The Brief

Employees at the U.S. Education Department who were fired in March got an unexpected email on Friday – telling them to return to work.

These federal workers, including many attorneys, investigate family complaints of discrimination in the nation's schools as part of the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). They were terminated by the Trump administration in a March reduction-in-force, but the courts intervened, temporarily blocking the department from completing their terminations.

That left 299 OCR employees, roughly half of its staff, in legal and professional limbo – because the department elected to place them on paid administrative leave while the legal battle plays out rather than allow them to work. Court records show 52 have since chosen to leave.

On Friday, an unknown number of the remaining 247 staffers received an email from the department. That email, which was shared with NPR by two people who received it, says that, while the Trump administration will continue its legal battle to downsize the department, "utilizing all OCR employees, including those currently on administrative leave, will bolster and refocus efforts on enforcement activities in a way that serves and benefits parents, students, and families."

Staff were instructed to report to their regional office on Monday, Dec. 15.

In a statement to NPR, Julie Hartman, the department's press secretary for legal affairs, confirmed that the department "will temporarily bring back OCR staff."

"The Department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the Reductions in Force," Hartman wrote, "but in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers."

The department did not clarify how many staffers it was recalling or why it was recalling them now, after keeping them on paid administrative leave for much of the year.

"By blocking OCR staff from doing their jobs, Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department's own making," said Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, a union that represents many Education Department employees. "Students, families, and schools have paid the price for this chaos."

The department did not respond to a request to share the current size of OCR's complaint backlog, but one department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the Trump administration, told NPR that OCR now has about 25,000 pending complaints, including roughly 7,000 open investigations.

Gittleman said the administration's decision to keep these OCR attorneys on paid leave "has already wasted more than $40 million in taxpayer funds— rather than letting them do their jobs."

NPR could not independently verify that cost.

In October, the administration attempted to fire another 137 OCR staffers, though they were reinstated as part of a deal to end the government shutdown.

In all, just 62 employees at OCR have not received a termination notice at some point this year — about 10% of the office's January headcount.

Two days before the department notified staff they were being recalled, NPR reported on the impact these OCR cuts have had on students with disabilities and their families.

Maggie Heilman told NPR that she filed a complaint with OCR in 2024, alleging that her daughter, who has Down syndrome, was denied her right to a free, appropriate public education at school. OCR began investigating in October 2024, but it was disrupted repeatedly by the aforementioned staff cuts. Heilman's case remains one of the roughly 7,000 open investigations.

Of the administration's decision to try to cut many attorneys who protect students' civil rights, Heilman said, "it's telling families with children like [my daughter] that their hurt doesn't matter."

Since Trump took office, public data shows that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 such cases.
Copyright 2025 NPR

When it comes to impaired driving and the state’s open container law, a rolled and ready joint is more like a can of beer in giving police cause to search a car than a few crumbs of marijuana, according to the California Supreme Court.

The court’s reasoning: You can smoke a joint and drink a beer, but loose marijuana isn’t readily consumable.

In a ruling handed down today, the high court ruled that police must find marijuana in a condition that’s ready to be smoked if they are going to charge a driver with an open container violation.

“We hold that at a minimum, to constitute a violation of (the open container law), marijuana in a vehicle must be of a usable quantity, in imminently usable condition, and readily accessible to an occupant,” wrote Associate Justice Goodwin Liu in a unanimous opinion.

Loose marijuana found on a car’s floorboards is like spilled beer, the court ruled. “In assessing whether the marijuana is imminently usable or readily accessible, courts should consider whether the marijuana could be consumed with minimal effort by an occupant of the vehicle,” the court found.

The ruling reversed a magistrate judge, trial court and the California Court of Appeal, which had all agreed that the loose marijuana constituted an open container violation and gave police cause to search a vehicle.

Recreational marijuana has been legal in California since 2016 when voters passed an initiative allowing it. It remains illegal under federal law.

The case at issue was out of Sacramento, where police officers stopped a car and searched it, finding 0.36 grams of marijuana crumbs on the floorboards of the backseat, along with a tray on which to roll joints. The driver hadn’t been driving erratically, her registration and license were unblemished and she had no warrants out.

“No officer suggested he was concerned that (the driver and passenger) could have somehow, while riding in the front of the car, collected the scattered bits of marijuana from the rear floor behind (the passenger) for imminent consumption,” the court ruled. “Nor was there evidence of paraphernalia, such as matches, lighters, rolling papers, blunts, or vaporizers, that could facilitate the marijuana’s consumption.”

The Supreme Court also found that the officers did not have probable cause to search the car in the first place. The police had argued that the driver’s nervousness and possession of a rolling tray was sufficient to search the car, an argument the court rejected.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A taxpayer-funded program that provides unhoused people with tents, meals, bathrooms and around-the-clock security in a South L.A. parking lot will close on Jan. 31, according to the nonprofit that operates it.

Urban Alchemy is terminating a $1.2 million contract with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to run the program through the current budget year, which ends in June.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit says it’s not getting enough funding under that agreement to keep the site open.

“The economics of the contract don’t work,” an Urban Alchemy representative told LAist. “It reached a point where we started losing money on it, and we had to make the decision about what’s best for our organization.”

The Lincoln Safe Sleep Village on South Central Avenue was one of only a handful of similar government-sanctioned tent encampments operating around the state.

Regional homelessness officials and a federal judge raised concerns about the Safe Sleep Village last year after observers found the site was operating at half capacity while the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, was paying it to operate at full capacity.

Urban Alchemy said a portion of the site was closed in 2024 because LAHSA and the city of L.A. instructed it to do so.

Now that the program is closing down entirely, city and LAHSA officials are scrambling to transfer remaining residents to other shelters.

People living at the site first learned of the impending evictions late last week, according to multiple residents interviewed by LAist. One of them, Miles Johnson, said he’d been living there with his girlfriend for 10 months.

“ We just got moved,” he said. “We just got put out. All our stuff is still in bags.”

LAHSA says it has been working to secure alternative shelter placements for 25 people who were living at the Safe Sleep Village.

Ahmad Chapman, a spokesperson for LAHSA, said the agency expects to make housing offers to all remaining participants before the closure.

The main entrance to the Lincoln Avenue Safe Sleep Village, located in a parking lot in South L.A.

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Residents displaced

The Lincoln Safe Sleep Village is located near the intersection of South Central Avenue and East 25th Street in a parking lot next to the historic Lincoln Theater. It’s in Councilmember Curren Price’s ninth district.

A South L.A. nonprofit called the Coalition for Responsible Community Development purchased the property in 2020 using state Project HomeKey funds. It has plans to build a 60-unit affordable housing complex there soon.

Price’s office told LAist this week that news of Urban Alchemy ending its contract to run the site came as a surprise.

“Until this recent news, our expectation was to transition any remaining residents by the end of this year,” Price’s communications director Angelina Valencia-Dumarot told LAist. “This sudden change disrupts that plan and creates uncertainty for unhoused neighbors currently at the site.”

On Tuesday afternoon, city of L.A. crisis response teams were transporting several residents and their belongings from the Safe Sleep Village to other nearby open shelter beds.

“They dumped me off at a place and I almost didn't get a bed,” James Rudy told LAist. “This was all last minute. I was afraid they were going to screw me.”

He said he was forced to throw away most of his clothing and belongings during the move. Rudy is now staying at a shelter 5 miles away called Testimonial Community Love Center, where clients are required to leave each day between 8:45 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., he said, adding that he preferred the tent village.

“The place we left wasn’t that bad.” Rudy said. “I was in a tent, but at least I was able to do what I needed to do. Here it’s not really practical.”

Tracy Wallace told LAist on Tuesday that her husband had been transported to another shelter, and she was waiting to reunite with him there.

“We're gonna be apart, not sleeping together,” she said. “Because one side is for men and the other side is for women, but that's still fine.”

Urban Alchemy said it was making former residents’ well-being a top priority. The organization estimated that, as of this Wednesday, there were seven residents still waiting on alternative placements.

“As we wind down our operations at this site, we appreciate the efforts underway to help guests move to safe, supportive places.” spokesperson Jess Montejano said in a statement.

Urban Alchemy told LAist that five of its 15 workers were laid off this week. Ten have been transferred to work in other Urban Alchemy projects, and the organization is working to connect the laid-off employees to other jobs, Urban Alchemy said.

The nonprofit bills itself as a social enterprise, hiring mostly formerly incarcerated people.

Some displaced residents from the Lincoln Safe Sleep Village were transported to alternative shelters on Tuesday.

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Cutting ties with LAHSA

LAHSA had contracted with Urban Alchemy to operate the Safe Sleep Village since 2022. Annual funding for the site was reduced from $2.3 million last budget year to $1.2 million this year.

The latter amount was supposed to pay for 46 tent spaces. But Urban Alchemy said the contract didn’t cover its fixed costs.

“We have to provide the staff no matter what, per the terms of the contract, whether it’s one person or 46,” an Urban Alchemy representative said. “We tried to work with [LAHSA] often, to try to find a way for it to pencil, and it just wasn’t the case.”

Urban Alchemy said LAHSA “arbitrarily changed its funding formula,” resulting in the nonprofit losing nearly $1 million on the contract.

The nonprofit first notified LAHSA on Dec. 22 that it planned to terminate the contract, both parties confirmed to LAist.

According to LAHSA payment records, Urban Alchemy spent about 69% of its budget on personnel for the 2022-23 budget year. Payroll records for February 2024 showed an average of eight staff members working at the site around-the-clock.

Last Thursday, one month after notifying LAHSA about the closure, Urban Alchemy’s director of operations in L.A. emailed city and LAHSA staff, demanding help rehousing residents.

“Given the urgency of the closure date, ongoing uncertainty places guests and frontline staff in an untenable position,” Tim Kornegay wrote in a Jan. 22 email. “Leadership action is critically needed now to prevent avoidable harm.”

The next day, LAHSA representatives told Urban Alchemy about a transfer plan for the people still living at that Safe Sleep site, the agency said.

Early this week, Mayor Karen Bass’s office and Price’s office told LAist they were aware of the situation and supported LAHSA’s work to prevent people from winding up with nowhere to go.

City of Los Angeles crisis teams helped transport residents to new shelter locations before the closure.

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A federal judge weighs in

Months before Urban Alchemy announced it would shut down the South L.A. site, questions about its funding and capacity made their way to a federal judge.

The situation emerged as the city of L.A. is under a court order to provide more shelter for unhoused Angelenos and LAHSA is under scrutiny for having failed to properly manage hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with service providers like Urban Alchemy.

Last year, LAHSA paid the nonprofit $2.3 million based on inaccurate data about the site’s capacity, records show. On paper, Urban Alchemy had 88 available beds on site. In reality, half that many were available.

Officials from the Homeless Services Authority had instructed the nonprofit in April 2024 to close down operations in one of two converted parking lots, according to emails reviewed by LAist. Dozens of plywood tent platforms were removed, but LAHSA did not update the capacity data or funding for the site until more than one year later.

The city of L.A. and LAHSA continued to report outdated capacity data about the South L.A. tent program to a judge overseeing a settlement that requires the city to open 13,000 new shelter beds by next June.

In November, U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter described the situation as “obvious fraud.”

Michele Martinez, a special master appointed to help enforce the terms of the settlement, visited the site in June and found that it appeared to be operating at half capacity. She then tried to verify the number of beds available at the site with city officials, but did not get an answer, Carter said at a November court hearing.

The city of L.A. corrected the information reported to the judge after one member of LAHSA’s governing board, the LAHSA Commission, visited the site and reported what he saw there.

Commissioner Justin Szlasa said he had voted to approve millions in funding for Urban Alchemy last year with the understanding that the South L.A. space could accommodate 88 people. But when he visited in May 2025, he saw that half of it was closed.

Szlasa filed a public records request with LAHSA in September to obtain the contracts and payment details for the Urban Alchemy site, but he has not yet received a full response, he said.

He told LAist he’s been asking for an evaluation of the contract to be put on the LAHSA Commission’s agenda.

Urban Alchemy does not have any remaining contracts with LAHSA, but the organization runs a tent village in Culver City and has some other contracts with the city of L.A.

The organization recently pulled out of operating a large homeless shelter in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district after city officials said the nonprofit had knowingly overspent its budget at the shelter.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, groups of three and four people headed out from the El Toro Public Library in Lake Forest for the last day of Orange County’s biennial count of unhoused people. The survey helps officials decide what services are needed and keep track of changing demographics and trends.

The last point in time count in Orange County saw a spike of around 28% in the number of unhoused people, with around 7,300 people experiencing homelessness. Results for the point in time count usually come out in May.

What volunteers observed

Rocio Palafox and Cameron Pastrano from Orange County’s Office of Care Coordination together with volunteer Mike Kimball went out to survey Irvine on Thursday morning. All the unhoused people they encountered were living in their cars parked at places like Irvine’s Metrolink station and long-term parking lots.

They were just waking up as they answered the anonymous survey.

Rocio Palafox and Cameron Pastrano navigate to a canvassing area during Orange County's biennial count of unhoused people.

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One of the people surveyed — who asked that LAist not identify her as she is in the process of applying for jobs — was 59 years old and said she has been sleeping in her car for over a year.

“ Lost my job and lost my place to live because of it,” she said. “ Rent is crazy, can't afford it. You need more than one job.”

Another person, 61, also said she’s living in her car because she has trouble finding work. She also asked that LAist not use her name as she is hoping to land a job soon.

“ I got laid off from two jobs at the same time right before Christmas, which was really hard,” she said.

Becks Heyhoe-Khalil, executive director of United to End Homelessness, tallied people experiencing homelessness in Costa Mesa, where all the people she encountered were sleeping on the streets.

“ Over and over again, what we heard was financial, loss of a job and the challenge to be able to continue paying rent and it sort of began this spiraling effect,” she said.

When wages are stagnant and do not increase with the rising cost of living, Heyhoe-Khalil said, it’s “ a really dangerous recipe for people to fall through the cracks and end up experiencing homelessness.”

Challenges with the count

Heyhoe-Khalil said she’s been part of the counts for many years. This year, for the first time, she noticed there was "a little bit more hesitancy around responding and participating in the survey itself.”

Many people declined to take part in the survey, she said, worried about entering some of their information into the system.

Even in Irvine, Palafox and Pastrano encountered a handful of people who declined to answer the survey, but they still entered the data as observational.

Doug Becht, director of Orange County’s Office of Care Coordination, which leads homelessness efforts, said in south Orange County cities, most unhoused people live in their cars, which can make it challenging to engage with them.

 ”Vehicles move quite often, so that care can sometimes be choppy,” he said.

South O.C. also has the fewest number of shelter beds, he said, so finding supportive housing can be a challenge. And those cities have long resisted plans to build temporary shelters.

Instead, the county has tried to engage South O.C. cities to develop other forms of support, Becht said. In San Juan Capistrano, the city hall is now only located on the bottom floor. The rest has been converted to supportive housing.

Why the point in time count matters

The point in time count — required to take place during the last 10 days of January — helps the federal government allocate funds toward addressing homelessness. State and county officials use those funds to assess what programs and services are needed on the ground.

Becht said the count also helps the county engage with people experiencing homelessness. Once they have a person on the radar, it will allow outreach teams to go back out and try to get them off the streets and into temporary housing.

 The biggest takeaway from the last count in 2024, he said, “was that we have a bottleneck in our shelters.”

“We just don't have places to put them. And the longer they are in the shelter, that means the longer I have to wait to help people on the street move into the shelter,” he added.

L.A. County is considering plans to remove potentially thousands of unhoused people from areas around sports venues ahead of the Olympic Games in 2028.

County officials issued a strategy report last week advising local governments on how to clear people from encampments near major events and move them into temporary housing. However, the same report notes that there are concerns there won't be enough beds and there's no new funding for such an effort.

Sarah Mahin, L.A. County's director of Homelessness Services and Housing, submitted the report at the direction of the Board of Supervisors. It’s one of the first indications of how homelessness in the region might be approached ahead of and during the Olympic Games.

Shayla Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles said the plan is aimed at eliminating visible signs of homelessness for the Olympics, rather than addressing the root causes of the housing crisis.

" You're not actually getting people off the streets. You're simply attempting to make specific locations clear," she said of the county's approach. "It is about taking resources to clear encampments in the most visible locations when you have cameras and tourists all putting their focus on Los Angeles."

L.A. County's Homeless Services and Housing Department did not immediately return requests for comment.

Efforts to remove unhoused people will focus on the security perimeters of Olympic venues, according to the county's report.

"The County will use any established security perimeters…to identify and coordinate with host jurisdictions to prioritize encampments that may be affected," Mahin wrote.

LA28, the private nonprofit planning the Olympics, also told the county that those security perimeters would be its focus, according to the report.

“In the event that LA28 is advised that relocating unhoused individuals may be necessary for their own safety, we will ensure that the appropriate local government stakeholders have sufficient time to plan for the necessary services and housing support,” LA28 wrote in a statement to LAist. 

A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said her office was in touch with the report's authors to "discuss next steps in continuing efforts to address this humanitarian crisis."

As part of the regional strategy, the county has developed a tool to estimate costs for cities looking at removing encampments around venues. That tool allows local jurisdictions to enter the expected number of people, the percentage of individuals who will go into shelters, and how many people will need long-term housing support.

Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation said she appreciated the county's focus on moving people into shelters, but that the plan would open up unhoused people to possible criminalization.

"The first round is to offer shelter, and the second round is often to bring in cops or to put up fences or to invest in citations," she said.

The report includes the latest "point in time" count of people living outside in the council districts of Los Angeles hosting Olympic events, as well as other host cities like Long Beach and Pasadena. In total, that number is more than 5,300 people.

"However, the number of unsheltered individuals in the areas immediately surrounding event venues should be reassessed closer to event dates to ensure an accurate estimate," the report states.

County supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn introduced a motion asking for the report in 2024, referencing concerns about public perception of local government's approach to homelessness ahead of many major events coming to Los Angeles.

"Efforts to address homelessness in advance of international sporting events in other jurisdictions have had uneven results, leading to accusations that governments are busing unhoused individuals to the outskirts of host cities without addressing the underlying lack of shelter capacity," the motion states.

The county's guidance points out that additional resources for plans to clear encampments at this point don't exist.

Representatives for Long Beach, for example, told the county that it could be challenging to secure motel rooms for interim housing at typical rates around the Olympics. The city also expressed concern about unsheltered people and at-risk tenants being displaced. 

Clearing encampments without enough housing resources could lead to displacing more unhoused people and those at risk of homelessness, Mahin wrote.