The Brief

Next door to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington, an oil pumpjack slowly bobs up and down. Across the street, oil holding tanks and a couple more pumpjacks pepper a park landscape.

This L.A. neighborhood has the highest concentration of oil drilling in the city. And in the absence of consistent monitoring by regulators, a small group of public health advocates has taken matters into their own hands, documenting equipment leaks using a high-tech camera.

It looks something like a camcorder, but it’s no ordinary video camera — it’s a forward looking infrared camera, or FLIR.

Cesar Aguirre with the Central California Environmental Justice Network uses a FLIR camera to monitor methane leaks at an oil drilling site at a park in Wilmington.

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“ Methane absorbs a certain wavelength of light, and this camera is tuned to that wavelength, so you're able to see methane,” explained Ivan Ortiz, an analyst and field investigator with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, based in Bakersfield in Kern County, where the vast majority of California’s oil drilling occurs.

The group was able to buy the camera, which cost around $100,000, through a combination of grants. It has allowed them to document leaks at dozens of sites near homes, schools and other sensitive areas in Kern County that otherwise may have gone unnoticed. The camera is approved by state and federal regulators to monitor such leaks.

Since October, they’ve partnered with a coalition of Angelenos to monitor drill sites in L.A. and submit data to regulators in the hopes they’ll conduct more thorough inspections and fix the leaks.

“We really want to hold regulators accountable to make sure that they do their job, and set an actual gold standard for community protection and not protecting profit,” said Cesar Aguirre, an associate director at CCEJN.

Cesar Aguirre, left, and Ivan Ortiz look at a methane leak from an idle oil pumpjack that they documented with a FLIR camera.

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Why it matters

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that’s rapidly heating up the planet. It often leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines and tanks. And when methane leaks, it’s likely other chemicals are too, such as benzene, a carcinogen.

Research has found that communities living near oil drilling sites have higher rates of asthma, cancer and premature birth.

Monitoring methane has been a key way for researchers to parse out health impacts from oil and gas infrastructure, versus other sources of pollution, such as nearby freeways.

Homes in Wilmington are neighbors with oil infrastructure, including this holding tank.

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“ Methane, generally, is not considered a health toxin, but we use it as a proxy marker for exposure because it's specifically related to natural gas and oil extraction and not to traffic,” said Jill Johnston, an environmental health professor at USC who studies the health effects of oil drilling in L.A.

“Even in neighborhoods in L.A. where we know there's a lot of different kinds of pollution, that proximity to oil wells can be a factor that influences health outcomes,” Johnston said.

Her research was cited in a state law passed in 2022 that requires a 3,200-foot buffer zone between new oil and gas wells and neighborhoods and schools. It was also cited in the ordinances passed by the county and city of L.A. to phase out oil drilling in neighborhoods (which has been stalled by lawsuits brought by the oil industry).

A screenshot from the California Geologic Energy Management Division well map of oil wells and holding tanks in a park and next to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington.

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But L.A. was built on oil, so these drill sites are all over the city.

“This kind of aging infrastructure throughout L.A. is really concerning for health and safety,” said Emma Silber with Physicians for Social Responsibility L.A., one of a coalition of groups working to end urban oil drilling in the city.

Small leaks add up 

With the FLIR camera, Ortiz, Aguirre and Silber walked to one of the pumpjacks in the Wilmington park. This pumpjack is idle, which means it’s not producing oil. But it hasn’t been plugged, so it can still leak.

And sure enough, it is. Ortiz looked at the black and white viewfinder of the camera — tiny plumes of what look like smoke come out of a joint in a pipe.

“It's like very short burps coming from the pipe,” Ortiz observed.

Then we headed over to some oil holding tanks a couple hundred yards away, right next to the park’s soccer field. The numbers started to go up.

“I can smell it,” said Silber.

“ 14...14.9, that's as high as it went. It’s starting to go down,” Ortiz said.

“ Well, let's not stay here then,” Silber replied, adjusting her face mask.

“But now we have it, it's in the data, so we're able to submit that,” Ortiz said.

Emma Silber, right, and Cesar Aguirre assess a pumpjack for methane leaks.

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What’s considered by regulators to be normal is a leak at 2 parts per million, or ppm. On this day, these tanks appeared to be leaking at nearly 15 ppm, and just a few months ago, the group measured leaks here as high as 134 ppm.

That’s far less than the 50,000 ppm that could cause an explosion, but researchers worry about the cumulative impact of these smaller, near-constant leaks — for both the planet’s and people’s health.

“They may be small leaks individually, but the cumulative impact means that there are higher risk exposures for the communities living around them,” said Kyle Ferrar, a researcher with FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that investigates leaks and associated health risks from oil and gas sites.

(LAist reached out to O’Donnell Oil, the oil company that owns the visited sites, via phone and email, but did not receive a response.)

Advocates have documented methane leaks from these tanks using infrared several times.

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Irregular monitoring 

Ferrar said a big part of the problem is the lack of consistent monitoring. While big refineries are required to have fence line air sensors, these small sites aren’t.

“All the monitoring has to be done via inspections, and typically there's not many triggers that would inspire an inspection to occur — that means that community members and researchers like myself have to be on the ground identifying issues,” Ferrar said. “Even when we do identify these leaks, we don't know how long they've been leaking for.”

It's time-consuming and expensive to inspect these sites one-by-one, so regulators often rely on community complaints and self-monitoring by oil companies.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which oversees these sites along with the state, has only 10 inspectors for a region with thousands of wells.

Small drill sites like these are not required to have fence line air sensors like big refineries are.

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A spokesperson for the agency told LAist in an email that “our enforcement team does its best to conduct unannounced on-site inspections, but some sites are visited more frequently if they are subject to public complaints.” The companies that own the sites are also required to submit self-monitoring reports more frequently to the district.

Better data, however, is necessary to actually drive effective policy, said Johnston, the USC professor.

“Regulators want data to push policy changes, but yet no one's going out and collecting the data that's needed,” she said. “And so, again, the burden has fallen on the community to have to prove that they're being harmed.”

If a minor leak is confirmed by an inspector, the air quality district sends a notice to the oil operator to fix it. If the leak hits more than 50,000 ppm, the inspector cites them with a violation, meaning the oil operator is subject to a fine and possible litigation. Operators have more time to fix smaller leaks — two weeks or more — whereas bigger leaks are required to be fixed as soon as within the day, according to the air quality district’s regulations.

Ivan Ortiz inputs data, from the FLIR camera, into an app. The data will also be submitted to regulators.

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Ferrar said the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the state now have some of the most robust monitoring efforts in the country — including a mobile van owned by the air quality district that can document leaks at the street level, a state law that went into effect in 2018 that says any level of leaking methane is a violation, and new satellite monitoring of methane leaks — but it still doesn’t go far enough.

“The oil and gas industry says that they're able to extract oil and gas safely without leaks — well, we have yet to see it,” Ferrar said. “And the people, taxpayers, are the ones who are paying for the inspections, paying for all regulatory oversight of these industries.”

Whack-a-mole accountability

Even if the sites are inspected and the leaks fixed, they’re likely to leak again in another spot, so it’s a bit like whack-a-mole, Ferrar said.

“Many of these sites are producing very little oil but still have a lot of pressure down hole, so there's still a lot of leaks coming up and the potential for leaks to form is always there,” he said.

The real answer, he said, is shutting them down.

“These wells that are producing very little oil, they need to be shut down,” Ferrar said. “There's no reason for them to be operating this close to homes.”

That’s something many community members have wanted for years. As a result of that advocacy, back in 2022, the city of L.A. passed an ordinance to end new drilling and phase out existing drilling in the city over the next 20 years, but the effort has been stalled by lawsuits brought by oil companies. A Superior Court judge struck down the ordinance last year, citing state law.

The team heads out to monitor methane leaks from oil wells and tanks at a Wilmington park.

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What’s next

The settlement on that case is nearly final, and once it is, the city will reintroduce the ordinance, said City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky.

“We have clear authority now from the state that we didn't have before, so we think it's important that we protect the public health of communities,” she told LAist.

That authority is a new state law passed last year that gives cities the explicit right to limit or prohibit oil drilling within their jurisdiction. Previously, only the state had that power.

But Yaroslavsky emphasized that there needs to be faster ways to shut down sites to address both the public health and climate harms of these leaky wells and tanks.

“We can't just rely on one strategy, and we shouldn't wait for the courts; the legal process will take time,” Yaroslavsky said. “We know that the oil industry has very deep pockets, really limitless pockets, and they will sue on everything. So we're actively testing a couple of different models.”

One model is not renewing a pipeline franchise agreement, which allows an operator to move oil via underground pipelines. That’s what happened earlier this year at a drill site in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood that has a long history of violations. Now, the company that owns that site is coming to the table to discuss how to redevelop the site with community input, Yaroslavsky said. The city is also exploring other regulatory avenues to shut down other sites, she said.

“There's a lot of data that shows that urban oil drilling has negative health impacts on surrounding communities, so even low levels [of leaks] aren't acceptable feet from where people are going to school or work or living,” Yaroslavsky said. “There are these legacy polluters in the middle of neighborhoods, and we can't continue to normalize their presence.”

From left, Ortiz, Aguirre and Silber monitor an active oil pumpjack next to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington.

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If you suspect a leak

You can submit air quality complaints by calling South Coast Air Quality Management District’s hotline (800) CUT-SMOG (288-7664), by using AQMD's online form, or through the agency’s mobile app. Complaints can be filed anonymously.

You can search the record of violations for regulated facilities, such as oil wells, near you via the air district's F.I.N.D. tool.

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.