The Brief

What’s good for Riverside County is good for the whole state: After a pilot to automatically admit high school students into the California State University system in the Inland Empire county took off last fall, lawmakers this year passed a law to greenlight a similar program statewide next fall.

Leaders at the California State University last year launched the pilot to attract more students to the university system and to steer some to campuses that have been struggling with enrollment declines.

The pilot worked like this: University officials and high schools in Riverside County pored over student course completion and grade data to identify every county high school senior who was eligible for admission to the 10 of 22 Cal State campuses chosen for the pilot. Then the students received a brochure in the mail last fall before the Nov. 30 submission deadline, plus digital correspondence, telling them they were provisionally admitted as long as they submitted an application to one or more Cal State campuses, even those not in the pilot, and maintained their high school grades.

Starting next fall, all students in California will be eligible for the automatic admissions program, which will expand the roster of participating Cal State campuses to 16. Cal State will release more information on the program’s implementation in February, its website says.

In justifying the expanded program during a legislative hearing, bill author Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Democrat from Napa, said college should be as seamless a transition from high school as it is for students finishing one grade and advancing to the next. “It's entirely an invention of us, the gap between 12th grade and college. … The same gap does not exist between elementary school and junior high or junior high and high school.”

The legislation, Senate Bill 640, passed without any opposition and was signed into law by the governor. The program doesn’t mean students can enter any major at the campuses they pick. Some majors may require students to show higher high school grades or tougher courses if those programs have fewer openings than student demand. For Californians, the standard minimum GPA for entry is 2.5 in a series of college-preperatory courses.

Students will also be free to apply to the six other over-enrolled Cal State campuses, though admission isn’t guaranteed. Those are Fullerton, Long Beach, Pomona, San Diego, San Jose and San Luis Obispo.

What the Riverside pilot did

High school counselors told CalMatters that the Riverside County pilot encouraged students who never considered attending a university to follow through with the automatic admissions process. Counselors also reached out to some students who were a class or two short of meeting the requirements for Cal State admission to take those, encouraging more students to apply to college who otherwise wouldn’t have. Younger students who were off the college-course taking track might be emboldened to enroll in those tougher high school courses knowing automatic admission is in the cards, the counselors said.

Silvia Morales, a senior at Heritage High School, a public Riverside County high school, got an automatic admissions letter last fall. “I was pretty set on going to community college and then transferring, because I felt like I wasn’t ready for the four-year commitment to a college,” she said. She eventually submitted her forms, encouraged by her high school counselor.

Following the Riverside pilot, Cal State campuses saw roughly 1,500 more applicants and 1,400 more admitted students in 2025 compared to 2024, though just 136 more students enrolled.

The data for Riverside County reviewed by CalMatters suggests that more applicants and admitted students through an automatic admissions policy doesn’t translate into more enrolled students. Colleges closely follow their "yield rates" — the percentage of admitted students who ultimately enroll. In 2024, the Cal State yield rate for Riverside County was about a third. But in 2025, it declined by a few percentage points, meaning a lower share of admitted students selected any Cal State campus.

This suggests that the system will have to work harder to convert admitted students into ones who actually enroll, said Iwunze Ugo, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, particularly with students who would not have applied were it not for the automatic admissions program.

Automatic admissions doesn’t mean automatic enrollment

While admission to a college overcomes a major hurdle to eventually enrolling, there are numerous steps necessary before students sit down for their first college course. Accepted students must submit additional grades, put down a deposit, complete registration forms and actually show up for the fall term. Students who were less engaged in the college-going culture are more likely to “melt” during the process between acceptance and enrollment, some studies show, though researchers say this can be reversed with additional outreach to students at risk of not enrolling.

And even with an automatic admissions program, students must still register online and complete the application, which many students under the Riverside pilot didn’t do. Cal State sent out more than 17,000 automatic admissions notices to students, and just under 12,000 formally applied to at least one Cal State campus. Those who didn’t apply may have chosen another option, such as the often more selective University of California, private campuses, community colleges, or no college at all.

“I think that'll be incumbent on the CSU to pick up some of that slack and encourage students admitted through this path to go through the rest of the process and ultimately end up at a CSU campus,” Ugo said.

Cal State officials also recognize this. “Students who apply independently tend to have stronger self-directed interest, and therefore stronger intent to enroll,” said April Grommo, a senior Cal State official who oversees enrollment management. More direct engagement with students admitted through this program will be necessary, she said.

Some campuses with a recent history of declining enrollment got a tiny pick-up from the pilot. San Francisco State saw 311 more applications from Riverside County in 2025 than in 2024. That translated to 11 more enrolled students, a review of Cal State data shows.

A statewide program may steer more students to attend campuses with enrollment woes, even if the “yield rate” declines. That’s because if the rate of new students enrolling doesn’t rise as quickly as the number of students admitted, the yield rate drops.

Under the expanded statewide program, Grommo said the system anticipates “enrollment growth as well, but not necessarily at the same rate as applications and admits,” she added.

And as the economy shows signs of decay, the prospect of a college degree may compel more high schoolers on the fence to attend Cal State; System data show students from there earn a typical salary of $71,000 five years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. Postsecondary enrollment tends to rise as the number of available jobs decreases, a social science phenomenon in which employers are more selective about who they hire, compelling many job-seekers to hit the books to show they’re more trained.

Of course, souring economies often result in less public funding for colleges as state budgets are beleaguered, which may lead to fewer professors and staff for a growing cadre of students. “But I think generally, having more students is not a problem,” Ugo said.

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

A federal judge said she’ll need more time to decide whether to grant a temporary court order to give immigrants detained at Adelanto ICE Processing Center immediate relief.

Immigrants rights groups and a private firm filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security in January. They allege that the approximately 2,000 people currently held at the Adelanto complex are subject to inhumane treatment.

On top of squalid conditions, plaintiffs say detainees are fed cold, unsanitary food and expected to drink dirty water. They also allege detainees must often wait several months to see a doctor, if they ever do.

“The conditions in which these non-citizens are being held in the Adelanto detention facility, as alleged in the petition, are certainly concerning,” said Judge Sunshine Sykes at a hearing Tuesday for the Central District of California. “I think that each of us would never want to be in that position.”

Still, Sykes said she was tentatively inclined to “deny the motion [for a preliminary injunction] without prejudice or to allow plaintiffs to withdraw the motion and refile it,” which would give the immigrants rights groups a chance to address her concerns. She then gave the attorneys the opportunity to respond and, potentially, convince her otherwise.

What’s happening at Adelanto?

Adelanto is about 90 miles away from downtown Los Angeles. According to the lawsuit, the detention center does not accommodate detainees with special needs. Detainees with mobility issues, for instance, are assigned top bunks. And in a sworn declaration, one detainee described being put in handcuffs and ankle chains when she is taken to court appointments, even though she uses a cane.

Plaintiffs also say solitary confinement is used to retaliate against detainees who speak out against these conditions and to isolate those who are experiencing mental health crises. An LAist analysis of the most recent ICE data found that as of January, Adelanto is among the top 10 facilities that put immigrant detainees in solitary confinement across the country.

The detention center is run by The GEO Group Inc., one of the largest private prison operators in the United States.

The federal government has declined LAist's request for interviews and comments, and The GEO Group has not responded to those requests.

The arguments for and against an injunction

In the hearing, Judge Sykes raised concerns that The GEO Group and the Adelanto warden are not named in the lawsuit. She also questioned how the court could enforce an order for immediate relief and wondered if there might be a more “efficient” way for the plaintiffs to proceed.

The federal government has asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit altogether. Pushkal Mishra, representing ICE and DHS, said “between the government and the alleged injury are the independent, discretionary, uncertain and speculative day-to-day activities of a third party.” The GEO Group and its employees, he argued, “are the proper defendants in the case, not [the] government.”

The advocates' lawsuit underscores that companies like The GEO Group are subject to inspection by the federal government. Recently, ICE gave the Adelanto ICE Processing Center a “good” rating. Since September 2025, at least four people have died in detention at Adelanto, the most recent March 25.

At the hearing, Vanessa Young Viniegra, a fellow at Public Counsel, refuted the federal government’s argument that ICE and DHS should not be named defendants in the case.

“The Supreme Court has been clear that the government has a constitutional duty to care for the people in its custody and the people that it chooses to detain,” she said, “regardless of whether it employs a private company.”

Judge Sykes interjected: “I don't think I'm saying that the government is not a proper defendant. I'm saying that The GEO Group [and] the warden of Adelanto may need to be joined or brought in as defendants as well.”

Young Viniegra noted that the motion for the emergency court order provides the government “some leeway” in terms of how it obligates Adelanto to provide adequate care for detainees.

“We're not asking the court to order, you know, a specific number of staff,” she said. “It's up to the government to comply with its constitutional obligations and exactly how it does that and its relationship with GEO is for it to decide.”

What's next?

Sykes said she’ll need more time to make a decision. In addition to the preliminary injunction, she is also navigating the federal government’s motion to dismiss the case and a motion by the plaintiffs to make this a class action lawsuit, meaning the court’s outcome would apply to all Adelanto detainees.

Learn more about Adelanto

• Is Adelanto's ICE detention facility a ‘concentration camp’? And does it matter?
• Adelanto ICE facility's use of solitary confinement is among 10 highest in US, data shows
• These Angelenos journeyed to Adelanto to protest conditions at immigrant detention centers

When it was first built nearly 100 years ago, the Jardinette Apartments building in Hollywood made international headlines for its radical design. At the time, Los Angeles had never seen anything quite like architect Richard Neutra’s iconoclastic vision of what apartment living could look like.

But by the end of the century, the Jardinette had become dilapidated, its historic significance hidden behind years of neglect.

Now, this pioneering piece of L.A. architecture is coming back to life.

Developer Cameron Hassid bought the nationally registered building in 2020 after previous owners tried but failed to restore it. With the renovation now nearing completion, the Jardinette’s original concept once again is coming into clear view.

“It was a big, heavy lift,” Hassid said, describing the project as the most complicated in his career. “There are so many apartment buildings in L.A. But none of them will have the story or any of the significance that this does.”

First steps for a now-famous architect

In the 1920s, Neutra was a young Austrian architect who had recently moved to the United States to work with Frank Lloyd Wright and fellow Austrian émigré Rudolph Schindler.

Historians cite the style he would go on to develop — with its flat roofs, expansive windows, deep overhangs and blending of the indoors and outdoors — as defining the language of mid-century California modernism.

Neutra's Palm Springs Kaufmann Desert House from 1946 and his Silver Lake VDL Research House II from 1965 became iconic homes of the period.

Richard Neutra's family lived in the VDL Research House II, located in Silver Lake and designed by Neutra with his son, Dion.

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But the Jardinette, built in 1928, was Neutra’s first major commission in L.A., coming just a few years after his arrival in the United States.

Architecture historians say Neutra’s goal was to strip down the Jardinette’s design, maximizing light and fresh air in the building’s 43 modestly sized apartments, all in keeping with the burgeoning International Style.

Long ribbon windows are the most striking feature in an otherwise unadorned facade. Windows join at corners and stretch across nearly entire walls, connecting living rooms and kitchens. Panes in the walls of interior closets bring “borrowed light” into shadowy interiors.

Neutra outfitted many of the apartments with balconies that cantilever off reinforced concrete. The balconies were ideal for outdoor plants — hence the name Jardinette, or Little Garden.

The restoration of the Jardinette Apartments is nearly complete.

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Barbara Lamprecht, an architectural historian who consulted on the preservation of the Jardinette, said Neutra’s approach would have seemed utterly alien amid the 1920s development boom in L.A.

“All these other revival styles were happening: Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival,” said Lamprecht, the author of Neutra: Complete Works from the publisher Taschen. “This was not a milieu that encouraged, fostered or remotely understood the tenets of early modernism.”

Once-lauded edifice falls on hard times

The Jardinette helped secure Neutra’s fame far beyond the confines of Southern California. His work on the Jardinette was included in a landmark 1932 architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But by the 1990s, the Jardinette had all but lost its visionary purity. It was painted pink and green. The previously uniform steel windows were mismatched, using cheap materials. The walls were graffitied.

By the late 20th century, the Jardinette had fallen into disrepair.

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“It was sad,” said Corey Miller with June Street Architecture, who worked on the renovation.

“It's just what happens when buildings get neglected,” he said. “It's important to look back on these ideas and not lose them and try to maintain them and not cover them up. Now, hopefully for another 100 years, more generations of people can experience the design the way it was originally intended.”

Working with the limits of a century-old building

The team behind the Jardinette’s renewal said the building was not easy to renovate. It was originally built without a cooling system. Its electrical system couldn’t meet modern energy needs. It didn’t have stand-up showers.

Installing those modern amenities while preserving Neutra’s original design proved challenging at times, said Anant Topiwala with June Street Architecture.

The team preserved whatever original materials they could, Topiwala said, but they needed to order custom tiles, windows and other parts in order to match historic photographs and documents.

A historic photograph shows the Jardinette in its original state.

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“We were like archeologists, in a way,” he said. “There was a lot of peeling back. What do we think the paint color was? What do we think that wood detail was?

“Neutra didn't like angles. We needed to make sure, for example, the casing around the doors didn't meet at a mitered corner. There's just so many interesting things.”

Pulling permits for a protected landmark

The Jardinette has multiple historic designations. It’s in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. And it’s protected as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. Those classifications limit what kinds of changes are allowed in a renovation. Getting all the necessary permits was a job in itself, one handled by Michael Norberg with Cali Planners.

“Everything you can think of that could come up did come up on this building,” Norberg said. “But I think the bones have been reinforced. The historic aspect has been retained. The entire nature and history and spirit of this building is still here.

“And I love the fact that the city was willing to work with us on maintaining that,” he said.

How the past informs future plans

Hassid said the renovation should be completed by this summer. He added that he’s not yet sure what the building’s future will be, but he won’t sell it to a typical real estate investor. He recently put it on the market with Neema Ahadian of Marcus & Millichap.

“We've sold some really beautiful buildings, but nothing that has the history that you can find here,” Ahadian said. The buyer will need to be someone who understands the value of preserving a piece of architectural history, he said.

“This building's been through a few ownerships that have not necessarily had the same vision,” Ahadian said.

Two windows join at a right angle and a door opens to a balcony in one corner of a Jardinette apartment.

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When he first took on the project, Hassid said, colleagues told him he was nuts. But he said ultimately the effort was worth it to preserve an L.A. architectural gem.

“I hope we made Richard Neutra proud, bringing his building back to life,” he said.

What does real luxury look like? 

Neutra built the Jardinette at a time when movie studios were growing. The Paramount studio lot is just a few blocks away.

Barbara Lamprecht, an architectural historian with expertise in Neutra's work, consulted on the preservation of the Jardinette.

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Lamprecht, the Neutra historian, said she’s looking forward to seeing how people occupy the apartments. She said Neutra designed the Jardinette to bring a new kind of luxury to occupants who might have included up-and-coming actors or below-the-line production workers.

“The luxuries in life are access to sunlight, to views,” Lamprecht said. “This was the raison d'être for this entire building: to provide graceful, expansive lives to people who weren’t in single-family dwellings in the Hollywood Hills.”

Whoever the next tenants will be, Lamprecht said, “I feel like, for the first time, this building is not invisible any longer.”

Pasadena Unified will hear from the public Tuesday night as it considers plans to close and consolidate several schools within the district.

The campus closures are in response to declining enrollment that has left PUSD with a budget deficit that recent layoffs have not solved.

What’s happening

Parents and community members will hear from the School Consolidation Advisory Committee (SCAC) about its recommendations for which schools should be closed or consolidated.

It is the second of two town halls offered by the district. The first one was virtual.

There will be a public comment portion for attendees to give their input on the recommendations presented.

Which schools are in danger?

The advisory committee recommended a handful of schools be closed.

For TK through 8th grade, the recommended closures include Don Benito Fundamental School, Webster Elementary and Norma Coombs Elementary. The schools McKinley and Eliot Arts Magnet would merge, with the McKinley campus closing.

For high schools, the committee recommended consolidating Thurgood Marshall and Blair High School.

“But those are also six through 12 campuses, so the proposals being considered would split up those schools to nine through 12 and six through eight,” said David Wilson, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News who spoke to Larry Mantle on LAist's daily news program AirTalk.

What’s next?

The advisory committee will present its recommendations to the Board of Education on May 28.

The board will then vote in June.

"PUSD remains committed to an unbiased process, guided at every step by Total School Solutions (TSS), the District’s independent consultant," a PUSD spokesperson said in a statement. "We remain committed to transparency and care for our community throughout this process."

How to attend the town hall

The district is hosting the in-person town hall from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday at Pasadena High School, 2925 E. Sierra Madre Blvd.

Monday's arraignment of 31-year old Cole Tomas Allen, a California man who is charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump over the weekend, opened legal proceedings that many extremism experts will be watching closely.

Allen, a high school tutor with a background in mechanical engineering and computer science, allegedly attempted to storm the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner on Saturday night, where Trump and other high-level administration officials were gathered with the Washington press corps. He was stopped by federal law enforcement officers before getting close to his presumed targets.

According to a White House official, Allen's sister told the Secret Service and local law enforcement that her brother was known to make "radical" statements. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and NPR has not confirmed this with Allen's family members. But this characterization has puzzled some experts who track extremism, who say that it does not align with writings and social media activity that are believed to link to the defendant.

"You look at the social media profiles that have been attributed to this suspect and they're really not that radical," said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that tracks online threats and narratives. "Oftentimes it's like quite centrist, pretty moderate left wing, if anything."

An affidavit filed by an FBI agent in support of the charges claims that Allen sent an email to members of his family moments before initiating the attack. The email specifies some grievances against Trump administration officials and policies.

"I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration," the letter states. The letter appears to reference a range of issues from immigration detentions under the Trump administration, U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, the bombing of a girls' school in Iran and the Epstein scandal.

In an apparent reference to Trump, the letter also says "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes."

But Holt and others say these views, however pointed some of the terminology may be, fall within a modern mainstream left. He and others say it is very unclear what may have tipped the individual from such widely held views into an alleged violent plot.

"That's part of what's troubling, is when you start to have people who are kind of seemingly normal, law-abiding members of society feeling like violence is the solution," said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director and chief vision officer at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University.

"I think there's a little bit of nihilism reflected here," Miller-Idriss said. "This idea that there is no more solution, violence is the answer, nothing else is going to change, nothing else is going to be effective."

The alleged assassination attempt is the latest high-profile data point in a growing environment of political violence in the U.S. over the last decade. While most of that is attributed to the far right, there is alarm about rising violence from the left. Even amidst this backdrop, however, Holt and Miller-Idriss both note that the weekend incident at the Washington Hilton hotel stands out.

For starters, Holt said he's seen no indication that the defendant was steeped in conspiratorial thinking. He said that more typically, people behind acts of violent extremism are nursing grievances fed by false narratives.

"If you were to just kind of randomly bump into one of these people on the street, you might get the sense that something was a little off," Holt said. "Whereas this seems -- just looking at, you know, this BlueSky profile that's been attributed to the suspect and this document that's been attributed to the suspect – I'm not getting that same kind of read."

In addition, Miller-Idriss said the defendant's presumed writings suggest that he felt personally responsible for not having taken action sooner against the administration. She said they do not appear intended to incite others to take similar action, or to spread a particular ideological message. The tone is one of "defeatism," Miller-Idriss said, which contrasts with a more typical pattern of political violence, particularly from the far right.

"I don't think you usually see the defeatism on the far right, [which is] more of a mobilization of martyrdom, of wanting attention, of wanting to launch a movement, to be a firestarter, that kind of thing," she said. "This is like a much more hopeless kind of language and rhetoric being used."

Holt said this tone is troubling, not simply because of how it may connect to the violence that Allen is alleged to have been planning. But also because it may signal that on the left, there may be a growing perception that the levers of democracy can no longer work to effect change.

"That is a bleak point for an individual to get to," Holt said. "But I also think that people are getting to that point now should be cause for reflection for people who work in politics or who work in advocacy, or whatever it may be, that [with] the many problems that we're up against today, there is a subset of the American population that's losing hope and is having a hard time imagining a way out of it."
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