come,” said Ashley Hernandez, a community organizer and Wilmington resident.
Hernandez was among dozens of demonstrators who gathered outside City Hall Wednesday morning for a rally ahead of the council vote, holding signs with slogans like “Clean air & health over big oil wealth” and “Together we can stop the climate emergency.”
The city of L.A. first moved to phase out oil drilling in 2022. That motion was later overturned after Warren Resources, an oil company, sued the city, arguing that only the state could enact such a policy. A state law passed last year explicitly granted cities the right to ban oil drilling, and the L.A. City Council again took up the cause. L.A. County is planning a similar ban.
Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky, Heather Hutt and Adrin Nazarian spoke in favor of the ban at the morning rally.
“Seven hundred fifty-nine of these active wells sit just steps from homes, churches, parks, hospitals and other places that our residents visit and congregate on a daily basis,” Nazarian said.
Richard Parks, president of Redeemer Community Partnership in South Los Angeles, said his family and several of his neighbors who live near oil drilling sites where odor-neutralizing chemicals are sprayed into the air have faced health consequences, including miscarriages.
“We were left to wonder, did we lose these children because of the way these oil companies were operating in our community?” Parks said.
For South L.A. resident and high school senior Isabella Galbraith, the fight to close oil wells has lasted most of her life. She said she participated in her first protest, advocating for the closure of the Jefferson drill site, when she was just 5 years old. (That site has been closed and is now being developed into a park.)
“It's not normal to struggle to breathe. It's not normal for all of your family members to have asthma, to be getting cancer,” Galbraith said. “It's a daily reality for all of us, and it shows up in the little ways, and they have big, lasting consequences.”
Oil companies have already said they plan to fight the ban, arguing that the ordinance constitutes a taking of private property without compensation and a violation of their rights.
Meanwhile, Parks said he hopes the city continues to take action on oil wells, including revoking conditional use permits for nuisance oil drill sites and using the authority of the L.A. Fire Department to plug idle oil wells.
Meanwhile, Yaroslavsky also advocated for the wells to be properly plugged and cleaned up.
“We need to make sure these wells are properly plugged and these sites are cleaned up, and we need to make sure the companies responsible for this pollution are held accountable,” she said.
Local residents are already looking to the future of what these sites could be once they’re shut down and cleaned up.
“I'm looking at … the future of these sites. Maybe these could be parks that our communities desperately need,” said Wilmington resident and rally organizer Wendy Miranda. “I'm just really excited for Wilmington, for South L.A., for other communities that have oil drilling near them to see that this will no longer be in our neighborhoods.”
Topline:
A federal judge agreed on Tuesday to keep the Trump administration’s suspension of the L.A. Homeless Services Authority on hold. That lets LAHSA keep running key homelessness systems while it hands its federal roles off to L.A. County in the months ahead.
Why it matters: Judge David O. Carter's order keeps federal homelessness money flowing to the L.A. region through LAHSA while the agency’s lawsuit over the suspension plays out. It also blocks HUD’s plan to have local service providers apply directly to the federal government for funding.
Why now: Carter’s earlier order blocking the suspension was set to expire yesterday. The day before, a regional planning group voted to make the county the lead agency for the region’s homelessness database and its housing matching system, completing the county’s selection for all four of LAHSA’s federal roles.
What’s next: Lawyers told the court they’re close to settling the entire lawsuit, possibly within about two weeks. HUD’s lawyers said the last roles would move to the county no later than the end of 2027.
The backstory: HUD suspended LAHSA in June, citing alleged financial mismanagement. LAHSA sued, calling the suspension “a baseless attempt to eliminate” both the agency and the region’s homelessness planning group, called the L.A. Continuum of Care.
A federal judge on Tuesday agreed to keep the Trump administration’s suspension of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority on hold, allowing the joint city-county agency, known as LAHSA, to keep running key homelessness systems while it hands its federal roles to L.A. County.
That means federal homelessness money will continue to flow to the L.A. region through LAHSA while the agency’s lawsuit over the suspension plays out.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s order came at the joint request of LAHSA, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care. The decision came as Carter’s earlier order blocking the suspension was set to expire Tuesday.
LAHSA sued the federal housing department, HUD, in June. The L.A. Continuum of Care joined the lawsuit on LAHSA’s side.
Lawyers for both sides told the court they’re close to settling LAHSA’s entire lawsuit. “In terms of a settlement agreement, we are 90% there,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, adding that a signed settlement agreement could be ready in about two weeks.
Their joint request, filed Monday, came the same day the L.A. Continuum of Care voted to make L.A. County the lead agency for the region’s homelessness database (in a 253-43 vote) and its system for matching unhoused people with housing (in a 219-38 vote).
With those votes, the county’s new homelessness department has now been formally selected to take over all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA — in a process ordered by Carter. The group picked the county earlier this month to run the annual homeless count and manage the region’s applications for federal homelessness funding.
In court Tuesday, Carter said the city and county have “bickered” for years, and that LAHSA was created “to solve that problem but was just a punching bag on many occasions.”
In the short term, not much will change for people seeking shelter and services. LAHSA will keep running the system used to match people with housing and the database where outreach workers log the people their organizations help.
But the handoff to L.A. County will happen in stages. Shayla Myers, an attorney for the Continuum of Care, told the court the settlement would include “staggered transition times.”
HUD’s lawyers said the database and housing matching system would move last, no later than the end of next year.
Once the transition is complete, one government will be in charge of the region’s core homelessness systems. That’s a big shift.
For years, these roles have been held by LAHSA, a joint agency overseen by both the city and county, which made it hard to hold anyone accountable when the system fell short.
The shift in overseeing the homeless count will be one major change for the region. The timing hasn’t been announced and is being worked out in settlement talks. For now, LAHSA plans to run the next count in January, according to the agency’s leadership.
LAHSA has run the count for about two decades, and its accuracy has faced repeated scrutiny. In August, the L.A. City Council unanimously called for a review of this year’s count, citing possible errors.
HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs in June, citing alleged financial mismanagement. The federal housing department announced proposed penalties against the L.A. Continuum of Care, saying it wanted to have local service providers apply directly to HUD for funding.
LAHSA sued later that month, calling the suspension “a baseless attempt to eliminate” both the agency and the L.A. Continuum of Care. LAHSA argued HUD’s stated reasons were a cover for the Trump administration's goal of dismantling the regional system. The L.A. Continuum of Care joined the lawsuit on LAHSA’s side, arguing that “HUD’s actions threaten to dismantle the very role Congress assigned to local Continuums of Care.”
In August, Carter, the federal judge, blocked the suspension through Oct. 27 to avoid disrupting funding for homeless services amid a transition away from LAHSA.
He also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start looking for replacements for LAHSA in four key federal roles. As of this week, that selection process is complete, and the parties in the case agree LAHSA needs to keep running key homelessness systems until those roles move to L.A. County.
The court’s order Tuesday keeps the suspension on hold until the end of the lawsuit. It also blocks HUD’s proposed penalties against the Continuum of Care for now, so local providers won’t be forced to apply to HUD directly.
HUD and local officials are now ironing out a transition plan. HUD’s lawyers said the responsibilities would fully move away from LAHSA no later than the end of 2027.
Carter Hewgley is chief strategy officer for the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, which will take over the responsibilities from LAHSA. Hewgley said at Monday’s meeting the department “is committed to a transition plan that preserves vital subject matter expertise and continuity of services.”
LAHSA budgeted about $24 million to run all four of these roles in the current budget year, according to a report from the county’s chief executive officer.
LAHSA spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for the number of employees who support those functions.
HUD, LAHSA and the L.A. Continuum of Care will continue negotiating a settlement.
Essayli said Tuesday the parties have agreed to more than two dozen provisions, with four or five still left to work out.
HUD’s attorneys said the department needs assurances that federal money will be spent properly during the transition, but flagged that the agency doesn’t have the funds to pay for a court-appointed monitor.
As settlement negotiations continue, one sticking point is “harm reduction,” which refers to programs that aim to make drug use less dangerous. Harm reduction strategies can include using public money to distribute clean pipes or syringes.
Essayli said that going forward, “federal dollars can no longer be used for harm reduction.”
Myers, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s attorney, argued that harm reduction is already covered by HUD’s current funding rules and doesn’t need to be part of the settlement.
Carter's order Tuesday requires HUD to process the region’s pending funding application — for about $240 million — as usual.
HUD's current rules bar federal grant money from going to organizations that knowingly distribute drug paraphernalia or knowingly allow illicit drug use on their property.
HUD’s broader funding guidelines are being challenged in federal court in Rhode Island. In the meantime, a federal appeals court has allowed HUD to move forward with them.
HUD's June notice suspending LAHSA did not mention harm reduction. It cited LAHSA's alleged failures in financial management, internal controls and safeguards against conflicts of interest. It also described what HUD called “repeated false statements” to the federal agency.
On Tuesday in a downtown L.A. courtroom, the federal judge pressed the parties to quickly settle their remaining differences.
“Ultimately, you hold the cards in terms of approval,” Carter told HUD’s lawyers. “You have to be happy with this.”
The attorneys said they expect to finish working out the details by the end of this week.
Carter also weighed in on a separate deal between the city and county of L.A. over how the city will use the systems once the county takes over.
In court Tuesday, he displayed the agreement’s terms and warned that deals like it “cannot supplant my rulings.”
“It’s essential to this court that we have a centralized authority, one place of accountability,” he said. “We don’t want a decentralized LAHSA situation again…We’re done with that.”
Topline:
Groups that provide legal services to immigrants filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to stop the Trump administration’s new policy of hiding the locations of tens of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.
Why it matters: The policy, adopted suddenly last month to expedite deportations, interferes with immigration lawyers’ rights by making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to locate their clients, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston. It asks a judge to issue an order blocking the “unlawful and inhumane” change. “No one should be denied a meaningful opportunity to defend their rights because the government has made it impossible for their lawyer to find them,” said Jacquelynne Bowman, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services, one of the four groups listed as plaintiffs. “This arbitrary new administrative change leaves hundreds of thousands of people at risk of potentially life-altering consequences without essential legal help.”
The backstory: The lawsuit challenges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision, first reported by The Associated Press, to remove the locations of people facing final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System and to instruct staff not to reveal their whereabouts. As of last month, the move affected more than 16,000 of the nearly 69,000 detainees who were in ICE custody.
Groups that provide legal services to immigrants filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to stop the Trump administration’s new policy of hiding the locations of tens of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.
The policy, adopted suddenly last month to expedite deportations, interferes with immigration lawyers’ rights by making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to locate their clients, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston. It asks a judge to issue an order blocking the “unlawful and inhumane” change.
“No one should be denied a meaningful opportunity to defend their rights because the government has made it impossible for their lawyer to find them,” said Jacquelynne Bowman, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services, one of the four groups listed as plaintiffs. “This arbitrary new administrative change leaves hundreds of thousands of people at risk of potentially life-altering consequences without essential legal help.”
The lawsuit challenges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision, first reported by The Associated Press, to remove the locations of people facing final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System and to instruct staff not to reveal their whereabouts. As of last month, the move affected more than 16,000 of the nearly 69,000 detainees who were in ICE custody.
ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the lawsuit.
The agencies have not publicly confirmed the change, but have said they are prioritizing people with final removal orders for deportation. They have also said they are facing a “historic number of injunctions” from courts blocking their efforts. The agencies have denied that they are disappearing detainees, saying they remain free to make phone calls.
Since 2010, lawyers and family members have used the online system to track detainees as they get moved from facility to facility through ICE’s sprawling detention network.
Approximately 1.4 million people living in the U.S. are subject to final orders of removal, which means an immigration judge has ruled they should be deported and the decision has been upheld on appeal or not appealed.
Those individuals still have several options to challenge the conditions of their detention and looming deportations, including asking to reopen proceedings, seeking relief from removal to third countries and challenging violations of their rights. Federal judges have ruled thousands of times that detainees should be released or granted bond hearings.
Since the change went into effect, lawyers have been unable to find clients and potential clients and have spent “significantly more time” tracking down others, the lawsuit says. Calls to ICE, including to its Detention and Removal Information Line, “lead to long wait times on hold, sudden hang-ups, a general lack of information or no answer at all,” it says.
As a workaround, some lawyers have tried to find their clients through an ICE program that schedules legal calls, but only a small percentage of detention centers use it, the lawsuit says. The result has been delayed or missed legal filings and fewer cases taken, according to the organizations.
The lawsuit argues the change violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it was adopted without explanation and the First Amendment, which protects lawyers’ ability to advise people of their legal rights and seek prospective client
