The Brief

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 3, 2026.

Boyle Heights artist Robert Vargas unveiled a new mural Tuesday titled “Songs My Father Taught Me,” depicting a handcuffed mariachi and a child as the Eastside continues to grapple with the effects of ongoing immigration raids.

The mural, located at the corner of 4th and Mathews streets, shows the wrists of a mariachi handcuffed, the red, white and green colors of the Mexican flag are visible on his charro suit. Beside him, a child wearing a T-shirt featuring a patriotic cartoon bald eagle looks on while holding a guitar.

It’s one of five murals Vargas plans to paint this week as part of his “#WeAreHuman” initiative, which he said features images that show “truth and resiliency in our culture, and hopefully empower us and give us strength,” according to an Instagram Reel announcing the unveiling.

At the unveiling on Tuesday, about two dozen people watched as Vargas put his finishing touches on the painting. In attendance was East LA-born actor Edward James Olmos, who called the work “a great statement to who we are as a people.” “We will rise way beyond this,” he said.

For Vargas, the full message lies in the small details of the painting, including the wedding band on the mariachi’s finger, the eagle on his jacket facing the cartoon eagle on his son’s shirt, the guitar the boy is holding and the somber look in his eyes as he watches his father being detained.

“When I see this image, I see myself. I see brown faces, I see representation…but I feel heartbreak,” said Michelle Lopez, who was at the unveiling. “Seeing his father hand off that guitar to him, the passing of the torch. …To see the two eagles facing each other, ‘How is one eagle illegal?’” Lopez said.

The mural at 2426 E. 4th St. was unveiled about a week after the Eastside was hit with some of the heaviest immigration activity it had experienced since the raids began last June. A few blocks north on Mathews Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, a man identified by his family as Abraham was detained by four masked agents in a driveway. According to his nephew, Chris, who witnessed the incident, Abraham had been standing on the sidewalk when agents approached him. Two days later, his family said, Abraham was back in his hometown of Puebla, Mexico.

Vargas is known for his large-scale murals across LA and internationally. In Boyle Heights, his giant, three-panel mural near Mariachi Plaza immortalizes the late Dodger legend Fernando Valenzuela. In Little Tokyo, a 150-foot-tall mural of Shohei Ohtani honors the Japanese baseball star. Vargas also painted a second mural of Ohtani in his hometown of Ōshū, in the northern prefecture of Iwate.

The intersection of 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights has been dubbed “Robert Vargas Square” in recognition of the artist’s work and ties to the neighborhood.

Participants in this year's field test of the 2030 census may be asked about their U.S. citizenship status, the Trump administration revealed Thursday.

The proposal, which is part of a regulatory filing for the test, comes months after President Donald Trump — in the middle of a redistricting push for new voting maps that could help Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives — put out a call on social media for a "new" census that would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status.

In Congress, a growing number of Republican lawmakers are backing similar controversial proposals to leave out some or all non-U.S. citizens from a set of census numbers used to determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes.

According to the 14th Amendment, those census apportionment counts must include the "whole number of persons in each state."

And in federal court, multiple GOP-led states have filed lawsuits seeking to force the bureau to subtract residents without legal status and those with immigrant visas from those counts. Missouri's case goes further by calling for their exclusion from all census counts, including those for distributing federal dollars for public services in local communities.

Results from the 2026 test are not expected to be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is designed to inform preparations for the next once-a-decade head count in 2030, which include a report on the planned question topics that is due to Congress in 2027.

The planned questionnaire for the test comes from an annual Census Bureau survey that is much longer than recent forms for the national tally. It's not clear why the bureau is using the American Community Survey to test methods for the census. Spokespeople for the bureau and its parent agency, the Commerce Department, did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.

In addition to citizenship status, the form asks about people's sources of income, whether their home has a bathtub or shower, and whether the home is connected to a public sewer, among other questions.

The form, however, does not reflect changes to racial and ethnic categories that the Biden administration approved for the 2030 census and other federal surveys, including new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino." A White House agency official said in December that the Trump administration is considering rolling back those changes.

On Monday, the bureau announced major cutbacks to the census test, which is now set to take place between April and September and involve around 155,000 households in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C.

As with all surveys conducted by the bureau, federal law bans the agency from putting out information that would identify a person to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.

Still, many census advocates are concerned the Trump administration's plan will discourage many historically undercounted populations, including households with immigrants and mixed-status families, from participating in the field test at a time of increased immigration enforcement and murky handling of government data.

Previous Census Bureau research has found that adding a citizenship question would likely undermine the count's accuracy by lowering response rates for many of the least responsive populations.

During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census, while declining to rule on whether the president can carry out an unprecedented exclusion of people without legal status from apportionment counts.

In one of its new filings to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, the bureau says the form for this year's census test "will ask no questions of a sensitive nature." Whether its proposed questions move forward is now for OMB to decide.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR

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These Winter Olympics will feature a new sport for the first time in over three decades.

While the Games regularly add events within existing disciplines, they haven't introduced an entirely new sport since the return of skeleton in 2002.

That changes this year with the debut of ski mountaineering, aka "skimo."

The sport, which involves hiking up and skiing down a mountain, will feature three events: women's sprint, men's sprint and mixed relay.

That's in addition to five brand new competitions in longtime Winter Olympic sports — for a grand total of eight new medal opportunities at this year's Games. Here's what to know about them.

The new sport: ski mountaineering

In ski mountaineering, athletes navigate a set course amidst rugged terrain. They attach climbing skins to the base of their skis while they ascend a mountain, quickly maneuver their skis off to tackle a series of steps on foot, then readjust and ski back down.

The sprint race consists of an ascent and descent, starting with time trials and seeding athletes into groups of six. In the mixed relay, teams of one man and one woman alternate four laps — two ascents and two descents — on a longer course (with an elevation gain of 460 feet compared to 230 in the sprint).

According to Team USA, ski mountaineering has its roots in the "need to traverse the snow-covered landscapes of Europe in prehistoric times," and can officially be traced back to the mountains of Switzerland in 1897.

But the sport known as skimo really took off in the 21st century, hosting its first world championships in France in 2002 and establishing a World Cup circuit two years later.

It was added to the Winter Youth Olympic Games in 2020, and the following year was approved for inclusion in Milano Cortina — a fitting country for its Olympic debut, since the sport has a long history and many international champions in Italy.

Ski mountaineering competitions will be held in the Valtellina Valley town of Bormio, at the same venue as Alpine skiing.

The U.S. team narrowly qualified for the Games in a high-stakes Utah race in early December, the very last chance for teams to earn Olympic ranking points.

The mixed relay team of Anna Gibson and Cam Smith won its race by a minute and a half on home snow, beating rival Canada to take home a gold medal and secure for Team USA the continent's last Olympics spot. It wasn't just a major victory, but a chance for Team USA to educate curious Instagram followers about the sport itself.  

New events within skeleton, luge, ski jumping and moguls

The other new events are additional variations of existing competitions, giving more athletes — particularly women — a chance to compete:

There's dual moguls, a freestyle skiing event in which two athletes compete side by side, performing aerial tricks on two jumps of a bumpy course. Traditional moguls, featuring one skier at a time, have been part of the Winter Games since the 1990s. This year will feature both men's and women's dual moguls.

Another new event is mixed team skeleton, which pairs one man and one woman from the same country to race down an ice track head-first on a small sled.

This year also marks the debut of women's doubles luge, in which two women from the same country double up on the same sled to race down the track, feet-first. The existing doubles luge competition will officially become a men's event, which it effectively has been since the 1960s, since women were technically eligible but never previously participated.

Ski jumping is also getting a brand new event, the women's individual large hill competition. That means both men and women will compete in normal and large hill events, as well as a mixed team event, which made its debut in the 2022 Beijing Games.

Men have one additional ski jumping medal event, which is rebranding this year: the super team, a new format that replaces the traditional four-person team competition with pairs of two competing in up to three jumps. Olympics organizers say the restructuring makes the competition more dynamic and paves the way for smaller nations to participate.
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